Color of Rape: Gender and Race in Television's Public Spheres

1. Television and Theories of the Public Sphere

If you’re not on television, you are nobody. —Suzanne Stone, To Die For The statement in the epigraph is uttered in the movie To Die For by the protagonist who hopes to be a television star. She enters the field with no obvious training, but her physical appearance allows her first to be a “weather girl” on the local news and then a news anchor. The movie underscores the power of nomination bestowed on television: the medium does not just recognize individuals and events but also endows them with cultural significance and legitimacy. An accompanying, and perhaps an overpowering, subtext is the disdain expressed toward television as a shallow, superficial, inauthentic medium of communication. This double theme has been repeated in other Hollywood movies and even in television programming. Commonsense understandings of the medium and of the scholarship conducted on it shuttle between rationalizing the cultural authority of television and condemning its ability to trivialize “serious” issues. Nevertheless, all agree that television representational practices have a significant structuring influence on our everyday lives. In his seminal work Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson theorized that print-capitalism was a key element in the formation of the nation as imagined community; print media allowed people to share affective bonds with those they had never encountered and thereby engendered a communal sensibility.1 While there have been no explicit studies that theorize the ways 15 1 Television and Theories of the Public Sphere in which the technology of television has sustained and altered the concept of imagined community, numerous scholars have pointed out the medium’s role in constituting shared imaginations.2 They have attested to the power of its visual elements, the ability of the medium to seemingly transport viewers. Television provides a “window out to the world and into the home,” and in so doing, it informs people’s conceptions of the private sphere and their modes of engagement with the community. Television programming represents a “dramatisation of consciousness,” Raymond Williams asserts. Its programs produce a flow that attempts to link viewers.3 In this book I explore not just the real and imagined communities that television enables, but I specifically interrogate the ways in which the medium can facilitate democratic community formations. In this chapter, I underscore theories that help inscribe television’s role in this democratic project. I also point out why rape becomes a useful site to intervene in this arena, one that highlights the ways in which television programming mobilizes gendered and racialized bodies (men, women, white, and nonwhite) and inscribes them within democratic communities. The double theme that I have already referred to, television’s capacity to bestow social legitimacy and to trivialize issues, is a key consideration as I outline the need to include the medium in discussions of contemporary democratic formations. DEMOCRATIC SUBJECTS In the United States, television’s relationship with women has been complex and problematic. Feminist scholars in particular have pointed out that television , like other mass media, has targeted the female viewer as the primary consumer for the household and hence the key source of revenue for the industry.4 These studies point out that the medium has facilitated the formation of a particular imagined community, one that allocates specific roles for women and the feminine. Examining the historical moment of television ’s arrival into the American household, diverse scholars have pointed out that the apparatus reconfigured the domestic space. Until recently, television programming reproduced the ideological separation of the public and private realms, firmly positioning the home as the space of femininity and leisure and the public world as a place of masculinity and work.5 Arguing that television solicits a gendered viewer, feminist scholars have interrogated consistently the medium’s relationship to women’s everyday lives. They have teased out the connections between television programs and the larger social and cultural milieu in which the programs are viewed. In television’s repre16 COLOR OF RAPE sentational practices, women’s bodies have borne the burdens of the entire body politic, these scholars argue. My interest in this book lies in tracing how television programming solicits (white and nonwhite) women as subjects of democratic communities. I do not just underscore the gendered nature of the imagined communities facilitated by television but specifically explore where women fit into the democratic debates and discussions enabled by its programming. Informed by critical race theories, other scholars have pointed out that the medium...