ABSTRACT
Chapter 6 draws some conclusions. Taken together, most of the programs examined share an overlapping concern with the direst consequences of the gender gap – discrepancies in social justice. Chapter 3 establishes the racial nature of the male gaze, which underlies mechanisms of social control and punishment. Chapters 2, 4, and 5 share a thematic concern with the social justice gap, and its racial and class permutations, mainly the legal system’s failure to protect women from rape and other forms of male violence. Chapters 2 and 4 are further concerned with the criminal justice system’s propensity to dismiss violence committed against women, particularly when they are poor. Chapters 4 and 5 are critical of the legal system’s biased treatment of people of color, specifically the court’s propensity to mete out harsher punishment for women of color who kill, and its failure to protect men of color from police brutality, respectively. This chapter closes with some speculative remarks about the relation between the dramas treated in Difficult Women and some of the female-centered dramedies and satires created by women that likewise deal with issues of gendered power.
