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"The Cultural Politics of Wife Swap : Taste, Lifestyle Media, and the American Family"

2007; Volume: 37; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/flm.2007.0057

1548-9922

Sarah A. Matheson,

Media Studies and Communication

"The Cultural Politics of Wife Swap:Taste, Lifestyle Media, and the American Family" Sarah A. Matheson (bio) The suburban situation comedies of the late 1950s and mid 1960s provided an enduring portrait of the American family that, even to this day, conjures a potent image of what the idealized domestic lifestyle looked like during this era. Series such as Leave it to Beaver and Father Knows Best presented idyllic representations of comfortable and orderly households located within tidy suburban neighborhoods and filled with precocious yet well behaved children. This was also an image that depended upon clearly defined gender roles (breadwinner father, homemaker mother) and worked to naturalize a middle class positioning in its definition of family life. In her analysis of these series, Mary Beth Haralovich points to the various kinds of exclusion that contributed to the narrow image of the family that these programs supported. She writes that these series rarely make direct reference to the social and economic means by which the families attained and maintain their middle-class status. Their difference from other classes is not a subject of these sit-coms. By effacing the separations of race, class, age, and gender that produced suburban neighborhoods, Father Knows Best and Leave it to Beaver naturalize the privilege of the middle class. (129) In their representation of the family, therefore, these programs emphasized sameness and homogeneity, evading differences based on race, ethnicity, and class. And, as Haralovich's analysis reveals, they also depended upon an image of an ideal middle-class lifestyle in which home, décor, and the other luxuries promoted within post-war consumer society provided the backdrop upon which these family-focused narratives unfolded. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Wife Swap, ABC Television The specific image of family constructed through this type of suburban situation comedy has obviously faded from American television, giving way to more varied representation. Today, reality television has arguably taken center stage as the genre providing popular images of American family life. In 1973, PBS's An American Family presented a candid glimpse of the private conflicts and struggles of the Loud family and is widely identified as the first documentary series on U.S. television to probe family life in this way. It was considered controversial due to its frank representation of their domestic life and for what it revealed about the less than ideal dynamics that underpinned the "typical" suburban family. With the current explosion of reality based series, images of "real" family life now permeate all areas of the television landscape, presenting a variety of representations of marriage and child rearing. TLC's shift from its more educational focused mandate to its later, "Life Unscripted" (and current "Live and Learn") format, for instance, has been accompanied by a host of "lifestyle documentaries," many of which are devoted to relationship, parenting, and family issues (Stephens, 191). These include, for example, daytime series such as A Wedding Story, A Baby Story, Bringing Home Baby, Surviving Motherhood, as well as prime time series such as One Week to Save Your Marriage, Little People, Big World, Shalom in the Home, Honey We're Killing the Kids, and House of Tiny Terrors. The recent spate of celebrity reality shows on cable channels has featured a number of series that highlight the wacky yet ordinary character of their everyday domestic lives. These include MTV and VH1 series such as Meet the Barkers, Newlyweds: Nick and Jessica, The Osbornes, [End Page 33] Breaking Bonaduce, Hogan Knows Best, A&E series such as Tuckerville and Gene Simmons: Family Jewels, Growing Up Gotti, and E!'s House of Carters and Gastineau Girls. The recent success of series such as Trading Spouses, Nanny 911, Supernanny, and Wife Swap reflects the spread of this type of programming from daytime schedules and cable channels to prime time networks, confirming the central place of the genre on American television generally. This essay examines the representation of the family in ABC's reality program, Wife Swap, focusing specifically on issues surrounding gender and class. Based on the popular British version, Wife Swap garners high ratings for the network and, according to ABC's website, is its most...