In her foregoing exploration of television's closet logics, Joyrich observes that "the institutional organization of U.S. broadcasting situates television precisely on the precarious border of public and private, 'inside' and 'outside.' Here it constructs knowledges identified as both secret (domestically received) and shared (defined as part of a collective national culture)" (445). In other words, television's textual contortions around homosexuality are not only akin to those of the culture at large (in Sedgwick's terms), but also interlaced with them -- and related binary hazards. If television compromises familiar boundaries, this is in part because it has its roots as a mass medium in destabilizing postwar transformations. In an article about television as "The Suburban Home Companion" in the 1950's, Lynn Spigel maintains that, during an era when the frontiers of (the domestic) inside and (the economic) outside were being renegotiated, "Television was caught in a contradictory movement between private and public worlds, and it often became a rhetorical figure for that contradiction" (213) -- the home's "antiseptic" "window on the world," but also a breach in its walls that lets in social contagions. Such ambivalence had gendered ramifications, as television "became a central trope for the crisis of masculinity in post-war culture" (229). The volatile public/private nexus is at the heart of television's gendered economic deployment as much as of its discursive features. Streeter and Wahl write that "The idea of the living room as the center of leisure in the modern TV household is part of a broader... discourse of the 'consumer'... Assumptions about domestic space, and its function within a capitalist economy, are built on the gendered roles of married couples" (249). That is, the stability of consumer capitalism, from its inception, depended upon the segregation of public and private domains that were constructed as masculine and feminine, but by a wholly ideological fiction: "women became involved in the market because of the simple necessity of purchasing goods to maintain a household... This hidden economic influence hints at the fallacy of the 'separate spheres' theory, of the idea of a private space disengaged from the marketplace" (250-1). Thus though, as Spigel reminds us, a "fear of feminization has characterized the debates on mass culture since the nineteenth century" (229-30), this already rich ambivalence about the literal and symbolic role of women in the economy (particularly in relation to consumption) took on new intensities when television entered the picture.
As Serafina Bathrick writes, "the new [post-war] economic reality that... middle-class women, wives and mothers were entering the labour force as never before" (100) was an especially fraught node in these gendered networks, and the professional woman became a privileged emblem of the anxieties stimulated around the shifting public/private border. While television is thoroughly entangled with the gendered contradictions and transgressions that span public and private spaces, the overdetermined figure of the working woman is necessarily imbricated with the televisual terrain. The professional woman, in literal terms, crossed onto the TV screen with the popular Mary Tyler Moore Show in 1970 (when the reorganization of the workforce had already been underway for more than two decades, as Bathrick points out). This and other initial portrayals were predictably ambivalent, manifesting "the historical and ideological mandate for keeping the familial intact" (105) via "another, albeit more 'responsive', commitment to family values" (103) displaced onto the "workplace family." At the same time, representing the domestic (or, indeed, erotic) concerns proper to femininity within the public professional setting was often an insurmountably thorny proposition: a 1971 article "asserts that working women portrayed on TV are never granted private lives and that mothers are denied any relationship to the workplace" (102), and we would be hard pressed to demonstrate that the representational landscape has changed much since. Kirsten Lentz argues that, additionally, typical discourses around these programs translated feminist struggles against such double binds into "television’s struggle for legitimation" (50), a move that "relies simultaneously upon freeing television from its femininity and conferring new value on that femininity" (51). This strategic maneuvering demonstrates, again, that the uncertainties posed by the changing status of women, and by the disruptive working woman in particular, are bound up with uneasiness around television itself that it must navigate and contain. Finally, Lauren Rabinovitz recognizes that "Network programming executives initially became interested in 'feminist programming' in the early 1970s because it was good business," given "an important national shift in audience" (145) toward the young female professional as the new privileged consumer. In this metatextual sense, too, television's position vis à vis women's roles is inextricable from the complex interdependence of consumer capitalism and gender.
Inhabiting the borderlands of several critical oppositions, then, these negotiations inevitably intersect with erotic peril and discipline (as Sedgwick suggests they must). The fantasmatic association of lesbian deviance with female autonomy predates post-war economies and media, and in the television age, the specter of transgressive same-sex desire continues to haunt profoundly conflicted portrayals of the working woman. Sasha Torres remarks on "the televisual tendency to use feminism and lesbianism as stand-ins for each other" (177) across the industry's various attempts to capitalize on feminism's potential demographic appeal. She argues that this deployment performed contradictory functions, vacillating between representing the lesbian character (beginning with Marilyn McGrath on the hospital drama HeartBeat) as the "privileged signifier of feminism" and thus like other women, and as fundamentally different from other women to "ease the ideological threat... by localizing the homosexuality which might otherwise pervade these homosocial spaces" (179). In other words, the architecture of the closet reasserts itself over the figure of the feminist or professional woman as the impulse to simultaneously incorporate and displace her violation of the culture's constitutive boundaries. Because Sedgwick's theory of the closet exposes how the homo/hetero frontier is inextricable from other foundational binaries, because television itself and the pleasure we take in it as consumers are deeply implicated in cultural changes that generate ever-intensifying anxieties about such divisions, lesbian desire (as both lure and threat) is integral to televisual domains.
As Serafina Bathrick writes, "the new [post-war] economic reality that... middle-class women, wives and mothers were entering the labour force as never before" (100) was an especially fraught node in these gendered networks, and the professional woman became a privileged emblem of the anxieties stimulated around the shifting public/private border. While television is thoroughly entangled with the gendered contradictions and transgressions that span public and private spaces, the overdetermined figure of the working woman is necessarily imbricated with the televisual terrain. The professional woman, in literal terms, crossed onto the TV screen with the popular Mary Tyler Moore Show in 1970 (when the reorganization of the workforce had already been underway for more than two decades, as Bathrick points out). This and other initial portrayals were predictably ambivalent, manifesting "the historical and ideological mandate for keeping the familial intact" (105) via "another, albeit more 'responsive', commitment to family values" (103) displaced onto the "workplace family." At the same time, representing the domestic (or, indeed, erotic) concerns proper to femininity within the public professional setting was often an insurmountably thorny proposition: a 1971 article "asserts that working women portrayed on TV are never granted private lives and that mothers are denied any relationship to the workplace" (102), and we would be hard pressed to demonstrate that the representational landscape has changed much since. Kirsten Lentz argues that, additionally, typical discourses around these programs translated feminist struggles against such double binds into "television’s struggle for legitimation" (50), a move that "relies simultaneously upon freeing television from its femininity and conferring new value on that femininity" (51). This strategic maneuvering demonstrates, again, that the uncertainties posed by the changing status of women, and by the disruptive working woman in particular, are bound up with uneasiness around television itself that it must navigate and contain. Finally, Lauren Rabinovitz recognizes that "Network programming executives initially became interested in 'feminist programming' in the early 1970s because it was good business," given "an important national shift in audience" (145) toward the young female professional as the new privileged consumer. In this metatextual sense, too, television's position vis à vis women's roles is inextricable from the complex interdependence of consumer capitalism and gender.
Inhabiting the borderlands of several critical oppositions, then, these negotiations inevitably intersect with erotic peril and discipline (as Sedgwick suggests they must). The fantasmatic association of lesbian deviance with female autonomy predates post-war economies and media, and in the television age, the specter of transgressive same-sex desire continues to haunt profoundly conflicted portrayals of the working woman. Sasha Torres remarks on "the televisual tendency to use feminism and lesbianism as stand-ins for each other" (177) across the industry's various attempts to capitalize on feminism's potential demographic appeal. She argues that this deployment performed contradictory functions, vacillating between representing the lesbian character (beginning with Marilyn McGrath on the hospital drama HeartBeat) as the "privileged signifier of feminism" and thus like other women, and as fundamentally different from other women to "ease the ideological threat... by localizing the homosexuality which might otherwise pervade these homosocial spaces" (179). In other words, the architecture of the closet reasserts itself over the figure of the feminist or professional woman as the impulse to simultaneously incorporate and displace her violation of the culture's constitutive boundaries. Because Sedgwick's theory of the closet exposes how the homo/hetero frontier is inextricable from other foundational binaries, because television itself and the pleasure we take in it as consumers are deeply implicated in cultural changes that generate ever-intensifying anxieties about such divisions, lesbian desire (as both lure and threat) is integral to televisual domains.
