Welcome to the Dreamhouse
Popular Media and Postwar Suburbs
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- $31.99
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- $31.99
Publisher Description
In Welcome to the Dreamhouse feminist media studies pioneer Lynn Spigel takes on Barbie collectors, African American media coverage of the early NASA space launches, and television’s changing role in the family home and its links to the broader visual culture of modern art. Exploring postwar U.S. media in the context of the period’s reigning ideals about home and family life, Spigel looks at a range of commercial objects and phenomena, from television and toys to comic books and magazines.
The volume considers not only how the media portrayed suburban family life, but also how both middle-class ideals and a perceived division between private and public worlds helped to shape the visual forms, storytelling practices, and reception of postwar media and consumer culture. Spigel also explores those aspects of suburban culture that media typically render invisible. She looks at the often unspoken assumptions about class, nation, ethnicity, race, and sexual orientation that underscored both media images (like those of 1960s space missions) and social policies of the mass-produced suburb. Issues of memory and nostalgia are central in the final section as Spigel considers how contemporary girls use television reruns as a source for women’s history and then analyzes the current nostalgia for baby boom era family ideals that runs through contemporary images of new household media technologies.
Containing some of Spigel’s well-known essays on television’s cultural history as well as new essays on a range of topics dealing with popular visual culture, Welcome to the Dreamhouse is important reading for students and scholars of media and communications studies, popular culture, American studies, women’s studies, and sociology.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In these 10 engaging, witty and extraordinarily well-observed critical essays on the past five decades of television and other popular media, Spigel (Make Room for TV) delineates some major contradictions in postwar American society and culture. What does it mean, she queries, that suburban households of the 1950s often revolved around television, which brought public issues into a traditionally private space? Or, almost 50 years later, why did the same Congress that OK'd the V-chip then flood the media with the "pornographic" details of the Starr report? Spigel's wide-ranging interests and instinct for quirky but salient facts make for an intellectually rich and enjoyable read. In "White Flight," she discusses the 1960s genre of the "fantastic sitcom" (e.g., Lost in Space,Bewitched) as a commentary on and reflection of "the organization of social space and everyday life in suburbia." In "Seducing the Innocent," she analyzes opposing adult ideas about young viewers as vulnerable children versus potential consumers that have plagued children's TV programming since its inception. In "Outer Space and Inner Cities," she uncovers a strong critique of NASA by African-American media during the height of the space program in the 1960s. While overtly political in her feminist analysis of Barbie (which is also a critique of feminism's failure regarding corporate sexism), she praises the Barbie Liberation Front, which switched the voice boxes of Barbie and GI Joe dolls to create gender-bending playthings Spigel never sacrifices nuance or ignores the pleasure people derive from popular culture. Smart, often surprising, Spigel's essays are an important addition to feminist and cultural critiques of media culture. B&w photos.
