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Chapter 5 Appearance: Expertise and the Community of Viewers As 90210 fans and I settled down to watch an episode, one of the first things viewers did was to cheer or jeer a character's appearance-in particular, a female character's hairstyle or clothing. Viewing time was peppered with such comments, voiced in a striking tone of authority. Because of my interest in female identity, I decided to focus my analysis on comments about the women's appearance, which were unquestionably the most frequent. At first glance, comments about appearance might seem superficial, or at least of marginal significance. Certainly, the viewers themselves regarded this talk as trivial. However, as I examined the transcripts more closely, using the social constructionist perspective, I became convinced that these comments worked complexly on a number of levels. Study of talk about appearance generated themes that will resound through this book. The comments created a pleasurable community among viewers that positioned the speaker as "expert," and this expertise worked unproblematically to reify and perpetuate the dominant notions of female identity described in the last chapter. In other words, this talk functioned hegemonically, winning pleasurable consent to a specific construction of the "pretty, nice" female and concealing ways in which this limited patriarchal identity can oppress women in the real contexts of our lives. Community, Pleasure, and Expertise Consider these typical excerpts from viewing sessions: Show comes on. KATEY: Didn't she used to have brown hair? It looks red. * * * Appearance: Expertise and the Community of Viewers 69 Show plays. Brenda (talking about ring): "Brandon, relax. It's just on my right hand. Besides, Stuart insisted- " ERIKA (interrupting dialogue): She looks awful bony. CASEY: I don't think she's that pretty. ERIKA: She's too pale. * * * Brenda (talking about eating meat): "We might as well eat our own young." BOTH: Snigger. KAREY: I actually like Cindy's hair right there. It looks good compared to other episodes. MARION: Yeah. It doesn't look like a helmet anymore. KAREY: Vh-uh. * * * Donna and David talking about his piano playing. MARY: She has new hair. Cute. CHRYSE: I liked the other kind better. * * * David talking about his music. Donna persuades him to take piano lessons. KAITLIN: I like her sweater. Seventh-grader Katey mused about a slight change in hair color; college students Marion and Karey revisited Cindy's hair when it used to "look like a helmet"; and high-school students Mary and Chryse blithely disagreed about Donna's new "do." On one level, this talk can be analyzed in ways similar to those used by, for example, Brown (1994). It worked to construct and maintain the viewer community; it provided a shared arena of experience and gave rise to a pattern of friendly talk that drew its strength from a topic of common interest; and it generated enormous pleasure as the talk flowed out, uncensored and sure of acceptance. However, drawing on the social constructionist notion that we construct a certain type of identity by what we say, I examined how this talk positioned the speaker. I first found that this shared bond allowed another important pleasure: It positioned the viewer as expert. Viewers spoke as equals of the characters, even superior to them: Almost all of the observations about appearance were phrased unhesitatingly as declarative statements, and others' opinions were not explicitly consulted. Even Katey's question about hair color quoted at the beginning of this chapter was rhetorical ("Didn't she used to have brown hair?"). Katey didn't wait for anyone to answer and clearly didn't really expect a reply . Instead, she supplied her own response, following the question with a statement that trusted her personal perception and positioned her- 70 Chapter 5 self as authentic source of knowledge, saying firmly, "It looks red." This confident, knowledgeable identity, a subject position probably unavailable to these girls in many other contexts, constructed them as knowing as much about appearance criteria as their friends-and more than the actors or directors! Even a disparity of opinion about appearance, as between Mary and Chryse above, seldom resulted in conflict. At first, this seemed to indicate that the appearance-commentary community was built around a relative lack of emphasis on "right" answers. However, on closer examination , it became clear that the "right" answer was simply the act of commenting on appearance. These viewers clearly were all members of the same club, whose invisible lexicon of membership rules included not only attention to and...

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