Friends, Judaism, and the Holiday Armadillo: Mapping a Rhetoric of Postidentity Politics

Abstract

Critical communication literature that problematizes postfeminism, therapeutic rhetoric, Whiteness, and representations of marginalized groups all point to a comprehensive rhetoric of postidentity politics, a rhetoric characterized by the assumption that identity politics are no longer relevant. In this essay, I analyze an episode of the popular television program, Friends, in which Jewish identity politics are represented. I situate my critique of this episode first within the history of Jewish representation on television but primarily as a starting point to map out the characteristics of a rhetoric of postidentity politics.

Negative assessments in humour: a way of doing gender

“…This might not be the reason why Annika turns the defiling part towards Jonas, but Jonas deviates from the heterosexual norm. Naomi Rockler (2006) shows that marginalized groups of people easily become the butt. In joking towards Jonas, Annika has the heterosexual privilege.…”

Dispreferred actions and other interactional breaches as devices for occasioning audience laughter in television “sitcoms”

“…One basis of conversation analytic studies is to understand laughter as an action-oriented, recipient-designed feature of interaction, rather than as a Sitcoms have previously been studied in terms of their constitutive features, influence and legacy, as vehicles for understanding social change, for their relevance to particular audiences, and with regards to genre and intertextuality (for example, Mills 2005). Many researchers have investigated the way sitcoms undermine or reinforce stereotypes of gender, age, class, race and sexuality (for example, Rockler's [2006] study of the representation of Jewish identity in Friends). The current paper makes a novel contribution to the existing literature on television comedy, and on understanding how humour works more generally, by examining how laughter is occasioned by interactional breaches or transgressions, rather than by joke-telling, wordplay or transgressions of ''what is socially respectable or ethically correct'' (Littlewood and Pickering 1998, 292).…”

‘How Can I be Too High in Rank to Dine with the Servants, but Too Low to Dine with My Family?’: Intersectionality and Postfeminism in Amma Asante's Belle

“…12 Considering these films as 'postfeminist' thus allows an analysis that can acknowledge both the feminist and antifeminist sensibilities of these films. Such containment can include the individualising of solutions to institutional or systemic discrimination (with characters ultimately responsible for their own equality), epilogues that suggest that the systemic discrimination depicted within the film has successfully been resolved (with the implication being that equality has been achieved contemporaneously), and the prioritisation of discrimination experienced by majority populations, with the subsequent silencing of marginalisation experienced by minority populations.…”