If his classic novel, The Great Gatsby, is any indication, F. Scott Fitzgerald loved the sound of a woman’s voice. The book, upon which Baz Luhrmann’s upcoming film adaptation is based, is like a textual serenade to a thrilling and unique feminine voice that rings out like “a wild tonic in the rain.” Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby will hit theaters this Friday, with Tobey Maguire voicing Fitzgerald’s masculine narrator and Leonardo DiCaprio portraying the mysterious Jay Gatsby. Fitzgerald’s intriguing feminine voice – which belongs to Daisy Buchanan – will be embodied by Carey Mulligan. Gatsby’s promotional materials indicate that Mulligan’s performance will offer the nuanced physical performance demanded by the role – but if Gatsby’s trailers are any indication, Daisy’s voice will have some impressive help from the film’s soundtrack. Her voice carried little influence or power in Fitzgerald’s day – in an age in which “the best thing a girl can be in this world [is] a beautiful little fool” – but Gatsby’s soundtrack artfully blends Fitzgerald’s 1920s female voices with a cast of contemporary female musical powerhouses, who insistently reclaim Daisy’s silenced perspective.

In an effort that delayed the film’s release substantially, Luhrmann recruited Jay-Z to compile an impressive array of top artists. The most impressive among them are women, performers who intimately express the timeless emotional appeal of Fitzgerald’s Daisy. Beyoncé’s collaboration with André 3000, an eerie rendition of Amy Winehouse’s “Back to Black,” is an unsettling confession of compulsive loyalty to an unfaithful partner. The vulnerable honesty of Lana Del Rey’s “Young and Beautiful” begs for reassurance that love can outlast youth. And Florence + the Machine’s intensely powerful “Over the Love” nods to Daisy’s gendered social restrictions, channeling the frustration of a woman “borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

On the surface, these songs may not strike a feminist chord. In many ways, they speak to the powerlessness of Fitzgerald’s jazz age women. But while Lana Del Rey, Florence Welch, and Beyoncé, like Daisy, have incredibly memorable voices, their performances are also overflowing with generations of hard-won power. Welch’s voice has been called “hauntingly powerful” and “too loud for the room,” pointing to the brick wall of sound she pushes from her adept Lungs. She describes her music as “something overwhelming and all-encompassing that fills you up,” putting her right at home alongside female mogul Queen Beyoncé’s authoritative style. And while Lana Del Rey’s tender contribution to the musical compilation is more subdued, her industry prowess earned her featured billing. Setting her apart from other contributors, Warner Brothers’ “Soundtrack Sampler” features a still image of Del Rey’s name in the bold, graphic lettering of the film’s title screen.

Regardless of whether these musicians should be considered feminist or not, these songstresses’ massive voices bubble up under the story’s surface, threatening to overturn the masculine narrator’s perspective in favor of Daisy’s lilting voice. Some of the film’s trailers even seem to take on Daisy’s point of view, layering Carey Mulligan’s beautifully nuanced facial reactions to the violence she both witnesses and perpetrates over contemporary female performers’ driving vocals. Daisy’s voice may not have had much power in the jazz age, but with singers like Beyoncé, Welch, and Del Rey to offer their vocal prowess to the character, Daisy’s perspective takes on a whole new meaning for feminism. United with these musicians’ vocal power, Daisy becomes an illustration of where we’ve been, where we are, and where we’re going.

Fitzgerald describes Daisy’s as “the kind of voice that the ear follows up and down, as if each speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be played again.” I like to imagine the woman whose lilting speech compelled him to craft such a lovely phrase, but like so many women – both historical and contemporary – her voice has been silenced. In performances that truly speak to the power of a musical message, Florence Welch, Beyoncé, and Lana Del Rey have taken up her cause. Together, they remind us of the hope in a powerfully insistent voice. They remind us that some voices are forever silent. And, most importantly, they remind us that our voices – and media soundtracks – can be important feminist tools as we “beat on, boats against the current.”

In case you haven’t tuned in, The Newsroom goes behind the scenes at the fictional Atlantis Cable News (ACN) to examine journalism in our increasingly divided political landscape. Much of the first season focused on anchor Will McAvoy’s (Jeff Daniels) on-air tirades against the Tea Party and the political repercussions of those attacks. While the show’s creator Aaron Sorkin aims to soften his politically charged narratives with a spattering of office romance, the show’s strength is its “breaking news” segments. The Newsroom asks viewers to relive experiences like the BP oil spill, Nancy Grace’s Casey Anthony coverage, and the debt ceiling crisis, pulling drama from both the narrative world and our own memories.

At the risk of being mocked by the clearly superior chorus of The Newsroom haters, I unabashedly admit that I’m a fan. I cheered when Will revealed the Koch brothers’ Tea Party control, held my breath through ACN’s reverently cautious coverage of the Tucson shooting, and sat on the edge of my seat waiting for President Obama’s mysterious May 1^st announcement of Osama Bin Laden’s death. Obviously, not everyone loves that kind of drama, and that’s okay. What bothers me as I scour The Newsroom’s popular press reviews is the nagging feeling that I am being judged for my fandom by some elite social club.

I’m not railing against your average “it stinks” reviews. This is a chorus of big-time reviewers–writers for Time, The New Yorker, and The Huffington Post, among others–arguing that The Newsroom is so obviously bad that its mere hundreds of fans only enjoy the show because we have no idea what good programming is because we “never watch TV.” They accuse The Newsroom’s supposedly self-righteous viewers of recommending the show to “less enlightened people than themselves” as a ploy to sound intelligent. There are even insinuations that the show’s viewers are tuning in for the purpose of “luxuriating in its particular badness [as] a kind of Twitter parlour game.” In this sea of hatred, it becomes hard to tell whether charges of “elitism, self-righteousness, windbaggery and bias” are being leveled at The Newsroom or its fans.

In the name of fairness (and balance), I’ll admit that some of the critiques of the show itself are reasonable. Sorkin likes his dialogue fast, which can make for an exhausting viewing experience. The show’s characters are on a “mission to civilize,” which sometimes results in preachy diatribes. And yes, the show’s women (all of its characters, really) sometimes act flakier than their job titles would allow in the real world. I don’t take issue with those, or any, arguments about the show’s content. I do take issue with the chorus of writers trying to prove their own journalistic savvy by denouncing The Newsroom’s fans as ignorant, illiterate outsiders, ill-equipped to draw our own conclusions because we don’t have a Master’s in Journalism from Northwestern.

The smugness that Huffington Post’s Maureen Ryan detests in Will McAvoy oozes from her review of the show: “All I can do is what any other educated citizen of this great nation would do: Change the channel.” That emphasis is mine, because as an educated citizen who does not change the channel, I find her words condescending and dismissive. I’m not arguing that everyone should like the series, but there’s a certain irony in chiding The Newsroom for being overly partisan and divisive and then presuming to, in the show’s words, “speak truth to stupid.” You don’t have to be an audience studies scholar to see that this kind of elitist disdain is what trivializes soap opera fans, dismisses popular music as feminine, and ghettoizes television research. And the worst part is that this is a pile on. It’s as though entrance to the exclusive media critic club requires increasingly vitriolic and disdainful judgment, not of The Newsroom, but of its audience.

I am a fan of The Newsroom, but I won’t judge you if you’re not. There’s no reason to generalize that an entire fan community is stupid, ignorant, or media illiterate, and it’s insulting and unfair to do so. The least we can do, as media critics and human beings, is call out divisive, elitist dismissal for what it is–the enemy of real discourse. After all, the fact that I disagree with you doesn’t mean either of us is stupid; it just means we’re having a conversation.

More than the man himself, King’s plea for peace became a symbol of tense times, wrenched from the shaking man’s lips to frame him as an unwitting cultural icon. So I wasn’t surprised that this line, often misquoted “Can’t we all just get along,” sprung to my mind when I heard King’s NPR obituary. What did surprise me, though, was the image in my mind’s eye. It wasn’t King at all–it was David Alan Grier. And it wasn’t a news broadcast–it was In Living Color.

In Living Color, set to be “rebooted” next spring, was the comic brainchild of Keenan Ivory and Damon Wayans. In its heyday, the award-winning mixed-race sketch comedy series catapulted then-unknowns like Jamie Foxx and Jim Carrey to stardom, and its revolutionary take on 1990s culture earned the series TV Land’s Groundbreaking Award. The series’ knack for racial commentary and its Hollywood headquarters made it an obvious venue for a satirical take on the Los Angeles Uprising, and the show’s 1992 season overflowed with dancing looters, L.A.P.D. Sgt. Stacey Koon’s exaggerated lisp, and of course, David Alan Grier as Rodney King.

In a particularly memorable sketch, Grier’s Rodney King is joined by Jim Carrey’s Reginald Denny, the truck driver pulled from his cab and beaten nearly to death in the rioting. Grier’s dialogue, peppered with clichés like those in King’s famous address, urges viewers to “Stay in your car!” Grier’s face twitches uncomfortably and Carrey’s eyes look in opposite directions, dark reminders of the violence that left King with permanent brain damage and Denny with a dislocated eye socket, among numerous other injuries. The scene ends as the two shuffle anxiously over to a brown Hyundai, reminiscent of King’s vehicle on that fateful night. The sketch is the kind of funny that puts a knot in your stomach. In 1992, it provoked the kind of laugh that moved that lump out of your throat for just a minute–it was comic relief in every sense of the phrase.

Satire is an amazing thing. It has a way of softening and recasting difficult subjects; it makes the really tough cultural stuff palatable enough to consume and digest. Rodney King’s face, twisted with pain and anxiety, was heart-breaking; David Alan Grier’s was poignant and irreverently reflective. It provided enough distance to allow for a thoughtful consideration of the moment’s haunting urgency. In Living Color was easier to watch than the surreal footage of people bleeding to death on the streets of a burning American city, and Grier’s comically twitching eye wasn’t as emotionally crushing as King’s plea for peace. America needed both. And for some of us distanced both proximally and culturally from the Uprising, the parody not only made sense through our understanding of the real–the real made sense through the lens of the parody. This complex interplay fused together my memory of the comic signifier and the tragic signified forever.

The L.A.P.D. didn’t kill Rodney King on that fateful night. Instead, their TASERS and night sticks, aided by a camcorder and the American media, solidified his place in our cultural memory. And while that space may have been co-opted and renegotiated by comic satire, the cool thing about media is that it leaves all kinds of trails–nothing is ever really lost. So after I finished listening to the NPR story about King’s death, I Googled David Alan Grier’s impression, taking in two very different mediated projections of an icon unwittingly thrust into the heart of a war.

But to the real man, the late Rodney King, attention must be paid. So I pulled up a YouTube video of King’s famous statement, the original one, in all of its pained, horrified, prolific glory, and I did my best to pick apart the man from the parody. After all, the least I can do is accurately remember, in King’s own voice, the movingly genuine phrase he wanted to be remembered by: “Can we all just get along?”

Grimm’s weekly plotlines, developed around Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm’s 1812 Children’s and Household Tales, follow the modern crime genre format. The series follows Detective Nick Burkhardt, a Portland police officer dismayed by his great aunt’s revelation that he is a “Grimm” – a descendent of the Brothers Grimm whose powers allow him to see pseudo-shape-shifting Wesen whose otherwise human faces transform into grotesque configurations reminiscent of big bad wolves, evil witches, giants, and the like. What’s worse, these creatures-in-disguise often partake in inter-species violence, resulting in many of Portland PD’s murder cases. The series is as much police drama as fairy tale, featuring—like CSI, Criminal Minds, and NCIS—dimly lit camera shots, stealthy detectives with guns and flashlights, and, of course, women’s bloody and broken bodies.

Dead women are standard set dressing on most crime dramas, so I wasn’t surprised by the ill-fated red-hooded coed in Grimm’s pilot. But the more I watched, the more I realized the women in this series aren’t usually homicide victims – they’re monsters. The first morphing face belongs to a beautiful Hexenbiest (loosely translated “witch bitch”) named Adalind whose Barbie-esque blond exterior hideously contorts to reveal that Grimm’s beauty is only skin deep. Adalind makes consistently dangerous choices, using her beauty—and the monstrous truth beneath it—to ruin men. Not only does she cast a love spell on Nick’s partner Hank, she also kills an elderly cancer patient and unleashes an impressive physical attack on Nick – she uses her beauty, NBC muses, to “put any man completely at her mercy.” Adalind is the monstrous feminine who seduces men before castrating them, at least figuratively, with her power.

I can’t say that I’m surprised by Grimm’s monstrous femininity. Fairy tales (and crime dramas, for that matter) are morally instructive, recycling cultural fears into cautionary tales, and Grimm funnels the mythos of women’s irresponsibility and cold indifference into a crime drama. “Tarantella,” for example, features a Spinnetod (or “black widow”) – a mother who seduces men before sucking out their internal organs through their abdomen – and the Cinderella-turned-Murciélago (“hideous bat-like creature”) in “Happily Ever Aftermath” emits a shrieking sound that explodes her entire family’s eyeballs, leaving herself heir to her father’s fortune. It is from these stories that we learn what a “good mother” looks like, and she certainly wouldn’t seduce men in the name of eternal youth. And “good women” like Cinderella are rewarded through quiet suffering, not monstrous murder.

Grimm emerged from a cultural climate particularly interested in moral instruction, as evidenced by recent legislative fervor over women’s choice. Last week, Kansas legally allowed pharmacists to withhold prescriptions they “reasonably believe” could terminate pregnancy, the “Protect Life Act” allows hospitals to “let women die” rather than perform life-saving abortions, and of course, transvaginal ultrasound legislation requires women to be probed vaginally before terminating a pregnancy. These bills are just as terrifying as, say, tales of fire-breathing lady-Dämonfeuer, which also come from the assumption that women’s free (and presumed irresponsible) choice destroys American morality in a fury of fire and brimstone. Just as Grimm’s monstrous women threaten men, GOP politics frames women’s rights as a threat to family values, “fetal rights,” and men’s sovereignty. Grimm naturally channels this milieu, borrowing from traditional anxiety about strong, independent women encapsulated by the Brothers Grimm.

As Grimm’s first season wrapped up, the monstrous women were back. Adalind sicked her cat on Nick’s fiancé, turning her into a modern-day (comatose) sleeping beauty, and the mysterious “woman in black” unleashed a flurry of ninja-like moves before revealing her identity as (spoiler alert) Nick’s mother, long thought dead. Missing mothers are common in fairy tales, but Grimm’s finale raises the question: if Nick’s mother has been alive all of these years, why hasn’t she been mothering him? Even though the woman in black may not be the archetypal “evil stepmother,” I’m not holding my breath for a “happily ever after” moment in Grimm’s second season – what kind of a boring fairy tale leaves a “good mother” alive? We’ll have to wait until fall to see if her crime was drinking children’s blood or simply disappearing from her child’s life. Or maybe Grimm will give us a truly updated fairy tale – you know, one with progressive female characters.

The ultimate in camp masculinity, Eastbound and Down’s primary character is Kenny Powers (Danny McBride), a man who, after being fired from professional baseball for “juicing up,” becomes a substitute gym teacher in North Carolina. As Powers struggles to reenter the Major Leagues, the show follows his daily activities of “cruising in his Denali,” snorting cocaine at a sleazy local bar, and riding his jet-ski, “The Panty Dropper.” The HBO series illustrates this hyper-consumerist lifestyle through the character’s racist, homophobic, misogynistic one-liners, the best of which have been dubbed “powerisms.” While this term nods to the character’s last name, Kenny’s dialogue reeks of white masculine power. As cultural critics, then, we need to ask how this type of supremacist rhetoric functions in America’s “postracial” political climate.

Kenny’s overbearing white masculinity nestles securely into white mainstream media, which made Powers’ season two move to Mexico surprising. The narrative, which situated the burned-out ball player outside of his signature dominance, follows his failing cock-fighting career as his only friends (Powerism: side-kicks) abandon him when his rooster is killed. It turns out that whiteness is not so powerful when personified as an isolated white dude in Mexico. If we didn’t know better, we might think that Powers’ masculine white power had lost its sting. However, Powers soon uses his assumed racial dominance to take what he believes is rightfully his: a pitching job with The Charros. In this role, he is back on top, parading his white masculine bravado as Mexican baseball star “La Flama Blanca” and forcing his way into his girlfriend’s personal and professional life.

Fans shouldn’t have been surprised by his forceful resurgence; this is how whiteness operates in postracial America. In the U.S., the last few years have seen a slew of violently aggressive anti-immigration laws, born primarily of the fear that American white males will be swallowed up in an actual postracial (Powerism: Mexican) culture. When hegemonic masculine whiteness is challenged, it takes by force, in politics just as it does in comedy. While lawmakers like Jan Brewer and Scott Beason recoil at accusations of racism, comic hero Kenny Powers quips, “I transcend race, hombre.” And just as Kenny’s come-back campaign unapologetically entreats, “Mexicans, for once in your life get off your couch and do something,” so too have lawmakers suggested that remarks about shooting Latina/os from helicopters are harmless. In short, masculine white power, personified in Eastbound and Down and postracial America, is only interested in “making the world your bitch.”

Of course HBO does this all in the name of comedy. Kenny shoots his friend, but we laugh when he disinfects the wound with margarita mix; he casually tosses a pistol to a child in the baseball stands, and her cheerful expression is incongruously hilarious; and when Powers violently destroys a Mexican music studio, his oafishness set against a cheesy 1970s soundtrack had me rewinding my DVR to watch the sequence again. But bringing a critical eye to this type of racial and gendered violence is unsettling, especially when we consider the cultural context. Maybe in a postracial society a white dude joking about Mexican poverty, rape, and exploitation would be funny, but this is not a postracial society. The white power movement is thriving in America, and Kenny Powers is a microcosm of this backlash; when white masculine dominance is threatened, it responds violently, militaristically, and without regard to innocents in the line of fire.

Eastbound and Down will be remembered for one of the least likable characters ever written into comedy. Kenny Powers was a misogynist, homophobic white supremacist. And as much as it pains me to admit it, I laughed. I watched old episodes on HBOGo. I even bought the season 1 DVD set. It’s a funny show. And after thirty minutes of powerisms, American really does seem postracial – at least when compared to Kenny Powers’ universe. But I can’t ignore the way that Powers’ extremist white masculinity pushes the boundaries of racism, allowing us to discount everyday examples of bigoted behavior as part of the postracial bubble. There is nothing funny about white supremacy, misogyny, or homophobia, but they are ever present in our media. Maybe we’re not as postracial as we thought – all the more reason to bring a critical eye to our television screens.