Course Description

At the core of the course is the question how feminism has become a demonized and ridiculed “F-word” in an age when issues of gender and sexuality are at the center of constant, often explosive political debates. These debates often connect media representation and political representation but tend to do so in simplistic ways that bypass or distort decades of sophisticated feminist theory and practice. We will trace back such representations through the decades around case studies that encompass film, video, television and new media practices. The case studies come from the United States and beyond, taking into full account the global interconnectedness of media production and consumption as well as the transnational travel of feminist ideas. The main goal of the course is to evaluate how useful feminist thinking is to understanding the relays between media and political representation; and to develop a lasting critical apparatus to analyzing the politics of gender and sexuality in the media.


Thursday, December 5, 2013

Men Get Secrets and Women Get...?

Doing research for my project and paper I came across a Huffington Post article, "On TV Dramas, Men Have Secrets, Women Are Crazy", which articulated a very valid point that I had not yet linked across currently popular dramatic television shows: the male protagonist hides a massively dangerous secret that drives the majority of the narrative. And one of the most significant people he hides it from is his wife (at least for season one and probably two and three). Breaking Bad, Mad Men, and Homeland all carry this structure emphasizing TV's representation of a clear dichotomy in gender roles and perceptions about marriage and the family. I've decided to slightly change gears in my paper on quality TV wives to focus on this point. I believe "the secret" is a narrative device that illuminates cultural beliefs and perceptions on the family, marriage, and most importantly gender roles.

The secret is always largely the husbands "work" whether that's being a meth cook, domestic terrorist, or a successful ad man. Despite the wife's eventual discovery of this secret over the course of the show, her initial exclusion from it (and general exclusion thereafter) elicits the dichotomy between the woman's world and the man's. In all three of these shows the wife (Betty, Skyler, and Jessica) are mothers as well as women; however, being a mother becomes their defining characteristic. While that doesn't mean it necessarily limits them to staying at home (Breaking Bad) it still is one of their most significant aspects--their husbands getting to explore darker, deeper, and more serious themes outside of the domestic sphere. Further, as the wife (especially while they still aren't aware of their husband's secret) they are further distanced from participating in the "serious" work of their husbands placing them in a safe environment that they, as women, are capable of handling. And because of their repression from being apart of "the knowledge building community [their husband's world] their testimony is not valued" says Sharon Crasnow in her essay on Mad Men, "Why Does Mad Men Make Us So Mad?" I plan on elucidating these points further with academic resources to deconstruct the myth of progressive representations on TV and America's nostalgia for the conventional family structure.
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