Ervi Pantti, Dr

Mervi Pantti, Dr. Soc. Sci., Senior Lecturer, University of Helsinki. Must-see Medicine Women Exceeding limits of Genre and Gender in ER The writers of "ER" have had seven years to perfect their portrayal of women doctors, so we expect them to have it right by now. But they have yet to have a female physician who totally pushes the envelope, challenging authority figures, acting like a know-it-all and stomping off in a huff when things don't go her way. A female Doug Ross would be "must-see TV." (Booth 2001) The commercial imperative of the television industry, coupled with the demand for programming that is the ‘same but different’, has led to more and more combined genres in an effort to draw bigger audiences. Genre hybrids such as the phenomenally successful medical drama series ER (1994-) are calculated to appeal to diverse audiences and capitalise on different markets. As Robin Nelson (2000) has discussed, television executives, have become aware of shifting cultural values and learnt that crossovers of role and genre can do miracles for ratings. Consequently they are more willing than before to entertain innovative, non-traditional gender representations of characters during previously conservative prime time television slots. The result has been a discussion that has intrigued industry professionals and academics alike. My goal is here to find out what kind of impact this yearning for a mass audience has had in changing images of women, on television, in professional roles traditionally assigned to men. Specifically, I trace the recent hybridisation of genres and their effect on gender representations. My case-in-point is an example par excellence: the much celebrated, watched, and discussed medical drama ER. I discuss the programme in relation to the following dimensions: generic history; generic; form-related features; and representations of characters. I then conclude by suggesting that the series’ multidimensional generic features cater for multilayered representations of both genders; and thus provide for a broad platform for both identification and emancipation. Better Images, Please! The idea that anyone in authority should decide what is ‘better’ has become something of a taboo. In much of the recent theorizing and analyses of the media, the notions of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ gender representations are practically absent. This is, naturally, in line with that particular tradition that emphasizes ‘reading against the grain’ and celebrates the polysemy of the text. However, here I wish to take a different standpoint in that I want to address the questions of quality, with regard to a particular genre and a particular series (as opposed to television as a medium), and assess that from the gender perspective. Media scholars, including feminist researchers, have long recognized the role of television as a cultural forum for public discourse about social issues and social change. According to Newcomb and Hirsch (2000), TV offers ‘a way of understanding who and what we are, how values and behaviour are adjusted, how meanings shift’ by providing ‘a multiplicity of meaning rather than a monolith dominant view’ (p. 564). Hence, for Newcomb and Hirsch the key task of television is the raising of issues that reflect and bring together a variety of viewpoints in a society (though it is not necessary for TV to have clear solutions for the problems under discussion). Although I agree with the authors that television’s emphasis is on presenting a diversity of opinion rather than coherence, I do not believe that it features debate without direction. Television’s ongoing debate is conditioned and constrained by its aesthetic conventions and by its social and cultural context. Television also produces representations of gender through different discourses. These images tell us about the values and norms attached to gender in our culture. In relation to these ‘cultural ideals’, which are produced by representations, real women and men construct their own identities and construct their histories (De Lauretis 1987: 10). The notion of cultural forum thus contains the conflicting nature of these representations and holds that the images of women are far from homogenous and that television does not promote one solid set of values. The conflicting nature of TVs images is most of all due to fact that television contains different types of programmes, which all tell a story in their own words. However, these stories and the values they produce are bound to an era and therefore change along with cultural change. These inherent contradictions and movements can thus be called television’s polysemy (Newcomb & Hirch 2000). In this clashing of different images and ideals, the ideal types of gender representation can be and are broken. Television and its programmes are not the cause of change, but rather, as John Fiske (1987: 45) believes, television is in the midst of this movement of changing ideological values. Whereas Fiske identifies television as the fellow traveller of progressive social change, others have viewed it as conservative and ultimately supportive of the status quo. Todd Gitlin (2000) has argued that dominant ideology is produced through prime time. According to him those programming hours contain those images that best are thought to attract large audiences whereas contrasting and controversial viewpoints are (perhaps) shown in single programmes at marginal viewing times. If ideas, ideologies and values alternative to the mainstream culture are touched upon, they are cushioned with the emotional and the private. It is then claimed (and widely shared) that this results in the loss of broader social connections. Many of the initial feminist dealings with film and television were calls to action that grew out of a conviction that women’s oppression was related to demeaning and stereotypical media representations (Brundson et al 1997: 4-5). After the mid 1970s, this social and political criticism was overshadowed by psychoanalytical - semiotic academic analyses. However, the concept of images of women must be still considered crucial for feminist thinking - without necessarily connecting them directly to social reality. The concept entails both audio-visual texts, as well as the definitions, presuppositions and visions they produce about womanhood and the feminine. The impulse behind studying representations of women and other oppressed groups, as Richard Dyer (1993:1) writes, lies in the notion that; how different social groups are represented is part of ‘how they are treated in life’. In the ‘first wave’ of feminist media research, scholars and activists argued for ‘better’ representations of women, urging television executives to realize changes that portrayed women in less stereotypical ways (see Walters 1995: 31). Gaye Tuchman, in her much-cited 1976 essay “The Symbolic Annihilation of Women by the Mass Media”, argued that the media was suffering from ‘culture lag’ by maintaining sexist imagery and sex-role stereotyping even in the face of changing social reality, and consequently reflected only the previously dominant values of society. Tuchman represents a typical first wave image analyst who worked on a prescriptive rather than a descriptive level and saw culture as a reflection of reality. While fluid representations of gender and the view of (overly) active audiences have taken over in academia, tales of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ images of women are still very much part of both popular and academic discourses – though more openly in the former than in the latter. This claim can be seen in the quotation at the beginning of the paper: ‘a female Doug Ross would be “must-see TV”’. Making judgments is a problematic task for television studies, as after the ‘cultural turn’ it was seen as an act of oppression and elitism. As Charlotte Brunsdon (1997: 127) has written, ‘film and television studies … rarely explicitly engages with issues of critical evaluation, except perhaps politically in the varied guises and defences of the “progressive” and the “popular”’. While judgments of quality usually must be traced from between the lines, John Mepham (1990: 51) has boldly tried to provide us with a recipe for it: ‘High quality television is television which is excellent as measured by its faithfulness to these principles: the rule of diversity, the cultural purpose of telling usable stories and the ethic of truth telling.’ With good reason Dyer writes that a great deal of image analysis, typically fuelled by anger or frustration, seems only to demonstrate that there is nothing new on the media front. He argues that studying images needs to be tempered by considerations that get more nearly at the real political difficulty of representations. This means, first of all, stressing that representations always entail the use of the codes and conventions of the available cultural forms of presentation. Secondly it means that cultural forms do not have single determinate meanings because people make sense of them in different ways, even if we are, of course, restricted by both the viewing and the reading codes to which we have access and by what representations there are for us to view and read. Thirdly, what is represented in representations in not directly reality itself but other representations. (Dyer 1993: 2-3). The analysis of images always needs to see how any given image is rooted in a network of other images. Genre history is an essential part of that network: the modern day medical drama draws from the conventions established by earlier medical dramas, which originally drew from the conventions of films, radio plays and novels. A most unsuitable job for a woman Television’s medical drama is part of a wide category of medical fiction, which encompasses many genres from science fiction and horror to melodrama and romance (see Moody 1998: 9-22). In the history of television’s prime-time medical drama the beginning of the 1960s represents its first turning point.

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