ABSTRACT
An anecdote to start with: in 1988 I conducted a small-scale ethnographic study of viewer readings of The NewlyWed Game (Fiske, 1989). On the show four couples were asked about the wives’ sexual compliance to their husbands’ ‘romantic needs’. The two wives who were least compliant were non-white. The two compliant wives were white. The female responses from which the contestants had to choose the most appropriate all had a racial accent-they were ‘Yes, master’, ‘No way, José’, and ‘Get serious, man’. ‘Master’ bore the accent of slavery, ‘man’ of blacks and ‘José’ of hispanics. Gender politics and racial politics were mapped onto each other.
