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Published Letters: 1
What does it mean that all the fall shows are supposedly about women, celebrating women, focusing on empowered women--an assertion Traister casually proposes based on the most superficial summaries of the shows--and bypasses examining of what is tied up in how these shows are frame & portray women--and continues straight on to meditating how the shows frame men & masculinity.
Please!
Maybe before we start wringing our hands over the poor, underminded male characters in the show, their loss of status and alarmist anxiety of not existing in their long held positions of power and domination, it would be nice to spend a little time considering the general themes inherent to what has for centuries been, and remains, a patriarchally constructed culture. I would love to see a television show in which a "powerful" woman was scripted according to traditional definitions of masculinity, or feminity, but rather moved past those restrictive binaries altogether. Perhaps in such a scenario there would be a place, also, for men whose identity wasn't dependent on forms of masculinity whose "strenghth" and "power" can only exist at the oppression of another, other gender/race/religion, or must be sacrificed and fretted over, in the face of such "differences."
