A Landscape of Desire - The TV Edition

Reading the Cupples article "Field as a Landscape of Desire" gave me the most insight and best explanation of the positive and negative aspects of becoming sexually involved, or allowing oneself to be a sexual being within a research context.

Since the premise of this blog is to discuss the ideas of the articles in a pop culture context, I want to relate the idea of sleeping with someone in the research field to having a beloved will-they/won't-they couple become involved on a favourite television series.

One of the go-to tropes on television is to have two people together who have an incredible amount of chemistry, and the question for audiences becomes "will these two EVER get together?" A great classic sitcom moment would be Ross and Rachel in Friends and their epic first kiss.

More recently Jess and Nick on New Girl or Mindy and Danny on The Mindy Project are great examples of couples whose chemistry begs the question of whether or not they will pair off. In both of these situations, there is a professional or potentially moral conflict standing in the way of their potential romances. Jess and Nick are roommates. They live in LA, a city where young twentysomethings (a teacher and a bartender respectively) cannot afford to live on their own. If their relationship attempt were to fail, they could potentially find themselves in a difficult living situation.

In the case of Mindy and Danny on The Mindy Project, the couple in question are both doctors who are associates at a private clinic in New York. While they do not have the issues of joint housing to consider, they could potentially threaten a very lucrative, positive work environment.

These difficult scenarios are true to life. Often couples meet each other in places where they're relationships might cause more harm than good.

These are the same issues that face researchers in the field: how will it effect their work? How could it effect their living arrangements (especially when out in the field)? What are the moral implications, and how will it change them personally? With Cupples, she took a positive approach. She appreciated herself as a sexual being, and understood that allowing herself to be a sexual being in the research context. Though she may not engage in actual sex, she can appreciate that men are attracted to her, and their attraction can be a positive thing for them.

Television takes this pro-sexuality approach as well, because the "will-they/won't they" aspect always ends in "they do." There is often fall out, the relationships sometimes don't work, but this failure aspect is often milked for comedic purposes.

With Cupples, she understands that there is a potential for negative fallout when becoming sexually involved in the field, but she suggests that to ignore the sexual entirely is to deny an aspect of the research that will exist regardless of whether it is acknowledged or not. Men and women in a research community will make assumptions about a researchers sexuality. Within a relationship with chemistry, that chemistry will also exist whether or not the couple chooses to act on their feelings. Those feelings will also impact the relationship whether or not they consummate things, much like sexual assumptions in the research field do.

So whether they will or won't, whether they do or don't, and whether a research decides to engage sexually in the field, there will always be sexual side effects.