Pamela Chan
CTCS 412 Blog
As Andrea Press mentions in her article
“Gender and Family in Television’s Golden Age and Beyond,” images of women,
work, and family on the small screen have changed significantly throughout the
past several decades. In the fifties, we were introduced to the classic “Leave
It To Beaver” type of family—with the white picket fence and everything that
came with it. Press then discusses the slow emergence of stronger, more
rebellious women like Lucille Ball and Gracie Allen, who although continued
their roles is the domestic spheres, constantly attempted to escape beyond the
confines of their home.
Postfeminist television then opened up a
whole new set of possibilities for the representations of women, with shows
like L.A. Law and The Cosby Show featuring women making
“choices” between work and family. More recently, there have been favorites
such as Ally McBeal and Sex and the City, which as Diane Negra
puts it in “Quality Postfeminism?”, generate “complex portrayals of (mostly)
single, sexually active working women, sketching in rich detail characters who
would have merely been femmes fatales in another era.”
Obviously, television has definitely come a
long way, and its depictions of gender and of the family continue to influence
American culture in indescribable ways. These days, current television,
according to Press, “presents a third wave-influenced feminism that picks up
where postfeminism left off, introducing important representations more varied
in race, sexuality, and the choices women are seen to make between work and
family” (p. 139).
What’s ironic, however, is
that although representations of social class, sexuality, and race have become
more diversified, there still seems to be a lot of “narrow casting” in
television of the postnetwork era. Shows like The L Word or Weeds may
be playing to audience groups that are open to lesbianism or drug use, but like
the “golden age of family television,” they still have “a white, middle-class
bias” and “[err] on the side of portraying conventionally beautiful actress”
(Press p. 147).
For example, The L Word, as Press argues, “displays young lesbian women as though
they were heterosexual glamour girls” who all possess a kind of beauty that belong
to a certain social class. Weeds, in
addition, could be given brownie points for its matter-of-fact portrayal of
drug dealing in white suburban middle-class America—but it still “retains the
norm of focusing on thin, conventionally beautiful women”—i.e. Mary Louse
Parker.
In the
article, Press goes on to mention another example in Lynette Scavo from Desperate Housewives—whose portrayal of
an on-again, off-again working mother “contrasts markedly with families of television’s
golden age.” Yet in many ways, she is still visually portrayed as someone who
remains “conventional and straightjacketed, impervious to decades of feminist critique”
(p. 147). This also makes me think about the brief discussion we had in last
Monday’s class—about certain people’s criticisms towards Orange Is The New Black and how the storyline seems too devoted to
telling Piper Chapman’s journey from upper-class New York socialite to wide-eyed
prison inmate.
In short, Press’ article makes an
interesting point—television has undoubtedly been able to open up in terms of
offering more diverse images of women, work, and family. Shows like The L Word are pivotal in the struggle
for gay, lesbian, and minority rights—and its presence on prime time cable television
is already a huge step in itself.
Social consciousness about the rights of gender and minority
groups, says Press, may have “fundamentally changed in the United States” – but
it still has a very long ways to go. Though prime television has become more
racially and sexually diversified, that ‘diversity’ still remains limited for
women as “thin, young, and conventionally beautiful images [continue to] predominate”
(p.148). It seems that even in this day and age, we, as a society, still “remain
decidedly ambivalent about feminism for women” (p. 148). Now that’s something
to think about.
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