About

This is a blog about gender and American popular culture, written by two English professors. We both see the world through the lens of cultural studies, which means that we think that things like advertising, television, mainstream films, popular music and the internet are worthy of serious academic study and commentary. Our goal here is to focus on the way gender is constructed in the mass media.

Thus, we have given our “mission statement,” so to speak. But that still doesn’t explain the title of this endeavor. Even though we usually tell students to avoid opening with a definition, in this case one is probably necessary.

The two body problem is a term used in academia to describe the difficulty that married couples often have finding jobs in the same geographical area. The term probably originated among scholars in the sciences, since the two body problem is also a concept in physics. In both cases, however, the central ideas are relevant to this blog.

We’re academics ourselves, and we’ve been lucky enough to solve the two body problem (the academic version, anyway). One of us teaches at a four-year university, one at a community college, one has tenure, and one soon will. We’re also married, and we’ve found ourselves engaged in myriad discussions over the years as we’ve looked critically at the world of American popular culture. Our hope is to carry some of those discussions, and an occasional “monologue,” into our posts here. Of course we also invite you to participate in the discourse.

We also see this blog model as an alternative to the two dominant blog formats: traditional, individually-written blogs and group blogs. While individual blogs can provide unique and distinct narrative voices, offer insight into their authors’ idiosyncracies, and speak with a clarity and authority, they can also be solipsistic and/or lack rhetorical balance. Group blogs offer much greater diversity of opinion and perspective but can be unfocused or overly contentious.

Our two body “solution” is to offer two distinct yet coordinated narrative voices, sometimes individually, sometimes collectively. Professor Moss (a woman) may comment on masculinity and Professor Bean (a man) may comment on femininity. Our point is not to provide a woman’s opinion on femininity and a man’s on masculinity (or at least not always to do so) but rather to open up gender for discussion on any terms we think are appropriate. We may post together, and usually we will comment on each other’s posts, but we also want to create a space in which each of us is free to stake out her own territory. We see this as a joint venture, but one that still allows for individual commentary.

You will find that each of us has a distinct way of positing a problem, analyzing a text, etc., but you will also notice the ways in which we see our shared, and often perplexing, culture similarly. In short, this blog is a sort of barycenter of our separate orbits (yes, astronomy geeks, in this analogy we’re a binary star). We hope you will like both our individual and collective contributions.