Читать книгу Sociology of the Arts - Victoria D. Alexander - Страница 28

Sandell (1998) studied the popular television series Friends. This American sit‐com, which focuses on six friends who live in New York City, was originally broadcast from 1994–2004 in the US. It was also viewed internationally and is currently available on Netflix. Sandell, whose study was completed during the show’s fourth season, argues that the show reflects “fantasies and anxieties” which are “resolved in a kind of fantasy wish‐fulfillment” (p. 144). For instance, American society is geographically mobile. As people pursue employment and move to other parts of the country, they are separated from their original families. The show reflects this and provides a fantasy solution in which people no longer living near their biological families create “alternative families” through close relationships with friends: “Friends thus captures and romanticizes the formation of alternative kinship networks made up of friends and neighbors,” (p. 145). Similarly, finding fulfilling employment in capitalism can be challenging, but the show reflects the notion that friendships can “compensate for some of the frustrations” of urban employment (p. 145). In other words, the “utopian promise of the show is that alternative families can substitute for both the failures of biological families and the failures of professional life” in the contemporary world (p. 147).

The show also depicts other alternative family arrangements, including a lesbian couple raising a child, surrogate motherhood, and divorce. In this way, Sandell argues, Friends “is not a show which champions normative heterosexuality” and the nuclear family (p. 142). But at the same time, “the characters self‐consciously [invert] gender roles to highlight the constructedness of gender, but doing so in such a way that it finally reinforces existing stereotypes about men and women” (p. 149). In addition, the show reflects “whiteness” (p. 151). Not only are the main characters all white, so are most of the supporting characters and extras. This whiteness does not reflect the actual demographic composition of New York City, of course. Moreover, racial difference is erased in most episodes, and coded as disruptive in episodes where non‐white characters do appear, reflecting racism. Sandell writes, “Even though the show foregrounds and celebrates kinship networks which challenge the mythical nuclear heterosexual family…the visibility of these ‘alternative families’ is made possible only by simultaneously rendering invisible other kinds of ‘difference’” (p. 143).