Scenes from the Frontier of the Material World: Television Images of Sexuality and Youth

Introduction

The sexualities and sex acts performed by young people are of constant fascination to both the media and the public.  The popular press has continually expressed (and fuelled) anxiety around the seemingly increased sexual activity of youth.  In this discourse the media, often especially television, have been the at the center of a great deal of finger pointing which tends to revolve around a view of the media as offering explicit consent–if not templates–to promiscuous and sometimes “deviant” sexual behavior.  What this analyses omits, however, is the fact that television does not simply mirror back social reality, nor do viewers simply model the behaviors they see on screen.  This is not to suggest that youth sexualities are not problematically rendered in the media landscape, but that they need to be addressed in terms of the way in which they are constructing possibilities for sexual identification.  That is, the engagement in sexual life by young television characters is both rooted in external discourses on sexuality and sexual propriety and is also an active part of the (re)construction of these discourses through the bodies at work and play on the television screen.

This essay offers a discussion of a series of specific examples of youth sexuality culled from the contemporary lexicon of television texts.  They suggest that a certain diversity of sexual identities and behaviors is finding a place in television today.  However, what at first may seem like an increased fluidity in representation is often harnessed to an overarching framework of compulsory heterosexuality, racial segregation, and reductive moralism around issues such as abortion rights and traditional nuclear family structure. 

The shows which I will discuss have not been chosen at random, but represent those with which I was most familiar at the time when I was first writing this paper.  I have, where appropriate, added acknowledgements of newer shows which add dimension to this discussion and which have been introduced during the time this work has been in the process of being rewritten.  The shows which are discussed in most depth were all popular during the late ‘Eighties through the mid to late ‘Nineties:  Beverly Hills, 90210, Party of Five, Roseanne, Dawson’s Creek and My So Called Life.  The shows themselves are marked by differences and similarities which are important for this study.  All the shows focus on white adolescents and young adults within both a peer and family context, sometimes allowing for some diversity.  They represent a variety of class positions (working, middle, and upper) and physical locations (urban, suburban, small town).  Most of the shows have introduced at least one character who is not heterosexual, but only rarely have these characters become focal points in the narrative for long periods of time.  Thus it is my desire to examine how, within the seeming diversity of these settings and the characters who “live” in them, there may be distinctive threads of discourse on the subject of youth sexuality that can be followed and critiqued.

Youth Sex Offenses on the Small Screen

Youth sexualities (especially those of young women) are contained and heavily regulated within the corporate matrix of television.  They are often restrained by hegemonic discourses aimed at constructing particular types of young, sexual bodies.  While some contemporary discourses on youth sexuality have allowed (even fostered) networks to broaden their range of representation, the fact is that seemingly progressive images may be deeply rooted in a dichotomy between good and bad sexualities.  Like the category of youth itself, the space in which young, sexual bodies exist is problematic, fragmented and easily co-opted by the media.  The battles that surround the production of contemporary youth sexualities, social and material, are being waged, in part, on-screen.  In the pages which follow I will be exploring the spaces in which a few of these battles are being (and have been) fought.  By examining images of youth sexuality being deployed televisually, I hope to demonstrate how television texts both open up and close down the potential for alternate sexual identifications.

“Good Bodies” on 90210:  Suburban Sluts and Goddesses¹ 

When I write “good bodies,” I mean to suggest an ideological position through which television texts attempt to put forward an idealized vision of youthful bodies and sexualities.  This discourse is entrenched in television—especially with the publicity given over the rise in sexual activity among young people—although it has become somewhat loosened over the last few years.  Treichler (1996) states that “the nuclear Dick-and-Jane family is at once the most vulnerable target of sexually transmitted disease and the strongest armor against it” (382).  This discourse, in which the “Standard North American Family” (SNAF, Smith, 1993) becomes an epiphany, attempts to induct its viewers into the “good” side of our cultural/sexual value system (Bell, 1994:  94).  Sexuality comes to be coded within a patriarchal and heterosexist signification system, in which this vision of “sexuality is not only defined but enforced” (de Lauretis, 1991:  350).  That is, the young bodies we see (watch) at play in television narratives are not produced by accident.  They are constructed along very specific lines which acknowledge the sexual climate of a specific time period and what is acceptable to “see” there.

Cohen and Krugmen (1994) describe the sexual problematic of the aging cast of Beverly Hills 90210 as being:  “the cast grew up and wanted “hot, dirty sex, and lots of it” (40).²   The show started out as a high school melodrama, full of didactic, after-school-special feeling moments. Sex was depicted as something to be desired (especially for teenaged boys) but, equally, as something that should not be undertaken lightly.  Even with the increase in sexual activity as the show’s characters moved from high school to a more free University lifestyle and, finally, into adulthood, their sexualities remained relatively unproblematic.  The characters might have questioned whom to have sex with now, but none of them had crises of sexual identity.  In a world where the “sexual drive is object-directed” (Grosz, 1995), this show tells its viewers which objects are appropriate for their desires.  90210 often set up situations in which minor or transient characters served to demonstrate inappropriate objects of desire, or negative sexualities (McKinley, 1996). 

Good bodies are the norm in prime-time depictions of youth sexuality.   In the case of 90210 the narrative world is the upper-class suburb of Beverly Hills, California, and its surrounding communities.  Over the last decade it has remained focused on the consumer culture most often associated with the late ‘Eighties and ‘Nineties:  cars, rock bands, shopping/fashion, school, work, and sex.  The narrative foregrounds a spectacle of heterosexual coupling and gender-coded behaviors which reflect a move towards an adulthood which emulates an improved vision of the characters’ family lives.  There is, however, an element of hyperconformativity in this text which may offer the potential for it to be decoded by a camp sensibility (Joyrich, 1996).³   The characters live for the pleasure of themselves and each other as spectacle, focusing their attention on fashion and style (consumption) and the taking up of spectacular roles.⁴  And if the kids with the fashionable zip code still step right off the pages of Seventeen rather than Vogue, their sexual experimentations run more towards Cosmopolitan. But by the final episodes of the seventh season, six of the seven main characters are paired off, re-establishing a harmony of appropriate matching of race, class, and heterosexuality as the characters move out of University and towards adulthood.  Nearing the end of the tenth (and final) season (1999-2000), the characters move into the realm of heterosexual monogamy and marriage.  One couple has already marched down the aisle and set themselves and their infant daughter up in the former residence of paterfamilias Walsh (the only family in the run of this show to depict middle-class solidity).  Of the other four original cast members, Donna and David’s wedding marks the series finale, with not-too-subtle hints that Kelly and Dylan may not be far behind them (perhaps in time for a reunion special!).

This was not always the case.  In previous seasons, the show’s directive of serial heterosexual monogamy demanded the insertion of characters outside the primary community in order to establish the boundaries of acceptable sexuality within the sociocultural matrices of the show.  Donna (Tori Spelling) was involved with an abusive, working-class musician and an older fire fighter before becoming involved with Noah (Vincent Young).  Their relationship was problematized by her brief infidelity with a model and his propensity for substance abuse and lying.  Kelly (Jenny Garth) dated a rapist fraternity boy and a drug-addicted painter, before reconfirming her engagement to Brandon (Jason Priestly).  After breaking off their engagement (Priestly had decided to leave the show) she became involved with a lawyer while maintaining her attachment to another old beau, Dylan (Luke Perry who left the show for several years and returned in 1998).  Brandon had an affair with his professor’s wife, a fling with an old-flame, a platonic relationship with an African-American woman from Texas, and finally tried to forget Kelly by dating a wholesome, farm-girl.  Clare (Kathleen Robertson) teased Steve with her options to date a Prince or a member of the rowing team with a high I.Q.  Steve (Ian Ziering) fell for a drag queen and cheated on all his nice girl friends until he finally decided to get serious about Clare.  After Clare left the show Steve courted several women including a single mother (Hilary Swank) before meeting Janet (Lindsay Price).  Though continuing to balk at the idea of monogamy Steve and Janet settled down, married, and gawked at the birth of their first child.  David, frustrated by Donna’s insistence on remaining a virgin until marriage, had sex with several young women.  Having shed his schoolboy persona a few seasons back, David still battled to find the right woman as his torch for Donna continually flared up. And bad-girl Valerie (Tiffani-Amber Thiessen) faked a pregnancy with her married lover, rejected her high school beau, and dated an up and coming actor.  Thiessen left the show just after Priestly, but her spot was quickly filled by Vanessa Marcil, playing Donna’s cousin (later revealed to be her half-sister) from the wrong-side-of-the-tracks, with her sights firmly set on richer-than-rich Dylan.  This is just a cursory examination but it is telling in that, as the show has moved out of the liminal space of adolescence, its hegemonic function has sealed itself.  The discourse of sexual exploration, while still being acted on, has moved towards the necessity of forming permanent heterosexual ties and the creation of traditional nuclear families.

The narrative structure in which this program developed cannot completely foreclose on the sexual choices of its characters.  Indeed, Donna’s decision to remain a virgin for many seasons despite her cohort’s move into sexuality was offered up as an indication of choice (for a girl) throughout many years of the show’s run.  Likewise, the other characters are again and again offered the choice to seek sexual experiences (albeit ones regulated within the norms of heterosexuality) outside their group.  But in the end, choices which include differences of race, class, geography, ability, and sexual orientation are foreclosed as the characters return to the narrowly defined “good bodies” of their particular group.  In its extensive run, Beverly Hills 90210 has offered its viewers the chance to engage in many debates about sexuality and youth, but it always returns to the primacy of the heterosexual dating spectacle–moving inevitably towards middle-class marriage and monogamy—where bodies perform their gendered expectations and non-conformists (by choice or birth) are always denied inclusion.

“Funny Bodies”:  Even Lanford’s not a Straight World

The inquiries into Roseanne Barr’s hit show Roseanne have tended to focus on the star’s more-real-than-life personality (Rowe, 1994) and on the show’s working-class aesthetic (Mayerle, 1994).  Kellner (1995) puts the show into the ‘Nineties category of “loser television” and offers up as a description that these shows “articulate [the audience’s] own frustration and anger in experiencing downward mobility and a sense of no future” (149).  But Roseanne is not only about class.  It has also done some deconstructive work around the issue of homosexuality in working-class, suburban America, especially in its televised form.  Roseanne revolves around life in the suburban, blue-collar town of Lanford, Illinois, during the ‘Eighties and ‘Nineties.  It articulates a pervasive anxiety about making ends meet, family support and continuity, gender dichotomies, and life-cycle changes.  This is a something of an ode to the primacy of working-class values, expressed in a middle-class voice. The figure of Roseanne sets out to celebrate motherhood, sexual equality, tolerance of difference and an ethic of hard work.  While the Connor children have always been part of the text of Roseanne, they have not been allowed the freedom of sexual exploration which is presented in this television text as the prerogative of adulthood.

As Whatley (1994) describes it, when homosexuality enters into the mass media it is primarily performed through the bodies of adults.  Taking this as  supposition rather than fact, let me examine the case of Roseanne.⁵   This show has had many storylines which deal with the fluidity of sexuality, but it always followed an ideological code where heterosexuality is seen as the preferable (only) choice for the young.  In one episode, Dan (John Goodman) heaves a sigh of relief when his son D.J. (Michael Fishman) says he never wants to dance with another boy.⁶   In this same episode Roseanne is kissed by her bisexual friend Nancy’s (Sandra Bernhard) girlfriend (Mariel Hemingway) while out at a gay bar.  D.J.’s question is prompted by his mother’s dancing with other women which Dan, in true politically correct grimace, insists is okay (although his reaction suggests that while this may be okay for women, it definitely is not for men).  Other episodes have included:  a Halloween party where Fred’s (Michael O’Keefe) familiarity with many drag queens suggests he may once have frequented gay bars, Roseanne’s mother Beverly (Estelle Parsons) coming out as a lesbian, Roseanne’s orchestration of a camp wedding for Leon (Martin Mull) and his boyfriend, and the introduction of former teen porn star Traci Lords as a busperson at Roseanne and Jackie’s (Laurie Metcalf) Restaurant.⁷   There is a lot of tongue-in-cheek humor and parody in these storylines, but also a pervasive feeling that sexuality is something that is complex, ambiguous, sometimes subject to change, and always in need of respect and acceptance.  Life outside the heterosexual norm is shown to be a viable choice with a lived reality, even in Lanford.

What is absent on Roseanne, is the attribution of any of this complexity, fluidity, and ambiguity to the youth population.  Indeed, Darlene (Sara Gilbert) and Becky (Lecy Goranson/Sarah Chalke) Conner are both married by the age of eighteen and in the last season D.J. has a girlfriend.  Throughout the history of the show, problems of youth sexuality have focused on when/whether to have sex with your boyfriend, going on the pill, and pregnancy.  These kids may have weird friends but they do not have gay friends, nor do they seem to have any questions about their own sexualities.  Even tomboy Darlene—who was often held up as a good role-model for young women, who worried about whether getting her period would ruin her jump shot and wrote poetry about the dilemma of not fitting in as a “girl”—seemed to slide into dating and sex without many scrapes.⁸   In fact, the last season had Darlene accidentally getting pregnant (in Disney World–truly a magic kingdom!) and deciding to marry her high school sweetheart David (Johnny Galecki).  In the episode in which she announces these plans to her unhappy parents, Darlene describes how pregnancy/motherhood and the idea of getting married have finally rid her of her adolescent angst.  These choices have finally made her happy and seem to foreclose any other options.

“Liminal Bodies”:  On the Impossibility of Lesbian Sex

Meyrowitz (1985), drawing on early feminist writings by de Beauvoir and  Greer, writes about the privilege of the girl to remain a child (202).  This liminal space, the edge where gender, age, and sexuality begin to blur, is the marginal space where television’s beautiful lesbians reside.  In terms of the representation of lesbians on television, little has been written.  However, some new discourses have emerged from film theory which bear looking into.  Kearney (1996) writes that films about young lesbians like Fun and Heavenly Creatures “seem to represent a new political focus, away from the concerns of adult women to those of female adolescents” (100).  She describes the girls in these texts as “binary outlaws,” but de Lauretis (1991) cautions that some films (and, I would add, television series) “explor[e] the currently fashionable discourse on lesbianism to the end of an effective delegitimation of [the] lesbian—and perhaps even the feminist—politics of sexual difference” (257).  I believe that this is an especially topical subject at a moment where Ellen Degeneres has been and gone as the first lead character of a television show to come out both on and off screen, when Entertainment Tonight has had a brief flirtation with how hip it is to be a lesbian in Hollywood, and when Hilary Swank has moved from 90210 to the Oscar podium for her portrayal of transgendered youth Brandon Teena (in Boys Don’t Cry).

Young lesbian-identified women on television are an emergent category.  They have tended to be peripheral to textual storylines and theirs are bodies which do not tend to perform desire.  The short lived show Relativity featured one of the first honest lesbian kisses on a prime-time drama, but never resumed that storyline (and since the show was canceled before the end of the season it is unlikely to reappear). ⁹   Friends character Ross’s (David Schwimmer) wife left him for a woman just prior to the show’s premiere.  Despite the fact that she and her lover are the only stable and long-lasting relationship on the show (we still are not all totally sold on Monica and Chandler’s happily-ever-afters), they are mostly inserted as a trope that reasserts the importance of the heterosexuality of the rest of the characters, the importance of Ross’s paternity of their child, or to present a sense of his emasculation.  On Party of Five, Julia quickly brushed off the advances of a young woman early in the show’s history.  But several seasons later she was startled by her feelings for her writing professor.  This was a very interesting (albeit brief) storyline which actually addressed the question of lesbian desire and its very material (or active) aspects.  Julia is obviously awestruck by her writing teacher, a charismatic published author, and they become friends as the young teacher helps Julia hone her own writing style.  But Julia is confused when she discovers that her mentor is a lesbian and is curious about what this means about her feelings for the older woman.  Finally, Julia tries to establish her feelings by acting on them sexually, with a kiss.  But she does not get the response she anticipates as the older woman cautions Julia about her actions.  She insists that Julia be aware of her feelings, that, as a lesbian (a woman who desires other women), this course of action has serious material effects.  It is not something to play at (she does not want to be Julia’s exploratory tool) but part of who she is.  Julia does not kiss her again and this character does not remain long in the text.  However, this remains an interesting episode because it actually establishes the reality (materiality) of lesbian desire.  But there is no place for it in this text and so it is shut down almost as quickly as it is opened up and no similar themes were taken up in the following seasons.

The Party of Five character continued the trend towards the depiction of lesbian characters, on television, as beautiful femmes (there is not a true butch among them, nor do we find (m)any truly butch characters in television).  Although the comment is made about an adult woman, Roseanne’s aside that her friend Nancy always dates beautiful women (Mariel Hemingway and Morgan Fairchild) and unattractive men (Tom Arnold) literalizes (that is, makes self-reflexive) the assumption of the beautiful lesbian within the television text.  This discourse has also been activated (in my mind) by an episode of Beverly Hills 90210 where David, posting invitations for a party on-line, accidentally sends his message to a lesbian callboard.  In the ensuing scene, an endless stream of statuesque models saunter into the party and begin dancing together.  The male ogglers openly express that the spectacle they are witnessing is a fantasy of theirs.  In this text, the lesbian is again merely a trope for heterosexual desire, wherein the masculine is the active term.  The young women, who are always conventionally lovely, thin, well dressed, and mostly white, seem to perform a carefully choreographed dance of traditional femininity.  There is no sense of the “binary outlaw” in these characters because (and this makes them rather different from other women on television) these young, lesbian-identified women never leave the space of the male gaze within the text.¹⁰ 

I would like to conclude this section by saying a few words about more recent developments, within the show Buffy the Vampire Slayer.  For the first three seasons, sensitive, brainy Willow was firmly established as a straight character, including her having a long-term romance with an equally cute redhead name Oz (Seth Green).  Upon Oz’s unforeseen departure from the show, a despondent Willow gravitated to a campus Wiccan group where she met Tara (Amber Benson).  The two quickly forged a strong bond which eventually appeared to become romantic.  The two characters now live together and are firmly a couple.  What is interesting in this case is that with the move from high school to college, sex became a central narrative trope of this text (especially in the forth season)—with one whole episode devoted to Buffy (Sarah Michelle Geller) and her boyfriend making love.  But the Network immediately asserted that Willow and Amber would not be allowed to (even/ever) kiss on-screen.  Given the supernatural nature of the show, there have been many attempts to work around this proscription.  Joss Weedon (the show’s creator, producer, director, writer) has even suggested that these rules are not problematic and that Willow and Tara’s relationship can be very clearly evoked without any actual sex being shown onscreen.  But I have to ask myself:  why?  Why does this have to be the case?  What happens if we see Willow and Tara kissing that does not happen when we watch the straight couples tumbling naked amongst the sheets together?  I think it points to the fact that the idea of lesbian relationships on television, especially among young people (but not exclusively) may be moving into acceptability.  But the visual representation of the materiality of their sexual desire must still be heavily regulated, if not entirely obscured from view.

“Bad Bodies”:  It’s Pay-Back Time

Whatley (1994) describes how certain themes are pervasive in the creation of bad sexual bodies of adolescents and young adults.  These included discourses of fear surrounding African and Latino men, pregnancy, disease, homosexuality, and violence.  Bad bodies are like liminal bodies in that they often exist at the margins of televisual texts.  On the surface, these bodies may be coded through differences in race, sexual orientation, age, and ability.  Other “bad bodies” come to be defined by their failure to conform with the moral standards of the television community into which they have been inserted. There is no unilateral definition of television’s “bad bodies,” which come in several forms, but among the most prevalent are the homosexual body, the pregnant body, and the bodies of the interracial couple. McKelly (1996) writes that death was often the only possibility for rehabilitating the rebel in classic film, and this seems to be a pattern for television as well.  Rebellious sexual bodies, bad bodies, can only be rehabilitated by their elimination (whether actual or metaphorical) from the text.

The homosexual body moves from liminality to “badness” when it becomes explicitly sexualized or actively engages in desire.  Two of the most explicit examples that I will draw upon both come from Beverly Hills, 90210.  In the first, Kelly is trapped in a burning building with a young woman who is lesbian-identified.  As the fire encroaches they get on their knees and start to pray.  At the end of the episode they are saved.  While Kelly is slightly injured, the other woman is burned over much of her body.  In the second example, Kelly goes to work at an AIDS hospice where she befriends a young man.  He is the first sexual/homosexual character to be seen on the show and he dies only a few episodes after his character is introduced.  In My So-Called Life, although one of the main characters (Ricki—Wilson Cruz) is gay, his body is continually made “bad.”¹¹   Although he finds friendship and understanding from some of his peers, he is unable to move into a position of active and reciprocal desire.  He is beaten and abandoned by his family because of his sexuality, and his visual image (feminine and somewhat flamboyant) makes him a questionable figure in the eyes of the most important adult figures in this text (the parents of one of his best friends). When Jack (Kerr Smith) is outed on Dawson’s Creek, his father refuses to recognize his sexual orientation and rejects him completely. Jack is so ambivalent about his own sexuality that when he first meets another gay man who is attracted to him, he refuses contact altogether.  Jack later moves into a more accepting position with regard to his sexual orientation, but the ambivalence remains.  And it is rooted, essentially, in his continual refusal to move into an active position of desire and relationship with another man, something—as is suggested by my earlier discussion of Buffy the Vampire Slayer—which might prove difficult to the production of the show.

In these last two examples there is a move towards acceptance of the homosexual character who occupies an important part in the television text.  But it is also true that, in each case, the sexuality of the character is sublimated.  In the examples from 90210, there are physical manifestations of what it means to have these bodies:  disease, disfigurement, and even death.  In the other examples, the characters are accepted, to a greater or lesser degree, within the text.  But their sexuality is closed down just as that of their heterosexual text-mates is rampantly raging.  What can perhaps be suggested from a reading of the 90210 examples, is that these characters are sexually active, they contain the desire, but they have not acted upon it.  It has yet to be seen how an actively sexual gay teenager—especially one that is seen being as actively sexual as their heterosexual text mates—would be produced as a central character within a television text.

Pregnant bodies on television exist on several planes, many of them negative.  Bakhtin (in Creed, 1995) has figured the pregnant body within the imagery of the grotesque:  the ultimate bodily excess.  Pregnant bodies are problematic in several instances.  First, is the faked pregnancy, which is often deployed in day-time soap operas (Mumford, 1995).  On Another World, a conniving teenage heiress convinced Nick (Mark Mortimer) to sleep with her and then faked a pregnancy in order to prevent him from marrying his girlfriend Sofia (Dahlia Salem).  On prime-time, Beverly Hills 90210’s Valerie faked a pregnancy and an abortion in order to extort money from her lover, a wealthy accountant.  Another reading of the pregnancy is as fake rather than faked.  In the show Get Real, a popular teenager is humiliated and rejected when classmates spread rumors that she is pregnant.  Though this episode is intended to show how destructive the high school rumor-mill can be, it also highlights how frightening the pregnant body can be when it is also the body of a teenager. 

The second way that pregnancy enters this discussion is through its termination.  Saying “terminated pregnancy” is a bit of a misnomer because very few characters actually have abortions on television.  Instead there is what I like to call the “Deus Ex Machina of the Period or Miscarriage.”  Consider these examples:  On Beverly Hills 90210 Brenda (Shannon Doherty) thought she was pregnant after deciding to have sex with Dylan (Luke Perry).  After struggling with the issue of pregnancy and abortion she suddenly got her period.  On Party of Five, Julia (Neve Campbell) missed her period not long after starting to have sex with her boyfriend Justin (Michael Goorjian).  After deciding to have an abortion (despite much derision from family and friends) she had a miscarriage before leaving for the hospital.  In both of these cases the female body is doubly marginalized and coded as negative:  first through its sexuality which has led to pregnancy and, second, through the specter of the choice to terminate that pregnancy.  A third way in which the pregnant female body is presented on television is through the pregnancy that can never be, or the fear of infertility.¹²   In Party of Five Kirsten’s (Paula Devicq) inability to bear children was directly linked to her abandonment by Charlie (Matthew Fox).  A similar storyline on All My Children chronicled Maria’s (Eva La Rue) mental anguish as she attempted to become pregnant by any means possible.  In both cases the female body is marked as deficient through its inability to conceive, its inability to pursue the heteronormative function of childbearing.  Though each of these examples of the pregnant body bears marked contrasts from the others, each depicts some aspect of the pregnant body, or the body longing for pregnancy, as somehow problematic or “bad.”

Interracial couples have also tended to be negatively coded within television.  Although this is not often explicit, and may sometimes be used to demonstrate the racist beliefs of others, the fact is that interracial couples do not tend to last on television (if they even get started in the first place).  For example, on Beverly Hills 90210 Donna once went out with an African-American basketball player (Cress Williams) being tutored by her friend Brandon.  Her mother, attending the same party as the couple, was very upset at her daughter for showing up with an African-American man.  Donna, equally upset, defended herself and criticized her mother’s racist ideas.  That, however, was the last we heard of Donna and D’Shawn’s relationship, and Donna returned to her string of white boyfriends.

Other interracial relationships end for more ambiguous reasons.  On Party of Five, Charlie and his African-American girlfriend Grace (Tamara Taylor) broke up after she told him she did not want to have children (linking her to the infertile woman but making her even more marginal because she does not arouse the sympathy that the infertile woman does).  On shows like Friends and Relativity everyone seems to be white, and on many other shows people of color appear as token couples or as characters inserted into the text in order to make a point about racism.¹³   Shows with primarily African-American casts follow similar conventions.  On an episode of Moesha, a young woman (Brandi) dealt with the anger of her family and friends after dating a white boy.  In this case, the relationship was explicitly framed as non-sexual, and though Moesha learned something about the intolerance of others and tried to teach tolerance to those around her, it was too late for her to make her own relationship viable.

Taking a look at the programs which have more recently dominated the youth market, I see an even starker trend emerging.  Some ongoing shows have continued to depict at least slightly bi-racial casts from which relationships between characters emerge.  To return to 90210 once again, Steve and Janet plan to marry despite their parents’ animosity for one another which holds overtones of racism (primarily depicted as stemming from her Asian parents).  But other shows seem to have discarded any movement toward multi-racial casting.  In Get Real, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Party of Five, Friends, Roswell, Freaks and Geeks and Two Girls and a Guy, the casts are almost exclusively white.  In shows where there is a modest introduction of multiracial casting, characters either date by race (Felicity, Clueless) or do not date at all (That 70’s Show).  This suggests that while the visual impact of young people having sex is diminishing, the same cannot be said of sex that occurs between characters of different races.  Often, the critique made of youth-programming is that it fails to address realistically the sexuality of adolescents.  These days, televisual teenagers are having almost as much sex as their “real life” counterparts.  But the sexual embrace that occurs between races seems to remain mired in taboo.

Conclusion: The Real Life of the Electronic Body

Like everything else in social and cultural life, television does not remain static but changes according to a variety of forces and pressures.  The manner in which youth sexualities have and are produced in television shows changes as well, sometimes becoming more restrictive, at others more liberatory.  Always, we must be aware that these texts actively participate in the construction of discourses on youth sexuality, rather than simply modeling them back to a sea of passive viewers.  I think it is also important to be aware of other discourses about youth sexuality that are operating outside of (but that often impact on) television production.  I have tried to show, in the preceding pages, that in the last ten years a lot has been going on in the mediated/televisual realm of youth and sex, including many changes.  But what exactly are these changes and what might they mean?

Even if the seemingly uninhibited sexual explorations young people are engaging in on television are causing a certain amount of social anxiety, youth sexuality seems to continue to be produced within a rather strict paradigm of containment.  Sex may be central to youth media and many criticisms of it, but it also needs to be critiqued for what it lacks and/or omits.  That is, on television youth sexuality is allowed to become active only within very specific scenarios.  These are often the family (SNAF), heterosexuality, monogamy (serial), and homogeneity.¹⁴   This paradigm also works towards the reimposition of racial barriers, class lines, and the yearning for traditional structures (of family and work) and imperatives (the abortion question).  We need to be asking why we do not see a diversity of sexualities and sexual affiliations on television, not just why we are seeing more sex.

Michele Byers

Dept. Of Sociology and Criminology

Saint Mary’s University

923 Robie Street

Halifax, Nova Scotia

B3H 3C3

¹Sluts and Goddesses (1992) is a video workshop on discovering the sex goddess within starring pornography star cum performance artist/activist Annie Sprinkle.  Written and Directed by Sprinkle and Maria Beatty.

²Emphasis in the original.

 ³Sontag (in Joyrich, 1996) describes this type of decoding as “a posture for the ‘culturally oversaturated’” (154).  This is useful for a show like Beverly Hills 90210 where cultural artifacts are central to the way the text is put together and where the way characters’ use of these artifacts (indeed overuse of them) is central to the construction of their identities.  Also thanks to Professor Robert Morgan for pointing out that 90210 is, in its own way, a Dallas for young adults.

 ⁴Unlike other programs aimed at a young adult market (i.e. Friends, Party of Five) Beverly Hills is structured as a televisual display of its characters who are central to the text of the show but also to internal texts which exist in that space.  For instance, Kelly is a Seventeen magazine cover girl, Donna is the weather “girl”  on her campus television station, Tracy is the campus anchor-person, Brandon is the campus station manager, Steve’s mother was once a television star, David is a rock musician and later a popular D.J., Nat was an actor in his youth, Kelly’s mother was a model, several characters have owned a night club (David, Valerie, Noah, Dylan), and Clare’s family is friends with royalty.   And so the characters are not only figured as important within the text but within the greater media culture in which the line between the text and the outside world begins to disintegrate. 

⁵Of course, this is not always the case.  The show My So-Called Life had a main character who was a gay teenaged boy.  Dawson’s Creek has a gay, male character who was outed during the second season and then became the star of the football team.  On Buffy the Vampire Slayer, previously straight Willow (Alyson Hannigan) fell in love with another young woman during the fourth season.  Other youth-oriented programs have introduced gay characters into their texts, but they tend to function as heuristic devices which educate the main characters while firmly re-establishing their heterosexuality.

 ⁶Apparently this is his symbolic entry into the heterosexual order.

 ⁷This episode is also one which plays with the notion of gender identity.  When Jackie seems unsure why hiring the sexy blonde will be good for business, Roseanne replies:  “Oh come on, even I’m getting a woody.”

 ⁸Jones (1993) has written an interesting article about conducting research and the problematic essentialism of the word “girl.”

 ⁹The most famous being the scene in L. A. Law which is mentioned in D’Acci (1992).

 ¹⁰I do not think male homosexual characters operate quite within the same framework, although they also seem to operate outside of desire and explicit sexuality.  These characters seem to be inserted within a community of primarily heterosexual characters and so their primary identification is with a traditional masculinity in which sexual orientation is almost incidental (in drama and melodrama), or a camp parody (in situation comedy).

 ¹¹ As I have described in another article (1998), Ricky is multiply marginalized within the text of My So-Called Life.  He is not only gay, but a poor man of color who lives outside of a nuclear family unit.

 ¹²This is very unusual in youth discourses because the focus tends to be on fear of pregnancy rather than the fear of being unable to become pregnant.

 ¹³I am not saying that exploring issues of racism is a bad thing.  One episode of Roseanne, for instance, featured the Connors dealing with their own unconscious racism when D.J. refused to kiss an African-American classmate in a school play.  However, none of these shows has moved beyond a superficial critique to interrogate the problems experienced by interracial couples.

 ¹⁴These are not discrete categories, nor are they prescriptive in the sense that they are all, always present.

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