The role of television in bridging the public and the private spheres highlights questions of sexual citizenship. This concept overcomes the relegation of sexuality to a private sphere whose eruption into the public sphere is perceived as an aberration or a threat. It also draws attention to the legitimate ‘public interest’ in regulating sexual behaviour […]

Underpinning many of the regulatory practices in television are the conceptual boundaries that classify and define what is appropriate to the public and the private spheres. Indeed, television has contributed enormously to the changing boundaries and relations between the public and the private through its central role in the formation of public debate in a […]

This chapter investigates the ways in which sexual discourse on television is regulated by state intervention and by the operations of the market. I am using ‘regulation’ here in the Foucauldian sense, which goes beyond the idea of regulation as ‘explicit rules’ to include the way in which all forms of discourse contribute to the […]

Traditional conceptions of sexual difference view sex as a biological category dividing men from women on the basis of their chromosomal, anatomical or hormonal charac­teristics. This biological difference then determines their ‘gender identity’, and for the majority, their ‘sexual orientation’ towards the opposite sex. This binary model of the sexes is known as biological essentialism. […]

During the 1980s, feminism was criticized for privileging white, heterosexual, middle — class women as the subjects of its discourse, while assuming a universal relevance. The ‘shared experience’ of women or its use as a category of political identity is, in these terms, made more problematic by its articulation with other formative identifications — especially […]

The influence of feminist campaigning for equal citizenship rights in the 1970s brought concerns over sexual equality on to the cultural policy agenda. The concept of sex role stereotyping is now widely used to criticize media representations and provides impetus to calls for more ‘positive’ images of women, especially in television advertising. Content analysis of […]

Without a doubt the most significant academic tradition of research in the analysis of sexual representations on television has been feminist cultural studies. From the early 1980s a rich diversity of approaches has been developed that, initially drawing on feminist film studies and feminist sociology, but then on a wider field of black, gay, lesbian […]

Suspicion of sexual pleasure has often characterized ‘left-wing’ public sphere debates as well. They frequently assume that a proliferation of sexual discourse is an unquestion­ably bad consequence of the effects of neo-liberalism, convergence, globalization and deregulation on the ‘quality’ of television provision. Understood as ‘dumbing down’ or ‘tabloidization’, these changes are seen to accompany the […]

The dominant tradition of academic research on television and sexuality has been carried out by psychologists and sociologists who use ‘content analysis’ of texts and ‘effects’ research on audiences. Government and industry sponsors of various kinds, and also advocacy groups promoting specific religious agendas, have funded these in the main. This is an important tradition […]

The structure of this book is based around genres, with each chapter focused on a single or closely related group of generic categories within which specific issues around sexual representation are explored. Indeed, it is a central assumption of my approach that genres are a key form of discursive regulation of sexual representation on tele­vision. […]