As a feminist scholar (and fashion fan) I frequently find myself returning to the problem of the body. Traditional trappings of femininity like make-up and nail polish and “feminized” interests like dance, fashion, and romance offer the body as a site of creativity, pleasure, and identity play but also something that is monitored, shaped, and disciplined. The contributors to the “Bodies” section in Elana Levine’s edited collection Cupcakes, Pinterest, and Ladyporn: Feminized Popular Culture in the Early Twenty-First Century explores this tension by examining how pregnancy apps, fandom-centered fashion blogs, nail-polish blogs, and televised gospel performances all negotiate the complex intersections of technology, gender and embodiment.

That this section is called “Bodies” (plural) is significant, because–despite looking at very different media forms with disparate relationships to the idea of the body–all four pieces in this section explore an investment in how these media work to provide community for their users. Throughout the chapters in this section there were four key threads: an exploration of how these female-targeted media dealt with tensions inherent to the presentation of the female body, the way in which the imagined user and their investment effected the platform, how the technology interacted with these concerns, and the fostering of a female community around these technologies.

Community

In “Mothers, Fathers, and the Pregnancy App Experience” Barbara L. Ley lists the facilitation of a community of mothers (and to a lesser extent fathers) to-be as an important feature of pregnancy apps, alongside their prominent informational and organizational features. “Dance, Dance, Dance, Dance, Dance, Dance, Dance All Night! Mediated Audiences and Black Women’s Spirituality” by Beretta E. Smith-Shomade looks at how a community based around shared spirituality can share profound religious affective experience through the viewing of gospel and religious performance on television. My own chapter “Fashioning Feminine Fandom” touches on how fashion blogs organized around specific fandoms (Dr. Who, video games, or Disney for example) bring together a community of (mostly female) fans interested in expressing their fandom through sartorial engagement. Some of these communities have become significant enough to hold real-world meet-ups.

Michele White’s “Women’s Nail Polish Blogging and Femininity” also addresses the community dimensions of beauty blogs, exploring how they become spaces for not only creative expression but for communities that guide and support one other’s nail art. White notes that while these communities often discursively emphasize the creative elements of nail art, some advice-giving practices end up reinforcing more problematic gendered messages about the woman’s body as a constant project to be worked on towards a normative “ideal.”

Body Presentation

It is the discussion of the photographing of nail polish bloggers hands that seemed to evoke this disciplining of the female body in White’s work, as the quality of the nails themselves (not their designs) are evaluated. She found one blogger’s advice to others on how to photograph their nails so they did not appear “fat,” indicating that even when the goal was creative artistry it is difficult to present the female body without opening it to such scrutiny.

Similarly, Ley found that while pregnancy apps generally provided their users with helpful prenatal information, health advice, and tools, at times some of these tools, like weight and behavior tracking functions, had the potential to facilitate a similar scrutiny of the pregnant body. Ley, in her focus on reviews of these pregnancy apps, draws attention to a key issue in the analysis of feminized popular culture–the experience of the media’s actual users–when she notes that for most reviewers these trackers were not experienced as disciplinary but rather gave the users a sense of control and made some tasks easier. My chapter looks at how most fan-centered fashion blogs de-center a focus on the body altogether. Unlike the majority of fashion blogs, fan-centered fashion blogs generally present images of outfits without showing wearers of these outfits. Because there is no body being photographed, it is the use of clothing and accessories to express an interpretation of a media character that is evaluated as opposed to the appearance of a woman’s body, the fit of the clothes, etc. I also argue that fan-fashion blogs can function to unmoor characters from their embodied associations by interpreting macho super-heroes as prom outfits or hyper feminine Tinkerbell as athletic wear or androgynous jeans and t-shirts.

Here, removing the image or specific referent of the body allows this form of fashion blogging to play with fashion with minimal discussion of body type, weight, or evaluations of attractiveness. Smith-Shomade’s chapter emphasizes the possibility of the female bodies’ presentation outside of the contexts of objectification and surveillance by looking at how women in Gospel-competition television shows like Sunday Best present an embodied experience of faith that can be shared by viewers.

Technological Medium

Smith-Shomade considers the impact the television medium itself has on facilitating an intimate affective connection between the person performing on screen and the viewer allowing them to share an embodied spiritual experience. Here the media form–the television screen–can connect multiple bodies and spirits. Ley’s chapter mentions how the intimacy of the smartphone screen and its visualization of the fetus as separate from the mother’s body through the app can reinforce problematic political narratives about the fetus but also allows the user to “share” her pregnancy with others in a new way through its visualization on the device.

The contrast between White’s and my own chapters also show how the significance of the technological differences between the presentation medium chosen for each blog (posting a photograph vs. building a collage with Polyvore) affects the ways in which the female body is or is not scrutinized.

Thematic Focus

Finally, each contributor considers how the thematic focus of each platform under discussion shaped its relationship to gender and embodiment. For Smith-Shomade the emphasis on faith and spirituality structures the context in which both the viewer and the text present the female singers, understanding them not simply as performers to be scrutinized but as participants in a faith community in which these kinds of spiritual experiences present an important space for African American women to take part. I argue that the emphasis on fandom as the focus that shapes the bloggers’ creative engagement with fashion both allows for fashion blogs that emphasize creativity and interpretation and de-emphasize consumption and beauty paradigms while carving out a space for a femininity and female fans to connect in traditionally “masculine” fandoms gaming culture. Ley attends to this issue by considering how pregnancy apps often marginalize or diminish the role of the father in the pregnancy experience and assume a married, heterosexual, cis-gendered user base, which ultimately has ideological problems and consequences for the apps’ usability for some reviewers (like fathers).

These four threads provide only a glimpse into the pieces featured in the “Bodies” section of the anthology, but they illustrate the significance and complexity of the issues identified in these chapters.

This post is part of Antenna’s Digital Tools series, about the technologies and methods that media scholars use to make their research, writing, and teaching more powerful.

In my last post, I discussed how I stitched together a system built primarily from simple office spreadsheet software to help me with the coding process used in my dissertation. As I moved into my first year post-diss with new projects involving multiple researchers and multiple kinds of research (examining not only television texts but also social media posts, survey responses, and trade press documents), I realized that my old methods weren’t as efficient or as accessible to potential collaborators as I needed them to be. This realization started a year’s worth of searching for a great software solution that would help me with the different kinds of coding that I found myself doing as I embarked on new projects. While I ultimately discovered a number of great qualitative research software, ultimately nothing was “just right.”

The problem with most of the research-oriented software I found was that they are based on at least one of two assumptions about qualitative research: 1) that researchers have importable (often linguistic, text-based) materials that we are analyzing and/or 2) we know what we are looking for/hoping to find. Both of these assumptions presented limitations when trying to find the perfect software mate for my research.

The first software I tried was NVivo, a qualitative research software platform that emphasizes mixed media types and mixed methods. This powerful software was great in many ways, not the least of which was that it counted for me. I first experimented with NVivo for a project I am doing (with Ashley Hinck) looking at Facebook posts and tweets as a site of celebrity activism, and in this context the software has acquitted itself admirably. It allowed me to import the PDFs into the system and then code them one by one. I found the ability to essentially have a pull-down list of items to consider very convenient, and I appreciated that I could add “nodes” (tags for coding) as I discovered them and could connect them to other broader node categories.

Sample Node List from NVivo

The premise behind my dissertation had been to set up a system to allow unexpected patterns to emerge through data coding and I had wanted to import this into my new work. NVivo supports that goal well, counting how many of the 1,600+ tweets being coded were associated with each node and allowing me to easily see patterns emerge in terms of which codes were most common and which were rare. An effective query system allows researchers to quickly find all the instances of any given node (e.g., all tweets mentioning a holiday) or group of nodes (e.g., all tweets mentioning a holiday and including a photo). While the format of my data meant I wasn’t able to use Nvivo’s very strong text-search query, its capability to search for text within large amounts of data, including transcripts, showed great potential. NVivo seemed to be the answer I was looking for, until I tried to code a television series.

Sort for most frequent nodes from my project with Ashley Hinck

For social media, my needs had actually been relatively simple. I was simply marking if any one of a few dozen attributes were present in relatively short social media posts. But with film and television they increased. It wasn’t as simple as x, y, or z being present, but rather if x (say physical affection) was present I also needed to be able to note how many times, between which people, and to add descriptive notes. This is not what NVivo is built to do. NVivo imagines that researchers are doing three different things as distinct and separate steps (coding nodes, searching text, and linking a single memo to a single source). NVivo is great at doing these things and I expect will continue to serve me well working with survey and text-based data. But for the study of film and television shows I found NVivo demanded that I simplify the questions I asked in ways that were inappropriate. After all, in the complex audio-visual-textual space of film and television it isn’t just that a zebra is present but whether it is live-action, animated, talks, dances, how many zebras are around it, what sound goes with it, etc. Memos allowed you to add notes but it only allowed one memo per source and the memos were awkwardly designed and hard to retrieve alongside the nodes.

I found that NVivo competitor Dedoose gave me a bit more flexibility in terms of the ways I could code but it did not do well with my need to simply add episodes as codable items. I was unable to import the episode. Also, simply typing in an episode’s title and coding as I watched was much harder than I expected. Like NVivo, Dedoose seems to imagine social scientists that work with focus groups, surveys, oral histories, etc. as their primary market. Trying to use Dedoose without having an existing spreadsheet or set of transcripts to upload proved unwieldy. In the analysis of film and television, coding while you are collecting data is possible, even desirable, and the notion that data collection and the coding of data would be two separate acts was built into this system.

If Dedoose’s limitation was the notion of importable data, Qualtrics’ was the notion that I would have already decided what I would find. I quickly discovered that while Qualtrics was wonderful at setting up surveys about each episode and effectively calculated the results, it did not facilitate discovery. If, for example, I wanted to code for physical affection and sub-code for gentle, rough, familial, sexual, it could manage that well. But if I wanted to add which characters were involved, this too needed to be a list to select from. I couldn’t simply type in the characters’ names and retrieve them later. Imagine the number of characters involved in physical affection over six years of a prime-time drama and you can see why a survey list (instead of simply typing in the names) would quickly become unwieldy.

That is how I found myself falling back on enterprise software; this time the database software FileMaker Pro. FileMaker Pro doesn’t do a lot of things. It doesn’t allow you to search the text of hundreds of word documents, it doesn’t visualize or calculate data for you, it doesn’t automatically generate charts. But what it does do is give you a blank slate to put the variety of types of information you need into each database and helps you create a clear interface for inputting this information. Would I like to code using a set of check boxes indicating all the themes that I have chosen to trace in a given episode? No problem! Need a counter to input the number of scenes in a hospital or police station? Why not?! Need to combine a checkbox with a textbox so I can both note what happened and who it happened to? Sure! And since it is a database system, finding all of the episodes (entries) with the items that were coded for is simple and straightforward. This ability to not only code external items but to code them in multiple ways for multiple types of information using multiple input interfaces proved invaluable. As did its ability to allow me to continue coding on an iPad as well as a laptop, which allowed me to stream video on my computer at work or while traveling and coding simultaneously.

FileMaker Pro has its limitations, too. It does not connect easily with other coders unless everyone has access to the expensive FileMaker Server, and since I have just begun using FileMaker I may find myself still paying for a month of Dedoose here and there to visualize data I collected in FileMaker or importing the notes from my database into NVivo to make a word tree. But at the end of the day what characterizes textual analysis is its interpretive qualities. The ability to add new options as you proceed, to combine empirical, descriptive, numerical, linguistic and visual information, and to have a platform that evolves with you is invaluable.

While I didn’t find the perfect software solution, I found a lot of useful tools and I discovered something important: As powerful as the qualitative research software out there currently is, no software currently is well suited to textual analysis. The textual analysis that media studies researchers do creates unique challenges. While transcripts of films and television shows can be easily imported (if they can be obtained), the visual and aural elements of these texts are essential and so many researchers in this area will want to code items without importing them as transcripts into the software. Furthermore, the different ways to approach media – counting things, looking for themes, describing aesthetic elements – necessitate the ability to have multiple ways to input and retrieve information (similar to Elana Levine‘s discussion about incorporating thousands of sources in multiple formats for historiographical purposes). The potential need to have multiple people coding television episodes or films requires a level of collaboration that is not always easily obtained outside of social-science-oriented software like Qualtrics. Early film studies approaches often combined reception with description and these two actions remain important in contemporary textual analysis. Textual analysis requires collecting, coding, analyzing, and experiencing simultaneously (particularly given the difficulties in going back to retrieve a moment from hours and hours of film or television). It is an act of multiplicity, experiencing what you watch in multiple ways and recording the information in multiple ways, that current software does not yet facilitate. The audio-visual text requires a different kind of software, one that does not yet exist, one that would not only allow for all these different kinds of input and analysis but also allow you to easily associate codes with timestamps, count shots, or scene lengths and link them with themes. While the perfect software is not out there, I found that combining software like Filemaker Pro, NVivo, Dedoose, and simple tools like Cinemetrics could still help me dig more deeply into media texts.

This post is part of Antenna’s Digital Tools series, about the technologies and methods that media scholars use to make their research, writing, and teaching more powerful.

2,125… or was that 2,215? When working on my dissertation, a question that came up again and again when I said I was trying to look at entire series of several television shows was “how many episodes did you look at total?” It was a perfectly reasonable question, and yet one I often wasn’t quite sure of the exact number when I was asked it. After a certain point what was another 50 episodes or so? If I couldn’t easily remember the number of episodes I was looking at, I knew remembering the details of each one wasn’t going to be possible. As a result, finding a way to code and take notes on the shows I was examining, and make them searchable later, was one of the first steps I took during my dissertation process. Four years later, as the research approach I developed in my dissertation has become increasingly important to my work, I am still in search of the perfect software.

When I began looking for a solution for my dissertation, I ran into three problems that I suspect are pretty common: 1) I had never worked on a project that size and was not aware that there were software solutions out there; 2) the software I had heard of could cost several hundred dollars; and 3) (most importantly) I wasn’t sure exactly what I was looking for. My dissertation began largely from an interest in finding a different way to approach television texts and wanting to investigate how the form of different television genres and a number of different themes of representation intersected. As a result when I sat down with my first stack of teen drama DVDs to code I didn’t know quite what I wanted to code. It was through the process of coding, thinking about what information I would need and want to be able to go back to, that I learned what I was looking for. I only realized that something like acts of physical affection were something I wanted to code with a simply y/n and character names after 6 episodes. It turned out that a shorthand for demographic information (e.g. WASM for White Adult Straight Man) would be important for medical dramas and crime dramas to denote the demographics of criminals, victims, suspects, and patients, although it had been entirely unnecessary for teen dramas. Coding, for me, was a learning process — something that both recorded information, made it accessible, and helped me discover what I was looking for. That process of discovery through research certainly won’t be foreign to most academics. After all, there is joy in finding that unexpected piece of the puzzle in an archive or watching a focus group coalesce in an unexpected way. However, as I have found half-a-dozen or more software demos later, that is not quite how most academic research software works. Most of the software I experimented with wanted me to know what I was looking for, or at least already have what I was looking at (i.e. interview transcripts, survey results) in a concrete way.

Because of this core issue — the fact that how much information, what information, and what kind was constantly evolving — I found then, and again three years later, that it was an enterprise (read: business) not academic software that best suited my needs. During my dissertation it turned out to be the relatively straightforward Numbers spreadsheet software that did the job. For each genre, I would set up a different spreadsheet with the unique sets of information I needed for that genre. For example, for crime dramas there would be a column for each of the following: demographics of victims(s), demographic(s) of perpetrators, demographics of suspect(s), motive, outcome, religion, non-heteronormative sexuality, gender themes, police behavior, and the nebulous “notes” section that inspired the columns and code short-hands that I needed as things evolved.

What made Numbers work was that I was transparently typing in words, the shorthand I evolved to stand in for the boxes on a traditional “coding” sheet, and numbers (episode numbers, number of patients, etc.). I could always change what I coded and how. Every few episodes I watched I would ask, ‘Is there something important and new I want to track?’ If there was I could word search my notes and assign them shorthands; so, as time went on, I needed less notes and could shorthand much more of my fiftieth ER episode’s notes then I could when I began my fifth. The spreadsheets seemed disorderly and overwhelming to my partner when he peeked at my work (see image below) but they had the advantage of elasticity, changing as I learned what I was doing and what I was looking for.

Numbers didn’t have any assumptions (like a lot of more powerful software does) about what information I would be inputting and how I would use it. Therefore, when it came time to sort that information it also leant itself well to finding the relevant episodes and connections. The filter function allowed me to pick any column and any search term and would show me only the rows (episodes) that were relevant. Every episode that contains the word “jealousy” in the motive column but not the words “anger” or “angry” and the religion code “CH” (for Christian) was only a few filter clicks away.

Like Elana Levine, I found that the software that was available couldn’t do the whole job itself. Numbers didn’t really recognize the information I was putting in as something it should count, so if I wanted to know how many white male victims of crimes there were (hint: a lot) I was on my own to physically count them up. As a result I discovered that Zotero, a research material collection system (similar to Scrivener) that I had been using for reading notes and collecting PDFs also helped me analyze those thousands of episodes. After filtering the information using Numbers, I would create files in Zotero where I would list all the episode numbers that discussed Buddhism, or in which a lesbian character appeared, or in which a patient died. I’d then count up the numbers of episodes in a given category. Because Zotero was so searchable, it made it quick and easy to find all the “important themes” a given episode dealt with and calculate all kinds of relationships that I hadn’t originally expected to look at (percentage of patient deaths that were pregnant women? Alcoholics? Coming right up!).

Spreadsheets and a digital version of a filing cabinet (my best way of describing Zotero) are not necessarily the high-tech solutions I might have initially sought but their content agnosticism and searchability made them perfect fits for the work I was doing at the time. Just the other day I pulled up one of my old spreadsheets looking for the sort of thing I hadn’t coded but likely would have kept in the episode notes, and found an episode of a medical drama featuring an elementary school teacher in mere moments. When I started my new job and embarked on new research projects, including those that required collaboration, I started to feel like spreadsheets just wouldn’t do the job anymore and went in search of the perfect software. One year, several meetings with my college’s IT guys, and quite a few demo downloads later and I still haven’t found it. My new, better spreadsheet alternative has turned out to be yet another business solution: FileMaker Pro. And the shoe still doesn’t quite fit, but more on that later (stay tuned for Part II next week).

While I might not have discovered the perfect piece of software, what I have discovered is that the creative use of open-ended software can serve the study of texts well. However, the available research software is not yet designed for the diversity of information, multiplicity of data input types, and unique twists and turns that accompanies the study of media texts.

In particular, I am interested in the growth of “Appisodes”: versions of television episodes with embedded games and interactive components that allow viewer/players to interact directly with the narrative, often through mini-games or other interactive components that punctuate the episode and are required to move the story forward. Introduced with minimal fanfare, Appisodes (which I have referred to as “Merged Screen” experiences) have recently been made available through outlets like the Itunes store or Amazon. The first few appisode apps released had a number of factors in common. Disney Jr. Appisodes, (which I have written about elsewhere), Dora the Explorer Appisodes, and VeggieTale Appisodes were all extensions of broadcast television animated series targeted at pre-schoolers. However, the most recent addition, Annedroid Appisodes produced by Amazon, breaks from this formula and points to some of the broader potential—and limitations—in this new format for children’s media.

Annedroids is a part of Amazon’s effort to compete with Netflix and Hulu through Amazon Prime and the creation of original programing. Annedroids is a half-hour live action series targeted at elementary school-aged children, and follows the exploits of a young girl Anne who designs, builds, and programs large, complex, and personality-filled robots and conducts scientific experiments and solves problems with the help of her two friends Nick and Shania. Made with a combination of live-action and CGI techniques, the series incorporates a large number of scientific concepts, using the robots and CGI elements to depict dangerous and dramatic scientific experiments while still using child actors that are relatable, realistic, and differ dramatically from the glitter and glam of many Disney stars. In addition to these science-centered storylines, the main character is a young girl who has an extensive knowledge of science and a penchant for building, coding, and engineering, presenting a strong role-model for young girls.

Annedroids, therefore, seems like the perfect fit for conversion into the appisode format. The series’ focus provides the opportunity for simple coding-based mini-games or games and activities that teach scientific principles. Given the older target audience of Anendroids, one might imagine that there would be a higher level of educational content in their Appisodes. However, in practice Annedroids Appisodes only show hints of this potential. Of the first two episodes released, each included only three interactive elements/games, only one of which (in each episode) had a clear educational component. Both of these games are based around the idea of completing increasingly complex circuits. Some other games included minor educational components (like the inclusion of weather data or different kinds of animal footprints), but most were based around simple movements—chasing or running from something—or finding the right spot where something was hidden.

By looking at Annedroids Appisodes, a number of challenges, limitations, and potentialities of the form can be seen. While interactive elements can be easily incorporated into a series like Dora the Explorer or Doc McStuffins because they are animated, converting live-action content into animated games in a way that appears seamless and preserves consistent quality is much harder. This is a challenge that must be resolved in order to make Appisodes a realistic option for a broader variety of content. How to incorporate interactive content in a way that authentically adds value and to the episode and is fun and engaging is another challenge, one that the distinctions between the Annedroids Appisodes and previous iterations places further into context.

Amazon’s stake in selling not only their content but their platforms to consumers makes their children’s content a strong site for considering the potential of appisodes for both creative-storytelling (lauded by Annedroids creator J.J. Johnson) and interactivity. With initiatives like Kindle Free Time, part of Amazon’s pitch to families is its ability to curate media content so children only have access to “age-appropriate” media and can be limited in terms of time spent on non-educational content. While series have only just begun exploring how children’s established media habits—including repetitive viewing and viewing on mobile devices—and access to new devices can allow for new forms of storytelling/media interaction, the themes and limited interactive elements of Annedroid Appisodes is an important case study in considering the limits places on such efforts.

Media is a significant part of many children’s lives, and how to encourage children to interact with this media in creative, playful, and even educational way represents an important avenue for parents and scholars to consider. Appisodes represent the possibility of incorporating the kinds of interactive learning studied and promoted in other media such as video games into children’s consumption of television content. For distributors like Amazon who are presenting their platform as a better alternative for many parents, explicitly activating the educational content potential of Appisodes can help to differentiate them and garner positive attention as the educational content of Annedroids itself has done. As a scholar and an aunt of two young girls, considering how a platform that is only beginning to take shape might be developed in a way that increases the play, interactivity, and educational potential of media presents an important opportunity to look at the growth of new media as an opportunity to develop the best aspects of media designed for children, not as a threat to children it is sometimes framed. As a fledgling format, Appisodes may have not reached this potential, but as the format grows parents, educators, and children’s media scholars will have the opportunity to explore what it does well, what it struggles with, and how we can advocate for the value of merging video and interactive content in children’s media’s future.

Doty’s voice was vivid in his work, so open and personal that far more than with most scholars reading his writing felt like listening to someone you knew well. His work brought you into his world, allowing you to re-experience Gentlemen Prefer Blondes or the bothersome but beloved Hitchcock catalog through new eyes. When I had the privilege of hearing him speak, his humor, warmth, and passion were readily apparent and his interest in nurturing a queer scholarly community was obvious; this inviting spirit came through in both his speaking and his writing, including his two pivotal books Making Things Perfectly Queer and Flaming Classics and numerous articles.

This spirit has made Doty’s work my go-to resource when first bringing queer theory, particularly queer reading, into the classroom. Whenever students find it difficult to see beyond the surface of a text, the detailed, lively confidence of Doty’s readings of classic texts opens up whole new ways of seeing to new audiences. Like many great theorists, his work provided numerous tools that has allowed me to be a better teacher not only when teaching queer theory but also when introducing students to decoding texts and varied audience practices. From his work I have seen students adopt a new lens through which they can make sense of media and the world.

While for many what Doty offered was a new way of seeing, for me, and for many others, he gave an even greater gift….a language for what we had experienced and did not yet know how to bring into our scholarly lives. I do not remember the first time I read Flaming Classics, but I do remember discovering for the first time a common language to put a name to what, as a young girl, I had always felt was going on in Batman: The Animated Series between Poison Ivy and Harley Quinn. He showed me how I could use in my work the strange feeling my teenage self had that I saw more of myself in Hawkeye in M*A*S*H then I did Hotlips and how I at once identified with James Bond and the Bond girls. Through his example, Doty showed the value in mining our own, sometimes complicated and conflicted, media consumption and responses in our work. He helped give me the vocabulary with which to explain myself, to bring what I saw in texts into conversation with queer theory. As a young scholar, being given a way to talk about what I saw in a way that was legible to others was an invaluable gift.

Doty’s work passionately argued for the importance of space for both the personal and political in our academic work. In so doing he helped to validate the labors of those of us who do not see academia and activism as antithetical, who find the political valuable–even inescapable–in work we do on queer sexualities and media. By problematizing but creating space for the “I” in our work, he helped to make us aware of our place as distinct readers of media texts even in our scholarly voice. By sharing with his readers little slices of his life and how they shaped him into the scholar that he was, he helped to give us the license needed to attempt to do the same. Doty’s work showed the value of getting beyond the simple empirical and understanding queer reading not as an optional or imposed reading but as simply another facet of a complex text.

It is through this lesson that Doty has impacted all of my work, not only my research on queer reading and representation but much of my textual analysis of media texts. The principles that Doty used in his queer reading practices went beyond the texts he discussed, or even queer reading as a methodology. Rather, it helped me to understand how to approach reading texts with an open mind, a sharp attention to detail and connotative meaning, and to trust the value in the meanings that we can wrest from texts rather than just those that are obviously there.

For all that Doty’s work has taught me, and all that it simply helped me learn how to say, I will always be grateful. While I never had an opportunity to take a class with Dr. Doty, I nonetheless hope that I can count myself as one of his students. I hope through my writing and my teaching, Doty will have many more students in the years to come. I mourn the work that he might have written, I mourn what else I could have learned from him, and I mourn that I gave up my opportunity out of cowardice to tell him how much his work meant to me. I regret that I never was able to thank him for the gifts that his work gave to me. I can only hope that those of us he touched gave something back to him, in the knowledge of the impact that his work had on so many of us and in the growth of the queer media scholarship tradition that he helped to foster.

Either by good luck or design, Veep hit the airways just as the political discussion was shifting from the Republican primary race to speculation about who Mitt Romney would select as a running mate. A Google news search for the word “veep” leads to a nearly equal selection of stories about the HBO series and Romney’s “veepstakes,” certainly an enviable position for HBO. Far from simply a matter of timeliness, the extent to which the discussions of Romney’s potential running mates focus on optics, personal politics and risk management undermines the claims of the chorus of political pundits declaring Veep unrepresentative of the actual political environment. While on its surface Veep is standard bawdy sitcom fare, with the politics taking backseat to the prat falls, underneath this surface a bitter truth about politics sits quietly.

Much of Veep focuses on exceptionally small things as opposed to the the earth-shattering, life changing politics of  the New Deal or a new tax cut, more interested in crisis management and small-scale political maneuvering. While the politics of photo-ops, for example, lack the gravitas of The West Wing or even the similarly comedic Battleground, it is nonetheless a very real part of politics in the age of 24 hour news. Even as Veep’s first episode, which focuses largely on the fallout of an offensive tweet and subsequent joke, was criticized for being unrealistic and overly cynical, those critics concurrently rehashed the firestorm surrounding a controversial remark from commentator Hillary Rosen. Rosen’s comment about Ann Romney’s lack of work history had no policy effects of any kind and had been retracted by Rosen by the time the Sunday shows devoted significant portions of their program to discussing it. Despite pious claims to the contrary, optics and the trivial are—for better or worse—a significant part of American political life; the discomfort brought about by Veep’s skewering of this portion of American politics has perhaps more relevance than solemn programs which deny this reality.

In fact, Veep could be seen as part of a larger trend on HBO towards more realist, politically or socially relevant programming. Having found success with the fantastic with programs like True Blood and Game of Thrones, made-for-television movie Game Change ushered in a season of politically themed fictional programming on HBO. Game Change, chronicling the vice-presidential candidacy of Sarah Palin, may have drawn extensive criticism from—largely Republican—commentators, but it also was seen by 3.6 million viewers during its first weekend, making it the highest-rated original movie on HBO in nearly a decade. With Julia Louis-Dreyfus’ Selina dressed all in red in the first episode of Veep and caught in the midst of a Twitter scandal, Game Change may even have served as a stealth roll out for Veep‘s April premiere. Like Veep, Game Change is very much about the behind-the-scenes manipulations that take place in hopes of controlling political optics, and similarly speaks to American fears that behind closed doors our political figures may be bumbling, vain, and feckless.

Meanwhile, HBO is also interested in how these politics are being refracted through the media given the upcoming arrival of Aaron Sorkin’s latest behind-the-scenes drama series, Newsroom. HBO is airing the series’ trailers as bookends for each episode of Veep, suggesting that topicality rather than tone will help move audiences across these programs (and continue their HBO subscriptions through the summer). Newsroom follows a cable news program whose anchor has decided to bring honor back to the news by becoming an Edward R. Murrow-like figure that dispenses with fluff and objectionable politics for hard news. Sorkin’s television programs tend to feature characters who are imperfect but deeply honorable, and he seems to be bringing this redemptive vision not only to the frequently censured genre of cable news, but also to the increasingly invisible figure of the moderate Republican. While it is unlikely that Sorkin’s choice of a Republican for his main character will make it any more palatable to the conservatives that condemned Game Change, it could allow for a deeper and potentially more optimistic view into the divided American political system.

While Veep leaves political party up to the imagination to allow for a more resounding condemnation of American politics, Newsroom seems to deploy it to support its image of passion and redemption, of political figures who are not venal but virtuous. Whether this new crop of politically oriented programming will pay off for HBO is very much an open question, but the mixture of frustration, cynicism, and optimism that characterize this cycle of programs is quite relevant to our political time.

The National Communication Association had such a tremendous number of interesting panels over the conferences five days that it would be impossible to truly capture anything like an accurate image of the event in a few hundred words. Instead, I want to provide a glimpse of one small segment of the conference, a sampling of feminist and girlhood panels. Several of the panels were organized by Sarah Projansky and brought some new faces to NCA for the first time. The first panel I attended from this grouping was entitled, Girls’ Voices in and Through Media and looked at particular feminist issues in girl studies. Sharon Ross presented a paper entitled “OMG, LOL: Urban Teen’s Thoughts on Media” that provided some fascinating early data about how different demographic groupings of teens, particularly divided by race and class, conceptualized and consumed media. Not only did Ross observe important differences in what these different groups of teens watched but she also found some key differences in the way these teens claimed to use or understand the media they watched. Jessalynn Keller presented her project “Talking Back to Seventeen: Girls’ Media Activism, Feminism, and the Blogosphere” exploring how a particular girl blogger entered into a complicated discourse with Seventeen magazine and its messages through “The Seventeen Magazine Project”  and what this case study may say about the potential for feminist girl activism on the web. UW-Madison’s very own Nora Seitz also presented on this panel, performing a fascinating analysis of the ABC Family program Huge and how the series’ representation of overweight teens deviated from the Alloy brand in core ways that reflected its specific authorship and industrial contexts. Sarah Projansky finished the panel with a particularly deep analysis of the media coverage of Venus Williams in her late teen years and the unspoken racism that emerged surrounding discussion of the beads that she kept in her hair and the differing approaches to this style taken by the news and tennis officials at different points in her career.

Later in the day, I attended a workshop titled “The Politics of Doing Feminist Girls’ Media Studies” featuring a variety of scholars in differing phases of their careers. Beretta Smith Shomade from Tulane University explored in depth the role of the teacher/activist/scholar in incorporating community activism and involvement in their scholarship and provided a particularly powerful example from her own work with students and media literacy education projects. More experienced scholars on the panel explored in depth the complex relationship between scholarship, activism and pleasure that often circulates around the media. Ruth Nicole Brown discussed an activist centered project on Soul Hot that explored how the Soul Hot phenomenon allowed the voices of black girlhood to be audible and to counter narratives that were “about us but never by us.” Angharad N. Valdivia, also an intersectional scholar, emphasized the ways in which we have to think about girls as not only consumers of media but as producers of media and culture. She explains the importance of being immersed in these kinds of media, of, as a parent, consuming media with kids. Valdivia argued that it is important to explore how, sometimes problematic, mainstream media may open up a space for certain kinds of subjectivities and recognition for young people. Younger scholars, like Lindsay H. Garrison and Jessalynn Keller discussed the challenges that they encountered with trying to find materials associated with girl’s media in traditional archives because of the ways in which girls work and girls media has historically been undervalued, as well as the challenges they encountered with reconciling feminist politics with the methodologies that they used in their interviews.

A more historical perspective on feminism could be seen in the panel: “Feminist Generations and Finding a Voice: Exploring Different Generations of Feminism’s Voices”. Cindy Koenig Richards began the panel by looking at the Washington Women’s Cookbook that was produced by Washington Women’s Suffrage Movement to expand its reach and its descendent Pots and Politics. She explained that while some dismissed these publications as too conservative and domestic that they also provided opportunities for women to be published for the first time and helped these women develop a public presence. Julia Wood provided a concise overview of the second wave and the departure that the third wave takes from it, in her view, surrounding issues of difference. She expressed concern about the need to assure that the third wave finds a way to engage more effectively in making their voices heard in key venues while addressing structural issue. Bonnie Dow brought up similar questions in her work, while discussing how postfeminism has to be reconceptualized in relationship to a particular life stage. She discussed her own experience with postfeminism through the prism of Sarah Palin, who is from the same generation. She argues that postfeminism has to be thought of as an authentic subject position in order to interrogate the new momism that she argues is having something of a backlash effect as part of this postfeminist position. Finally Natalie N Fixmer-Oraiz provided a fascinating case study of the third wave organization the Reproductive Justice Network which she argues eschews models of the wave that emphasized difference rather than those that emphasizes continuity. She explains how the Reproductive Justice Network privileges youth, intersectionality, and engages with young motherhood and queer and trans women.

The final panel that I attended along these lines was my own: The Girl and the Franchise. Morgan Blue began the panel with her paper “‘At least I know how to be a girl!’: Postfeminist ‘Girlification’ on Disney Channel” which explores how the a kind of sexualized young feminine girlfriend is privileged for both young girls and adult women. She argues that this dispersed cultural phenomenon is a “sensibility” and infantilizes women of all ages and illustrated this phenomenon with case studies from Hannah Montana and Wizards of Waverly Place. Derek Johnson explored the complexities of gender and fandom by looking at the case of a little girl Katie who was teased for being a fan of Star Wars in his paper “The Force is with you, Katie’: Media Franchising and the Confinement of Girls Through Multiplied Production”. He explained the activist response to the event and the media phenomenon that followed in support of Katie that attempted to frame Star Wars as “for girls” too. He explains the complex rhetoric of this response that both frames Star Wars as inclusive while also carving out individual iterations of the franchise that are clearly gendered  and funnel fans into ghettoized niches. The panel also included Taylor Nygaard’s paper “From Clothes to New Media: Alloy Inc. and the Colonization of Contemporary Girl Culture” which detailed the growing role the Alloy company has in various forms of teen media in particular television and forays into web series. She explored how the imperatives of Alloy, which run on particularly consumption oriented commercial lines,  inflect the massive amount of content that Alloy distributes for teens today. What about my paper? That is for another post.

As I hope the reader can see, a tremendous amount of different approaches to girlhood, feminism ad media are available in only a few brief panels. Yet the panels I detailed here represent only a small snapshot of the tremendous work done at the conference. What was your NCA experience? Let us know in the comments section so we can paint a bigger picture.

NBC’s gambit with Grimm is reasonably clear, and compelling on paper.  Grimm is structured like a crime procedural and includes many of the best aspects of this genre: a satisfying goal completed and mystery solved at the end of the episode, a high stakes focus for the narrative arc, and a resulting brisk pace. At the same time its novel twist, that the intrepid police detective is the last in the blood line of the Brothers Grimm and has the unique ability to see the monsters who are hiding in human form which lends itself well to the series additional serial level; where the mystery of the protagonist’s, Nick, family’s past can be as explored as well as the secret of the shadowy group implied at the end of the first episode. While this balance is structurally effectively, I have some serious concerns about its ultimate ideological effect. Early on in the episode, Nick is in the precinct and sees a random perpetrator briefly shift into a monster, the kidnapping of a young girl and an assault of a college student (stock plots of more traditional procedurals like Law & Order: SVU) is also traced to the work of a monster. This conceit’s potential ideological effects are troubling, it moves away from a period in which crime was depicted more contextually on television. It isn’t desperation, class or neighborhood issues, mental illness or family issues that cause criminal behavior, it isn’t even anything as messy and complex as motive, inside a criminal there is simply a monster. Since the criminal is truly a monster, the protagonist needs to have no qualms about shooting him or her and the producers seem to find nothing wrong with depicting a man who kidnaps a young girl as effete (complete with hand needlepointed pillows, hummel figurines, home cooked pot pie and an actor well known for playing gay characters) if he also happens to be a modern big bad wolf. There is much to like about Grimm, the filming is excellent, the writing reasonably tight and the premise strong. As a Friday night show on a struggling network it may even prove a success, but until I see more to the contrary I worry that Grimm is indeed a wolf in sheep’s clothing.

ABC’s Once Upon a Time fits less neatly into a popular broadcast television formula and as a result has both more challenges and more potential then its NBC cousin. Once Upon a Time’s premise is reasonably complex, there was a world and time in which fairytales were real and Prince Charming and Snow White reigned. The evil witch took revenge on them by transporting them to Storybrook, Maine where they would not remember who they were or their history. They can only be saved by Snow White’s daughter, Emma Swan, who just happens to be a bounty hunter, that was saved by the curse when they hid her in an enchanted wardrobe, a portal to the other world. By a tremendous coincidence Emma is lured to Storybrook by her own son who she gave up and was adopted by the witch, who in this world is the mayor of Storybrook. Got that? Good because the complexity of its narrative premise might ultimately be Once Upon a Time’s achilles heel. If Grimm’s concept and structure can be quickly discerned how Once Upon a Time will ultimately unfold is certainly a mystery, which is to be expected in a show conceived by two former Lost writers. This is in some ways to the series benefit, while some villains are clearly defined our heroine, Emma, is clearly no saint and our saint, Snow White, shows the potential to be anything but. As a result, Once Upon a Time evidences the potential for moral ambiguity that Grimm limits. Even so there is a strange backlash undertone to a show with such a strong female protagonist. In her everyday human context, the witch is a single career women, working hard to make it in local politics, whose evilness is indicated to her son (also Emma’s son) by a lack of maternalness – it is important that his damning accusation is not that she hurts him or fails to provide for him but that she only pretends to love him.  Emma’s ability to save the fairy tale characters, and to transform personally, comes from her willingness to stay in Storybrook and bond with the child that she gave up. If you are still not convinced about the series strange backlash undertone Rumplestiltskin actually is a snidely whiplash like character who menaces Red Riding Hood and her Grandmother, owns almost the whole town and his last name is….wait for it….Mr. Gold. Despite this, the interesting female protagonist and the potential for innovation and interesting moral ambiguity makes me want to believe that these red flags will be less disconcerting as time goes on.

At the end of the day, I found myself disappointed by these two new additions to fantasy television. In many ways they were more artfully done, more visually beautiful and more narratively compelling then I expected, but, especially compared to their CW cousins, they were also much more ideologically problematic then I had anticipated. Fantasy has the potential to break the rules in profound ways. The fact that in this case it appears to be used to instate an authoritarian model of intrinsic criminality and backlash tales of bad mothers, mothers in need of redemption, and the sainted mother who martyred herself from the outset is disappointing at best and disconcerting during a time of cultural shift at worst. Nonetheless, there were elements of the programs that were promising and I hope to be proven wrong.

While the team at Antenna and I are excited about the new premieres, as I am sure many of our readers are, I also find myself embarking on next week wondering…is the premiere season what it used to be? Like the political primary season, premiere season seems to be extending. While the CW has regularly introduced select shows before the main premiere week, this practice is expanding. This year both the CW and NBC are releasing multiple programs the week prior to the other networks. But more unusually nearly every network has already scheduled show premieres through October and November. Rather than mid-season replacements these are publicized fall premieres nearly a  month or more after the main premieres.

ABC is introducing its duo of American masculinity programs in October with Last Man Standing and Man Up. This seasons two fairy tale inspired programs, NBC’s Grimm and ABC’s Once Upon a Time, are premiering towards the end of October. Fox’s new animated program Allen Gregory is also premiering in October and Fox’s new comedy I Hate My Teenage Daughter is being held until November. Only CBS and the CW are only introducing new fall shows in September, and CBS is only premiering one shows in October, Rules of Engagement – a show that appears to just be running out the clock to hit the magic syndication number. CBS has been a ratings leader and kept retained the most new shows from last years fall premieres, so it is unsurprising that they are keeping the most traditional schedule.

But what does it say about the other networks, who have significantly stretched the definition of “fall premiere.” Does it express a lack of confidence in the programs that are being held until October or November? Maybe, certainly Grimm and Once Upon a Time are slightly riskier genres and ABC’s (possibly regressive?) man-coms seem a bit of a departure for their core demo. It could also represent an investment in a programs success, by giving it the opportunity to garner more attention when it premieres. Certainly, Fox seems to have learned from Glee that experimenting with a shows introduction can be effective. By the time its sitcom New Girl makes it to air, it will have had several pre-air premiere venues as it was pre-released on iTunes, Hulu, and on-demand. Whether this will ultimately bring the show added buzz or decrease its ratings is yet to be seen but it is clear that Fox is ready to reconsider how to “premiere” a show.

Does this season represent a change in what Fall premiere season is? There is a strong argument to be made that traditional premiere seasons make less and less sense. Now networks are not only competing with one another’s new and returning shows but cable shows that are premiering, in progress, or reaching their finales. Viewers may pick up a show during its very first episode, when they try it out on Hulu during its fifth episode, or during reruns and can still go back and see it from the very beginning. Is the best way to give a good show a strong start still introducing it in mid to late September with all the other network shows. In a fractured, year round television schedule, are the changes we see this year to the premiere schedule only the beginning. What do you think Antenna Premiere Week will look like in 2020?