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strategies to re-evaluate contemporary struggles involving race, ethnicity and class. The final two chapters of this second section look to more modern methods of coping with tragedy and healing. Robert Deam Tobin identifies strategies of gay mourning in post-AIDS America, suggesting how camp aesthetics have now entered the cultural mainstream as a means of uniting the tragic with the political. He contends that Six Feet Under explodes the rhetoric of gay responses to AIDS while, at the same time, re-using the fragments of that discourse in a general discussion of death.
    Bringing this section to a close is Ashley Sayeau and her contribution on how Six Feet Under is saturated in America’s cultural preoccupation with self-help. Interrogating this very middle-class obsession allows her to argue that beneath the self-help agenda lies
    ‘an almost irrepressible by-product of middle-class American anxieties surrounding success, fear and narcissism’.
    Just as the Six Feet Under characters are drawn from the post-Vietnam, post-feminist, post-civil-rights, post-Watergate eras of social upheaval, which rendered patriarchal authority suspect, the aftermath of 9/11 has led to another period of introspection and a questioning of American patriarchy – its foreign policy, the Bush administration and the Republican agenda. As if to confirm this, the series opens with the death of the patriarch when Nathaniel Fisher perishes in a tragic accident. The series thus, argues Tobin in an earlier article,
    ‘attempts to provide a positive answer to the question of how society should develop without patriarchal guidance’ (2002: 87). Sections three and four provide answers of sorts to this post-patriarchal dilemma.
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    INTRODUCT ION
    The first, ‘Making visible the female subject’, explores how the questioning of patriarchal authority has affected three women: Ruth Fisher (now Sibley), Claire Fisher and Brenda Chenowith. The authors in section three explore how representation is now up for grabs and how the Six Feet Under women are trying to carve their own identity, for better or worse, without patriarchal interference.
    Kim Akass argues that Six Feet Under offers a rare opportunity for an exploration of the middle-aged, post-menopausal mother with adult children, to suggest that there is more to this positioning than meets the eye. Invisible to most, Ruth’s narrative finds her embracing her liminal status and overturning expectations along the way. Janet McCabe charts the complex narrative territory negotiated by Claire as she searches for identity. Required endlessly to talk about who she is and justify her actions reveals the precarious processes Claire must negotiate in order to attain female subjectivity. The final chapter, by Erin MacLeod, deals with the complicated narrative world of Brenda. MacLeod’s chapter maps out the shift from Charlotte Light and Dark to Brenda’s own attempts at writing, to expose the difficulties confronting Brenda when speaking about experience beyond the established forms of patriarchal discourse.
    Section four investigates masculinity, male sexuality and the men in Six Feet Under . Joanna di Mattia leads with her study of the Fisher brothers, Nate and David. She argues that Six Feet Under offers a groundbreaking portrait of male intimacy rarely before seen on our television screens. If the portrayal of this sibling relationship is innovative then the representation of the Church, argues Brian Singleton, is nothing short of revolutionary. Read through queer theological theory, he argues that there is something more than a little queer about the Church and religion in this show. If the Church contributes to David’s unease about his sexuality, then what do we make of Claire’s (ex) boyfriend Russell and his sexual orientation?
    Samuel A. Chambers concludes this section with a study of heteronormativity and heterosexual assumptions of sexuality in Six Feet Under . Focusing on Russell allows