Stigma and the Single Girl: Performing Gender, Sex, and the City

Abstract

In this paper I analyze Sex and the City as performances of contemporary post-modern culture of femininity and engage in a multi-modal, semiotic reading of their socio-cultural significance. In particular, I argue that the same discursive formation underlies the ideology of the show: a discourse largely coinciding with the Standard North American Family Code (Smith, 1999) and therefore a discourse that stigmatizes single women and reinforces the value of marriage as both symbolic and material capital. Drawing in part from Goffman, I argue that an oppositional reading of the show also yields another interesting connotation: the show offers its viewers techniques and scripts of stigma resistance.

Citation

Davidson, T. (2006), "Stigma and the Single Girl: Performing Gender, Sex, and the City", Denzin, N.K. (Ed.) Studies in Symbolic Interaction (Studies in Symbolic Interaction, Vol. 29), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 93-116. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0163-2396(06)29009-4