In a provocative 1947 article in the American Political Science Review, John D. Millett argued that the effectiveness of the latest technologies—statistical charts, filmstrips, and even motion pictures—in training soldiers during World War II meant that they should be embraced for political science education as well. He dismissed critics who termed this a “softening” of the classroom experience, stating, “There seems little reason today why in our concern for preparation we should ignore or belittle commonly accepted media for effective presentation” (“The Use of Visual Aids in Political Science Teaching,” American Political Science Review 41 [1947]: 527). Laura Shepherd’s Gender, Violence, and Popular Culture: Telling Stories, published nearly seven decades later, shows just how far we have come in the journey toward active teaching and learning, as well as critical thinking about the mutually constitutive relationship between popular culture and politics.
This book presents an engaging critique of portrayals of gender and violence through the medium of television. Shepherd addresses themes of power, politics, gender, philosophy, and violence—as well as their interconnections—through the narratives and counternarratives found in popular television series and miniseries, including Angel, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Firefly, Oz, The Corner, Generation Kill, and The West Wing.
There is much to recommend in this thoughtful exploration at the intersection of popular culture studies and feminist gender theories. Shepherd’s book definitely makes a valuable contribution to the Routledge series Popular Culture and World Politics, which is designed as a forum for interdisciplinary research and innovative critiques of the relationship between new technologies and media and representations of political meaning. Here, the author employs a poststructural discourse analysis of representations of gender and violence through popular culture. She draws in contemporary perspectives from critical theory in international relations and media studies to convincingly illustrate the interdependent relationship between culture and politics.
Critical theoretical perspective aside, this book is about telling stories—and the normative significance of select stories and the act of storytelling. By examining both narratives and counternarratives of gender, violence, and power, this study expands perspectives on the stories being told in these popular cultural illustrations. A survey of dominant narratives describes overt messages of the television series just mentioned, while counternarrative analysis helps us explore the (often more important) critical perspectives therein. In the process, the author seeks to highlight how “our cognitive frameworks are (re)produced in and through the stories we tell ourselves and others. We glean ideals about the world and our place in it from the stories we are told; we reproduce these ideas and ideals in the stories we tell” (p. 3).
Gender, Violence and Popular Culture first highlights themes of morality, legality, and gender woven into two series developed by Joss Whedon, Angel and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Shepherd employs feminist and poststructuralist critiques to what are clearly postmodern narratives in the series. The author’s treatment of counternarratives in Angel is particularly insightful given that academics have heretofore directed most of their attention to its progenitor series, Buffy. While Buffy is most often read as a story of postmodern empowerment for women—Buffy as subversive female heroine, slaying evil where’er she finds it—Angel is something quite different. Here, gender and violence, and gendered violence, are key motifs, but the intent of the series seems to be to raise ambiguity versus “simple” solutions of good over evil. If Buffy is meant to be subversive, Angel is designed to subvert the subversion and raise more questions than it answers regarding gender and violence.
Shepherd later shifts attention to themes of postmodern security and order in a different genre, science fiction, through an insightful survey of the series Firefly. While there is no shortage of academic works on the intertextuality of science fiction and world politics (Jutta Weldes, To Seek Out New Worlds: Exploring Links between Science Fiction and World Politics [2003] is perhaps the best recent example), Shepherd offers interesting portrayals of patriarchy and colonialist discourse in this series. Here, narratives represent and even constitute alternative imaginings of identity, community, and authority. Firefly seems to revel in juxtapositions of order and disorder, authority and sexuality.
Later chapters on gender, violence, and security in the television series Oz and The Corner are especially engaging. The author mines lessons from episodes of the six seasons of Oz (1997–2003), a seeming treasure trove of explicit and implicit representations of gender and violence. Shepherd characterizes the prison world as a graphic depiction of “violence as a pervasive, even constitutive, aspect of the human condition” that pulls no punches (p. 70). For example, the series develops a very complex approach to the subject of rape, especially regarding how it is viewed by different characters and the extent to which its performative function is “normalized.” The author weaves discussions of the philosophical insights of Michel Foucault with characterizations of this other world, where horrors like rape are seen by one authority figure as having a “leveling effect” in the prison population by providing social structure and “order.” Also fascinating is the discussion of examples of power, hierarchy, and sexual violence in The Corner, a miniseries portrayal of harsh insights from ethnographic journalism.
Case studies of the miniseries Generation Kill and the longtime popular show The West Wing are interesting, but receive perhaps more predictable treatments in this analysis. Generation Kill depicts the experiences of a U.S. Marine battalion during the invasion of Iraq in 2003, and is part of a broader and much-studied genre of war films. The author does bring up interesting ways that emotional attachments are masculinized in this story, as well as the role of some protagonists as “truth-seers, seekers/speakers” who try to make sense out of the invasion and their lot in life. Exploration of themes of feminism and political strategy in The West Wing raise the somewhat counterintuitive notion for longtime fans of C. J. Cregg (the fictional female White House press secretary, and later chief of staff) that Aaron Sorkin’s series is far less supportive of liberated feminism than one might imagine.
Finally, while the book provides an engaging survey of themes of gender and violence in popular television series, the readers may find themselves wanting more. This is a short book, and any one of the chapters could be more fully developed. Alternatively, one could imagine a much more in-depth treatise focused on the three series by Joss Whedon, or perhaps the war genre in television and film. A second, albeit minor, quibble with the framing of the project relates to truth in advertising: This book is effectively about representations of gender and violence in a single medium of popular culture—television shows—and passes on the opportunity for links to a variety of related media. Third, a more fully developed comparison of frames and messages from the different series would be fascinating. Here, “modern” readers may struggle with the author’s avowedly post-modern approach, and they may wish to read a more fully articulated conceptual framework early on in the book.
That said, this book reminds us to think critically about the stories we tell, watch, and perpetuate. It makes a variety of interesting points that, taken together, offer a valuable contribution to the scholarship of teaching and learning, feminist theory and gender studies, and international relations theory.
