Wednesday, November 4, 2009

The hand holder

The Hand Holder

It can be said that a given set of gender roles for males and females are ambiguous in one sense, but in another they can describe a specific situation to a tee. Within the city and urban areas stores, images, and displays were once considered to be a hub for males to interact and according to Massey (Barker pg 377), “these city spaces and the modernist experience were deeply gendered.” Due to the fact that males were the only gender that were accepted within the city “scene,” females were the subordinate and seen as completely detached from the activities a male would partake within the city. Today, these gender roles are reversed to some extent in that females are the flaneur, in Massey’s words, and males are relatively detached. The popular HBO show Sex and the City exemplifies these ideals of gender role reversal.

As pedestrian as a street sidewalk seems, the clip “hand holder” from Sex and the City portrays the sidewalk as the most public stretch of land within the city and it is dominated by women. Massey stated, “gender relations vary over space,” (Barker pg. 377) and through this the once assumed mundane sidewalk becomes the place where gender roles are defined so clearly. Smith makes the attempt to hold Samantha’s hand and her initial reaction was to pull away and act as though nothing happened, but in reality Smith was making the attempt to show affection and be the dominant gender in this instance. This event is so relevant because at one time, as Massey stated, men were the flaneur, the principal figure perusing the city and over time women have assimilated that role. Samantha was attempting to do just that, appear to be the dominant gender that roams the streets holding the upper hand against males.


Works Cited
Barker, Chris. Cultural Studies Theory and Practice. Minneapolis: Sage Publications Ltd, 2008. Print.

"YouTube - Sex and the City: Hand Holder (HBO)." YouTube - Broadcast Yourself. Web. 04 Nov. 2009. .