There’s a talk being held tomorrow at Annenberg, hosted by Laurie Ouellette, Professor in Communication Studies at the University of Minnesota, that I find really relevant to our work during the week of November 14th on displaced civic support and responsibility from governmental programming to the private sector. Here’s the info on the talk:
Monday, November 28 at 12P in Annenberg Room 207 will be Laurie Ouellette, Professor in Communication Studies, University of Minnesota. Her topic: “It's Not TV, It’s Birth Control: Reality Television and the ‘Problem’ of Teenage Pregnancy”
>From Professor Ouellette:
"This talk considers the recent deployment of reality entertainment (Baby Borrowers, Dad Camp, 16 and Pregnant, Teen Mom) as “birth control.” Why have commercial television and cable networks taken up biopolitical objectives? What possibilities and contradictions emerge when sex education is outsourced to commercial media? I situate recent reality interventions within gendered circuits of post-welfare governmentality in the United States and show how they fit within a genealogy of thinking and acting on the “problem” of teenage pregnancy."
Ouellette’s look at how reality television stands in as “birth control” points to Anna McCarthy’s similar interest in locating the work that reality television performs upon the viewer in reiterating national values while activating the viewer in an illusion of participation and prevention within a specific value-set. McCarthy states that “...some aspect of the work of the state in the realm of social citizenship - work that may be reparative, in the case of Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, or punitive, in the case of Judge Judy - seems to have been outsourced to the private sector, specifically television, and individualized in particular selves and experiences.” McCarthy’s notion of outsourced civic work can directly be seen in the influx of teen pregnancy reality programming that Ouellette cites in her research on outsourced sex education. As McCarthy recognizes with court television (but which can be applied in a larger context to reality television altogether), reality television is a space where “governance and entertainment blend together” (18). The ways in which teenage pregnancy reality television takes on the two disparate notions of ‘governance’ and ‘entertainment’ becomes highly problematic when recognizing their merge within the work of ‘sex education’. Questions that come up for me are: are the values within reality television of crisis, drama and shame - values that operate toward an entertainment value-set -- entering into the work of sex education for the viewer? How is relishing in the ‘mistakes’ of pregnancy operating toward a specific type of sex education? Does this perspective lean toward a more abstinence-based sex education, or an education geared more toward behavioral and preventative knowledge as well as awareness of public health resources and access? Also, looking at the ways in which women’s health and birth control resources are being pushed to the periphery within the last few months, significantly aligns with this influx of sex education programming within the televisual realm. This kind of governmental depletion of women’s health support directly feeds into the questions I raise above in terms of the specific type of sex education that reality television is producing.
Moreover, in considering teen pregnancy (and youthful pregnancy at large -- seeping into the early 20-something age range) within the realm of ‘celebrity’ as exhibited in other televisual and online/print media outlets, the work of reality television to this specific sex education end becomes extremely problematized. With news and entertainment televisual programming that takes up celebrity pregnancies (see Hillary Duff, Jamie Spears, Bristol Palin), the sex education premise seems to be diluted. These are not your common, anonymous, middle-class teens; they’re seamlessly having children, and can monetarily afford to take care of their children while maintaining their careers (or high school career?) with ease. Moreover, in light of their celebrity identities, these pregnancies are not necessarily deemed ‘mistakes’; the notion of ‘mistake’ leaks over from the reality television shows like 16 and Pregnant, but seems to be less prevalent within these examples of ‘successful youthful moms’. These archetypes of success in relation to the archetypes of disaster that both feed into the notion of youthful pregnancy share the same televisual space (and many times share the same televisual audience), which even moreso produces a flawed sex education program within realm of the private sphere of media.
I’m really looking forward to Ouellette’s talk, and thought I’d share this with you in the case that you missed the ZdC email update about the event! Seems like it’ll be really interesting and relevant to our work.
No comments:
Post a Comment