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We examine the television show Battlestar Galactica ( BSG) through interviews with creative people working on the show to illustrate the production context of the show and the science fiction (sf) genre. Media scholars suggest sf stories are critical stories about our political systems and our anxieties about new technologies, social change, race, gender, class, and religious conflicts. We investigate constraints and agency in the production of BSG as a site of critical cultural commentary and the politics of racial and gender representation in the series. We find that the creators behind BSG struggle with the moral and political nature of the stories they create, within the constraints of power, social structures, and a neoliberal economy and in doing so actively participate in their own acts of meaning-making in the production process.

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This article considers the performance of Canadian masculinity in sketch comedy. In particular I consider the characters Buddy Cole (The Kids in the Hall), Red Green (The Red Green Show), and Raj Binder (This Hour Has 22 Minutes). These characters offer Canadian audiences unique parodies of nostalgic conceptions of Canadian masculinity. Using camp and gender parody, the above-mentioned comedians deconstruct popular mythologies about masculinity and Canadian-ness. These portrayals are at one and the same time both critical and optimistic—a paradox that works its way through much of Canadian popular culture.

This article considers Canadian comedian Debra DiGiovanni’s self-deprecatory humour as a performative strategy. In keeping with a performance tradition of self-deprecation as established by women like Phyllis Diller and Joan Rivers, DiGiovanni offers ‘failure’ as a comic strategy. Her comedy is heavily reliant upon the framing of her lack in relationships, in self-control and in body image (in relation to normative gender standards and expectations). At the same time, however, DiGiovanni also engages critically with gendered expectations of heteronormative desirability, lampooning thin women, superficial men and celebrity culture. Although her comedy is generally characterized by self-deprecation, her humour also leaves space for an ambivalent politics of gender.