Television, Sex and Society Analyzing Contemporary

Representations - 1st Edition

Visit the link below to download the full version of this book:

https://medipdf.com/product/television-sex-and-society-analyzing-contemporary-re
presentations-1st-edition/

Click Download Now

 Television,
Sex and Society
Analyzing Contemporary
Representations

Edited by

Basil Glynn, James Aston

and Beth Johnson

 Continuum International Publishing Group
A Bloomsbury Company
80 Maiden Lane, New York, NY 10038
50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP

www.continuumbooks.com

© Basil Glynn, James Aston and Beth Johnson, 2012

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or
transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording,
or otherwise, without the written permission of the publishers.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Television, sex and society : analysing contemporary representations / edited by
Basil Glynn, James Aston, and Beth Johnson.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4411-7945-6 (hardcover : alk. paper) – ISBN 1-4411-7945-3 (hardcover : alk.
paper) – ISBN 978-0-8264-3498-2 (pbk. : alk. paper) – ISBN 0-8264-3498-3 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Sex on television. I. Glynn, Basil. II. Aston, James, 1973- III. Johnson, Beth, 1980-
PN1992.8.S44T45 2012
791.45'6538–dc23
2012002887

ISBN: 978-1-4411-8178-7

Typeset by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NN

 Contents

Foreword vii
Matthew Pateman

Introduction ix
James Aston, Basil Glynn, Beth Johnson

Part one TV and the Democratization of Sex 1

1 Shameless: Situating Sex Beyond the City 3

Beth Johnson

2 Sex, Society and the Slayer 17

Madeleine Smith

3 Fangbanging: Sexing the Vampire in Alan Ball’s True Blood 33

Melanie Waters

4 True Blood, Sex and Online Fan Culture 47

Emily Brick

Part two TV and the Absence of Sex 63

5 Beekeeper Suits, Plastic Casings, Rubber Gloves and Cling Film:

Examining the Importance of ‘No-sex’ Sex in Pushing Daisies 65
Rebecca Feasey
vi Contents

6 Television X-cised: Restricted Hardcore and the Resisting of the

Real 79
James Aston

7 Imagination in the Box: Woju’s Realism and the Representation

of Xiaosan 93
Ruth Y. Y. Hung

8 My Lovely Sam-soon: Absent Sex and the Unbearable Lightness

of Sweet Korean Romance 111
Jeongmee Kim

Part three TV Sex and Heritage: Sexual

Representation and Re-presentation 125
9 ‘Why Should I Hide My Regard?’: Erotic Austen 127

Jonathon Shears

10 Performance Anxiety and Costume Drama: Lesbian Sex on the

BBC 143

Amber K. Regis

11 The Conquests of Henry VIII: Masculinity, Sex and the National

Past in The Tudors 157

Basil Glynn

Notes on Contributors 175

Bibliography 179
Index 191
 Foreword

T elevision is a political medium. But the citizenry is often unmoved by

this politics swirling around their privacy; too readily allowing reception
to occlude engagement. Until sex happens. Sexual representation in any
medium is never innocent (in all meanings of the word), and it is naive and
disingenuous (even scandalous) to pretend otherwise. Moralists seek to
censure on behalf of ‘common sense’ or ‘decency’ (while denying they are
‘political’); radicals seek to celebrate sexual representation as though there
were no political problem with this. And it is television – the most political
of media – which is the most potent arena of sexual images. TV screens are
the banners and barriers wherein the images move, and the domestic space
becomes the virtual agora. The representation of the supposedly most private
of acts (a fiction, of course; a furtive disavowal of libidinal histories and erotic
genealogies) in the private space of the home, the family, can spark a politics
like no other form of representation. Dramatic, comedic, cartoonish, factual,
satiric, educative – the genres of sexual representation in the televisual
medium all have one thing in common: sexual representation. And it is that
which drives the writers in this collection.
What does it mean to represent sex on television? This simple question
is at the heart of this collection of essays. And the answers are as various,
urgent, worried, celebratory, messy, ordered and exuberant as sex is; and
as multi-valent, engaged, complex, sophisticated, informed and enjoyable as
television.
The question, though, is both more contained, and more various than
I might suggest. There is a necessary periodicity that circumscribes the
televisual texts chosen. And this is what makes the collection so necessary
now, and what will ensure it becomes a key historical marker as the question
of representing sex in television continues to fascinate scholars in years to
come. The writers of this volume are attentive to the contemporaneity of their
discourses – discourses both televisual and sexual: which is to say political.
This is a book of politics, a book that situates popular texts mostly consumed
in domestic spaces in the full glare of the social world. And by specifying a
world that is post-DVD, post-digital, and massively de-regulated in the US and
UK contexts; and which benefits from a concomitant trans-nationalizing of
viii Foreword

popular discourses from previously segregated markets such as South Korea,

these essays collectively offer a tentative global view.
The global reach does not, however, seek to simplify or homogenize the
practises of representation. The politics of this collection is located in speci-
ficity – the specific production contexts of the shows, the specific theoretical
and political traditions that inform the essay’s argument. These various
specificities work against the over-arching moral certainties of voices that
would seek to contain both the particular instantiation of sexual activity and
its representation into totalizing schemes of abjection, revolution, domination,
control or whatever; but are nevertheless energetically committed to an
understanding of these discourses.
The particularity, care and attention of each essay to its text, to its
moment, to the specific questions posed by its particular form of repre-
sentation provides a profound set of specific insights. But the totality of
the collection, without forcing an agenda or determining a position, offers a
more generalized politics of response. The collection as a whole understands
television as politics; representation as politics; but equally it understands
politics as representation – which is to say that the act of creating a televisual
aesthetic to represent a sexual act, encounter, conflict or whatever is under-
stood as political gesture. This gesture is implicated in histories of television,
of commerce, of art, of sexuality, of exploitation and liberation. It cannot
seek to offer answers (television is a political medium, and politics offers
no answers) but the gesture, by virtue of being political engages the polis
(however unaware or unwillingly) in its newly articulated space of political
action, its living room, or kitchen, or bedroom agora.
And this book is further part of that politics. It offers articulations, histories,
contexts and arguments that serve to provide parameters for debate,
positions for dispute. Like the shows they discuss, the essays challenge,
interrogate, unsettle, amuse, delight and frustrate in equal and splendid
measure. Television is a political medium (aesthetic and the industrial) and
sexual representation is always a political action (aesthetic and libidinal) and
this book analyses, celebrates, engages with and critiques these intersec-
tions of different modalities of the political.
These modalities will shift, and when they do this book, as well as the
shows it discusses, will be essential in the emerging histories of television,
sexuality, politics and representation. Would that all academic books had such
ambition.

Matthew Pateman
November 2011
 Introduction

A s the title of this edited volume indicates, Television, Sex and Society:
Analyzing Contemporary Representations aims to provide a critical
overview of representations of sex on television from the 1990s to the
present day. Focusing specifically on representations of tele-sex in the
United Kingdom, United States of America and East Asia, the purpose of the
collection is to both intervene in and add to debates concerning the various
screenings of sex, sexuality, gender, im/morality and the societal ideologies
regarding sex that such programmes convey in the everyday. There is a need
to do this because as Feona Attwood (2009) has recently stated, there has
been a gradual ‘mainstreaming of sex’ in the contemporary age. And yet,
although Attwood discusses a wide spectrum of cultural manifestations
from commercial media production to amateur and/or DIY creations covering
disparate forms such as advertising, literature, music and cinema, little
is aimed at television and in particular how sex is represented within the
medium. The need therefore to readdress television as an important cultural
site in the representation of sex is essential, especially seeing as television
is integral to everyday discussions and representations of sex, evidenced
by the sensational and salacious headlines garnered by many contemporary
productions, be it the ‘films, football and fucking’ (Dawn Airey cited in Moyes
and Robins, 2000) of early Channel 5, the biting bloody sex in True Blood
(HBO, 2008–), the teenage titillation in Shameless (Channel 4, 2004–) or the
‘sexing up’ of the 1990s BBC television adaptation of Jane Austen’s Pride
and Prejudice. Sex on television then is a ‘sexy’ and significant issue, and,
more so than ever, stitched to the fabric of the everyday. It is because of
the centrality of sexual representations on screen and the increasing cultural
significance they hold in contemporary society – intervening in both political
and popular spheres of debate about censorship, sexual ethics and the very
value of sexuality itself – that this book aims to intercede. In doing so, it
will situate televisual sex alongside the growing proliferation of academic
discourse on contemporary representations of sex by accounting for and
addressing the mass medium of television and the wide range and variety of
sexual types, images and narratives that have been produced, screened and
watched in the contemporary era.
x Introduction

Public approaches to sex on screen in the twenty-first century are vast not
only in their volume, but in their opinions regarding why audiences desire,
or not, to watch sex on screen, what time sexualized content is acceptable
for broadcast, what types of representations are hot, or not, the legitimacy
of sex as a television subject and the blurring of public and private repre-
sentations of sex and sexual practice in contemporary society. That is to
say, sex on television is still a contentious and highly political issue. While
Mary Whitehouse may well be viewed as a comical and repressed figure
from a former age, concerns about the mainstream media’s proliferation of
sexualized representations remain rife. Politically, culturally and sociologi-
cally then, representations of sex matter in and to contemporary society. As
such, compelling questions need to be asked about such representations
like: How, if at all, does sex on screen interject and shape the everyday of
sex in the real? What do these representations mean on a political level?
Is watching sex on screen another means of societal self-pleasuring? And,
in what sense do such images trouble or adhere to dominant ideologies of
sexual correctness? For example, Attwood (2009, p. xv) has underlined the
importance of sex in the modern era by saying, ‘As sex appears to become
more and more important to contemporary cultures, permeating every
aspect of our existence and providing a language for talking about all kinds of
things, its meaning becomes more elusive and more ambiguous’. The latter
point is picked up by Ariel Levy who, in discussing the impact of representa-
tions of sex on feminist politics, recently argued in her monograph Female
Chauvinist Pigs: Woman and the Rise of Raunch Culture (2006, p. 198) that:
‘We are still so uneasy with the vicissitudes of sex we need to surround
ourselves with caricatures of female hotness to safely conjure up the concept
“sexy”’. Therefore, despite the growing proliferation of sex in society and its
centrality in the public sphere and the everyday, its practices either remain
hidden, distorted or unclear. A need to render the sex act transparent in
cultural manifestations is thus essential and Television, Sex and Society:
Analyzing Contemporary Representations aims to address this imbalance
and provide much needed analysis on the how, why and for what purposes
sex is represented on television. In doing so, academic analysis surrounding
the representation of sex will become more visible and insert itself within
everyday discourse providing a necessary extension of academia into the
everyday where the issue of sex, both its production, its practice and its
reception is now, more than ever, vital to an open and public debate.
Following on from the research and analysis of recent screen and sexuality
scholars such as Kim Akass and Janet McCabe (2003), Feona Attwood (2009),
Ariel Levy (2006), Brian McNair (2002), Susanna Passonen (2007), Clarissa
Smith (2007b) and Linda Williams (1989; 2009), the essays that make up
 Introduction xi

this collection consider mainstream texts such as True Blood, Shameless,

Pushing Daisies (ABC, 2007–9) and The Tudors (Showtime/Working Title/
Octagon/Peace Arch/Reveille, 2007–10). Each ask through close textual
analysis if televisual sex broadcast via our everyday screens showcases more
or less democratic representations of sex and as such provides a significant
move away from earlier historical productions. That is, do these texts exploit,
critique, or challenge the ‘dominant male economy’ (Williams, 1989, p. 4)
of culturally produced sex? Do these television programmes reinforce
gendered production, content and viewing practices that position the male
as a central agent or, do they instead provide a riposte to the dominant
patriarchal hierarchy involved in the televisual production of sex? As Brian
McNair (2002, p. 207) argues, ‘The whole point of a sexual politics worthy
of the adjective “democratic” is that we gain and exercise the right to find,
articulate and celebrate our own sexualities, while showing due respect for
the tastes, desires and sensitivities of others’. Therefore, this collection will
ascertain whether contemporary television can indeed be seen as pushing
the boundaries of sex so that their representational strategies promote a
more progressive, inclusive and democratic form.
With the question of the democratic potential of contemporary television
in producing public and everyday representations of sex and sexual practice
at the forefront, the collection will engage with the texts via broad cultural,
political, national and sociological frameworks. In doing so, important
questions will be asked such as how does contemporary television define
the limits of sexual representation now that the surrounding discourse has
become more evident within the public sphere? What are the impacts of new
viewing formats on adult television spectators? Is sex still, in the twenty-first
century, seen as ‘dirty’? How are the texts analysed in this collection shaped
by the time and context in which they are produced? The collection is not
focused on governmental policies regarding the screening of sex on television
or on arguments regarding censorship. Rather, Television, Sex and Society
aims to address the shifting cultural relationship between sex and society
and how television contributes to, challenges and complies with everyday
notions of the sexual realm in contemporary society. That is, by looking at
sexual representations from British, American and East Asian television, the
triumvirate of production, representation and reception can be analysed so
that the interconnectedness between consumption, lifestyle, social condi-
tions and the private and public sphere can be mapped out. In doing so, an
understanding of exactly what representations of sex, and the how and why
can be effectively marked out so that we begin to explain and address the
crucial role television plays in the public and everyday discourse over sex.
xii Introduction

Part One: TV and the Democratization of Sex

The four essays that introduce the first part of this collection ‘TV and the
Democratization of Sex’ consider three hugely popular cult television texts;
the BAFTA winning UK television series Shameless created by Paul Abbott,
the sassy series Buffy the Vampire Slayer (WB/UPN, 1997–2003) created by
Joss Whedon and the seductive vampiric US text True Blood, created by Alan
Ball. Asking if and how such texts can be understood to interject in debates
regarding contemporary representations of, and dialogues about a shift from
sex driven by patriarchal desires to a more democratic female agency, the
essays consider the narrative structures, aesthetics, points of view, marketing
techniques and creative contexts employed by these shows.
In the opening essay ‘Shameless: Situating Sex Beyond the City’, Beth
Johnson explores how the unashamed representations of the sexual desires
of four female characters in Shameless, namely Monica Gallagher (Annabelle
Apsion), Fiona Gallagher (Anne-Marie Duff), Sheila Jackson (Maggie O’Neil)
and Karen Jackson (Rebecca Atkinson), are connected to and cartographized
through the fringe spaces of the ‘Chatsworth Estate’. Contemplating the
ways in which the UK series moves away from high-end US visions of slick
surfaces, spaces and bodies, found, for example, in series such as Sex
and the City (HBO, 1998–2004), the chapter analyses the social positions,
dominant sexual desires and complex narrative functions of these women,
arguing that in the series, female desire is unashamedly repositioned at the
centre rather than at the peripheries of the narrative. As Johnson argues:
‘The interests of the characters do not revolve around “looking good” while
having sex, or having sex in good looking places. Rather, Monica, Fiona, Sheila
and Karen gain pleasure from the real of their desires, be they reflected or
enacted in a clapped-out camper van, on a cheap kitchen floor, in character as
a dominatrix or on the backseat of a car on the edge of the council estate.’
Attesting that one of the most powerful themes of the series is thus
its revelation of the absence of female sexual shame, Johnson argues that
the privileging of women’s space and desires in the series lays bare a new
democratic concourse of pleasure achieved primarily through female rather
than male agency. Actively rejecting traditional female stereotypes centred
on finding the ‘right man’ and ‘settling down’, Shameless’s women find
pleasure in excess and unrestraint. Moving away then from middle class
performances of sexual ‘properness’, Monica, Fiona, Sheila and Karen desire
sex and demand satisfaction in the diegesis of the series. As Johnson notes:
‘One commonality of all these female characters is that their sex drives are
repetitively shown to be much higher than those of their male counterparts.
 Introduction xiii

BDSM sex, one-night stand sex, extra-marital sex, lesbian sex – it is these
engagements through which the women achieve pleasure.’
In Madeleine Smith’s chapter based on the cult television series Buffy the
Vampire Slayer entitled ‘Sex, Society and the Slayer’, the author considers the
tensions between the realms of sex and society prevalent in Joss Whedon’s
representation of contemporary American culture. Engaging with the work
of Jeffrey Weeks (1985) in relation to the dialectic between acceptable and
unacceptable sexuality as well as acknowledging and adding to debates
regarding the socio-political, sexologist and feminist theories keyed out
by previous readers of the series, Smith explores the contours of socially
repressive and liberatory models in Buffy the Vampire Slayer by looking
intently at textual moments or, what Jason Jacobs (2006) refers to as
‘cherished fragments’ of the televisual.
Providing close analyses of various sex scenes between Buffy Summers
(Sarah Michelle Gellar), Angel (David Boreanaz), Parker Abrams (Adam
Kaufman), Riley Finn (Marc Blucas) and Spike (James Marsters), Smith
illustrates hypocritical attitudes towards gender, frames sex as a means of
direct conflict regarding ‘insider’ and ‘outsider’ societal status and exposes
the ambiguous position of Buffy’s men, struggling to find a new place in the
world. Nominating Buffy’s relationship with sex and society as a ‘pedagogical
one’, Smith goes on to discuss the significance of representations of casual
sex, patriarchal prejudices, desire and sexual degradation in the series.
Arguing that such representations highlight and engage with contemporary
political battles concerning gender, power and social place in contemporary
American society, Smith notes: ‘Buffy can be viewed as intrinsic to enabling
discussions around American culture’s most complex and contested issues
regarding what is desired and/or expected of its inhabitants’.
Moving on to considering frequently violent representations of sexual
encounters in True Blood, Melanie Waters chapter ‘Fangbanging: Sexing
the Vampire in Alan Ball’s True Blood’, considers the ‘non-normative erotic
spectrum’ occupied by vampires and reads the series through this spectrum
as one bound up with contemporary sexual socio-politics. Arguing then that
sex on screen is rendered graphic and provocative in True Blood, Waters
contends that the vampires are ‘not only used as a means of querying
prescriptive accounts of sexual identity, but also as loci for exploring vexed
questions about promiscuity, consent, prostitution, and even rape’. Focusing
on the gender politics of the debased body, Waters suggests that the series
is able to condone some of its violent excesses through pushing front and
centre representations and rituals of purification. Yet, she notes, the series
shows a worrying trend in its solicitation of female, homosexual or non-white
victims.
xiv Introduction

Recognizing the vulnerability of such bodies as sites less able to resist

invasion, Waters goes on to analyse the shape shifting ‘telepowers’ of
vampires that are ‘obsessively concerned with questions related to bodily
boundaries and their transgression’. Going on to discuss the gothic preoc-
cupations of the show, Waters argues that vampires are cast as ‘enemies
within’ and thus draws out parallels between the violent and frequently
erotic invasions that the series depicts and the actual context of the shows
production in a post 9/11 world. Recognizing the series’ ability to expose
democratic representations of sexual pairings that go beyond white hetero-
normative relations, Waters suggests that sadly, True Blood fails to celebrate
such diversity, instead, rendering it as dark, dangerous and potentially deadly.
Emily Brick also writes on True Blood but her focus is distinct in that
her chapter concentrates on an analysis of ‘True Blood, Sex and Online Fan
Culture’. Contemplating both the original novels on which the series is based
as well as Ball’s televised re-creation, Brick argues that the clear framing from
novel to film of male vampires as objects of desire make them particularly
appealing to the fantasies and fan fictions of female television audiences.
Noting the female centred point of view that dominates the show, Brick
suggests that both the series itself and the numerous media platforms that
supplement the show (and add to its success) demonstrate a fantasy of
female democracy in both a social and sexual realm.
Looking at fan conversations concerning the distinctions between the book
and television series on sites such as ‘Facebook’ and ‘Yahoo!’, Brick suggests
that the sexual aggression of key male vampiric figures is, while rendered
explicit on television, also ‘mainstreamed’. Such a reframing allows and
encourages the opening up of spaces to female fans. The numerous repre-
sentations of sex screened in the show function like fantasies themselves
and, in this sense, Brick concludes, the TV series can be seen to ‘operate
as a form of fan fiction itself, adding in fantasies and sexual encounters
which are absent from the written text’. As such, True Blood can be seen
to punctuate the closed borders of traditional textual narratives, offering a
fantastic dialogue of democracy.

Part Two: TV and the Absence of Sex

The four chapters comprising the ‘Absence of Sex’ part of the collection
offer a variety of approaches and national contexts to examine how the
representation of ‘no-sex’ sex can challenge or comply with dominant
modes of representations that oscillate between a rigid patriarchal ordering