{"id":129,"date":"2018-11-27T03:34:12","date_gmt":"2018-11-27T03:34:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/gendersexualityandmedia\/?p=129"},"modified":"2020-04-20T15:34:38","modified_gmt":"2020-04-20T15:34:38","slug":"tvs-the-catalysts-of-family-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/gendersexualityandmedia\/2018\/11\/27\/tvs-the-catalysts-of-family-life\/","title":{"rendered":"TV\u2019s : The Catalysts of Family Life"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u00a0<\/em>\"\"<\/p>\n

In Week 2, I was struck by Lynn Spigel\u2019s article \u201cTelevision and the Family Ideal in Postwar America\u201d. It talks about the TV and how it fit(s) into domestic spaces of the US. With its introduction, the TV became the \u201ccentral figure in representation of family relationship\u201d.<\/p>\n

What I first found interesting about this article was its talk of the home and domestic spaces. Homes and its sub-sections are both a means of inclusion and separation. The home is both the space of a big unit but one of sub-units as well. As Spigel writes, spatial imagery was the language for which how home magazines described family life. People, primarily women, were taught to view homes in a systematic way: everyone had their separate living spaces, holding claim to an invisible decorum of segmentation. The home was redirected and reorganized to meet ever growing needs. \u201cIf the children are cranky, let them play in the yard. If your husband is bored at the office, turn your garage into a workshop where he\u2019ll recall the joys of his boyhood.\u201d All of these points hit to an underlying point about family life. This focus on the home being a remedy to family dynamics admits that families are inherently volatile. The use of the home and its subsections has an underlying assumption that there is something to fix in family life. The nuclear family is a trope fed to us for decades, one most prominent in the mid-1900\u2019s. The segmentation of space placed forth the boundaries necessary to deal with these issues.<\/p>\n

At its core was the joining of man and woman. This in itself carries its ironies as the family home was commercialized as the place for this unity, but man and woman were supposed to maintain their separate gendered lives. The man was supposed to have (by example) his office and garage space. The woman was supposed to tend to domestic duties, most commonly represented by the kitchen. Houses were carefully crafted to show very opposing things. Families were supposed to be both unified in a space and separated within it.<\/p>\n

(Side note: Additionally, the rise of the Playboy penthouse went against the nuclear family image. Bachelor pads put men in positions of domestic organization, dodging a fine line of emasculation. No longer did men not need to worry about their living space, but rather the opposite.)<\/p>\n

This was all disrupted by the TV. The TV forced families again to rethink the domestic space and its organization. At its core was \u201cWhere should you put the television set\u201d. The television set became the emblematic center depicted in magazines. TV\u2019s created a unifying force that both fit into the segmentation of family life but also had to bring opposing forces together. TV\u2019s expanded to be present in many different rooms in a house, not just the living room. TV\u2019s became catalysts for separate lives to be joined into one.<\/p>\n

My take on all of this is one I mentioned prior. TV\u2019s, representative of domestic spaces, were marketed in the same way nuclear families were in the mid-1950\u2019s. There was the man, the wife, and their two kids (boy and girl) with a dining table full of food and warm smiles. On screen, romance films featured a dashing semi-predatory man \u201cwinning over\u201d a beautiful woman. At the end of the film, they were happily together and usually occupied a living space. All of this came under a guise of \u201cpurity\u201d and idealism, in which a beautiful home with a nice TV set was the trademark of a happy life. Indirectly, this othered any and all identities that didn\u2019t fit into that mold. This is why media and film has so much power. It normalizes certain points of views and lives. What is seen on screen is accepted and used as the framework for how we view our own lives. For this reason, the simple placement of a TV is significant, especially when we consider that not all homes are the same.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u00a0 In Week 2, I was struck by Lynn Spigel\u2019s article \u201cTelevision and the Family Ideal in Postwar America\u201d. It talks about the TV and how it fit(s) into domestic spaces of the US. With its introduction, the TV became the \u201ccentral figure in representation of family relationship\u201d. What I first found interesting about this … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “TV\u2019s : The Catalysts of Family Life”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":717,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-129","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/gendersexualityandmedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/129","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/gendersexualityandmedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/gendersexualityandmedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/gendersexualityandmedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/717"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/gendersexualityandmedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=129"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/gendersexualityandmedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/129\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":131,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/gendersexualityandmedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/129\/revisions\/131"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/gendersexualityandmedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=129"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/gendersexualityandmedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=129"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/gendersexualityandmedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=129"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}