Date of Award

7-15-2010

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Teaching & Learning

First Advisor

Kimberly Donehower-Weinstein

Abstract

This analysis examines the ways in which cultural feelings about feminism are both exhibited through and reflected in popular culture channels such as television. This project continues work done by feminist television scholars, but it also introduces an important element to further such analysis: an urban-rural binary. The ideologies of rural and urban are so deeply embedded in our cultural consciousness that their influence on how viewers interpret the programs is undeniable. The urban-rural binary presented in these programs draws upon notions of nostalgia and morality long-held in our culture. In the programs analyzed here (Green Acres, Northern Exposure, and The Simple Life), the ways in which rural and urban women are represented rely on nostalgic ideologies about the rural. Viewers' values, reflective of embedded cultural expectations and understandings, come into play when they watch the programs, resulting in an almost unconscious assignation of value judgments to the characters, including the women, based on the values associated with the rural. The introduction of how rural and urban contribute to analysis about women and feminism on television has not been very deeply plumbed, however, which is where this project enters the discussion. The intersection of ideologies represented here, those Jeffersonian notions of country life, the survivalist fantasy of the wilderness, and the roles of women in society, is an important one. Nostalgia plays a crucial role in maintaining both the rural idyll and the angel in the house image, and it's also a favorite strategy for television to employ to please viewers. That viewers assign meaning to what they see is an important element of the ways in which these portrayals work because viewers bring so much of their understandings of rural and urban with them when they watch programs like the ones analyzed here. This project provides the addition of that layer of analysis that includes consideration of the rural-urban binary to existing discussions of representations of women on television, which creates a richer and more complete discussion.

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