ABSTRACT Title of Dissertation: SCREENING DIVERSITY: WOMEN and WORK in TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY POPULAR CULTURE Laura K. Brunner, Do
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
ABSTRACT Title of Dissertation: SCREENING DIVERSITY: WOMEN AND WORK IN TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY POPULAR CULTURE Laura K. Brunner, Doctor of Philosophy, 2016 Dissertation directed by: Professor A. Lynn Bolles Department of Women’s Studies Screening Diversity: Women and Work in Twenty-first Century Popular Culture explores contemporary representations of diverse professional women on screen. Audiences are offered successful women with limited concerns for feminism, anti- racism, or economic justice. I introduce the term viewsers to describe a group of movie and television viewers in the context of the online review platform Internet Movie Database (IMDb) and the social media platforms Twitter and Facebook. Screening Diversity follows their engagement in a representative sample of professional women on film and television produced between 2007 and 2015. The sample includes the television shows, Scandal, Homeland, VEEP, Parks and Recreation, and The Good Wife, as well as the movies, Zero Dark Thirty, The Proposal, The Heat, The Other Woman, I Don’t Know How She Does It, and Temptation. Viewsers appreciated female characters like Olivia (Scandal), and Maya (Zero Dark Thiry) who treated their work as a quasi-religious moral imperative. Producers and viewsers shared the belief that unlimited time commitment and personal identification were vital components of professionalism. However, powerful women, like The Proposal’s Margaret and VEEP’s Selina, were often called bitches. Some viewsers embraced bitch-positive politics in recognition of the struggles of women in power. Women’s disproportionate responsibility for reproductive labor, often compromises their ability to live up to moral standards of work. Unlike producers, viewsers celebrated and valued that labor. However, texts that included serious consideration of women as workers were frequently labelled chick flicks or soap operas. The label suggested that women’s labor issues were not important enough that they could be a topic of quality television or prestigious film, which bolstered the idea that workplace equality for women is not a problem in which the general public is implicated. Emerging discussions of racial injustice on television offered hope that these formations are beginning to shift. SCREENING DIVERSITY: WOMEN & WORK IN TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY POPULAR CULTURE by Laura K. Brunner Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Maryland, College Park, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2016 Advisory Committee: Professor A. Lynn Bolles Chair Professor Deborah Rosenfelt Professor Saverio Giovacchini Professor Elsa Barkley Brown Professor Sheri Parks, Dean’s Representative © Copyright by Laura K. Brunner 2016 Table of Contents Introduction 7 About Screening Diversity: ..................................................................................... 11 1. The Politics of Work, Feminism and Representation 18 American Work Values ........................................................................................... 20 Mass Media and Capitalism .................................................................................... 23 Global Neoliberalism and the Revival of Class Analysis ....................................... 25 Conclusion .............................................................................................................. 32 2. Introducing Contemporary Viewsers 33 Shaping Collective Memory ................................................................................... 38 Unprecedented Access ............................................................................................ 42 Navigating Viewser Experiences: ........................................................................... 45 Limitations and Ethical Considerations .................................................................. 53 Conclusion .............................................................................................................. 50 3. Career Women on Screen, 1940-2007 58 Old Fashioned Ideas (1939-1951) ........................................................................... 60 The Pictures Got Small (1951-1968) ...................................................................... 69 Selling Progressive Politics (1968-1981) ................................................................ 76 When Greed Became Good (1982-1996) ............................................................... 86 Feminism Gets a Makeover (1997-2007) ............................................................... 94 Conclusion .............................................................................................................. 96 4. “For God and Country”: The Moral Imperative to Succeed 105 Scandal (2012-Present) ......................................................................................... 108 Homeland (2011 – Present) .................................................................................. 105 Zero Dark Thirty (2012) ....................................................................................... 113 Role Models .......................................................................................................... 115 The Professional and the Organization ................................................................. 123 Subversive Possibilities of the Screen .................................................................. 133 Conclusion ............................................................................................................ 130 5. #BitchBoss/#BossBitch: Love Hate Relationships with Unruly Women 139 Parks and Recreation (2009-2015) ........................................................................ 142 VEEP (2012-) ........................................................................................................ 144 The Proposal (2009) .............................................................................................. 147 The Heat (2013) .................................................................................................... 148 #BitchBoss ............................................................................................................ 150 ii #BossBitch ............................................................................................................ 158 Conclusion ............................................................................................................ 166 6. Other Women: Comparing Experiences and Creating Solidarity 169 The Good Wife (2009-) ........................................................................................ 171 The Other Woman (2014) ..................................................................................... 174 Temptation (2013) ................................................................................................ 175 I Don’t Know How She Does It (2014) ................................................................ 177 Work Hard, Twerk Harder! #TOW Advice...........................................................180 The Righteous Path................................................................................................187 Chick Flicks, Soap Operas and Tyler Perry...........................................................190 Conclusion ............................................................................................................ 196 Epilogue 198 Appendix I: Glossary 203 Appendix II: List of Screen Titles 217 Bibliography 222 iii Introduction Eli Pope (Joe Morton): Did I not raise you for better? How many times have I told you? You have to be what? Olivia Pope (Kerry Washington): Twice as good. Eli: You have to be twice as good as them to get half of what they have.1 I began this project in an allegedly post identity (post-racial and post-gender) moment in U.S. history: Barack Obama was our first black President, and Kerry Washington was the first black actress to star in a network television show in a generation.2 Shonda Rhimes’s3 Scandal put Olivia Pope on screen as a successful, black, professional woman. Scandal introduced the topic of race cautiously, at first, although, the novelty of interracial romance was an undeniable part of the show’s appeal.4 On October 3, 2013, Eli’s lesson to his daughter, “you have to be twice as good as them to get half of what they have,” set off shock waves of recognition among black fans. The father-daughter exchange was familiar to anyone who grew up black in the United States. Suddenly, I was unable to keep up with Scandal’s live Twitter feed. 5 Few people really expected television to offer such “a scathing indictment of white privilege,” as Tara-Lynn 1 Scandal, “It’s Handled,” written by Shonda Rhimes, directed by Tom Verica (ABC, October 3, 2013). Many audiences did not watch on the original air date. Some watched an international broadcast. Some audiences used technology like Digital Video Recording (DVR) to delay their initial viewing. Others relied on subscription services such as Hulu, Netflix, and the network-sponsored ABC-Go application. 2 Diahann Carroll starred in Julia, created by Hal Kanter (NBC, 1968-1971). Teresa Graves starred in Get Christy Love (ABC, 1974-1975). 3 Shonda Rhimes also created the hit series, Greys Anatomy (ABC, 2005-), Private Practice (ABC, 2007- 2013) and How to Get Away With Murder (ABC, 2014-). 4 Scandal, “Defiance,” written by Shonda Rhimes, directed by Tom Verica (ABC, November 29, 2012). White house