Television and Postfeminist Housekeeping
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Television and Postfeminist Housekeeping

No Time for Mother

Elizabeth Nathanson

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eBook - ePub

Television and Postfeminist Housekeeping

No Time for Mother

Elizabeth Nathanson

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About This Book

In this book, Nathanson examines how contemporary American television and associated digital media depict women's everyday lives as homemakers, career women, and mothers. Her focus on American popular culture from the 1990s through the present reveals two extremes: narratives about women who cannot keep house and narratives about women who only keep house. Nathanson looks specifically at the issue of time in this context and argues that the media constructs panics about domestic time scarcity while at the same time offering solutions for those very panics. Analyzing TV programs such as How Clean is Your House, Up All Night, and Supernanny, she finds that media's portrayals of women's time is crucial to understanding definitions of femininity, women's labor, and leisure in the postfeminist context.

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Publisher
Routledge
Year
2013
ISBN
9781135090739
Edition
1

1 Disordered Homes

Organizing and Cleaning the Domestic Mess
In 2009, on the brink of leaving network television, Oprah Winfrey’s company, Harpo Productions, announced it would launch yet another spin-off for one of the “experts” who had appeared as a guest on her own show for years. The Nate Berkus Show (NBC) first aired September 10, 2010, and stars domestic designer Nate Berkus, a young, fit, energetic, openly gay man with a playful mop-top of brown hair and twinkling blue eyes. Since 2003, Berkus had appeared on Oprah hosting segments about domestic design. Like other Oprah-guests-turned-talk-show-hosts Dr. Phil McGraw and Rachael Ray, he was given his own talk show under the auspices of Harpo Productions. Each episode has a theme like “spring” or “small spaces” and features a variety of segments on different domestic design topics, ranging from choosing paint colors to creating a moss landscape in a city garden. While the show does include tidbits about other lifestyle matters such as cooking and fashion, the show is “dedicated to living beautifully.”1 By bestowing upon his live studio audience and at-home viewers tips about how to create style in a domestic space, Berkus promises to improve the lives of Americans. This program draws connections between the domestic space and the everyday lives of its inhabitants, and such seemingly easy connections are reflected in the straightforward, ostensibly simple pieces of advice he offers. On this show, domestic aesthetics promise to be therapeutic; as Oprah exclaimed, “he's done some of the most incredible transformations we’ve ever seen on the show and helped so many people across the country bring beauty and peace and tranquility into their homes.”2
Apparently, by 2010, domestic design had proven popular enough that it could produce content to fill an hour-long weekday talk show that would appeal to a wide audience. Reportedly, when Berkus appeared on Oprah's show, the total audience ratings increased an average of 13% and the number of women viewers 25–54 years old (Oprah's “core constituency”) in-creased by 20%.3 Partly this trend should be seen in light of changes to the daytime network programming that will be further discussed in the next chapter4. This show capitalizes on trends that have been growing on cable television for years; for example, the Home & Garden Television network (HGTV) was launched in 1994, and its offerings are very much domestically oriented. While the home has long been the subject of TV programs, both explicitly and implicitly, in recent years the explosion of lifestyle and reality television turned the home into a character on television programming. Programs like Berkus's show presume to offer problem-solving solutions to daily life through pedagogical address. On cable, and increasingly on network television, the daytime hours are devoted to explicit representations of domestic life, and present a world that implies that domestic neglect has led to decreased “beauty” in everyday life.
This chapter explores how lifestyle television programming concerned with the look of the home appeals to contemporary concerns about everyday life and the widely circulated claim that families suffer from a lack of quality time together. While domestic space is ostensibly the focus of such programming, these shows posit that a distinct lack of time is the cause and solution for domestic, and by extension, personal disarray. Concerns about the decreasing amount of time families spend at home litter the media landscape, and this lack of time and need for housework becomes an implicit critique of the supposed freedoms feminism has brought to American women; while women may be increasingly “free” to pursue careers and “have it all,” their homes suffer under the weight of neglect, clutter and dirt. The movement of women into the public sphere of work has impacted the private sphere, and the problems and solutions are articulated in temporal terms. The “gendered” and specifically “feminized” nature of this domestic advice explicitly and implicitly blames women for this domestic neglect and holds them responsible for fixing their homes, and by extension, their families. As the predominantly female live studio audience for Nate Berkus illustrates, femininity is the primary addressee in these programs, which construct a moral panic around the home and then offer up solutions to widely debated dilemmas of the postfeminist age. In other words, the programs are not merely “helpful.” Instead, like the history of advice literature aimed at women since the nineteenth century written by women like Lillian Gilbreth, as was discussed in the introduction, lifestyle television at once produces, maintains and yet also gives voice to anxieties about the ideology of domesticity even while making some adjustments for twentieth-century circumstances5. Lifestyle television that focuses on the appearance of the home appeals to and perpetuates anxieties about domestic time crises that are rooted in critiques of how women specifically spend their time. Through analysis of lifestyle programming about domestic design, organization and cleaning, this chapter considers how contemporary lifestyle television depicts the everyday rhythms of the home. Lifestyle television programs like Home Made Easy that focus on domestic design and cluttered homes depict gendered solutions to render homes simpler, more organized and more efficient spaces, thus granting families more quality time. Furthermore, shows like How Clean Is Your House? that highlight domestic filth and set about cleaning the dirt promise to restore these homes to their past dirt-free, fullycared-for state. Simplicity, time management and restoration of the past emerge as temporal solutions to the domestic time bind and produce a gendered discourse about domestic labor and everyday life.

THE SIMPLE HOME: DESIGNING A SPACE FOR QUALITY TIME

From the homes depicted in the magazine Real Simple to those featured on Extreme Makeover: Home Edition (ABC), American houses appear to be rather undone. Living rooms are full of unread magazines, attics remain unfinished “home offices,” and kitchens are overflowing with archaic equipment. According to much popular culture, American homes are in desperate need of a fix-up, and much television programming depicts domestic interiors in extreme terms rife with a sense of clutter and crisis. The meloramatic show Extreme Makeover: Home Edition selects a different family each week to receive a major home renovation. These families have all suffered a major tragedy and are living in exceptionally horrendous conditions; plotlines include children with life-threatening illnesses, men who have lost their jobs after being rendered paralyzed in a car accident and abandoned orphans left to fend for themselves. Other television shows take domestic disorder to a pathological extreme. Programs like Hoarders (A&E) depict the pitfalls of unruly domesticity by profiling one or two individuals each episode diagnosed by the show as “hoarders,” and then treat the “patient” through a combination of psychiatric intervention and televisual embarrassment, which takes the form of purging the house of piles of possessions. Hoarders, and other shows like it, foreground the exceptional nature of such pathologies, as each Hoarders episode begins with white text over a black screen that defines hoarding as a “mental disorder marked by an obsessive need to acquire and keep things, even if the items are worthless, hazardous, or unsanitary.”
One need not turn to such unfortunate extremes to see television’s obsession with household disorder. The home and its upkeep is the subject of much lifestyle television that focuses more on fixing everyday rhythms than profiling moments of domestic crisis in the hyperbolic, tragic rhetoric of shows like Extreme Makeover and Hoarders. Lifestyle television programs that air on cable networks like DIY, TLC and HGTV take domestic mess to task on a smaller, more routine basis. These networks feature shows that focus entirely upon rendering the home more useful by imposing order on what appears to be chaos in the private sphere. This chaos appears in the form of “unattractive” interior aesthetics and illogical layout, problems that can be solved through new consumer products and experts who teach the merits of simplicity and streamlining. On these shows the concept of the organized home is the ideal, and this ideal appears throughout these programs, from the title to the tagline and the narrative format. Shows like Home Made Easy (DIY), Home Made Simple (TLC) and Design on a Dime (HGTV) promise straightforward, quick, low-budget solutions that promise to limit the clutter encroaching on daily life and streamline the look of the home. The websites for these shows promote these qualities: Home Made Easy 's website explains that the show “is about making your everyday life easier, as well as saving time, money and sanity.”6 And the site for Home Made Simple explains how the show's experts “work together with families to devise simple solutions for easy living.”7 The constant stress on simplicity that can be found on many of the daytime lifestyle television programs creates and reveals anxieties about the apparently untidy nature of daily routines, thus speaking to larger issues about how families, and particularly women, spend their time.
The rhetoric of simplicity extends to the repetitive and reliable narrative format of these programs. Television programs like Home Made Easy frequently air on cable networks like HGTV or TLC during the daytime hours and follow a very similar structure. An individual episode features one home that is in need of an interior design makeover: some of the homes have fallen into disrepair, some remain incompletely decorated, some are just poorly adorned. The shows each have their own team of designers who first tour the home and meet the family who nominated their house to be subjected to televisual makeover. Once the team has learned about the family and their home, the experts embark on painting walls, buying furniture, organizing shelves and arranging decorative objects in each room. This overarching format is like many makeover programs, moving from problem to solution incrementally and reliably without much drama or tension; by the conclusion the rooms have been redesigned and the family may happily return home. In this way, the format is simple and reliable, articulating a sense of the everyday in its very ordinariness and appealing to everyday audiences focused on the quotidian and the domestic.
By invoking the language of “advice” and “instruction,”8 these series appear to serve an educational function. Unlike a program such as Hoarders, which offers a cautionary tale about a psychiatric condition, these shows more clearly address everyday lives and everyday problems, and do so through an optimistic combination of pedagogy and entertainment. As Charlotte Brunsdon has explained, this type of show invokes a “balance between instruction and spectacle.”9 Spectator pleasures are found not in the direct, and by implication, active, application of skills seen on TV but rather in the observation of the spectacle of housework that is rendered in pleasurable terms. The very popularity of such shows and the success of channels like HGTV and TLC can be partly attributed to this combination of audience pleasures. As Anna Everett claims, “The fact of HGTV's phenomenal rise within the cable TV industry's boutique-style, narrowcasting environment could be said to rest with the unique way that the programming recodes TV's much-debated passive and active audience address and subsequent viewer positioning.”10 Watching lifestyle programming is not just an entertaining or educational experience; it is both at the same time. Lifestyle programming presents stories that progress from the shock of uncovering the spectacle of unruly domesticity to the joys of learning how to manage homelife. It speaks to contemporary anxieties about domesticity through narratives that are fun to watch while educating viewers on how best to live with and manage those anxieties. These simple narratives, which progress seamlessly and efficiently offer a trajectory that appeals to and constructs notions of domestic crises through this combination of pedagogical and pleasurable spectatorial addresses, literally turning (house) work into leisure.
While the shows vary in small ways, they all draw connections between the state of the home and the family contained within. It is the goal of these shows to transform the home, and by extension, to transform the family inside. In this way, shows like Home Made Easy and Design on a Dime are part of a larger trend in reality television devoted to the makeover. This type of program promises that through the correct application of consumer products and self-management, individuals can more fully realize their sense of identity. Through changes to one's face, body, clothes, car, home or routine, an individual finds him/herself happier, more fulfilled, and more confident. Brenda Weber claims that “by linking selfhood to empowerment the makeover suggests it can bring forth a material and visible element of what constitutes the self, which the evidence of desolate Before and jubilant After images in celebratory reveal ceremonies make exceedingly evident.”11 Such programs render physical transformations spectacular, and when completed they promise to render the self more coherent, whole and self-sufficient. There are a variety of explanations for the appearance and popularity of the televisual makeover and such discourses of autonomous selfhood in this particular historical context. Laurie Ouellette and James Hay argue that reality television participates in neoliberal governance by promoting the virtues of self-management instead of teaching citizens to rely upon state institutions: “Only in the current stage of liberalism, with its specific requirements of entrepreneurialism and self-responsibilization, do the techniques of everyday self-management become so central to television's governing role.”12 Like other makeover programs, lifestyle television articulates that physical and consumer-based transformations grant individuals a sense of self-sufficiency and empowerment. On television shows devoted to everyday design this notion of self-sufficiency is translated into the demands for temporal order and efficiency; these programs teach not only self-management but moreover illustrate how temporal management is the means to achieving familial and individual success.
The design shows discussed here frequently invoke time as both the problem and the solution to domestic dilemmas, thus justifying the need for the domestic makeover. Lifestyle television shows represent American homes as moving quickly and provide answers that are similarly speedy. They stress time as the problem and solution to everyday life, and illustrate how “quality” time need not be incompatible with contemporary lifestyles but how it has become lost to the rhythms of everyday life. For example, 24 Hour Design (HGTV) features an explicit narrative about time: the designers on this program explain again and again how they spend only one day fixing a messy, poorly decorated room. By using paint and new furniture, as well as decorative features like sculpture and posters, the program revamps what the television homeowners complain is an underused, poorly planned space. The show finds drama, and presumably differentiates itself from the sea of design programs by explicitly highlighting the role time plays in home design. Other lifestyle programs, such as Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, use deadlines to produce narrative tension (viewers inevitably wonder, “Will Ty and his team finish the home before the family returns from their trip to Disneyland?!”). 24 Hour Design, however, uses a deadline to stress the everyday accessibility of home design. As the introduction to the program explains, 24 Hour Design fixes homes “in the 10 sweet short hours between sunup and sunset.”13 By restricting the on-screen work to daylight hours, the program presents home decoration as a user-friendly process that viewers can likewise perform within the temporal constraints of their busy lives. One need not take time off of work for home construction, and the tasks need not drag out over weeks, wasting much-needed family time. This presentation of temporal “simplicity” illustrates to viewers that they have no excuse for allowing their homes to remain underused and underdesigned. Even with their busy lives, viewers should have time for home.
To support its rhetoric of the general accessibility of home design, 24 Hour Design presents design as a speedy process, articulating this through shots that quickly zoom in on the room being designed, pan across the do mestic space to survey activities, and cut between various people performing repair tasks. Furthermore, the program makes use of split-screen images to efficiently depict the variety of tasks being performed. This technique, as well as the image of a ticking clock in some of the split-screen images, results in a realistic aesthetic not unlike the film Timecode (2000) and the television program 24 (Fox). While 24 Hour Design does not employ a real-time narrative like Timecode, 24, or the Food Network cooking show 30 Minute Meals, as I will discuss in Chapter 2, these texts all highlight the passage of time using these on-screen devices. On 24 Hour Design, the splitscreen images represent the design work as broken into individual parts turning what might seem like the overwhelming prospect of transforming a space into smaller comprehensible tasks. By turning time into a unit of TV entertainment this program underscores how home renovation is eminently doable through careful management of each task and rational organization of domestic labor and domestic space.
This split-screen imaging stresses the simultaneity of actions performed at the same time but in different places, and each of these actions is guided by a different design specialist. This show, like so many lifestyle programs, depends upon the expertise of multiple professionals to bring the design to fruition. These “experts” operate as if they...

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