http://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/?article=1104

“I am struck by how dark the show is,” says Elijah Anderson, the Yale sociologist whose classic works Code of the Streets, Streetwise, and A Place on the Corner document black inner-city life with noted clarity and sympathy. Anderson would be the last person to gloss over the severe problems of the urban poor, but in The Wire he sees “a bottom-line cynicism” that is at odds with his own perception of real life. “The show is very good,” he says. “It resonates. It is powerful in its depiction of the codes of the streets, but it is an exaggeration. I get frustrated watching it, because it gives such a powerful appearance of reality, but it always seems to leave something important out. What they have left out are the decent people. Even in the worst drug-infested projects, there are many, many God-fearing, churchgoing, brave people who set themselves against the gangs and the addicts, often with remarkable heroism.”

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200801/bowden-wire/2

“Women,” said Tony-T. “Where I come from, women run most of the things [that the show] talks about. It’s the women that have the power in the ghetto. This show totally got it wrong when they made it all about men. Women are the politicians; they can get you a gun, they got the cash, they can get you land to build something on.”

(Note that these comments are based on Season 5, I get these sense they haven’t watched earlier seasons. And there were some important roles for women characters in the last two episodes, which they also didn’t see. But still, it seems that there is a lot more the show could have told us about the role of women in these communities …)

Although I’ve only read parts of it, Rouse’s “Engaged Surrender” would be a good choice for some perspective on female gender relations among African Americans.

Kelly – my concern with gender in “The Wire” is not so much about whether or not the women tend to be good or evil, weak or strong but whether they tend to be visible or invisible, essential or marginal. Also, thanks for bring up Xenobia (one of my favorite characters).

I believe that male dominated cast of The Wire is mostly a reflection of the world it recreates.

The Police – male dominated
The Game – male dominated
The Ports – male dominated
City Hall – male dominated (though not nearly as much).
The School – female dominated (and I believe mostly depicted as such)
The Media – White male dominated (though similar to the political realm)

The Wire does not glorify it’s subject matter so, IMHO, I view the ommission of female characters from the majority of these institutions as a good thing. Especially considering how much damage these institutions have done/are doing to our society.

The main characters of the school:
Prezbo: A perfect way to continue/redeem his character after the tragedy of S3. Also, Ed Burns himself taught in the Baltimore City Schools after leaving the Police Department.

Bunny: The perfect character to try the corner kids/stoop kids experiment. Again, a perfect continuation from S3 to S4.

Two male characters who moved from the male dominated Police world into the school system.

As far as why they chose 4 boys to follow. Well, The Wire wanted to show where the likes of Avon, Stringer, maybe Bubbles, maybe Omar, come from. How they are made. Again, the drug game is a male dominated game. It makes sense to follow these boys. It’s not as though female students were completely ignored. There were plenty of female students and they were shown in a wide ranges of abilities and personalities. Crystal – the girl that Mrs. Donally recuits to take clothes to Dukie’s house (“give these only to Duquan”). Xenobia was a great character. Remember the slashing in one of the first days of Prezbo’s class? Remember the girl who urged the rest of the class to quiet down cause Mr. Prezbo was trying to teach? Clearly she happened to be a “stoop kid”.

As far as the school staff goes, it was female dominated, despite what the cast and crew page over at HBO.com tells you. Everyone one of teachers in Prezbo’s team were female. Mrs. Sampson was a very strong character, as was Ms. Duquette. Every administrator who came down from North Ave. was female.

Michael’s mother was a drug addict. Ofcourse he had no father, and his step-father sexually abused him.

Namond’s mother was straight up evil. Ofcourse his father was a sociopath who had commited many a murder and is in jail for life. What made Mrs. Brice the way she was? And look at the contrast between the four kids and how they were raised.

Both of Dukie’s parents were addicts.

But, how about Miss Anna, Randy’s foster mother? Nobody has mentioned here. She was a damn saint.

All in all, I think The Wire does depict mostly a “man’s world”. But damn, it’s a messed up world isn’t it. I think that says a lot more about gender, personally.

Please, don’t give away anything on Season 5 yet. Haven’t watched it yet but I’m glad to hear that it may correct some of the gender problems in the earlier narrative.

I really should continue my argument by separating my critiques of the “The Wire” as an “ethnographic text” from critiques of it as a work fiction even though this division may be somewhat artificial.

As an ethnographic text, I would first ask who the population being studied is since the show itself doesn’t say. If the population is urban males in Baltimore, then I have no quarrels with the show in terms of gender. “The Wire” does nothing that I would deem inaccurate or misleading with regard to its female characters. But, It doesn’t do a good job representing them and thus should not be thought of as covering a more complete urban experience. If we break down gender relations,

1. Male-Male: Relations between and among the social aspects of masculinity (males, male dominated spaces, masculine coding systems etc).
2. Male-Female: Relations between and among the social aspects of masculinity and femininity (as above).
3. Female-Female: as above.

Then, how well does the show explore the salient features of these types of relations in all their complexity and variety (a far different question from how accurately)? I would say that in the show the discussion and analysis of the complexity/variety of male-male relations is outstanding, of male-female is good and female-female is poor. Again, poor in the sense of being insufficient not inaccurate. If the subject of the study was the male gender within society, this is exactly the kind of breakdown that one would expect. To study males, one needs lots of research on male-male interaction, solid research on male-female interaction and accurate research on female-female interaction in those places where relevant to understanding male-female interactions. This pattern of apportionment is similar to early ethnographies (possibly johanna’s comment earlier gets to this).

It would take a good deal of space for me to go through how I think that coverage of female-female relations is marginal. I would like to note though, that most of what “The Wire” shows about Kima (I understand Kima as a woman despite my lack of clarity earlier) and Rhonda would fall under the male-female heading as they interact mainly with the men around them and with the male dominated institutions in which they spend most of their time.

Further, counting becomes important when we ask whether there is sufficient variety in the female-female interactions and we aren’t forced to bring in outside texts/knowledge or to generalize the interactions and pick a few women as representing universal womanhood. I went to the cast and crew page for “The Wire” over at HBO this afternoon and counted 74 males and 9 females as major characters. Under the heading “School”, the number is 8 males and 1 female. Yes, it is an over simplified form of examination but that is quite a discrepancy and should raise some red flags.

If we have to bring in outside sources/information/theory in order to understand female-female relations but can construct good theories of on male-male and male-female relations using the text alone, there is a problem.

To refer back to my first comment, this whole gender problem is more a problem of omission and emphasis than it is of inaccuracy. Yet, marginalization can be achieved through selective omission and selective emphasis. I would be interested to hear from Johanna and young if this is the kind of thing that they were thinking about when they made their comments. Or, am I in my own world over here (likely).

Without giving anything away to Strong, who doesn’t have Season 5 in Europe yet, I noticed as I watched the next-to-final episode of the Wire tonight that Kima’s actions are driving the entire series toward its conclusion. This seems as if it will put Victor’s assertion to rest that “Kima’s ability to move the plot forward is limited.”