The second question is easier to tackle than the first, so I’ll start there.  In the tradition of feminist standpoint theory, I/we need to remember as scholars and teachers that despite how we may professionalize and depersonalize our writing, that our questions and approaches are shaped by who we are and where we’ve been.   So, to illuminate where I write from, I grew up the daughter of a Mexican mother and German and English American father, in mostly white neighborhoods in the U.S.  I thus write as a Latina and Chicana, with these identities claimed mostly as an adult, and as mixed race. My mother didn’t get the opportunity to go to high school, and my parents, while they helped me get a college education, never expected me to pursue graduate degrees.  Especially important to my work today, I later became a social worker, and worked for several years with low-income families and Latina and African American teen parents in San Francisco before returning to graduate school to pursue a Ph.D in media studies. Do my mixed ethnic background, class positioning, past romantic partnerships with women, work experience, or even my feminist values make my scholarship more feminist, however?

There’s a story I tell sometimes when asked what inspired me to become a media studies scholar. One of my days working with teen parents has stuck with me; it was a screening of Mi Vida Loca, Allison Anders’ film about Latina gang members.  The girls were riveted, and later told me that it was the first time they’d seen themselves in a film.  (Which is not to say that I’m proposing Latinas should always be portrayed as cholas or as working class, but that we all want to see ourselves represented, respectfully, in the media). In my visits to my clients’ homes I also saw how many of them were very isolated, with only their babies and a television to keep them company.  As I considered what mid-1990s television offered them in terms of role models or inspiration to even finish high school, I realized just how much media representation – or lack thereof – matters.  This is part of what is feminist in my work; I’m motivated by the fact that these young women are not there, on the TV or movie screen, or behind the scenes telling their stories. But Console-ing Passions made me think about how I might better foreground feminism in my research, teaching, and mentoring. We may assume it’s “built in” to our work, as a colleague and I joked at the conference, but our readers and students don’t necessarily know that.

Excellent anthologies such as Yvonne Tasker and Diane Negra’s Interrogating Post-feminism and the work of a number of smart scholars, many who contribute to Antenna, aside, the word feminism is coming to feel out of place in contemporary media scholarship.  As we’ve become more integrated into the academy, it seems we’re in fact expected to build in feminist, anti-racist, and related objectives but not focus on them too directly. We’re also not always studying histories of oppression that contribute to the dearth of female and non-white voices in media production or the impact of media texts on audiences, which at worst, I think, can result in analyses that are far removed from how media matters.  We might be viewed as less than rigorous scholars if we call attention to or take an activist stance when we encounter denigrating representations, cite Gloria Anzaldúa or bell hooks before Foucault or Stuart Hall, or acknowledge that we personally are motivated by feminism and related ideals. And I write this as someone with the new freedom of tenure, remembering that it often is less safe to be open on these topics as a graduate student or untenured faculty member.

I don’t think all media studies scholarship should be feminist or social change-oriented, but I do think we play a role in creating space for this work, and that what we say and what we leave out has an impact.  I’d love to hear others’ thoughts on this as well. What’s your opinion on the integration of feminism in contemporary media scholarship?  How can scholars successfully accomplish this? And do these issues resonate in the same way for younger scholars?

Regardless of whether you are a Gleek (if you don’t know this term, read on), you may have noticed the buzz surrounding FOX’s musical comedy, which returned Tuesday to the second-best ratings of the night after a “Gleek Week” of promotional appearances and news coverage.  Created by Ian Brennan, Brad Falchuk, and Ryan Murphy, Glee focuses on a diverse group of teenagers participating in a high school show choir, treating the participants in “New Directions” with alternating doses of warmth and snark.  It also is one of the first series in the last few decades to successfully incorporate musical numbers; its music has become a lucrative cross-promotional element of the Glee phenomenon.

The series has garnered ardent fans, or Gleeks, around the world — evident in the many websites dedicated to it, such as Gleeks United, Glee Club Online, Forum Français de Glee, Glee Brazil, and my favorite, What Would Emma Pillsbury Wear?, inspired by the fashions worn by the eponymous guidance counselor with a penchant for all things sterile and for sexy-librarian sweaters. Just as notable, it appears to have been embraced as particularly American. The cast was invited by First Lady Michelle Obama to sing at the White House’s annual Easter egg roll last weekend, and they followed that up with a Glee-themed episode of The Oprah Winfrey Show (she praised them as the “hardest working cast on television”).  News coverage on the return of Glee and spoilers have followed in most major news outlets—including two dueling reviews in The New York Times—and in scholarly forums (a shout out to In Media Res, which recently hosted a Glee-themed week).

What is it about Glee that has inspired this phenomenon?   Based on my own experience, as a Gleek and as a scholar focusing on the series in my research, I find the show’s play with diversity equally satisfying and frustrating, and always compelling (arguably, it is “post-racial” and reinforcing of traditional racial stereotypes). And it seems that for many fans, the show’s focus on underdogs overcoming challenge, sly satire, and feel-good musical numbers are clear pulls.  With respect to these and other appeals, Glee is a prime illustration of what Valerie Wee has described as hyper-postmodern media culture. A mash-up of generic influences, intertextual references, music, and ideological content that is both eerily nostalgic and forward-thinking, the series can be read and enjoyed by fans in multiple and diverging ways.

This week’s episode, “Hell-o,” provided a full helping of these and other pleasures.  We witnessed cheerleading coach Sue Sylvester (Jane Lynch)’s return to the high school and renewed mission of obliterating the glee club and the long-awaited blossoming of two romantic relationships, Mr. Shuester and Emma and Rachel and Finn, although difficulties naturally arise for both couples. In these and other entanglements as New Directions looks toward regionals, the timing and humor are spot on, not the least of which was the limiting of the musical numbers to songs with the word “hell” in the title. The hilarious mix that ensues includes “Hello, I Love You,” “Highway to Hell,” and “Hello, Goodbye.”

And the narrative may not be important as the sum of Glee’s parts; they include the hyper-postmodern mash-up described above, exciting and talented performers, upbeat music that can be enjoyed in other arenas, sweetly geeky fandom, and the overall ethos of embracing the loveable loser in all of us.

Are you a Gleek, and if so, what do you think encourages its appeal?  What do you make of the series as a contemporary television, music, or theatrical text? In response to this complicated series we plan to follow Glee, its paratexts, and its fandom on a weekly basis as it continues to air this season.  We hope you’ll take part in the discussion.

1. It should be called White Teen Mom.

Teen Mom showcases several teens in an attempt at portraying a diversity of situations, but Farrah, Amber, Maci, and Catelynn are all EuroAmerican.  While this might help dispel notions that teen parents are always girls of color, why would the series not focus on girls from a variety of ethnic backgrounds?  (And I do realize that Teen Mom is merely following the teens from 16 and Pregnant who chose to continue to let their stories be followed, with African American teen Ebony dropping out, but there are justifications for bringing in other teens in this case). Teen pregnancy and parenting rates have been found to correlate with socioeconomic background, which translates to teen parenting being more often a reality for Latinas and African Americans than for white teens.   If the point of Teen Mom is to discourage pregnancy among all teen girls, they seem to be off the mark here.  Or does Teen Mom merely aim to entertain?

2. It glosses over related socieconomic factors.

It goes without saying, then, that the series usually ignored the socioeconomic factors (e.g., poverty, related issues of troubled families of origin, schools in crisis) that contribute to teen parenting looking like a decent lifestyle choice.  Aside from the storyline focused on Amber, who appears to have little to no support from her own family, the series seldom addressed societal factors that encourage teens to choose to become parents.

3. It doesn’t (overtly) proselytize.

Not directly, at least.  It doesn’t present teen parenting as easy, but it also doesn’t come across as preachy. It does, however, through choices in editing, clearly present the various teen moms as survivors, as unfeeling, or as victims. An interesting choice was to include one teenager (Catelynn) who gave birth and put her baby up for adoption.

4. It gets the isolation right.

Each of the teens whose lives are followed struggle with issues of isolation and having to question whether their loved ones will step up to help them, which realistically underscores challenges that teen parents face.  On the other hand, the camera crews are keeping them company – for now.  It’s notable that the series has a message board for teen moms and former teen moms. I made note that threads on the board like “What did you have to give up to become a teen mom?” and “What The Teen Mom Show doesn’t show” had hundreds of responses.

5.  It wants to present teen parenting in a neat package.

While the series apparently aims to show the real hardships of teen parenting, it also falls into the trap of classical Hollywood storytelling in trying wrap up each teen parent’s storyline, if not happily, at least neatly by the final episode. Farrah is shown to be taking classes in culinary studies, Maci and her fiance have gone through couples counseling and are trying to work out their difficulties, etc.  Such neat and happy endings in fact might undermine the goals of the producers… assuming such goals exist.

It wasn’t just this that struck me in the Vanity Fair photo spread, which featured Gomez, her fellow Disney-ite Vanessa Hudgens of High School Musical fame, and four other young actresses, however. Notably, the photos of the six actresses, all trumpeted as stars on the verge, were displayed in such a way that Gomez, Hudgens, who is of partial Filipino, Chinese, and Native American descent, and Zoë Kravitz, the daughter of biracial actress and musician Lisa Bonet and Lenny Kravitz, were positioned on pages opposite lighter skinned, “white” actresses Lily Collins, Isabel Lucas, and Amber Heard. The editor who chose to display the photos in this manner might argue it was simply artful to play up contrasts.  And it’s not to argue that the “ethnic” stars have particularly dark skin (this is Hollywood, after all), just that they are racialized as not exactly white, and the positioning next to “whiter” stars makes this assertion stronger.  Moreover, the juxtaposition eerily echoes the way in which leaked gossip in 2008 characterized Selena Gomez and Hannah Montana actress and singer Miley Cyrus (the arguably All-American daughter of country singer Billy Ray Cyrus) as unfriendly rivals and ultimately positioned Gomez and purported BFF Demi Lovato, another Disney actress and singer also of half-Mexican heritage, in a separate camp from their more EuroAmerican counterparts at Disney.  Is the conglomerate thinking of teen celebrity promotion in relation to ethnic blocs? If so, I wonder how executives might refer to these different stables of triple-threat wonders.  “All-American” versus, say, “E.A.”?  Gomez, Lovato, and Hudgens would certainly fit the moniker E.A., an acronym coined by journalist Ruth La Ferla to describe the new generation–Generation E.A., for Ethnically Ambiguous, in which youth are increasingly mixed and the rise of mixed-race actors and models has followed.  Edward Wyatt similarly has trumpeted “Generation Mix” in relation to increasing diversity in Disney and Nickelodeon programming and films.  Perhaps promoting mix is fine by the studios, as long as the centrality of whiteness is preserved through a parallel track of star promotion.