ABSTRACT
This chapter attempts to describe key elements of postmodern paradigm of plasticity, and explore some of its effacements—the material and social realities that it denies or renders invisible. Women, John Fiske's argues, connect with subversive "feminine" values leaking through the patriarchal plot of soap operas; blacks laugh to themselves at the glossy, materialist-cowboy culture of "Dallas." The general tyranny of fashion—perpetual, elusive, and instructing the female body in a pedagogy of personal inadequacy and lack—is a powerful discipline for the normalization of all women in the culture. Incest, exercise addictions, women who love too much, the sex habits of priests, disturbed children of psychiatrists, male strippers—all have their day, all are given equal weight by the great leveler: the frame of the television screen. Many men and women may experience the primary reality of the video as the elicitation of desire for that perfect body; women, however, may also be gripped by the desire of becoming that perfect body.
