Page 160 - Cultural Studies A Practical Introduction

144 Visual Culture

economic self - sufficiency). The show was hailed as groundbreaking because
it avoided setting up a simple binary in which women must identify with,

and be identified as, either virgins or whores, idealized mothers or erotic
temptresses, Madonnas or Mary Magdalenes. Instead, through its main
characters it offered a series of gradations along a continuum of socially
acceptable models of contemporary femininity. There is Samantha, an
ambitious publicist who exhibits the uninhibited sexual voracity usually

coded as hyper - masculine; Carrie, a conflicted writer who struggles to
bring together her “ feminine ” need for romantic love with her “ masculine ”
desire for professional success; Miranda, a well - heeled lawyer and unmar-
ried mother negotiating a relationship with a sensitive, working - class man;
and Charlotte, a sexually prudish art dealer who unabashedly yearns for a
husband to take care of her and a baby she can nurture. The show offered
a postmodern twist on the old - fashioned melodrama, a genre that tradi-
tionally involves female characters suffering emotional loss as a result of
their determination to behave in a virtuous manner. We may not imme-
diately associate the women of Sex and the City with the customary meaning
of “ virtue, ” but the show is ultimately rather conservative in its defi nition
of what constitutes a life properly lived: three of the four protagonists
achieve this by cultivating a monogamous, romantic relationship with a
man who is capable of ensuring them a lifestyle marked by conspicuous
consumption and respectable class status.
Even as Sex and the City challenged some traditional feminine values,
such as the prohibition against women seeking sexual pleasure for its own
sake, in other ways it worked to maintain gender stereotypes by framing
women as vain, materialistic, and emotional. It may be argued that the
show simply wouldn ’ t “ make sense ” if the female characters were primarily
motivated by political power, social justice, or intellectual curiosity, but
this is the point: what we see on the screen both refl ects what falls within
the realm of possibility in the real world – what “ makes sense ” – and creates
that range of acceptable possibilities that constitutes the so - called main-
stream by showing us what is “ normal. ” That which is not represented on
screen seems undesirable, perverse, or nonsensical when it ’ s encountered
in reality because we have all internalized codes that instruct us about how
to interpret such dissonant possibilities. Looming over this process is the

capitalist market, which is concerned first and foremost with selling goods
and services. The expansion of women ’ s sexual freedom may be a notable
social advancement, but what is most important to the media conglomer-
ate which produces the show is that viewers are repeatedly exposed to the