Welcome to the dreamhouse : popular media and postwar suburbs / Lynn Spigel.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Spigel, Lynn.

Series:

Console-ing passions

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Television broadcasting--Social aspects--United States.

Television broadcasting.

Television broadcasting--Social aspects.

United States.

Physical Description:

426 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm.

Place of Publication:

Durham, NC : Duke University Press, 2001.

Summary:

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.

Contents:

Part I TV Households

The Suburban Home Companion: Television and the Neighborhood Ideal in Postwar America 31

Portable TV: Studies in Domestic Space Travel 60

Part II White Flight

From Domestic Space to Outer Space: The 1960s Fantastic Family Sitcom 107

Outer Space and Inner Cities: African American Responses to NASA 141

Part III Baby Boom Kids

Seducing the Innocent: Childhood and Television in Postwar America 185

Innocence Abroad: The Geopolitics of Childhood in Postwar Kid Strips 219

Part IV Living Room to Gallery

High Culture in Low Places: Television and Modern Art, 1950-1970 265

Barbies without Ken: Femininity, Feminism, and the Art-Culture System 310

Part V Rewind and Fast Forward

From the Dark Ages to the Golden Age: Women's Memories and Television Reruns 357

Yesterday's Future, Tomorrow's Home 381.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

0822326876

0822326965

OCLC:

44905045