Editorial
1 Face to Race — Gender, Ethnicity and the Media is the fourth issue of gender forum to address the nexus of race and gender, this time with an emphasis on audiovisual media. Television and film have been of key concern for cultural studies, and certain strategies in media representation have been shown to apply across dimensions of ethnic, sexual, economic or religious difference. This issue addresses the question whether diversity transcending discreet categories of difference does and can find representation beyond the fringes of our mediascapes. Frequently, media representations seemingly progressive in regard to either race or gender turn out to be deplorably heteronormative or eurocentric.
2 As constructions of race and gender inform or subvert each other, they can be alternatingly employed as strategies of cultural normativity. The necessary theoretical framework for discussions of these issues focusing on notions of power and the gaze, of visuality and the body, of voyeurism and reciprocal visual pleasure has been of central importance in feminism, gender studies as well as postcolonial studies.
3 The three articles in this issue address these concerns from different angles. Jennifer Esposito and Bettina Love's study "The Black Lesbians Are White and the Studs Are Femmes: A Cultural Studies Analysis of The L Word" approaches the popular American television series The L Word. Being one of the few mainstream television formats centering on lesbian characters, the show's representative politics are scrutinized in regard to their homogenizing tendencies. The study also includes focus group data that emphasize the identificatory relevance such a show has to be credited with in a heteronormative mediascape.
4 Norbert Finzsch's essay "Male Gaze and Racism" transfers a decentered notion of the gaze to the study of racism. Necessarily, such an approach entails a positioning vis à vis Laura Mulvey's film theory as well as its later modifications. Within the context of a definition of racism as a visual ideology, the possibility of returning the gaze and subverting the power strategies is focused on. Drawing on Lacan and Barthes this essay provides a historical analysis of Australia's colonization and the depiction of the indigenous Others foregrounding the counterdiscourses challenging the normative, white male heterosexual "viscourses" of colonial accounts.
5 Focusing on a series of events in the 2007 UK Celebrity Big Brother series, Melissa Wright's contribution "Racist Bullying or ‘Girls Being Girls'? Untangling Constructions of Race and Gender in Celebrity Big Brother" discusses the masking of racial privilege via the use of gendered discursive constructions within the theoretical framework of critical whiteness studies. Wright's analysis addresses the discursive tactics attempting to hide the series' underlying racism, such as the assumption that racism is a phenomenon limited to male working class contexts.