QUEEN OF THE HILL

Rachel Ramlawi

A Thesis

Submitted to the Graduate College of Bowling Green State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

MASTER OF ARTS

December 2020

Committee:

Becca Cragin, Advisor

Jeffery Brown

© 2020

Rachel Ramlawi

All Rights Reserved iii

ABSTRACT

Becca Cragin, Advisor

An exploration of feminist themes within Fox’s King of the Hill. Using Peggy Hill as a site of discourse, I examine the way the show presents the gendered division of labor, motherhood, and body positivity. Contrasting the show with other sitcoms and other animated sitcoms, I look for the ways in which King of the Hill utilizes postmodern sincerity in order to make an honest message about feminism. I examine the episodes, “Goodbye Normal Jeans.”

“Peggy’s Turtle Song,” and “Transnational Amusements Presents Peggy’s Magic Sex Feet” as a way to establish the progressive discourse the show is saying about feminism. In looking at these episodes I argue that King of the Hill presents a positive and progressive view of feminism with regards to gendered divisions of labor, motherhood, and body liberation.

iv

Dedicated to my mom Susan Cook, father Mustafa Ramlawi, sisters Jamie Ramlawi, Tess Cook,

Grace Cook and three best friends, Tiffany Alcock, Marley Stuever-Williford, and Emily

Solomon, who without their support I could never have finished this. v

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

A big thanks to Dr. Cragin for advising me and guiding me through this process. And for teaching me the ropes when it comes to TV studies.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

INTRODUCTION ...... 1

CHAPTER ONE. “IF THE BOY LEARNS TO COOK ANE CLEAN, WHAT’S HIS

MOTIVATION TO GET MARRIED?”: DOMESTICITY ON KING OF THE HILL ...... 8

“There’s No Rule that Says Only Women Can Do Housework”: Gendered Division of

Labor Makes Monsters ...... 14

CHAPTER TWO. PEGGY’S PROBLEM WITH NO NAME ...... 24

Empty Time and Clipping Coupons: Motherhood Madness ...... 28

The Problem Has a Name – it’s Patriarchy ...... 32

Peggy’s “Turtle Song”: Poetry as a Voice to Scream With ...... 36

CHAPTER THREE THE RADICAL BODY POLITICS OF BOBBY HILL ...... 43

“First We Must Reach the Men”: Body Positivity as Exploitation ...... 47

The Body Politics of Bobby Hill ...... 53

CONCLUSION ...... 58

WORKS CITED ...... 64 1

INTRODUCTION

Among all the postmodern ambivalence that was a trademark of TV in the late 90s, there sat a sincere gem – King of the Hill. Since the Flintstones first aired in 1960 animated sitcoms have been a part of American popular culture, in the 90s this genre expanded from what was originally a children’s genre1 to a genre that was explicitly adult oriented. When the Simpsons aired in the late 80s, the genre which had tapered off in the 70s had been revitalized, and in the 90s The

Simpsons was soon joined by Comedy Central’s South Park, and network siblings Family Guy and King of the Hill. King of the Hill was a slice of life animated sitcom about the Hill family, and their neighbors. The Hills, and most of their neighbors were lower-middle class Texans, who lived in the fictional town of Arlen, Texas. King of the Hill stood out from its animated peers with a sort of startling sincerity in its episodes. Much of the premise around each episode of King of the Hill isn’t a father-knows-best set up, though on the surface it appears that way. A number of episodes feature Hank or Peggy (the patriarch and matriarch of the family respectively) being confronted with an issue that is liberal at its roots, and over the course of the episode, Hank comes around to changing his conservative views. There’s less of the ambivalence we see in most sitcoms that started in the 90s in King of the Hill as Hank is often explicitly shown to be wrong in his behavior or his viewpoints in the text. Couched in a comfortable humor, with a man not so different from people in “real America,” this sitcom had the chance to reach a broad audience of people with its progressive viewpoint.

Class, race, stereotyping, mental illness, exploitation of workers, ableism, veterans’ rights, and gentrification are just a few of the topics tackled in the twelve seasons of King of the Hill. I

1 Though The Flintstones was aimed originally at parents, and given a primetime spot, it has was very popular with children. Is still used to market multivitamins to children. Stephen Cox, “The Modern Stone Age Family Has its Golden Anniversary,” LA Times (Los Angeles, CA), Sep. 11, 2010. 2 am focusing very narrowly on King of the Hill’s discourse about a few feminist issues. While one can, and should, go into the way King of the Hill goes on at length about toxic masculinity in the relationships between Bobby, Hank and Hank’s father Cotton, I just don't have the ability to in the scope of this thesis. Instead, I’m going to focus narrowly in on a single character – Peggy

Hill. Peggy is Hank’s wife, Bobby’s mother, three-time winner of Arlen Jr. High’s Substitute

Teacher of the Year Award, and a champion boggle player. Peggy is an interesting site of discourse for a few reasons, while she’s a wife and a mother, she also works, routinely fails at the domestic labor, and is not traditionally attractive. In these areas she falls outside many of the traditional ways we see women even within animated sitcoms. For instance, Marge Simpson and

Peggy Griffin from The Simpsons and Family Guy, are both beautiful stay-at-home moms who excel at the domestic labor, a sharp contrast to their schluby husbands. Peggy Hill contrasts these other animated women, making her a fascinating to read for the ways in which King of the Hill uses her as a site of discourse surrounding feminist issues. I will examine the ways in which King of the Hill pushes back against hegemonic ideas of a gendered division of labor, body positivity and motherhood.

King of the Hill is unlike other animated sitcoms, in two areas, the first is the aesthetics of the show itself. King of the Hill relies on animation that is both simplistic and grounded in reality.

There are no gags where characters hurt each other and are seemingly fine the next scene. There is no talking poop or babies, no alien invasions, or anthropomorphic animals. In "Back to the

Drawing Board. The Family in Animated Television Comedy," Michael Tueth writes about how animated shows use the concept of carnival. Through the use of animation, they distance themselves from reality enough to try and critique it. Tueth writes, "The Simpsons and other successful animated domestic comedies have been able to explore darker, subversive aspects of 3 family life thanks mainly to the possibilities of the cartoon aesthetic."2 King of the Hill deviates from the carnival as most of the time as it relies on a clean, understated almost plain aesthetic.

The aesthetic of King of the Hill is pseudo-realistic. Each character is so simplistic it allows you to almost forget about the cartoon format all together. In this way the show draws you in with a sense of normalcy. No injuries that are miraculously recovered from, no ethnic caricatures, no quick trips across the world on money they don’t have. King of the Hill instead lulls you into a sense that this could really happen, there could be an Arlen, Texas, these could be your neighbors.

This isn’t to say of course, that King of the Hill never uses the grotesque or carnival, sometimes they do. The rarity of it only seems to highlight the distorted or unrealistic images that are being presented. When Peggy stares at the twisted laughing faces of stay-at-home mothers gleeful talking about couponing we’re supposed to see how horrifying this thought is from Peggy’s perspective. She’s wondered into a nightmare, and the sudden, unusual distortion highlights that. The show does not attempt to make a caricature of the themes within each episode, nor does it attempt to make a caricature of the citizens of Arlen.

While it would be easy to lean into Southern stereotypes, using over exaggerated accents and overblown ethnic stereotypes. The show instead leans into a sort of realism for the voices of the cast, even characters with accents like the Laotian neighbors that live next door to Hank are given rich, vibrant interior lives. There is nothing stereotypical here. No ten-gallon hats and the only distinctly Southern accents comes from the quick speaking Boomhauer. And even this is not the type of Southern accent anyone would expect to come out of Texas. Though the combination

2 Michael Tueth “Back to the Drawing Board: The Family in Animated Television Comedy,” in Primetime Animation: Television Animation and American Culture. ed. Carol Stabile and Mark Harrison (Oxford: Routledge, 2003), 141. 4 of simplistic style, and a depiction that does not mock the lower middle class conservative

Christian Texans, King of the Hill builds a platform that allows them to reach a broad audience with their rather sincere messages. King of the Hill does not mock a conservative audience the way many might feel The Simpsons, Family Guy, or South Park does. Instead they slip feminist, and class-conscious messages into the show the way you might sneak spinach into a smoothie. In ways that are easier for an audience who might not agree with those messages to see and consume. These messages also make the show remarkably sincere, genuine, and heartwarming for audience members who may not need to be told it’s okay to learn sex-ed.

The aesthetic style of King of the Hill deviates from the postmodern ambivalence and parody that informs the style and content of other animated shows. Instead King of the Hill relies on what Jim Collins dubbed the New Sincerity. In “Genericity in the Nineties: Eclectic Irony and the New Sincerity” Collins writes about the ways in which postmodernism not only gave birth to an explosion of sarcastic and ambivalent media texts in the 90s, but it also gave way to texts that are earnest and honest. Collins defines this new sincerity as “a response to the same media sophisticated landscape … these films attempt to reject it (ironic manipulation) altogether purposefully evading the media saturated Terran of the present in pursuit of an almost forgotten authenticity attainable only through a sincerity that avoids any sort of irony.”3 Now, it’s not to say that King of the Hill never engages in irony, it sometimes does, but the emotions and message it is trying to convey are sincere in nature. It’s one of the things that helps King of the

Hill stand apart, the sincerity of its humor, its politics and its animation.

This thesis is broken down into three chapters that focus exclusively on Peggy Hill. As the one female character that is in every episode of King of the Hill, I think she's the best place to

3 Jim Collins, "Genericity in the 90s: Eclectic Irony and the New Sincerity" in Jim Collins, Hilary Radner and Ava Preacher Collins, eds., Film Theory Goes to the Movies, (New York: Routledge, 1993) 257. 5 start for feminist analysis. I break down my analysis of Peggy into three separate chapters exploring gendered divisions of domestic labor, motherhood, and body positivity. I picked these three areas of analysis because they are some of the places, I find King of the Hill to have more progressive feminist messages within sitcoms.

In Chapter One, I situate King of the Hill against other research done on the animated television show The Simpsons. In utilizing the ways in which The Simpsons uses Marge as both a site that satirizes the ridiculous demands placed on housewives, and yet also reinforces them, I then look at the ways King of the Hill utilizes Peggy in discourse about the domestic labor women provide. To do this, I analyze the episode “Goodbye Normal Jeans” to contend that King of the Hill argues that gendered divisions of labor are bad for women. The episode starts off with

Hank worried about Bobby learning to cook and clean for himself, because if he does, he won’t be motivated to enter into a heterosexual relationship with a woman. While it seems like Hank’s worries over his son’s heterosexuality may be at the crux of the episode, it pivots rapidly to an exploration of the ways in which Peggy fails at domestic labor. In a series of mistakes and blunders made by Peggy throughout the episode, the show watches as Peggy slowly descends into domestic madness, wrecking herself as she tries to keep providing domestic labor for the house. The conclusion of the episode as one affirming that marriages are not built on what women can do for men, but rather love allows the space for Peggy to be a partner, not a domestic servant.

In Chapter Two, I discuss the ways in which “Peggy’s Turtle Song” tackles three feminist issues. The first being ideal motherhood as presented in sitcoms through the way the often position sitcom mothers as stay-at-home moms. King of the Hill contrasts this, as many working- 6 class sitcoms do4, as Peggy has a job. In “Peggy’s Turtle Song” King of the Hill brings Peggy home for an episode so that she can better care for her son who has recently been mistakenly diagnosed with ADHD. Her son is thirteen and doesn’t require an excess of mothering it turns out, especially since the ADHD meds turn him into a zombie. What happens next in the episode is an examination of what Friedan described as the “problem with no name,” which Peggy addresses by turning to poetry. I utilize the works of Audre Lorde to discuss the ways in which poetry acts as a site of protest, something the show reinforces by insisting that it allows Peggy “a voice to scream with” at a time when she’s feeling frustrated and bound by the expectations of her husband. I also examine the ways in which this episode contrasts the popular idea of women being stay-at-home mothers in the 50s, as a reality that was not true for working class women.

Ultimately, this episode treats work outside the home, as something necessary for the mental well-being of mothers, and states the desires of the patriarchy are determinantal to home and marriage.

The Third and final chapter of this thesis turns body positivity. Within the past decade body positivity has become a pop culture phenonium. What started out as a radical movement focused on, among other things, a radical acceptance of bodies that deviated from beauty standards, it has recently become co-opted by capitalism. A movement that was once about acceptance has come to mean expanding beauty, so that all women may equally be exploited by the beauty industry.

King of the Hill tackles this problem in “Transnational Amusements Presents Peggy’s Magic Sex

Feet.” Peggy, who it has long been established within the canon of the show is insecure about her big feet finds herself exploited by a maker of porn fetish videos. He convinces her that she's empowering herself by subjecting herself to the Male Gaze. The show’s episode and the end of

4 Roseanne and Malcom in the Middle are also sitcoms revolving around working class families where the mothers also work. 7

Peggy’s shame about her feet comes when she accepts that looks aren’t important at all. In divorcing herself from the idea of being found beautiful all together, Peggy is able to finally accept her large feet. This message firmly states that the important things about people aren’t their looks, arguing that liberation from beauty standards doesn’t come from expanding definitions of beauty so that all women may be subjected to the Male Gaze, but rather in doing away with the concept of beauty all together.

Now, this is certainly not all there is to talk about even with regards to feminism in King of the Hill. There are many more topics the show covers in its thirteen-season run. The topic of toxic masculinity itself within in the show could cover a thesis all its own. There are also more women on the show, women of color in the Southeast Asian neighbors next door, and poor women in Luanne. There are even more ways in which Peggy could be explored as a site of discourse on feminism. I kept my focus solely on Peggy as a site of feminist discourse with regards to domesticity, motherhood, and body image. Not only for time, but for the position of privilege which Peggy also occupies within the space of the show. Peggy, the matriarch of the show, is a white, lower-middle class, able bodied (for most seasons anyways), cisgender woman.

Given more time I would look at intersections of class, race and gender presentation, all subjects which are indeed covered in the show. But for the purposes of this thesis my focus is narrow, talking about the ways in which women such as Peggy do still face oppression from the patriarchy, and also the ways I feel King of the Hill has the most radical feminist messaging.

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CHAPTER ONE: “IF THE BOY LEARNS TO COOK AND CLEAN, WHAT’S HIS MOTIVATION

TO GET MARRIED?”: DOMESTICITY ON KING OF THE HILL

They say behind every great man is a great woman. This seems to be especially true of the sitcom genre. Where would it be without the wives and mothers who run the house? These women run the gambit from harried working-class mothers, nagging wives, and benevolent domestic goddesses. From Lucy Ricardo, to June Cleaver to Marge Simpson sitcom wives tend to have one thing in common, and I’m not talking about their propensity to wear pearls. While many wives on sitcoms might not be middle class, or take of their family with the same kind of easy grace Marge Simpson and June Cleaver do, almost all wives in sitcoms do the lion’s share of the domestic labor. It’s not uncommon to watch a woman cooking, and cleaning while her husband finds something else to busy himself with like work, lawn care, or spending their time away from the home drinking. Women and their relationship to domestic labor within the diegesis of a text is perhaps one of the easiest places to examine and see what the text is saying about women and their role in the home, and their role in heterosexual relationships. June

Cleaver, and even ultimately Marge Simpson, both reaffirm a traditional, hegemonic ideas of domestic labor as a key factor of a woman’s contribution to heterosexual relationships. They are not only expected to perform domestic labor by their husbands and families, but they often excel at it. This is also one of the places where King of the Hill produces some of its most thoughtful and feminist messaging. Peggy Hill lacks both pearls and a woman’s apparent knack for domestic labor.

King of the Hill boldly asserts that women’s value in relationships is not derived from their ability to maintain a home, cook, or even their ability to sexually gratify their husbands.

Instead it portrays valuing women for gendered divisions to domestic labor is destructive for women, and families. This is a position that is rare to see, even in satirical comedies like the 9

Simpsons where the postmodern ambivalence surrounding the show often winds up sending a mixed message about domestic labor within the confines of heterosexual relationships. Marge functions as satire for the demands placed on housewives, but Marge is also needed to care for the house and kids or else the family falls apart. This can be read that though the demands placed on women are ridiculous, they must be performed in order for the family unit to function. In

King of the Hill, when Peggy’s role as domestic head of house is threatened, she reacts in ways that are outlandish, if not cruel, as she’s scared, she will no longer have a place in the house. The more Peggy attempts to reclaim the lost domestic labor, the more damage she does to herself, and her household. King of the Hill not only allows Peggy to fail at domestic labor, but actively displays that the expectations to perform it are harmful for families.

Television scholars have written on the way domestic labor is portrayed on sitcoms, splitting it into two categories: domestic labor as in cooking and cleaning, and domestic labor with regards to child rearing. It’s hard to split out the differences between the two, as they’re pretty interwoven, but I will be going into motherhood in greater detail in the second chapter. For the sake of this chapter I’ll be discussing the ways in which domestic labor (maintaining a home) is portrayed on King of the Hill. I will also be splitting the literature on the subject up into two pieces, as best I can to focus on the domestic labor involved in maintaining a home.

In Philip Green’s book Cracks in the Pedestal: Ideology and Gender in Hollywood, Green discusses the ways in which Hollywood cultural products change with society, but only within acceptable boundaries. This is what he called the structure of Hollywood’s ideology, that,

“Whatever the nature of its commodities at a particular time, its primary social function of expressing normative dreams and fantasies and communicating ideologies, has never changed, 10 and neither have the basic techniques of visual narration that accomplish this function.”5 This is useful to remember because sitcoms are of course, a visual format that expresses a society’s ideology. As media that is primarily focused on the heterosexual family, and home they can be a site to question, challenge, or reinforce hegemonic ideas of domesticity. If a society believes a woman’s place is in the kitchen, we may see sitcoms that feature stay-at-home moms, lovingly tending to their home and family as their first priority. Green, who was focusing on the ideology of gender specifically, certainly thought that sitcoms reinforced conservative gender ideologies.

While there are certainly plenty of sitcoms that play with gender roles, or gender reversal even, but Green found that ultimately, “all domestic sitcoms, without exception, are jokes built around the premise that this is the kind of work [domestic work] women are expected to be doing and the space in which they are expected to be doing it, and they are expected to be doing that work in this space as part of a nuclear family; and isn't it funny when a man does it instead, or a woman does it poorly … The comedy of role reversal is comic only because we need not take role reversal too literally but can (must) view it as an unexpected twist on what we know to be the "real" reality: the domesticated shrew who stands behind every untamed man.”6 I think perhaps saying without exception is a bit of a bold statement, especially since King of the Hill doesn’t fit this description at all. Perhaps this is one of the things that makes the way the show grapples with domesticity so interesting. Peggy’s failure at domestic work while often a punchline, never seems to be directed at Peggy herself. His arguments do, of course hold water with the majority of sitcoms America produces. From the beginning of the format of this specific kind of genre we see time and time again women portrayed in stereotypical roles within sitcoms.

5 Philip Green, Cracks in the Pedestal: Ideology and Gender in Hollywood (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998), 49. 6 Green, 71. 11

Baring a few exceptions, for most wives in sitcoms, it doesn’t matter if they are working class mothers, middle class professionals, or stay-at-home m others they all must ultimately perform the domestic tasks of caring for a house and caring for children.

This is also the place King of the Hill distinguishes itself from other post-modern animated sitcoms, especially The Simpsons, which has produced the most famous animated mother of them all. In “Marge Simpson, Blue-Haired Housewife: Defining Domesticity on The Simpsons”

Jessamyn Neuhaus discusses the ways in which Marge Simpson both satirizes and reinforces hegemonic gender ideologies. Neuhaus points to all the ways in which Marge acts as a satire, from her scratchy voice that’s not a pleasant, or womanly voice; to her towering trademark beehive. The beehive is as unrealistic as our expectation of the perfect wife and mother — which

Marge often is. Neuhaus also writes about the ways within the narrative Marge is often dissatisfied with her home life, finding the work thankless and stressful. Despite these critiques

Neuhaus ultimately concludes that the satire falls short of the work it’s supposed to do. For every episode where Marge finds work thankless and stressful, we have episodes where without Marge the nuclear family — if not the whole town collapses. Neuhaus writes, “The Simpsons offers a relatively mild critique of domestic gender roles. It playfully and humorously questions the function of the nuclear family in American society, but it ultimately embraces the centrality of female domesticity to the very definition of ‘‘a family.’’7 The Simpsons truly attempts to have it both ways, they can offer up a critique and poke fun at the concept of the nuclear family, give

Marge a ridiculous beehive, and have the family fight, but ultimately the show doesn’t want to think of a nuclear family without a stay-at-home wife and mother. This is important for the

7 Jessamyn Neuhaus, “Marge Simpson, Blue-Haired Housewife: Defining Domesticity on The Simpsons”, The Journal of Popular Culture 43, no. 4 (2010): 3 12 contrast it provides with King of the Hill. Not only does Peggy work outside of the home, but the show explicitly states on more than one episode that Peggy doesn’t need to, and perhaps shouldn’t, provide domestic labor to the family.

Matthew Henry continues the discussions about Marge and domesticity in The Simpsons,

Satire, and American Culture, in his chapter, “‘Don’t Ask Me, I’m Just a Girl’: Feminism,

Female Identity and The Simpsons,” where he discusses both Marge’s role in the private sphere and her role in the public sphere. Henry notes a few places in which Marge’s domestic labor is highlighted either positively, or ambiguously. Henry examines episodes from early in the show, where Marge uses her domestic labor in order to thwart Burns, and as an act of political protest, to times Marge leaves the home and instructs her family she needs more help managing the house. Ultimately, while Henry feels the show at times rightly points out the ways in which domestic labor is trivialized it is overall “ambivalent about feminism and female identity.”8 This ambivalence is fairly typical of post-modern popular culture, but perhaps that’s why post-modern satire isn’t the best way to critique society. This is also not something that King of the Hill engages in. While there are moments of satire within the show, most often it is sincere in its messaging. There is nothing ambivalent about the messaging surrounding its matriarch, Peggy

Hill, it states quite clearly that gendered division of labor is detrimental to women.

There are several episodes in King of the Hill where Peggy is either allowed to stop participating in domestic labor, or her participation in it is destructive to home and town. In

“Maid in Arlen” (S7E22), she relishes hiring a maid, so she no longer has to participate in housework. Instead taking the time to relax and kick up here feet. While there’s certainly a gender and race critique to be made about this episode, as Peggy transfers the work to a South

8 Matthew A Henry, “‘Don’t Ask Me, I’m Just a Girl’: Feminism, Female Identity, and The Simpsons,” in The Simpsons, Satire, and American Culture (New York, Palgrave Macmillion, 2012): 96 13

East Asian woman, that critique is outside the scope of this chapter. What is worth noting about this episode is that Peggy escapes domestic labor and is not penalized by the show for seeking that escape. Neuhaus points out that sometimes when Marge’s lapses from domesticity it can literally put the whole town of Springfield at risk. Conversely, in King of the Hill’s “Bystand

Me” (S10E2), Peggy fails so miserably at dispensing cleaning advice she almost poisons half the town as she instructs them to make mustard gas. In this moment where Peggy attempts to fulfill the standard gender role of “domestic goddess” is more disastrous than her deciding to simply not do it. It’s also a problem caught by her husband, who knows what cleaning supplies you can’t mix. The show concludes with Peggy losing her domestic advice column, but retaining her job at the paper anyways. The show maintains time and time again that Peggy Hill, loving wife and mother, is anything but that domestic goddess. It is perhaps best shown in the episode

“Goodbye Normal Jeans,” the fourth episode of the seventh season, which will be the focus of this chapter. While Green may claim that humor isn’t derived from women failing at domestic labor, that’s exactly where the humor in this episode is directed. In this episode we see Peggy upstaged at domestic labor by her thirteen-year-old son Bobby, and the panic that ensues as she feels she’s being replaced. Neuahus writes that with Marge, when she’s removed from the home chaos ensues for the Simpson family. The home, quite literally, cannot function without Marge.

While there is a certain kind of chaos that ensues in “Goodbye Normal Jeans” it doesn’t stem from Peggy leaving the home, but as she desperately attempts to cling to the gendered division of labor. The chaos is resolved only when Hank tells Peggy that he doesn’t need a wife to provide domestic labor for him, but rather their partnership rests on the fact that he loves her.

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“There’s No Rule That Says Only Women Can Do Housework”: Gendered Division of Labor

Makes Monsters.

The episode starts with how Hank’s expectations of how labor is divided in the home might affect Bobby who is taking a Home Economics course, and then the episode shifts to how it harms Peggy. Bobby is failing Home Ec. not because he’s too manly to do the work, but because he is goofing off. It’s not Bobby’s poor grades that distress his father, but rather that Bobby is even being forced to participate in this class at all. Hank is worried that in learning how to maintain and care for a home on his own it will contribute to a lifelong bachelorhood. This fear reads as thinly veiled homophobia, and an outright desire to maintain traditional gender roles.

Hank espouses what we traditionally think of with regards to nuclear families, that they function through maintaining traditional gender roles. Hank says, “if Bobby learns to cook and clean for himself what’s his motivation to ever get married?”9 This scene of Hank’s anxiety over Bobby being a permanent bachelor should he learn his share of doing household work is juxtaposed with Peggy cooking dinner. At this point Peggy perceives herself to be good at domestic labor, when in reality, she’s average at it. The house is clean, dinner is made, but it’s nothing amazing.

This is likely due to Peggy’s over inflated sense of self, which the viewer is already familiar with. Several episodes have been dedicated to Peggy’s self-confidence which often steps over the line into arrogance. At this point in the episode, Peggy isn’t concerned about Bobby taking Home

Ec. Despite Hank’s insensitive comment, which states that the value of a wife and marriage is that a man gains a cook and a wife, she feels Hank is overreacting. That being said, Hank’s comment about a wife’s role in a husband’s life seems to be the crux of what this episode’s

9 King of the Hill, season 7, episode 4, “Goodbye Normal Jeans,” directed by Kyounghee Lim and Boohwan Lim, written by Kit Boss, aired November 24, 2002 in broadcast syndication, https://www.hulu.com/watch/14e57575- a6b9-49f2-ae26-77b58e12577a 15 conflict is about. While this is obviously a joke on the part of a writer, it’s not far off from how we’ve seen women traditionally portrayed in sitcoms, and in life, where they are constantly asked to fulfill most of the domestic household duties like cleaning or cooking.

A few scenes later Bobby sits on top of the washing machine as his mother does laundry.

Bobby is static in this scene of domesticity, out of the way, but ultimately unhelpful as his mother does the work. Bobby tells his mother, “Dad says men install washing machines, they service washing machines, but they aren’t supposed to use washing machines,”10 Once again we see a stratification of domestic life. The manly art of mechanics is appropriate for men to learn, but to be able to actually use the machine as part of helping bear the domestic load, is not a man’s job. Hank, like many, has segregated domestic work along gender lines. While Peggy had reassured Hank earlier that Bobby learning Home Ec. wasn’t something he had to worry about, she tells Bobby pointedly that his father’s words shouldn’t be listened to. “Oh Please,” Peggy tells Bobby, “There’s no rule that says only women can do housework and men can have careers.

I can do both.”11 Peggy smartly points out that there’s a real disconnect in this type of thought.

She is expected to both go to work and take care of the house so there’s no reason that men can’t too. Though Peggy doesn’t seem to insist that Hank help her out with housework, at this point she seems unafraid of Bobby learning to do what his father does not. At this point it seems as though not only is Peggy unafraid of a son who might be a bachelor forever, she is also interested in raising a son who can help share the burden of housework. At the start of the episode, Peggy is championing feminist messaging that domestic labor can and should be shared, while at the same time, still performing the lion’s share of it in her house. At this point, Peggy doesn’t feel insecure

10 King of the Hill, season 7, episode 4, “Goodbye Normal Jeans.” 11 King of the Hill, season 7, episode 4, “Goodbye Normal Jeans.” 16 about her place in the house, but these gendered divisions of labor are going to eventually cause

Peggy to self-destruct.

The episode shifts rapidly when in doing laundry Peggy destroys Hank’s beloved blue jeans.

It’s here the audience sees for the first time this episode, the ways in which Peggy isn’t as good at domesticity as she thinks she is. While Hank is upset at the loss of her pants, Peggy reminds him that even world-famous surgeons make mistakes, she still has a lot of pride in her ability to perform in the domestic sphere. Bobby, guilty over the loss of his father’s pants, turns not to his mother to help correct them, but his Home Ec. teacher instead. This is the first instance of Peggy being displaced as head of domestic household. Bobby no longer sees her as reliable, so he turns instead to his teacher for help. Because of this, Bobby makes his father a new pair of pants, and in his first foray into domesticity without his mother guiding him, he already outshines her.

Peggy is shocked that he made the pants on her sewing machine, because her sewing machine

“can’t make seems this straight.”12 It seems up until this point Peggy had been lying to herself, blaming her domestic failings on something else, but now with Bobby also performing domestic tasks her complete failure at them is on display for both her family — and the audience. The jeans Bobby makes Hank are perfect, Hank is happy, telling Peggy, “I’m glad you ruined my jeans, Bobby’s made them even better!”13 This isn’t a callous dig, but rather it seems like it should be a resolution to Hank worrying about Bobby in Home Ec., and Hank worrying about the way labor is divided along gender lines. This is just the beginning of the conflict within the episode, as the crux of it shifts from Hank worrying about his son deviating from traditional masculine gender roles in the house, to Peggy fearing being displaced in her home.

12 King of the Hill, season 7, episode 4, “Goodbye Normal Jeans.” 13 King of the Hill, season 7, episode 4, “Goodbye Normal Jeans.” 17

While Bobby helping his mother with some of the chores around the house should help alleviate some of the burden her husband places on her, instead it just causes her distress. This is understandable, as at the start of the episode her husband tells her that wives primary purpose in a marriage is to keep a home. Because of this insecurity, Peggy starts to behave abominably towards her son. Peggy attempts to assert her dominance in the domestic sphere. She behaves hostilely to Bobby as he cooks a roast for his school assignment, in large part due to her insecurity. Bobby’s cooking also outshines hers, and in one fell swoop her place in the household has been thrown out of order, her position is now precarious. The show doesn’t attempt to allow

Peggy to reclaim that spot either. The more she attempts to re-establish her place as head of the domestic household, the more unsympathetic to the viewers, and the more alienated from her family she becomes.

Distressed over this turn of events, Peggy attempts to make a Thanksgiving Centerpiece found in a women’s magazine while her husband and son are out. By the time they return home the centerpiece, and Peggy are both a mess, disheveled and in disarray. Hank, taking in the scene in his dining room, immediately identifies what she’s using to make the centerpiece as yard waste. Not only that, the audience finds out that Peggy has stolen the bird’s nests she used for it right out of the tree, leaving the birds eggs on the sidewalk like a poacher. Not only did Peggy completely fail to wow her family with her centerpiece, but she also gets lice from the endeavor.

In attempting to pursue domesticity, Peggy is literally punished by the text with an unclean, unsympathetic sort of monstrosity. The desperate bids to retain the hegemonic gender roles in the family seem to shift Peggy from mother, wife, and a character the audience may sympathize with to one that is hard to stomach. In this representation of Peggy’s descent into uncleanliness, the episode seems to be warning that the harder we cling to traditional domestic gender roles, the 18 more they will destroy us in the end. This is a sharp contrast to the Simpsons where Marge is usually re-confined to her home space by episodes end as the town or her family falls to disaster when she leaves her role as home maker, as Neuhaus wrote, Peggy is destroying her home, herself, and family the tighter she clings to her role as home maker.

The last thing Peggy attempts to do out of petty jealousy of her son is seduce Hank. Her jealousy has so twisted her into something repulsive, that this attempt also pushes her out of her own bedroom. She gets a new hairdo in an effort to seduce her husband, something appropriately tall for Texas. Hank loves her new hair, and expresses he’s attracted to her. This soothes her, and she’s even fine with Bobby cooking dinner for the pair of them. Feeling secure in her place in the home and marriage, she relaxes for a moment on asserting her dominance as the head of the house, as she can provide for her husband sexually. This is absurd of course, because Peggy is not competing with another woman for her husband, and the idea that she should have to seduce him to prove she can give him things their son can’t, can come across uncomfortable for the audience. When it comes time to actually seduce her husband, he can’t stand the smell of the products her hairdresser put in her hair. Hank, in fact, can’t even bear to be in the same bed as her. Peggy continues to be repulsive within her household, so much so that she is even forced out of the bed from her husband. In sharp contrast to Peggy, Hank is still behaving normally, and if

Peggy weren’t so desperate things in the house would be fine. Outside of his comment about

Bobby at the beginning of the episode, that a wife cooking and cleaning is motivation for men to get married, there’s no reason for Peggy to be so fearful.

As Peggy tries to fall asleep that night, she overhears Bobby and Hank bonding through the night. Long-time viewers of the show know that Peggy should be happy about this. Over the course of the past seven seasons of the show, Hank and Bobby have struggled to bond. They’re 19 not interested in the same things, and Hank often feels Bobby is peculiar. “That boy ain’t right” is one of Hank’s catchphrases on the show. While father and son both love each other, their relationship has always been strained. Instead of being happy that Bobby and Hank are finally bonding with one another, Peggy is just jealous that her son and husband are getting along so well. In Bobby’s room Peggy finds the lady’s magazine she had tried to use earlier to make the centerpiece. She quickly calls Hank in, in an attempt to get Bobby in trouble. Trying once more to cling to hegemonic gender roles, and cast Bobby’s skill at cooking and cleaning as feminine she attempts to insight gay panic in Hank, by showing him the home making magazine. Once again, it’s also worth it to note that not only has Peggy’s house been thrown out of whack, but she’s also absolutely failing at one of the things she actually is good at. The kind, compassionate, and wise mom from the beginning of the episode is completely gone by now. In her place is a cruel, vindictive woman, attempting to get her son in trouble in an effort to win back her place as head of the domestic household. Her vindictiveness backfires, Hank isn’t concerned about the women’s magazine, instead he just wants Bobby to make Thanksgiving dinner. While this is a chance for Peggy to just relax on Thanksgiving, as Hank points out, she is utterly devastated that

Bobby will be cooking. Once again, the tighter Peggy clings to traditional gender roles the worse a person she becomes, the more tenuous her relationship with her husband becomes.

Instead of relaxing as Hank suggested, Peggy strikes out in pettiness once again. She takes the turkey from the oven, not yet fully cooked, steals Bobby’s bike and rides over to her hairdresser’s house. She figures she’ll provide Thanksgiving for the one man who seemingly needs her. Peggy (mistakenly) believes that her hairdresser is gay, and so she figures she’ll give him a Thanksgiving dinner as society has barred him from having a family of his own. On her way out to his house she drops the turkey on the ground, and apparently unconcerned for her 20 health or others — just picks it back up and keeps biking to the house. Once she gets to the hairdresser’s she finds he’s married, with a child of his own, so as she puts it — not even he needs her. In this final act Peggy once again behaves like a bad person, stealing the turkey that a thirteen-year old boy is happily making for his family, and once again covers herself in harmful bacteria, while attempting to feed a raw, uncooked turkey to others. This signals the ways in which gender roles are ultimately destructive to women. Peggy should be free from the burden of domestic labor, allowing herself a chance to relax. If Peggy had simply allowed herself to let go of doing the lion’s share of the domestic labor in the home, she would never have gotten lice, or been kicked out of bed, or ruined Thanksgiving dinner while potentially giving herself salmonella. Instead the show draws attention to the way that her attempts to cling to outdated gender roles gradually descend her into a character that is unlikable in both personality and physical presence. It appears that a division of domestic labor along gendered lines is literally destroying Peggy and her marriage. The solution King of the Hill proposes to this problem is not to allow Peggy to return to domestic labor, but rather to reassure her that she does not need to do it at all.

Peggy’s perceived worth as a partner to Hank has come from the idea that her only value is in the domestic labor she provides. This is something that is often repeated in sitcoms, the most valuable thing Marge Simpson can do is cook and clean for her family less, as Neuhaus pointed out, the whole town fall into disrepair. The home hasn’t fallen into chaos and disorder, nor has the town of Arlen, the only person truly affected is Peggy. She’s gotten lice, and though she hasn’t been pushed out of her house, she has run away from it, feeling replaced and useless. At this point most sitcoms would re-establish the domestic normality of Peggy as domestic head of the household, in order to resolve the conflict. King of the Hill does not, instead King of the Hill 21 decides to affirm that Peggy’s worth does not come because she provides domestic labor, but rather that her family loves her.

In order to help his wife, feel better at home, Hank devises a plan. Hank sends Bobby to cook

Thanksgiving dinner for a neighbor instead, and cooks all of Peggy’s weekly meals for her.

When she gets home, rather than seeing this as a kind gesture she begins to weep in despair. That

Hank was able to cook all this on his own proves he doesn’t need her at all, as far as she is concerned. “You don’t even need me to make Spa-Peggy” she wails. To which Hank replies.

“Nope, I guess not, but that’s okay. I didn’t marry you because I need someone to cook and clean for me. I married you because … you know … you know … the love.”14 Rather than reinforcing that Peggy’s value lies in her ability to cook and clean, the show outright rejects it. While at first this seems like an episode centered around the constant panic Hank has about Bobby not performing masculinity and heterosexuality correctly — and in a lot of ways it is — it’s also an episode centered around the destructive nature of gender roles. We can see this both in Hank's initial unease at Bobby cooking, cleaning and sewing, and Peggy's descent into domestic madness that culminates in stealing the Thanksgiving turkey. The show firmly says that gendered divisions of labor devalue women and are destructive to the home. While at first, it’s tongue-in- cheek in the beginning when Peggy is pointing out that women often do household chores and have jobs, by the end the message is explicit.

This break in reinforcing traditional domestic gender roles is continually played for gags throughout the series. Peggy’s inability to cook, and her lackluster cleaning skills are touched on throughout the series as a whole. These things are funny, primarily because Peggy thinks she’s good at them, and because this can sometimes lead to disastrous consequences. The joke is never

14 King of the Hill, season 7, episode 4, “Goodbye Normal Jeans.” 22 that Peggy fails at domesticity so she’s not a good wife, or mother, her love for her family is rarely in question. In fact, within this episode it’s not that she fails at domesticity that makes her undesirable for Hank (or some members of the audience), it’s that she has a need to outshine her thirteen-year-old son. It’s uncomfortable to watch her need to outshine a young boy who’s ultimately helping her and following her advice from earlier in the episode — that men can take care of a house, if women can. The ultimate solution to this though, isn’t that Bobby stop what he’s doing to make space for his mother to cook and clean again, it’s to show Peggy that domesticity isn’t what Hank ultimately needs or wants from her. Now of course Peggy goes back to presumably being the primary cook in the household after this episode, because sitcoms always reset at the end of the episode. What doesn’t ever go away is the running gag about Peggy and her inability to clean. The show never suddenly makes Peggy a domestic goddess, and it is always suggesting it is better for her to stay away from domestic labor.

While sitcoms have a long history of reinforcing conservative ideas about women’s role in the household, King of the Hill effectively breaks from that time and time again. The show not only makes jokes about Peggy’s bad domestic skills, but also asserts that it is okay for her not to perform them. That perhaps things would be better for her, and safer for Arlen and her family if she didn't perform them. More than that in the episode, “Goodbye Normal Jeans” the show attempts to tackle the idea that in heterosexual relationships a gendered division of domestic labor is detrimental to the household. It pokes fun at men who think getting a maid and cook was part of the bonus of getting married. Instead it reminds the audience that marriages are built around the love two people share for one another, while pointing out how forcing domestic labor on women is bad for them. Considering the ways in which sitcoms rarely seem to fundamentally challenge the notions of a woman’s role in the household, King of the Hill says not only is it okay 23 for Peggy not to be the best person in the house at domesticity, your wife wasn’t put here to cook and clean for you, and asking her to do so is bad for her and the family. This is a radical and sentimental statement for a sitcom to make is in line with the overwhelmingly feminist message of King of the Hill.

24

CHAPTER TWO: PEGGY'S PROBLEM WITH NO NAME

King of the Hill is a sitcom centered around a nuclear family, which means any discussion of

Peggy Hill isn’t complete without investigating how the show presents motherhood. Mothers in sitcoms seem to be segregated along class lines; we have the middle-class mothers who often stay at home, and the working-class mothers who work outside of the home. In the 80s and 90s we started to see a shift in middle class mothers who often worked outside at the home like, Jill

Tayler from Home Improvement, Clair Huxtable on The Cosby Show, or Peggy Hill from King of the Hill. The Hill family is not quite working class, Hank is middle management at his propane company, and Peggy is a substitute teacher. While the family isn’t wealthy, they also are never shown to be truly struggling for income to support their small family, or whatever needs might arise like a new truck, a motorcycle, or for Peggy to stop working. In “Peggy’s Turtle Song”

(S2E22), Peggy stops working to devote more time to being a mother. The show does a few interesting things in this episode. First, it interrogates the reasons for Peggy staying at home, and often point out that this desire is not Peggy’s, but one forced on her by the patriarch of the family

— Hank. In these moments Hank isn’t so much the target of the show’s tongue-in-cheek satire, but rather the nebulous ideas of “family values” and traditional gender roles. Next, it rebukes our nostalgia about women of the 50s all being stay-at-home moms. While there certainly is, as Betty

Friedan put it, a problem with no name, among the stay at home mothers of the show, the show also points out some women in the 50s and 60s actually did, indeed work. This episode also establishes the way poetry can be used to give voice to women, making the personal political, and lastly it concludes with the statement that men must support their wives’ desire to leave the home. “Peggy’s Turtle Song” interrogates the inner lives of stay-at-home mothers, the avenues 25 women have for self-expression and protest, and the way patriarchal desires reflected in “family values” often act as a detriment to the family.

In Honey I’m Home: Sitcoms and Selling the American Dream Gerard Jones writes about the way sitcoms have evolved over the years to often reflect a glossy, rose-colored version of the

American family. In the introduction to the book, Jones clearly lays out where the jokes come from in a variety of sitcoms, like The Cosby Show, Jones writes the usual plot of an episode comes as follows, “Domestic harmony is threatened when a character develops a desire that runs counter to the group’s welfare, or misunderstands a situation because of poor communication, or contacts a disruptive outside element. The voice of the group — usually the father … — tries to restore harmony but fails. … The problem turns out to be not very serious after all, once everyone remembers to communicate and surrender his or her selfish goals. The wisdom of the group and its executive is proved.”15 This is the established norm of sitcoms, a typical “father knows best” style that the Simpsons so often satirizes. It’s important to note this, because it’s important to discuss the ways in which King of the Hill deviates from it. Hank isn’t always wrong in King of the Hill, especially in later seasons, but in the early seasons of King of the Hill though, Hank is often wrong. In positioning Hank as the arbiter of working class, conservative

“family values” the show often reveals the way that those patriarchal family values are harmful to the family. As Hank comes around, viewers too can see perhaps some of their own preconceived notions surrounding families are also wrong. It also changes the script on the way sitcoms handle conflicts, proving perhaps through the sincerity of the show, and the negotiation of what those patriarchal values mean, that viewers can in fact change their own views. Jones writes that sitcoms eventually came to provide morality lessons — right around the same time

15 Gerard Jones, Honey I’m Home: Sitcoms and Selling the American Dream. (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1992), 4. 26 that the “father knows best” plotline started to come around (this is both from the show Father

Knows Best, and simply that many sitcoms emulated the format). With the way King of the Hill changes the morality lesson, it effectively can inoculate the audience with progressive feminist messaging.

“Peggy’s Turtle Song” also grapples with some of the ideas we have about our past. When it comes to women fulfilling “traditional family roles” in the home, most often we think back to the

50s when women were stay-at-home moms. Either we think of June Cleaver and her consistent devotion to her family as a homemaker, or we think conversely of Betty Friedan’s problem with no name. Friedan defined this in her revolutionary work The Feminist Mystique, the problem stay-at-home mothers like June Cleaver had because they were feeling unfulfilled and unsatisfied by their life as a homemaker and a mother. Now, it’s worth noting that this view of women in the

50s has always had pushback. Even in the 60s labor rights activists like Myra Wolfgang criticized Friedan, saying she didn’t care about all women, and was uplifting wage work.16 It’s a valid criticism, there were those of course that weren’t stuck at home, working class women and women of color have always worked. While Friedan’s blind spot comes from focusing on middle class white women, our collective misremembering mostly comes from ironically enough, popular culture from the 50s. Carole Stabile defines this as “‘Leave it to Beaver Syndrome,’ a condition caused by years of watching reruns of family sitcoms, viewings that induced nostalgia among many white people for a form of family that was historically contingent and far from universal.”17 This syndrome is important to remember when discussing the American family

16 Dorothy Sue Cobble, “Lost Visions of Equality: The Labor Origins of the Women’s Movement,” in The Feminist Theory Reader 4th Edition, ed. Carole R McCann and Seung-Kyung Kim (New York: Routledge, 2017), 135-148. 17 Carol Stabile, The Broadcast 41, (London: Goldsmith Press, 2018), 11 27 sitcom, as many uphold hegemonic gender norms around motherhood, in the same ways Leave it to Beaver did. It is important to see where this started so that we can see where it deviates.

Looking to network and animated sibling the Simpsons once again, we can use Marge as a contrast to Peggy. I turn to Matthew Henry again, and his examination of women within The

Simpsons, trying to tease out what the show is trying to say about the show’s position on motherhood. He once again writes that the series is mostly ambivalent and ambiguous with regards to motherhood. Marge in particular exists in a liminal space, according to Henry, while she’s free to leave the home — and never stopped by Homer, it is usually Marge’s ambivalence, or outside factors like sexual harassment that returns her to the home. Though arguably as

Jessamyn Neuhaus pointed out, it’s less Marge and more the fact that the family literally cannot function without her that usually brings her back to her role as stay-at-home mother. From either perspective it reinforces the idea that the best place for a woman to be is the home. If it’s outside factors that drive Marge back to her home, then the public sphere is simply too dangerous for her to participate in. If it’s the fact that her house literally cannot function without her, then without mother’s the nuclear family cannot survive. The politics of the Simpsons is often progressive, but it’s worth noting that a seemingly liberal show like the Simpsons can often uphold more conservative ideology when it comes to gender.

Finally, it’s worth discussing the ways in which poetry has often been viewed as a tool of protest for women, because that is in large part what this episode is based around. “Peggy’s

Turtle Song” is a protest song about the conditions of being a stay-at-home mom. Audre Lorde famously wrote that, “For women … poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence.”18 Lorde continues to talk about the ways in which poetry can give name to the

18 Audre Lorde, "Poetry Is Not A Luxury." Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Crossing Press, 1985. 73. 28 nameless, and how it’s a vital part of protest. When we’re discussing the ways in which Peggy’s actual “Turtle Song” is important, it stems from this idea of Lorde’s, that poetry helps women to give voice to the things they cannot actually seem to name. Peggy can’t name where her anxiety is coming from, not in regular conversations, but she can name it in song. For this chapter on motherhood, I examine episode twenty-two, from season 2 of King of the Hill “Peggy’s Turtle Song,” and I am examining the ways in which motherhood is represented in it. From the ways in which Peggy — the mother reacts to staying at home, to the ways in which Hank — the patriarch, considers it a reflection in family values. I am also examining the episode for the ways in which poetry is used as part of protest for women, and the ways in which patriarchy is ultimately detrimental to marriages and families.

Empty Time and Clipping Coupons: Motherhood Madness

This episode is centered around Peggy becoming a stay-at-home mom to her thirteen-year- old son, Bobby. After Bobby receives several sugar laden breakfasts he is sent to school where he acts up, and due to the sugar displays many aspects of attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder19.

Convinced this diagnosis is somehow a failing on her part as a mother, Peggy offers to stay at home to take care of Bobby, this is important for two reasons. First, we glean insight to the lives of stay-at-home moms, and the ways in which women even in the 90s still have “a problem with no name.” The second is that it dispels the myth that all women in the 50s were dedicated stay- at-home mothers, and that somehow being a stay-at-home mom means a woman is more dedicated to her family.

As a stay-at-home mom, Peggy finds her days filled with a lot of nothing, after all she’s a stay-at-home mom to a teenage boy. He’s gone most of the day, leaving her with large chunks of empty free time. In an effort to find some community, Peggy has tea with other stay-at-home

19 Though as the show came out in the 90s it still refers to the learning disability by its old name ADD. 29 moms in the neighborhood. She expresses her worries to the group, telling them, “I almost worry

I have too much time now,” 20⁠ to which another mom confirms that’s a problem. Another mother offers up the suggestion that she pass the time clipping coupons. The last member of the group says, “I think we’d all go a little crazy without coupons,” 21⁠ a joke. The group laughs and we see their laughter from Peggy’s point of view. The laughter becomes distorted, and frightening. The women’s faces twist like they’re in a horrifying fun house. These women and their life are depicted as frightening to Peggy, who’s now one of them. King of the Hill is an animated show that is often based in more simplistic animation, that often doesn’t stray into what Michael Tueth refers to as grotesque in “Back to the Drawing Board: The Family in Animated Television

Comedy.” Borrowing from traditions of Mikhail Bahktin’s carnival, Tueth writes that animation allows for the kind of violence, and twisted reality that would be too disturbing outside the format of animation, and that through this grotesque performance they can critique family life.

“Viewers’ comfort with animation’s presentation of the grotesque, however, also permits the cartoon to offer an alternative view of family life, presenting both parents and children as at least potentially monstrous.”22 King of the Hill rarely relies on this presentation of the grotesque, so it feels starker and more jarring when it’s used. Watching the stay-at-home moms' faces twist and contort like fun house mirrors, as their laughter distorts and grows louder can make the viewer feel the same kind of discomfort Peggy feels at the thought of spending her days clipping

20 King of the Hill, season 2, episode 22, “Peggy’s Turtle Song” directed by Jeff Myers, written by Brent Forrester, aired May 10, 1998 in broadcast syndication, https://www.hulu.com/watch/612c0b8d-5839-481a-8d4f- 8b069bd990e3 21 King of the Hill, season 2, episode 22, “Peggy’s Turtle Song.” 22 Michael Tueth “Back to the Drawing Board: The Family in Animated Television Comedy,” in Primetime Animation: Television Animation and American Culture. ed. Carol Stabile and Mark Harrison (Oxford: Routledge, 2003), 142. 30 coupons. This distortion also suggests that maybe the mothers have gone a little mad anyways, even with their coupon clipping as their days seem to stretch out with too much time to fill.

Later in the episode we also notice how oblivious Hank is to his wife’s boredom and discomfort. Peggy’s day is spent doing a lot of nothing, and Hank refuses to see that there isn’t a lot for her to do, especially when their son is at school. Hank is so caught up in this idea that he’s living a “traditional nuclear family life,” that he fails to notice his wife’s misery. There’s a scene in the episode when Hank gets home from work, where he tries to take out his prized guitar

Betsy and play a song. An old-fashioned family jam session, he dubs it, but the guitar string breaks, and he needs to buy a new one. At the chance of getting out of the house, Peggy visibly perks up, which Hank doesn’t notice. Instead of seeing how excited she is to get out of the house, he tells her that “I’m sure you’ve had a full day,” 23⁠ but the viewer knows she hasn’t. The viewer is aware that her day hast just stretched out before her with very little for her to apply herself to.

This is because Hank doesn’t seem to realize that Peggy’s housework load hasn’t increased, and neither has her work as a caregiver, because Bobby is thirteen and gone for most of the day.

Hank’s selfish desire to play to patriarchal notions of “traditional family values” causes him to be a bad husband. These desires primarily stem from misremembering his own childhood.

Hank was after all the one who encourages Peggy to stay at home. Peggy to feel a tremendous amount of guilt as she blames herself for Bobby’s diagnosis. She believes she should have been there for Bobby, rather than being a “hot shot” substitute teacher. Peggy’s reaction here shows just how important Bobby is to her, but also how skilled she thinks she is at her job.

As she’s ranting and pacing around her bedroom she tells Hank, “sometimes I think I should just

23 King of the Hill, season 2, episode 22, “Peggy’s Turtle Song.” 31 quit my job and devote myself full-time to being a mother.”⁠24 It’s a statement she says purely because she’s upset by what’s happening to Bobby, but Hank visibly perks up at these words.

He’s excited by the prospect of Peggy being a stay-at-home mom to their thirteen-year-old son.

Thinking back to how his mother had raised him in the 50s. He says to Peggy, “My own mom never worked in her life. Home — that’s what mattered to her. And she just kept making it stronger every day until the divorce.” 25⁠ The writers are clearly engaging in a bit of satire here, poking fun at Hank and traditional homes in general. First, Hank implies that home was important to his mother because she didn’t work, thus implying that through work Peggy (and other working wives and mothers) must not care about their homes. This isn’t true, even for

Peggy, after all if she didn’t care she wouldn’t feel guilty, and the writers make it clear that staying at home is no guarantee a home is strong. After all his mother stayed home, and her marriage ended, and her home split in two. This is something the writers use to make clear that wanting Peggy to stay home is a selfish desire on Hank’s part, because his mother did in fact work.

Hank’s ideas about what it looks like when women care for their home comes from this collective remembrance of the past being like Leave it to Beaver or Father Knows best. This false memory is clarified in this same episode when Hank calls his mother for Mother’s Day.

Following a fight with Peggy, he tells his mother tells his mother that Peggy just isn’t a devoted mother, like she was. First, Hank never seems to question his devotion as a father despite the fact that he’s still working. Immediately setting up a double standard between man and woman.

Women are devoted and good mothers if they spend their whole time raising their children,

24 King of the Hill, season 2, episode 22, “Peggy’s Turtle Song.” 25 King of the Hill, season 2, episode 22, “Peggy’s Turtle Song.” 32 fathers on the other hand can both work and be devoted fathers. Furthermore, he can’t remember how unhappy his own mother was being stuck in the house all the time. She corrects him immediately, telling him she took odd jobs just to get out of the house. Hank is surprised by this, and she reminds him of when she drove a taxi. In Hank’s memory she just drove a yellow car.

The importance of this conversation that it is corrective, not just for Hank but perhaps for the viewing audience as well. It corrects the idea of the past as one where women simply sat at home, and that made them better mothers. Hank comes from a working-class family, his father installed asbestos into schools. Working class women often did have jobs outside the home, even during the 50s and 60s. Hank suffers, like many Americans, from what Stabile dubbed “Leave it to Beaver syndrome”26 , where there is a collective memory the past as it was on Leave it to

Beaver, or Father Knows Best, and being a mother meant gladly devoting oneself to raising children and taking care of the house. Hank simply figured that’s what his mom did, because that’s what being a good mother meant during his childhood. His mother corrects him, she worked, and in correcting him she not only corrects our vision of past mothers, but she also allows Hank to see that his desires are selfish, and actively harming his wife and family. Once he realizes his idealized, devoted mother worked, he sees that Peggy can both work and be a devoted mother.

The Problem Has a Name – It's Patriarchy

In twenty-one minutes, this episode clearly lies out the groundwork for how patriarchy is a detriment to marriages. As I have gone over, Hank is the one who pushes Peggy to stay home and is the only one who cares about it. Bobby is a zombie for much of the episode, thanks to his

ADHD medications — a fact neither parent really notices due to their marital friction.27 Bobby

26 Stabile, 11. 27 Pretty ironic, considering the point of Peggy staying home was that she would be able to better keep an eye on 33 doesn’t really care that his mother is staying at home for him now, as witnessed the morning after

Peggy and Hank make the decision for her to stay home. Her first day as a stay-at-home mom she makes a big breakfast, in an effort to kick start her run as a dedicated mother. Hank is the only one who appreciates it. He is “happy about this old-fashioned breakfast.” 28⁠ The word old fashioned is stressed, and Hank repeats old fashioned, family values, and traditional over and over again within the episode. For Hank this is about fulfilling hegemonic patriarchal ideals about family, one where he’s the bread winner, and Peggy is a devoted stay-at-home mother. He doesn’t really care about the benefit to Bobby, or what it does to Peggy. It’s used throughout the episode as a way to brag about how the Hill family is meeting these American ideals about middle class heterosexual marriage. The person who this is really supposed to be done for,

Bobby, didn’t ask for it, and doesn’t care about it once it happens. At breakfast, Peggy’s over eagerness for Bobby to eat what she’s cooked is written on her face as she expectantly watches her son choose his breakfast. (Three pancake faces he can choose from, based on his mood.)

Bobby appears to care very little about the breakfast that’s put in front of him, the only person excited about the breakfast is Hank.

Hank’s braggadocio about the Hill’s fulfilling his idea of a middle-class American continues throughout the episode, when they go to run errands, and when he’s in the alley with his friends.

When Hank gets to the guitar store to pick up a new string for his guitar, he talks about the changes at their house with the store clerk. The store clerk says that he couldn’t picture Peggy as a stay-at-home mom, to which Hank replies, “Well she’s got 2 full time jobs now: wife and mother. It’s longer hours and less pay, but you don’t hear me complaining.” 29⁠ This joke is once

Bobby. 28 King of the Hill, season 2, episode 22, “Peggy’s Turtle Song.” 29 King of the Hill, season 2, episode 22, “Peggy’s Turtle Song.” 34 again poking fun of Hank, and his ideas about marriage. First, Peggy was a wife and mother before this, she just also worked. That hasn’t changed at all, all that’s happened is Peggy no longer works outside of the home. Second, of course Hank wouldn’t be the one complaining.

Even under those conditions he’s not the one taking a dock in pay, or working longer hours, furthermore he’s not the one who suddenly finds their days stretched with a vast empty, nothingness. Hank’s not complaining because as far as he’s concerned Peggy being a stay-at- home mom just means now she’s conforming to gender norms that Hank thinks women used to enjoy conforming to. Third, it appears the store clerk — an older, white man — is fairly unimpressed with the Hill family’s return to “old fashioned values.” Hank often spends this episode bragging to other men, who he feels will value the same thing he does. Here he is attempting to appeal to another man, who is older than he is. The store clerk has grey hair, and his face is drawn with wrinkles, and he doesn’t seem impressed. Hank’s efforts to brag about the family’s new adherence to old patriarchal rules don’t impress an older man, who seems to be more concerned about Peggy.

Unable to impress the store clerk, Hank turns to his friends in the alley and attempts to brag to them about Peggy’s new position within the Hill house. He brags with his friends that “family values are in at the Hill house,” 30⁠ the use of family values is interesting here. Only eight years earlier The Simpsons had been publicly lambasted by the President George H Bush, and First

Lady Barbara Bush, complaining that the show had no family values. ⁠31 Eight years later another

Texas patriarch is invoking the term “family values” to mean a family structure very similar to

30 King of the Hill, season 2, episode 22, “Peggy’s Turtle Song.” 31 Parker Ryan, “Barbara Bush's Letter to Marge Simpson Revealed by Series Showrunner.” The Hollywood Reporter, April 18, 2018. https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/live-feed/barbara-bushs-letter-marge-simpson- revealed-by-series-showrunner-1103722. 35 the Simpson family. Marge is after all a stay-at-home mother, and now the Hill family follows suit. For this episode, Peggy is staying home, but the show portrays this as unsatisfying for her.

Hank, meanwhile, makes comments about how happy he is that Peggy is fulfilling the traditional role of wife and mother, with no real life of her own outside the family. Hank’s friends think it’s great that family values are in and are quick to congratulate him about it. Ironically none of the men in the alley have a traditional marriage themselves. Bill talks about how he made an ultimatum to his wife about work or him, and now he’s divorced and unable to get a girlfriend.

Meanwhile, Dale blames the rise of feminism for the way family values have taken a nose dive

— Dale is notable not bread winner of his house, his wife is cheating on him, and he’s raising another man’s child. Their praise of the situation rings hollow for a viewer who is aware of this situation. After all, neither one of them has healthy relationships or marriages, and Bill specifically in his quest to pursue the same kind of hegemonic heterosexual marriage Hank is so proud of, wound up destroying his marriage.

This work vs home dynamic is not great for Hank’s marriage either, as Peggy has to find places to find fulfillment and enjoyment out of the house, she has turned to guitar playing and writing her own song. Even this is causing contention within the house, because Hank finds the song to be sad, and his displeasure at her writing it leads to a fight between Peggy and Hank. At the end of their fight, Hank tells Peggy “I thought we agreed to take a big step backwards together,” ⁠32 this is rather tongue-in-cheek, the audience should laugh at this joke. By this point the audience knows this isn’t really Peggy’s choice, or something she’s happy with, it’s really

Hank’s decision. In forcing his wife to be a stay-at-home mother they’ve taken a step backwards in what a modern family looks like. Following this scene though, Hank discovers that his mother

32 King of the Hill, season 2, episode 22, “Peggy’s Turtle Song.” 36 also never simply stayed home, and the lens with which he’s viewing the past is misguided and factually inaccurate. While this conversation is corrective and allows Hank to see his views about the past are misguided, it also allows him to start seeing things from Peggy’s point of view. Hank realizes he’s not being sympathetic to his wife while she is struggling. At this point in the episode

Peggy has left for the Mother’s Day concert to sing her turtle song, and so Hank wanders the house. He comes to her office which is decorated by her teaching awards, a class photo she participated in smiling brightly amongst smiling children, and a bumper sticker that proudly declares that she taught the honor student at the local middle school. He looks at the calendar which used to be full, but then is just empty save for the date marked in red for a Mother's Day recital with a giant smiling face. Hank frowns realizing the impact of what being a stay-at-home mom has had on his wife. It’s only when Hank realizes his desire for fulfilling these patriarchal attitudes about marriage has negatively impacted his wife, and his marriage, and he decides to support her, that the episode comes to a conclusion and their relationship returns to normal.

Peggy's "Turtle Song": Poetry as A Voice to Scream With

To fill her empty days in this episode, Peggy starts to learn guitar from a feminist guitar instructor named Emily. Finding her flyer — emblazoned with the sign for women’s empowerment — at the guitar store, Peggy starts taking guitar lessons. Emily has her hair dyed green, she’s pierced, tattooed, a stark contrast to Peggy with her long jean shorts, her glasses, and big brown hair. While there’s clearly a lot that’s different about the two women, there’s a camaraderie that’s being established between the pair of them. Peggy perches eagerly on the edge of a stool, eager for a chance to talk with someone and do something for herself. The teacher asks why wants to play guitar. Peggy explains she has free time because “my husband 37 and I recently had to make a choice between our child and my career,” ⁠33 While Peggy is sincere here, the audience can see the way irony is being utilized here. Our child — Bobby is both of theirs, but it’s only Peggy’s career that was ever on the line. It’s Peggy who’s being asked to sacrifice in ways that Hank doesn’t have to, even though Bobby is their child. The guitar teacher doesn’t say anything to that, though she does suggest that Peggy might be dissatisfied with the situation, telling her that maybe it’s not that she’s looking to spend her free time with a new hobby, but might be looking for “a voice to scream with.”⁠34 She identifies the dissatisfaction in

Peggy’s life, and feels she might be looking for a creative outlet in order to channel the frustration she’s feeling. As Audre Lorde said, “Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought.”35 Or maybe this is a way for Peggy to use art in order to express how she’s feeling about the changes in life. Emily confesses that’s what drove her to guitar. That she needed an outlet to express everything that was inside. Peggy confirms what her teacher is saying, when she tells her “well I don’t know if my husband would appreciate screaming in the house,” before she lets out a scream. Emily is startled when she screams but Peggy seems to have enjoyed it, “well he might have to get used to it,” Peggy says before she screams again. 36⁠ In this moment Peggy establishes her independence from Hank. She is her own woman, and while she acknowledges her husband’s desires, she will ultimately find a way to assert her own. While she’s struggling to assert her desire for her job, in this moment she will still assert her desire to express herself. In this moment that expression is an actual scream. A primal vocal cry at the frustration she’s feeling over being cooped up in the house all day with very little to do.

33 King of the Hill, season 2, episode 22, “Peggy’s Turtle Song.” 34 King of the Hill, season 2, episode 22, “Peggy’s Turtle Song.” 35 Lorde, 73. 36 King of the Hill, season 2, episode 22, “Peggy’s Turtle Song.” 38

It is Emily who encourages Peggy to write her own music, Emily encourages Peggy to work on her own music during their guitar lesson.

Emily: I bet a woman in your position would have a lot to say

Peggy: And what position is that?

Emily: Well, you know, having to give up your life’s work to make things easier for the

rest of your family.

Peggy: Yeah, I suppose a situation like that should make me want to sing.37⁠

Emily correctly identifies the source of Peggy’s problems, noting again that music might be a creative outlet for her to express the things she can’t get out. Peggy seems to misunderstand just a little bit, “a situation like that should make me want to sing” sounds like she’s talking about joy. This isn’t what Emily means at all, Emily means that this is the source of frustration and the reason she finds her life stifling. While Peggy might not consciously know it yet, on some subconscious level she knows what she wants to sing about isn’t joy. Peggy’s ability to be able to name what she’s going through comes from art, from songs, from poetry.

The song comes out in bits and pieces over the course of the episode and doesn’t have an ending until the episode concludes. It also causes friction in the household as Hank gets frustrated every time Peggy practices it. Hank says he doesn’t get it and suggests adding something upbeat, making it a love song. The couple argue, and Peggy gets frustrated saying it’s old fashioned, and Hank says old fashioned is good. While Peggy cannot seem to articulate a fight about why she doesn’t think old fashioned is good for her, she sticks up for her song, denying Hank the ability to change it. In this moment Peggy is able to vocalize — not just through her song, but in her defense of it, her dissatisfaction with old fashioned. It doesn’t work

37 King of the Hill, season 2, episode 22, “Peggy’s Turtle Song.” 39 for her song, because it doesn’t work for her. Hank gets frustrated and tells her, “I just don’t understand why you have to keep singing that depressing turtle song” to which Peggy replies, “I don’t know either Hank, but I do. I feel very strange lately. Last night I dreamt we had 20 children.” ⁠38 Hank misunderstands this as a desire for more kids, which Hank cannot physically provide for Peggy. Hank doesn’t recognize Peggy’s song as her giving voice to her frustration, and boredom. Peggy can only truly vocalize her problems and protest her situation through her music and poetry. She says doesn’t know why she feels very strange, but then she immediately tells him she dreamt they had 20 children. This isn’t a desire for more kids, Peggy is giving roughly the size of a class in that description. What she wants to do is go back to work. Hank misunderstands it, because he thinks she’s happy being a stay-at-home mother. He reads it as a desire for a larger family, when really, it’s a desire to return to teaching.

The song gets its conclusion and eventually Peggy does make it a love song. This is because at the end of the episode, her husband shows up to support her. He provides her with his beloved guitar to play on and stands at the back of the room to support her singing her turtle song. He supports her protest, even in a room full of women who are cheering and whooping about how bad her husband must be. This moment of support is also later given to Peggy returning to work.

The song and the episode conclude with the idea that in a marriage when a partner is supportive and loving, it can help their partners so that they can exist happily and freely in the world. That a supportive partnership can help provide direction, but that support has to be about putting aside selfish desires — in this case Hank’s desire for Peggy to be a stay-at-home mom — so that life doesn’t feel isolating.

38 King of the Hill, season 2, episode 22, “Peggy’s Turtle Song.” 40

The song she crafts is ultimately about isolation, being unable to find yourself in that isolation, and that connectedness is the best way to remember who you are, so that life doesn’t feel like a cage. The lyrics to Peggy’s turtle song, make it pretty clear what she’s singing and protesting about:

There once was a turtle who lived in her shell,

her shell was her home and her prison as well.

The turtle got frightened and wanted to hide,

so, she tucked her head into the safety inside.

But then came a moment of terrible doubt,

she could not find any head hole to poke out.

But a miracle saved her before her heart sank,

the magical love of a turtle named Hank.39

Well Peggy spends the episode this is just a song about a turtle, this song has given her the means to express and voice her frustrations and what she’s feeling in her life as a stay-at-home mom, or as Emily puts it, “how a woman feels when the world tells her who she is supposed to be.”40 It’s important for Peggy to be able to express herself, especially because her husband —and society

— are telling her that it’s natural and good for a woman to take joy in simply being a mother, and that she shouldn’t want anything more. She sings about her home, being her prison, and then getting stuck inside that prison. This is a song about isolation, and an inability to find oneself within that isolation. Especially because her husband, her partner, is forcing her into that isolation. It’s when Hank comes to support her, that she is able to see clear and poke her head

39 King of the Hill, season 2, episode 22, “Peggy’s Turtle Song.” 40 King of the Hill, season 2, episode 22, “Peggy’s Turtle Song.” 41 back out of the hole. Hank’s support of Peggy helps not only their marriage, but it helps his wife escape her isolation and imprisonment within their home.

King of the Hill presents an interesting look at how women can use poetry to protest, how stay-at-home moms might feel trapped in their situation, and the ways in which patriarchy is detrimental to heterosexual marriages. It subtly satirizes family values in a way that seems non- threatening, but in an episode where the family attempts to return to a Father Knows Best era, it’s clear the father doesn’t know best in this situation. Hank’s desires for a hegemonic patriarchal family structure are deemed selfish, and destructive to his wife and his partnership with her. It’s only when Hank lets go of those desires that the family unit is able to return to normal.

At the end of Peggy’s song within the episode, one audience member says to another that she thinks Peggy copped out in the end. Perhaps a sort of acknowledgement from the writers that some — especially feminists — would find the end of the song a cop out. After all Peggy didn’t want to make it a love song, didn’t want to cave to what Hank wanted, but that isn’t as important as the support of Hank. Ultimately the conclusion isn’t a cop out, for Peggy doesn’t continue to be a stay-at-home mom, Hank supports his wife and encourages her to go back to work. Things are returned to normal when Hank gives up the idea that Peggy shouldn’t be devoted to something outside of the home.

The episode also shows the ways in which poetry is used as protest, even when women don’t know it. Peggy found a voice to be able to vocalize a dissatisfaction she wasn’t able to find the words for. In music she was truly able to express herself and take a stand for what she wanted.

The song creates tension in the family, but also the means with which to relieve it. The Mother’s

Day recital Peggy insists on going to helps the Hills find out the problem with the marriage, and that the best way to re-establish family order is for Hank to support his wife. Audre Lorde said, 42

“Poetry coins the language to express and charter this revolutionary awareness and demand, the implementation of that freedom.”41 Peggy was able to make demands about a desire to break from old fashioned family values, to make her husband see what it was she was experiencing.

This episode shows the ways in which poetry can create friction, and also engender empathy.

When husbands are empathetic and supportive to their partners, putting aside desires that patriarchy is supposed to tell them they want, that their partnerships will thrive.

41 Lorde, 74. 43

CHAPTER THREE: THE RADICAL BODY POLITICS OF BOBBY HILL

Some of the most radical feminist politics to come out of King of the Hill comes from the show’s stance on body positivity. In the fourth season of the show, King of the Hill tackled the feminist issue of body positivity using Peggy’s big feet as a way to demonstrate how exploitative the concept of beauty and body positivity can be. Body positivity wasn’t new when the episode aired as discussions around women’s bodies, and rigid beauty standards are as old as the corset.42

What was radical was what the show decided to say about it. At the time no one was considering the ways in which expanding definitions of beauty might not be liberation at all, and that perhaps liberation didn’t come from loving your body, but rather not thinking about it. This concept has started to receive more attention in recent years where it is referred to as body neutrality. Body neutrality differs from body positivity in that rather than focusing on loving your body, you simply don’t waste time or energy on thinking about it at all.43 While this radical movement started gaining traction in 2015, the episode this chapter focuses on aired in the year 2000.

Needless to say, King of the Hill was ahead of its time. The episode, “Transnational Amusements

Presents: Peggy’s Magic Sex Feet” showed the ways in which body positivity can be used by the patriarchy for exploitation, and proposed the way for people to feel free from the oppression of beauty standards was body neutrality.

A large part of this episode doesn’t simply focus on body positivity, but also on the Male

Gaze. This episode parrots a lot of body positivity that by being included in beauty standards is a path to liberation. A lot of current body positivity trends want to expand the definition of

42 Deborah Jean Warner, “Fashion, Emancipation, Reform, and the Rational Undergarment” Dress, 4 no 1,(1978): 24-29 43 Leigh Weingus, “Inside The Body Image Movement That Doesn't Focus On Your Appearance.” HuffPost. HuffPost, August 15, 2018. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/what-is-body- neutrality_n_5b61d8f9e4b0de86f49d31b4. 44 beautiful while not interrogating that expanding the definition of beautiful just subjects more women to objectification under the Male Gaze. Now, Mulvey defines the male gaze as something that happens specifically when women are objectified for the pleasure of an audience through a camera.44This is reflected in this episode, not simply because we’re dealing with a show in which an audience watches, but because Peggy think’s she’ll find liberation literally in making pornography. She subjects herself to the fetishization of the camera, the audience, and the director thinking that through objectification she’ll be found beautiful and thus, liberated. In fact, she even uses male desire for her feet as a reason for doing the movies. It's of course impossible for women to achieve liberation through objectification, as the very process of objectification is meant to dehumanize women.

Peggy is specifically convinced to buy into her own oppression, which isn’t abnormal for the body positivity movement. In Bitchmedia, Evette Dionne criticized the body positivity movement, and how it's been commodified in her article "The Fragility of the Body Positivity

Movement: How a Radical Movement Lost Its Way," Dionne wrote that the original movement for bodies that exist in the margins was never supposed to be just about body positivity, it was supposed to be about radical change to the discrimination that people face due to their bodies — not in fashion, but rather in places of work, and health care. Dionne writes, "Much like feminism, body positivity has been warped by capitalism and media to sell experiences rather than pushing for protection for people whose bodies are marginalized.”45 King of the Hill, goes out of the way to point out that the movement Peggy is championing is the same one that causes her exploitation to begin with. For her, all that matters is being thought of as beautiful. It does not matter that she

44 Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasures and Narrative Cinema,” pdf (1975) 45 Evette Dionne. “The Fragility of Body Positivity: How a Radical Movement Lost Its Way.” Bitch Media. Accessed April 9, 2020. https://www.bitchmedia.org/article/fragility-body-positivity.

45 has to drive two hours out of town to buy her shoes, rather than swinging to the local mall, or that shoes are likely far more expensive for her, what matters is beauty. When the focus is only on beauty, no empowerment can come from it. Beauty causes us to shift our focus and lose sight of what’s important in actual systemic structures of power. To be sure, Peggy’s big feet don't cause her to face the same kind of discrimination that fat, disabled, or trans people do, but even she focuses in on looks rather than the practical importance of how her big feet cause her to lose time and money, compared to women with average shoe size. In this instance we can see that the idea of beauty, and the focus on beauty co-opts the fact that these movements were about structural inequality in the first place. In doing so capitalism manages to take a movement and make it about individual choice, rather than systems of oppression.

In many ways this calls to mind Audre Lorde’s “The Masters Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House.” In her iconic essay, Lorde writes about the ways in which systems of oppression will only ever allow so much change to happen within them. “What does it mean when the tools of a racist patriarchy are used to examine the fruits of that same patriarchy? It means that only the most narrow perimeters of change are possible and allowable."46 In attempting to use the Male Gaze to gain access to other patriarchal ideals such as beauty Peggy will never fully be able to gain liberation. Even if she’s successful in getting people to see that big feet are beautiful, she’ll never manage to empower women through notions of beauty. As

Peggy cannot gain power or liberation through expanding definitions of beauty, neither can anyone who’s sole focus of dealing with body image stems from beauty. After all, as Lorde tells us, using the tools of the patriarchy will never bring down patriarchy, “they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. And this fact is only threatening to those women who still define

46 Audre Lorde, "The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House." Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Crossing Press, 1985. 204. 46 the master’s house as their only source of support."47 For women who may have been perhaps denied some of the support of the master’s house, through things like traditionally defined beauty, using the master’s tools — like objectification — may be tempting. After all, as Dionne pointed out in “The Fragility of Body Positivity” that there are actual benefits to being traditionally pretty, structural benefits like money and health care. It’s easy to see that perhaps by simply expanding the definition of beauty, more people can reap those benefits, but beauty is a standard that is always set by the patriarchy. Even if it includes everyone, it still focuses someone’s worth on their appearance, which is not genuine change. One must stop using beauty in order to actually survive, both systemically and personally.

There is a movement that disavows beauty all together. Body neutrality is not about loving and accepting all bodies, it’s about not thinking about bodies at all. The movement has gained popularity as celebrities such as Jameela Jamil and Taylor Swift take up its cause.48 Now it should be noted that both Jamil and Swift are thin, and wealthy, and Swift is white, which firmly places them well within most standard definitions of beauty. None the less, they’ve taken up body neutrality as opposed to body positivity because it allows them to devote more time and space to other things, rather than worrying about their looks. Jamil has started a body neutral instagram account — @i_weigh — where people are encouraged to submit photos of themselves where they’ve added text that includes all of their personality traits — funny, good mom, smart, good cook, etc — that are considered more valuable than their weight. The instagram was one of sixteen that Prince Henry, the Duke of Sussex and his wife Megan Markle included on their

47 Lorde, 206. 48 Julie Mazziotta, “Jameela Jamil Can't Do Body Positivity: 'I Believe in Just Not Thinking About Your Body'.” PEOPLE.com, October 4, 2019. https://people.com/health/jameela-jamil-cant-do-body-positivity-i-believe-in-just- not-thinking-about-your-body/. 47 sixteen websites for mental health awareness month.49 So it’s fair to say body neutrality is really having its moment in the sun, the thing is — this very idea was placed fourth in King of the Hill back in the year 2000. While it lambasted the body positivity movement as something co-opted by patriarchy and capitalism, it stressed that true liberation came in the form of dismissing beauty all together. Bobby Hill just might have been ahead of the curve on this one.

For this chapter I will be examining "Transnational Amusements Presents: Peggy's Magic

Sex Feet," the 23 episode of season four, for the ways in which the body positivity is used by both the patriarchy, and capitalism to exploit women for the Male Gaze and profit. I will also be examining the ways in which true liberation lies in body neutrality.

"First We Must Reach the Men": Body Positivity as Exploitation

As the episode begins, Peggy and Hank are going out for a date night with their neighbors and friends Nancy and Dale gribble. They were going to go to a restaurant, but at the last-minute plans changed and everyone's going to go bowling. Peggy attempts to get out of it, and as the scene shifts to the bowling alley we understand why. Everyone gives their shoe sizes as the camera starts pans in on Peggy's face, she looks ashamed and embarrassed. Long time viewers of the show may start to pick up the reason on Peggy's panic. King of the Hill established within the first season that Peggy is ashamed of her feet, which are a size 16. In season one, the audience has seen that Peggy buys her shoes when Hank leaves on trips and changes the numbers on them to read a size 8. This shame of her feet is why she didn't want to go bowling. Peggy does what she can to get out of wearing the bowling shoes on date night, but the bowling alley says

49 Hannah-Rose Yee, “Jameela Jamil Responds to Special ‘Honour’ from Meghan and Harry.” Stylist. Stylist, May 2, 2019. https://www.stylist.co.uk/people/jameela-jamil-meghan-markle-prince-harry-instagram-i-weigh/264658.

48 policy is policy. When she gives her size to the man renting shoes, he's visibly shocked, and pulls out a pair they've never had to use before. At seeing the large 16 on the back, the camera zooms in on the shoes, and the number on the back. Everyone will know her shoe size. Rather than stay for date night, Peggy flees from the bowling alley so no one will know her shame.

Peggy's shame about her body is at the center of this episode, and there are multiple ways capitalism exploits this shame. First, Peggy attempts to go shopping at the only shoe store that sells shoes her size, she wants to simply buy a pair of bowling shoes that will lie about the size on the back. In exchanging her money for this good, rather than just renting shoes, Peggy can affectively use capitalism and its commodities to cover up the shame she feels about her feet.

The second way comes after Peggy leaves the shoe store in distress. After finding out her feet are still growing, and she's now up to a size 16 ½, she runs to her car and begins to cry. It's then that she's approached by another woman who also has big feet, this woman tells her about someone who can help her feel good about her feet. Peggy takes the name, and goes to see a man dressed as a doctor who showers compliments on her feet. He tells her, "Some might see them as big, but

I see them as vibrant, and alive. They're also very hot."50 Right away this doctor starts off by flattering Peggy, and confirming that the one thing she thinks really detracts from her confidence about her looks in in fact actually good looking. While King of the Hill is an animated show it mostly attempts to keep to a standard sitcom format, in that it grounds its comedy in reality. The audience may be able to safely assume that Peggy Hill lives in the same world they do, a world in which women are valued primarily for their looks. In a world where women are valued for

50 King of the Hill, season 4, episode 23, “Transnational Amusements Presents: Peggy's Magic Sex Feet” directed by Cyndi Tang-Loveland, written by Jonathan Collier, aired May 14, 2000 in broadcast syndication, https://www.hulu.com/watch/3ef6073e-d73d-4a64-997e-95e32ad53740

49 their looks, appealing to concepts of beauty is often what the patriarchy has to do in order to exploit all women, even ones who may not be conventionally attractive.

The doctor, Grant Trimble, is not a doctor at all, but rather he is a man who preys on women in order to convince them to make foot fetish porn. By appealing to concepts of beauty, and adopting the language of body positivity, Grant spends the episode consistently lying to and exploiting Peggy Hill for profit. He tells her what she wants to hear, like her feet are actually beautiful, and then he asks her to make an "inspirational" video. Grant lies to Peggy, telling her that by recording video of her feet, she will empower other women who also have large feet to feel good about their feet. This exposes the ways in which body positivity can be exploited by the patriarchy. When the focus of a movement is expanding concepts like beauty, all it does is open the doors for more women to be exploited under the name of empowerment. In reality, beauty is always, and has always been a patriarchal concept, used to exploit women so they are more ornamental then they are people with thoughts, and feelings, and talents.

Peggy fully buys into this belief in exploitation as empowerment. She heads home and immediately tells Hank about it and explains to Bobby what is happening. With her feet in a foot soaker, something she would have been embarrassed to do before, the audience might assume

Peggy is in fact feeling more confident about her feet because of this. While that's a good thing, it is ultimately not sustainable, as King of the Hill shows as the episode progresses. Peggy explains to Bobby that she is making a movie, because she had been persuaded by the media to believe her feet were unattractive. Peggy considers her exploitation to be at the hands of the media industry, and while that's true, she does not see that she's being exploited by Grant – who is also part of the media industry. While this is going on, Hank is discovering that his wife has been tricked into making foot fetish porn against her consent. Hank's friends, Dale, Bill, and 50

Boomhauer, found the site where the videos were posted online and showed it to Hank. He attempts to confront Grant Trimble, but when the threat of violence doesn’t work, he has no choice but to tell Peggy. Peggy has consented to make an empowerment movie for women, she never consented to making pornography that will be viewed by men. While she's reluctant to believe she was duped at first, Hank slowly walks her through it, and she becomes horrified by what happened.

As I wrote before, doing this video as an empowerment video did cause Peggy's self- esteem to improve. She wasn't ashamed of her feet, she put them in a foot soaker, and when

Hank came to tell her he catches her painting her toes, something the audience might guess didn't happen before as she tells Hank, "no more painting my toenails alone in the dark."51 But as Hank shows her what's happened, she feels violated and ashamed. Those same toes she'd been painting red earlier, she tucks away under a mop when she realizes what the video was actually pornography. That is because empowerment cannot come from exploitation, and because her consent was violated. The lies of the patriarchy – represented here by Trimble – ultimately simply hurt Peggy further in exploiting her. While women may believe that they are empowered by being included in the definition of beauty, ultimately, they too are being exploited by the idea that beauty is the thing to be valued for at all. The first time Peggy feels valued for the thing she is most ashamed of, and the first and last time Peggy is valued for her looks in this series, she's being exploited by a man hoping to make money off of her.

Making money off of exploiting women's insecurities is what Trimble does, and he lives in a massive house because of it. When Peggy goes to confront him, the audience sees he's living in a large, opulent home. During this confrontation, Trimble, our stand in for the patriarchy in

51 King of the Hill, season 4, episode 23, “Transnational Amusements Presents: Peggy's Magic Sex Feet” 51 this episode, shifts his tactics in attempting to get Peggy to go along with her own oppression again. He explains to her that while they were trying for women's empowerment, they didn't quite make it, and instead men tune into watch the videos, He tries to explain that appealing to men is the best way to earn rights for women. Trimble argues that if she keeps making foot fetish videos eventually, she'll normalize how beautiful her feet are, and she'll see big feet in all sorts of entertainment and advertisements. Here Trimble links empowerment for women to two key places, first the Male Gaze. Trimble argues that by subjecting herself to being fetishized by men,

Peggy helps change the beauty industry, an industry that is never going to empower women. He makes it sound like she has to play the game in order to win it. This is impossible of course, because no woman can win a game designed by the patriarchy. Peggy of course, falls for this, as many women do, the lies of the patriarchy are nothing if not seductive. Peggy says, "I'd be like

Rosa Parks,"52 somehow linking the body positivity movement to the civil rights movement, in a moment that is supposed to be absurd. While there are certainly some people who are denied rights because of the bodies they inhabit, especially trans, disabled and fat people, being seen in media doesn't actually break down the systems of power that deny them those rights. In making fetish porn Peggy is obviously not going to empower anyone, and she's certainly not fighting for anyone's civil rights by trying to expand definitions of beauty so that more women can be considered worthwhile because of their looks.

Peggy doesn't tell Hank that she's gone back to working for Trimble, but she does tell

Bobby, who doesn't get it at first. He pushes back at first, not understanding, saying, "But you said this website was for women," to which Peggy replies, "Well, ultimately they are, but first we must reach the men."53 This of course doesn't make sense, because women's empowerment

52 King of the Hill, season 4, episode 23, “Transnational Amusements Presents: Peggy's Magic Sex Feet” 53 King of the Hill, season 4, episode 23, “Transnational Amusements Presents: Peggy's Magic Sex Feet” 52 cannot come from the patriarchy. The patriarchy will do everything in its power to make sure women cannot be empowered. This follows a lot of neo-liberal feminist ideals that you have to get men on board with feminism first. As Lorde wrote in "The Master's Tools Will Never

Dismantle the Master's House," attempting to get oppressors on board with your rights, is just another tool of oppression. “Women of today are still being called upon to stretch across the gap of male ignorance and to educate men as to our existence and our needs. This is an old and primary tool of all oppressors to keep the oppressed occupied with the master’s concerns.”54 In believing that she needs to get men on board with her cause Peggy is still concerned with the patriarchy's concerns, but it's more than that. She's relying on tools of the patriarchy in order to even bridge that gap. She's attempting to rely on the male gaze to educate men to her humanity, but that is impossible to do, because the male gaze is, at its core about objectifying and dehumanizing women.

In the end when Trimble finally breaks and attempts to simply pay Peggy to be part of her exploitation, the show reveals the full extent of how exploited Peggy's been. This whole time she's been performing sex work, and Grant has been profiting off of it. He offers to pay Peggy two-thousand dollars a day for fifty minutes' worth of work, and that is simply her cut as a performer. He admits that he doesn't pay women for their work in these videos until they catch on to the fact that they're making foot fetish videos for men's pleasure. It has nothing to do with beauty, or changing beauty standards, it has everything to do with exploiting women for profit.

When he can no longer get them to go along with their exploitation through the coercive language of body positivity, he then attempts to use money. Capitalism relies on exploitation, and in convincing women that they too can be beautiful, or radically expand definitions of beauty

54 Audre Lorde, "The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House," Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Crossing Press, 1985. 208. 53 through their exploitation it will use whatever means it has available, including movements that are supposed to make women feel good about themselves.

The Body Politics of Bobby Hill

The end to Peggy's problem with her body image issues and her liberation do not come from expanding definitions of beauty. It comes from ending them all together. After Trimble reveals that the reason he can make money off of her feet isn't because they're beautiful, but rather that there's a profit to be made fetishizing flaws, Peggy spirals. She cries at home, her hair is drawn unkempt, her traditional green tank top, blue shorts outfit is replaced by a grey sweat suit indicating a complete lack of care about her appearance. More than that she attempts to self- harm, so that she can fit into those beauty standards. There is a scene where Peggy goes to a doctor – a real one – who tells her there's no problem with her feet. She tells him "What I would like you to do is smash them with a hammer and reset them until they are a size 5."55 The doctor looks appropriately horrified, and refuses to do it, but it shows how far Peggy is willing to go, to fix this perceived flaw with her body. She is willing to damage her body, go through pain in order to fit into normative beauty standards. This is not unlike what women often do, every day, to fit into what the beauty industry has defined as beautiful. Women will go on harmful diets, undergo dangerous plastic surgeries, and in some places bleach their skin in an effort to fit into modern beauty standards. Beauty standards are harmful, and as the doctor leaves horrified, the audience may be horrified as well by how far Peggy is willing to go to be beautiful. This is a critical look at the way beauty standards can literally cause women to do harm to their bodies.

55 King of the Hill, season 4, episode 23, “Transnational Amusements Presents: Peggy's Magic Sex Feet” 54

Freedom for Peggy does not come from expanding the definitions of beauty, that is what lead her into a doctor's office and asking for her feet to be smashed with a hammer. The way

Peggy finds liberation is in eradicating the idea that beauty is important all together. Oddly enough, when Trimble was first attempting to appeal to Peggy, she listed some other good qualities about herself, she's a gifted athlete and schoolteacher, but the thing she really wanted to hear was that she was hot. When Peggy shuts herself in her room at the end of the episode, her son Bobby comes into the room for one last talk with her. Bobby asked if she'd be making more videos, and she said no, telling him "All that stuff I told you about empowerment, it was all lies.

The whole time, I was making smoosh videos, and they only wanted me for my ugly feet."56

Bobby reacts empathetically, telling her, that what happened was cruel. This is the first time

Peggy has been offered empathy over what happened. Hank tried to lift her spirts, but ultimately failed when he compared her feet to special tires you buy for truck. Hank tries to find ways to also empower her to feel good about her body, but Bobby just reacts empathetically. He makes space for Peggy to be upset over what happened. Peggy continues telling him, "you don't understand bobby, I actually let myself believe that these [gestures to her feet] were beautiful."57

The advice Bobby gives next is what winds up perking Peggy up out of her depression. Bobby points out to his mother that looks aren't where a person should derive their value from.

While Peggy claims that Bobby can't understand, Bobby points out that he can, because he's fat. Fat people regardless of gender often find themselves the targets of mockery, discrimination, and of course are far from the ideal picture of the human body. Peggy rushes to reassure Bobby that he's not actually fat, attempting to candy coat the reality of the situation, because Peggy knows how our society views fat people – that is to say with derision. Bobby

56 King of the Hill, season 4, episode 23, “Transnational Amusements Presents: Peggy's Magic Sex Feet” 57 King of the Hill, season 4, episode 23, “Transnational Amusements Presents: Peggy's Magic Sex Feet” 55 doesn't need his mother's reassurances though, because unlike her he is fine with the way his body looks. Bobby doesn't need to be attractive because he has achieved liberation through body neutrality. He's liberated, because he doesn't actually care about how his body looks. In not caring about his body, Bobby finds his self-worth in other areas of his life. Bobby tells Peggy,

Mom I'm fat, but big deal. I don't feel bad about it. You never made me feel bad about it,

and just because there are some people in the world who want me to feel bad about it,

doesn't mean I have to. So, Bobby Hill's fat … he's also funny, he's nice, he's got a lot of

friends, a girlfriend.58

Bobby lies out a very clear politics of how he relates to his body, and the ways in which he manages to stop thinking about his weight. Bobby can shrug off what people think about his body, because he ultimately finds his self-worth not in his looks, but in his personality and his relationships. He lists the good things about himself and points out that people like him the way he is. Bobby prides himself on his comedy which is a talent he's cultivated over time, and tellingly on his kindness. He values himself because he is nice to other people, and he figures those around him – his friends and his girlfriend, value him for that as well. As Bobby points out that his body is not what defines him, he offers up to his mother to find things that define her outside of her feet. Peggy is a great softball pitcher, a boggle champion, she's got a family and friends who love her, there are things she can value about herself that have nothing to do with her feet. Peggy ultimately finds comfort in Bobby's words. The episode ends as she goes bowling again. This time, she announces her foot size over the PA for the entire bowling alley to hear.

Peggy, like Bobby, has achieved liberation not through finding beauty in herself, but in discarding beauty all together.

58 King of the Hill, season 4, episode 23, “Transnational Amusements Presents: Peggy's Magic Sex Feet” 56

Beauty is only skin deep tends to be a saying that gets tossed around in our society, while we still place a tremendous amount of importance on it. There is a variety of shame and stigma that surrounds bodies that deviate from what is considered "normal" anything from gender non- conformance, to body weight, to disability is met with public and private backlash. Bodies that deviate from the norm are punished financially and often in the form of health care and the law.

Many movements exist to counter the ways society treats and deems many bodies as unacceptable, and of all those movements, body positivity is the one that has been commodified.

Body positivity removes the onus from structural institutions to stop oppressing those bodies and moves it to people to start seeing their bodies as beautiful. The key to do this, our society tells us, is through the purchase of commodities. Covergirl changed its slogan from "easy breezy beautiful" to "I am what I make up" saying that the new slogan was about making sure that women were comfortable in their own skins59 as if the make-up industry doesn't completely rely on making women feel uncomfortable with the way their skin looks naturally. This is how expanding definitions of beautiful and body positivity can become something that's exploitative rather than something that liberates. King of the Hill explores this as Peggy is literally exploited as she attempts to embrace her body and find the beauty of it.

Where then, does true liberation lie? King of the Hill answers that too. It comes from advice from Peggy's son Bobby. He reaches out and reminds her that his body too is shamed in our society. Bobby's fat, and his response is that it doesn't matter. That there are other good things about him, things that truly make him the person he is. Bobby rejects the notion that he needs to worry about his looks, because for him liberation lies in saying "so what?" to the fact

59 Elana Gross, “CoverGirl Just Ditched Its Iconic ‘Easy, Breezy, Beautiful’ Slogan After 60 Years.” Allure. Allure, October 10, 2017. https://www.allure.com/story/covergirl-drops-easy-breezy-beautiful-covergirl-slogan.

57 that he's fat. He rejects it as a negative descriptor completely, and rather than saying he's fat and beautiful, he points out he's got a personality that's beautiful and people love that about him. In showing this to Peggy she embraces the rejection of beauty and she finds her liberation. Bobby

Hill teaches us that when it comes to body politics, the true liberation is remembering we're more than just our bodies.

58

CONCLUSION

Often times when I told people what I was going to do my thesis on they assumed that a show like King of the Hill would disparage feminist messaging. There was sort of this unspoken belief by everyone who asked after my thesis that when writing about feminism and King of the

Hill I would be out to take the show down a peg. They were often surprised when they found this wasn't the case. King of the Hill has progressive, feminist messaging, most often displayed through the main female character of the show – Peggy Hill. This has always been the case of the show, as the very second episode featured Peggy teaching Sex Ed in their conservative Texas town of Arlen. Peggy overcomes her own past, the poor teaching her mother gave her with regards to sex ed60, her discomfort with saying scientific terms for sex parts like penis and vagina, and the reaction she gets from the town for teaching Sex Ed. She's shamed, threatened, and at first her own husband refuses to support her. The episode ultimately doesn't end with

Peggy backing down, not from the town, and not from her husband. As she goes to teach Sex Ed, none of the children are allowed to stay, their parents refused to sign their permission slips. None save for her own son Bobby. In the end, her husband supports her, and that's just the second episode. King of the Hill often breaks with the "father knows best" tradition that sitcoms often take, as the Hank realizes he needs to be more supportive of Peggy, or of his non-traditionally masculine son, or needs to stand in defiance of the toxic masculinity of his father.

Within this thesis I focused on how Peggy acts as a site of feminist discourse with regards to domestic labor, motherhood, and body image. These were the places I thought King of the Hill presented some of the most progressive messaging in regards to not only sitcoms, but in the case of body image at the time it was progressive even within feminism.

60 The sex ed Peggy received was simply a book of flowers, provided by her mother. 59

In Chapter One, I discussed the ways in which the show allows for Peggy to fail at domestic labor, and the ways that this is contrasted with Marge Simpson in the the Simpsons.

While Marge often satirizes the ways in which housewives are expected to act, the show often still displays the family or even in some instances the town falling apart when Marge fails to cook or clean for the family. This is a direct contrast with the way that Peggy is written in King of the Hill. There is more than one episode where Peggy's inability to do domestic labor is used as the crux of the joke, in that it is better off for everyone if she simply doesn't do it. In the episode I examine, "Goodbye, Normal Jeans", Peggy fails at domestic labor as compared to her son Bobby who excels at it. The more she attempts to outshine him, the worse things in the household get. The episode carries on with Peggy's slow descent into monstrosity, both in behavior and even physically, and it does not end with her figuring out how to cook and clean for the household. Rather the episode ends with her husband Hank proving he doesn't need her to do stuff like cooking and cleaning. He reassures her that the most important part of their relationship is not what she can do for him, but rather that they love one another. This is a sharp contrast to the Simpsons where even when the show points to how ridiculous the demands on Marge are, they also often narratively reinforce the way a woman's labor is required to make the house run, making the show's message on the hard demands of domestic labor ambiguous at best. King of the Hill on the other hand provides a clear message – the demands and pressure of domestic labor on women can negatively impact both them and their household. Love and support are what make a marriage function, not a woman's ability to cook and clean.

In Chapter Two, I shift my focus from discussing domestic labor with regards to cooking and cleaning, and instead turn to motherhood. For this chapter I examine the ways in which the show discusses motherhood, I discussed the mythic idea that all women were stay-at-home 60 moms in the 50s – when working class women often held down jobs to help support their families. The ways in which patriarchal family demands are often destructive to women, and how women can use poetry as a form of protest. Within twenty minutes the show addresses each of these points. I draw on scholar Carol Stabile to make connection from Hank's revelation that his mother worked as a child, to point out that our conception of what the 50s was like is warped by remembering TV shows from the past.

While our perceptions of the past may be warped by TV and movies from the past but the patriarchal desire to keep women in the home is still a damaging one. This is also reflected within the episode as Peggy attempts to be a stay-at-home mother, and her days shift from being filled with teaching – a job she loved – to taking care of a thirteen-year-old son who is hardly ever home. Her son, Bobby doesn't wind up needing a lot of care as he's at school most of the time, this demand only seems to make Hank happy. In attempting to please Hank to be the kind of mother that he thinks she should be, she makes herself unhappy, and the marriage and the family suffer as a result. Showing patriarchal demands and pressures as something that is detrimental to the family is a progressive message for a sitcom. Once again, in deviating from the

"father knows best" format sitcoms typically take, what we see is that Hank learns and grows as a person and husband as he realizes he's wrong to want to keep his wife home.

And finally, in Chapter Two, I discuss the ways in which this episode shows that poetry is a way for women to protest the way they're being treated. I draw from scholar and poet Audre

Lorde, to discuss the ways in which poetry is a site of feminist resistance. The episode displays that in Peggy's actual turtle song. She is unsure of why she's writing it or singing it, but it clearly displays the ways in which she is unsatisfied with her home life. For her poetry becomes a way 61 to survive being home, and a way to voice her dissatisfaction with her situation in ways she couldn't frankly address to her husband.

The final chapter turns to body positivity and the Male Gaze. In this the episode’s messaging isn’t simply progressive for the time, or for a sitcom, it was progressive for feminism itself. The body positivity movement started out as a part of a radical movement focused on destroying structural discrimination against non-normative bodies. The movement’s idea of radical self-love was quickly co-opted by capitalism as a way to exploit women, and sell them products while at the same time telling them to love their bodies. In expanding the definitions of beauty, women remain stuck focused on appealing physically to men. In “Transnational

Amusements Presents Peggy’s Magic Sex Feet” Peggy winds up being tricked into making foot fetish videos with the very same language capitalists use to coerce women into buying products to help them love their bodies better. This episode struck me as remarkably progressive for the ways it details how capitalists exploit women by both telling them they’re beautiful the way they are, but at the same time seek to financially exploit them by proclaiming they could think of themselves as more beautiful so long as they choose to be appealing to the Male Gaze. The conclusion is both heartwarming, and almost twenty years ahead of its time.

Body neutrality is a relatively new movement being popularized by celebrity activists like

Jameela Jamil, and it simply states that you stop thinking about beauty all together. Jamil is over a decade behind Bobby Hill championing the same thing. Bobby, overweight, comes to his mother to tell her that the things worth valuing aren’t looks, but rather that people care for her, and her personality. When Peggy accepts this, she is able to stop fretting about her feet – a piece of her character that is carried forward from that episode forward. The show never once has her 62 return to hating her feet. This message and character growth were progressive not just for the early 2000s, but they remain progressive for feminist messaging today.

King of the Hill ran for thirteen seasons, and to date is the third longest running animated sitcom right behind the Simpsons and Family Guy. Daniel Kurland once pointed out on Vulture that the talent fostered on King of the Hill would go on to shape our modern TV landscape as we know it.61 While there has been much written academically on the Simpsons, the way it affects the post-modern landscape, the ways it shows religion, race, and gender on the show – there has been relatively little written on King of the Hill despite the fact that it also impacted tv for generations to come, and had much to say in the way it shows religion, race, and gender on the show. My hope was to fill in just a small portion of that gap. The sincerity of the show is also a postmodern aesthetic, and should make for an easy of reading the messaging within the show. I picked out a few feminist messages as they are written into Peggy’s storylines, and found it important the ways in which they contrast with not only the Simpsons, but often ways they can contrast with sitcoms all together.

For a sitcom called King of the Hill, one might assume it takes a standard “father knows best” approach to the sitcom. That is the wife and the children find themselves embroiled in day to day problems and their father knows how to get them out of it. I think the name, that it is set in

Texas, and the lead character is Republican is always why I’m often met with such disbelief when I say I’m doing my thesis on feminism in King of the Hill. In sharp contrast to the name of the show, and to people’s assumptions, King of the Hill is not a father knows best comedy. In fact, it is a comedy in which the father learns his outdated theories about masculinity, motherhood, race, class, and gender roles are wrong and learns to be a better father, husband, and

61 Daniel Kurland, “None of the Best Comedies on TV Would Exist Without 'King of the Hill',” February 10, 2015, https://www.vulture.com/2015/02/none-of-the-best-comedies-on-tv-would-exist-without-king-of-the-hill.html. 63 person because of it. The sincerity of King of the Hill is a postmodern aesthetic that is often unexplored, especially in animated sitcoms. While many animated sitcoms may feel like they may all fall into the ambivalence and ambiguousness of the Simpsons, I argue that is not the case for King of the Hill. It is very sincere in the ways it corrects Hank, and asks him to be better. It’s very sincere when it empathizes with Bobby or Peggy in ways you often don’t see in animated comedies, though is starting to become more common in both animated and traditional live action sitcoms. Bob’s Burgers, Parks and Recreations, The Good Place, are all popular sitcoms that employ a sincerity in the same way King of the Hill does. (Perhaps in no small part due to all the writers and show runners who got their start on King of the Hill, who now work or worked on those respective comedies.) When it comes to looking at what 90s animated sitcoms were attempting to push into American discourse, King of the Hill holds a distinct place worth exploring.

This thesis is only the tip of the iceberg, there is a lot more to explore in both feminist messaging in King of the Hill, and progressive messaging. Further research can and should be done on the themes of masculinity within the show, the way Hank often unlearns toxic masculinity in order to either accept his son, openly display affection for his wife, or to disavow his father’s toxic masculinity. Class often comes in to play in the show, sometimes in regards to feminism with the case of Hank and Peggy’s niece Luanne Platter, who lived in a trailer park, and is attempting to move into the same lower middle-class position the Hills occupy. In race, with the Southeast Asian neighbors Hank has. There is also mental illness, disability, gentrification, gender roles, sexuality, assimilation, amongst many other themes ready to be explored in King of the Hill. This little 90s comedy had a lot to say from the little Arlen community, and what I have said about it, is only the beginning. 64

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