ABSTRACT
A growing body of scholarship in the study of television pays critical attention to the ways in which the dynamics of sexuality and gender frame understandings of contemporary television culture. Furthermore, a linear understanding of television’s development fails to account for the multiple ways in which it is actually consumed. Thus the trajectory has sought, in part, to mimic the chaos, choice and connectedness that often comprises the experience of watching television. Gender and sexuality are thus not the effects of neoliberalism, rather they are fundamental to the very apparatus that produces the citizen-subject. Making generalised claims about how neoliberalism ‘defines’ contemporary television would serve to imprecisely fix how these discursive systems intersect. Few people watch programmes from only one genre, network or era, especially in a viewing culture where notions of choice and diversity increasingly dominate understandings of how the discerning viewer should behave.
