Mad Men, Mad World: Sex, Politics, Style, and the 1960s by Goodlad Lauren M. E.; Kaganovsky Lilya; Rushing Robert A

Author:Goodlad, Lauren M. E.; Kaganovsky, Lilya; Rushing, Robert A.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Duke University Press

TELEVISION PROFILING, DEMOGRAPHY SETS: THE CASE OF “COLORED TV”

Yet, however telling these textual demarcations may be, ultimately I am less interested in how the program as a media object is marked as “different” than in how it reveals the ways in which our differences as social subjects are marked by media: in its exploration of the articulation of identity (which is not merely expressed, but made emergent) within commodified and mass-mediated flows. One site of this involves Mad Men's treatment of race, which, though not as elaborated as other subjects the program engages, is extremely significant. By its very omissions, Mad Men presents racial difference not so much as an experienced self or sociality as, from the perspective of corporate culture, a potential market slot—a target demographic to be distinguished from a so-called general group. While this obviously yields only a very limited perspective, it calls attention to how identities become, indeed, delimited—realized, in part, as market categories (the ways in which identities are constituted and reconstituted as they intersect with media formations that, however problematically, give them definition, and vice versa).

As scholars such as Sasha Torres and Kirsten Lentz have noted, this mutual definition has historically codified terms of both television and race. The emphasis on the “live” coverage of civil rights protests in the late 1950s and early 1960s, for example, helped to establish both TV'S presence in American culture and a sense of “presence” in race itself (authorizing an understanding of race as intrinsic to one's very “life being”). This linkage became even further established in the 1970s with the rise of the “realist” and “relevant” sitcom, in which it was precisely those TV shows that dealt with race or racism (with what were conceived as “real issues,” even if treated via comedy) that were seen as appropriate to that televisual discourse (see Lentz; Torres, Black, White). In TV'S flow and segmentation, race might be even further defined—with, for instance, as Herman Gray has shown for African American representation, a division of marked racialized figures into the pull-oneself-up-by-one's-bootstraps characters foregrounded by the rise of the so-called black sitcom and the poor, nameless masses in the backdrop of many news reports against whom that individuated character is implicitly positioned (see H. Gray, “Remembering Civil Rights”). Mad Men does not explicitly get into these issues, but in its narration of an early version of “narrowcasting,” it does allude to how race starts to become a TV category—literally, in one example, used for the sale of TV sets.21

The idea to deploy race in this way is the brainchild of the account services executive Pete Campbell, whose approach to racial identity might usefully be counterposed to the copywriter Paul Kinsey's. Kinsey is interested in “beatnik” culture, professes “bohemian” ideas, and, for a time, dates Sheila White, an African American woman. On a bus trip with her to Mississippi to register black voters, Paul espouses a utopian notion of an end to racial difference—even if this is an odd, cynical utopianism, since

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