Children’s Television, Ethnicity and Gender in the United States

• In Event: Scholar to Scholar I
  In Paper Session: Discourses of Stability and Change: Gendered Identities and Children’s Television

Abstract

Whereas the dominant tendency continues to be to talk about and represent people, culture, and populations as stemming from discrete ethno-racial categories, the “Latin explosion” which is anchored within contemporary Latinidad renders these efforts at best problematic and at worst untenable. Through an exploration of representations of Latina girls in U.S. children’s television programs, this presentation depicts how Latina girls can be any ethnicity or race they are needed or want to be. They can be marshaled to represent, and of course appeal or sell to, whiteness, but they can also represent generalized otherness as well as more specific stereotypical Latinidad and a range of other ethnicities. The rise of the ambiguously ethnic image also demands a lightening of the dark subject. While Blackness is still part of the racial spectrum, the introduction of Latinidad as an in-between location plays into the continuing tendency to under represent or altogether ignore its presence within U.S. culture. Furthermore the rise of the ambiguous Latina simultaneously plays into the marketing needs of a complex heterogeneous society and underscores the fact that there is no purity within any given ethno-racial category or within the U.S. body politic.

Author

• Angharad Valdivia, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign