6. Provocative Screens

This chapter concludes the book with six key findings from the analysis presented in the preceding chapters, and concludes with some thoughts on the policy-relevant aspects of audience responses to offensive content and on future research. The chapter notes first, that avoiding the feeling of being offended can operate as a strategy for evading responsibility and action. Second, identity-forming ‘us-and-them’ boundaries invoked by audiences to describe taste cultures are actually porous and thus need constant reinforcing and maintenance. Third, the neoliberal sovereign consumer judges which television programme is offensive through the device of ‘choice’. Fourth, feelings of offence operate often in and through the body, but they sometimes stay discursively unarticulated. Fifth, affective, bodily reactions to offensive television content can create a productive space with potential for action. Sixth, humour regimes continue to matter, but are intersected by exclusionary taste cultures where being offended is perceived as ‘uncool’. The chapter argues that in terms of the regulatory treatment of offensive material, the category itself is currently insufficiently defined and populated. And finally, the chapter posits that a conversation on the subject matter of ‘offensive’ content is readily derailed into a conversation on free speech and censorship, which is an unproductive and reductive outcome.