Welcome to the Dreamhouse

Spigel Lynn Spigel

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.

Sujets

• Sociologie, société et politique
• Cultural studies
• Americas
• Television
• Media studies

Informations

• Publié par: Duke University Press
• Date de parution: 01 juin 2001
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780822383178
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

Welcome to the * Dreamhouse *

- 

Edited by Lynn Spigel

Television and Cultural Power

* Welcome to the Dreamhouse * *

Popular Media and Postwar Suburbs

*

Lynn Spigel

   Durham and London * *

©  Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper & Designed by Amy Ruth Buchanan Typeset in Sabon by Tseng Information Systems, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in- Publication Data appear on the last printed page of this book.

Roslyn Spigel,

–

Withlovetomymother,

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction



ix

Part I: TV Households

The Suburban Home Companion: Television and the Neighborhood Ideal in Postwar America 

Portable TV: Studies in Domestic Space Travel

PartII:WhiteFlight



From Domestic Space to Outer Space: The s Fantastic Family Sitcom 

Outer Space and Inner Cities: African American Responses to NASA 

Part III: Baby Boom Kids

Seducing the Innocent: Childhood and Television in Postwar America 

Innocence Abroad: The Geopolitics of Childhood in Postwar Kid Strips 

Part IV: Living Room to Gallery

High Culture in Low Places: Television and Modern Art, – 

Barbies without Ken: Femininity, Feminism, and the Art-Culture System 

Part V: Rewind and Fast Forward

From the DarkAges to the Golden Age: Women’s Memories and Television Reruns

Yesterday’s Future, Tomorrow’s Home

Index







Acknowledgments

Thankyou to my friends and colleagues for their wisdom and guid- * ance. Charlotte Brunsdon, Julie D’Acci, Michael Curtin, and George Lipsitz read various essays and inspired me with their own work. My dear friends Margie Solovay and Chris Berry always deserve very special thanks. Victoria Johnson, Anna Everett, Steven Classen, Chris Anderson, Ellen Seiter, David Morley, Horace Newcomb, Moya Luckett, Constance Penley, Henry Jenkins, Herman Gray, Nick Browne, Jan Olsson, Mimi White, William Forman, and Mary Beth Haralovich all offered much ap- preciated support. I’m also grateful tofriends and colleagues Marita Sturken, Dana Polan, Tania Modleski, Marsha Kinder, Barbara Corday, Michael Renov, Tara McPherson, Alison Trope, and Doug Thomas for their ideas and collaboration over the years. Heather Osborne, Innis Bar- ton, and Liza Trevino provided valuable help with research. I am also grateful to the people at the Wisconsin Center State Historical Archives, the John Fitzgerald Kennedy Library, the USC Doheny Cinema Library, the UCLA Film and Television Archive, the Museum of Television and Radio, the Smithsonian Institution, and the Museum of Modern Art Library and Archive. Finally, I am especially thankful to Jeffrey Sconce for his kindness, intelligence, and humor while I put this collection together.