"This Is Mud on Our Faces! We're Not Really Black!" Teaching Gender, Race, and Age through Humour in the Golden Girls
Bibliographic record
Abstract
All teachers could use more studies about sharing of humor as a force in classroom that enhances learning and helps to create and sustain bonds of community. Working together in classroom, teachers and students find equanimity when we laugh together. (bell hooks 2010,75)Introduction: Is this funny?Full disclosure: I love The Golden Girls. I also recognize that it is a cliche that I love The Golden Girls. As a white, straight, femme, feminist, I have watched this sitcom since I was a child. These are four women who I have aspired to be like - sexual, smart, underestimated, and hilariously sarcastic. I also recognize that this is a show that most of my undergraduate students are unfamiliar with. The context of show-the socio-political climate of United States in 1980s-is unfamiliar and subject matter(s) that characters introduce are almost nonexistent on contemporary sitcoms. I choose to screen this show with knowledge that it will be amusing for some, ambivalent for others, and completely new to most of them. As a feminist instructor, I see my role as providing students with material that inspires dialogue, critique, and enjoyment.I think it's funny, but it makes me uncomfortable. This is a common response that I have received from undergraduate students in Ontario, Canada when showing them an episode of sitcom The Golden Girls entitled Mixed Blessings (Harris 1985). I have shown this episode in courses such as Sociology of Gender, and Media and Popular Culture. While I will discuss synopsis of show in more detail below, for now I will note that this episode includes and stereotypes of gender, race, age, and sexuality, among others. In my work, I often teach about social stigma, oppression and violence using a feminist intersectional lens. These topics are undeniably contentious, as discussions of social privilege and oppression are psychically challenging and can produce student resistance. As feminist sociologist Kathy Davis argues, these intersectional discussions take up the political project of making social and material consequences of categories gender/race/class visible... by...deconstructing categories, unmaking universalism, and exploring dynamic and contradictory workings of power (2008, 74). As these intersectional discussions can be weighty and emotional subjects, finding moments of levity, where appropriate and pedagogical, is crucial to our ability to enjoy process of teaching and learning.The vast majority of current undergraduate students were born after The Golden Girls originally went offthe air in early 1990s. While The Golden Girls is recognizable to some of students-due to its reruns, cultural resurgence as feminist-icons, memorabilia (via action figures, Lego sets, T-shirts, Internet memes, etc.) and Betty White's continued television and film presence-the majority of students that I have taught are unfamiliar with it. The Golden Girls episode Mixed Blessings incorporates subjects of gender, sexuality, whiteness, mixed race, interracial relationships, blackface, age, class, and familial relations. As bell hooks claims [h]umor can provide a needed break from serious, intense material and discussion (2010, 72). While much has been written on subject of teaching critical thinking in academy (Curry-Stevens 2005; DiAngelo and Sensoy 2009; hooks 1994, 2010; Schick 2000), this paper stems from my interest in exploring relationship between teaching critical feminist ideas to undergraduate students and humour. The lack of familiarity that students have with material provides four pedagogical outcomes that are achievable through in-class screening and discussion. These pedagogical outcomes are: combining an unfamiliar representation with familiar tropes; forcing unspoken to become explicit; enabling oppression and privilege to become tangible and discussable; and, encouraging learning to become joyful. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".