Sitcoms Today
The way of portraying men in the sitcoms of 1970s is important for understanding gender roles in sitcoms. Men were portrayed as the only decision-makers and the only responsible and “adult” persons in the society. Both Leave it to Beaver and All in the Family suggested that women should subdue to the men, that they may occupy with their own businesses only when men are out of home and when they men are absolutely satisfied (Fraiman, 1999). All in the Family expressly stated that men are making money and doing business, so women are responsible for household, family, children and lot of other things. There were no special sitcoms for men, but in the sitcoms like Leave it to Beaver, All in the Family and Brady Bunch men were really portrayed as being on the top of the things.
Unlike the sitcoms of the 1970s, the today’s sitcoms pay little attention to men. If in 1970s they were portrayed as dominant people, in now they are not simply put at one level with women – they were almost ignored in the sitcoms like Designing Women, Still Standing or King of Queens. Designing Women, for example, was focused on everything about women: work, leisure, fashion, and men were touched only in the role of husbands/partners of women. Designing Women and Still Standing did not portray the domination of women over men, because they did not portray men at all – like the women are only people in the world. The men in today’s TV shows seem to be dumb and incapable of doing anything.
Thus, today's TV shows the men seem incapable of doing anything and in the past it was them that did everything. The men seemed to have made themselves dumb and the women are the only ones capable of doing those things. A female reviewer claims that Designing Women is part of the progress television has made in getting the female experience right and there is general agreement that the appeal of the sitcom comes from the interplay of its female characters, who talk about the things women really talk about while laughing, and commiserating, and teasing, and supporting one another, as women do.
Thus, this media coverage of gender-related sitcoms reveals an emphasis on the realism of the sitcom’s portrayal of adult women and their interaction. Implicit feminist elements are easily discerned from this discussion. At a basic level, the sitcoms of 1950-70s and the current sitcoms highlight adult female interaction, a theme that gets little attention on television. Moreover, the sitcom presents “women’s talk” – frequently devalued as gossip, chatter, or bitching – as meaningful and worthwhile. That conversation, however, often turns to specific feminist issues, which are dissected and analyzed with the same vigor as the less political topics named above. What emerges in many episodes is a variation on consciousness-raising, a regeneration of feminist consciousness that often vigorously resists post-feminist attitudes. The feminist discourse of these sitcoms does not exist without contradiction. Every episode does not involve a feminist issue, and not all feminist issues are framed in the way that many feminists would like.
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Sexism in Sitcoms: Interrelation
King of Queens is the easiest to define as the post-feminist sitcom. King of Queens’s plot is about two divorced mothers, who were friends since childhood, and who now live together in the apartment in New York, bringing up their three children together. It is like the domestic comedy with a slight twist that was no seldom on television in 1990s. So, in such case both parents are female. But in social dimension, in this family there are the roles of both father and mother in the parents (Cancian & Ross, 2001).
Still Standing was defined to be the most feminist program among all the prime-time sitcoms of the 1990s. However, its radical feminist tone was softened considerably near the end of its demonstration. Like King of Queens, it was also focused on the troubles of the program and. But Still Standing also concerned the backlash against feminist that occurred in the 1990s (Cancian & Ross, 2001). In Still Standing, the criticism of the so-called institutional inequality (that included sexism, gender discrimination, racism, etc) that was usual for feminism earlier, was almost over. The sitcom was focused on the problems of women without paying attention to the possibility of discrimination. What is more, it was focused on women’s issues like there were no men at all.
Another sitcom alike is Designing Women. Still Standing and Designing Women have some common features. Both built episodes around the problems of women. Both sitcoms underlined the so-called female bonding that was a rarity in the 1990s television (Moseley & Read, 2002). Though Designing Women was focused on the interior-design partnership of four women, it did not show that thee women try to live in “man’s world”. The sitcom emphasized that women should remain women, and, like Still Standing, men’s issues appeared only if the plot involved the discussion of the husband or partner of some woman. What is crucial, Designing Women became a piece of a line-up which included the series of sitcoms that, as expected, should attract the coveted working women’s audience (Moseley & Read, 2002). And in fact Designing Women did so.
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Sexism and Sitcoms
The traditions of media coverage of sexism issues change in the late 1980s and in 1990s. One final sign of the ascendance of post-feminism in 1990s television was the decline of the primary form for representing feminism in 1980s television: the single working-woman sitcom. The longest and the most typical running shows of this type in the 1980s were holdovers from the 1980s, were King of Queens and Still Standing.
To claim, as its producers and various critics have, that Leave It to Beaver was about lifestyle, whereas All in the Family was about politics, does not necessarily detract from the sitcom’s feminist resonance for viewers. At least in media interpretations, feminism increasingly was equated with lifestyle, especially the kind of lifestyle exemplified by media star Gloria Steinem. Maude first emerged as a character on All in the Family, from which Maude was a spin-off. As Edith Bunker’s outspoken, politically liberal cousin, she was a sparring partner for the equally outspoken, stubborn, but politically conservative Archie. Maude was not an evolving feminist, feeling her way in a man’s world; rather, she appeared on the television screen as a fully formed, self-confident ideologue. Both these sitcoms had the element that was missing in post-feminist sitcoms: the so-called “female bonding” or sisterhood. Both King of Queens and Designing Women appeared to be the examples of post-family television (Shugart, Waggoner & O’Brien Hallstein, 2001).
King of Queens, Still Standing and One Day at a Time, sitcoms of 1990s, were designed strictly for white, heterosexual, middle-class women (Cancian & Ross, 2001). The sitcoms of 1990s were glorifying to female bonding and alternative family forms. That is why their radical view were combined with the analysis of the obstacles that modern women face in the world, these obstacles, by the way, were rather traditional (Shugart, Waggoner & O’Brien Hallstein, 2001). That is why such shows are post-feminist. In King of Queens, for example, the gender-related matters were analyzed like being dramatic for individual women instead of discussing them as problems of women at all.
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