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ABSTRACT
This paper explores a surprisingly common yet critically overlooked televisual trope that regulates gender roles and sexual interactions: jokes about male impotence. Drawing from a close textual analysis of 40 episodes that deal with erectile dysfunction from 30 American and British television comedies spanning five decades, I argue that the humor surrounding depictions of impotence establishes norms that determine who has and deserves power and pleasure in sexual relationships. As a genre known for its proclivity to expose sexual taboos and anxieties, television comedy poses a rare site in which the causes of impotence, its ramifications, and the methods of coping with the condition are featured more prominently and discussed more openly compared to other media texts. Consequently, this paper is able to encompass many comedic scenes in many programs, providing a deeper understanding of the various mechanisms through which sexual scripts and notions of masculinity are constructed, normalized, and renegotiated.
Acknowledgments
I would like to express my deep gratitude to Professor Jonathan Gray, the two anonymous reviewers, and the editors of Feminist Media Studies for their valuable feedback on earlier drafts of this article.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Daphne Gershon
Daphne Gershon is a PhD student in the Media and Cultural Studies program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research interests center around the representation of gender, sexuality and ethnicity in the media, and television in particular. Currently, she is interested in media discourses about masculinity. E-mail: [email protected]