Television and Sexuality (Issues in Cultural and Media Studies)

CONTENTS
SERIES  EDITOR’S  FOREWORD x
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS xii
|| INTRODUCTION 1 1
Cultural transformations 1
The digital revolution 3
Pleasure and risk: researching television and sexuality 5
Genre, taste and discursive regulation 8
Effects studies 9
Public sphere debates 11
Feminist cultural theory 13
From ‘progressive texts’ to ‘postmodern ambivalence’ 14
Differentiated identities and hierarchies of taste 16
Biological essentialism and performative genders 17
Summary 18
|| SEXUAL  CITIZENSHIP  IN  THE  DIGITAL  AGE 20 2
Television regulation in the UK and USA 21
The sexual citizen 26
The sexual consumer 30
Market regulation 33
Recommended reading 37
|| PORNOGRAPHY  AND  THE  REGULATION  OF  TASTE 38 3
Postmodern pornography 41‘Middle-brow’ pornography 44
Women and the gendering of pornography 48
Conclusion 53
Recommended reading 54
|| SEX  SCANDALS 55 4
Sex scandals as media events 56
The gendering of publicity 59
Affairs of the state on confessional television 63
Sensationalism, shame and the cult of celebrity 67
Melodrama and the carnivalesque 69
Conclusion 72
Recommended reading 73
|| THE  SCIENCE  OF  SEX 74 5
The technoscientific gaze: a critique 75
Discovery Channel 78
Beauty and the beast 81
The intelligible body: machines and cartographies 84
Constructions of sexual difference 88
Conclusion 91
Recommended reading 92
|| DOCUMENTING  THE  SEX  INDUSTRY 93 6
From prostitution to sex work: a history of feminist intervention 96
Current affairs documentary and political debate 101
‘Auteur’ documentary and the ethics of production 106
Conclusion 109
Note 109
Recommended reading 110
|| GAY,  LESBIAN  AND  QUEER  SEXUALITIES  IN  UK  DRAMA 111 7
Coming out of the closet 112
Distinctions in taste and the politics of aesthetic form 114
Popular drama: sexuality as a social issue 117
Quality drama: the politics of difference 118
Politically incorrect: queer lifestyle drama 123
Conclusion 126
Recommended reading 127
|| POSTFEMINIST  DRAMA  IN  THE  USA 128 8
‘Having it all’ in postfeminist drama 130
|| TELEVISION AND SEXUALITY viiiRemediating women’s magazines 134
Bourgeois bohemians 136
The aestheticized self and sexual relations 139
Conclusion 143
Notes 144
Recommended reading 144
|| CONCLUSION 145 9
Generic inertia and innovation 145
Looking towards the future 147
GLOSSARY 150
APPENDIX 155
BIBLIOGRAPHY 161
INDEX 172