The Real Housewives, Gendered Affluence, and the Rise of the Docusoap (original) (raw)
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This project offers the opportunity to examine the ways in which normative conceptions of class and gender cohere to produce an archetypal, trans-historical villain, what we term “the rich bitch.” In this essay, we employ the concept of irony to analyze how Bravo’s The Real Housewives of New York City creates rich women as objects of cultural derision, well-heeled jesters in a populist court. The show primes its savvy, upscale audience to judge the extravagance of female scapegoats harshly in tough economic times. The housewives’ class and gender flops are inter-related on the show. The lure of class status produces inconsiderate mothers. Ultimately, The Real Housewives of New York City uses irony to produce a provocative, post-feminist drama about rich women too crass to be classy, too superficial to be nurturing, and too self-obsessed to be caring. *Reprinted as a chapter in "Gender, Race, Class, & Media: A Critical Reader," 4th edition, 2014, Gail Dines & Jean Humez (editors)
Feminist Media Studies, 2008
"In this paper, through an examination of mostly British make-over television programs we examine how the feminine has become a new site of limitless possibility and endless consumption, the fulcrum of intensifying processes of neo-liberal reinvention of continuously making over the self into successful, post-feminist bourgeois subjects. We argue that the central premise of contemporary make-over programs is the question: “Is the transformation of abject subjects possible?” We also suggest the focal object of transformation in many shows is the working class woman who fails both as subject/object of self-reflexivity, desire, and consumption. We argue it is her mind and body that represents a core site of abjection—a subjectivity designated as uninhabitable and therefore also a central site of regulation. It is upon the working class woman’s mind and body that the drama of possibility and limitation of neo-liberal reinvention is played out. We also argue that it is perhaps in reference to that which is made abject and uninhabitable that it becomes possible to talk about class as a dynamic of identifying against what we must not be, and which fuels incessant attempts to refashion selves into generalized and normalized bourgeois feminine subjects."
Through the Gaps of My Fingers: Genre, Femininity, and Cringe Aesthetics in Dramedy Television
Television & New Media 21.1 , 2018
Concentrating on the series "Girls" (2012-2017), "Fleabag" (2016), and "Insecure" (2016-), this article examines the female-centered dramedy as a current genre of U.S.-American television culture with specific investments in gendered value hierarchies. The article explores the format's dominant narrative and aesthetic practices with specific focus on prestige dramedy's "cringe" aesthetics. Cringe is increasingly mobilized as a mode of political expression following the format's privileging of female subjectivities. As such, cringe is tasked with negotiating the tensions between drama and comedy on one hand and intersectional relations of identity politics on the other. Character "complexity," embedded in ideological themes around identity, modifies the "comedy" in cringe and becomes associated with the more prestigious dramatic mode, this way governing the texts' appeal to cultural value. The article demonstrates the ways the female-centered cringe dramedy expresses its politicization and "complexity" via disturbing gendered expectations of mediated femininity, and specifically body and sexuality politics.
The Rich Bitch: Class and Gender on The Real Housewives of New York City
Feminist Media Studies, 2013
This project offers the opportunity to examine the ways in which normative conceptions of class and gender cohere to produce an archetypal, trans-historical villain, what we term "the rich bitch." In this essay, we employ the concept of irony to analyze how Bravo's The Real Housewives of New York City creates rich women as objects of cultural derision, well-heeled jesters in a populist court. The show primes its savvy, upscale audience to judge the extravagance of female scapegoats harshly in tough economic times. The housewives' class and gender flops are inter-related on the show. The lure of class status produces inconsiderate mothers. Ultimately, The Real Housewives of New York City uses irony to produce a provocative, post-feminist drama about rich women too crass to be classy, too superficial to be nurturing, and too self-obsessed to be caring.
The Nouveau Reach: Ideologies of Class and Consumerism in Reality-Based Television
This essay presents a critical analysis of the class and consumptive ideologies on reality-based television programs The Apprentice, The Bachelor, While You Were Out, and Pimp My Ride. In the United States and the United Kingdom, consumption of material goods has risen markedly and the class gap has increased. This essay describes the prevalence of lavish commodities and commodity fetishism that normalise an upper class lifestyle and the prevalence of the myth of the American dream and meritocracy that obscure class barriers. I conclude that the sum of these capitalist ideologies encourages viewers to spend beyond their means, potentially resulting in wider class divisions.
Consumption in the city: The turn to interiority in contemporary postfeminist television
European Journal of Cultural Studies, 2015
In this article, I discuss a postfeminist ‘turn to interiority’ which takes place in US postfeminist television from 2005 onwards. Drawing on the theoretical critiques of postfeminist retreatism and girlie femininity, this turn is characterised by a concern with interior spaces – reviving domesticity and the importance of finding and securing a home – as well as internalised consumption – replacing forms of material consumption with the quest for self-actualisation, particularly through eating and expressions of the authentic self. I analyse this shift through a comparative analysis of the television shows Sex and the City, Girls and The Mindy Project. I argue that the turn to interiority is a product of the US cultural context, but also that this examination evidences the malleability and longevity of postfeminist ideology. Accordingly, I argue for the continuing importance of critical scholarship on postfeminism as an insight into the failures and pervasiveness of neoliberal politics.
All Postfeminist Women Do: Women’s Sexual and Reproductive Health in Television Comedy
Reading Lena Dunham’s Girls: Feminism, postfeminism, authenticity and gendered performance in contemporary television, 2017
In this book, edited by Meredith Nash and Imelda Whelehan, leading and emerging scholars consider the mixed critical responses to Lena Dunham’s TV series Girls and reflect on its significance to contemporary debates about postfeminist popular cultures in a post-recession context. The series features both familiar and innovative depictions of young women and men in contemporary America that invite comparisons with Sex and the City. It aims for a refreshed, authentic expression of postfeminist femininity that eschews the glamour and aspirational fantasies spawned by its predecessor. This volume reviews the contemporary scholarship on Girls, from its representation of post-millennial gender politics to depictions of the messiness and imperfections of sex, embodiment, and social interactions. Topics covered include Dunham’s privileged role as author/auteur/actor, sexuality, body consciousness, millennial gender identities, the politics of representation, neoliberalism, and post-recession society. This book provides diverse and provocative critical responses to the show and to wider social and media contexts, and contributes to a new generation of feminist scholarship with a powerful concluding reflection from Rosalind Gill.
Women, soap opera and new generations of feminists
Critical Studies in Television: The International Journal of Television Studies
At a time when television studies was still an emerging subject, the soap opera attracted a number of high-profile studies, largely conducted by feminists, that also set the agenda for television studies as a whole. While the soap opera no longer finds the same level of attention, the scholarship of that time remains important to the work of feminist television researchers of different generations. In this dossier, five researchers, three of them emerging, two of them mid-career, reflect on the importance of the scholarship to their own work and careers, how their own work expands on it and what it tells us about problems that feminist television scholarship might encounter tomorrow.
The goal of this research is to compare contemporary representations of masculinity and femininity in two HBO television series, Entourage and Sex and the City, and illustrate how these representations intersect with consumption. In the analysis, the authors discuss how gender fluidity gives the characters the freedom to be multifaceted in their performances – performances with regard to three emergent themes: domesticity, sexuality, and authenticity. Characters in bothprograms negotiate the tensions between more traditional gender roles and the assumption of contemporary roles through consumption. The characters find ways to simultaneously re-establish and reinforce their gendered identities as they create new roles, often with the aid of consumption. On the other hand, it is the consumption itself that is sometimes complicit in creating new tensions.