No Girls Allowed: Television Boys’ Clubs as Resistance to Feminism

Authors

Pamela Hill Nettleton PhD, Marquette UniversityFollow

Document Type

Article

Language

English

Publication Date

12-2016

Publisher

SAGE Publications

Source Publication

Television & New Media

Source ISSN

1552-8316

Original Item ID

DOI: 10.1177/1527476416630300

Abstract

This article analyzes the male-only spaces present in four television series, FX’s The Shield, Nip/Tuck , Rescue Me, and ABC’s Boston Legal, which each include a gendered territory as a recurring feature. I argue that these homosocially segregated environments enforce boundaries against women and shelter intense bromance relationships that foreclose romantic relationships of any kind, acting as physical incarnations of troubling retrograde sexual politics and ideologies. I also assert that the “boys’ clubs” in which these narratives take place, enabled and empowered by the aesthetic dimensions of architecture and design, help establish workplace patriarchy as commonplace, reasonable, and benign. This article reveals that in these television boys’ clubs, problematic gender ideologies are protected and celebrated, misogyny is naturalized, and patriarchal beliefs and behaviors legitimized.

Comments

Accepted version. Television & New Media, Vol. 17, No. 7 (November 2016): 563-578. DOI. © 2016 The Author(s). Used with permission.

Recommended Citation

Nettleton, Pamela Hill PhD, "No Girls Allowed: Television Boys’ Clubs as Resistance to Feminism" (2016). College of Communication Faculty Research and Publications. 424.
https://epublications.marquette.edu/comm_fac/424