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Gender, sexuality, race and ethnicity mix with pop culture
YOUNGSTOWN
Youngstown State University students and professors discussed contemporary representations of gender, sexuality, race and ethnicity in television and movies in a fun open-forum event Thursday afternoon in Kilcawley Center.
Comic book superheroes, television show stars, novel main characters and more were among the many figures brought up in the discussion about women in pop culture.
Students asked questions and discussed their favorite television shows while professors broke down the reasons why they, and society, are drawn to them.
Dolores Sisco, YSU English department professor and director of American studies, shared her favorite media fads which include strong female characters.
“When I started watching ‘Scandal,’ the reason I got impassioned was [the show] had this black woman who just broke that mold of black women in a position of respectability,” she said.
Sisco was talking about lead character Olivia Pope – actress Kerry Washington.
“Before, you didn’t see black women being evil. But here you have [Pope] and she’s educated, she’s beautiful [and] here she is committing adultery and fixing presidential elections. ... Finally she’s not Clair Huxtable [from “The Cosby Show” in the 1980s]. She was perfect and didn’t do anything wrong.”
Normally, she continued, black women – and even white women – were cast as “matronly.”
“They loved their children, and that’s all they did,” Sisco said. “They didn’t have a career.”
Tiffany Anderson, director of the Africana Studies program at YSU, agreed, saying it’s nice to see and discuss women making their way into media.
Although not a woman, Anderson cited African American performer Donald Glover as black culture permeating the media world.
Glover got his start performing Derrik Comedy, an internet sketch comedy, in the early 2000s which played on YouTube.
“I enjoy the connection between the millennials’ use of YouTube in order to break into larger platforms,” she said.
Now, Glover’s FX television show “Atlanta” is the No. 1 comedy of the year and won two Golden Globe awards in 2016.
“It’s just good to make those connections,” Anderson said.