STUDIES
Sex and the City — The Politics of Women’s Genres
The text focuses on the category
of women’s genres, first established in film and television
studies, as particularly appropriate in analyzing television
serials such as Sex and the City. Annette Kuhn and Charlotte
Brunsdon define women’s genres as »mass cultural fictions
of femininity« or »images for women« instead of media produced
»images of women«. Kuhn insists on the political usefulness
of women’s genres because of their ability to transform
the universal, homogeneous and androgynous spectator into
a gender specific spectator, while Brunsdon’s argument
stresses the importance of power relations present in the
feminist desire to regulate all discourses on femininity.
In these terms, though they are often dismissed as personal,
private, and therefore automatically apolitical forms,
the political quality of women’s genres can be recognized
in this struggle to control the representations of femininity.
The text also states the significance of the changes within
the politics of the popular, visible in the emergence of
new representations of femininity in women’s genres such
as Sex and the City. Such changes, according to David Glover
and Cora Kaplan, depend on the relationship between the aesthetic
and the political, because »the intersection of sexual politics
with other pressing social concerns has been the site of
the most significant ideological shifts within the genre«.
Representations of femininity present in Sex and the City
reflect the differences between traditional and contemporary
images of women: while their goals are still based on the
pursuit of meaningful emotional relationships, they don’t
necessarily imply marriage or children. Also, the serial
not only takes feminism as its starting point, but insists
on showing the ways in which the heroines enter into negotiation
with feminist ideas, as well as their ambivalence toward
new feminine identities. Problems discussed in Sex and the
City aren’t presented as individual since every episode shows
the heroines struggling to resolve similar issues which are
then transfigured into common, shared women’s problems through
their mutual conversations and Carrie’s voice-over commentary.
The show’s political character isn’t just a consequence of
taking feminism for granted but an inevitable result of its
formal structure: Carrie, as a sex columnist, generalizes
the individual experiences of her friends, transforms their
particular personal problems into a collective discussion
of feminine identities.
Maša Grdešiæ |
