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Mapping feminism: representing women's liberation in 1970s popular media

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Mapping feminism: representing women's liberation in 1970s popular media

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Content MAPPING FEMINISM: REPRESENTING WOMEN’S LIBERATION IN 1970S POPULAR MEDIA by Jennifer Susanne Clark A Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (CRITICAL STUDIES) May 2007 Copyright 2007 Jennifer Susanne Clark ii Acknowledgements It is an understatement to say that this dissertation is not mine alone. From its earliest conception to its final moments, this project depended upon a variety of professional and personal supports for which I am very grateful. I was fortunate enough to work with a dissertation committee comprised not only of world-class intellectuals, but also of kind and generous mentors who unfailingly gave me their attention and support throughout my time at the University of Southern California. Dana Polan adopted me as an advisee when I was far along in my Ph.D. program and was generous enough to continue on in an advisory role, even from across the country. He read and responded to countless weekly reports, directed me to engaging ideas and scholarship, gently urged me to complicate my very basic ideas, and, at times, propped up my sagging morale. I could not have asked for a more compassionate, enthusiastic, or dedicated advisor. Tania Modleski, whose feminist scholarship I have long admired, helped me to define my own field of study through her extraordinary courses and her incisive feedback. Tara McPherson’s optimism helped me through many trying moments and her suggestions for my project made for some of my most enjoyable research and writing. Throughout my academic career, I have encountered teachers and scholars, too numerous to name here, who encouraged me in ways they will never know. Mary Jean Corbett helped me to see that graduate school was a possibility; Andrea Lunsford helped me see that I belonged there. Terry Moore, Judith Mayne, and Linda Mizejewski introduced me to feminist film scholarship and modeled exemplary iii scholarship and teaching. Lynn Spigel’s excellent courses introduced me to creative research methods and cross-disciplinary investigations. My dissertation group kept my project on-track and limited its weaknesses. In the group’s early formulation, Priscilla Ovalle, Karen Beavers, and Mary Jeanne Wilson endured many of my burdensome early drafts. Chunchi Wang and Stephanie DeBoer stayed with me to the end, reading and re-reading an enormous amount of unpolished writing, while providing me with invaluable feedback and plenty of good cheer. Going through the process of dissertation writing with these intelligent, thoughtful, and accomplished women made it more bearable and less lonely. I received financial support from the American Association of University Women in the form of their American Fellowship, which freed up my time and energies to complete the dissertation. USC’s Center for Feminist Research and the Division of Critical Studies also provided much-appreciated fellowships and scholarships. I owe a personal debt of gratitude to Meg Leder and Vim Pasupathi, whose friendship has survived graduate school and lives lived apart. They have made me laugh and feel better about a staggering array of life’s concerns. They are dear friends whose wit and intelligence have enriched my life. Nelda Williams and Bob Williams have become my family and friends over the course of the past seven years. They have provided me with countless delicious dinners, unflagging enthusiasm for my scholarship, and sage advice on matters both intellectual and emotional. iv My parents, Phyllis Clark and Ronald Clark, made sacrifices throughout their lives so that I may have and, more importantly, value my education. My time in graduate school may have seemed like a lengthy and peculiar journey to them, but they never once questioned my career choice. My sister, Kristi Clark, often asked that difficult, risky question: How is the dissertation going? and actually listened to the answer. Finally, I thank Bill Dunks, who is my greatest champion. v Table of Contents Acknowledgements ii Abstract vi Introduction 1 Chapter 1: Picturing Feminism: The Liberated Woman and the 10 Revival of the Television and Film Industries Chapter 2: Women’s Lib on the Couch: Psychology, Embodiment, 81 and Surveillance within a Therapeutic Culture Chapter 3: Police Women, Criminal Women and the 154 Public, Urban Landscape Chapter 4: Picturing America and Its Women: 241 The Complex Alliance of Nationalism and Feminism in 1970s America Conclusion: The 1980s: The End of the Liberated Woman? 301 Bibliography 317 vi Abstract This dissertation explores the role of 1970s popular media and the U.S. Women’s Liberation Movement in constructing representations of female liberation. Feminism posed significant challenges to conventional techniques of representing women, creating a state of representational uncertainty within the Movement and within the industries of television, film, and other mainstream media. Although feminism and popular media are often perceived as antithetical cultural forces, each operated in a productive relationship, even in dissent, with the other to formulate meaningful images of women’s new “liberated” identities. As a media expression of feminism, the figure of the liberated woman afforded producers, directors, and network executives a new source of storylines, a new aesthetic of producing womanhood, and a new set of business practices based on revised gender ideologies. While feminists based a significant portion of their political energies on protesting media representations of women, they also turned to the media not only as an outlet for their political platform, but also for a grammar of visibility. The Women’s Movement selectively borrowed from media to produce and advance their coherence across the geographically and ideologically fragmented category of “Woman.” By identifying and analyzing the particular resolutions to the representational challenges created by feminist forces of the Seventies, this dissertation considers the new spaces, identities, and discourses involved in women’s everyday lives, feminist political groups, popular media texts, and media’s industrial practices. Exploring film vii and television texts such as Police Woman, Get Christie Love!, and An Unmarried Woman, as well as women who enacted various forms of liberation that garnered intense media attention and disrupted prevailing gender representations—Patricia Hearst, Barbara Walters, Angela Davis, and Gloria Steinem, among others—this project utilizes feminist media theory; critical geography; and theories of gender, race, and sexuality to consider the mutual participation of mainstream media and feminist groups in the construction of female subjectivity within a specific industrial and socio-historical frame. 1 Introduction As with many academic projects, this one originates in personal experience. I am a feminist who was born in the early 1970s. As such, I did not participate conventionally in feminism during what arguably was its greatest era. Instead, while growing up, I accessed this pivotal socio-political moment through popular cultural mediations of feminism. My age, combined with the regional and personal terms of my life, distanced me from the Women’s Liberation Movement of the Seventies. Growing up in a small farming community in Ohio, I encountered a series of political, personal, geographical, and cultural obstacles to my burgeoning feminist sensibilities. In order to connect with feminist ideas and images, I turned to popular representations of feminism in order to understand and model myself on the proper modes of behavior befitting a “liberated” female. From this perspective, I entertain highly subjective notions about feminism and feminists that were, and continue to be, shaped by media representations. While I acknowledge the problems of mainstream media constructing feminism for young girls and women, I also recognize the centrality of these popular versions of feminism in my own life, the tangible access to other dimensions of identity and action they provided me, and language and concepts I borrowed from media representations to articulate my own discontent. The flexibility of fantasies involved in media constructions of liberated women—whether it was Wonder Woman or Gloria Steinem—spanned geographical and ideological distances for me. 2 I relate this personal contextualization to demonstrate the ideological effectiveness of a range of popular cultural productions about/for women, even ones that were (and continue to be) perceived as anti-feminist by many feminists. I also intend to draw attention to the importance of geographical specificity and regionalism in understanding the (in)abilities of political movements to reach populations defined by the economics, labor, landscape, and cultural paradigms of a particular locale. This project attends to the formulations of feminisms within popular media of the 1970s with the goal of understanding the specific challenges faced by media industries and feminist groups in their drive to articulate feminist politics and subjectivities for the mainstream public and the particular solutions they devised in order to do so. With the flexible, amorphous concept of “liberation” as a common signifier, the media and the Women’s Movement worked to formulate and make material a tangible, transmittable conceptualization of this quality. In order to accomplish this, both feminists and the media utilized surprisingly similar techniques of visualization that were connected to material conditions of identity, space, and prevailing cultural practices of the 1970s (e.g. techniques of self-expression and surveillance within a therapeutic culture). The Seventies as a Decade Configuration This study begins with the year 1970, the year in which “‘women’s lib’ was on everyone’s lips.” 1 Conceptually important as the mark of a new decade during 3 which feminism became a powerful presence, 1970 was also the very year when feminism met significantly with popular media. As a 1970 Newsweek article reported, “1970 was the year in which American women became intellectually aware of the modern feminist movement.” 2 It then predicted the future success of feminism through popular cultural means of communication: “1971 may turn out to be the year in which women’s lib will become part of [women’s] everyday lives.” 3 A germinal moment for the Women’s Movement, 1970 was the year during which New York State liberalized abortion laws; the House of Representatives passed the ERA; and the Women’s Strike for Equality in New York City drew between 35,000 to 50,000 women, making it the “largest demonstration for female equality in American history.” 4 Along with these political and legal triumphs, the Movement gained a public profile and viability through popular cultural means. Feminist publications, such as Sexual Politics, The Dialectic of Sex, and Sisterhood is Powerful, became best sellers. Feminist activists successfully engaged with popular media industries. In a highly publicized event, feminists occupied the corporate offices of the Ladies Home Journal and successfully protested the magazine’s inequitable employment practices and stereotypical representations of women. 5 In the year 1970, feminism began to merge seemingly disparate institutions of the judicial system and the private sphere, to redefine public spaces through women’s visible demonstrations of discontent, and to control the creation and content of popular media with expressions 4 of feminism as a central force. This era, as explored in this project’s conclusion, came to an end at the close of the decade with ascendancy of Reaganite masculinity and its attendant reassertions of conventional gendered identities on cultural, legal, national, economic, and personal fronts. Mapping the Liberated Woman By 1970, just as the Women’s Liberation Movement gained in popularity and challenged the hiring practices, industrial economics, and fundamental visual logics of popular media, the media industry found women audiences who were aware of the Movement increasingly appealing. Attempting to capture this new, lucrative demographic and to reinvent industrial and aesthetic practices through the onscreen presence of feminism, popular media sought to court a seemingly hostile audience and to create a representation of a woman who challenged the fundamental aesthetics and business practices of mainstream media. In order to accomplish these goals, media needed to produce a mediated figure of feminism that would necessarily break with conventions of representing women (through glamour, femininity, demure yet apparent heterosexuality, etc.), yet that would enhance, not destroy, media’s economic might and cultural influence. This critical balance often proved elusive. Real-life feminists were, at best, skeptical of the media’s ability to represent them. Moreover, one of feminism’s primary goals was to shatter the production of images of women that proved popular and pleasurable to mass audience. What, then, was mass media supposed to do with this powerful challenge? The media response 5 needed not only to manage the political threat to its industrial mainstay—the image of woman—but also to capitalize upon it. This capitalization was, however, not without its own flux. Feminists also worked through mediated images to formulate a new image of woman and to express a sense of their own political movement, often usurping the techniques and material processes of the media to express their presence. This project suggests that media and feminist groups required reciprocity to function productively in 1970s America and, in order to do so, engaged in a mutual “mapping” to make feminist politics legible to the American public. In attending to the particular visual terms of liberated womanhood’s visibility, this project identifies culturally/aesthetically significant patterns that emerged on the representational scene during the convergence of feminism and media. The challenges to and reinvention of visual codes posed in this convergence became a key preoccupation for media industries and feminist groups alike. In Alice Doesn’t, Teresa de Lauretis identifies the importance of codification of the subject and image by posing the following question: “For how else would social values and symbolic systems be mapped into subjectivity if not by the agency of the codes (the relations of the subject in meaning, language, cinema, etc.) which make possible representation and self-representation?” 6 Both the media and feminists were pressed to formulate new codes of gender representation and subjectivity. These codes constructed an image of liberated womanhood that strove to encompass the myriad 6 women who made demands on the prevailing system of representation, to produce a new grammar of womanhood that satisfied all parties involved in producing and receiving this image (the media and feminist groups, not to mention the public audiences for both), and to articulate the abstraction of gender liberation in its most marketable notion (the fantasies, energies, vitality, and desires unleashed by the liberated woman, not the “dull” aspects of feminism, e.g. extracted legal battles, congressional hearings, corporate mandates). Feminists and media industries formulated the terms of a new social and representational world inhabited by the liberated woman, which could be articulated on a number of registers. Refuting the visibility of femininity long-employed by visual systems of meaning, the new figure of liberated womanhood posed considerable challenges to the project of representation. To fill the void left by feminist challenges to conventionally feminine subjectivity, media and feminists retooled the signifiers of womanhood to make them visible within feminism’s new representational demands. Thus, both groups manipulated the signifying terms of space, identity, and discourse to produce an identifiable set of codes that demarcated the body, language, action, and desires of the newly minted figure of the liberated woman. Feminists and media mapped “liberation,” as demonstrated through the particular examples explored in this project, through embodiment, discourse, and geography in the following ways: 7 • Female subjectivities formulated by approximations to and displacements from other bodies, identities, and behaviors typically defined through racial Othering; • Geographies of liberation that authorize particular spaces as appropriate stagings of female independence; • Therapeutic culture/surveillance technologies that produce both space and subjectivity that, in turn, produces and disciplines feminism. These modes of visualization work in relation to one another, each inflecting the others within the context of the feminist movement, the general social climate, and the specific media requirements of the 1970s. Specific elements of these mappings emerge differently among and within this dissertation’s chapters, depending upon the text or figure under discussion. While particular techniques of visualization figure more obviously at times than at others, the overall conception of this dissertation assumes connections, whether implicit or explicit, among the terms of identity, embodiment, space, and discourse. Since this project examines popular media texts, it presents a picture of feminism that does not reflect accurately the complexity of feminist politics or the organized Women’s Liberation Movement. Instead, it deliberately calls forth a version of feminism that is neither wholly of the Movement nor of the media, but rather a union of both. This study is not concerned with the adherence of the images of liberated womanhood to “real” feminist politics and ideologies. Rather, it takes 8 into consideration demonstrations of feminism often condemned as stereotypical in order to gauge the specific patterns and terms of visibility of liberated womanhood and to identify productive relationships between the stereotypical image and audience interpretation, industrial investments, and feminist themselves. Although the liberated woman became visible in often-stereotypical ways and is easily dismissed through a simple binary formula of “true” feminist versus media- appropriated “feminist,” the stereotypical modes through which feminist politics became transmitted reveal complex, contradictory, and productive ideological issues. As Sasha Torres points out, the stereotypical is worth exploring for the “creative and unpredictable work it does.” 7 The liberated woman, as a stereotype of a feminist, makes concrete shifting, amaterial terms of feminist politics and identities. In short, she maps feminism, making it visible and available for critical interrogation. 9 Notes 1 Sara M. Evans, Born for Liberty: A History of Women in America (New York: Free Press 1989) 287. Although feminism had already congealed as an organized political movement— in 1968 according to most accounts—1970 was the date feminist historians often identify as the emergence of a mainstream, publicly acknowledged movement. 2 “Feminist Yearbook” Newsweek 16 Nov. 1970: 113. 3 “Feminist Yearbook” 113. 4 Alice Echols, Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America, 1967-1975 (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1989) 198. 5 See Echols 197-202 and Evans Chapter 13: The Politicization of Personal Life (287-314) for detailed accounts of these events. 6 Teresa de Lauretis, Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1984) 3-4. 7 Sasha Torres, Black, White, and in Color: Television and Black Civil Rights (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2003) 1. 10 Chapter One Picturing Feminism: The Liberated Woman and the Revival of the Television and Film Industries “We do not dislike women.” William S. Paley, CBS board chair, in a 1970 stockholders meeting “Turn on, tune in, and take over.” radical feminist newsjournal off our backs, 1972 The rise of the Women’s Liberation Movement in the 1970s coincided with significant industrial shifts within popular media. In the aftermath of Hollywood’s studio system collapse and in television’s heightened attention to demographics, both film and television worked increasingly hard to capture niche audiences, to formulate innovative aesthetics and content, and to capitalize on the political movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Feminism proved surprisingly useful in meeting these needs. Transformed by the Women’s Liberation Movement and by fundamental changes in business practices, television and film depicted with increasing frequency what would become a stock figure in the decade: the liberated woman. In a 1974 article on mainstream media’s new fascination with feminism, radical feminist newsjournal off our backs identified the “liberated woman” as an embodiment of feminist politics best suited for media representation and audience address. Expressing her feminist politics through popular cultural, visual means, the liberated woman refused to wear dresses and, instead, wore pants-suits and helped to formulate a “media image” that was “for everybody and aimed at women who are 11 still married and struggle with their prick husbands for their ‘equal rights.’” 1 Unlike the radical feminist, whose subjectivity was formulated by her political activism and who lived “closer to the action,” the liberated woman was amenable to consumer culture, posing an easily envisioned, easily represented figure. 2 Distinctive from liberal feminism and its goal of integrating women into the public sphere and achieving equality within pre-existing social structures, radical feminism critiqued fundamental gendered structures of private and public life, challenging the “sexual politics of personal life.” 3 Employing current theoretical terms, Alice Echols defines radical feminists as “social constructionists who wanted to render gender irrelevant.” 4 Conversely, the liberated woman helped to render a gender-specific visibility and signified women’s progress through pre-existing social structures such as media, law, education, and employment. 5 Throughout the Seventies, the liberated woman served useful purposes for the media and for the Women’s Movement. This chapter examines the figure of the liberated woman, the ways in which she is attached to the labor, processes, and products of television and film industries, and the outcomes of this relationship. With this figure, mainstream media was able to announce its improved status through its attention to the current socio-political context in content and in business practices. The liberated woman helped media industries effectively renew audience interest and target a new audience segment of women made visible and desirable, in large part, through the cultural, economic, and personal gains of feminism. 12 Although television and film depended upon the presence of women at every level of production and consumption, the revolutionary promise the liberated woman posed could easily turn into threat, compromising the established power inherent in and produced by these very same media industries. Teresa de Lauretis helpfully theorizes the interconnectedness and resulting power dynamics of gender subjectivity and technology in Technologies of Gender. While media disciplines gender, producing a series of gendered positions as the “effect of representation,” gender also stands in the “excess” of representation, posing a possible “rupture . . .if not contained” by representation. 6 Since the construction of gender operates through the processes enacted by and as the product of media technologies, its powers are incomplete, flexible, and reversible. While I employ de Lauretis’s theorization to understand the relationship between media and gendered subjectivity, I also consider this relationship within a historically and culturally specific frame that fundamentally structures its terms. Even as television and film industries turned to feminism as a central force for their revisions, they worked to contain the worst of the ruptures posed by feminism. For their part, feminists were very aware of the powerful challenges they posed to prevailing systems of representation and to core aesthetic and economic decisions of media industries. This awareness—along with their knowledge of media’s powerful abilities to transmit palatable, material images of new, potentially progressive gender ideologies—pressed feminists to capitalize upon media technologies and industrial structures. Feminists utilized their power to shape the 13 media, knowing full well that the media would accommodate the terms of their self- fashioning. According to radical-socialist feminist group the Class Workshop, “Women’s Liberation is getting popular enough that the media needs [sic] us as much as need them.” 7 In addition to this chapter’s primary exploration of the media’s use of the liberated woman, I also explore the function of popular media in the formulation and dissemination of the Women’s Movement. While the subjectivity and image of the liberated woman was, in part, produced by the media, the media provided important tools of visualization with which real-world women were able to formulate their gendered identities. The dependence between the forces of feminism and media, frequently manifested through productive dissent, modifies both conventional cultural studies debates and feminist scholarship about the relationship between feminism and media. Rather than ascribe strictly to an industrial co-optation or a resistant audience model, this chapter argues that the political feminist movement and the popular culture industry required the techniques and materials of the other to secure their viability within the economic, aesthetic, and ideological circumstances of 1970s U.S. culture. While this revises typical assumptions about the function of popular culture within political movements and the relationship of ideology and audience, it also reformulates conventional histories of feminism and its hostilities to and distance from mainstream media. 8 Just as television offered viewers a vision—albeit with compromised politics—of countercultural youth movements and anti-war protests during the 14 1960s, as Aniko Bodroghkozy details in Groove Tube, 1970s television and film presented feminist politics to their viewers through similarly negotiated mediated terms. According to Bodroghkozy, popular television “could not, and did not, manage to ignore or repress” political protest but instead “grappled with and confronted” relevant, often controversial conditions of the times. 9 Media attempts to represent social rebellion and political upheaval are not as simplistic as a classic model of media co-optation assumes. Instead, challenges to dominant social order prove “tricky” to television representation. 10 This “trickiness” unsettles the power of media to contain successfully the radical politics of social movements, creating an ambivalence to—and, often, a failure of—media’s drive to contain and co-opt. Anxiously Embracing the Liberated Woman Although film and television needed the liberated woman, both as a real world audience member and as an onscreen representational figure, media’s abilities to limit these powers and to convert them to the good of the industry were uncertain. In a Pandora’s Box scenario, the liberated woman’s influence over media, once unleashed, threatened to grow out of control if unchecked. At the very moment women and racial minorities tempted television with their untapped consumer potential as well as the narrative and aesthetic materials they offered, these groups provoked paranoia about the effect they would have on the future of television. This paranoia is reflected in numerous magazine articles throughout the decade with titles such as “The Troubles of Television—And a Coming Revolution,” “Hidden TV Messages,” and “TV: Do Minorities Rule?” 11 Exemplary of this type of journalism, 15 Robert Balon’s “Prelude to Big Brother? Measuring Broadcast Audiences in the Year 2000,” expresses concern for the contemporary moment, 1978, through an imagined apocalyptic future brought about through television and its interest in representing and addressing the liberated woman. Balon’s vision of a future dystopia hinges on television’s business practices introduced in the Seventies. By the year 2000, these decisions have grown out of control. According to Balon’s predictions, networks have proliferated and are facing fierce competition for lucrative, increasingly fragmented audiences. The drive to capture niche audiences defined by gender, race, and sexuality has driven the industry to near-ruination. Television, having catered to audiences since the 1970s, has become a “junkyard of third-rate shows.” 12 Television’s downfall happens in the midst of a larger social wasteland, presumably brought about by the failures of the television medium. Perched high above a nightmarish New York cityscape filled with pollution and overpopulation, Jesse Brake, director of programming for Continental Television, a failing network, labors in his office to find an antidote to the Year 2000’s programming problems. Attempting to reformulate television content to save it from utter ruin, Brake identifies the source of the dreck filling the airwaves. With access to the now- antiquated technologies of a Betamax machine, he identifies all current programming as “verbatim reruns of Police Woman.” 13 Anxieties about television’s future in a time of industrial and technological upheavals coalesce around the ruination of the city, television content and business practices, and the state of human freedoms. All of these concerns function as the by-products of the 1970s entrée of the onscreen 16 liberated woman and television’s response to feminism, both symbolized by the woman cop drama. Through the guise of its science fiction narrative, the article warns late- Seventies readers about the host of evils unleashed by television’s capitulation to female audiences’ desires and consequent woman-centered action shows. Television utilizes extreme technologies to gauge audience responses to its product, going as far as to surgically implant Internal Audio-Visual Meters into viewers’ ears. The meter “instantly and continuously translate[s] all visual and auditory stimuli” to a computer center that compiles regional data made available to the highest bidder. 14 The viewer’s body, already rendered passive and feminized through its acceptance of television’s stock fare of the police woman genre, succumbs to this new surveillant technology brought about by the television industry’s uncontrolled drive to address particular demographics. It is significant to note the source of this future trend; television began targeting specific audiences in the 1970s, partially as a response to newly empowered female market and the networks’ increased attention to women. The network’s salvation depends upon the liberated woman, both as onscreen figure and offscreen audience member, and this new media attention to her presence sparks conservative gender responses. Given the power of the police woman, television’s stock liberated woman figure, to restructure entire networks and provide permutations of programming into the year 2000, her presence becomes too powerful, too threatening to civic order. Though not explicit in the gendering of TV’s failure, Program Director Brake’s antidote to both this invasive technological power 17 and the degraded products of television looks curiously like the revival of patriarchy played out in a nostalgic space of the frontier—a Bonanza redux. Brake promises to save television through a program featuring a “strong-willed rancher on the Venetian Colony” whose wife is dead and, as a consequence, “[h]e’s got to raise three sons alone in the wilderness.” 15 Brake’s proposed show, The Venetians, restores patriarchal structures while imagining a new outerspace frontier of woman-free, unpolluted spaces and relationships that will give audiences what they now presumably desire and lack. In the case of “Prelude to Big Brother?” Women’s Liberation and its media effects bring about a futuristic nightmare that can only be resolved when women are, quite literally, excised from the scene by the male producer of television’s representations. As much as television depended upon the liberated woman, her function must be carefully controlled or else it could have long-ranging and serious consequences. The lucrative content of the onscreen liberated woman proved both convenient and unsettling to the male-controlled media industries and foundational cultural tenets of patriarchy. Thus, gendered control of representation, even as women were gaining onscreen viability as fictional liberated women, was increasingly important and vigorously defended throughout the decade. The scenario established in Balon’s article, though fictional, resonates with the realities of the anxious industrial relationships between the producers of the liberated woman image and the representational power of the onscreen image. The male media worker bore the responsibility of reining in the growing empowerment of women, both on- and 18 offscreen, lest their influence overwhelm the industry, the audience, and the fundamental nature of American society. Even more threatening than the onscreen liberated woman, the real-world woman behind the onscreen representation possessed even-greater disruptive potential. Like her onscreen counterpart, she required the presence of a male media worker to channel her energies for the betterment of media, the audience, and the larger state of culture. The abilities of the media to imagine women’s power and to represent it through televisual and filmic terms often came in sharp conflict with the actual women behind these onscreen representations. By increasing the number and prominence of women working within the industry, television and film improved their image, complied with Federal Communications Committee (FCC) regulations about equitable airtime and fair/accurate representations, and responded to feminist activism. Yet the presence of real women working within the higher echelons of media industries provoked uneasiness and anxieties. Identifying the specific relationships between “woman” and “women” reveals the fundamental power dynamics of representations of gender and the cultural, historical, and ideological terms that produce them. “Woman” is the term Teresa de Lauretis uses to identify a “fictional construct, a distillate from diverse but congruent discourses dominant in Western culture.” 16 While not outside of representation and discourses surrounding and constructing “woman,” de Lauretis defines “women” as distinctive from “woman.” “Women” are the “real historical beings who cannot be defined outside of those discursive formations,” but whose “material existence” offers a crucial 19 distinction from discourse and representation. 17 In the rest of this chapter, I tend to the women behind the woman in order to establish the centrality of the image and the management of the person. I doing so, I deploy the feminist analysis de Lauretis suggests by considering simultaneously two poles of female subjectivity, that of woman and women, that structure the field of media productions during a turbulent social, economic, and industrial period. The Spectacular News Woman In comparison to the fictional creations of male producers, directors, and programmers, real-life women media workers provoked more controversy, possessed more potential power, and posed more of a threat to the media and its gendered foundations. Less easily contained and controlled than the onscreen representation of liberated womanhood, these women prompted concerns about the very core of gendered powers that were expressed through the state of the media. Nowhere is this more apparent during the Seventies than in the arena of television news. The troubled, yet foundational relationship of feminism and television news became one of the most vivid and controversial of the 1970s media industry. Female newscasters summoned up debates as to their qualifications for and impact on the serious nature of television news. These women were blamed for the degradation of television journalism and for single-handedly bringing about the demise of television’s most revered genre. Starting with Barbara Walters’s entrée into TV news and feminism’s demands for women working within the industry, the 1970s marked a time of the growing 20 presence of women within television news. With the career opportunities and prestige of television news, the hiring of women newscasters and anchors marked the success of liberal feminism. Television could pronounce itself attentive to feminism through its hiring practices. The on-air presence of a woman filling such a prestigious position would quell political protests and target the growing feminist and feminist-friendly audience. Beginning with Walters, the news began to openly court female audiences by hiring women in prominent positions. However, the growing power of women within television also provoked hostility and apprehension both within fictional representations of TV news departments and within network news organizations themselves. 18 The presence of television newswomen threatened the ideologies, economics, and aesthetics of the masculine domain of the news genre. Barbara Walters’s highly publicized hiring proved extremely controversial because of its ability to transform the gendered terms of television news aesthetics and economic practices. Walters’s multi-million dollar payday, along with her mode of reporting, generated a host of anxious responses to the state of television, both in terms of content and of industrial/economic policies. With her unprecedented success as a highly paid female television employee, Walters activated a series of discourses involving complicated sexism sourced in the need for and fear of women’s presence on television news programs. Richard Salant, CBS News president and the man who would later hire the less-successful female news anchor Sally Quinn, was a key figure in these debates. Salant’s response to Walters conveys the fundamental gendered anxieties present within this new system of supply and demand. Salant 21 loudly and frequently critiqued ABC’s personnel decision, calling Walters’s salary a “‘grotesque amount of money.’” 19 The boundless nature and power of the grotesque, figured in economic and in bodily terms, establishes a key visualization of the female news anchor and her disruptive qualities. Mary Russo identifies the figure of the female grotesque as “open, protruding, irregular, secreting, multiple, and changing; it is tied to non-official ‘low’ culture of the carnivalesque, and with social transformation.” 20 Although Walters registered primarily as an economic grotesque, highly-visible television news women Sally Quinn, Christine Chubbuck, Jessica Savitch, and Connie Chung registered as grotesques in embodied racial, gendered, and sexualized terms that paralleled the degree of their empowerment within the television industry. Walters’s overreaching economic powers, rendered as grotesque, exposed a foundational shift in news programming. With her famous contract, Walters threatened to reveal the capitalist mechanisms driving so-called objective television news. The terms of Walters’s hiring incited nothing less than a media outrage, reminiscent of the uproar over the 1950s television quiz show scandals. Through her overt participation in hiring bidding wars, salary negotiations, and successful commercial endeavors, Walters “single-handedly corrupted broadcast journalism.” 21 Somewhat illogically, Salant critiqued the newly established cost of a news anchor, yet participated in the escalation of salaries himself. Salant proclaimed that, if Walters is a “‘$5 million woman, then Walter Cronkite is a $16 million man.’” 22 Evoking a vision of bionic, superheroic fictional television characters, Salant mixes 22 genres and their respective place within the range of television quality, and envisions the gendered battle between male and female media workers in epic terms. This meeting of news and fantasy fiction not only indicates the magnitude of this competition, but also suggests that television and its hierarchies and divisions have all collapsed within the face of the new gendered order ushered in by the first female news anchor. As much as Salant objected to Walters’s salary, the publicity of her salary provided the television industry a way with which to announce its progressive nature and to make a commodifiable, material spectacle out of Women’s Liberation. Salaries were often the means by which television could promote the increasing visibility of on-air women and their expanded occupational roles. Salant’s reference to bionic men and women parallels another notable salary debate within the world of television. Numerous articles illustrate the rising power of female network stars and television’s laudatory encouragement of women’s empowerment by comparing the respective salaries and the ratings of The Six Million Dollar Man’s Lee Majors and Bionic Woman’s Lindsay Wagner. Majors’s contract entitled him to $300,000 and no royalties while Wagner’s garnered her $500,000 a year for five years, an annual film role with Universal, ABC’s parent company, and 12.5% of merchandise sales. 23 Wagner’s triumph over Majors, who was reportedly quite angered at his inferior salary, revealed the important and often mutually beneficial challenge the onscreen liberated woman posed to the conventional business practices of the industry. 23 Interestingly, unlike the case of Walters, neither the press nor industry insiders responded to the Bionic Woman actor’s salary triumph over the Six Million Dollar Man’s with the same level of intense criticism. This parallel case of the battle of the sexes demonstrates a key difference in media workers and their respective fictional or non-fictional genres. The fictional representation of a Bionic Woman apparently proves less disruptive to the world of television than the non-fictional, news-casting version of a Bionic Woman. In the case of Lindsay Wagner, there is a clear distinction between the onscreen powers of the fictional character and the offscreen capabilities of the actor. Wagner is not Jamie Sommers, the Bionic Woman. In the case of Barbara Walters, Walters represents the same powerful force both onscreen and off. That is to say, she “is” Barbara Walters, regardless of the space or terms of her representation. The meeting of the on- and offscreen Barbara Walters, unlike the division between the Bionic Woman (Jamie Sommers) and the offscreen woman who portrays her (Lindsay Wagner), disrupts the central patriarchal division of “woman” and “women.” As much as the industry could promote itself through Walters’s salary, there was much more discomfort about and management of the non- fictional presence of a powerful woman inhabiting television screens. Part of the anxiety surrounding the non-fictional bionic woman stems from her capacity to erode the ideological division of media-specific boundaries. These boundaries separate the masculine, objective, intellectual world of news from the feminine, money-bound, personality-driven business of entertainment. Washington Post journalist Charles Seib cites Walters as an example of the growing power of the 24 entertainment-styled news anchor over the professional, in-the-field reporter. To Seib, this pivotal sea change, inaugurated by Walters’s presence and her style of reporting, demonstrates that the “‘line between the news business and show business has been erased forever.’” 24 The two styles of newscasting can be interpreted as thinly veiled concerns about gender within the privileged domain of the television workplace. Show business is a feminized aspect of the media that depends upon openly entertaining audiences and openly catering to them. The goal of appealing to audiences, ushered in by a female anchor, overtly privileges the likeability of the newscaster over the objective integrity of the masculinized values of conventional, straightforward news reporting. By drawing attention to the pleasing nature of the newscaster, entertaining news also announces the presence of the newscaster’s (female) body (the smiling face, the hairstyle, the outfit), raising concerns of how effectively it will engage the audience and promote pleasurable viewing. As a female superstar, Walters brings femininity to journalism, drawing attention to the personality and physicality of the newscaster. In doing so, Walters’s presence confuses the conventions of television’s generic representations and the bodies—or, in the case of male news anchors, the fantasy of disembodiment—that inhabit them. Salant addresses this confusion when he sarcastically wonders, “‘Is Barbara a journalist or is she Cher?’” 25 Once the news has been feminized by the presence of women, entertainment news would bring about the demise of authentic, important journalism and television with it. 25 The glum predictions and outright paranoia about the future of television news suggest that once the feminized appeals to the audience become part of the news, the gates will be opened to a whole host of other intrusive, unwelcomed bodies. The harshest critics of Walters and the new brand of news chose to signify the threat to the institution of TV news through entertainment and the threatening bodies that inhabit the world of onstage performance. By choosing Cher as the figure with which to confuse Walters and to mark her disruptive influence on television news’s integrity, Salant summons up the suggestion not only of “entertainment,” (Cher as a singer, comedy show host, celebrity) but also of spectacularly embodied ethnicized/racialized “difference.” 26 According to Diane Negra’s star study of Cher in Off-White Hollywood, Cher’s persona throughout the Seventies “represented a chameleonic sense of multi-ethnicity through bodily display.” 27 Throughout this period, Cher’s costuming, hair, and make-up signified Native American-ness and other exoticized non-white ethnicities. 28 Salant’s pairing of Walters, a powerful white woman, and “race” constitutes a pattern of visualization that was deployed repeatedly and flexibly by media industries to make material the conditions and the threat of female empowerment. Walters’s otherwise confusing role—a feminine, yet powerful force—and the threat of her encroachment on the domain of white, male newsmen is articulated through racial terms. Salant later summons up a comparison more overtly raced than his Cher example, accusing Walters of turning traditional television journalism into a “‘minstrel show.’” 29 The presence of the economically powerful woman news anchor not only degrades television news to the basest level 26 of popular entertainment, but also transforms it into an entertainment form that is linked to the spectacle of black performing bodies. If Walters confused the issue of news and its power through her gender (an anomaly: a female “newsman”), her disruptive abilities registered more clearly, as more powerfully threatening when visualized through a companionate racial threat. In spite of their intense critical debates surrounding their on-air authority, their monetary value, and their very gendered televisual presence, female news anchors earned higher ratings for struggling networks. Barbara Walters, the very woman who single-handedly threatened to bring about the destruction of television news integrity, was the woman who helped land ABC in a first place position in the ratings war. During the mid-70s, ABC finally ascended from a long-standing third place finish in network competition. It heavily promoted Walters and the terms of her hiring during the ramp-up for the fall lineup—a particularly crucial time in television’s calendar year. One season later, ABC placed in a “dead heat for first place with CBS.” 30 Walters, while obviously not single-handedly responsible for this gain, played a pivotal role in helping the network out of its losing position. The network’s publicity surrounding Walters and the timing and level of their promotion indicated that the network understood the potential payoff of a highly paid female anchor. In the first week of her new job, Walters created a ten-point increase in ratings with a payoff of $1.5 million per year per point for the network, proving that “viewer curiosity pays off.” 31 The spectacle of a female news anchor, especially one who commanded media attention outside of the newsroom for her financial 27 empowerment within the industry, demonstrated that the successful female media worker, though dangerous, made for profit. The uneven nature of the industry’s acceptance of Walters illustrated, yet again, the media’s powerful ambivalence about the women who promised to revise their business. Just as TV newswomen promoted television as compatible with contemporary culture influenced by the Women’s Liberation Movement, women working within the industry challenged the industry’s established generic and economic models of gender. As a result, they experienced a traumatic and highly visible expulsion from the industry. Profitable for the spectacle they created as powerful media workers, these women also proved profitable as spectacular failures. As much as Walters contributed to the career possibilities for women working in television news, a different pattern of on-air visibility for this figure emerged. Beneficiaries of Walters’s success, news anchors Sally Quinn, Christine Chubbuck, Jessica Savitch, and Connie Chung all seemed to fulfill feminism’s call for equitable employment within conventionally masculine fields. Unlike Walters, these women provided gendered spectacles of successful female news anchors who dramatically fell from power. This image proved much less controversial and risky for the industry, yet still satisfied the all-important “viewer curiosity.” The dramatic spectacle of the distressed woman newscaster offered television compelling content and higher ratings. More easily visualized in conventional terms of femininity or “woman,” this representation of women’s success as media workers was converted into saleable 28 spectacle that would be lucrative to the industry without escaping its representational framing. In her article “Getting Serious: Women at the Anchor Desk,” Julia Keller identifies the problem of a woman newscaster’s identity as a “burden placed upon women by a business whose predominantly male decision-makers still have not decided if women are either legitimate contributors, fully equal to their male counterparts, or window-dressing for ratings,” producing compelling, “distressed newscasts.” 32 The publicity surrounding Barbara Walters’s groundbreaking hire suggests that she inaugurated this particular occupational and ideological confusion surrounding the female news anchor. Walters successfully negotiated these terms, but other women in the business were not so fortunate, registering instead on the representational field as hysterical failure. 33 These women provided television a figure with which they could prove their responsiveness to the Woman’s Movement, offer viewers novel content of a powerful female media worker, and ultimately contain the political and economic upheavals her success would have posed. Hoping to dethrone both Barbara Walters and ABC, to capitalize on the popularity of the novel female news anchor, and to address the cultural changes in an audience conscious of the Women’s Movement, CBS hired Sally Quinn in 1973. The position was created as a direct result of feminist activism. 34 With his “back to the wall by the women,” network president Richard Salant, who was so vocal in his disapproval of Walters’s hiring, vowed to hire a woman anchor after a “CBS women’s meeting.” 35 Quinn describes this meeting as “one that most companies are now well accustomed to, where the women demand better pay and working 29 conditions, equality, etc., and at this meeting they had demanded a woman anchor.” 36 With the liberal feminist demands of economic empowerment, universal equality, and inclusion in the workplace, these “women’s meetings” reveal feminism’s growing influence and the important symbolic weight a female news anchor held for some sectors of the Movement. Although created as a result of feminist activism and promoted as a visible symbol of Women’s Liberation, Quinn’s place within TV news was structured by sexist tokenism. The networks could only envision one successful female news anchor and, with this conceptualization, operated upon a model of simple displacement. Indicating that television could only accommodate a single woman in this powerful position, CBS news director Gordon Manning conducted a “big talent search” for “the woman who could take on Barbara Walters.” 37 The singular nature of the woman news anchor, while the source of her economic power and her ability to command an unprecedented salary, was also the means through which the media could manage her threat. By visualizing workplace competition between two women as feminine rivalry, the networks re-placed these liberated women into conventional representational terms. Newswomen’s power, confusing to pre-existing representations and ideologies, became legible and acceptable when reformulated as a feminized “catfight.” The Washington Post’s first article on Quinn’s new job featured a story titled “Showdown at Sunrise,” which was accompanied by pictures of Walters and Quinn, significantly placed “opposite each other.” 38 30 As a female news anchor promoted by the network as a novelty, Sally Quinn failed quickly and spectacularly. In her autobiography, We’re Going to Make You a Star, Quinn recounts her brief stint as a news anchor in a narrative characterized by melodramatic peril. Television psychologically and physically traumatizes Quinn. The stress of the job makes her physically ill, prompts her to binge drink, and causes severe acne that results in permanent facial scarring. After only her second day on the job, Quinn suffers a 102-degree fever and a massive physical breakdown. The effects of working in television reconfigure gender by marring Quinn’s feminine beauty, driving her to masculine and destructive behaviors, and generally confusing the terms of her gender identity. Even as she acquires occupational status within the field of television, television activates a disempowered, feminized state for Quinn. As a solution to the trauma of working in TV news, Quinn retreats to a field of domesticity and its appropriate feminine labors, which provide a psychological/emotional refuge. Lying in her studio office, Quinn considers interior design schemes she could execute in the homes of friends and family. As Quinn recounts, “The only thing that didn’t upset me was decorating.” 39 Quinn’s involvement with decorating domestic spaces created a “whole new escape” from the brutalizing world of television. 40 In addition to furnishing fantasy rooms, she also dreams of Vogue layouts in which she may appear. Confined to the imagination of the domestic space and the glamour of fashion magazines, these therapeutic fantasies, in comparison to TV news, seem to be the appropriately gendered ones for women. 31 In spite of its domestic status as an object in the home, television was a hostile real space whose material realities often destroyed the women who came into contact with it as working professionals. 60 Minutes producer Don Hewitt makes this media-specific gendering quite clear when, in a lunchtime encounter with Quinn, he relates his initial reaction to her hiring: “‘The day your show went on the air I went into [CBS news director Gordon Manning’s] office and I said: ‘Gordon, what’s going on? You promised us Deep Throat and all we got was Sore Throat!’” 41 Instead of the pornographic image of Linda Lovelace and fantasies of female sexuality, Quinn offers a physically traumatized (Sore Throat) bodily representation on television that failed to register within the medium and the genre and failed to impress either television executives or audiences. As a novel and potentially disruptive presence on the television screen, the female newscaster came under intense occupational and public surveillance and evaluation. Television’s intimacy—in the form of its representational mode, audience address, and widespread transmission into the home—fostered scrutiny that re- energized traditional judgments about and containments of women’s sexuality, appearance, and basic life’s choices. As she recounts in her memoir, Quinn was overwhelmed by the labor it took to sustain the fantasy perfection of her onscreen image. To remedy this, Quinn travels on a cross-town bus to reconnect with reality and to “keep on being one of the people,” in spite of her fame and economic privilege. 42 This foray into public transportation backfires and Quinn realizes that the public will not accept her as “normal” or “real” and will judge her by an idealized, 32 yet accessible version of femininity promised by television. Quinn describes the mob scene that ensues when she travels on the bus, revealing the uncomfortable disconnection between her onscreen image and her identity as a real, embodied person: “Suddenly a young women, sitting below me, pointed a finger and yelled, “‘Hey, I know you! You’re Sally Quinn, the new TV star! I saw you on the Morning News!’” 43 Once “people started pushing and shoving to get a better look” at her, a horrified Quinn realizes that she has been caught in a moment of realism and “kept apologizing” for her inability of her real-life femininity to measure up to the fantasies of her onscreen image: “I hadn’t expected to be recognized, because my hair is dirty, and my makeup, and it’s so embarrassing, I’m not used to this…Mercifully, the ride came to an end and I collapsed in bed for the rest of the evening.” 44 Quinn’s fallible feminine body fails to coincide with the image of a powerful woman media worker; instead her status as such brings about feminine shame under intense public scrutiny. After the incident, her body fails doubly, collapsing under the pressure of media stardom and the demands of career success. In a similar moment of paradoxical failed success as a female star, Quinn shops at Encore, a second-hand clothing store, and is recognized by a woman who asks her, “‘What on earth are you doing shopping in here when you make all that money? Aren’t you afraid you’ll be seen? A big star like you?’” 45 Quinn realizes that her public visibility and her monetary success constrict her private life, specifically its gendered terms. Ashamed of behaving in ways that are not in keeping with her onscreen image as a highly paid, ground-breaking female media star, Quinn reverts 33 back to the very competitive structure initially established by media coverage of her new job, wondering, “Would Barbara Walters be caught in Encore?” 46 Her identity as a successful media woman worker afforded Quinn her occupational prestige and visibility—she is tapped for the TV job because of her abilities as a Washington Post reporter and as a symbol of a successful female media worker—yet it is this same identity that offered her up for surveillance and criticism. As one viewer writes in a complaint letter to Dick Salant, president of CBS news, “‘I shall not watch Sally Quinn unless she marries the character she’s living with.’” 47 Salant takes the threat seriously and asks Quinn to discuss the possibility of marriage with her partner, indicating the ambivalent and fluctuating qualities associated with television’s working woman, her status as a liberated subject, and her abilities to revise television’s staid gender/sexual politics. In both her life as an unmarried, successful newswoman and in her televised death, Christine Chubbuck best represents the grotesque nature of prominent newswomen. More tragic than Sally Quinn’s psychological and physical collapse, Chubbuck, a 29-year-old local newscaster in Florida, shot and killed herself during an on-air broadcast. Like Quinn, Chubbuck’s career served as a material marker of feminist activism and resulting FCC attention to gendered hiring practices within the television industry. Chubbuck operated both as a conduit for spectacular news on which she reported and as fodder for spectacular news of which she was a topic. Featured in the Style section of the Washington Post, Chubbuck’s on-air suicide was described in the article’s title as follows: “Christine Chubbuck: 29, Good-Looking, 34 Educated, A Television Personality. Dead. Live and in Color.” The placement of the article in the Style section reinforces the aesthetic significance of Chubbuck as spectacle, while the title’s summation underscores the pivotal elements of Chubbuck’s grotesque nature: the anomalous converge of an attractive, smart women who succeeded in a male-dominated field of TV news. Chubbuck offered television the productive presence of a successful female news anchor as well as the shocking, “live” spectacle of her downfall. Exceeding the considerable importance of her career accomplishments, Chubbuck’s suicide “put station WXLT-TV on the map.” 48 In an interesting convergence of Seventies’ female media workers, Sally Quinn covered the incident for the Washington Post. Although Quinn suffered at the hands of the TV news industry, she reproduced the ideological relationships between gender and female media workers she encountered during her own short-lived television career. In Quinn’s analysis, the importance of Chubbuck’s suicide is explained by two interrelated elements of gendered identity and occupation: the socio-sexual psychological problems of a “spinster” and the function of the television news workplace in the death of a highly motivated and correspondingly tragic woman. Typical of media coverage of the event, Quinn framed Chubbuck’s suicide in terms of her status as a failed woman, brought about in large part through her career success as an on-air newscaster. Chubbuck’s feminine shortcomings—her grotesque gender and sexual characteristics—were many. Self-identified as a virgin, Chubbuck lived with her mother and two brothers. In her mother’s explanation of the motivating force behind the suicide, Chubbuck, faced with an impending thirtieth 35 birthday, knew that, with this landmark date, she would become “‘officially’” an “‘old maid.’” 49 In the section of her article dealing with the “spinster” characterization of Chubbuck’s life, Quinn makes a dramatic and telling formatting choice. At this point of the article, Quinn shifts from conventional prose paragraphs to bulleted points, as if to tick off the long list of these problems so numerous and so obvious to the audience that they do not require elaboration: • Everyone agrees that her sexual status was a manifestation of the problems she had in relating to people… • She had worked for nearly a year with a young man named George Peter Ryan…Chris developed a crush on him…He rejected her… • She had had very few dates in the past months… • Last summer she had had an ovary removed… • She had no real friends… 50 These bulleted points enumerate Chubbuck’s sexual limitations, her failures to sustain relationships with men, and her general insecurity about her femininity and heterosexual appeal. Ticking off these overwhelming gender transgressions, Quinn establishes the inevitability of Chubbuck’s need for such dramatic self-punishing behavior. Although the sexual and gendered explanations for Chubbuck’s suicide conform to conventional representations of a woman made unhappy by her feminine shortcomings, the terms of Chubbuck’s occupation were complex and less amenable to facile analysis. The occupational facets of Chubbuck’s identity—successful 36 television newscaster and prototypical liberated career woman—proved more unwieldy and less easily understood within conventional representations of femininity. George Ryan, a male co-worker in whom Chubbuck expressed a romantic interest, only to be rejected by him, found the “problem” of Chubbuck’s occupational power nearly intolerable. A woman, yet also an able competitor in the workplace of TV news, Chubbuck’s presence confounded existing notions of appropriate female subjectivity and the interactions that stem from it. Chubbuck proved so unsettling a presence that Ryan had to undergo transference therapy to accept her both personally and professionally. In order to interpret Chubbuck in an understandable and even palatable fashion both Quinn and the subjects of her interview subsume Chubbuck’s identity as successful female news anchor—a conceptual anomaly—under the easily conceptualized terms of conventional femininity. Ryan expressed his anxieties over Chubbuck’s occupational power as a female news anchor and co-worker through gender disapproval. Ryan describes Chubbuck as “‘a liberated woman, a pain in the ass, not very attractive, almost manly.’” 51 Chubbuck’s career success and resulting empowerment converge with gendered personality flaws, constituting an extreme version of the “grotesque” newswoman figure. Unlike Quinn, who, during the height of her on-air visibility and her vocational power as a media worker, retreated into an appropriately feminine relationship to media, Chubbuck refused to comply with conventional gender ideologies of media genres, labors, and identities. According to Ryan, Chubbuck “‘was doing a man’s job, only doing it better than a man. She was 37 precise and efficient. There was nothing feminine about her.’” 52 Chubbuck’s facility as a news anchor, a “man’s job,” becomes a liability and an explanation for the despair that drove Chubbuck to her on-air tragedy. Gender Translation on the Big Screen: Network’s Revision to the Tragic Newscaster Although confined to the relatively small live audience of a regional television newscast, Chubbuck’s suicide eventually generated, through media coverage and translation into other media venues, nationwide visibility. The spectacular failings of the female news woman prompted a highly visible, critically acclaimed representation in another, more-esteemed media venue of Hollywood film. According to a number of sources, Chubbuck’s suicide served as the inspiration for Howard Beale’s on-air suicide announcement and eventual murder in the 1976 film Network. 53 Transposed from television to film, from a woman’s on-air suicide to a newsman’s tragic assassination engineered by a career-obsessed female TV executive and carried out by a black militant group, the film significantly revised the ideological significance of Chubbuck’s suicide and the terms of its legibility. This revision dealt with the anxieties about the growing influence of women and racial minorities as television workers, content for important news stories, sought-after audience members, and threat to conventional newscasting and the white men who symbolized its venerated cultural position. Although it borrowed from a real-life female newscaster’s tragedy, Network’s indictment of television news and the growing influence of women and racial minorities bolstered the critical standing of 38 film as the medium capable of critiquing the corruption of media and the shifting cultural mores that it represents. Written by Paddy Chayefsky, renowned for his theatre background and his role in quality productions of television’s Golden Age, Network was celebrated for exposing the crass, economically driven television news industry of the Seventies. 54 As Chayefsky himself boasts, the film accomplishes what the most radical contemporary television programs—deemed a “monstrous test pattern” by a Los Angeles Times article interviewing Chayefsky—cannot. Although Norman Lear’s programs are “stylistically similar” to Network, even he cannot sustain the biting satire of Chayefsky’s film. 55 According to Chayefsky, “‘Norman Lear has come close . . .but not close enough.’” 56 Even more damning, Chayefsky equates the influence of television’s economics and industrial demands with a feminizing influence on its greatest male artist. Chayefsky predicted that Lear would “‘become hysterical’” once he encountered “‘a ratings problem.’” 57 A parallel critical force to Chayefsky, Howard Beale (Peter Finch) is the film’s white male protagonist, a bastion of honesty, and a clarion voice of criticism in a world gone mad. Beale’s on-air indictments of television are so threatening, so radical that they result in his violent expulsion from network news. Engineered by Diana Christensen (Faye Dunaway), the power-hungry female programming executive, and executed by the black political militant stars of her news/entertainment hybrid program, The Mao Tse-Tung Hour, Howard is assassinated on-air during one of his newscasts. Figured as heroic because of his 39 commitment to principled news journalism and the masculinity vital to its existence, Howard is introduced by the film’s opening voice-over as “a mandarin of television, the grand old man of news” and is visually linked, through the talking heads on separate television screens, with Walter Cronkite and other venerable male newscasters of the day. Howard’s death is an indicator of the wrong-headed direction of TV news during the Seventies. Women and racial minorities prove the powerful catalyst for the corruption of news and the death, both symbolic and literal, of hard- working, honorable white men who once guided incorruptible, earnest, and substantive television news. With falling ratings in a news world dominated by sensationalism and, not coincidentally, by the on- and offscreen centrality of women and racial Others in television content and programming decisions, Howard Beale is no longer a viable media worker. Fired by Max Schumacher (William Holden), the director of the Union Broadcasting System’s (UBS) news division and Howard’s longtime friend and fellow TV news reporter from the good old days, Howard proclaims that he will kill himself. He informs Max of his decision, telling him, “I’m going to blow my brains out, right on the air, right in the middle of the 7:00 news.” Max responds, “You’ll get a hell of a rating, I’ll guarantee you that. Fifty-share, easy. We could make a series out of it: Suicide of the Week . . . I love it. I’d put fuckin’ Disney right off the air.” Max’s darkly comical response to his friend’s announcement of suicide attests to the new trend of spectacular television news that has no place for earnest, professional newscasting that Max and Howard both revere and embody. The next 40 scene features Howard returning to work the next day, in the midst of a hectic newsroom. The personnel responsible for the content of the news program sit around the table during the film’s opening credits, discussing the slate of stories for the evening’s program. They run through a telling list of possibilities: Squeaky Fromme, guerillas in Chad, OPEC, and Patty Hearst. With its interest in sensational stories of racial, ethnic and gender unrest, the new news culture has no room for white masculinity. The forces of the political power of African and Middle Eastern peoples and the social disturbance and violence propagated by women have, with the aid of the news media, victimized white men. When expressed through the male figure symbolic of respected patriarchy, the spectacular on-air suicide of the female news anchor became a noble and compelling force. Unlike Chubbuck’s grotesque life and death played out on-air, the spectacle of Howard’s televised on-air death signals the sad passing of television news’s integrity. Howard re-establishes his powers within this new culture by announcing, during his news broadcast, his intentions to kill himself during the next day’s show. Frank Hackett (Robert Duvall), the representative of the Communications Conglomerate of America (CCA) that assumes control over UBS, initially panics over Beale’s announcement, calling it a “grotesque incident.” However, Howard’s commitment to the news ultimately proves heroic and noble. Capable of “articulating the rage” of Americans, Howard represents authenticity and honesty. In Howard’s analysis, he makes his shocking announcement of his intended suicide not because it is grotesque, but because he “ran out of bullshit.” Howard’s 41 capacity to report compelling news comes from his rejection of inauthenticity that is linked to femininity. Howard explains his newfound clarity to the viewing audience: “I was married for thirty years filled with shrill, shrieking fraud, so I don’t have any bullshit left. I just ran out of it, you see.” With his post-marital, maverick reporting style to sustain him, Howard decides not to commit suicide, but instead continues his newscasting, channeling the Truth from a godlike voice he begins to hear. Unlike Howard’s commitment to authenticity, which finds expression only after he is freed from the strictures of femininity and domesticity, Diana Christensen corrupts the truth and chooses spectacle over authenticity once she takes control of the news division. The liberated woman figure of the film, Diana replaces Max Schumacher as the head of the news division and transforms it into an outlet for gendered and racial sensationalism. Unlike Max, she understands that “TV is show biz and even the news has to have a little showmanship.” This awareness, along with Diana’s abilities to “hustle” better than Max, brings about a powerful new trend in television news: the conflation of entertainment and reality. A hallmark of her drive to produce sensational news and a sign of her powerfully corrupting influence, Diana establishes her reputation by producing the Mao Tse-Tung Hour. Taken with the Ecumenical Liberation Army (ELA), a group of black militants who kidnapped a rich white female heiress—an action clearly patterned after the Symbionese Liberation Army and their kidnapping of Patty Hearst—Diana sees their criminality as “something really sensational.” This sensationalism comes from the amenability of the group's criminality to media representation. During the process of robbing banks, 42 the ELA films the crime. Diana sees this convergence of political dissent and visual spectacle as an opportunity to bridge political activism and news, trivializing both in the process. She turns their filmed crime into a series in which the ELA shoots real footage of their crimes and Diana develops a fictional show around the footage. Diana’s series, along with her revamping of the news, reverses the news division’s losing profits and propels the network from its last-place position to first place in network competition. Diana, with the raw materials of a militant black group and the spectacular nature of a discontented, newly politicized white heiress, ushers in entertainment news and the gender and racial spectacle that proves vital to its existence. As a ruthless, successful female media worker who displaces conventional news and the men who work in the field, Diana’s professional empowerment reveals the nature of personal gender liberation—represented as simultaneously powerful and tragic. On her first date with Max Schumacher, which she initiates, Diana reveals the dangerous influence media workplace ambition has on a woman’s gendered identity: I can’t tell you how many men have told me what a lousy lay I am. I apparently have a masculine temperament. I arouse quickly, consummate prematurely, and can’t wait to get my clothes back on and get out of that bedroom. I seem to be inept at everything, except my work. I’m good at my work. So I confine myself to that. All I want out of life is a thirty-share and a twenty-rating. She proves this in a later sex scene during a weekend getaway at the seashore. Comically, the scene cuts several times throughout the night between various 43 romantic scenarios. During each of these moments, Diana is talking non-stop about television and her concerns about The Mao Tse-Tung Hour, while Max silently listens. The evening culminates in a sex scene, with Diana on top. Still talking about TV , she climaxes almost immediately. In the post-coital moment, she is still dreamily talking of programming, planning a soap opera called The Dykes, a “tragic story about a woman who’s in love with her husband’s mistress.” The incongruity of a rapidly climaxing woman who cannot quit thinking of television during a romantic interlude is brought to a narrative climax by the intrusion of lesbian sexuality at the very moment of heterosexual coupling. The gender comedy of the sequence is brought to its outrageous close by the introduction of Diana’s new project, which pushes even further the limits of television programming and its trend of gendered, racial, and now sexual inclusion of newly politicized, culturally visible, and increasingly empowered social groups. Diana’s threat to masculine power exceeds that of the television workplace, yet is corrected by the very tools of her empowerment. When Max finally leaves Diana, he employs the terms of television to reject her increasing control over his life. As a consequence of his relationship with Diana, Max fears that he is “turning into one of [her] goddamn scripts.” Max articulates Diana’s abilities to dehumanize men in the terms of media; through her proficiency at manipulating media, which secures her career status, Diana has encroached on the public and the private spheres of masculine control. Max makes the gendered terms of this role reversal explicit, evoking his emasculation by referencing another powerful female television worker 44 and her powers over masculinity and media: “I’m not some guy talking about male menopause on the Barbara Walters show.” Rejecting this narrativizing of his subjectivity through female-controlled media, Max insists that, “I’m here, real.” This “real”ness, which also marks Howard Beale’s on-air newscasting, places Max outside the reach of the feminized media world. In the face of this masculine authenticity, Diana “can’t switch to another station.” As a liberated woman whose sexual and professional empowerment comes from her abilities to control television, Diana’s fundamental relationship to television ultimately proves her pathology and weakness. Again, Max strategically deploys media to discipline Diana’s growing power: You’re television incarnate Diana. Indifferent to suffering, insensitive to joy. All of life is reduced to the common rubble of banality. War, murder, death, all the same to you as bottles of beer and the daily business of life is a corrupt comedy. You even shatter the sensations of time and space into split seconds, instant replays. You’re madness, Diana. Pure madness. And everything you touch dies with you. After delivering this crushing speech, Max kisses her goodbye. The film conflates Diana’s terrifying powers with the horrors of television itself, then reverts to Classical Hollywood aesthetics. At this point, Diana becomes vulnerable for the very first time. Using soft focus—an aesthetic convention that signifies femininity—the camera shoots a now-tearful and silent Diana in close-up. This aesthetic shift underscores the important transference of power indicated in Max’s speech. No longer capable of sustaining her masculine sexual assurance and her aggressive professional “hustle,” Diana becomes weak and passive. By denouncing the 45 influence of the female media worker and her style of programming, Network pathologizes the influence of women working in the field of television, revealing their fundamental gender identity behind the borrowed masculine powers they enjoy through their occupational standing. Although women like Diana Christensen save television networks, they also introduce content and aesthetics that destroy patriarchal authority and replace it with gender, racial, and sexual Otherness. Incapable of willing these women away—the network needed them and the racial and sexual politics they brought with them—Network fantasizes about the limits it can place on their influence. Male Media Workers and Their Female Stars: A Ventriloquy Act Driven by their need for liberated women, yet uncertain of the outcomes of this relationship, television and film industries established a conduit through which to channel the energies unleashed by this new interdependence. The relationship between the pioneering male media worker and the representational terms of “his” liberated woman reveals a structural constant within the industrial innovations of the Seventies. Male media workers who helped produce representations of onscreen liberated women were able to reformulate their occupational prestige and to transform the industrial practices of their business through their relationships to the on- and offscreen liberated woman. The power generated by representations of women’s liberation worked flexibly to reinstate masculine power, while offering new narratives about the media’s laudatory attentiveness to women and crucial revisions to media products/business practices. 46 A case in point, Ron Samuels, Lindsay Wagner’s young manager, was celebrated for his ability to broker Wagner’s lucrative Bionic Woman contract. In his representation of Wagner, Samuels established his own business acumen through the unorthodox terms of his deal-making that challenged the conventions of Hollywood business transactions. Previously unknown, Samuels met with Universal’s studio heads and asked for the generous terms of Wagner’s “fat contract.” 58 In Samuels’s self-promoting version of the encounter, the executives were rendered dumbfounded by his audacity: “‘[T]here was absolute silence in the room. They simply couldn’t talk.’” 59 After a few days, they agree to Samuels’s terms. Samuels, represented as a heroic maverick character in press coverage, cuts a figure who, like Wagner’s onscreen character, performs “preposterous feats” and pushes the industry to acknowledge the growing importance of women through their financial empowerment. 60 The powers of the onscreen liberated woman, the Bionic Woman, parallel, instigate, and authorize the offscreen industrial abilities of the male Bionic Manager. After Universal agreed to the terms of the contract, Samuels made the rounds at Universal’s studio lot, “wearing a crash helmet as a gag, and was applauded on several sound stages.” 61 Through his association with a liberated woman character, the male agent pushed the industry to financially acknowledge a woman actor, to pay her more handsomely than her female predecessors or male contemporaries, and to launch the platform upon which male media workers could reformulate their own status and industrial business practices. 47 While the new brand of gender representation revitalized television’s business practices and content, onscreen liberated women and their burgeoning feminist sensibilities reinvented the figure of the male producer/creator. Like Lindsay Wagner’s manager, Fred Silverman’s championing of onscreen female liberation created a powerful new type of television management and guaranteed innovative executive talent a place within the industry. As the head of programming, Silverman guaranteed his long-running career success through his abilities to address, in popular media formulations, the cultural force of feminism (The Mary Tyler Moore Show at CBS, then Charlie’ s Angels at ABC). Dubbed “The Bionic Programmer” by Time, Silverman’s industrial power stemmed from his relationship to representations of liberated women and his presumed knowledge of female audiences and their growing discontent with conventional programming. 62 Silverman’s training began at the age of twenty-five, when he was placed in charge of daytime programming at CBS. While managing the feminized schedule of daytime TV , Silverman cultivated his impressive programming instincts that came from his ability to “cater to the ladies.” 63 Silverman’s abilities to transform television's address to women in a time of feminism’s popularity marked his and the network’s increased powers of competition. With his unparalleled abilities to gauge the needs of television audiences and the “ladies,” Silverman “divined” the “rising public interest in seeing women more prominently featured on TV .” 64 This insight cemented Silverman’s exceptional career during the Seventies. Delivering television shows that featured liberated women, Silverman moved from the conventional daytime programming of 48 soap operas and women’s daytime drama to develop some of the most lucrative primetime representations of women’s onscreen liberation, which, in turn, saved failing networks and captured sought-after audiences. 65 In addition to the economic calculations of the media businessman, the male media “artist” could make daring artistic ventures in the name of liberated women. Throughout the 1970s, a pattern of ventriloquizing took shape as male producers and directors expressed their own discontent, pushed for radical business practices, and generally reinvented the Great Artist figure through the presence of the liberated woman. While making Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974)—a story of the recently widowed Alice Graham (Ellen Burstyn) who sells her house and takes off across the country with her son to pursue her lifelong dream of becoming a singer, director Martin Scorsese experienced a radical shift in his outlook on women. During the shoot, Scorsese confronted the sexism he attributed to his Sicilian-American upbringing, a change that prompted his personal and artistic growth. Scorsese assessed the situation as follows: “‘I had to come to terms with what I can only call my own hatred of women.’” 66 Paul Mazursky, in making An Unmarried Woman (1978), the story of a woman undergoing the process of divorce, therapeutic self- awareness, and a personal and sexual re-awakening, reimagines his own subjectivity in order to channel the pain and empowerment of his protagonist. In the creation of one of his most popular and critically acclaimed films, Mazursky recounts the radical effect the process had on his creativity and sense of self: “I sort of became a woman for about three or four months. It was very comfortable.” 67 49 Perhaps the most notable male media worker with the closest attachment to “liberal” politics and ground-breaking content, television producer Norman Lear was credited with radically reinventing television content and business practices during the Seventies. With All in the Family (1971-79), Maude (1972-78), Sanford and Son (1972-77), and Good Times (1974-79) among his notable credits, Lear’s range of programs achieved “legendary status,” primarily through “the central element “ of “various controversial themes.” 68 For all of his controversial programming, Lear’s Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman (1976-77) proved the most challenging, disturbing even Lear’s own personnel. In an on-set 60 Minutes interview, Mike Wallace asked Carroll O’Connor, “What do you think of Mary Hartman?” O’Connor, unable to summon a positive response, mumbles a series of contradictory responses. Co-star Sally Struthers comes to O’Connor’s rescue, instructing Wallace to “ask him again what he thinks of Mary Hartman” and then holds up a “Do Not Disturb” sign to the camera, blocking O’Connor from view. Lear’s programs, including All in the Family, were deemed “significant” because of their representations of race, which prompted “a vocabulary and an epistemological grounding for subsequent discussions of race, racial representation, blackness, and whiteness.” 69 Unlike Lear’s typical programs and central concerns with race, Mary Hartman focused most significantly on gender. More specifically, the program dealt with the conventions of gendered narratives and psychological explorations of a woman’s sexual and domestic unhappiness. This particular, “perverse” focus on gender accounts for the program’s controversial standing, even within the context of a Lear production. 50 Mary Hartman features Mary Hartman, a dissatisfied housewife living in Fernwood, Ohio amidst a bizarre dysfunctional world of sexual, economic, and psychological conditions. The program employed the melodramatic conventions of daytime soap operas, but magnified the tone and content of the genre to include taboo sexual and social topics. With her obsessive investment in her home and her inability to distinguish between the fictions presented to her on television and the disturbing realities of the world around her, Mary’s domesticity reveals the psychological delusions and depression necessary for a woman to exist in the conventional role of wife, mother, and homemaker. This off-putting image of Mary as a discontented, disturbed housewife facing a host of domestic problems—ranging from waxy yellow build-up on the kitchen floor to serial killers to her husband’s erectile dysfunction—provided Norman Lear with the material necessary to launch a radically different type of program and a new mode of selling it. After failing repeatedly to sell Mary Hartman to the networks, Lear invited independent station owners to his house for an evening meal, and then passionately pitched the show. Moved by the power of Lear’s plea and by the nature of the program, one brave station owner stood up and pledged his support by buying a 12-program contract for the show. The rest of the crowd quickly followed suit. Lear’s strategy for launching Mary Hartman and the success of the program itself prompted reports that Lear would have a “revolutionary impact on the way the TV industry works.” 70 On the strength of the innovative nature of the show, Lear successfully sold the program to independent broadcasters, offering an alternative to directly selling to 51 the Big Three. This strategy promised to deliver a “blow” to the networks. 71 By articulating the discontent of a fictional housewife, Lear also articulated the discontent of television viewers seeking innovative, daring programs. Mary Hartman allowed Lear to challenge the staid politics and programming practices of network television. The networks’ rejection of Mary Hartman operated as a media version of paternalism, in which they prescribed what America “sees—and doesn’t see.” 72 With his “offbeat” program, Lear challenged the networks’ monopoly over content and their “play-it-safe approach.” 73 As a Newsweek article proclaims, “only Norman Lear has the power—and the chutzpah—to bring such a mind-blowing mélange to television.” 74 The same man who brought a $10 million lawsuit against the networks’ conservative anti-sex, anti-violence “family hour” revamped onscreen representations of domesticity and gender to launch another attack on network television’s fundamental business practices, successfully challenging network television’s narrow scope of representations and unassailable programming power. Mary Hartman’s most distinctive and most publicized threat to prevailing media culture came in its relationship to television news. In spite of its role in breaking the Watergate scandal, the news became a suspicious arm of industrial self- interest in the 1970s, especially in its gendered politics and patriarchal figures of newscasting. A ratings threat to conventional, paternalistic news, already under duress with the gender critiques posed by the cultural influence of Women’s Liberation, Mary Hartman’s depiction of a befuddled housewife caught in a series of bizarre events provided viewers with a critical alternative to conventional television 52 news. By conflating the sensational with the mundane, Mary Hartman offered audiences the type of newsworthy material and lack of pretense that conventional newscasting failed to deliver. Running opposite the eleven o’clock news, Mary Hartman encouraged people to relinquish their “well groomed compulsion for the late news” and its “paternalism,” embodied in “authoritative figures” Walter Cronkite, David Brinkley, and Harry Reasoner. 75 Credited with “doing toe-to-toe combat with the father authority of the late-night news,” Mary Hartman conveyed a hyperbolic version of television reporting that reveals the connection between everyday life and the apparatus of television, laying bare the foundational relationship of television and capitalism that the news’s objectivity attempts to mask. 76 Mary Hartman posed serious competition to the late night news and its paternalism, outperforming the evening news in the all-important urban areas of New York, Chicago and Los Angeles. 77 This competition prompted local stations to launch unconventional news programs of their own. Dealing in Hartmanesque items of interest, such as nudity, prostitution, and vasectomies, Los Angeles’s “MetroNews MetroNews” revamped its news program to capitalize on the trend of news as entertainment and as hyperbolic extension of the problems encountered in everyday life. Mike Wallace, in a 1976 60 Minutes interview tells Louise Lasser that the show is “driving news broadcasts off the air.” Lasser responds, “I know, isn’t it wonderful?” and explains how news programs are now being scheduled before and after Mary Hartman to avoid direct competition. If the genre of traditional news was 53 faltering in the current social climate of skepticism and cynicism towards detached patriarchal authority, then the dramatic, personalized news of Mary Hartman provided an important alternative. Its knowing send-up of gendered dramas typical in fictional programming and its critique of news’s patriarchal condescension attracted sophisticated viewers who otherwise rejected television’s offerings. While a direct challenge to the patriarchal terms of news, Mary Hartman also corrected the feminine faults of television drama. The program offered audiences the pleasures of watching a soap opera without the ideological or cultural taint traditionally associated with the genre. The feminine consumerism associated with the genre is also disrupted, offering a potent challenge to women’s role as domestic consumer-laborer within the capitalist system. Barbara Ehrenreich praised the revolutionary politics of the radical soap opera in a 1976 article published in Socialist Revolution: “We jolt from Mary musing about death to brisk homemakers competing in a paper towel wet-strength content […] The contradiction is overpowering. Maybe the Waltons can sell granola, or Mary Tyler Moore sell pantyhose, but how can Mary Hartman sell anything?” 78 Instead of the earnest fantasies of soap operas, Mary Hartman’s sophisticated appeal comes from its complex realism, a quality that follows a convoluted route through its self-aware qualities. Unlike the daytime soap opera, a feminized/degraded TV genre, the nighttime “hip” soap is “different,” in part because of its “stylized” reality that makes it “more real than realism, more like life.” 79 Once the program moved melodramatic television from the content and the 54 at-home domestic workday context of daytime soaps, Mary Hartman organized a viewership that included liberated women who worked outside of the home. A concrete demonstration of the show’s outreach to women alienated from conventional representations of femininity, San Francisco’s Commission on the Status and Rights of Women adjourned its meetings by 10:30 p.m. so they would not conflict with the program’s 11:00 p.m. airtime. 80 The show’s brand of “schizophrenia” assured the network of a “rabid cult following among the trendy” identified in their geographical locations reaching from the “Manhattan high-rises to the Hollywood hills.” 81 By simultaneously spoofing typical, conservative representations of “Middle America” and female domesticity, Mary Hartman provided television with the very programming necessary to transition from rural comedies and fantasy shows of the 1960s, and consequently captured the newly desirable audience of urban, politicized viewers. The broad geographical and presumed attendant ideological leanings made Mary Hartman an ideal television text during a moment when the industry worked to address savvy, politicized urban audiences. The case of Mary Hartman demonstrates the gendered dynamics of Seventies television production: the liberated woman was the means through which men enacted real-world power as media workers responsible for crafting the representations of “woman,” yet real-world “women” working on the same representation were nearly destroyed. Even though the fictional liberated woman held the key to the industrial problems and to the career successes of male media 55 workers of the 1970s, she became troubling to television as a real-life media worker. Just as Mary Hartman allowed Lear to make passionate appeals to the industry, to control the means of selling programming, and to generally enact a revised version of the genius-artist figure, the real woman behind Mary Hartman, actor Louise Lasser, failed to achieve the same power and status. As Lasser’s case demonstrates, the women who occupy the representational world of the liberated woman faced psychological strain, physical exhaustion, an upheaval of lifestyle, and a loss of subjectivity as they brought women’s liberation to the screen. The relationship between Lasser’s psychologically charged personality and the demands of working on an innovative program created the tension vital to the distinctive nature of the program. Lasser’s on-set behavior transformed rehearsals into a “continuing psychodrama” that could only be salvaged by Lear’s genius. 82 While Lasser retreated to her dressing room during one of her “crises,” the on-set environment propelled Lear to energetically reconstruct the show. Newsweek writer Harry Waters witnessed on-set disasters that were saved dramatically when Lear tossed off a new script revision at a moment’s notice. The production schedule and stresses of the show provoked Lasser’s “volatility” and physical/psychological collapse, while they served to underscore producer Lear’s genius quality. The show’s innovative status made for precarious moments of production. While urging Lear to new creative heights, the program’s pressures to maintain its cutting-edge reputation dehabilitated Lasser. In her effort to maintain the show’s quality status, Lasser became “so depressed over the scripts that she stopped eating for days.” 83 56 While the production of quality television energized its male genius creator, it pushed the woman worker into psychological and physical weakness. In a moment of intense strain, Lasser’s vocal cords failed her, causing the show to tape without her for an entire week of episodes. Citing physical and emotional exhaustion, Lasser describes the condition brought about by the demands of television work: “‘You just can’t conceive you’re going to do this many shows. I get trapped feelings. It’s almost like dying.’” 84 With her rumored drug use and visible weight loss, Lear reportedly “hustled the high-strung actress” into a hospital stay. 85 In this anecdote and in numerous others, Lear functions as a salvation figure, rescuing the show by immediately and successfully revamping an episode or scene and saving the beleaguered woman whose professional and personal life converged in a massive psychological and physical trauma. Media coverage of Lasser inevitably conflates the actor with the character, using the similarities between domestic spaces and psychologized behaviors that occur in these spaces to demonstrate the controversial aspects of the actor and character. The unconventional domesticity and the psychological uncertainties of the program and of Lasser’s life promise unmediated access to the real woman and to the program’s innovative realism. Numerous interviews confirm the importance and realism of Lasser’s onscreen characterization of a woman in crisis through the actor’s numerous psychological and personality quirks. Working in a role that is “perfectly tailored” to the “actress’s real persona,” Lasser underwent fifteen years of psychoanalysis to “ease her own Mary-like malaise.” 86 Accounts of her mother’s 57 suicide, her failed marriage to Woody Allen, and her unconventional childhood work in concert to create a psychological biography and an explanation both for Lasser’s abilities to deliver a meaningful, quality performance and for the gendered foundations of her psychological problems. Described as a woman who “takes her hang-ups home,” Lasser lives within a homespace that “correspond[s] rather alarmingly to the Kitsch of the Hartman household.” 87 Lasser’s earlier domestic life with Woody Allen is also called upon to construct meaningful connections with Lasser’s onscreen persona. Recalling the chaotic terms of her life with Allen, Lasser details its “predictably bizarre” nature. 88 Lasser and Allen never had cash on hand, did not know how to cook, and entertained themselves with copious amounts of television viewing. 89 Lasser’s marriage to Woody Allen “explains” her relationship to psychological introspection and establishes the intellectualism and sophistication that comes from her regional experiences as a native New Yorker. A predecessor to Lear’s influential positions of authority, Allen figures as an important authorizing element in establishing Lasser’s credibility, both as a “quality” actor and as a psychologically complex figure. Lasser’s relationship with Allen solidifies her role as companion to and conduit of the male artist/genius media worker. When gendered psychology and geography are brought into the equation, a universalizing portrait of a psychologically unwell woman emerges. The regional specificity of the fictional television program disappears and Lasser’s Hollywood/Beverly Hills work- and homespace folds into the space of small town America. Female psychosis bridges both the distinction between fantasy and reality 58 (a fictional character, Mary Hartman versus the real person acting, Louise Lasser) and between geographical and ideological distances (Beverly Hills, California versus Fernwood, Ohio). These binary oppositions of identity, space, and ideology—all material for the program’s sophisticated humor—disappear under the influence of a woman’s public and private sickness that permeates every geographical location. Even as Lasser’s psychological condition reached an uncertain level during the shooting of Mary Hartman, Mary’s psychological state was what made the show so appealing, daring, and controversial. Journalists like Boston’ s Herald’s Anthony LaCamera reviewed the program in ambivalent, confused terms, only able to conclude that “‘there is something sick, sick and twisted, twisted’” about show. 90 Although many advertisers and stations dropped the show, soap opera magazines dismissed it as an insult to viewers, and conservative groups protested the controversial plotlines, the perverse psychology of the program made it a favorite with liberal audiences, feminists included. 91 If television was filled with “sickness,” this sickness was vital to its functioning as an innovative medium. This sickness frequently stemmed from women, on- and offscreen, who existed in deeply disturbed states. Male media workers profited from this psychological state of the medium and of its women, gaining insight into their own masculinity, finding their own relative psychological health, or launching maverick programs and programming strategies. A New Type of Female Stardom 59 As dehabilitating as representing the liberated woman was to certain female stars, the unsettled dimension of the female star during the 1970s offered women new modes of establishing power within media industries. New manifestations of female stardom, its economics, and its aesthetics provided opportunities for genuine political expressions of feminism and a more inclusive range of female self- representation. Conventional female stardom made little economic or ideological sense in the aftermath of the studio system, in the field of television’s new aesthetic formulations, and in the cultural context of a society made increasingly aware of sexism. As feminism demanded that visual images reflect women’s realities, television and film revised their aesthetics through a new attention to realism, addressing feminism’s imperatives and its own industrial revitalization by casting “real” women. In doing this, film and television effectively broke with conventional Hollywood glamour—an economic necessity and an aesthetic innovation—and standards of female beauty—a response to societal rejections of the obvious objectification of female “beauty”. By announcing its new mode of casting, film and television utilized the unconventional female media worker to present its political, creative, and economic reinventions. Typical of this trend, Look’s 1971 article “Would You Let Your Daughter Do It? Or What It’s Like to Work on TV in Hollywood!” promised its readers a look at the gritty underbelly of the “real” world of Hollywood and television. The expose-styled title evokes a paternalistic tone of protection while titillating the reader with an implicit promise to grant full access to the sexually 60 charged “Hollywood” industry. By conflating Hollywood—a term typically reserved for the film industry—with the television industry, the article joins the two worlds to grant television the cultural status afforded Classical Hollywood, and to update “Hollywood” through a new immediacy of its female stars and cutting-edge business tactics. In short, the quality of the Old meets the modernity of the New through the figure of the new-styled female star. The Look article represents prevailing concerns about women working in television and the shifting aesthetics of gender on television, both brought about by the Women’s Movement. This new brand of woman is a hard-working, aggressive actor who feels capable of accomplishing anything and expresses a willingness to do anything to achieve her career goals. Television’s focus on “real” women, including its stars, demonstrated television’s new style, which replaced the “snob and glamour days of Hollywood.” 92 By rejecting this older version of female movie star allure, the labor of the new female star was easily captured and processed by the various media industry arms attached to the star image. Her accessibility operated on a number of levels: audiences could enjoy “real” women both on- and offscreen; her realness mitigated the fantastical nature of stardom, prompting the spectator’s clearer identification with the star; and her labor became more lucrative and more democratic. These modes of accessibility were demonstrated by Look’s ability to stage a group photo of the women, a feat that was “seldom possible in the old status- conscious movie capital.” 93 61 This new aesthetics of stardom, which called for “real” representations of women, threatened the one domain of economic security conventionally enjoyed by women media workers: feminine beauty. In this new industrial and aesthetic climate, conventional femininity no longer granted women power—albeit questionable power—within the business. As one actor puts it, “‘the ‘pretty look’ isn’t much in…we don’t seem to have any superstars anymore.’” 94 The Classical feminine star depended upon commodified feminine beauty for her economic power. Now that the industry no longer needed the highly rarefied, glamorous woman, nearly any woman would do, lowering the market value of feminine beauty and sexual allure. As much as the realistic-looking female actor forwarded the political agendas of feminism, this new casting preference for “real” women, paradoxically, weakened the most powerful asset women possessed in Hollywood: nearly-impossible standards of beauty. The extraordinary quality of Classical Hollywood glamour gave the few women who possessed it an ability to command economic compensation befitting such a rarefied commodity. Once the material accoutrements of the Hollywood fantasy lifestyle and the glamorous valance of the star had been stripped away, young female actors began to understand the realities of the economic structures of Hollywood. No longer enchanted with the starlet’s lifestyle, these pragmatic actors focused on the clear economic differences between women and men in the field. With “no more mink coats, swimming pools and Cadillacs” the glamorous fantasies of Old Hollywood were gone, leaving only stark economics as the gauge of success. 95 Within this 62 economic context, female stars began to reflect critically on the material terms of stardom. Articulating a feminist analysis, female stars note repeatedly in interviews that “‘almost all the choice parts go to men.’” 96 In place of an alluring face, a woman must now possess intellect and an ability to manage her own career. As one actor interviewed by Look observes, she does not “‘run into dumb girls out here anymore; if you’re dumb, you’re not going to make it.’” 97 In order to compete in a world clearly governed by sexism, this new type of female actor had to learn to manage her own image. By overseeing the terms of her own career and learning the industrial and economic functions typically reserved for male managers and studio heads, this savvy star relied upon her own abilities, again reflecting a version of feminist politics. Actively managing her own image, the female star of the 1970s understood the need to engage with the masculine domains of business and economics or, in the words of one such potential star, “‘You have to call the shots yourself.’” 98 Although the demise of glamorous femininity cost beautiful women in Hollywood their jobs and diminished the competitive edge of the exceptional woman, it also democratized the field of acting. An obvious benefit of the realistic standards of casting, a wider range of women was able to capitalize on the benefits of stardom. In addition to this inclusiveness, women gained greater control over their acting personas and onscreen image. Within the context of the media’s turn to a less- mediated construction of onscreen womanhood, the female actor valued for her own subjectivity could succeed through her own presentation of self. As one actor explained this match of personality and persona, “‘A girl doesn’t have to pretend to 63 be anything she’s not. You’re just yourself, whatever that ‘image’ may be— hopefully, that of an interesting person.’” 99 Stardom, along with its impossible ideals of femininity, was simultaneously demythed and democratized. Women were invited to actively participate in the star system through their capabilities and individual subjectivity. This ideological and aesthetic shift placed the means of career success in the hands of women themselves. The Feminist as Star In the downfall of Classical Hollywood’s studio system, stardom became a more flexible, open commodity/opportunity. After the studio system’s collapse, Hollywood no longer owned a stable of regular stars with which to draw public attention and financial profit. At its most powerful, Hollywood’s star system fostered and sustained a “whole network of dependent industries…gossip magazines, press agents, etc." 100 But after Hollywood “had to admit, reluctantly, that the star system no longer makes profits at the box office,” the industries it once supported had to “move elsewhere.” 101 No longer the exclusive property of Hollywood, stardom leaked into multiple venues and elevated unlikely public personalities, including those of the Women’s Movement. The “everywhereness” of Hollywood’s new brand of stardom included political movements that were often antagonistic to Hollywood and its ancillary industries, yet the new economy of stardom made this an acceptable, even desirable, outlet for post-Classical Hollywood’s economic energies. Gloria Steinem, famously identified during and since the 1970s as the star of the American feminist movement was, in many respects, radical feminism’s worst 64 fears realized. In their long-standing, publicized criticism of Steinem, radical feminist group Redstockings went so far as to accuse Steinem of CIA connections and, because of this, found her singular presence in popular media coverage suspicious. Charging that the “media installed her as a ‘leader’ of the women’s movement and covered her past activities,” Redstockings declared Steinem harmful to the Movement. 102 To some feminists, by “promoting token women,” Steinem’s media-friendly politics and Ms. magazine, the popular publication linked to Steinem, represented the corruption of the movement and a privileging of celebrity mentality. 103 In spite of her controversial relationship to popular media, Steinem also represented mainstream feminism’s and mainstream media’s greatest hope in capturing a wide audience of discontented American women. With her media- friendly appearance, her interest in public exposure, and her aim of making feminism accessible and unthreatening to a broad range of women, Steinem proved to be the foremost star of the Women’s Movement. Along with her star-like physicality and charisma, Steinem’s visibility as a political symbol depended upon a media-ready visualization of feminism. In 1971 Steinem formulated Women’s Action Alliance, a feminist group which worked to address “‘sex discrimination . . .throughout America,’” yet it strove to accomplish this political goal by rectifying, through Steinem’s guidance, feminism’s “major problem,” that of “women’s lib image.” 104 Early expressions of the Women’s Movement called for collective action and cautioned against superstardom that the mainstream media so eagerly wished to manufacture and sell. In a typical media response to her public appearances, 65 Steinem’s public talk to the Western Society of Advertisers conference was conducted “amid the whir of cameras, TV floodlights, flashcubes popping that one associates with a media superstar.” 105 However treacherous a feminist star appeared, her media presence served as a convoluted site of political opportunities and pitfalls. The possibility that a feminist could even qualify as a star in the workings of mainstream media was, in and of itself, a powerful indication that mainstream media required feminism to reinvent itself after a transitional industrial struggle. As much as stardom jeopardized feminism, the possibilities of feminist stardom offered even extremely critical feminists a hope that a woman in a position of stardom would effectively revamp the ideologies of media stardom and womanhood. A superstar like Steinem offered an image of a liberated woman that the media would necessarily take seriously, if only for their own profit margin. As off our backs writer Jones predicts, “With superstardom there is the realization of what a woman can do (NOW THERE’S A WOMAN THE PRESS CAN’T IGNORE).” 106 Well-aware of the post-studio system’s star vacuum and the force of previously unrepresented women’s liberation that could fill that vacuum, feminists effectively strategized to capitalize on the media upheavals of the 1970s, offering their politics in a media-ready form that benefited both parties involved. In spite of their particularly critical attitude towards the media and its tendency to create individual “superstars” to represent the Movement, radical feminists recognized the strategic opportunities mainstream media provided them. Hoping to capitalize on and control the terms of popular representations of feminism, 66 even the most radical, anti-capitalist feminists conceded that the fortunes of feminism and the media intersected. In 1970, radical feminist groups The Feminists and Redstockings founded the Class Workshop, which laid out exacting rules to effectively short-circuit media attempts to elevate individuals above the collective while simultaneously retaining a viable presence in the media spotlight. Cautioning members that “‘[n]o one is to participate in the media alone,’” the group’s attitude revealed that they fully understood the techniques of the media coverage and its centrality in their political success. 107 While the reciprocal demands of the media and feminism marked an ambivalent relationship for both, the conceptualization of a feminist collective challenged the fundamental drive of media to define a political movement in terms of the exceptional, dynamic individual packaged according to the logic of liberal humanism, capitalist success, and gendered visibility. Feminism Tunes In and Takes Over Feminists, aware of film and television’s interest in liberated women, converted the industrial drive of political co-optation to their advantage. Various feminist sects, ranging from liberal to radical groups, utilized popular mainstream media for their own political gain. Feminists used their influence within the television and film industries to publicize their politics; demonstrate their power in their influence over the content and hiring practices of local television stations, networks, and film studios; form new branches of feminist activism to deal with media industries; and control the representational terms of the liberated woman figure. In this relationship to popular media, feminists articulated a coherent 67 community, strengthened their presence in the lives of a broader range of women through their common practice of television-viewing and movie-going, and formulated a common agenda across a wide-ranging, often fragmented movement. Mainstream media, for all of its invasive and politically suspect attention to women, became a vital tool in the organization and visualization of feminism’s collective strength. Although suspicious of the motivations behind the media’s interest in their politics, feminists modified earlier hard-line rejections of mainstream media. Typical of early Second Wave feminism’s condemnation of popular media, Betty Friedan’s 1964 article “Television and the Feminine Mystique” extended to TV the arguments of The Feminine Mystique (1963) and its rejection of women’s magazines for the psychologically damaging effects they had on women. This early expression of the Women’s Liberation Movement, credited as a foundational catalyst in the resurgence of feminism in the United States, condemned television and popular media, failing to see opportunities for feminist intervention. Since the “whole process of the feminine mystique is projected on television to such an extreme,” Friedan condemned television for fostering the “stunted, dehumanized, sick image of women” and what it was “doing to real women.” 108 Women suffered from these representations, but the very medium of television also suffered by transmitting these images. Friedan, in addition to her concern about the “self-contempt” that television’s feminine mystique bred in real women viewers, wondered what it was “doing to television” itself. 109 68 Unlike Friedan and earlier expressions of Second Wave feminism, feminists of the 1970s embraced, if ambivalently, the new attention television and film paid to liberated women. Feminists engaged creatively and selectively with media’s attempts to create a marketable group identity for liberated women audiences and a viable representation of the liberated woman. As distasteful as popular media representations of women and the business practices of Hollywood film and network television were to most feminists during the Seventies, they understood the need to engage with media industries and to influence their content and address. As feminist newsletter Goodbye to All That proposed in 1971, feminists should become more, not less, involved in television and film and should work to raise their awareness of media content. After cataloguing the various sexist representations of popular television programming, Goodbye’s article, “Women on TV ,” poses the following question to its feminist readership: “What can women do about network programming like this? Is the answer to stop watching TV , as a protest?” 110 Although it appears that “most shows are a complete waste of time, ignoring them, as many women do, will not make them disappear.” 111 Instead of rejecting television outright, Goodbye suggests that the solution to television’s deplorable state of gender politics should result in feminists “working actively to change broadcasting.” 112 One of the most notable and visible ways that feminists “actively” worked to alter the representations and economic structures of media was their petitioning of the FCC and local television stations for equal employment opportunities and for program funding for accurate representations of women. Partly a strategy of political 69 protest and partly a savvy, voluntary co-operation with the media’s industrial machinery, feminist groups offered their services to television networks as the TV industry attempted to gauge the nature of feminism and to invent lucrative representations of liberated womanhood. Feminists strategized with the knowledge that the media was their unlikely, but powerful ally as they strove for nationwide visibility. Gloria Steinem understood this productive alliance: “If women are to have any hopes of accurate representation on television, then women’s groups must now work with programmers.” 113 Steinem’s attitude underscores the necessity of the relationship feminists needed to forge with media industries in order to capitalize on their mutually productive affiliation. With “Women, Women Everywhere,” as an off our backs article proclaims, the “word has reached the lowest common denominator of American mass media, television, that women are to be recognized and responded to.” 114 Feminists, understanding television’s new recognition of its accountability to women, began applying pressure to television stations. These meetings promoted feminism as a public entity with powerful economic and cultural influence. Their successful FCC complaints and their meetings with local television stations garnered considerable publicity for feminism and provided the Movement with a material gauge of their successes. Typical of this feminist-media interaction, the Washington D.C. chapter of the National Organization of Women (NOW) held a “session” in 1972 with local TV stations executives to “complain about programming and newscasting policies.” 115 Shortly after the meeting, the station launched Nancy Dickerson and the New Woman 70 and Everywoman. The latter, a series “designed to ‘record the current revolution’ among women,” was afforded “one of the largest budgets for the station’s local programs.” 116 In the relationship between feminists, the FCC, and local TV stations, the success of feminist activism became legible through the on-air content and the economic policies of local station decisions. Beyond the obvious technique of overt activism and calls for improved programming, feminism gained momentum through the media in its relationship to the everyday lives of women otherwise disengaged from radical political activism. The issue of representation proved successful in recruiting support for the feminist cause. Feminists’ publicized attacks on the media prompted “growing numbers of women of all classes, raced and political persuasions” to join “feminist groups from Coast to Coast” or, at the very least, to “cheer [. . .] them on silently.” 117 In their interactions with television, a cultural form with which most American women felt familiar, feminists were capable of addressing the interests of less-politically visible groups of women positioned across social and geographical lines. Feminists exploited the nationwide presence and popular outreach of television, using this pre- established network to convey their political investments in bettering the lives of women through improved media products intended for and addressed to women. Publicizing these causes, feminists also recruited women who understood the inadequacies of television, experienced their own personal discontent with the media, and recognized the need to agitate for change, if only in popular television programming. 71 The organizational energies unleashed by feminism’s new attention to and involvement in popular media produced new strains of activism within the Movement itself. Engagement with television’s programming and hiring practices fostered growth within feminist groups and provided the grounds for new formulations of special-interest groups under the umbrella of feminist politics. The subject of women’s representations and the female labor force within television and film industries proved a productive common ground for organizations. Groups such as Media Women and NOW’s Task Force on the Media gave feminists another platform from which to articulate their political goals. The groups’ activities, when responding to popular media, magnified the efforts of a relatively small group of feminists and granted them greater public visibility in the mainstream press. Their grassroots efforts and local protests reaped results in great proportion, partly due to the far-reaching influence of a single television program and widespread television viewership. Ultimately, feminists’ impact on the television industry gave them the ability to gauge the power of their growing presence. Feminists raised awareness of their political presence through their overt and covert attempts to dismantle anti-woman media practices, politics, and economic structures. In one of the most well-documented feminist media protests, members of the Women’s Liberation Front stormed the CBS stockholders meeting in San Francisco in 1970 and demanded that the network abolish sexist representations of women. This “female assault” on the network powers was “gleefully reported by broadcast journalists.” 118 This public visibility and media pronouncement of 72 feminism’s success in confronting and reforming the television industry promoted and amplified the influence of feminism on popular media. Even the mainstream, industry-friendly publication TV Guide reported the influence of feminists and their tactics on the television industry. As the 1970 TV Guide article “Is Television Making a Mockery of the American Woman?” asks, “Is there any chance that the feminists— still a tiny minority of American women—will actually succeed in influencing TV if they keep up this barrage?” 119 The article concludes that, “Yes, there is.” 120 Ultimately, the liberated woman media worker of the Seventies posed a pervasive, potentially uncontrollable, and thus dangerous, threat to popular media. Her presence prompted concerns about and fantasies of unlimited power and influence, which translated into feminism’s advantage. The following conception of this figure reveals the productive potential she held for the Women’s Liberation Movement during the 1970s: “the entire communications world […] is studded with feminist Trojan horses” and is “full of feminist borers-from-within.” 121 Imagined as omniscient presence within the media workplace, the feminist media worker-activist permeated every facet of the industry and held unlimited potential to revolutionize it. Notes 73 1 Sorryien, “Fashion Politics and the Fashion in Politics,” off our backs 31 July 1974: 17- , Gender Watch, ProQuest, U of Southern California, USC Libraries, 11 Nov. 2005 <http://www.proquest.umi.com/>. 2 Sorryien 17- . 3 Alice Echols, Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America, 1967-1975 (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1989) 15. 4 Echols 6. 5 In order to differentiate between real-world feminist politics and the representable aspects of women’s new lifestyle choices and the cultural significations of those choices, I use off our back’s concept of the liberated woman to identify the ways in which a particular type of woman, attached to feminist politics in the 1970s, served as a model for mainstream media’s conceptualization of feminism. Simultaneously, the real-world manifestation of this figure relied upon mainstream media’s visualization of feminism to formulate her identity as a liberated woman. 6 Teresa de Lauretis, Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film, and Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1987) 3. 7 Qtd. in Echols 208. 8 While I acknowledge that, pragmatically speaking, media interests depend upon ideological dissent for new raw materials, which are then processed through a mainstream frame of representation, this project privileges the ways in which feminism and mainstream media outlets operated within a relationship of reciprocity. 9 Aniko Bodroghkozy, Groove Tube: Sixties Television and the Youth Rebellion (Durham: Duke UP, 2001) 3-4. 10 Bodroghkozy 3. 11 “The Troubles of Television—And a Coming Revolution,” U.S. News & World Report 21 Dec. 1970: 58-60. “Hidden TV Messages Create Social Discontent,” Intellect Feb. 1976: 350 Harry F. Waters, “TV: Do Minorities Rule?” Newsweek 2 June 1975: 78 12 Robert Edward Balon, “Prelude to Big Brother? Measuring Broadcast Audiences in the Year 2000,” USA Today Nov. 1978: 53. 13 Balon 53. 14 Balon 54. 74 15 Balon 53. 16 Teresa de Lauretis, Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1984) 5. 17 de Lauretis, Alice Doesn’t 5. 18 Most notably, 1976’s Network represents the downfall of TV news at the hands of a pathologized, demonized female news producer played by Faye Dunaway. The presence of the aggressive woman within the news business instigates the vulgarization of news, the destruction of venerable newsmen’s careers, and a series of failed personal relationships including the destruction of a long-standing marriage. Ultimately, the newswoman is a tragic figure who, like the medium, has become cold, unfeeling, and emasculating. See Chapter One’s discussion of this film for a more extensive treatment of Network’s gender politics. 19 Qtd. in Betty Medsger, “On a Million-Dollar Misunderstanding,” The Progressive Aug. 1976: 19. 20 Mary Russo, The Female Grotesque: Risk, Excess, and Modernity (New York: Routledge, 1995) 8. 21 Medsger 19. 22 Qtd. in Medsger 19. 23 “TV’s Super Women,” Time 22 Nov. 1976: 68. 24 Qtd. in Medsger 19. 25 Qtd. in Medsger 19. 26 In Off-White Hollywood, Diane Negra traces the flexible ethnic and racial identifications of Cher’s persona of a career that spans the late 1960s to the 2000s. Cher’s 1970s star image was marked by numerous significations of ethnicity. Although Negra critiques Cher’s personality during the Seventies for its dependence on pivotal male creators of her image (husband Sonny Bono, designer Bob Mackie, and music producer David Geffen), I am interested in Cher’s potentially disruptive bodily spectacle of ethnicity on display during this period. 27 Diane Negra, Off-White Hollywood: American Culture and Ethnic Female Stardom (London: Routledge, 2001) 167. 28 For a full discussion of Cher’s ethnic, sexual, and gendered performances and appearances, see Chapter 7, “Stardom, Corporeality and Ethnic Indeterminacy: Cher’s Disrupted/Disruptive Body,” in Negra’s Off-White Hollywood, 164-181. 75 29 Qtd. in Medsger 19. 30 Tim Patterson, “New Sexist Hype: Women Crimebusters” Guardian 27 Oct. 1976: 20. 31 Patterson 20. 32 Julia Keller analyzes the specific instance of Connie Chung’s 1995 firing from CBS. While this incident falls outside the range of my study, it is interesting to note that the figure of the newswoman in crisis persists well beyond the Seventies. See Julia Keller, “Getting Serious: Women at the Anchor Desk,” Delights, Desires, and Dilemmas: Essays on Women and the Media, ed. Ann C. Hall (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1998) 39-47. 33 I am referring here to Sally Quinn’s and Jessica Savitch’s on-air breakdowns. 34 I do not wish to equate Sally Quinn with authentic or progressive feminist politics. Her autobiography does acknowledge, if unevenly, the influence of women’s groups on her hiring. However, she also charges these same groups as responsible for having her fired. By 1992, Quinn has firmly positioned herself against feminism, most notably in her infamous Washington Post article, “Who Killed Feminism?” in which she declares the movement dead and its leaders extremist. She accuses feminists of zealous political correctness and condemns their rejection of domesticity and heterosexuality. Sally Quinn, “Who Killed Feminism?” Washington Post 19 Jan. 1992: C1-C2. 35 Sally Quinn, We’re Going to Make You a Star (New York: Ballantine, 1976) 21. 36 Quinn, We’re Going to Make You a Star 21. 37 Quinn, We’re Going to Make You a Star 11. 38 Quinn, We’re Going to Make You a Star 68. 39 Sally Quinn, “So There I Was on TV! Me, Sally Quinn! Oh, My God!,” Esquire Aug. 1975: 107. 40 Quinn, “So There I Was on TV!” 107. 41 Qtd. in Quinn, “So There I Was on TV!” 125. Linda Lovelace’s performance creates an ongoing fascination on the part of 1970s television. Intertextual references to Deep Throat abound, especially when male characters want to put women in their place. For instance, in the Maude episode “Maude’s Moods,” which I discuss in more detail in Chapter Two, Maude’s husband Walter enthusiastically, but mistakenly anticipates Lovelace’s arrival at the Findlay home. He is greatly disappointed to find out that the visitor is not Lovelace, but Barbara Walters. 42 Quinn, “So There I Was on TV!” 124. 76 43 Quinn, “So There I Was on TV!” 124. 44 Quinn, “So There I Was on TV!” 124. 45 Quinn, We’re Going to Make You a Star 203. 46 Quinn, We’re Going to Make You a Star 203. 47 Quinn, “So There I Was on TV!” 107. 48 Sally Quinn, “Christine Chubbuck: 29, Good-Looking, Educated, A Television Personality. Dead. Live and in Color.,” Washington Post 4 Aug. 1974: F8. 49 Qtd. in Quinn, “Christine Chubbuck” F9. 50 Quinn, “Christine Chubbuck” F8-F9. 51 Qtd. in Quinn, “Christine Chubbuck” F9. 52 Qtd. in Quinn, “Christine Chubbuck” F9. 53 The relationship of the spectacular on-air suicide and the state of the 1970s television news industry apparently made for poignant representational material. According to a number of unverifiable sources, Chubbuck’s suicide served as the inspiration for Howard Beale’s death in Network. See, for instance, Wikipedia’s entry for Christine Chubbuck. “Christine Chubbuck,” Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia, 18 Aug. 2006 <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christine_Chubbuck>. The Los Angeles Times makes a parenthetical aside that links an unnamed Chubbuck’s suicide as proof of Chayefsky’s remarkable abilities to address the cultural unrest of the day: “(A Florida newscaster did commit suicide on the air last season.)” Clarke Taylor, “Paddy May Have a Hit on His Hands,” Los Angeles Times 21 Nov. 1976: M50. 54 Most notably, Marty (1953). 55 Clarke Taylor, “Paddy May Have a Hit on His Hands,” Los Angeles Times 21 Nov. 1976: M50. 56 Qtd. in Taylor M50. 57 Qtd. in Taylor M50. 58 “The $500,000 Timex,” Time 26 Apr. 1976: 85. 59 Qtd. in “The $500,000 Timex” 85. 77 60 “The $500,000 Timex” 85. 61 “The $500,000 Timex” 85. 62 “The Bionic Programmer,” Time 22 Nov. 1976: 70. 63 “TV’s Super Women” 69. 64 “TV’s Super Women” 68. 65 See Chapter 4 of this dissertation for an account of Silverman’s success and the importance of his programming decisions in the success of networks. 66 Qtd. in Susan Braudy, “Bang! A Little Gift from Hollywood,” Ms. Jan. 1975: 36. 67 A Decade under the Influence, dir. Ted Demme, IFC Films, 2003. 68 Although she acknowledges the range of political issues Lear addresses in his various programs, Kirsten Marthe Lentz identifies race as the key element of “relevance” typically associated with Tandem/TAT programs. Kirsten Marthe Lentz, “Quality versus Relevance: Feminism, Race, and the Politics of the Sign in 1970s Television,” Camera Obscura 15.1 (2000): 6. 69 Lentz 6. 70 Harry F. Waters, “The Mary Hartman Craze,” Newsweek 3 May 1976: 63. 71 Waters, “The Mary Hartman Craze” 63. 72 Waters, “The Mary Hartman Craze” 63. 73 Waters, “The Mary Hartman Craze” 63. 74 Waters, “The Mary Hartman Craze” 56. 75 Liz Ewen and Stu Ewen, “Mary Hartman: Al All-Consuming Interest,” Sevendays 26 July 1976: 29. 76 Ewen and Ewen 30. 77 Waters, “The Mary Hartman Craze” 54. 78 Barbara Ehrenreich, “Mary Hartman: A World Out of Control,” Socialist Revolution Oct.- Dec. 1976: 136. 79 Lorraine Davis, “The Soaperstar,” Vogue June 1976: 157. 78 80 Waters, “The Mary Hartman Craze” 54. 81 Waters, “The Mary Hartman Craze” 55. 82 Waters, “The Mary Hartman Craze” 62. 83 Harry Waters, “Remodeling Mary,” Newsweek 27 Dec. 1976: 51. 84 Qtd. in Waters, “The Mary Hartman Craze” 63. 85 Waters, “Remodeling Mary” 51. 86 Waters, “The Mary Hartman Craze” 55. 87 Davis 157. 88 Waters, “The Mary Hartman Craze” 61. 89 Waters, “The Mary Hartman Craze” 61. 90 Qtd. in Waters, “The Mary Hartman Craze” 54. 91 Waters, “The Mary Hartman Craze” 54. 92 Jack Hamilton, “Would You Let Your Daughter Do It? Or What It’s Like to Work on TV in Hollywood!,” Look 7 Sept. 1971: 34. 93 Hamilton 34. 94 Qtd. in Hamilton 34. 95 Hamilton 34. 96 Qtd. in Hamilton 34. 97 Qtd. in Hamilton 38. 98 Qtd. in Hamilton 38. 99 Qtd. in Hamilton 38. 100 Georgia Jones, “Twinkle, Twinkle . . .The Great Superstar Fiasco,” off our backs 30 Sept. 1972: 2- , Gender Watch, ProQuest, U of Southern California, USC Libraries, 2 July 2005 <http://www.proquest.umi.com/>. 79 101 Jones 2- . 102 “Redstockings Assert Steinem CIA File,” off our backs 30 June 1975: 7. 103 “Redstockings Assert Steinem CIA File” 7. 104 Edward P. Morgan, “Power of a Woman,” The Progressive Apr. 1972: 8. 105 Linda, “Gloria in Wonderland,” Goodbye to All That June 1972: 7. 106 Jones 2- . 107 Qtd. in Echols 208. 108 Betty Friedan, It Changed My Life: Writings on the Women’s Movement (New York: Random, 1976) 49. 109 Friedan 48, 49. 110 “Women on TV: Ann Gets Her Man,” Goodbye To All That Oct. 1971: 2. 111 “Women on TV” 2. 112 “Women on TV” 2. 113 Qtd. in Jones 2- . 114 Fran Pollner, “Women, Women Everywhere,” off our backs 30 Sept. 1972: 21- , Gender Watch, ProQuest, U of Southern California, USC Libraries, 2 July 2005 <http://www.proquest.umi.com/>. 115 Pollner 21- . 116 Pollner 21- . 117 Edith Efron, “Is Television Making a Mockery of the American Woman?,” TV Guide 8 Aug. 1970: 7. 118 Efron 7. 119 Efron 9. 120 Efron 9. 121 Efron 9. 80 81 Chapter Two Women’s Lib on the Couch: Psychology, Embodiment, and Surveillance within a Therapeutic Culture Four middle-aged women sit around a restaurant table, drinking wine, laughing, and talking. In the course of their conversation, they discuss early-onset menopause, the arrest of an elevator man for indecent exposure in the building of one of the women, and the frustration of one of the other women at her husband’s lack of sexual interest in her. The conversation soon turns to one of the women’s relationship with a nineteen-year-old man she has just met. Although the other women initially tease her about the age discrepancy, they eagerly listen to her describe the benefits of the relationship: “He’s calm, quiet; he doesn’t come on; he’s very bright. He’s not afraid to be tender.” In addition to his sensitive, attentive personality, this young man is capable of sexually satisfying a woman in unconventional ways; as his female lover recounts, the night before, the two engaged in an extended discussion about loneliness that led to a sexual encounter: “He actually massaged my eyes, and then I had an orgasm, and then another, and then another.” The women are impressed, since, as one of them puts it, most men are “all wrapped up in sexual ego,” a condition that equates to sexual anxiety and overcompensation. This scene takes place in An Unmarried Woman (1978), a film about Erica Benton (Jill Clayburgh), a woman who, in the process of undergoing a divorce from her unfaithful husband, engages in a new understanding her own self-reliance and self-worth as a single, “unmarried” woman. The film utilizes scenes of informal 82 meetings among close female friends and formal therapeutic relationships to explore the sexual liberation of women and the consequences for gendered identities and behaviors of both women and men. The film’s women demonstrate a facility in psychological diagnosis (e.g. “sexual ego”) that grants them analytic tools with which to critique the patriarchal terms of gender and heterosexuality in their personal lives and in larger social structures. Applying the particular situation of her friend’s older woman-younger man relationship to more universal ideologies of gender and sexuality, Erica situates the personal within a political frame to indict the gender inequities of society’s sexual double standards. She asks her friend, “Well, if you were a man and you were talking about a nineteen-year-old girl, then there would be no problem, would there?” As this brief scene from An Unmarried Woman suggests, engagement with psychology and therapeutic relationships serves as a linking device between women’s growing liberation, the terms of their own self-awareness, and their knowledge of others’ motivations and drives. Films and television programs of the Seventies featured with growing frequency liberated women engaging in therapeutic culture, whether in formal professional situations or through informal conversations in their day-to-day lives. 1 Feminist groups utilized these very same terms of self- awareness and personal fulfillment to produce critical understandings of societal structures that produced personal dissatisfaction. By forming consciousness-raising (CR) groups, feminists engaged in scenarios reminiscent of the dinner meeting 83 among the female friends in An Unmarried Woman. The film’s all-woman support group, with its highly verbal interpersonal engagements, represents, albeit in a mainstream media articulation, consciousness-raising. Founded in 1968 by New York Radical Women and popularized during the mid-1970s, CR refers to group sessions in which women talk through their personal problems and share their subjective experiences in order to find validation in their shared emotions. Ideally, this personal level of understanding extends into political consciousness that, it was hoped, would translate into large-scale social changes. For feminist groups and media industries alike, the relationship of therapy’s processes and its outcomes to gender emancipation offered yet another facet of visible, transmittable feminism. This chapter attends to the merging of these forces in both feminist groups’ and popular media’s representations of women’s liberation to consider a specific line of discourse and visualization that grounded women’s subjectivity within a therapeutic ethos. Through this particular focus, I argue that feminists and mainstream media used articulations of psychological/therapeutic self- awareness as a strategy of producing and representing liberation within a culturally and historically specific gendered field of visibility. A central part of this visibility, in both camps, was the racially and sexually specific logic that accompanied the situating of heterosexual, white women as subjects within a field of psychology and “fantasy.” This often required and prompted the presence of racial difference, which typically manifested itself in the inclusion of a companionate figure of a black 84 woman. This figure, in relationship to the psychologized white women, signified the political import of the liberated woman’s situation and/or served as the truer victim of social oppression, thereby minimizing the complaints of the white woman. As figures with a presumed relationship to reality, these black women balanced and/or corrected white women’s flights into narcissistic unrealities. Finally, this chapter considers the proximity of therapy to confession and the ways in which the therapeutic encounter often offered up the confessing, psychologized subject for surveillance. The liberated woman’s pursuit of self-understanding and the resulting revelation of her supposedly inner-most desires made her vulnerable, in both representation and reality, to scrutiny and consequent disciplining through spectatorial voyeurism, objectification, and government interventions. However, the outcomes of these therapeutic consequences were uncertain and open to challenge and repurposing by feminists. Surveillance oftentimes proved a productive force for feminists, helping them to understand themselves as viable political agents and to convey their collective identity defined by their mutual persecution. Therapeutic Culture, Feminist Culture: The Primary Debates Psychiatry and psychology gained increased influence by the 1970s, even within political groups who were wary of its pathologizing effects. This interest stemmed from the reformulations of identity prompted by the Civil Rights, student anti-war, and Women’s Liberation Movements of the late 1960s. Feminists adopted the political understanding from various Leftist groups that “emotional experience 85 and social organization could not ultimately be separated, that oppression and liberation alike took internal as well as external forms.” 2 Certainly psychiatry and psychology had been used to vilify women’s growing independence and assertions of self apart from the heterosexual nuclear family—ranging from Philip Wylie’s post- WWII identification of “Momism” to, contemporaneous with the Women’s Movement, Dr. Benjamin Spock’s emphasis on women as primary caregivers and psychological influences on children. But, as Ellen Herman argues in her historical analysis of psychology and political cultures, psychology also helped to “construct the feminist” by offering analytic tools and concepts “to resist the separation of private and public, to bridge the yawning chasms between the psychic and the social, the self and the other,” while providing nuanced understandings of identity that “discredited” and disrupted “[m]onolithic understandings of ‘woman’ and ‘gender.’” 3 Although radical feminist groups were careful to differentiate CR from therapy, both modes of self-exploration rely upon personal introspection and transformation. Feminists who advocated CR in a 1977 issue of Women: A Journal of Liberation identified the useful commonalities between CR and psychoanalysis: their opportunities for women to “break down barriers which keep us from self- knowledge; to get to the roots of our discontent; to free ourselves from self- destructive situations.” 4 The differences between psychoanalysis and CR are both material and ideological. CR aims to include all women, in part through its break with the professional structures of the medical profession. With this independence 86 from the field of psychiatry, CR is “available to all sisters” and offers a group- oriented, egalitarian structure with “no profit-motive, no desire to tyrannize, no set of preconceived answers, no leader.” 5 By accessing their subjective experiences and emotions, women could identify the degree to which these personal issues were widely shared, and then take them from an individual to a collective, political sense of their oppression as a cultural and socio-economic group. Or, in the words of Women’s feminist advocates of CR, “as the group works through its problems, it usually realizes that the individual hang-ups have social and economic as well as emotional origins.” 6 While some feminists were embracing the self-awareness and resulting political impact promised by therapy and CR, other cultural critics were cautious about the social influence of therapy, with its emphasis on inwardness and individuality. In his best-selling 1979 book The Culture of Narcissism, Christopher Lasch condemns the widespread turn to the psychology and psychoanalysis, charging this new social consciousness of psychological motivations, drives, and desires as narcissistic, as his book’s title announces. Lasch urges readers to attend to the rise of therapy as an expression of a larger cultural shift. Instead of seeing the underlying and fundamental psychology of humans as ongoing and fundamental as a Freudian analyst might, Lasch promotes a historically and culturally specific analysis, or “[t]heoretical precision,” to understand the origins and ideological significance of prevailing psychological disorders. 7 Or, more simply put, “every age develops it own 87 peculiar form of pathology” that requires an equally refined and culturally specific mode of analysis. 8 The Seventies marked a time of increased emphasis on and commonplace participation in “therapeutic culture”: the everyday presence and influence of popular versions of self-awareness and psychology, as well as increased engagement with professional psychology and psychoanalysis. This therapeutic culture coincided with the popularization of feminism; an examination of the relationship between these two forces illuminates the ideological uses of psychology, both in aid of and in containment of feminism’s aims. Lasch’s call for an identification of the forces involved in producing the socio-psychological proves helpful in understanding the relationship between feminism, representations of female empowerment, and the turn to therapeutic interventions. To Lasch, the Seventies mark a time of therapeutic culture because of cultural developments—“bureaucracy, the proliferation of images, therapeutic ideologies, the rationalization of the inner life, the culture of consumption”—that manifest themselves in a significant “change in personality structure.” 9 While Lasch does not execute an overt gender-specific analysis of this turn to the therapeutic, women certainly experienced and responded to media saturation, technologies of surveillance and rationalization, and the heightened influence of capitalism in very particular ways. Lasch does intimate a gender critique that is not particularly sympathetic to women—a tendency he sustains throughout his ongoing lament of the downfall of traditional social structures—when he identifies “changes in family life” 88 as a crucial catalyst for America’s desire to seek out therapeutic interventions in their day-to-day lives. 10 Taking gender difference into account further nuances the “theoretical precision” required by an analysis of the Seventies and its turn to the therapeutic. An examination of the various uses of therapeutic culture, both in the world of feminist politics and in onscreen representations of women’s liberation, reveals the productive, if not politically uncertain, function of therapeutic culture for women. Rather than mere narcissism, I would suggest that women, influenced by the presence of the Women’s Movement, in a rare moment of self-awareness and empowerment, felt capable of understanding the world as a place that should reflect their desires and accommodate their increasingly self-determined “selves.” Producing Realism, Surveying Pleasure: Media and the Promise of the Self- Aware Woman Film and television of the Seventies often featured their liberated woman protagonists in therapeutic scenarios—whether in personal interactions with other women or in professional environments of patient-therapist relationships—in order to externalize and make visible a woman’s discontent, to authenticate her psychological depth as a character, and to provide seemingly unmediated access to a woman expressing her true feelings about key personal issues (e.g. opinions about men, sexual desires, the level of satisfaction in family life/obligations). While providing new aesthetic options for representing women characters, therapeutic scenarios also offered ambivalent ideological effects: women were afforded 89 expression, in their own voice, of dissatisfaction and anger, yet this offered their private emotions up for surveillance and possible containment. In short, media’s new interest in women’s engagement in therapy and CR both promoted female liberation and offered another mode of offering audiences pleasurable technologies of gender. This promised to represent women in aesthetically innovative and ideologically progressive ways. A return to An Unmarried Woman reveals the important function of therapeutic culture in both picturing women’s empowerment and limiting its effects through various modes of self-awareness. In addition to the restaurant scene among the female support group, the film features a series of seemingly dissimilar scenes of therapeutic scenarios with productive and restrictive outcomes on the self-aware female subject. The film’s most obvious and least conventional expression of female empowerment takes place in a scene of professional therapy between Erica and her female therapist. In this encounter, the content of conversation and the aesthetic means of capturing the exchange illustrate the representational opportunities presented by therapeutic culture. The scene is filmed with a relatively static camera positioned on the level of the two women. This camera placement, along with the scene’s limited editing style, replicates that of the restaurant scene and implicitly ties the two scenes together. These aesthetics offer minimal intrusion on the actions and language of the women, privilege the content of the scene, and encourages viewer identification with the onscreen culture of women. 90 Everything about the scene of professional therapy signifies informality and “realism,” which is placed diegetically under the control of the women within the scene. Through the course of the scene, the women are seated on cushions on the floor, as they unselfconsciously speak of the culturally taboo topic of a girl’s sexual and social maturation and the bodily realities of menstruation. Demarcating the casual, non-threatening environment of therapy, the therapist has kicked off her shoes, while Erica delivers an extended monologue recounting her memories of having her first period. Clayburgh’s performance conveys realism: interrupted thoughts, repetitions, uncertain word choices, and laughter and other emotive expressions. Equally significant to this acting style is the content of the recollected experience, which links female friendship and intimacy to the physical transformation of a young woman, and expresses a pride in both: You know, I. . .Well I got my period when I was, uh, when I was 13, you know, and most of my, well. . .[sighs]. . . some of my friends, well my best friend [laughs] [pause]. My best friend was Karen Feinstein and she got her period when she was twelve, you know, so I thought there was really something wrong with me ‘cause I didn’t get my period. So I had a terrible year from 12 ‘til 13, you know. . .I mean, I. . .I really thought there was something wrong with me. Continuing in a similar conversational fashion, Erica talks of finally getting her period by recounting, in great detail, the physical sensation of menstruation and the excitement she and friend Karen Feinstein experienced by sharing in this moment together. Within the therapeutic context, the film offers a rare look at a grown woman’s understanding of her own embodiment, foundational female relationships, 91 and shared experiential moments with other women—all of which revolve around a pivotal, yet underrepresented and underdiscussed moment in women’s lives. Clayburgh’s naturalistic acting, with its awkward physicality and halting moments of dialogue, promises a true portrait of a woman’s road to independence. This depiction of a woman coming to terms with her own sexual and political knowledge conforms to the trend of 1970s Hollywood that promised to focus on “heroines” that were “at some level, offered as representations of ‘real’—natural as opposed to Hollywood—women.” 11 The use of therapeutic language and scenarios, along with a general psychological awareness, produced unromanticized scenes of women’s emotional states. As An Unmarried Woman’s therapy scene suggests, the film’s realism depends upon a woman’s cognizance and celebration of her own embodiment and pleasures. This emphasis on realism and the female subject reflects the growing influence of feminist politics and media protests that call for representations of women that reflect real women’s desires, life stories, fears, and fantasies. In this respect, therapeutic culture and its representational possibilities proved instrumental in mainstream media’s abilities to address the political concerns of feminists. The realism produced in therapeutic scenes like the one between Erica and her therapist also placed women in situations that afforded audiences a new and complex mode through which to surveil women and their sexuality. The terms of realism that expressed a woman’s self-awareness were also the ones that offered her 92 up for surveillance and reformulated the conventional terms of cinematic pleasure with woman as the object of the gaze. The relationship between subjectivity, self- awareness and the control of the known subject is one that has been theorized most famously in Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality. This link between knowledge and power or the narrativizing of the self and the disciplining of the self, found renewed, historically specific expression during the 1970s. Increasingly part of everyday life and relationships, and popular vernacular, culture, and knowledge, therapeutic culture prompted people to become involved in their own self-knowledge and to express this to others so that their identity could be apprehended. With the public presence and cultural incentive to speak of/get in touch with one’s self, “[c]onversation takes on the quality of confession.” 12 While elements of this version of self-knowledge produce productive socio-political engagements, this therapeutic discourse also makes the subject more vulnerable to surveillance from without. A gender-specific analysis augments this generic consideration of the discursive- confessional relationship: the nature, degree, and outcomes of surveillance that accompanies the self-aware subject become even more complicated in their power dynamics. One final moment from An Unmarried Woman rounds out the complex nature of therapeutic culture and representations of liberated women. In the scene that directly precedes the restaurant group meeting discussed in the chapter’s opening, Erica lies in bed, fantasizing about her role as a prima ballerina in a world premiere 93 of Swan Lake. After her husband and daughter leave, Erica moves through the rooms of her apartment, wearing a T-shirt and underwear, performing ballet to music that, presumably, plays in her head. The camera effortlessly and unobtrusively follows Erica as she adjusts her underwear before dancing, uses a houseplant as a dance partner, and engages in a private fantasy of her own construction. The structural pairing between the Swan Lake scene and the restaurant scene with the female friends is a significant one. It suggests an admirable thematic through-line of women’s pleasurable fantasies and self-fulfillment and deflects focus from the voyeurism of the scene that depends upon Erica’s “to-be-looked-at-ness.” 13 The conventional voyeurism of Hollywood films would mar the ideological effectiveness and unity of a liberated woman picture and therefore must be complicated. The film’s scenes of therapy and pseudo-CR sessions guarantee this by offering an ideological “out” for the film’s presentation of a woman as a pleasurable object for spectatorship. Much like the scene with Erica’s therapist, the Swan Lake sequence also promises a window into a woman’s innermost desires, without mediation from the camera or elements within the diegetic world. The formal elements of the scene, along with Erica’s fantasies of empowerment, Clayburgh’s naturalistic performance, and the viewer’s pleasure in surveilling the actions of a liberated woman come together in Erica’s private, pleasurable performance of Swan Lake. While, on one hand, the film presents an unconventional means of conveying the protagonist’s pleasures of “fantasizing about being a ballerina, taking pleasure in 94 her body,” it also produces a new scene of surveillance, in which the viewer can take pleasure in the assumed everyday activities of a woman who produces her own pleasures. 14 Charlotte Brundson sees An Unmarried Woman as a capitulation to conventional mechanisms that situate woman as spectacle, but complicates this through its construction of a female character who “can plausibly do, as well as be done to and looked at.” 15 I modify this interpretation slightly to include the type of surveillance, fostered and permitted by the influence of therapy and CR that was formulated in 1970s cinema. In this brand of surveillance, camerawork and scene content assures audiences, aided by the liberated woman herself, that they will be privy to women in a revised manner, again, without accepting responsibility for sexism or objectification of women. This new onscreen figure, her behavior, and the manner in which she is represented ensures that cinematic pleasure will not be disrupted, but will be reformulated in innovative ways that signify the modernization of a woman who, paradoxically, produces new avenues of surveillance through her “real” moments of self-actualized, liberated behaviors. Registering Identity in Black and White: The Psychologized Self and the Crisis of Women’s Subjectivity The therapeutic ethos of the 1970s simultaneously proposed an assertion of self through discourse and self-reflection while calling into question the very nature of subjectivity. This both/and sense of self represented the promise and hazard of psychologized individuality, prompting an investigation of selfhood while presenting 95 uncertain outcomes of what this investigation meant for the individual. Generically, therapeutic culture produced, as Lasch negatively assessed, a “cult of intimacy” that “originates not in the assertion of personality but in its collapse.” 16 While the “collapse” of personality may be an overstatement of the case, Lasch’s comment indicates an unsettling of identity brought about by a relationship to therapeutic culture. I propose that this challenge to subjectivity bore a particularly powerful effect on white women who were seeking their assertions of self within a feminist framework. White feminists, engaged with therapy or its politicized counterpart, CR, were reformulating their identity apart from the core gender, racial, and sexual elements of white femininity. To do so, they rejected identities that depended upon self-sacrifice, emotionally intuitive behaviors, passivity in social and sexual terms, and a general compliance with patriarchal culture. Without these terms of heterosexual femininity to call upon, a certain class of white feminists was faced with reformulating subjectivity from the ground up and reinventing the scripts that guided their public and personal performances of identity. White feminists, even if not consciously aware of their problems of registering an image of liberation and of political viability, repeatedly and overtly expressed a peculiar envy of black womanhood’s authenticity and representational “presence.” By rejecting their cultural legacy of feminine visibility and conformity to heterosexual standards of beauty, white feminists were left unmoored, representationally speaking. In a number of interviews and articles, they patterned 96 their gender struggles along the lines of civil rights battles and black activism. They did so in the hopes of formulating a new sense of womanhood that conformed to the terms of responsible, authentic political activism and broke with patriarchal terms of race and gender. As University of Chicago professor and white feminist Peggy Way suggests in a 1970 dialogue with black feminists Joan Brown and Helen Fannings published in The Christian Century, black women possessed the power to signify an admirable politicized gender identity. The exchange between Way, Brown, and Fannings serves as a symptomatic expression of the concerns certain white women felt about their own identities within a politically aware culture. While this exchange, limited to a single interview, does not adequately represent the complex racial conflicts and coalitions within the Women’s Liberation Movement, it does tell a particular story that repeats across various forums and within various contexts. In the perception of some white feminists, black womanhood—with its perceived visible iconography and its politically defensible subjectivity—possessed representational riches. This fully formed, intact gender identity fulfilled feminism’s imagination of what politically informed, wholly empowered, and representationally viable womanhood looked like. To certain white feminists, like Way, black women’s politically productive/responsible representational powers far exceeded that of white women’s. Lamenting the lack of “heroines” for white women, Way asks the black women interviewees if they had “black image women” who served as visible role models 97 that could publicly symbolize the empowerment and integrity of black female politics. 17 Way’s question gestures to the larger ideological conception of black womanhood as a powerful signifying “presence.” This notion of black womanhood as “presence” has historical roots reaching as far back as the Middle Ages and most famously gained credibility in nineteenth-century pseudo-scientific discourses about the quantifiable differences between black and white women. To briefly summarize these long-ranging and exhaustively researched histories, black womanhood signified bodily presence, typically through “observable,” sexualized traits of genitals, buttocks, and facial structures. 18 Obviously, by the 1970s, the literal physical display of the naked, objectified body was no longer acceptable. However, a similar ideological function persisted. Like their historical precedents, contemporary conceptions of black womanhood continued to signify overtly the qualities (e.g. sexual assertion, physicality/embodiment, desires and appetites) that remained “covert” in conceptions of white womanhood. 19 Critical of this practice in its more contemporary form, cultural theorist bell hooks critiques this drive of white cultural/individual attraction to racial difference. While there is potential in this relationship, one that hooks acknowledges, it ultimately fails under the overwhelming recuperative powers of dominant cultural forces: “Whether or not desire for contact with the Other, for connection rooted in the longing for pleasure, can act as a critical intervention challenging and subverting racist domination, inviting and enabling critical 98 resistance, is an unrealized political possibility.” 20 White feminists of the 1970s who sought to define themselves and their political interests through an attachment to black womanhood engaged in a complex longing for and hopeful engagement with racial difference that hooks herself regards as “potentially revolutionary.” 21 Regardless of the motivations behind white feminists’ attempts to signify their own politicized presence through a relationship to the category of black womanhood, individual black women, and a perceived black female politicized culture, these attempts were mediated powerfully by the terms of a patriarchal, racist, capitalist society. 22 Conventional images of womanhood available to white (heterosexual, middle-to-upper class) women proved challenging to feminist politics. The pre- formulated personal and social identities of white women were defined within the terms of normative racialized gender that fostered feminine dependence and heterosexual purity. In her historical survey of this idealized cultural standard of white womanhood, feminist historian Barbara Welter named these tenets “the cult of True Womanhood.” 23 By rejecting this identity in favor of a politicized feminist identity, heterosexual white women found themselves facing a problematic visual/representational system. Unlike black women, who “may not need this kind of femininity image” white women who relinquished their claims to femininity also relinquished foundational elements of their subjectivity. 24 Once they did so, they faced an undefined identity and a lack of representational terms for their sense of 99 self. From the perspective of white feminists like Way, black women possessed a representational advantage through the politically defensible racial dimension of their identity, which they could leverage into a political and personal asset. By assuming that a black woman “has the black image to identify with,” white feminists, according to Way, “are farther back than you [black women], at least in the sense of a basic identity.” 25 Without conventional femininity signaling their subjectivity and representational presence, white womanhood became a deeply fractured identity that required fundamental reconstruction and reimagining. As disempowered gendered subjects, white women found it difficult to signal overtly a claim to empowerment without invoking racial privilege. In addition to the perceived representational signification black women possessed, they also stood for legitimate political expression, something to which white women—with their racial and sexual privileges—could not lay claim. Way understands her involvement in the Women’s Liberation Movement as a response to her sense of political uncertainty. As a white person in America, Way possessed little political viability once, within the progressive political landscape of the 1970s, “things became blacker and blacker.” This post-Civil Right moment left socially conscious whites with limited identification with radical social justice. Way questions this problem in her lament: “[W]hat were we left with? We didn’t want to become whiter and whiter, because that wasn’t our identity. So I think that maybe some of us in women’s liberation are seeking a reification of who we are out of loss of the identity we thought we were 100 developing in the movement.” 26 After rejecting their conventional gendered identities, white women were faced with representational uncertainties and a need to locate a politically responsible/viable sense of self. Some white feminists solved this problem by attaching themselves to black women in personal and political relationships, by articulating an affinity to a perceived black culture, and/or by borrowing from the visual style and language of black political movements. 27 A case in point: white feminist Gloria Steinem made a series of public speaking engagements during the 1970s alongside Margaret Sloan, a black lesbian feminist, founding co-editor of Ms., and co-founder of the National Black Feminist Organization, to promote the feminist movement across the United States. While Steinem’s personal motivations for this pairing cannot be subjected to responsible analysis, the ways in which this relationship was represented in racial terms can be. The visual impact of this Steinem-Sloan collaboration and the response of feminist and mainstream media to it bear a remarkable parallel to the terms of black female presence and white female loss of/search for identity discussed in the Way-Brown- Fannings dialogue. Reporting on a speaking tour stop at the National Student Association (NSA) Congress, off our backs reporter Frances Chapman conveyed not only the content of the evening’s speeches given by Steinem and Sloan, but also the visual and ideological significance of their onstage presence. Describing Sloan as “an overweight black woman” who appeared alongside Steinem, the “dreamy blonde sex object in a clinging bodyshirt,” Chapman identified the core images each woman 101 presented and appreciated the disruption Sloan posed to Steinem’s signification of white femininity. 28 In Chapman’s estimation, Steinem’s “dreamy” appeals were counterbalanced with Sloan’s overt physicality, which carried an ideological gender correction to Steinem’s by not conforming to the idealization of blonde female heterosexuality. Presumably the two women exploited this racialized gender contrast in their onstage performances, during which they were “honest enough to be openly theatrical about their incongruity.” 29 This incongruity carried over from the physical presence of the two women to their attitudes about the mainstream media’s attempts to characterize feminists— especially Steinem—as conventionally glamorized female media stars. As photographers repeatedly attempted to capture the event, Sloan resisted their efforts, making no attempt to “appear” as a feminine object of photographic capture would. Critiquing the “straight media” as “the property of the white male,” Sloan then “complained” to those very white male media workers, who were zealously taking photographs: “‘Are you trying to blind us?’” 30 Coming from a black woman whose image thwarted patriarchal definitions of femininity and heterosexual appeals, this critical and pragmatic response to the “straight media” proved critical to the feminist politics of the event. Curtailing the mainstream media’s attempts at capitalizing on Steinem’s photo-ready image of glamour and sexuality, Sloan infused the event with a realism and politically mindful rejection of the sexualization of idealized femininity represented by Steinem. Typical of mainstream representations of 102 Steinem, a 1971 Newsweek article described her as the “stereotype of the Eternal Feminine…the Sexual Object sought by all men, and by all women.” 31 In the case of feminist politics, Steinem’s signifying power as the Eternal Feminine proved to be a liability. Without the vocal and bodily presence of Sloan, the event could have easily failed to register as a feminist event, but rather as a media spectacle, with Steinem signifying only through her white femininity and heterosexual appeal. Sloan’s directness and frank critique of media co-optation is linked, in the logic of the off our backs article, to her identity as a black woman. Much like Peggy Way’s envy of and search for her version of the “black image woman” that she expressed in her dialogue with black feminists, off our backs located a valuable source of politicized representation in the figure of black womanhood and its particular nature of embodiment, resistance to feminized objectification by the media, and articulation of political dissent. This linking of black womanhood to frank expressions of a woman’s needs/desires (i.e. gender assertion) and effective rejection of media co-optation carried through much of the Women’s Liberation Movement and representations of feminism by feminist and mainstream media alike. As a 1971 issue of Ebony reports, the Women’s Liberation Movement “quickly adopted slogans and symbols of the black liberation movement like ‘Right On!’ and the clenched fist.” 32 The article features a picture of a crowd of shouting women— primarily white with a few black women in their midst—who are all holding their fists aloft. The visual qualities of this gesture prove remarkably effective in 103 conveying the internal, amorphous emotions of protest and dissatisfaction, while privileging the female body’s agency/activity and potential for collective political force. Authorized through its origins in the Black Power Movement, the raised, clenched fist of the salute validates the political protests of white women, magnifies their threat to the power structure, and rejects the image of the white female body as passive and feminized. Steinem herself used her public appearance with Sloan as an opportunity to express her political platform through an attachment to blackness and racialized terms of oppression. During the speaking tour, Steinem used unusual and often- inappropriate racial terms to substantiate her feminist analysis. In order to critique the lack of attention to reproductive issues in the recent Democratic National Convention, Steinem cast the failures of feminist politics in racial terms. Steinem critiqued the women who worked for the McGovern campaign and failed to represent issues important to the Women’s Liberation Movement by calling them “‘house niggers.’” 33 This gender betrayal and the importance of women’s political causes, when registered on the same level as the complex alliances formed and broken under the oppressive regime of U.S. slavery, conveys its significant, if not overexaggerated, impact. This connection of experiences between blacks and women carried through to Steinem’s privileging of gender oppression over other oppressions. During her 1972 speech at the NSA Congress, Steinem prioritized the urgency and importance of 104 gender struggles over class struggles. According to Steinem, Marxism produces an uneven political effect that “turns black street people into black bourgeoisie but turns women in factories against housewives.” 34 As in the case of her critique of the McGovern campaign, Steinem blamed women for the defeat of women’s political gains and gauged the impact of their gender betrayal in racial terms. However, she also amplified the importance of feminism through a comparative racial analysis that assumed racial ascendancy through class betterment. Unlike the black population (only black men, presumably, although Steinem did not parse out the gendered terms of race), women, in comparative terms, continued to suffer from sexism, even with economic improvements. This comparison places (white?) women as the ultimate oppressed group, weighing in even beneath black (male?) Americans. Steinem’s deployment of race to compare and to differentiate women’s struggles from those of black Americans reveals the powerful, if not conflicted, role of racial difference within expressions of gender disempowerment and calls to feminist political action. Articulated by a white feminist clearly identified, through the media and by her critics, as a figure of idealized, feminine white womanhood, Steinem’s connection to black subjectivity counterbalanced her perceived representational and ideological shortcomings as an effective political figure. Steinem called upon racial “presence,” both as embodiment and political import, to demonstrate her politics’ relationship to “real” problems, to illustrate the pressing nature of women’s disempowerment, and to voice her understanding and experience 105 of the realities of oppression. All of these elements provided Steinem with a credibility otherwise lacking in her public persona, while acting as an antidote for white feminism’s removal from reality and its danger of female stardom and media objectification. In short, racial difference helped feminism to keep it “real” in a complex sense of the term. This realness saved feminism from the media fetishism of white femininity and from criticisms of its relatively unimportant complaints in the face of more overtly visible and violent racial oppression in America. Right On, Maude!: Therapeutic and Racial Interventions in TV’s Maude Not confined to the Women’s Liberation Movement and individual feminists, the media also turned to racial embodiment at the very moment representations of liberated white women informed by a therapeutic sensibility were appearing onscreen. With the influence of the Women’s Liberation Movement and therapeutic culture, the state of women’s embodiment and subjectivity underwent substantial changes during the 1970s. As feminist activism demanded representations beyond conventional modes of visualization that objectified and demeaned women, film and television worked to formulate new modes of representing women and to correct images of overt sexism. In part, they accomplished this by establishing female subjectivity with a character’s self-narrativized identity conveyed through monologues delivered in therapeutic scenarios, in private moments of reflection and expressions of desires, or in “honest” conversations with other women. This mode of establishing female identity demarcated the media’s awareness of feminism, solved 106 the ideological problems of representing the liberated woman, and offered aesthetic innovations to film and television’s product. As productive as this narrative-driven focus on women proved to be, it also presented a problem of embodiment and materiality. The turn to a therapeutic ethos concurrently brought about a need to re- embody womanhood, which the media accomplished through new modes of surveillance and the assertion of racial difference, as demonstrated by this section’s discussion of Maude. “Television’s Maude is an erratic woman, occasionally daffy, but is she a manic-depressive?” 35 Time posed this question in its coverage of a special two-part Maude episode, aired in 1976, which featured the title character seeking psychiatric treatment and taking lithium. In keeping with Norman Lear’s programming, Maude often dealt with controversial, topical subject matter. Featuring Maude as an outspoken feminist and all-around liberal, the show often brought together narratives of Maude’s liberated womanhood, relations between whites and racial and sexual minorities, and the underlying psychological elements involved in all of these identities, relationships, and culturally informed behaviors. Using racial and sexual difference in conjunction with Maude’s fantastical worldviews and psychologically intensive personality, Maude demonstrates the interdependence of therapeutic culture and women’s liberation, as well as the racial corrections that both presumably required. Typical of other contemporary media representations, Maude turned to a twinning of black and white womanhood in order to signify the political importance 107 of its content, police the political expressions of white women, reveal the relative unimportance of their demands and discontent, and underscore the powerful political and personal force of black women in comparative terms to white women. From its very opening sequence, Maude signals a relationship of the title character’s gender emancipation with an accompanying racial presence. As the camera moves through the landscape of New York City to arrive at Maude’s front door in the suburbs, black soul singers laud her accomplishments and link her to a history of freedom fighters like Joan of Arc. They also call upon the politics of the Black Power Movement, through their emphatic “Right On, Maude!” to validate her fearless and often socially unacceptable actions. The surrogate musicality of blackness literally sings the praises of the liberated white woman, linking her to a white “feminist” tradition (Joan of Arc, Lady Godiva, etc.) and a black soul aesthetic that implicitly authenticates her behaviors as “real” and politically meaningful. 36 Maude’s theme song constructs a companionship between disembodied black voices and a white woman’s audacious actions, yet does not place them physically within the same sphere. For the majority of the series, the black bodies imagined behind the theme song’s voices do not make an appearance. Conspicuously absent from interior domestic space, where the majority of the series’s action takes place, neither the initial urban setting of New York City nor its attendant racial diversities are typically involved within any given episode. It is only when Maude’s liberal, feminist politics prove too outrageous that the bodies of Others—racial, ethnic, sexual, and 108 otherwise—enter the space of Maude’s home to both effectively sponsor and disrupt Maude’s so-called “freedom fighting.” The relationship between blackness and feminism is a complex one, open to a number of sustainable interpretations and analyses that have become more prevalent in recent feminist theorization. In her comparative analysis of Lear’s “relevant” programming and MTM’s “quality” programming, Kirsten Marthe Lentz argues that, within the logic of 1970s television and its attention to contemporary gender and racial politics, blackness and feminism were diametrically opposed. The realism of “race” exposes the “ridiculously ideological” nature of feminism with its interest of “language and representation.” 37 This interpretation positions white feminism as effectively disempowered through the policing presence of race. Certainly, within the analysis of this dissertation, “race” does signify realism, with white womanhood often foundering in its drive to signify its political stance. However, the relationship between racial difference and white feminism calls for an understanding of the multiple and contradictory ways in which this particular dynamic operates. Within a psychoanalytic framework, black and white womanhood stand not only in diametrical opposition, but also within an interdependent relationship of mutually productive and restrictive terms. In many ways, Maude performs a gender masquerade to enact her liberation. Maude’s/Bea Arthur’s physicality and gendered behaviors fall into the visible domain of gendered drag. Maude’s unconventional height; boxy, imposing 109 physicality; unwaxed upper lip; and deep voice convincingly serve as the appropriate canvas for her assertive, aggressive behaviors that are typically associated with masculinity. Maude successfully exists as a masculine female subject. As such, she reveals the constructed nature of gender and challenges the social dictates that define femininity as the one true expression of womanhood. This performance of self clearly threatens entrenched gender systems. Even with this masculinization, Maude’s white femininity, ideologically burdened with the conventions of its racialized gendered characteristics—again, the legacies of True Womanhood—does not sufficiently demarcate serious political protest or anti-social sentiments. In order for white womanhood to represent this adequately, in media logic, the authorizing racial Other, either literally or symbolically, must be present. In her consideration of the relationship between particular expressions of white female subjectivity and racial difference, Tania Modleski refocuses long-standing debates about white masculinity and its dependency on blackness/racial mimicry to consider the ways in which “white womanhood might have been created out of white cultural expropriation and travesty of blackness.” 38 Maude relies upon such a relationship to formulate Maude’s subjectivity. 39 Although Maude does not enact a literal racial performance (e.g. performing or citing minstrel songs, wearing blackface, assuming a physicality or vocalization that invokes an impression of black culture), she does require the presence of black womanhood, often through a twinned figure, in order to express 110 her masculinized womanhood and to assert her political perspectives as such. Modleski exemplifies the interplay between sexuality, race, and gender in her analysis of Mae West’s performances of white womanhood in which her “rebellious reconstruction of womanhood depended, in part, on a masquerade of black femininity [. . .] that had nothing to do with cross-racial solidarity.” 40 Unlike West’s racial identifications for the sake of sexual/gendered outrageousness, Maude’s attachment to black womanhood does not require her to assume a direct masquerade, but instead constructs her liberation in proximity to racial difference as both expression and repression of her outrageousness. In “Maude Meets Florida,” an episode that obviously links white feminism to the presence of racial difference, Maude’s liberal politics, as evidenced through her hiring and consequent magnanimous treatment of Florida, a black maid, backfires. In her relationship to Florida, Maude continually seeks out opportunities to trumpet her anti-racist sentiments: refusing to let Florida perform any physical labor, insisting that she enter the house through the front door, and pressuring Florida to eat lunch with her. Florida rejects Maude’s well-meaning, yet misguided political progressiveness. Instead, she insists on a realistic understanding of her labor. To Florida, Maude’s open-mindedness and desire to treat her as an equal are an inconvenience and, implicitly, a testament to the unrealistic, foolish nature of white women’s understanding of gendered and racial equalities. As Florida informs Maude, Maude’s gestures of solidarity are nonsensical and unwelcomed; Florida prefers to 111 use the back door since it is closer to her car, to eat lunch alone, and to do the work for which she is paid. Florida’s commonsensical understandings of materially based realities undermine the anti-racist impulses of a white woman, exposing them and her as foolish, while implicitly validating America’s racist structure of economic and social inequalities. All of this is authorized powerfully by a black woman’s point of view, which generates an authenticity to her commentary on race relations and assures viewers that black Americans are compliant with the current state of race relations. 41 Consistent with Lentz’s interpretation, Maude and Florida’s relationship is formulated by its oppositional structure: nonsensical white feminism versus racial realism. However, the psychological/psychoanalytic terms of Maude’s drag performance demonstrate white feminism’s fundamental attachment to black womanhood and its perceived authenticity. Not coincidentally, “Maude Meets Florida” opens with Maude answering a phone call from the cleaning service that informs her of Florida’s imminent arrival. This opening scene establishes Maude’s entertaining drag identity and creates a humorous set-up for ensuing gender confusions. The audience, privy only to Maude’s end of the conversation, listens in on this joke on gender confusion. Presumably the caller from the cleaning service mistakes Maude’s voice for a man’s and assumes that Maude’s husband has answered the phone. In response to the caller’s greeting, Maude corrects the misidentification with the punchline, “No, Mr. Findlay has a much higher voice.” 112 This moment, in circuitous fashion, hints at the influential relationship between race and gender confusions, with the introduction of black womanhood prompting the masculinization and empowerment of white womanhood. At the very moment of Florida’s presence, even as not-yet-arriving, Maude’s masculinity and concurrent power become firmly established. Like the opening theme song, Maude’s subjectivity as an unfeminine woman relies upon racial difference, even through tenuous terms, to underscore her rejection of passivity, disempowerment, and domesticity typically associated with white feminine women. The theory of gender masquerade, as established in Joan Rivere’s “Womanliness as Masquerade,” illuminates the relationship between Maude’s unfeminine assertion of self, her companionate rejection of femininity, and her need for the ideological significations of black womanhood. Only recently have feminist scholars identified the central importance of the racial terms of gender masquerade. In her now-famous study, Riviere recounts a case in which a white female patient, who is successful in a male arena yet reverts to an exaggerated act of femininity to avoid punishment for her unfeminine abilities, recalls a dream of a sexual encounter with a black man. In this dream scenario, a black male intruder breaks into the house where the white female patient is doing the washing with her arms bare. The white patient seduces the black male, presumably to turn him over to the law. The overtly sexualized/threatening black male body provides an excuse for the white woman to indulge in transgressive sexuality while simultaneously entering the legitimizing, 113 powerful realm of the law and patriarchy. Tara McPherson privileges this moment, emphasizing its racial implications for the masquerade of gender. In her reassessment of Riviere, McPherson revises analyses that make “femininity always dependent on, derivative of, masculinity” and result in “the erasure of the other social relations against which femininity takes shape and is performed.” 42 In the case of Maude and the series’s foundational goal of expressing liberated womanhood, Maude’s gender performance cannot appear to be “dependent on” or “derivative of” masculinity (the external male figure, regardless of his race). Instead, Maude herself consistently must own masculinity in order to demonstrate to the audience her status as a liberated woman. Unlike the female patient of Riviere’s study, a highly successful woman retreats to highly feminine behaviors in the presence of men in order to escape punishment for her accomplishments within the male world, Maude does not revert to overt femininity. In Riviere’s case, “women who wish for masculinity may put on a mask of womanliness to avert anxiety and the retribution feared from men.” 43 Maude herself never retreats from her “mismatching” of gender, sexuality, and sex, manifested in her subjectivity as the masculine, heterosexual female. But, with the appearance of race, her drag performance becomes denaturalized and revealed as a masquerade. Within the context of a program that signals political progressiveness and depends upon its unconventional female protagonist, a representation of feminine masquerade would not suit the series or the larger industrial and cultural 114 moment. Maude’s “wish for masculinity” is both authorized and deflated by the presence of a “real” racial subject, whose realism complicates the white woman’s terms of liberation. In her extension of Riviere’s masquerade, Jean Walton provides a final link for Maude’s necessary relationship to black womanhood in her gender performance. 44 Rather than seeing the black male body of the intruder as a literal one, Walton found, in stories of other patients with similar fantasies, that the taboo heterosexual liaison with a black man was not the driving force of patients’ desires. Rather, the ideological notion that blackness equated to “real” masculinity assured patients that, by invoking racial difference, they accessed a truer, more essential version of masculinity. Maude’s substitution of the black female body for Riviere’s black male body to authorize Maude’s gender performance then begins to make sense. Under the requirements of racism, which demand a differentiation between white and black women, black women have historically confused the gender logic of femininity = woman. If black woman has been made to signify masculinity, then she becomes the “safer” version of masculinity—as opposed to black men and the violation of the heterosexual taboos of racism—to which the white woman could attach herself. Unlike the sexual repercussions of a white woman’s relationship to a black man, as in Riviere’s patient, where her reputation would be questioned, her authority compromised, and racial-sexual concerns would overshadow the gender 115 empowerment the white woman seeks to register, the black woman fulfills the same function without the same ideological burdens. By attaching themselves to black women as repositories of masculinity, white women seeking empowerment effectively circumvent the problems of the overt sexualization of their attachment to black masculinity embodied by men. As Maude’s daughter Carol points out to Maude in “Maude Meets Florida,” “When you see black, you melt.” While Maude’s relationship to Florida is not overtly erotic, as in the case of Riviere’s patient and the black male intruder, Maude is invested in an intimate relationship with Florida, as evidenced through Carol’s comment and Maude’s express wishes on display throughout the episode. This desire indicates, on some level, Maude’s drive to access the identities and behaviors otherwise denied to the white heterosexual woman. As much as the presence of the black female body is intimately linked with Maude’s gender performativity and helps produce her masculinity and empowerment, the show ultimately reverses this process. In this respect, the masculine signification of the black female becomes a liability to Maude’s gender performance. After a peripheral and typically “raced” character is introduced to the core cast of characters (Maude’s white family and friends who are helpless in the face of her masculinity), Maude’s gender performance eventually becomes less convincing. Appearing in the figure of the plain-talking black maid, the economically strained black tenets of Maude’s slum rental properties, or the politically disenfranchised black voters Maude encounters in her canvassing for votes, black 116 characters engage Maude in the “authentic” world of radical expressions, which authorizes her masculine force in order to right injustices. Yet, this authenticity also prevents Maude’s political expressions and gender revolt from veering too far into challenging territory. Unlike the recurring white characters who are basically powerless to stop Maude’s political crusades, personal vendettas, and verbal barbs, these assorted black characters heighten the effect of her gendered status as a white woman. They ultimately reveal her identity as a woman, not as a masculine force. The show implicitly and explicitly compares Maude’s gendered drag to the more concrete, violent, and historically verifiable social injustices facing the black women (and sometimes men) in her midst. In this comparative relationship, Maude’s gender confusion is inevitably deflated and its threat diffused. As in the case with her relationship to Florida, Maude can no longer successfully entertain female masculinity when its performative nature is deflated by a truer, “realer” black woman, whose genuine political discontent does not require performance or calculated presentation of any sort. In the end, Maude is clearly, after all, a woman because of her race. Her whiteness renders her foolish and formulates her unrealistic perceptions of the world. With this, her masculinity can no longer dominate (over/through) racial difference. In short, when presented with significant economic and political injustices endured by racial minorities, Maude is unveiled, at the most basic level, as a white woman whose racial status ultimately betrays her gendered status. 117 The Liberated Woman Meets Therapy: Maude’s Gender Confessions Therapy, as in the case of racial difference, often intervenes as a mode of interrogating Maude’s challenges to patriarchal gender order. With the overt presence of psychoanalysis in a number of episodes, Maude’s political energies are—as in the case of racial difference—authorized and contained through therapeutic explanations of her behavior. The starkest example of this is “The Analyst,” a single episode that takes place entirely within an analyst’s office. The episode is marked as “special” by a limited laugh track, the very basic set of the analyst’s office, and the absence of other characters. The episode promises the audience knowledge of the “real” Maude in her engagement with therapy, yet this reality is also marked by a theatrical staginess that aesthetically underscores its departure from a conventional sitcom episode. Sparse lighting, a limited set, and Maude’s/Bea Arthur’s awkward speech patterns and language choice designate the “realness” of the episode within the world of a theatrical performance. This staged reality foregrounds Maude as a single protagonist who is enabled through the therapeutic scenario to narrate her own life and the events that constitute her identity. This outcome of therapy keeps Maude’s power intact by focusing solely on her story and the terms of its narration—her self- directed recall and interpretation of her own life’s events. Maude is now relieved of any complementary, contrasting bodies that she usually uses as a vehicle for her expressions of feminism, masculine assertiveness, and political activism. In this isolation, Maude’s psychologized life story is a 118 testament to her complex subjectivity and its non-conformist gender and sexual dynamics. During the process of her monologue, Maude’s story unsettles the “natural” relationship of gender and sex by explicitly expressing her sexual desires, her unfeminine anger, and her antipathy towards marriage and family. In less positive terms, Maude’s engagement with therapy limits her political and personal empowerment. Without the presence of racial difference, Maude’s empowerment does not have its usual safeguards, so therapy steps in to provide this function. As the episode progresses, Maude’s masculine assertion of power falls away to reveal her political stances as psychological defenses. By the conclusion of her therapy session, Maude undergoes a psychological breakthrough in which her life’s story becomes that of a patriarchal drama. With the therapeutic session’s success, Maude is forced to confront and identify her confidence, dominant/domineering personality, masculine persona, and political beliefs as psychologically motivated responses to aging, her unfulfilling relationship with her father, and her failed marriages. As her gender facade crumbles in the face of professional psychology, Maude is reduced to a pathological, narcissistic woman. Maude’s male therapist is the only other person in the room and, throughout the episode, says little. His presence is further minimized through formal elements: he is never filmed from the front or in any detail and the audience only sees his hand and a single shot of the back of his head. The minimized presence of the therapist, along with the limited set, stages Maude’s monologue with ambiguous outcomes. 119 Largely uninterrupted by the interpretative influence of a therapist, the audience experiences this scene of therapy as an opportunity for a less-mediated encounter with Maude as a self-produced subject. In this sense, Maude is the powerful facilitator of her own story and serves as the agent of her own “cure.” On the surface, this technique conforms to the aims of feminist CR. On another level, this places Maude in a mode of confession, which Foucault discusses as a “ritual of discourse in which the speaking subject is also the subject of the statement” who engages in the ritual that “produces intrinsic modifications in the person who articulates it.” 45 The influence of feminism on 1970s television narrative, characterization, and aesthetics alters Foucault’s terms of the confession, its modifications of the subject, and the function of the interlocutor. Within a television series that produced audience pleasure through the political assertions and aggressive personality of its female protagonist, an obvious containment of these qualities would compromise the program. Instead, the “modifications” Maude undergoes as a result of therapy/confession appear to be wholly elective and, on one level, work to foster her increased independence and unique sensibility. The largely absent presence of the therapist masks the power relationship between confessor/patient and medical professional/interlocutor, allowing the audience to imagine that it is seeing the performance of a powerful woman (yet reassured that it is safely contained to the therapeutic encounter) while sharing the authorial position of the interlocutor. 46 120 The limited set and absence of other characters force Maude to interact with only herself, literally and symbolically suggesting a confrontation with herself. This state places Maude, in her self-analysis, in the interlocutor position, which grants her the power to “judge” as well as to “forgive, console, and reconcile” 47 This analysis allows Maude to both express and evaluate her subjectivity as an assertive woman with an imposing/masculine physicality that challenges the binary sex-gender system (man-masculinity/woman-femininity). At one point, Maude looks at herself in a mirror and describes herself as a woman with the “innocent glow” of Donna Reed and the “crisp features” of George C. Scott. This profound gender confusion does not hold as Maude eventually delves into narcissism. Maude’s powerful self-assessment is corrected as she expresses, again while gazing into a mirror, a more appropriate femininity in her dismay over her husband’s waning sexual interest, her father’s emotional distance, and her anger at her mother. This act of repeated mirror gazing reinforces Maude’s status both as a narcissistic woman and an individual set apart from the rest of the world. Maude’s individuality, clarified in the therapeutic mode, falls into the trap real-world feminists of the time predicted and worked against: self-involved psychologizing with no promise of larger political change—or what Betty Friedan called “navel gazing.” This intense focus on the self in therapeutic situations not only isolates women from politicized action, but also threatens to reinforce conventional claims about women as self-absorbed narcissists. 121 Maude’s Media Therapy “Maude’s Moods,” an episode that also prominently features therapy and psychoanalytic analysis, deploys media itself as a therapeutic agent. The episode follows Maude’s engagement in the world of politics when she launches a presidential campaign for Henry Fonda and suffers a severe episode of manic- depression as a result. Framed by the action of the Fonda for President campaign, Maude’s therapeutic crisis is rendered less of a “special” episode than “The Analyst.” The aesthetics of the episode comply with the series’s typical narrative structure and story content: Maude’s political tendencies veer too far out of control, she is reined in, and all characters involved learn a lesson about more harmonious and balanced personal and political outlooks. The episode uses psychological motivations and therapeutic responses to author Maude’s aggressive behaviors and ultimately to limit them. Maude acts in an assertive fashion, yet is only capable of doing so because she suffers from manic-depression. While a psychological state engenders and “excuses” Maude’s confrontational, powerful behaviors, it also becomes the means of controlling Maude. Ultimately, Maude’s manic-depression demands an intervention, which comes in the form of professional psychoanalysis and popular media. Administered by a professional analyst and her husband, respectively, these therapeutic interventions serve not only as a correction to Maude’s diagnosed mental illness, but also to her gender ambiguities. Official and unofficial modes of therapy 122 recalibrate the upheavals Maude poses to conventional gender identities, roles, and relationships within the space of the sitcom’s domestic arena. Maude’s overly enthusiastic and ultimately misguided efforts to nominate Fonda as a Presidential candidate grant her the means by which to overturn the gendered space of the home. In the episode’s opening, Maude has converted the domestic space of the Findlay home into a center of campaign activity. The presence of public sphere politics and the labor that it requires of Maude literally drives Maude’s husband Walter to the margins of the space. He is repeatedly thrust out of or barred from the central domestic spaces of the living and dining rooms. This physical dislocation of the family patriarch parallels the larger uncertainties of the Findlay’s marriage relationship and its gendered terms. Walter discovers that Maude has not only been forfeiting sleep to work on the campaign, but she has also spent their life’s savings without consulting Walter. Maude’s daughter Carol reassures Walter that Maude’s alarming and disruptive behaviors are typical; she’s “had these super highs off and on” since Carol was a child. Maude’s friends, neighbors, and family members, all women who are recruited as campaign workers, agree with Carol’s assessment, noting that it is this manic energy that makes Maude so exciting, compelling, and, ultimately, more powerful than the rest of them. Walter has little argumentative recourse in this assessment of Maude’s emotional state; her as-of-yet undiagnosed manic-depression overpowers Walter’s attempts to rationally critique Maude’s irrational choices. His objections are literally 123 interrupted by Maude’s intense, psychologically motivated behaviors. As Maude’s friend Vivian puts it, “She’s so dynamic.” Coincident with Vivian’s pronouncement, Maude enters the front door, flings her arm into the air, announces herself with a dramatic “Ta da!”, and freezes in the pose for everyone in the living room to admire. The camera privileges this moment, zooming in from a medium shot of her initial entrance to a close-up just in time to capture her face as she verbally announces her presence. Maude’s dramatic, self-staged entrance and disruption of the space that Walter had attempted to control up to that moment indicates, through character, performance, and formal elements, Maude’s facility in dominating space and controlling the focus of other people’s attention. When Walter voices his disapproval of her campaign, this time to Maude, Maude rallies the other women in her living room-cum-campaign headquarters to join her in singing the campaign song she has devised to promote Fonda. This moment underscores Maude’s manic energy and masculinity, linking her psychological condition with her unconventional gendered presence. Both of these states of subjectivity grant Maude the privilege of dominating space and people that is typically reserved for men. This performance, produced by the female energies that Maude has marshaled and directed, overwhelms Walter and silences his complaints. The scene makes Maude’s empowerment evident and humorous through the dissimilar vocal styles of Maude and the rest of the women. Singing an octave below the other women, Maude joins in on the singing already in progress and 124 overwhelms their tremulous soprano voices with her guttural baritone voice. At the very moment of her most energized manic-ness, her masculinity is put on show both for Walter and for the audience. This conjunction of psychology and gender play suggests that the very energy that makes Maude unmanageable is also that of gender aberrance, a secondary disorder that must also be cured. The cure for Maude’s primary problem—her delusions that Henry Fonda actually wants to be President and that her campaign will successfully see him elected—comes in the form of formal, professional intervention. The male psychiatrist who treated Maude nineteen years earlier acts as the agent of this intervention. The initial appearance of the therapist establishes the field of psychiatry as an authoritative one that will also cure Maude’s secondary, implicit problem: her rejection of femininity and its disempowerment. When Maude’s family visits the psychiatrist at his home, they find him working under a Model T car. He emerges, wearing a sedate cardigan and speaking in rational, calm tones. Calling upon conventional signifiers of masculine labor and know-how, this introduction of the male psychiatrist counterbalances his otherwise intellectualized and feelings-oriented profession. He is a reassuring embodiment of genuine masculinity that can diagnose Maude’s psychologically unwell condition and her masculine façade. This hybridization of patriarchy and psychiatry presumably works in the service of women who, not coincidentally, suffer from mental illness at the very moment they have successfully achieved a new assertiveness and occupied unconventional gender 125 roles. This timely appearance of the male psychiatrist assures audiences that men can survive, and even thrive, within a culture influenced by feminism and imbued with a therapeutic ethos. This crucial presence of professional psychiatry, once established, authorizes consequent informal psychological diagnoses and treatment by other male characters in the episode. After his initial introduction and confirmation that Maude is indeed manic-depressive, the male psychiatrist does not reappear during the remainder of the episode. Maude’s treatment comes instead in various manifestations of popular media, its therapeutic effects, and its gender normalization. Equally important as the fields of psychiatry and psychology, the media are also responsible for intervening, in more complex and subtle ways, in Maude’s forceful challenges to patriarchal order. Much to the same effect as the professional psychiatrist, Henry Fonda appears on the scene to curb Maude’s psychological and gendered un-wellness through the cultural influence of Hollywood. Fonda comes to Maude’s home under the false pretense, concocted by Maude, that he is scheduled to appear in a community theatre production for philanthropic causes. Classically dressed in a trench coat, Fonda is the very picture of assured, effortless masculinity. After he arrives and learns that he was lured to the Findlay home so that Maude could plead her case for his running for office, Fonda responds to Maude’s aggressive pleas in a soothing, measured manner befitting his onscreen masculine persona. This exchange showcases Maude’s and Fonda’s contrasting manners of behavior, appearance, and conversational qualities, 126 privileging Fonda’s calmly confident masculinity over Maude’s frenzied aggression, which the audience already knows is a symptom of mental illness. Maude herself recognizes the way that Fonda’s “integrity shines through.” This integrity, on one obvious level, signifies Fonda’s uncorrupted value system. Yet, given the context of the scene, integrity also serves as a complex term that indicates Fonda’s integrated—whole, unified, and unconflicted—gender subjectivity. This second meaning becomes the more important of the two when Maude demonstrates her own lack of integrated gendered subjectivity. Instead of inherently knowing how to behave in a commanding, masculine manner, as Fonda does, Maude borrows her identity from media representations to deliberately stage a performance of her persona. Maude pieces together a conflicting and thus unintegrated gender identity for herself that is meant to impress Fonda and to persuade him, against his unwavering objections, to join her cause. To accomplish this, she calls upon a set of ready-made personae represented in Hollywood films, dressing and behaving in a manner that appears “sincere, folksy, yet chic; a cross between Will and Ginger Rogers.” Maude’s psychological issues are externalized and represented by this confusion of gendered signifiers, which also testifies to her fragmented subjectivity as a masculinized woman. One Hollywood figure, Will Rogers, represents masculinity in its earnest and simplistic form, while the other, Ginger Rogers, represents feminized glamour and elaborate performance. Maude’s unlikely melding of identities with which to self-fashion her own suggests a polarized world of gender 127 performativity that Maude must reconcile and correctly identify with before she can be “cured.” Maude’s ability to construct her subjectivity through models produced by Hollywood mark her powers to transform herself and to affect people’s responses to her. Yet this drive to attach herself to multiple identities also points to the troubled gender identification Maude presents throughout the series. As many times as Maude has her gendered performance under her control, marking her liberation through attachments to media representations and visible violations of gender normativity, she also loses control of her performances. Her attachment to media also marks her inability to control her own subjectivity. Media often get the best of Maude, proving the larger force that eventually masters Maude’s rebellion. However, before this disciplining media intervention can happen, Maude’s threat must first be amplified so that others recognize it and are compelled to police Maude’s theatrics through therapeutic interventions and more appropriate media formulations. After Fonda leaves the Findlays, still refusing to be swayed by Maude’s passionate speeches and self-presentation as a Will-Ginger Rogers hybrid, Maude’s noble determination to shape the political landscape becomes a dangerous mental illness. Now completely depressed, Maude represents highly irrational and dangerous femininity. She threatens to burn down the house to show how determined she is to see Fonda run for President. When family members and neighbors object to this lunatic plan, Maude accuses them of having no “imagination.” 128 Ultimately Maude’s own “imagination” is the force that confuses her gendered identification to the point where it begins to fail. Even after Fonda makes a public proclamation on a nightly news interview that he will not run, Maude is still undeterred in her fervor. Her misrecognition of reality and refusal to see Fonda’s rejection of her plans for him merge with the nature of television itself. Maude’s worldview parallels that of television interviewers who befuddle Fonda even as he makes his initially emphatic statement about his intention not to run for office. Television and its agents, news reporters, confound the language Fonda uses to deny his desire to seek public office by inserting double negatives and other language traps that confuse Fonda’s intentions. Through these games of language, television makes it sound as if Fonda is running for office, in spite of his emphatic proclamations to the contrary. This positions the mode of television (il)logic and (mis)representation on Maude’s side. The dangerous influence of television and its link to femininity has been documented and theorized in a series of pivotal feminist television studies. 48 Television’s status as a domestic object defines it as irrational, feminine, and threatening to the public domain of politics, masculinity, and activity. This conception plays out in the scene of Fonda’s press conference and Maude’s response to it. As much as the episode is about gender, it is also about the state of media and its ideological and psychological effects that, like Maude, must be righted by media’s control and interpretation within the domain of masculinity. 129 As viewers of the television broadcast, Maude’s friends and family turn to her after Fonda’s announcement, expecting that this public media intervention will finally convince Maude that her fantasies are incorrect and should be abandoned. Instead of seeing the interview for what it eventually becomes—Fonda’s rejection of his nomination—Maude refuses the consolation friends and family offer her for her defeat, angrily responding, “I’m tired of your constantly referring to my enthusiasm as manic-depression.” Maude and the television interviewers’ “enthusiasm” for the Fonda Presidential ticket converge in their irrationality and unrealistic points of view. Just as the reporters exploit the flexible “realities” of the television medium, Maude uses television and her interpretation of its message to produce an unrealistic representation of Fonda and his intentions and to deflect her family’s attempts at psychological diagnoses of her behaviors. Walter attempts, yet again, to confront Maude’s inappropriate fantasies with the authorizing force of the medical profession. He initially suggests, in predictable fashion, that Maude “needs to see whoever can help. . .if that’s a psychiatrist or a doctor, go see them.” Having failed in this tactic, Walter then offers an unconventional solution to Maude’s delusional state by invoking the healing powers of media: “If you need to see a television repair man, then go see a television repair man.” By identifying the television repair man as a therapeutic agent, Walter brings the forces of media, which Maude had previously manipulated for her own purposes, back into a world of reality and masculine aptitude. This therapeutic function of the television repair man places limits 130 (professional, technical, and masculine) upon the fantasy nature of Maude’s and TV’s images and language. In doing so, Walter relocates the therapeutic function of television to an external authority who can control both its technology and its effect, and can rein in the inappropriate and outrageous fantasies that the female viewer takes up. As the next section proposes, the management of representation and media technologies proved crucial to the control of the rising social forces of therapeutic culture and feminism of the 1970s. Gloria Steinem as “The New Woman”: Psychologizing and Surveilling Feminist Subjectivity The August 16, 1971 cover of Newsweek features a photograph of feminist icon Gloria Steinem with an accompanying banner naming her “The New Woman.” The issue’s cover photo, which features a smiling, photogenic Steinem in a close-up portrait, and its related article work in tandem to represent Steinem as appropriately feminine and beautiful, in spite of her feminist politics. This “Special Report,” subtitled “A Liberated Woman Despite Beauty, Chic and Success,” effectively counterpoises feminism and femininity. While this gesture is not particularly novel in mainstream media coverage of the Women’s Liberation Movement, the mode by which Newsweek formulates feminism and femininity underscores the complex interconnectedness between therapy/confession, production/knowledge of the subject, and visualization/technologies of surveillance. In this Special Report on Steinem, the narrative and visual terms of feminism and femininity’s oppositional 131 relationship depend upon a therapeutic understanding of the personal and psychological issues that formulate Steinem’s personal subjectivity and her political identity. The article’s deployment of popular psychologizing bridges the seemingly incompatible terms that formulate the “despite” of the subtitle, while providing a portrait of Steinem that prompts scrutinization of her anomalous identity. Operating within a therapeutic context, Steinem’s public image and personal story offer a complex of conventional and “modern” significations that are, on various levels, pleasurable to the reader. The first, and most obvious, pleasure that Steinem offers is that of conventional feminine beauty. Establishing this in its cover photograph, the article opens with a lengthy discussion of Steinem’s “‘most incredibly perfect body’” in great and objectifying detail, going as far as to wax poetical about the ways her clothing “rides like a midsummer night’s dream” on her frame. 49 The article takes some care to distance this description from retrograde objectification, attributing part of these observations to a female friend of Steinem’s. This beauty also operates as the source of the mystery of her motivations for political expression. Newsweek extols Steinem’s success as an intellectual with a degree from Smith College, a sophisticated world traveler who has been to four continents, a sought-after celebrity who regularly turns down appearances on notable television talk shows, and a socially adept sophisticate who has danced in the best clubs and has dated famous, influential men. Given all of these qualities, Steinem flummoxed the Newsweek 132 writers, who posed their confusion as a near-universal one: “What gets nearly everyone about Steinem as Liberationist is that she Didn’t Have To.” 50 Figuring out why, then, she Did, becomes the driving force behind the article. Accomplishing this goal proves difficult, in part because of the implausibility of Steinem’s politics and because of her inaccessible private personality, one that Steinem herself alludes to in her self-appointed nickname, the “‘great stone face.’” 51 In order to resolve the complex terms of Steinem’s political choices and public persona, the article traces Steinem’s rise to power in an autobiographical set of circumstances, establishing her current personality and life’s choices with a therapeutic framework of motivations, drives, trauma, and overcompensation. Mining the painful and potentially traumatic events of Steinem’s past, the article uses therapeutic terms to explain the foundations of her confounding political present and to break through the emotionally distant public façade of Steinem’s “stone face.” Interviewing Steinem and her friends, the article piles up details of Steinem’s past, which include living in a rat-invested “slum” and Steinem’s “Personal Visions of Defeat,” a game in which she envisions her worst fear: working as an attendant in a women’s public restroom. 52 This portrait of Steinem’s difficult childhood and its ongoing influence on her behaviors suggests Steinem’s psychological damage. This element of psychology helps to explain her politics as an emotional response to the shortcomings of her own life and removes it from the realm of an informed, intellectual response to social injustices. 133 In order to depict the horrible nature of Steinem’s background, the article’s authors and Steinem herself relate the depth of her suffering through racial terms. A child of divorced parents, Steinem grew up in a “depressing neighborhood” in the “industrial slums” of Toledo, Ohio, where racism and class oppression worked together to create an environment of violence and intolerance. 53 Steinem recounts growing up in “‘‘Joe’ country, the kind of place where they beat up the first available black on Saturday night.’” 54 These particular elements of Steinem’s upbringing function complexly to provide an understanding of Steinem and her politics. Her early understandings of injustice are fostered within an emotionally and psychologically trying (“depressing”) environment, laying the groundwork for the ongoing psychologizing of her motivations. In another sense, the overtly violent racism of her hometown drives her to and, in some sense, “justifies” her politics. The next layer of meaning, in conjunction with the political justification provided by racism, confirms the necessary presence of “race” for white feminist politics. The depth of Steinem’s suffering, while cast within psychologized economic terms, is also gauged by her proximity to the express, visible traumas of racism. Although others (the “first available black”) experienced these traumas directly and in bodily ways, Steinem emerges from these scenarios politically and psychologically transformed. Authorized by graphic racial oppression, Steinem’s fight against sexism—a more covert political situation due to its typical lack of public violence and visible/physical terms of disempowerment—becomes both legible and 134 warranted. Steinem’s psychological dossier and racialized traumatic auto/biography place her politics within a world of feminized compassion and psychologized damage, and “explain” why a beautiful woman would deign to live a life of a feminist. Steinem’s psychological profile extends from her motivations for turning to feminism to an interpretation of feminist politics itself. The article opens up its therapeutic interpretation of Steinem’s brand of feminism to the larger feminist movement. 55 Using such subheadings as “A Protective Blanket for Women,” and “Personal Problems Shared by All” the article further shifts the political aspect of feminism to the realm of the personal and implicitly assesses women as victimized/wounded subjects in need of protection. Relating the problems of Steinem’s formative years to her adult abilities to relate to other people, the article understands feminism as an expression of therapeutic relations. Steinem acts as a therapeutic agent, drawn to helping others through her own personal understanding of the “particularized case” of “suffering.” 56 The article places Steinem and her cause within the world of psychological understanding to diffuse the more radical and unsettling political projects at hand. Documenting the inexhaustible ways that Steinem listens to other women’s problems, the article implicitly equates feminism to just another form of therapy, in which Steinem’s “patience” for hearing about other women’s complaints and problems has become “legendary.” 57 The article documents a scene in which a woman “winging on the euphoria of just having kicked dope” and 135 an “enormously fat and wretched women who had just broken up with her female lover” confide in Steinem in order to “charge their batteries at her side.” 58 By breaking the link between feminist politics and issues of sexuality, economics, and social conditions that foster drug use in women, the article stages the encounters as one-on-one counseling sessions, which isolate them from their important material and ideological contexts. In addition to the narrative terms the article employs to investigate, articulate, and limit Steinem as a political figure, the magazine employs visual technologies to capture the “real” Steinem in an unguarded moment, placing this image on the front cover. In its drive to figure out the imperfect life behind the perfect façade, the magazine not only formulates a trauma narrative, but also justifies its invasive visual means of representing Steinem. Her glamorous image promises to sell magazines, but not just in conventional terms. Rather, the intriguing story about the woman who relinquished the social privileges granted to beautiful women plays a significant role in the cover shot. This curiosity about Steinem’s anomalous identity (a beautiful feminist) garnered a new type of scopophilic interest in capturing her image, which depends upon the therapeutic terms of the article. In a classic Foucauldian dynamic, the relationship of the therapeutic/confessional situation established in the article’s narrative quickly moves to the visual surveillance of the subject. The means through which the cover’s photograph was taken was included along with the credits for the article and photograph. With no supporting commentary or additional explanation, 136 Newsweek explains that Steinem “drew the line at posing for a cover photo” and, because of this, the photographer successfully captured Steinem’s image from afar, without Steinem’s knowledge. 59 Thwarted by Steinem’s political stance, the photographer instead “shot the picture through a long lens at a recent meeting.” 60 There is an implicit logic to this representation that requires no further explanation, even on the part of Newsweek. Within the article, Steinem’s autobiographical narrative and the stories of others about her represented Steinem as a therapeutic subject, which in turn offered the magazine a platform upon which to define the terms of her visual representation. Steinem’s representation as a psychological subject produces her political platform while containing its more radical elements through psychological explanation and technological surveillance. Productive Surveillance: Feminists Meet the FBI Although surveillance threatened to limit feminism’s goals of women’s self- definition and expression, feminists were able to strategically use surveillance by responding to government surveillance of feminist groups and individuals and converting these repressive situations into productive ones. Claiming the position of surveilled citizenry became, to some feminists, a marker of their political import. Additionally, the failures of government surveillance helped feminists argue for the sexist nature of the government and to underscore the complexity of feminist politics, which escaped the government’s unrefined techniques of identifying and containing women’s subversive behaviors. The relationship between the United 137 States government and feminists replicates Michel de Certeau’s relationship between “strategy” and “tactics.” Strategy is “the calculation (or manipulation) of power relationships” maintained by a body that isolates its own will and power to use on the less-powerful, whereas tactics are “the art of the weak.” 61 The government and the FBI relied upon their position as a rational, technologically adept, and systematically bureaucratic body for their sense of identity and place within the world that is necessary separate from the subjects it surveils. In its function of surveilling politically and socially suspect groups and individuals, the government worked to “delimit [its] own place in a world bewitched by the invisible power of the Other.” 62 The government maintained this separation from and superior position over the Other through the ideals of strategy: “mastery of place through sight,” “power of knowledge,” and a capacity to formulate the vagaries of human behavior and society into “readable spaces.” 63 Feminists used this delimitation and the masculinized terms of investigation to their advantage and tactically used their status as Other to undermine the success of the government’s strategies of surveillance, identification, and definition. Operating as citizens defined by the Unites States government, feminists occupied a conceptual and literal space that required “calculated action determined by the absence of a proper locus.” 64 Feminists used the terms of the government against itself to define feminists’ own sense of political efficacy and import or, to use de Certeau’s theorization, to “play on and with a terrain imposed on it and organized by the law of a foreign power.” 65 138 Feminists defended their legitimate claims to their surveilled state against the growing popularization and mainstream acceptance of surveillance. By the 1970s, government surveillance became so widespread and commonly applied to the American citizenry that it became a sign of status and cultural importance. off our backs describes the effect of widespread surveillance, the public’s growing awareness of the FBI’s invasive techniques, and the increasing inclusiveness of Richard Nixon’s list of enemies: “everyone is flattered to be on [Nixon’s list] because it means they’re political.” 66 The omnipresence of the FBI’s efforts operated as one of its most effective tools, turning typical dismissals of people’s fears of surveillance (“‘Oh, you’re just being paranoid’”) into acceptance (“‘So what. Everybody else is [being surveilled] too.’” 67 The depoliticization of surveillance, another by-product of its ever-present state, also proved crucial to its success. Feminists writing for off our backs were concerned that increased and commonly accepted surveillance led to a “false consciousness” of Americans who felt that “the government does not regard the Black Panthers, the S.L.A., or radical dykes or mistreat them any more than they do the Edward Kennedys or the Jane Fondas.” 68 The near-celebrity status that one assumed in gaining the government’s interest flattened the political problems and differences embedded in racial, economic, sexual, and gendered oppression. From this perspective, surveillance, in addition to its obvious attempts at disciplining and containing radical and/or politically marginalized groups, became a more nefarious 139 tool for diffusing political dissent. Feminists were anxious to claim “true” harassment by the government and actively deployed, in alliance with more public, aggressive political groups (e.g. Black Panthers, the SLA), their status as political threats that required intensive government surveillance. In short, being politically viable meant being surveilled. In spite of feminists’ criticism of the government’s growing violation of civil rights and legally suspect uses of surveillance techniques and technologies, feminists exploited their position as surveilled to signify their importance. Feminist groups proved difficult to surveil and marked the failures of government surveillance, revealed the limits of its effectiveness, and critiqued its patriarchal perceptions. Until the advent of the Women’s Liberation Movement, the government generally considered political figures of import exclusively as male. This gender-specific focus informed the FBI’s techniques of identifying and following the activities of radical political figures. Because of this, the FBI was unable to effectively watch individual feminists and feminist groups. In its “one size fits all approach” to investigating all politically suspicious individuals and groups, the FBI had problems understanding the specific political discontent of feminists and the modes by which they chose to express it. 69 In this respect, surveillance gave proof to feminist claims that sexism was embedded in the very foundations of American society and government. In economic/material terms, the FBI’s sexism and its resistance to seeing women as viable public sphere figures proved to be its failure. The FBI did not hire 140 women as agents until July 1972 and, with an all-male Bureau, the infiltration of feminist groups proved nearly impossible. Male agents did not prove particularly useful, in part because of their sexist attitudes towards feminism, which minimized the energies they exerted in investigating feminists and feminist groups. According to Ms., male agents overlooked the “significance of the women’s Movement with a male-supremacist’s contempt for anything directed by a woman.” 70 The ideological terms of feminism also mystified the FBI. As a political movement, feminism proved particularly puzzling in its activities and in its departures from traditional political actions. Feminists used the FBI’s failures to interpret their politics as a sign of their success and innovativeness as a political group. The foundational feminist concept of “the personal is political” and egalitarian organization became points of pride for feminists, not only for their abilities to thwart the FBI, but also because the very thwarting of the FBI demonstrated the extent of feminism’s revolutionary and successful politics. In the words of one feminist, feminism “baffled” agents because it was “largely unaffiliated, leaderless, and deceptively introspective.” 71 The complexity of feminism and the nuanced nature of its various political groups also served as a deterrent to investigation. Ruth Rosen, feminist historian and activist during the 1970s describes this situation as follows: What did WITCH, Mother Jones, Molly Maguires, Anna Louise Strong, Keep on Truckin’, Uppity Women, BITCH and Redstockings stand for? Which ones were dangerous? How could any male agent— or female informant—begin to grasp the fine distinctions between radical lesbians, radicalesbians, lesbian feminists, political lesbians, liberal feminists, radical feminists, dykes, socialist feminists, feminist 141 socialists, Marxist feminists and feminist Marxists? The politics of the women’s movement flummoxed even the most experienced agents. 72 The very terms of feminist politics that made them puzzling to the FBI were the very terms that were their most effective and far-reaching. Rosen also recounts the importance of feminism’s undervalued politics: The FBI searched for signs of subversion in the women’s movement but couldn’t recognize it when they found it. While they looked for communists and bombs, the women’s movement was shattering traditional ideas about work, customs, education, sexuality and the family. Ultimately, this movement would prove far more revolutionary than the FBI could ever imagine. Feminism would leave a legacy of decades of disorientation, debate and disagreement, create cultural chaos and social change for millions of women and men, and, in the process, help ignite the culture wars that would polarize American society. But at the time this was not what the FBI considered subversive behavior. 73 The challenges feminism posed to the sexual and gendered terms of patriarchy proved off-putting to agents, so much so that they were distracted by superficial elements of feminist protest. Instead of reporting on anti-government activities or the political threat of feminism, agents described the cultural affront feminists posed to their heterosexual, masculine sensibilities. From the perspective of agents, feminism’s greatest crime was its lack of appropriate femininity. Reports often focused on “inappropriate” gendered behaviors and appearances. Typical of this investigative focus, one agent’s report on a feminist demonstration reads: “‘They burned…[a] replica of male sex organs. During the entire demonstration participants used vulgar and obscene language’” 74 Equally interested in the unconventional appearance of feminists, FBI agents reported in great detail their hairstyles, lack of 142 make-up, and androgynous clothing, concluding that “‘[m]ost seemed to be making a real attempt to be unattractive’” 75 Given the various problems the FBI had in identifying and investigating the anti-government activities of women, it began to refine its techniques. The 1970s marked a shift in the mode and focus of government surveillance, prompted in large part by the nature of and tactics deployed by political groups like feminists. The FBI no longer limited its investigations to acts of overt violence or public displays of political subversion. According to FBI director Clarence Kelley, only after the early 1970s was the FBI effective in its observations of a wide range of political groups. Until then, it did not possess appropriate techniques for investigating the political activities of women’s groups. Shifting to micro-policing and more invasive technologies, such as wire-tapping and a focus on everyday, private actions, the FBI attempted to target feminists more effectively. This drive to understand less- conspicuous, clear-cut “political” acts also led to a redefinition of the activities the government could/should monitor. According to one report, anywhere from 1,000- 10,000 files were kept on individuals and groups involved in “non-criminal” activity. 76 Paranoia was a primary technique the FBI hoped would prove harmful to the integrity of the Women’s Liberation Movement. Much like Bentham’s Panopticon and its refined system of power, paranoia serves as an effective deployment of power that “renders its actual exercise unnecessary.” 77 Paranoia renders actual surveillance 143 largely unnecessary, since the surveilled would assume that their surveillance was ever-present and, as a result, would assume self-surveillance. This psychological (not architectural, as in the Panopticon) technique of “creating and sustaining” power succeeds through its “unverifiable” status. 78 Feminist Marcy Rein concluded, after reading her own FBI files, that the “unstated purpose of intelligence agencies” was a concerted effort “to subvert and demoralize their targets.” 79 Rein also identified the technique the FBI used in their attempts: “They count heavily on paranoia to absorb energy and inhibit action.” 80 Rein’s claim is substantiated by FBI files, which reveal that the agency wanted feminists “‘to think there’s an agent in every corner mailbox.’” 81 Although this was an alarming revelation to feminists, “paranoia” and the confirmation of their suspicions of the FBI’s interest in their political activities became a productive source of self-identification and energy for feminists. Able to access their FBI files through the Privacy Act of 1974, feminists came to a new understanding of their political import. After one feminist knew that that FBI had been wiretapping her phone, she realized that “All our ‘paranoid’ fantasies assumed concrete form.” Or, as Ms. understood the FBI infiltration of feminist groups, it was a “paranoid’s fantasy come true.” 82 Paranoia, once confirmed and vindicated, became a rallying force for feminists, thwarting the dehabilitating effects the FBI hoped it would have. After accessing their files, feminists found that their surveillance placed them in important political company, a position that underscored feminism’s political 144 value. Feminists saw that, in the files, “[o]ther names just sit on the page in bold capital letters—PAT NIXON and LEON TROTSKY right along with names of active feminists.” 83 In spite of the FBI’s seeming lack of interest in feminists and its resistance to taking feminists seriously, the content and sheer bulk of files proved “Hoover’s conviction that something awesome and revolutionary was going on.” 84 Feminism’s goals of inclusion, social responsibility, and cultural revision were so “awesome and revolutionary” that they thwarted FBI interpretation. With files filled with errors and misidentification (radical feminist and renowned author Kate Millett became “Case Millett” while historical feminist figures fared no better—Elizabeth “Katy” Stanton and the “Grimske” sisters rounded out the cast), the FBI proved to feminists that their politics were truly revolutionary in their nearly utopian inclusiveness: “[T]hey [the FBI] could never make sense of us. The Panther women showed up with the housewives. Revolutionary firebrands appeared to be comfortably middle-class. High school hippies marched beside established professional women.” 85 Claiming a relationship with political radicals, including Panther women, proved immensely vital to feminists’ sense of themselves. The FBI’s interest in feminist groups created a newly forged identity in white women who, unlike their black counterparts, were unused to government intrusion on their lives. As in other arenas, the conventional aspects of white femininity often made it difficult for feminists to formulate a public identity and a private sense of self that broke with the 145 ideological, conceptual, and representational constraints of white womanhood. White feminists found it difficult to assert their political identity and to register in the public’s, the government’s, and their own imaginations as political subversives. White feminists borrowed from racial categories of existence to explain their own situation, to criticize the government’s lack of interest in and knowledge of their particular political activities, and to articulate their sense of themselves as persecuted. In order to voice their status as suspicious political agents and to articulate their political situation, off our backs concluded that “[a]pparently women all look alike to the FBI, just like blacks. If you have a warrant for one, you can harass em’ all.” 86 This conflation of gender with race justifies the outrage feminists felt at being surveilled, harassed, and indiscriminately persecuted by the federal government. Cast in the “overt” terms of race, white feminists attached their “covert” political plight to that of a clearly marginalized subjectivity. With an anticipation of “infiltration, informing, harassment, and surveillance” that would “increase steadily,” feminists were able to claim an “officially threatening” political identity. 87 In terms of individual identity, knowledge of FBI surveillance confirmed one’s political subjectivity. One feminist who saw her FBI file understood the lengths to which the government would go to gather information on women like her. Through this knowledge, she came to a fuller understanding of herself as a feminist and of feminist politics itself: “Ultimately, it left me with a greater understanding of the depth of the struggle we are into, and a commitment to go on fighting.” 88 Having 146 been identified by the FBI as a subversive helped her identify her subjectivity. This process reverses the trajectory of the Foucauldian paradigm, in which self-awareness becomes tied to the confession, which then opens up the subject to surveillance and containment. Instead, in the case of this surveilled feminist, the energies operate in an oppositional fashion, with surveillance producing self-awareness, which leads to political resolve and empowerment. The feminist understood this process as follows: “I am into being who I am now—and everything I have ever been—a commie-jew- dyke-anarchist-witch! I feel very strong when I can pull together the different strands of my life and put them in some political form.” 89 This “political form” of subjectivity, comprised of a complex series of sexual, gendered, classed, governmental, religious, and social identities, came into full fruition as a response to the FBI’s identification of this feminist’s inappropriate activities. The potential for converting invasive governmentality into productive outcomes extends beyond the self, testifying to the feminist ideal of the personal as political. In the words of a surveilled feminist, “One of the most unique ways in which I have connected with my/our past was as I listened to the illegal FBI wiretaps.” 90 147 Notes 1 In addition to An Unmarried Woman, films of the Seventies used therapy, psychiatry, and CR groups in various manifestations to demonstrate a woman’s discontent with conventional roles as wives, lovers, mothers, housewives, and pink-collar workers. The most popular of these include: Diary of a Mad Housewife (1970), Klute (1971), A Woman under the Influence (1974), and Annie Hall (1977). Television also featured these elements, not typically in a whole series, but in “very special” episodes. These include episodes of: Maude (1972-1978); Police Woman (1974-78); Get Christie Love! (1974-75); and Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman (1976-77). 2 Ellen Herman, The Romance of American Psychology: Political Culture in the Age of Experts (Berkeley: U of California P, 1995) 277. 3 Herman 280. 148 4 Leah and Mary Jane, “Thinking about Psychiatry,” Women: A Journal of Liberation Winter 1977: 51. 5 Leah and Mary Jane 51. 6 Leah and Mary Jane 51. 7 Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations (New York: Norton, 1979) 32. 8 Lasch 41. 9 Lasch 32. 10 Lasch 32. 11 Brundson 55. Brunsdon is making her own argument here, but also relies upon Sue Clayton study for evidence. Sue Clayton, “‘Cherchez la Femme,’” City Limits 30 Apr.-6 May 1982: 44-5. 12 Lasch 28. 13 This term, of course, refers to Laura’s Mulvey famous theorization of woman as the object of the male gaze. 14 Charlotte Brunsdon, Screen Tastes: Soap Opera to Satellite Dishes (London: Routledge, 1997) 61. 15 Brundson 61. 16 Lasch 30. 17 Michael Stone, “Liberation Struggle Generates Tension on Race, Sex Issues,” The Christian Century 10 June 1970: 737. 18 The most famous example of this being Sarah Bartmann, commonly known as “The Hottentot Venus.” For an example of scholarship on the history of black women’s embodiment, as well as Bartmann, see Sander Gilman, “Black Bodies White Bodies: Toward an Iconography of Female Sexuality in Late Nineteenth-Century Art, Medicine, and Literature,” Critical Inquiry 12:1 (Autumn 1985): 204-242. 19 I borrow here from Gilman’s terminology, “overt” and “covert,” to signify the level of visibility in both black and white women’s representations. Gilman 204-242. 149 20 bell hooks, Black Looks: Race and Representation (Boston: South End, 1992) 22. 21 hooks 22. 22 Rather than judge whether or not particular white feminists were knowingly racist in their interest in relationships to black women/womanhood—a project that is neither wholly productive nor methodologically/ethically sound—I am interested in identifying consistent patterns of white feminism’s attempted attachment to black women. More importantly, I hope to understand why this was such a powerful means of visibility and politicization for white women. 23 Barbara Welter identifies the four mutually reinforcing ideological categories of white 19 th Century womanhood as piety, purity, domesticity, and submissiveness. Although these tenets are historically specific, they also pertain to ongoing, foundational qualities that are identifiable in American society across historical periods. Barbara Welter, “The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820-1860,” American Quarterly 18:2 (Summer 1966): 151-174. 24 Stone 737. 25 Stone 738. 26 Stone 736. 27 Certainly white and black women formed real bonds of political solidarity before, during, and since this particular political moment, but I deal here only with the relationships that distinctively articulate this visual and ideological racial reliance of white women upon black women, regardless of political intention. 28 Frances Chapman, “Ms. at NSA,” off our backs 30 Sept. 1972: 28. 29 Chapman 28. 30 Chapman 28. 31 Elizabeth Peer, et al., “Gloria Steinem: The New Woman,” Newsweek 16 Aug. 1971: 51. 32 Helen H. King, “The Black Woman and Women’s Lib,” Ebony 1 Mar. 1971: 69. 33 Qtd. in Chapman 28. This is not an isolated incident. Steinem consistently used terms applied to black women and men to illustrate the political situations of white women. For example, she “prefers the word ‘slaves’” to describe women who work in underpaid and unpaid labor situations and identifies certain women who gain political office and ignore the political interests of women as “‘Uncle Tom’ women.” Liz Smith, “Gloria Steinem, Writer and Social Critic, Talks about Sex, Politics and Marriage,” Redbook Jan. 1972: 76. 150 34 Chapman 28. 35 “Maude’s Mania,” Time 9 Feb. 1976: 56. 36 Kirsten Lentz offers a similar reading of this opening and its theme song, though she is careful to point out Maude’s “unity” with “African American cultural styles” as atypical of the show in general. Again, my argument departs from Lentz’s here, which sees the show expressing the “conflicts” between feminism and African American political interests. Kirsten Marthe Lentz, “Quality versus Relevance: Feminism, Race, and the Politics of the Sign in 1970s Television,” Camera Obscura 15.1 (2000): 12. 37 Lentz 13. 38 Tania Modleski, Old Wives’ Tales, and Other Women’s Stories (New York: New York UP, 1998) 81. 39 Modleski 81. 40 Modleski 81. 41 See Lentz for a more thorough analysis of this particular episode and its use of racial pragmatism to shut down the farcical political leanings of white feminism. 42 Tara McPherson, Reconstructing Dixie: Race, Gender, and Nostalgia in the Imagined South (Durham: Duke UP, 2003) 21-22. 43 Joan Riviere, “Womanliness as Masquerade,” Psychoanalysis and Female Sexuality, ed. Ruitenbeek, Hendrik (New Haven: College and University P, 1966) 210. 44 Walton discusses her interpretation of Riviere’s patient in Jean Walton, Fair Sex, Savage Dreams: Race, Psychoanalysis, Sexual Difference (Durham: Duke UP, 2001) 17-40. 45 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume I: An Introduction (New York: Vintage, 1990) 62. 46 The apparatus of television itself requires that that interlocutor include the at-home viewer. Mimi White suggests that the television apparatus itself redefines the nature of confession. Television intervenes and the “private exchange between two individuals” becomes “reconfigured as a public event, staged by the technological and signifying conventions of the television apparatus.” Mimi White, Tele-Advising: Therapeutic Discourse in American Television (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1992) 9. 47 Foucault, The History of Sexuality 61-62. 151 48 See, for instance, Lynn Spigel, Make Room for TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1992). 49 Peer 51. 50 Peer 51. 51 Peer 55. 52 Peer 53. 53 Peer 53. 54 Qtd. in Peer 53. 55 Steinem’s own attitude about the political viability of therapy and psychoanalysis was somewhat uneven. Although Steinem was vocal in her criticisms of psychoanalysis, likening sending a woman to a Freudian analyst to “‘sending a Jew to a Nazi,’” she also identified feminist outreach through therapeutic terms and benefits. (Qtd. in Smith 69.). During her appearance at 1972’s NSA, Steinem advised a female audience member to connect with her mother by approaching the mother and saying, “‘[T]ell me your problems.’” (Qtd. in Chapman 28). In her 1972 Redbook interview with Liz Smith, Steinem uses psychoanalytic terms to assess the problems of patriarchy. She likens the passivity of women/aggression of men within the conventional gender system as “‘a problem of sadomasochism’” and argues that “women have been trained to be masochists.” (Qtd. in Smith 69.) 56 Peer 52. 57 Peer 52. 58 Peer 52. 59 Credits, Newsweek 17 Aug. 1971: 3. 60 Credits, Newsweek 17 Aug. 1971: 3. 61 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: U of California P, 1984) 35, 37. 62 de Certeau 36. 63 de Certeau 36. 64 de Certeau 37. 152 65 de Certeau 37. 66 Sorryien, “Fashion Politics and the Fashion in Politics,” off our backs 31 July 1974: 17- , Gender Watch, ProQuest, U of Southern California, USC Libraries, 11 Nov. 2005 <http://www.proquest.umn.com/>. 67 Sorryien 17- . 68 Sorryien 17- . 69 Carol Anne Douglas, “One Size Fits All: More F.B.I. & Grand Juries,” off our backs 31 Mar. 1975: 16- , Gender Watch, ProQuest, U of Southern California, USC Libraries, 11 Nov. 2005 <http://www.proquest.umi.com/>. 70 Letty Cottin Pogrebin, “The FBI Was Watching You,” Ms. June 1977: 41. 71 Pogrebin 44. 72 Ruth Rosen, “When Women Spied on Women,” The Nation 11 Sept. 2000: 18- , FirstSearch, OCLC, U of Southern California, USC Libraries, 19 Dec. 2005 <http://wwwnewfirstsearch.org/>. 73 Rosen 18- . 74 Qtd. in Pogrebin 39. 75 Pogrebin 39. 76 Kelly, Janis, “War Games,” off our backs 31 May 1975: 1- , Gender Watch, ProQuest, U of Southern California, USC Libraries, 11 Nov. 2005 <http://www.proquest.umi.com/>. 77 Foucault, Discipline and Punish 201. 78 Foucault, Discipline and Punish 201. 79 Marcy Rein, “Are You Being Paranoid If Someone Is Really Following You?” off our backs 31 Mar. 1977: 11. 80 Rein 11. 81 Qtd. in Rein 11. 82 Pogrebin 37. 83 Pogrebin 37. 153 84 Pogrebin 44. 85 Pogrebin 38, 39. 86 Kelly 1- . 87 Kelly 1- . 88 Vickie Garbriner, “Bugged by the Past,” off our backs 31 Oct. 1977: 11- , Gender Watch, ProQuest, U of Southern California, USC Libraries, 11 Nov. 2005 <http://www.proquest.umn.com/>. 89 Garbriner 11- . 90 Garbriner 11- . 154 Chapter Three Police Women, Criminal Women and the Public, Urban Landscape “Extraordinary violence on the part of women . . . appears to be one of the more prominent ways in which the private now transforms itself into the public.” “Women with Guns,” National Review October 10, 1975 In 1968, the first woman made her way onto the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list, marking a dubious landmark in gender equity and socio-psychological commonalities between men and women. This criminal pioneer, Ruth Eisemann- Schier—a “sweet and charming blonde” according to the New York Times—landed on the list for participating in the kidnapping of a Miami heiress. 1 In 1970, a total of four women joined her on this infamous public record of criminality. Charged with murder and the bombing of government and military buildings, Susan Saxe, Bernadine Rae Dohn, and Katherine Power raised concerns about their involvement in “militant organizations such as Women’s Liberation,” which presumably explained their public, aggressive displays of political protest. 2 The fourth woman on 1970’s list, Angela Davis, was the FBI list’s most famous, highly publicized female fugitive. Charged with kidnapping, murder, and unlawful interstate flight, Davis, perhaps more than any of the other women, prompted a frenzy of media speculation about the nature of increasingly politicized women and their attachment to violence. The publicity generated around female criminals in the 1970s reveals contemporary 155 social anxieties about women’s identities, anti-social behaviors, and increased public presence. Attached to the growing visibility and political power of the Women’s Liberation Movement, female criminality, intimately entwined in assumptions about gender, race, sexuality, and violence, became closely linked to the uncertain outcomes of feminism. Increased public concern about female criminality came about just as women on police forces gained occupational power. With the passage of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act in 1972, which required equal hiring practices and occupational duties among men and women, police women were hired in greater numbers and, for the first time, patrolled the streets and worked as detectives. Twin figures on opposite sides of the legal spectrum, the woman cop and the woman criminal raised similar anxieties about the state of American womanhood and engendered similar fantasies about their unprecedented accessible, “liberated,” public presence. In addition, their increasingly publicized presence worked to justify the other’s existence: female criminals demanded female law and order while female police women were assumed to possess unique abilities to understand the motivations behind female criminality. Concurrent with the popular visibility of feminism, the female criminal and the female cop became fully developed, bankable images in American popular culture. What makes these figures unique within the representational realm of the liberated woman are the particular challenges they pose to the gendering of public spaces and the capabilities of women for anti-social and physically unfeminine 156 activities. Together, the criminal woman and the police woman formulated a mapping—in geographical terms—of the visibility of female liberation. Public spaces of the street, city, and police station functioned as a stage for women’s emancipatory actions and signaled, representationally speaking, a new socio-political status for women on both sides of the law. These “public” women raised issues inextricably linked to the various permutations and rejection of labor/capitalism, domesticity’s flexible parameters, and the resulting female engagement with and participation in public displays of violence and sexuality. As this chapter’s opening epigraph suggests, the emergence of an aggressive public woman, typically associated with “[e]xtraordinary violence,” troubled conventional divisions between the public and the private and, in doing so, effectively “transform[ed]” the private into the public. 3 The violent and/or assertive woman’s presence and activities within the public sphere drew attention to the female body in a capacity outside of domestic heterosexuality (e.g. reproduction, sexual attractiveness and availability to men, caregiving to children), announced women’s concerns within the public sphere, and demanded public sphere rights and responses to her needs and desires. Together, the police woman and the female criminal provided fertile and ambiguous ideological grounds for feminist and anti-feminist proponents alike, evoking similar gendered and raced fantasies about women’s abilities to navigate public, masculine worlds. With their engagement with the public space of the street and deployment of an accompanying streetwise epistemology, the criminal woman 157 and the police woman staged new modes of knowledge, activity, and subjectivity. Ultimately, these women induced deeply ambivalent responses in the general public and in media representations. As much as these figures prompted intense concern, they also proved desirable, evoking pleasure through audience voyeurism and public interest in the women’s audacious exploits. Along with the threat the criminal woman and police woman posed to conventional femininity and the terms of its representation, these women promised revitalization for television and film’s generic and political material by updating generic conventions, infusing woman characters and narratives with an unprecedented realness and relevance, and staging dramatically different spaces in which women’s liberated lives took place. The City: Staging and Managing Women’s Revolt In a time of urban upheavals and social concerns about city spaces and populations, U.S. cities of the 1970s represented chaos and uncertainty. With the racial and economic unrest of several urban centers across America, the city served as a repository of larger national crises. 4 These crises found cultural articulation within the breakdown of the heterosexual family unit, whose disintegration was often placed at the feet of women who sought their own occupational standing, pursued their educational goals, and utilized the legal system to respond to marital abuse and sexual violence at the hands of their husbands. As a result of all of these factors, women, in both real and representational worlds, sought divorce as they never had before. 5 Popular media fuelled the anxieties surrounding women’s liberation from the 158 conventional gendered, sexual terms of marriage. Yet the media also promoted themselves as the agents of understanding of this new scenario staged within the culturally degenerate/progressive space of the city. Unlike the heterosexual, domestic harmony typically associated with ideologies of “Middle America,” the cultural construction of the city as a space of non-domestic, non-familial freedom and permissiveness provoked renewed media interest during the 1970s. By focusing on the turmoil of American cities, a wide variety of popular media offered audiences an updated product and addressed the growing cultural anxieties about women, whose discontent and public violence were finding visible expression within the city. Capitalizing on this geographical emplacement of gender and sexual liberation, mass media found a new method of selling its product: its abilities to guide the bewildered public through the new social order of urban America. The city gained renewed representational currency as various media industries strove to depict the gendered, sexual, and racial terms of its unrest. The state of heterosexuality and women’s function within these disturbed arrangements became a central thematic and visual concern. Even a technological medium that was, by then, as traditional as radio capitalized on the growing concerns of the city and its morality through its abilities to connect to local cultural practices and to provide regional information to corresponding audiences. In a print ad for CBS radio stations, which appeared in a 1972 issue of Saturday Review, the central question of domesticity and its failing 159 state in urban locales looms large. Posing its primary provocative question, the ad asks, “Which of these cities has the highest divorce rate?” The question, isolated from the rest of the text and printed in large, bold font, occupies the top left quadrant of a visual box filled with pictures of various couples posed in their wedding portraits. The captions underneath each photograph identify the couple, not through their names, but through their city of residence. Instead of traditional language that solidifies the couple’s identity through the heterosexual male-dominated coupling (e.g. Mr. and Mrs. Smith, the date of the marriage ceremony), the text identifies the city in which the man and woman live (e.g. Boston, New York, St. Louis). Although it identifies Los Angeles, generally understood as a notoriously morally lax urban cultural space, as the winner of the competition for the “biggest unhitching post,” the ad is quick to point out that “San Francisco and Chicago aren’t far behind.” After establishing the growing abilities of large American cities to destroy marriages, the ad wonders, “What’s happening?” This perplexing problem requires an investigation of the transformed city, its inhabitants, and CBS radio, as was typical of media’s drive to capitalize on social reformulations, positions itself as the appropriate investigative agent. Radio promised to stage its comeback from its outdated media status through its ability to identify and respond to mysterious new social behaviors. While not able to commit to a clear answer to its own question (“What’s happening?”), CBS radio understood that “new social trends” contribute to the rising divorce rate. These new 160 social trends implicitly point to the sexual, economic, and cultural challenges brought about by contemporary radical social movements, especially feminism. Through its presence in each of these divorce-saturated cities, radio could accurately gauge a local climate of mores. With a regional location in every major American city, urban media outlets helped their audiences through anxieties about new social standards of gendered and sexual behaviors. The CBS conglomerate responded to the divorce crisis by evoking a regionalism that harkens back to older modes of media while infusing this regionalism with compelling, relevant content. A Los Angeles program informs listeners about California divorce laws, while a San Francisco station provides listeners with “The Subject is Sex,” a daily news report on divorce, “marital experiments” and “related matters.” Radio’s new devotion to unconventional domesticity and sexuality, set within feminism’s pressures to reformulate gender relationships and the domain of domesticity, secured its viability as a compelling, contemporary medium. The city, both as program content and as a demographic focus, proved central in radio’s revised fortunes. The CBS ad explicitly stages social upheavals within the titillating, yet alarming new city as productive grounds for unconventional social mores. The “new world of the U.S. city today,” as the ad suggests, is a “pressure- filled, precarious and challenging world.” Mass media alone understand this urban landscape. Their programming and presence in urban areas addresses the needs of a particular geography shaped by political/social movements. The new city and the 161 politicized culture it produces reformulate a domesticity—through rejections of monogamy, marriage, conventional gender relationships, heterosexual normativity, nuclear family life and structures—to which radio and television have long linked their media address. With this long-standing relationship to the domestic, television and radio reassured their viewers and listeners that they could be counted on to interpret the fraught landscape of failed domesticity. Relevant programming, the construction of the cityscape as a sexual battleground between men and women, the downfall of social mores, and the media’s presence in cities position mass media as the appropriate, reassuring response to a troubled society. The cultural upheavals produced by the political movements of the Seventies provided the need for remediations. Mass media was only too happy to oblige, reframing both its industrial purposes and its products/content to respond to the problems posed by the reformulated city and the corresponding uncertainty about the identities—sexual, racial, and gendered—that made up its landscape. Along with the domestic upheavals fostered by cities, the urban public sphere also offered a powerful space of women’s refusal of their traditional gendered behaviors and identities. Working on the streets for the first time as police women and detectives, women’s presence within the public space of the city revitalized cultural anxieties about the mobility of and access to women. This public display of occupational abilities, general cultural presence, and right to the streets demanded dominant cultural management of this new development. Popular imaginings of the 162 urban landscape pictured it as a space that fostered women’s dangerous behaviors. The very terms of the city that make it such a fruitful locale for women’s liberation— anonymity, “progressive” culture, energized pace of living, amenable to changes— also make it fertile ground for their emancipation beyond the scope of the law. Representative of such a locale, New York City—with its rise in female violence and anti-social activities—served “[c]riminally as well as culturally” as a “harbinger of things to come.” 6 Leading the way in a predicted nationwide spread of behaviors, urban spaces stood on the cusp of wider cultural changes and indicated the central function of the city both in women’s independence and of women’s unfettered revolt. As a New York City police lieutenant surmises in a 1974 Psychology Today interview, New York saw a rise of female violence because of “‘women’s own image of themselves’” as empowered women who “‘know more about what they want, and they want more of the things that men used to have.’” 7 This drive for equitable economic footing with men, a goal coincident with that of feminism, prompted women to use self-actualization and self-fashioned identities to earn social status equitable to men—by any means necessary, in some cases. This mode of representation provoked women’s new subjectivity and conceptualization of their abilities to operate similarly to masculine behavior, namely to use violence, physicality, and aggression as a means by which to claim power. As much as the setting of the city and the publicity of the women living there prompted social anxieties, women’s claiming of and self-production of their own image—which did 163 not conform to conventional femininity and passivity—proved equally powerful. The terms of women’s visible, outward identity became an important tool in controlling the woman who felt increasingly emancipated from the terms of patriarchy and/or the law itself. The contestation over the control of the urban woman’s public image often revolved around the terms of sexual display and the terms of desire, either exerted by or towards women. The sexual economy of the big city required particular modes of policing that underscored concerns about the convergence of women, sexuality, and power within public spaces. Although prostitution had long existed as a form of women’s public sexuality, it was an economically controlled image/energy that existed for the benefit of men. With the new presence of police women who patrolled the streets, often undercover, male access to public women’s sexuality was no longer assured. Police women were charged with utilizing their public sexuality as an occupational tool to discipline men who sought sexual gratification from female prostitutes. This ability to control men, while meant for the moral good of society, also granted police women potentially dangerous power. In order to limit this, police departments attempted to harness police women’s occupational and sexual energies. They did so by codifying the sexual image that police women presented on the street and by utilizing police women to control the sexual displays and empowerment of all women. As women started to patrol city streets, they were held responsible for the 164 management of women’s public sexuality. As “Flatfoot Floozies”—the term Newsweek reports is the one by which Washington D.C.’s undercover police women “are known”—police women worked as “decoys,” posing as possible prostitutes, serving as “one of the chief weapons against prostitution.” 8 Women, now part of the police force, could pass as prostitutes, providing the police department with new means of controlling unlawful female sexuality. The presence of these non-criminal women on the streets promised to solve the problems of commodified, public female sexuality, yet they also revealed the limits of conceptualizing the legally sanctioned, legitimate presence of women on the street. Although assigned to control prostitution and manage the illegal sexual activities of women on the streets, female cops confused the terms of public female sexuality. Now that women served the legal system, sexist behavior towards women on the street could no longer be deemed harmless. Instead, male sexism confused the terms of legal and illegal sexual behaviors. Police women had to understand the differences between run-of-the-mill sexual aggression that women encountered in their everyday lives and the sexual propositioning of a potential john to a prostitute. This legal parsing out of uninvited sexual advances proved thorny. According to a representative from the New York Civil Liberties Union, if a man propositions a woman on the street, “‘something that men do all the time in big cities with absolutely no intention of paying for the favor,’” the sexism of the situation changes when the woman is also a police officer. 9 The new terms of public gendered 165 sexuality and accompanying power dynamics threatens to unsettle assumptions about women as sexually available on the street, whether she has constructed herself as such or not. While this dynamic promised to dismantle all male sexual assertiveness or aggression toward women in public, the legal system intervened to place the responsibility of understanding nuanced definitions of these sexual advances on women. The Civil Liberties Union warned police departments that, when faced with any sexual overtures, if an undercover police woman responds in any way except to say “ ‘No’ or “Go away,’” then she could be charged with entrapment. 10 The civil liberties question raised by possible entrapment of men propositioning women on the street reveals the complexities of the police woman’s new public visibility and function as female officers of the state. With their status as generic public women on the street and as police women working undercover as possible prostitutes, female cops were doubly subject to street harassment without legal recourse. Through their occupational relationship to the law, one that presumably empowered them, these police workers occupied an especially vulnerable position on the street. As women, their mere presence on the street made them available to male sexual advances. As police women, their occupational duties and responsibilities also made them susceptible to punitive legal action if they failed to gauge correctly the intentions of these overtures. 166 The legal problem of entrapment also fostered the micromanagement of the police women’s sexual, bodily display. When they worked on the streets, they were not allowed to wear hotpants or halters and could only appear in “ordinary” clothes. Presumably, wearing “non-sexual” clothing would not deter men from soliciting sex from them, an assumption that reveals the ever-present sexualization of any given woman on the street. A public women, regardless of her clothing and other visual cues, signifies available, always-accessible sexuality to men—merely walking down the street offers her up as a sexual commodity. In contrast to the cautious limitations placed on women’s visual cues of sexuality, the guidelines for male police decoys posing as johns did not require any such detailed guidelines nor is the scrutiny of their sexual presence on the streets presented as a concern for the system of law enforcement. Police women who deliberately crafted the image of their public sexuality in order to punish men infringed on men’s sexual gratification and proved too threatening and confusing. As such, it required careful legal and representational safeguards that ultimately protected the rights of men, whether they were engaging in unlawful sex trade or “innocently” approaching “ordinary” women on the street with the hopes of a sexual encounter. The fact that police women, while wearing their normal clothing and acting in conventional ways, could nab men looking for sex underscores the confusion the legally empowered public women posed and the threat they presented to heterosexual masculine entitlement. 167 TV’s Police Women Television of the Seventies quickly adapted to the real-world presence of police women, their occupational and presumed gendered and sexual freedoms, and the new geographical terrain they inhabited. Through her occupation, the police woman provided representational possibilities that moved women outside of conventional domesticity and its corresponding storylines and characterizations. While television never permitted women to stray too far from their domestic abilities, it took advantage of urban geographies to formulate a revision of the public and private spaces of the city, merging the two within the figure of the woman on the streets who navigates, literally and imaginatively, the terrain of psychologically driven actors within the city. The police woman figure conveniently provided the motivation for new scenes of female activity that signaled popular media’s attention to the shifting realities of women during the 1970s. The cultural awareness of women’s drive for equality and the opportunity for topical “women’s issues” reinvigorated the genre, giving rise to a number of new programs. The Feminist and the Fuzz (1971), an ABC Movie of the Week, featured feminist Jane Bowers (Barbara Eden), who reforms sexist male cop Jerry Frazer (David Hartman) through their unlikely relationship as roommates. The movie’s teaser promotes the spectacle of sexism and the influence of feminism on the police system. Featuring a montage of images that situate feminist politics and police work together within a context of gendered violence (karate- 168 chopping feminists, feminists picketing a bikini contest and their consequent arrest, Jerry arresting Jane with overt physical force), the teaser plays “The Feminist” Jane’s voiceover over the images, announcing the central plot conflict: “I’m sharing an apartment with a cop lawyer sexual bigot boy scout.” Amy Prentiss (1974-1975), a NBC program whose popularity as two two-hour TV movies prompted the network to develop it into a series, featured a San Francisco female detective who is promoted to police chief. In this capacity, Amy faces the challenges of exerting her authority in the midst of departmental and societal sexism. In 1974, CBS aired Big Rose as a Movie of the Week. Starring Shelley Winters as female detective Rose Winters, the movie proved popular enough to prompt CBS to plan a series development, though it never came to fruition. The interest in liberated women and their effect on police and detective work continued until the highly popular 1980s series Cagney & Lacey (1981-1988). The series, comprehensively explored in Julie D’Acci’s Defining Women, exemplified television’s negotiation of feminist politics through the presence of police women and the critical relevance/realism they brought to the television screen. As part of their generic pleasure and corresponding ideological appeals, police programs have always offered audiences a voyeuristic look into the underbelly of the criminal world. Often set in cities and promising “realistic” depictions of sexuality and violence, the genre is a titillating one, generally propelled at the expense of women and racial minorities. Television programs Police Woman (1974- 169 1978) and Get Christie Love! (1974-1975) promised a revision of these genre politics by placing women, both white and black respectively, in charge of police investigations. These programs promised an updated depiction of gender and racial politics, often featuring as central characters figures previously criminalized or marginalized by police shows. While this evoked a sense of tokenism and co- optation, it also produced a specific sense of space and narrative that psychologized the city, and created a place for women’s and racial minorities’ inclusion into the labor force of police investigations and law enforcement. This departs from earlier manifestations of police dramas, which surveyed the city and its inhabitants through pragmatic, objective fact-gathering and material evidence. 11 TV’s police woman afforded viewers an opportunity to see the liberated woman in the city and to see the city through her particular perception. By placing police women on city streets, television created a portable domesticity—a transported and transformed set of domestic ideals played out within the world of the public—and infused it with physical action and psychological weight. Though largely forgotten in both today’s television histories and histories of feminist politics, Police Woman and Get Christie Love! were heralded by some feminists as a media achievement and as groundbreaking representation. Ms., in particular, championed these programs for their relationship to feminist philosophies and politicized, public sphere activism. The employment of women, both as writers and stars, served as visible proof of television’s attention to feminism, a gesture that 170 underscored and authorized the presumed progressiveness of onscreen representations of the female cop. Both programs hired women writers to “figure prominently in the development” of the series. 12 By featuring women as the leads of dramatic programs, a rare situation that had not happened “since Barbara Stanwyck starred in ‘The Big Valley,’” program content and hiring practices worked in conjunction with feminism’s interest in proving its influence over television and television’s interest in positive publicity that confirmed its sensitivity to the situation of women. 13 Finally, program content itself qualified as an expression of feminist politics—at least in the perspective of Ms., which praised the new police woman shows for representing the leads as “absolutely equal” to their male co-workers. 14 When considered together, Police Woman and Christie Love reveal the techniques of visualization television employed to represent the gendered, racial, and sexual dimensions of police women, their presence on the street, and the types of work they are equipped to do. Featuring Angie Dickinson as Pepper Anderson, Police Woman imagined the white female cop through a version of femininity that domesticated the city streets and granted the investigative woman unique detective skills through therapeutic insight. Unlike her male co-workers, Pepper is capable of understanding the core issues of familial and romantic conflicts, even when they are exhibited in the public sphere. Christie Love starred Teresa Graves as Christie Love, a black police woman whose understanding of the street and its problems stems from her innate streetwise sensibilities, which presumably originate in her experiences as a 171 black woman. Christie’s police skills depend upon her physical aptitude and her abilities to communicate with people who live out the realities of urban life. Television’s police women, as demonstrated by Police Woman and Christie Love, dealt with the representational challenges posed by police women by consistently evoking gendered and raced psychologizing to explain and mitigate the increased public presence of these women, their abilities to successfully perform the detection and the violence necessary for police work, and their expressions of liberal feminist politics. These TV programs illustrate the problems television had in picturing women working within the world of violence and exemplify media’s techniques of explaining and containing women’s abilities to navigate public space. The police woman’s place within the urban environment and the ideological terms of the cityspace as public and non-domestic required careful management. In order to imagine women within this world, representations of public, empowered women had to limit the gender upheavals staged by women’s entrée into this geographical and occupational place. Police Women’s Star Qualities: Angie Dickinson and Teresa Graves Angie Dickinson and Teresa Graves, the stars of Police Woman and Christie Love!, proved fundamental in developing the terms of identity and geographies central to television’s conceptualization of, capitalization on, and containment of the public woman who emerged over the course of the 1970s. An examination of the promotion media coverage of each individual star and the structural relationship 172 established between them reveals the racialized gender terms that inform each onscreen police woman’s investigative capabilities, her relationships to the victims and victimizers she encounters in her job, and the terms of her public presence. As the actor who portrayed Police Woman’s Pepper Anderson, Angie Dickinson brought a significant star persona to bear upon the ideological and aesthetic terms of television’s conception of its police women. Dickinson’s previous career in the Hollywood film industry, her well-known capacity to formulate professional and personal relationships with overtly masculine men, and her persona that engaged the terms of feminine beauty and masculine forthrightness all contributed to the development and management of TV’s police woman. Press coverage of Dickinson’s suitability for the role of Pepper Anderson often underscores the terms of Dickinson’s long-standing career and her personal life, both of which naturalize her abilities to represent a particular version of the public woman. The distinctive gendered characteristics of Dickinson’s star image make her a believable figure who can hold her own with men, both on the streets and on the police force. At the same time, Dickinson’s approachable, accessible heterosexuality limits the sexual and intellectual threats her onscreen counterpart poses by occupying public terrain and a masculinized vocation. With her unassuming, natural sexuality, Pepper’s mode of fighting crime depends upon inherent feminine skills that are not truly skills, after all, but are natural and intuitive expressions of her essential gender make-up. Using her “sensuality” to “outsmart criminals,” as Ms. puts it, Pepper’s/Angie’s sexual 173 energies are put into the service of social harmony. 15 Presumably, Dickinson’s abilities to express this new femininity proved effective in this regard, with a Policeman’s [sic] Union official informing the show that it had “‘improved relationships between men and women on the force’” and “‘[r]elieved a lot of tension.’” 16 Dickinson’s/Pepper’s brand of sexual and gendered appeal restores harmony between the sexes in the workplace, guarantees that neither men nor women audiences will be alienated from her charms, and founds the very abilities by which she can perform her job. Implicitly, yet crucially, figured as white, Dickinson’s femininity creates a star image that, in turn, justifies her character’s particular knowledge used in police work while protecting her from the overt sexualization typically associated with a woman working on the streets. Her particular brand of “sensuality” de-emphasizes the physical abilities of the active, capable body and demands a diversion of the violent activity necessary for police work. Dickinson’s 1975 TV Guide cover, which promotes her new role as Pepper Anderson, serves as an overt illustration of her carefully managed bodily appeals. The photo features Dickinson in a typical “cover girl” glamour shot. The overall attitude of the photo is an inviting one, conjuring up feminine sexuality of a previous era in Hollywood entertainment. Mediated by soft focus, Dickinson’s “nude” body is turned at an angle. 17 In this position, she modestly looks over her bare shoulder at the spectator, smiling. The photograph’s aesthetics express “‘beauty’, ‘glamour’ and ‘truthfulness,’” terms that Richard Dyer identifies 174 as ones that keep “the white face central as a touchstone” in visual arts. 18 Coded as glamorous and reserved, Dickinson’s body both summons up her feminine accessibility and refuses its place within the masculine domain of the public. The caption accompanying the photo underscores the feminine appeals on display, posing the question, “How Did She Ever Get on the Force?” This question points to the larger incompatibility of white femininity and the demands of the physical, public presence of the police woman—terms that conflict with conventional modes of understanding the place of white, heterosexual womanhood. However central Dickinson’s white womanhood was to her persona, her presence as “raced” proved difficult to register on its own. As such, it required a comparative figure of overtly raced womanhood. Numerous influential critical race feminist scholars have pointed out the representational absence that a white woman on her own poses and the consequent need for the presence of black womanhood that is crucially linked, yet maintained as separate from, white womanhood. 19 Tara McPherson has coined the phrase “lentricular logic” to discuss the visual and structural nature of this white/black binary and interdependence: “lentricular logic is capable of representing both black and white; but one approaches the limits of this logic when one attempts to understand how the images are joined or related.” 20 The structural pairing of black women with white women underscores the “natural” femininity of the white woman, while providing an essentialized difference of race. Within this relationship, the white woman becomes appropriately feminine because 175 of her comparable adherence to standards of femininity implicitly linked to whiteness. Her racial designation becomes invisible, as the black woman overtly stands in for “race,” which according to the racist (il)logic of American culture, can never fulfill the standard of womanhood as successfully as the white woman. TV Guide also featured Teresa Graves on its cover two months prior to Dickinson’s cover. A comparative examination of these two covers reveals the crucial differentiation the publication made in the racial terms of each woman’s function as the star behind the onscreen police woman. Press coverage of Christie Love typically underscored the gendered and racial ideologies structuring Graves’s/Love’s crime-fighting capabilities and methods. Similar to the program itself, this coverage often drew upon the iconography of Black Power and black urban political groups to denote the persona of the star. The November 1974 TV Guide cover features a headshot of Graves that conveys the “significance” of the television program, both in tone and in its political attention to race. This significance is signaled through the Graves’s serious expression and the overt aesthetic signification of race. The photo’s backlighting, along with its tight framing, draws attention to Graves’s Afro. Bathed in a purplish light, the Afro occupies a place of dominance in the photo. This aesthetic privileging repeats across press coverage, indicating the central function of the Afro in signaling the importance of the program and its star, premised on politically significant, authentic expressions of race. 176 The fetishization of Graves’s Afro signaled to contemporary audiences the political viability of the program as well as the racial authenticity of the updated police show genre. By explicitly privileging Graves’s Afro, media coverage implicitly summons up another media-worthy, “dangerous” black woman’s iconographic Afro and corresponding political import—that of Angela Davis. Davis recounts the significance of her Afro and the iconic status it assumed in photographic depictions of Davis’s revolutionary politics and the violence she/it presented: “I was intensely aware of the invasive and transformative power of the camera and of the ideological contextualization of my image.” 21 The photographed image, frozen in time and space, was flexibly interpreted and immediately recognizable, so much so that Davis encountered strangers who recognized her only after equating her with this image. In the words of one such person, Davis signifies only as “‘Angela Davis—the Afro.’” 22 Quite literally, Davis and the politics for which she stands were reduced to a single image, that of “an unruly natural hairdo” which “symbolized Black militancy (that is, antiwhiteness),” that could be used in service of the FBI’s wanted poster, by a Life magazine cover, and/or by an American public who saw Davis either as their political salvation or as their greatest fears realized. 23 By deploying the symbolic weight of the black woman’s Afro in the mid-70s, Christie Love and the press coverage surrounding the program played on the audience’s knowledge of the cultural meanings signified by Davis’s Afro. This association promised a fascinating glimpse into the subcultural world of the Black Panthers and 177 like-minded militants, authorized the vital connection of the program to authentic expressions of gender and racial politics, and harnessed the politicized, violent energies presumed to be attached to Davis and her contemporaries in the service of law and order. Promotional journalistic coverage of Christie Love and Police Woman consistently used the programs’ stars as the gauge of distinctions between the contemporaneous shows. While typically articulated as the stars’ personality traits— on-set behavior, diet and exercise regimes, demeanor during interviews, trivial likes and dislikes—the racial contrast between Dickinson and Graves operates as the fundamental, meaningful difference between the two women. Articles typically place photographs of the programs’ two stars side-by-side to invite explicit comparison between their physicality and appearance, signifying bodily distinctions—and through extension, essential identity—between white and black womanhood. The comparison between stars prominently displays their different embodiments of female liberation, with Dickinson registering through her naturalized femininity and ease within the world of men, while Graves signifies bodily presence in physical, aggressive fashion. The racial, sexual, and gendered terms of Dickinson’s photographs are powerfully inflected by this comparison to, yet distance from, black womanhood. Inflecting each other, the two photographs signify racial womanhood, whether implicitly or explicitly. Graves physically signifies the aesthetic and ideological 178 presence of black womanhood, which seems all the more intense and Othered when compared to Dickinson’s more passive, conventionally glamorous image. At the same time, Dickinson’s image signifies whiteness this vividly only when counterposed to Graves stereotypical physical signifiers of “race.” This difference establishes a crucial racial distinction between the two women and aids in the management of both the white and black public woman. Journalistic coverage repeatedly deployed racial contrast and gender comparison to assure audiences that, even with her new public presence, the white police woman remained “feminine” in physicality, sexuality, and demeanor. It also promised that black womanhood would continue to authenticate the urban experience for audiences and to deliver it through a titillating, sexualized display that limited the physical capabilities/threats of a black female cop. Perhaps more complex than the non-feminist press in its deployment of racialized womanhood, Ms. does perpetuate co-dependent racial imaginings in its coverage of Dickinson/Police Woman and Graves/Christie Love. While lauding both programs as models of pioneering gender politics, Ms. subtly distinguishes between the racial status of each program’s female star. Placing publicity shots of Dickinson and Graves side-by-side, the article establishes the contrast between the racialized bodies of each woman and the brand of public presence she possesses, the ideological terms of gender identities, and the type of police work she is capable of performing. With the photographs resized to match each other, the pairing privileges 179 Dickinson’s face and head in a photograph that features her mid-torso and up. In contrast to Graves’s photograph, which captures her mid-action, Dickinson stands with her forearm resting on the roof of a parked car, with the strap of her purse hanging over her shoulder. Looking off into the distance, her look and body language are neither confrontational nor physically mobile. Instead she is linked to femininity through her fashion accoutrements, pose, and expression. Dickinson, the more static of the two figures, cultivates a reflective femininity that allows the camera to capture her mid-thought. Looking off-camera, Dickinson’s pose suggests an accessible bodily presence that is carefully framed by the camera and suitable to photographic capture. Graves’s photograph for the same Ms. article figures her body and its active physicality, elements that could not accompany Dickinson without compromising her white femininity. Of course Graves did not merely underscore this core identity for Dickinson. For her own part, Graves registers crucial signifiers of black womanhood that promise action, authentic political expression, and physical violence. The Ms. photograph captures her mid-action in a karate move, her hands extended to the camera, dominating the foreground of the picture in fish-eye lens fashion. Her hands and upraised arms draw the viewer’s eye in a line, again to her Afro. Graves looks directly into the camera, her expression one of challenge emphasizing her action heroine toughness and her lack of coy posturing. The photo’s caption emphasizes Graves’s physicality, describing her as a “karate-chopping policewoman,” unlike 180 Dickinson’s caption, which lauds the star’s career, triumphantly announcing that she “has the lead” in the new police woman program. 24 As a fictional drama that features a black woman as its lead actor and narrative protagonist, Christie Love is an unusual program for American television, regardless of its historical moment. Rarely did or does television grant non-white women characters primary roles, especially in non-comedic genres. If featured in a program that explicitly forwards a liberated woman narrative, the black woman character typically provides the foil for the white woman’s liberated activities and attitudes, alternately provoking and policing them. When a black woman herself plays the role of gender transgressor as a liberated woman, instead of a companionate figure for other women’s gender liberation, she brings with her a burden/promise of “liveness,” figured through her racial presence. José Muñoz’s discussion of what he terms the “burden of liveness” helps explicate the crucial aesthetic and ideological significance Christie Love’s star (Graves) and protagonist (Christie) bring to the police woman genre and to the aesthetic expression of women’s liberation. Empowered groups seek out and demand to see racialized bodies perform a “story of ‘otherness’” that is activated for the gratification of dominant culture.” 25 The qualities of liveness promised by Othered bodies and performances offer unmediated access to and a spectacle of sexual/gender/racial difference that, separated from its political and social context, is easily consumed and controlled. Thus, Christie Love and its star offered viewers visual confirmation of 181 racial Otherness—Black Panther iconography, catch phrases that were presumably linked to black “street” culture, and scenarios of karate that evoked the training of black power groups—without any overt challenge to America’s existing power structures. Unlike Graves’s star function, where overt racial expression and identity are crucial to Christie Love’s significance, race becomes an implicit (though crucial) characteristic of Angie Dickinson’s and, through extension, Pepper Anderson’s meaning. In order to analyze the function of Dickinson’s persona in the characterization of Pepper, the Ms. article depends upon attributes of white femininity to understand the success and appeal of the program, its star, and its police woman character. In the case of Dickinson and Pepper, Ms. champions the remarkable abilities, shared by star and character, of a woman working in a man’s world and the (white) feminine qualities she uses to reform this world. Although the gender attributes Dickinson/Pepper brings to the job are promoted as exceptional within a male world, her talents are sourced in her essential womanhood and, as such, are unexceptional. The power of this exceptionalism to challenge the ideological terms of the genre and its representations of labor are managed through a paradoxical gender-blind outlook. As much as the show depended upon the novelty of a female police officer, the audience was allowed to enjoy, but was not supposed to notice, the singular nature of a woman on the force. Dickinson’s star image, with its transparent believability and seemingly uncalculated 182 abilities and sexual appeal, aided in this project. As the program’s producer explains, the show will succeed “‘because it’s good, not because Angie is a woman.’” 26 This curious disavowal of a woman’s presence fantasizes gender blindness that effectively minimizes the impact of women, both within television’s police show genre and within the real world possibilities of a woman on the police force. Dickinson herself naturalized her gendered presence as circumstantial, not exceptional, in order to distance herself from the political upheavals the police woman’s public, occupational presence introduced. Dickinson describes “feeling a responsibility to the women’s cause” as “terrifying” and claims that she “doesn’t like crusading.” 27 Instead of an identification with the Women’s Liberation Movement, Dickinson defines the media industry as the power to whom she feels beholden: “‘I feel a responsibility to both the producers and NBC.’” 28 A symbol of an older Hollywood studio system, Dickinson dutifully continued on in her role as loyal employee working within a new economic and ideological moment. As such, she deployed a lucrative image of female liberation while funneling its potential back into a corporate media structure. Dickinson’s career had always depended upon a synergy between the on- and offscreen characters Dickinson depicts and the characterization of Dickinson herself. This woman is loyal both to gendered ideologies and to those who help her gain power, yet not cloyingly so. Dickinson’s particular blend of feminine qualities and masculine capabilities marked her movie career, which was transcribed onto 183 television during Police Woman’s series run. Press coverage insisted on the authenticity of Pepper Anderson through Dickinson’s own appeal and well-known personal history as being a sexual companion to and/or a part of enclaves of masculinity—the Rat Pack, the Kennedys, and the set of Howard Hawks’s movie Rio Bravo, which included director Hawks and co-stars John Wayne and Dean Martin. 29 Dickinson’s depiction of Pepper carried on this tradition and was frequently represented as a natural extension of Dickinson’s own attributes. For instance, the very character of Pepper Anderson was one birthed of Dickinson’s own personality and outlook. Dickinson’s inability to “imagine a woman police officer named ‘Lisa’ [the original character name]” prompts her to suggest changing it to Pepper. 30 Explaining Pepper’s characteristics, Dickinson envisions her as a “sensible, good- looking girl with a sense of humor…attractive to men and appealing to women,” characteristics often attributed to Dickinson herself. 31 Like Pepper, Dickinson’s sexual appeal was built upon sexuality that is amenable to both men and women. Dickinson’s input into Pepper’s characterization attests to women’s growing control over their onscreen images within the television industry. As her name clearly suggests, Pepper is a fiery, spirited woman. This characterization parallels Dickinson’s own sexy spunkiness. Yet Dickinson’s conception of Pepper also reveals the limits of this industrial shift. Both Dickinson and Pepper also demonstrate gender-correctness as women who wish to please and to locate their power within the pre-existing social order. As Dickinson herself describes it, Pepper is a woman who, 184 like Dickinson, “‘can stand up to men without being resented by them.’” 32 This quality—assertiveness that does not displease masculine authority—serves Pepper’s characterization, which was reinforced by Dickinson’s relationship to media industries, in which she pleases TV executives before feminists. Dickinson’s persona is an unaffected one that produces a fantasy of access and knowledge on the part of the audience member/fan. This authenticity assures audiences that Dickinson’s appeals are “real,” both in their sincerity and accessibility. This down-to-earth star type conforms to a generic strategy of producing stardom that Richard Dyer identifies as “ordinariness.” 33 Ordinary qualities assure audiences that stars, paradoxically, are both ordinary and extraordinary, deserving of their unique status because of their unique beauty and/or charisma, yet are “essentially not transformed” by their economic power and social standing. 34 Dyer identifies this as a fundamental element of stardom, regardless of the cultural context, the particular nature of the individual star, and the ideological significance of her/his persona. A consideration of the ordinary, authentic elements of Dickinson’s stardom within the context of American women’s growing publicity and empowerment during the 1970s produces a more particular interpretation. Dickinson’s gender authenticity addressed a specific social moment, one that was fraught with concerns about the state of white femininity as women gained greater visibility in the public sphere. By managing her stardom according to a conventional template of authentic femininity with an overlay of self-sufficiency, 185 forthrightness, and a no-nonsense attitude, Dickinson was an ideal mainstream expression of 1970s liberated womanhood. With her “discipline, ambition, energy…more than a dollop of ‘do-goodism’…[and] healthy ego,” Dickinson represented media’s image of liberal feminism. 35 Concurrent with this clearly articulated liberated woman attitude, Dickinson continued to represent feminine stardom and an amenability to legible representations of femininity. Dickinson’s drive and assertive qualities, when “mixed with a very feminine interest in clothes and jewelry,” promoted her continued identification with feminine desires and behavior in the midst of her assertions of liberated-woman sentiments. 36 Dickinson’s wholesome demeanor and lack of pretense assured the public/audience/spectator of her innate disposition, which could then be applied to her onscreen characterization of a police woman. These traits, related in extensive detail in a Saturday Evening Post interview, promote the central qualities of both star and character: The same riveting, hypnotic eyes that look straight out of the screen on Friday night, the unflinching gaze over the businesslike revolver of the police woman, are now fastened firmly on you. The eyes suddenly seem to tell all she is…They’re bright with anticipation, determined, restless, and yet flecked with humor. Coolly professional. Direct. And nice. Like their owner. 37 Dickinson’s combined directness and niceness mitigate the professionally sanctioned violence of her onscreen character. Equally important is the access one can gain to her entire personality simply by looking her straight in the eyes. Joan Landes identifies this type of public womanhood as congruent with “publicity, authenticity, 186 transparency,” which are measures of a revolutionary society built upon equality for its citizens. 38 While Landes is referring to post-Revolutionary French society, the anxieties about the growing presence of the public woman and her possible usurpation of male authority also apply to 1970s America with its felt influence of and anxieties about the Women’s Liberation Movement. In a time of gender upheavals and public sphere instability, women are called upon to express an improved social order through their rejection of “artificiality, ornamentation, and disguise” tied to powerful and politically corrupt womanhood. 39 Yet women must also be careful not to become “femmes-hommes,” or, in the case of the Seventies liberated woman, a woman who possesses too much power in her assertive/aggressive personality, public persona, and exercise of public sphere rights—all of which result in masculinization. 40 Instead of duplicitous femininity or overreaching masculinity, women are called upon to achieve “transparent representation,” an honest and uncomplicated personality that can be counted on to carry on both the duties of uncorrupted womanhood and the ideals of a politically progressive society. 41 As women gained visibility within the public sphere and undertook economically viable jobs conventionally reserved for white men during the 1970s, Dickinson’s transparent stardom became especially important. Dickinson guaranteed white women’s continued femininity and heterosexuality, qualities that kept them from becoming overly powerful and thus masculine. As such, Dickinson’s ideals of 187 the public conformed to a media-friendly version of liberation while restabilizing the heterosexual terms of gender. As Dickinson herself understood and promoted this formulation, “‘The idea is to work with a man, but not threaten him. Everything’s okay as long as you don’t get in the way of his virility.’” 42 Dickinson authorizes an equilibrium of feminism and conventional values through her interpretation of her police woman character, a woman capable of being a man’s co-worker and public sphere equal, yet who will not compromise basic gendered identities formulated in terms of the private sphere (e.g. male virility). Through extension, the police woman effectively became a similar force in a world that could congratulate itself on its equal employment of women without reformulating heteronormative gender essentialisms. Dickinson’s power to assuage all fears about the public woman while offering up a depiction of women’s progress is made abundantly clear in the following passage, which sums up the effect of her stardom on the representation of the liberated police woman: “It’s certain that [getting in the way of a man’s virility] is something Pepper Anderson or Angie Dickinson would never do. She likes men. She also likes being a woman—in the best and most modern sense of the role.” 43 Graves’s star image, like Dickinson’s, also produced the all-important quality of “ordinariness,” yet this generic category, when focused on her particular persona, narrows to an expression of racially specific womanhood. In the case of Graves, ordinariness denotes a balance of racial authenticity and accessibility—qualities that work hand-in-hand with her liveness. It is crucial that Graves offers audiences a 188 “real” look at a streetwise black woman’s experience of the urban world and its criminality. Yet she cannot threaten them with overt politicization, confrontation, or challenges to the structures of white privilege. In order to accomplish this balancing act, Graves is charged an additional social with responsibility in depicting her character, which places a burden of authentic representation on her acting, physicality, and offscreen connection to her onscreen character. This authenticity must never veer into dangerous terrain; Graves’s career success depends upon her abilities to navigate a “respectable” womanhood that counterbalances an assumed racial hostility to dominant cultural standards of behavior, thought, and feeling. Ms., as always, relates Christie Love to Police Woman, citing the generic comparisons between the two shows. However, a significant point of contrast comes into play when Ms. considers the political import each show holds. Although both programs promote women’s equality, Christie Love is charged with a “higher level of awareness.” 44 In order to produce this “awareness,” the program depended upon its star to convincingly articulate experiences, attitudes, and actions attributed to an imagined universal black womanhood. Christie Love! generated spectatorial pleasure by promising realistic voyeurism of street life offered by the presence of a savvy, physically adept black woman. Graves herself played a crucial role in this project and was called upon to walk a fine line between spectacular physicality and racial realism. The show’s executive producer promised that the show would manage these two terms, so that 189 the pleasure of one would not negate the other. According to the producer, the show would draw upon Graves’s physical abilities only when they underscored the realism of the scenario: “‘[W]e will only resort to karate in realistic situations.’” 45 For her part, Graves would make acting choices that would produce Christie’s character as “‘a person, not a supercop.’” 46 This assured audiences that the exploitation qualities of the program, also a considerable selling point, would neither produce a fantastical world of female heroism nor position a black woman as too powerful; these qualities could mar the viewing pleasure for audiences who wanted to know what it was “really” like to be a black woman on the streets without worrying about the potential effect of her social discontent and violent actions. The show’s producer promoted the program by detailing the ways in which technical advice from a black female New York City police detective provided the series with authentic case details and police procedures. 47 In addition to technical details associated with police work, this outside consultant also produced racial authenticity. Not limited to content alone, black female subjectivity and experience—guaranteed by the black female consultant and by Graves herself—served as a hallmark of the show’s import. As the program’s executive producer explains, you “‘can’t have your lead be a young, black woman who grew up in the streets and not be aware of what she represents.’” 48 The “streets” are the location that links star to character and evokes the social awareness of both. By calling upon socially responsible representation, the show both deploys and 190 masks the voyeuristic sexual and raced pleasures of watching a black woman, both star and character, who knows her way around the streets. As much as this self-awareness and the urban realities of black Americans proved appealing, Graves’s stardom also managed the political potential of these elements. Graves must ensure that the representation a powerful, politicized black woman with the authority of America’s police system at her disposal would not veer too far into dangerous terrain. This came in the form of the social message the show sent to audiences who, ideally, would identify with Graves/Christie. In the program’s outreach, Graves’s role promised to produce a “‘positive moral effect’” on these black viewers. 49 They were meant to identify with a black woman’s accomplishments, both as the star of a hit TV program and as an onscreen character with a successful, “respected” career. 50 As the show’s producer suggests, the series’s feminist agenda is tied intimately to a less explicit one: racial management. Graves’s function as a black female star playing a successful career police woman provided positive messages, “‘not only from the woman’s point of view, but from the black point of view.’” 51 Articulating this “black point of view,” Graves/Christie converted feminist sentiments into conservative politics, namely by transforming young black women’s potential social discontent into productive energies for law and order. The show’s producer muses about, “‘How great it will be for young black women to see one of their sisters up there…on the right side of the law.’” 52 191 Finally, Graves’s highly publicized religious convictions and her feminine attributes of morality, docility, and humility allayed any fears that white, mainstream culture may have had about her onscreen representation of a powerful, physically assertive black woman. Christie’s public sphere capabilities are tempered by Graves’s private sphere tendencies, which conform to standards championed by dominant cultural standards. In this case, the disjuncture—quite unlike the conflation necessary to confirm racial authenticity—between star and character becomes a key selling point. Graves’s agent promotes this in her description of Graves: “She’s really quite conservative. She doesn’t smoke. She doesn’t drink. She lives with her mother…She’s very close to her family. She’s frighteningly neat. She’s a good cook. She knows how to serve properly and set the table nicely. Someday she’s gonna make somebody a terrific wife.” 53 When exhibited in the public sphere, Graves’s capabilities marked her as a feminist role model. When relocated to the private sphere, they became a marker of accomplishments and desires typically associated with the normative terms of white femininity. Transposed and eventually contained within a future heterosexual commitment to a man, Graves’s black womanhood and its presumed threats to the status quo quickly became neutralized. Although her knowledge of etiquette and commitment to wholesome living diffused Graves’s racial threats, her visible sexual appeals were simultaneously emphasized and disavowed. As a black woman, Graves’s sexuality is freighted with a host of anxieties about its uncontrollable nature as well as desires about its accessibility. Graves’s agent manages these contradictory 192 fears and desires by denying any calculation on Graves’s part. Her sexuality is both essentialized and unaffected: “‘She can’t help it. She doesn’t have to try [. . .] She’s doesn’t have to play sexy to be sexy. It’s nature’s accident.’” 54 Although accidental, Graves’s sexuality is always and obviously on display and, as such, potentially pleasurable to every onlooker/spectator. The “mere sight” of Graves is “‘going to give somebody the feeling that sex is there.’” 55 Police Woman: Feminine Intuition Cracks the Case With the powerful force of Angie Dickinson’s star persona behind it, Police Woman featured a version of public womanhood that humanized the police woman’s labor while mitigating the masculine, forceful public presence and physicality of her job. As a police drama featuring a white woman as its protagonist, Police Woman reformulated the genre’s conventional spatial and narrative dimensions without compromising the core terms of white femininity. These reformulations authored a visibility to women’s empowerment while shoring up fundamental ideologies of gender and race. The program accomplishes this primarily through its reinterpretation of femininity—specifically that which is identified with conventional white, heterosexual, economically privileged womanhood—as a powerful tool for reforming public behaviors and understanding the problems behind criminality through intuitive, essential womanhood. Pepper’s femininity provides her with the tools to perform her job. Unlike the men on the police force who, presumably, use their logical-reasoning skills, Pepper 193 employs her “woman’s intuition” to “crack the case.” 56 Pepper’s womanly instinct comes into play time and time again as she engages criminals and victims alike through emotional relationships based on her empathy for their situations. With the womanly intuition and feminine response Pepper brings to her investigations, both the gendered/sexual problems of the series and the solutions posed to them are privatized. This strategy effectively replaced public sphere activism with private sphere emotions and sensibilities. Pepper’s womanly intuition finds expression in her unerring understanding of motivations behind interpersonal, private relationships. As such, Pepper’s abilities to domesticate psychological aptitude—firmly staging it within the literal space of the home or the symbolic space of the feminine—remove psychology from the professional realm. Pepper’s emotional, often empathetic relationships to the victims and perpetrators of crimes typically take place within domestic spaces and are key in her successful investigations. This approach proves especially effective in domestic abuse cases where Pepper’s domesticated investigative methods uncover the mysterious causes behind spousal abuse and identify the true victim. Although Pepper is linked to psychological elements of investigation, the show works to place this scientific skill beyond her range of investigation. To attribute professional psychological aptitude to Pepper would compromise Dickinson’s persona and Pepper’s character as a feminine woman. Neither star nor character would meddle with science, but would instead rely upon female intuition. 194 Yet both can operate in the world of no-nonsense masculinity, eschewing the “soft” exploration of feelings in favor of outward-oriented action. This relation to, but separation from, psychologically motivated feeling marks the racially distinctive gendered position that Dickinson-as-Pepper, a model of the white police woman, occupies. Police Woman’s plot lines repeatedly deal with domestic violence, but often shift the script to represent men as the ultimate victims of women’s new legal and social “power” to bring rapists and abusers to legal justice. In one such program, the wife of a corporate president brings false rape charges against her husband “‘just to get attention,’” as the show’s producer assesses it. 57 Other storylines frequently included scenarios of sexual violence against and exploitation of women. One highly publicized episode featured the rape of hitchhiking teenage girls. The program’s producer’s self-proclaimed “‘favorite show’” involves a man who has sex with women, secretly tapes the encounters, and then blackmails the women with the footage. 58 In most cases, the series deals in the spectacle of women either victimized by violence and surveillance directed at their new sexual “freedoms,” or blames women for their abilities to manipulate the new legal and social awareness of violence perpetrated against women. In the case of the episode “Do You Still Beat Your Wife?” Pepper’s abilities to understand and prevent crimes against women depend upon her innate capacity to interpret correctly the conditions of domesticity, even within the working world of 195 the police force. The audience sees a scene of violence near the episode’s beginning that is clearly meant to identify the woman as victim. The program opens with an establishing shot of a house with an emotionally charged voiceover conversation taking place between a man and woman. They are arguing over the man’s new purchase of a guitar. With this violent exchange, complete with a baby crying in the background, the episode sets up a conventional melodramatic domestic abuse scenario mid-action, before the audience is even introduced to the characters and their motivations. After the scene cuts to the interior of the house, the argument escalates into stereotypical gendered issues. The man accuses the woman of “nagging” him about his financial irresponsibility. He feels trapped by his domestic obligations to his family or, as he puts it, he is “dying in this house.” The scene escalates with the woman’s tears and pleading and the man’s physical violence as he throws her against the wall and hits her in the face. Using the overwrought, generic conventions of abuse scenes, the episode sets up a predictable gender dynamic that requires the woman’s salvation from an outside source. Typically this comes in the form of the male police officer and/or lover. However, the program quickly disrupts this conventional narrative with the next scene. Cutting on the action of the man hitting the woman within their apartment, the camera moves to a staged dance performance of a theatrically costumed Frenchman dramatically “striking” his female dancing partner, who then “falls” to the floor. The dance performance continues in its choreographed, stylized violence, but the camera 196 de-emphasizes the onstage action as it pushes in on Pepper’s dismayed reaction. The stage performance is repeatedly intercut with reverse shots of the audience, which includes Pepper and her three male colleagues. Bill Crowley (Earl Holliman) asks Pepper, “You don’t like it?” She responds, “Not particularly, no.” He advises her to start enjoying it, since the female performer is the Police Commissioner’s niece and the tickets are free, courtesy of the Commissioner. Resisting this careerist move, Pepper retorts, “I will, as soon as she starts smacking him.” The placement of this scene, directly following the violence of the real world husband and wife, distances Pepper from the threat of feminine vulnerability and establishes her character as one who will not bow to the pressures of a victimized feminine existence, either in private (accepting a man’s physical abuse) or in public life (pretending to enjoy representations of abuse to appease her boss). The seemingly feminist statement made by the juxtaposition of two openings scenes is undercut by the action that immediately follows. After Pepper defiantly rejects women’s victimization, her colleague Peter Royster receives a mysterious phone call from a sexually assertive woman whose identifying trademark is her “furry voice.” The caller is a woman who has been stalking Peter and tracks him down to the performance. The third male colleague at the table jokes that he knows why the woman is attracted to Peter and would go to such great lengths to pursue him: “I think she crashed out of the local funny farm.” This lighthearted introduction of psychological motivations for potentially frightening behavior is turned into a 197 joke, since it is a woman who is instigating unwanted behavior towards a man. The scene then cuts back to the abusive household, where the husband has left and the abused wife opens to the door to the neighbor. In an over-the-shoulder shot, the audience only sees the neighbor’s horrified reaction to the wife’s face. Then there is another cut back to the performance and the curious subplot of the female stalker. Looking at Pepper, Bill proposes a toast: “To the prettiest cop I know. . .Mr. Royster.” This unexpected reversal is met with laughter, summoning up the sexual tensions introduced by the beautiful police woman in the midst of the previously all- male department. Only within the space of the police force are sexism, psychological disorder, and gender relations rendered harmless, so much so that they can be used as the basis for light-hearted collegiality. Even the subplot of the sexually aggressive woman stalker comes to a comical resolution at the episode’s conclusion: the woman is revealed to be a co-worker charged with the task of luring Peter to a hotel room for a departmental surprise party celebrating the anniversary of his hiring. Outside of the police force and its admirable abilities to manage the complex physical, sexual, social, and psychological interactions of men and women, these terms clearly run amok and require the intervention of the police. In “Bloody Nose,” another domestic abuse episode, the abused woman, Hillary, turns to Pepper to save her from her abusive husband, Sean. Like “Do You Still Beat Your Wife?” the episode opens with a violent altercation between a 198 husband and wife, in which the audience sees a shocking display of physical violence culminating in the man hitting the woman in the face. Significantly, the scene departs aesthetically and formally from “Do You Still Beat Your Wife?,” containing the melodramatic moment through the scene’s relative brevity and the lack of dramatic music or a crying child. The differences in the two episodes immediately establish a very different project, troubling the clear-cut gender dynamics of physical abuse within the world of conventional patriarchal heterosexuality. Pepper’s attitude towards the situation underscores this initial unsympathetic tone. A neighbor to the feuding couple, she is reluctantly enlisted by another neighbor to intervene, although she would rather turn the matter over to the on-duty police. Later, while working undercover as a waitress in a truck stop café to stop a crime ring, she worries about the risks she is taking and the probability that she will be killed if her cover is blown. When Bill asks if she wants to abandon the operation, she refuses, explaining her pessimism through the difficult feminized labor of food service that she is required to do: “I’m just tired, my feet hurt.” She then recounts, almost as an afterthought, her reluctant intervention in the domestic abuse situation between her neighbor, a “pretty young woman” and her “nutty husband”: “And there was some problem at the apartment today…I had to go play marriage counselor.” This intervention and therapeutic function is one that Pepper generally gravitates to, but in this instance, she rejects this role for reasons that are, at this point in the plot, 199 unknown. Instead, the storyline focuses on Pepper fulfilling the duties of a more conventionally feminine and disempowered female worker—neither a police officer nor a marriage counselor, but as an underpaid and generally harassed waitress. Although she performs this labor only as an undercover agent for her real job, Pepper is re-placed within the gender hierarchy with little prestige, money, or physical ease. Unlike the public sphere tasks she is generally called upon to perform as a police woman, Pepper’s waitressing job requires her to perform domesticated tasks of food service and subservience to men. In this capacity, Pepper’s body is transformed and revisualized: she wears a wig that signifies working class white femininity, her body is taxed by the physical demands of waitressing, and she is subjected to the surveillance of the sexist gaze of the truck drivers and the boorish male boss she serves. While seemingly unrelated, this secondary plotline of Pepper’s undercover work parallels the primary storyline. In both stories, the episode inverts its typical gender depictions and power relations. Pepper usually does not play the role of victimized woman, which makes her waitressing job seem unlikely. This confusion helps illuminate the central gender upset that exists at the heart of the episode’s primary plot, that of the abusive marriage. While the show initially sets up the conventional gendered situation in which the man is dangerous, unpredictable, and out of control and the woman is powerless and victimized through his violence, it ultimately places the blame squarely on the battered wife. Her status as a psychology graduate student provides the key to 200 solving the mystery of the source of the domestic violence, something that Pepper alone is able to apprehend. The audience is repeatedly shown a series of activities that construct Sean, the husband, as a typically violent, abusive man. He buys a gun, makes threats to neighbors, acts in unstable ways, and behaves as if completely disconnected from reality. However, the show also grants him moments that confuse this narrative. In retrospect, these moments serve as clues that indicate that something is not quite as it seems. One such moment occurs when Sean buys an illegal gun from a shady pingpong parlor owner. The seller asks Sean if Hillary is still having an affair with her hairdresser. Sean replies that he does not know for certain, but he is aware that Hillary is “playing some kind of game.” This conversation takes place during a scene that demonstrates the degree of potential violence Sean is capable of enacting (buying and potentially using a gun), yet it also reveals Hillary’s guilt in their marital discord and the psychological power she holds over her husband. Sean’s knowledge of Hillary’s abilities to manipulate him, the police, and various situations to her advantage serves as a constant in his scenes, even when he is behaving mysteriously. Hillary paints him as a “paranoid,” a fact of which he is aware and often comments on to others. When he returns to their apartment to move out, Sean correctly anticipates that Hillary has already changed the locks and has packed his belongings. In this scene, he also tells a neighbor that Hillary and “that police woman,” Pepper, cooperated in “a gesture of feminine solidarity” and “gave 201 [him] the final push.” This cryptic message, along with his acquisition of the handgun, seems to confirm Hillary’s fears about his violence and paranoid outlook that will drive him to inexplicable, violent behavior that no one can anticipate or stop. After leaving his apartment, Sean goes to Pepper’s apartment to apologize and admit that he “needs help.” In a confessional scene, he tearfully reveals to Pepper that he is the victim of his wife’s intellectual and professional expertise. As a “big psychology expert,” Hillary is “always pinning these labels” on him, a dynamic that he “can’t accept.” Begging Pepper to “tell [him] what to do,” Sean places himself in the position typically reserved for the victimized woman with whom Pepper sympathizes. Perhaps because of this atypical gender identification, Pepper does not offer him advice, but instead confronts him about the gun she knows he illegally procured. He laughingly responds to this, asking her, “You know what a gun’s supposed to symbolize, don’t you?” In light of this popular psychoanalytic explanation of male overcompensation, the gun no longer seems threatening, but instead seems pathetic. Well-aware of the phallic posturing required to maintain masculine superiority—likely through his wife’s continual use of psychology as a tool to deconstruct his masculinity—Sean can no longer lay claim to male power. This disconnect from empowerment and integrated subjectivity both activates and demonstrates his victimization on a variety of levels, all of which are brought about by women’s professional empowerment. 202 With their access to systems of knowledge—as police officers and as psychologists—women enjoy increased economic, intellectual, and social powers that threaten to unseat masculine privilege. Facility with psychology reveals the constructed nature of gender and questions the inherent abilities of men to dominate women. This episode of Police Woman links this knowledge with the investigative and legal powers of the police woman to represent the new gendered order and its potentially devastating effect on men. Instead of offering to help him, Pepper threatens to arrest Sean for carrying an unregistered gun. He responds to this rejection of his needs by linking the police woman’s abilities to ruin his life with that of the psychologizing wife: “That’s the plan, isn’t it? I mean, only Hillary couldn’t do that by herself, so of course she had to involve you. Have me arrested, have me committed.” With the admission of women to its professional ranks, both the legal and the medical institutions, once strongholds of masculine power, join forces with detrimental consequences for men. This cultural shift is made clear by Sean’s particular mode of victimization at the hands of Hillary’s psychologizing and Pepper’s policing. Although the show summons up this frightening new world of female empowerment, it eventually and necessarily contains it. At the end of the confrontation between Sean and Pepper, conventional gender power relations are restored, with Pepper feminized through physical helplessness and Sean masculinized through his physically threatening actions. In order to escape the threat 203 of arrest, Sean pulls his gun on Pepper, violently pushes her to the ground, and verbally berates her. While his previous speech about his emasculation and victimization at the hands of female psychologists and cops justifies this violence, the violence also reestablishes conventional gender roles in the midst of a physically intimidating encounter. Pepper, displaced from her police woman authority into a position of an abused woman, experiences male violence within the space of her own apartment. After Sean flees her apartment, Pepper occupies the role of the victimized woman faced with private sphere gender problems. Instead of acting as a police authority, Pepper calls the police to seek her own protection and to have a violent man placed under surveillance and possible arrest. Scenes like this one unsettle Pepper’s authority, reveal her fundamental, gendered place, and relocate real power within the structure of the police department. When Pepper’s agency is not authorized by her profession, she becomes just another victimized woman. Although the show summons up male empowerment, it is careful to reveal Sean’s ultimately disempowered state within the episode’s concluding scenes. As the program progresses, the audience, through Pepper’s investigation, realizes the true situation behind the violent husband-wife relationship. The wife’s knowledge of psychology enables her to manipulate her volatile husband, “provoking” him to abuse her. The wife uses her knowledge of psychology to “place labels” on her husband, who is teetering on the brink of insanity. The wife’s professional abilities to harness the powers of psychological manipulation figure her ultimately as the agent 204 of abuse, regardless of the physical abuse she receives at the hands of her husband. Her possession of psychological knowledge, facilitated through her formal training, reverses the gendered victim-oppressor roles of the relationship. With this psychological manipulation, the husband’s emotional instability motivating his violence is now seen as his liability and the source of his victimization. The wife’s sexual empowerment and freedom—signified through her extramarital affair— conjoin with her professional status to figure her as the empowered one. Using her particular combination of powers of the private and public sphere, the wife wholly emasculates her husband. Once Pepper has figured out the true dynamic of abuse, she confronts Hillary: “I wish I could understand why you lovely little things end up emasculating their [sic] men and then their [sic] husbands run around wondering what happened, blaming themselves.” In a world in which psychological manipulations permeate gender relations, Pepper’s use of psychoanalytic parlance and analysis is authorized/excused by the victimization of men. Without violating the domain of masculinity herself, Pepper reverses the “criminal” offense of emasculation by exploring the private sphere misuse of the psychologizing woman’s professional, public accomplishments and knowledge. Right after Pepper delivers her withering critique, her instincts about emasculation prove correct. Sean arrives on the scene with a gun, confused and cowering. Hillary alerts everyone in the room that he is armed and dangerous, in hopes that someone will shoot him. She has already set the stage for his shooting, 205 again using her psychological aptitude by warning the police that Sean is not the “personality type” who would surrender to anyone. In the episode’s climatic scene, the psychologizing woman uses her professional status and knowledge to bring about, quite literally, a man’s demise. A counterbalance to this use of psychology, Pepper intervenes as an intuitive psychologizing woman, sympathetic to masculine crises. As such, she staves off the violent confrontation with her nurturing, compassionate therapeutic insight and understanding. She disarms Sean and saves his life with her version of psychological/ideological analysis: “I’m here to help you. Look what she’s been doing to you. Sean, we’ve all heard about battered children, battered wives. . .Well what about the battered husband? The guy who gets hit, hurt, battered psychologically to the point where all he wants to do is kill himself or kill somebody just to get back some of that manhood.” The episode’s climactic scene brings psychology around full circle in service of masculinity via a compassionate female authority. Men, now victimized and in need of a new understanding of their psychological state, require the assistance of women like Pepper who are granted the power of psychologizing in order to assess and assist this new form of misunderstood masculinity. Get Christie Love!: Therapy on the Streets Like Police Woman’s Pepper Anderson, Get Christie Love!’s Christie Love engages with police work on a therapeutic level. In contrast to Pepper’s emotional intuition rooted in domestic knowledge and feminine integrity, Christie’s therapeutic 206 acumen stems from her experiences as a street-wise black woman. Through her knowledge of the racial and sexual politics of the city’s underbelly, Christie is capable of solving its crimes. Based in her experience of urban life, Christie deploys her awareness of the psychological make-up of people traumatized by urban life to resolve the problems of America’s—and sometimes the world’s—racism and sexism. Instead of a highly intellectualized, theoretical activity executed in the domain of professionals, Christie’s engages with therapy on the street level and, in doing so, converts psychological inquiry with her intense pragmatism, a function of her street smarts. Christie’s racial, sexual, and gendered presence constructs a distinctive version of the urban geography and produces a particular navigation through it that departs from that of television’s police men and white police women. Neither conventionally domesticated nor feminized, Christie deals with the public space of the street. Unlike the settings of many of Police Woman’s plot expositions, Christie Love rarely uses phone calls at or visitors in Christie’s home to set primary conflicts into motion. And, unlike Pepper’s limited public sphere action scenes that take place in semi-private spaces of bars or hotel hallways, Christie engages in physical confrontations in outdoor urban street scenes. Used in on-location shooting, these public spaces add a level of realism to the series through lighting, sound, and setting. Additionally, they offer Christie opportunities to relate to the street and to demonstrate her politicized “awareness” of urban problems. 207 Christie Love’s street version of psychologizing motivates storylines that move personal relationships into the public sphere and the world of race relations. This focus promises audiences an unmediated glimpse into the ghetto, the street, and the world of black Americans. Unlike the intensely domesticated psychology mobilized by Police Woman, Christie Love engages with relationships on a public, even global scale in order to deal with the effects of racism. Certain episodes feature Christie traveling abroad to solve cases originating in Los Angeles. In one instance, Christie travels around the world to uncover the networked economic structures of an international drug ring; another episode has her investigating the effects of the Vietnam War on an African-American veteran. With its interest in international geopolitics as well as American race relations, the series utilizes the figure of the mobile black police woman to link international racial concerns to domestic anxieties about gender and race. Christie’s black womanhood and her police status authorize her facility in navigating international relations and in identifying the effects of America’s global and domestic military, government, and economic policies. Christie Love’s global thematics and plot trajectories were supported by the exploitation aesthetics frequently used by the series. Crossing media boundaries to bring exploitation to television, Christie Love deployed the aesthetics of film exploitation popularized during the 1970s. 59 This film style and genre served as a vehicle for African-American casts, urban locales, and graphic depictions of sexuality and violence. Typified by Roger Corman’s independent productions, 208 Seventies’ exploitation films began to shoot on locations that translated onscreen as “unidentified third world countries” and produced new settings and female characters. 60 Judith Mayne identifies this new brand of exploitation in the women-in- prison films of the Seventies, which created “a new kind of woman prisoner, the political revolutionary.” 61 Christie Love translated these locations, aesthetics, and characterizations onto the medium of television, keeping intact exploitation film’s engendering of global space and international racial, and political connections. Television’s adaptation of exploitation altered the terms of exploitation to support its medium-specific needs: to deliver liveness within the context of 1970s race and gender relations. Using the “inferior” production values of exploitation film—hand-held cameras; seemingly unplanned, spontaneous shots; poor lighting and sound quality—television exploitation fulfilled a culturally, historically specific need for liveness and immediacy. In short, exploitation TV promised a version of liveness for the 1970s, accomplishing goals similar to those of 1960s television news coverage of the civil rights movement. In Black, White, and in Color, a study of television news’ need for the 1960s civil rights movement, Sasha Torres explores racialized liveness and the authenticating force of black bodies within television productions. Revising generic theories of television’s aesthetic requirements of liveness or crisis coverage, Torres argues that “it’s not enough for television to be live: the medium needs as well to represent ‘authentic’ persons of color.” 62 In the case of Christie Love, the presence of a black woman, her location on the street, and 209 the qualities of exploitation fare all worked together to manufacture 1970s television’s version of liveness, that of racial authenticity. In Christie Love, exploitation’s racial authenticity found its most visible expression on the street. Along with aesthetic realism, the street offers a space that promises to showcase the exploitation qualities of sexuality, violence, and race. In the series pilot, Christie is introduced walking along a city street, disguised as a prostitute. The image quality is grainy, the lighting is source lighting from street lampposts and headlights from passing cars, and the sounds are recorded on the street, not in post-production. Lacking graphics, a title, still shots, or extended theme music that would indicate the conventional opening of a television program and a fictitious character, Graves’s introduction appears “natural” and unmediated. This offers audiences a sense of voyeurism through this “liveness,” which forestalls the intrusion of television’s typical explication of the fictional world of a series. It also effectively conflates Christie with prostitution, initially offering audiences the image of an authentic, generic black female body—not a police woman character working undercover—performing sexual labor on the city street. These aesthetics and setting not only frame Christie’s public presence as visibly sexual and accessible, but also interpret her ongoing police work on the streets as sexual, defined by the prostitute image that consolidates labor, race, gender, and sexuality. The relationship of the public woman and the labor of sexuality stems from a long-standing representational figure of the prostitute, which, according to Yvonne Tasker, “allow[s] female 210 characters not only to inhabit urban space but to flaunt it (shouting, hailing passers- by) and, perhaps, to exhibit the ‘toughness’ through which working-class masculinities are regularly symbolized.” 63 The audience, while engaged in the pleasurable spectacle of the “live” black female sex worker, also sees a visible demonstration of her “power”: she talks back to passersby, refuses to let potential johns harass her, and generally exerts a confident presence within a dangerous public setting. The series exploits the significations of the street and the public labor of the cop/prostitute to signify Christie’s abilities—her “toughness,” so to speak. It also formulates a specifically raced expression of physicality, sexuality, and capabilities that distinguishes a black police woman from a white one. Along with her physical presence and capabilities on the street, Christie engages with psychological labor on the street. Both activities, physical and psychological, bear a crucial relationship to her perspective as a black woman who personally experiences the traumas of urban life and, because of this, possesses a unique epistemological basis for investigation. In “Fatal Image,” Christie investigates murders linked to a complex set of criminal activities and players involved in a money-laundering scheme. Unknown both to the audience and to Christie’s co-workers, the key to solving these mysteries lies in a secondary mystery of a relationship between a black female model and a white criminal kingpin. Christie alone understands this and, because of this, successfully solves the case. The interracial relationship leads Christie to investigate the woman, only to find out the 211 real mystery of the whole case—mistaken racial identity and the sexual tensions involved—in which money laundering plays an incidental role. In a room full of detectives viewing surveillance photographs, only Christie knows to zoom in on a single moment where the criminal under investigation puts his arm around the model, uncovering the previously unseen clue of the romance between the white man and black woman. The visual logic of the surveillance photograph designates aesthetic realism, affording viewers immediate, literally close-up, access to the image of interracial sexuality/romance. This pivotal moment of deduction also grants the black police woman superior interpretative skills that revise conventional power dynamics of surveillance and urban space in which black women would be the objects, not the interpreters, of surveillance. In this instance, the power of technology is placed in the hands of the doubly surveyed subject: a black woman. Her perspective affords insight into the intimacies of racial and sexual relationships that produces accurate interpretations of images gathered by street-level surveillance. Once the model turns up dead, Christie explores the streets of the black community, encountering along the way a series of suspects who inevitably do physical battle with Christie. She defeats each one of them with her karate skills, then offers them an analysis of the racial conflicts between police and the black community, offering herself as a means of solidarity between “brothers and sisters.” As one of her defeated foes, a black man she fights in an alley, admits, “You’re bad.” This “bad”ness, especially when acknowledged by the epitome of authority on the 212 subject—the street-smart, physically intimidating black man—gives Christie credibility to conduct her psychological investigations of this racial mystery. The episode’s secondary plot line involves George, a writer with a public relations firm who is hired to promote the police department. George chooses to cover Christie’s life story, deeming her the best publicity available for the project. Christie’s status as a black female cop marks her as admirable and a visible public symbol of America’s new acceptance of women and racial minorities in positions of authority. Christie’s exceptionalism is both racial and gendered and this status reminds the audience of the sexual taboos George, a white man, violates as he begins to fall in love with her as he writes her life’s story. Through her investigations, Christie realizes that George has killed the money-laundering criminals as revenge for their murder of the black model. Uncertain of his motives, Christie finally uncovers the pivotal clue of the case: George, who is passing as white, is really the black model’s brother. By revealing George’s racial masquerade, the show diffuses the threat of the sexual attraction between George and Christie and also allows Christie to perform her racialized street psychologizing. Unlike the doctors at the psychiatric hospital who are treating George, Christie successfully delves into the traumatic pain George feels as a black man in America. As George engages with Christie in a confessional mode, he frames his anguished desire to pass and his drive to murder within the conflicted subjectivity he experiences as a light-skinned black man. Gaining 213 George’s confidence, Christie uncovers the motivations for criminality: his anger both at America’s racism and at the undervalued, disposable nature of black people like his sister, who was a “black chick no one would miss.” Deducing the realities behind ambiguous racial identities and relationships is the key to Christie’s occupational aptitude. Christie proves, in this case and in her ongoing investigative work, to be a unique asset to the police force because of her first-hand knowledge of America’s racism and the traumatic effects it has on its citizens. She is then capable of “curing” the traumatized criminal. In these instances, therapy meets realism, offering a means to engage with and get to the “truth” of race and racism in America. Criminal Women as “New Feminists” While the onscreen police woman reassured audiences, if perhaps unevenly, that women’s new empowerment would cure America’s gendered and racial traumas, the rising rate and public visibility of female criminality generated considerable social anxieties about the outcomes of female liberation during the 1970s. Although the two figures of female cop and criminal occupied opposite sides of lawful behavior, they were often linked as inevitable by-products of social restructuring brought about by the Women’s Movement. With the growing presence of aggressive public women associated with political activism, mainstream America—at least according to popular media accounts of American culture—struggled to make sense of the motivations of all women who challenged conventional gender ideologies in the public sphere. Media representations labored to offer explanations of women’s 214 violent behavior, investigating the causes of “failed” femininity and its violent results. In setting up a cause-effect relationship between gender trouble and social disorder, these explanations excluded any radical political possibilities in women’s violence. Instead, women’s discontent within the social order of patriarchal capitalism—whether it was expressed through radical feminism or through bank robberies—was considered an expression of “failed” women who thoroughly rejected the natural order of feminine behavior. Although the media worked to represent criminal women within frameworks of legibility, these women posed considerable challenges to media representation, at times eluding the gendered terms of representation and upsetting the fundamental representational logic applied to women. In the media’s attempts to understand why women were committing more crimes, they often turned to feminism as the root cause. The rise of female criminality during the 1970s was, in the popular press, explicitly linked to the gains made in the public sphere by the Women’s Movement. A typical alarmist article, Psychology Today’s “The Rise of the Female Crook” immediately establishes a relationship between women’s growing occupational powers and public visibility with an increase in female criminality. The article opens with the following: Even though female emancipation in America is still young we have already become accustomed to the female traffic cop, the female bank executive, the female airline pilot, and the female telephone lineman [sic]. But suddenly we are faced with the fact that there are female car thieves, muggers, bank robbers, and embezzlers. 64 215 In the article’s estimation, female “emancipation” is an overpowering force, even in its infancy, to which all Americans have adjusted. The immediate success of feminism in occupational, pro-social terms signals its frightening potential to foster equally powerful and rapidly growing female criminality. The accelerated pace of feminist gains and its reach construct a heightened sense of alarm, especially when this powerful “emancipation” is the very same force that frees women from social constraints to “suddenly” perform criminal deeds. Women’s emancipation, when taken to its inevitable extreme, undermines society on every level, as evidenced by the forms of criminality that cross class lines, paralleling women’s career accomplishments throughout all classes. There are traffic cops and car thieves, bank executives and bank robbers, leading to the upper-echelon positions of pilots and embezzlers. This hierarchical perspective on class yokes together careers and crimes, further conflating all public sphere power that women possessed and effectively raising doubts about the wisdom of allowing women significant career achievements. Feminism’s threat registers in the public sphere, so much so that the article’s author, sociology professor Freda Alder, envisions a society overwhelmed by women roaming the streets, committing a variety of crimes ranging from “second-rate” domesticated, “‘feminine’” crimes of “shoplifting and prostitution” to more terrifying public crimes that involve overt, physical acts of violence. 65 By enacting crimes in the public sphere, hardened, violent woman criminals not only posed a material threat, but also challenged representational gendered divisions. Their 216 physicality and public presence provided evidence for the “steady erosion of the social and psychological differences between men and women.” 66 This conflation of women with masculinity threatened the binary sex-gender system and its essentialized differences between men and women. This also undermined the terms of gender visibility, making the new criminal woman difficult to conceptualize. The public/masculine woman and her newfound criminal liberation “escaped the scrutiny of the media,” which did not recognize this type of woman and therefore could not represent her. 67 The new type of female criminal identified with a type of liberation that Adler termed “new feminism” was linked to the uninhibited growth of women’s sense of entitlement. 68 This brand of feminism was dangerous, because it not only encouraged women to commit more dangerous, masculine crimes, but also operated outside of the constraints of organizational politics and visibility. These two anxieties—the unrestrained actions of masculinized, public women and the collapse/failures of hegemonic representational systems—worked in conjunction with each other. With its focus on individual autonomy and its rejection of bureaucracy, this “new feminism,” rejected the “formalized” Women’s Movement: “It is not an organized movement; it does not hold meetings or press conferences.” 69 Perhaps worse than their criminal bent, anti-social “new feminists” acted beyond the reach of the disciplining forces of media outlets and engaged in actions that were not directed to media capture. 217 The version of female criminality that media were able to articulate often supported ideological assumptions about the dangers of women’s liberation and its influence on women’s femininity. Much like its attentions to representing police women, the media’s concern about unsettled gender identities found expression through racial terms. Although white women participated in both feminism and criminality, their participation in both activities proved troubling to the representational logic that could not visualize white woman within the domains of either revolutionary politics or violent activity. The media were called upon to gauge the scope and level of female criminality, which they often expressed through racial configurations of gender. “Race” enabled popular media to “see” female violence and to attest to its growing threat. The Psychology Today article is illustrated with pictures taken from two Hollywood movies featuring women’s associations with crime: Scarface (1932) and Sheba, Baby (1975). The comparative analysis between these two films, which featured Karen Morley and Pam Grier, respectively, replicates the structure of comparisons frequently made between Dickinson/Pepper and Graves/Christie in the popular press. The caption underneath the two stills is entitled “From Gun Moll to Gunslinger,” invoking the lengths to which women of the 1970s, as reflected by film, have taken criminality. No longer accessories to criminal figures, women have become the prime instigators of violence. Not coincidentally, the Gun Moll and Gunslinger evoke embodiment and space according to the same racial logic of the 218 white and black police woman. Morley stands in an interior space as a male gangster takes stock of her boudoir outfit. Grier appears on the street, caught in mid-action, standing over a dying man. The article presumes that the comparison between the two women is self- evident, implying that Morley poses less of a threat to society because of the nature of her character’s white femininity and its inherent relationship to heterosexuality. Parlaying her sexuality into economic gains, the “furs and diamonds of a gangster’s mistress,” the Gun Moll is “quiet, compliant and available.” 70 Installed within the economy of the domestic realm, the moll is submissive in her sexuality, gendered appearance and behavior, and economic function. Apart from the objectionable commodification of her sexuality, the Gun Moll receives the benefits of criminality without compromising her status as feminine woman. This makes the traditional version of female associations with criminality acceptable, if not appealing. In contrast, the 1970s Gunslinger, depicted by black exploitation film star Grier, can no longer be envisioned in the same feminized terms of domesticated sexuality. With Grier’s Sheba as the model of the public black female presence, this new criminal woman provides the means for her own emancipation outside of the law, male criminal lovers, and societal constraints. She “scorns the subservient role” while using “fists, feet, fingernails, pistols, and spear guns on the men who get in her way.” 71 This non-sexual embodiment and violent physicality can only be articulated, in the logic of media representations, through the figure of the black woman. 219 Operating in the public sphere, she brings with her criminality that rejects private sphere heterosexuality and feminine display of beauty in favor of an active criminality that resourcefully uses any available tools at hand to execute violent criminality. Patty Hearst: Good (White) Girl Gone Bad Within the racial terms of female criminality, the violence of white women made little sense, ideologically or representationally. While black women (e.g. Angela Davis, Christie Love, Pam Grier) were constructed to fit media’s stereotypical signifiers of violent black womanhood—iconic Afro, black power fist, and black leather jacket—the portrait of white criminality that Patty Hearst produced proved much more unsettling to popular media deceptions. In 1974, the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) kidnapped Patty Hearst, the young white heiress to the powerful Hearst publishing empire. This crime and Hearst’s subsequent involvement in the SLA’s militant political displays of violence—most notably, the bank robbery of San Francisco’s Hibernia Bank— provoked a flurry of media responses that reveal the conflicting interpretations of the event, contemporary anxieties about women and violence, and media concerns over its inability to capture/represent this type of criminal behavior. Ranging from television commentaries to newspaper publications of SLA statements to Free Patty bumper stickers and t-shirts to pornographic movies, the media and all levels of popular representations were engaged in capitalizing on the event and making sense 220 of its ideological implications for the American public. 72 Mainstream coverage of the event struggled to figure out which conventional narratives about a woman’s discontent and the violent nature of criminality to employ, but often found that these narratives could not co-exist within a single representation. The paradox of a wealthy, rich, white woman who aggressively and publicly worked against capitalism, heterosexual mores, and feminine behaviors created a representational vacuum that journalism, film, and television frantically worked to fill during and since Hearst’s kidnapping, political transformation, trial, and Presidential pardoning. In order to minimize Hearst’s political power and to figure her within a traditional gendered, raced, and classed narrative, the media framed Hearst’s kidnapping within conventional interpretations of a heterosexual, patriarchal dynamic. In this narrative, Hearst plays the role of spoiled daughter who must be punished, then returned, reformed to the patriarchal arms of her father and fiancé. The SLA is figured as a perverse surrogate family of lunatics who threaten to undermine the foundations of American heterosexuality and capitalism embodied in the nuclear family. Beyond these terms of legibility, there are alternate interpretive possibilities of the SLA’s community structure that call for a more radical analysis. As Shana Alexander, an author who wrote an extensive account of the kidnapping and trial, understands it, Hearst’s involvement with the SLA was a “fiercely female event, woman-created and woman-driven.” 73 I contend that this woman-centric event posed a potentially devastating challenge to conventional gender ideologies and 221 representations. It is this very threat to the gender order that provoked the media to reconfigure the Hearst kidnapping as a “mythological event” to bring together gender, race, sexuality, and class in a coherent and ultimately reassuring fashion. 74 The case of Patty Hearst set a polyglot of white femininity, lurid sexuality, and class drama into motion, making it irresistible to mass media, even if they could not successfully sustain all of these elements in a single analysis. Focusing on the mechanisms of mainstream media and their relentless ideological management, marginalized media outlets like Militant and The Progressive recognized the relationship of media interests and Hearst’s kidnapping. As Leftist media outlets, they largely condemned the Hearst kidnapping as a media distortion of and distraction from truly radical politics. The Progressive urged its readers to move on from this media production to focus on the problems with America as it faced its Bicentennial and to attend to the Presidential primary. 75 Militant groups took President Carter to task for commuting Hearst’s jail term, comparing this act of justice to other acts of political injustices that had never been rectified. Reminding people that Carter did not intervene to commute the terms of radical figures like The Wilmington Ten or Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, Leftist publications understood Hearst’s importance as an indictment of economic privilege, nothing more. To them, her release from prison revealed the partiality of the judicial system and Carter’s presidential reign, under which, one could have access to “all the human rights that money can buy.” 76 222 In its dismissal of Hearst, the radical press, along with the mainstream press, could not visualize Hearst’s political import, largely because of her identity as a white woman. When compared to public sphere understandings of political power, Hearst becomes invisible and/or trivial. Unlike conventional political power, primarily conceived of as male (e.g. President Carter) or as racialized social power that physically embodied rebellion, primarily conceived of as black masculinity (e.g. black prize fighter Rubin “Hurricane” Carter), Hearst’s activities could only be articulated in private sphere terms. As such, Hearst’s actions were seen as those of a spoiled, rich, white girl who relied upon Daddy’s money to bail her out of a petty predicament. Although Hearst’s criminal/political trajectory led her to a self- professed identity of a radical feminist, her anti-social activities and political beliefs were rendered apolitical through conventional terms of representation. Hearst’s representational challenges revealed the media’s inability to picture a white woman’s anti-social actions and politicized beliefs. Yet these institutions and their fantasies of womanhood faltered in the face of Hearst’s deeds and unrepentant attitude. In her “misadventure,” Hearst “managed to defile every one of our sacred symbols: purity, property, family, and flag.” 77 Refusing her “feminine” role, Hearst also rejected work that was typically associated with the appropriately feminine woman: the maintenance of nation, monogamy, private property, and patriarchal relations. Hearst’s trial encompassed much more than a typical exercise of justice, extending into foundational concepts of gender and power. As an eyewitness to the 223 trial, Alexander wondered, “Is Patty on trial for fucking, or book writing, or bank robbing?” 78 Hearst’s “crimes,” which might also be identified as sexual freedom, articulation of one’s own voice/subjectivity, and a public challenge to the basic institutions of American capitalism, all seemed equally egregious in her trial and the publicity surrounding it. Hearst’s image and activities came under a great deal of scrutiny and surveillance during her kidnapping, criminal activities, and trial. Just as these events confounded media logic, the media and its tools of representation became the primary means through which the “real” Patty was ascertained. During her trial, the courtroom, “set up for a multimedia extravaganza,” became a literal theatre space, with projectors and film footage of the bank robbery arranged for a frame-by-frame viewing of the spectacle of Hearst, armed with an automatic weapon, robbing a bank. 79 On another level, the space of the courtroom provided a stage upon which Hearst was compelled to perform a gendered and raced subjectivity that could be transmitted to the jury and to the American public. Hearst’s lawyers coached her to behave in feminine ways: to smile, “behave,” and project a generally pleasant demeanor. Mainstream media images aided in this project. Alexander interprets the staging of Hearst’s courtroom femininity through her likeness to various glamorous Hollywood stars. During her testimony, Hearst is “costumed” like Eleanor Powell on one day and, on another, like a woman from a Busby Berkeley musical. 80 224 In her trial, more important than proving her guilt or innocence in actual criminal activity, Hearst was called upon to enact a convincing, flawless gender performance that would reassure the jury and the American public that white femininity was still intact, viable, and genuine. Even the SLA recognized the foundational role representations of white femininity played in Hearst’s identity and strategically prompted her to perform them. When sympathizers and potential recruits to the SLA did not recognize Hearst, SLA leader Cinque prompted Hearst, “‘Smile for the man, Tania…People don’t recognize you unless you smile, like in your pictures.’” 81 Without this feminine act, no one, literally, could see who she was. In “proving” that she really was Hearst, Hearst was called upon to perform a mediated gender image. This performance demonstrates the crucial role her feminine appearance plays, yet also unveils the performative and possibly erroneous nature of this gendered identity. Unlike popular media formulations and interpretations of Hearst’s personality as unremarkable femininity, Hearst shifted the meaning of this blandness to offer a glimpse into the ubiquitous nature of women’s social unrest and potential rebellion. As she identifies herself and like-minded political revolutionaries in her “Tania interview,” “We could be anyone’s daughter, son, wife, husband, lover, neighbor, friend.” 82 Hearst refashioned her subjectivity of a conventional, perhaps even boring, rich young white woman into a terrifying everydayness, revealing the potential anti- sociality embedded in the personality of each and every woman. If a privileged 225 woman like Hearst turned to bank robbery, transgressive sexuality, and “anti- American” activities, then any woman could. Hearst’s rebellion, though dramatic, potentially paralleled other women’s more “ordinary” revolt. Journalist Alexander recounts the personal connection she felt to Hearst’s violent response to the restrictions imposed by the feminine role: “A sharp physical sensation occurred as the revelation hit: Patty was my story.” 83 Geographical determinations were crucial to Hearst’s gender rebellion and its wider-ranging cultural upheavals, with “California itself [as] a character in the story.” 84 Hearst professed her self-determined subjectivity by deconstructing California as a fantasy utopia, renouncing the bland, laid-back personality presumably produced by this particular space. Upon her arrest and booking, Hearst offered “urban guerilla” as her occupation. In doing so, she reformulated her subjectivity in ways that challenged core ideological values associated with California. Hearst’s identity, inseparable from her background in suburban Hillsborough and Berkeley, came to unsettle the racial, cultural, and economic privileges typically associated with these places. By naming herself an urban guerilla, Hearst reframed California as a geography that fostered urban unrest typically associated, by the mid-1970s, with Detroit, Watts, and other impoverished cities with a high concentration of non-white populations. As Hearst herself moved from idyllic California to the urban street, her movement signified an unmasking of American fantasies that California represented: capitalist success, attainable 226 privilege, and white gentility and ease. After undergoing her kidnapping and political conversion, Hearst’s trajectory remapped California, moving it from an “atmosphere of clear blue skies, bright sunshine, rambling open spaces, […] long green lawns, large comfortable houses, country clubs with swimming pools and tennis courts and riding horses” to a “deceptively calm California,” which masked violent political unrest just waiting to surface. 85 During the period of her political transformation, Hearst became acquainted with another geography and its ideological values, that of the urban street. By encountering the physical space of the street and its culture, Hearst adopted behaviors that challenged private sphere values of femininity: (non)physicality, chaste sexuality, and genteel behavior. These qualities were repressed within the cultural determinations of Hearst’s experience of pre-SLA California. In the Author’s Note that prefaces her autobiography, Patty Hearst: Her Own Story, Hearst cautions her audience about the influence of the street, its transformative powers, and the realities it revealed to Hearst. The shocking elements of her story involve the “street talk” of the SLA, which deal in “profanity, vulgarity, and scatological images.” 86 Although she demurs from accepting full responsibility for the graphic and often perverse details of the autobiography by displacing them onto a street culture foreign to her, Hearst calls upon a space of powerful political and personal transformation. Her authorial cautionary note figures within the literary convention of women’s writing, affording Hearst a cover story for the shocking tale she is about to present 227 and shielding her from criticism. 87 Through the combination of this literary convention and the deployment of the street, Hearst can not only sell her audience on a titillating narrative of feminine peril and salacious details of her moral endangerment, but also promote and protect her authorial and “feminine” authority. While Hearst wrote her autobiography in order to assert her innocence and her rejection of revolutionary politics with the goal of gaining a Presidential pardon, her narrative did not successfully contain the frequent eruption of feminist politics. Throughout her experience with the SLA, she learned to reject the Southern femininity of her mother and the gender policing enforced by her older fiancé, Berkeley professor Steven Weed. Buried within the conventions of feminized writing, Hearst tells a tale of a feminist awakening, which she discovers through an association with the street, its sexual pragmatism, and its bodily realism. Hearst learned of non-monogamous, often interracial sexuality; physical emphasis on the body during training for violent, military-style operations; and communal activities required by shared living quarters, which demystify the gentility surrounding her bodily functions and needs. In her autobiography, Hearst relates the collective nature of the SLA’s living arrangements and their insistence that Hearst divest her own body of its feminized, upper-class propriety. Mocking her by calling her “a real Marie Antoinette,” the SLA members retrained Hearst to speak of her own embodiment: “‘Listen, if you gotta go pee, say, ‘I gotta go pee’: if you gotta take a shit, say, ‘I gotta take a shit.’” 88 With this reformulation of the private sphere and the highly 228 guarded white, upper-class, female body, the SLA effectively dismantled the foundational terms of white femininity and its denial of bodily functions, needs, and desires. Hearst was thus compelled to renounce the terms of her disembodiment, trading this in for an overt understanding of her sexuality and physicality, and a reformulation of the private/public spheres. While the mainstream media struggled to represent Hearst as a white, rich, female urban guerilla, the SLA successfully represented Hearst and its own group identity, using the mainstream media as an outlet to express these identities and to control the terms of these representations. The group proved so effective in controlling the media’s coverage of its politics and activities that, in many accounts, the media, not Hearst, became the SLA’s helpless captive. The SLA was able to manipulate the media through its communiqués and self-produced media-worthy narratives. By doing so, in addition to their kidnapping of Hearst, the SLA “took hostage the press.” 89 In less-obvious terms, the SLA wrested the power of representation away from the media by successfully articulating female rebelliousness and embodiment of violence. The most notable example of the SLA’s representational aptitude was their infamous, iconic “Tania” photograph, in which Hearst, wearing fatigues and a beret, posed in front of the SLA flag and carried an automatic weapon. This success at presenting a thoroughly terrifying image of white female revolt accomplished what mainstream media could/would not do. 229 Even as the SLA produced its media visibility, it constructed its politicized image in accordance with the visual conventions typically associated with revolutionary violence. To do so, group members enacted a variety of racial masquerades, transforming their middle-class white identities, at times quite literally, into more clearly revolutionary, marginalized subjects. 90 They attempted this through their relationship with Cinque, an escaped black convict who became their leader, and through their various performances/disguises as black criminals and revolutionaries. The group’s initial public violence, which garnered media attention, came with its murder of Marcus Foster, the black superintendent of the Oakland public school district who lobbied for identification badges for schoolchildren. Wearing blackface, the SLA killed Foster on the grounds of racial oppression. From their perspective, Foster’s proposed policy, with its potential to survey and control populations based on demographic information, “looked like the beginning of apartheid in the United States.” 91 In the aftermath of the crime, the SLA members who killed Foster were misidentified as black. The police responded by launching “Operation Zebra,” a citywide hunt that deployed racial profiling and resulted in widespread harassment of the city’s black population. In this bizarre and complex chain of racial misrecognitions, the SLA raised public awareness of their political presence and importance. By adopting the identity of black radicals, the white SLA members effectively motivated the police state and the media industry to action, 230 revealing that these institutions could only respond to an aesthetic logic premised on black criminality, which the SLA exploited to its own ends. As one of the few, if only, media outlets that explicitly provided an analysis of the racial politics central to the Hearst kidnapping and the SLA’s techniques of expressing its political dissent, The Black Panther took a great deal of interest in Hearst’s story and ran a series of articles on the subject. The newsletter understood Hearst’s politics as an attempt, albeit failed, at radical activities. This analysis departed from the analyses generated in the mainstream press, which typically viewed Hearst either as a victim, brainwashed into her political leanings, or as a cowardly political figure who, once captured, renounced a genuine political identity in favor of freedom. Unlike either of these interpretations, the Panthers saw Hearst as someone who truly wanted to join a radical movement, but could only engage with politics through a racial-gendered masquerade. Hearst latched onto patriarchal power through a gender rebellion staged within the sexual economy of American racism. The Panthers identified the power of Hearst’s sexual identity as a white woman who, as such, is capable of eliciting racist, conservative response through her threatened female chastity. Accusing her of “Turn[ing] Another ‘Trick’” and informing on her political allies, the Panthers unveiled the cultural investment in white femininity and the value placed upon the preservation of its purity. 92 Their analyses revealed the racialized sexual economy intricately bound up in white female innocence that, while 231 protecting Hearst from legal accountability, also rendered any of her expressions of legitimate political dissent illegible. More than fourteen years after Hearst’s SLA activities, Hearst continued to pose a representational dilemma. In Paul Schrader’s film Patty Hearst (1989), the greatest problem facing the production was Hearst’s ultra-white femininity produced by a particular geography and a corresponding gender and class position. With her “bland California persona,” Hearst lacked the appropriate “charisma” necessary for representation. 93 Hearst’s specific gender identity and the seemingly disparate activities she engaged in while with the SLA unsettled a multitude of media ideologies surrounding femininity and passivity. Accomplishing a successful representation of Hearst’s politics, in spite of her feminine persona, would stand as a testament to the skill of the person in charge of the project. Much like the liberated woman of fictional television and film (Mary Hartman et. al.) who fostered the careers and professional personae of male producers, executives, directors, and writers, Hearst promised to reconfigure Paul Schraeder’s standing as a writer-director infamous for his “unblushing machismo.” 94 Schraeder perceived Hearst as a formidable challenge to his directing abilities and boasted that his skill in overcoming Hearst’s deficiencies would ultimately demonstrate his talent—in spite and because of Hearst’s “lack.” As a representational nonentity or “‘empty vessel,’” Hearst eluded Schrader’s interpretations, resulting in a failed film. 95 By challenging the narrative logic of an 232 action-driven Aristotelian protagonist, Hearst effectively short-circuited the formula of conventional Hollywood film narratives. Hearst’s narrative sabotage placed Hearst outside of the space and story of conventional representation. While the male auteur’s inability to represent Hearst through conventional means signified her relative worthlessness in conventional patriarchal terms of representation, a re- evaluation of Hearst’s difficult visibility invites alternative interpretations of her image and its gendered significance. As 1970s French feminism and theories of l’écriture féminine suggest, women’s representational existence outside of the symbolic is a potentially powerful gendered space. 96 In seeing Hearst only as a “nonentity,” Schrader’s terms of legibility, like the mainstream media of the 1970s, overlooked Hearst’s radical challenges to patriarchal understandings of femininity. As Hélène Cixious expresses in “The Laugh of the Medusa,” women’s identities and self-expression outside of the terms of patriarchal representations, or the “feminine text,” “cannot fail to be more than subversive”: It is volcanic; as it is written it brings about an upheaval of the old property crust, carrier of masculine investments; [. . .] There’s no room for her if she’s not a he. If she’s a her-she, it’s in order to smash everything, to shatter the framework of institutions, to blow up the law, to break up the “truth” with laughter. 97 While Hearst, in strict political feminist terms, perhaps did not successfully represent this utopic and overwhelming challenge to patriarchy, her image and its fundamental unrepresentability does point to the important unsettling she presented to the mainstream ideological terms of white female visibility. 233 Only significantly later than Hearst’s initial media appearance and within a camp/trash film director’s production does Hearst’s image register productively as a media image. Appearing in a cameo role in John Waters’s Serial Mom (1994), Hearst’s image stands on its own, apart from laborious interpretations and attempts to place her within pre-existing imaginations of gender. Instead, her presence merely as Patty Hearst suffices to produce a legible representation. With its off-kilter depiction of a seemingly perfect suburban wife and mother, Barbara Sutphen (Kathleen Turner), who kills people who transgress the slightest rule of etiquette, Serial Mom satirizes the idealization of the domestic heterosexual haven and makes strange the femininity upon which it is founded. In her brief onscreen appearance, Hearst plays the role of Juror #8 during the film’s final courtroom scenes, where Barbara stands trial for the numerous murders she commits in the name of good manners. With relatively few lines, Hearst’s image alone signifies the humor of the scene. Her presence and the audience’s extratextual knowledge of Hearst’s criminal past infuse the entire film’s critique of femininity with another level of political import. Serial Mom places Hearst within a fictional realm of a violence and gender- normative femininity, symbolized by Barbara’s white, suburban, murderous womanhood. In Waters’s representation, the oppositional poles of femininity and violence co-exist, a feat never accomplished by mainstream media’s coverage and failed representations of Hearst. Cast within a story of a seemingly innocuous domesticated woman who violently defends the codes of propriety—the domain of 234 the feminine—Hearst’s image finally makes sense, finally registers. Barbara erupts into a murderous rage and bludgeons Juror #8 to death with a telephone for the unforgivable error of wearing white shoes past Labor Day. The visual logic of the scene underscores the pleasure of seeing Hearst in such a setting, while linking her to the eruption of violence in the most benign and conservative settings (in this case, suburban Baltimore). Only under Waters’s famous method of queering normalcy could Hearst become a recognizable figure of white female criminality. Notes 235 1 “Woman is Sought in Mackle Case,” New York Times 24 Dec. 1968: 21. Only five months after Eisemann-Schier’s crime, Marie Dean Arrington joined her on the list. An African-American woman, Arrington was a death-row prisoner charged with multiple murders, including that of her husband and raised some public concerns about race, gender, and the sanctity of the heterosexual marital relationship. Arrington escaped from prison and became a fugitive from the law. No more women were on the list until 1970, which are the four I discuss briefly in the chapter’s opening paragraph. 2 “Headliners: Susan Saxe Gets Out,” New York Times 9 May 1982: A9. Ronald Reinhold, “Students Hunted in Police Killing,” New York Times 26 Sept. 1970: 1+. 3 “Women with Guns,” National Review 10 Oct. 1975: 1096. 4 Examples of this urban crisis: New York City declared bankruptcy in 1975, saved only by President Gerald Ford successful appeal to the government for a $2.3 billion loan to the city. Widespread political unrest manifested itself in public displays of violence and property damage. By 1970, America had witnessed high-profile examples of this unrest: Watts (1965), New York (1964 and 1968), Detroit (1967), Newark (1967), San Francisco (1966), Washington DC (1968), Baltimore (1967 and 1968), Chicago (1968), and Cleveland (1968). 5 According to the U.S. Census, the rate of divorce per 1000 people rose from 2.5 in 1965 to 3.5 in 1970. By 1979, the rate had risen to 5.3 divorces per 1000 people. <http://www2.census.gov/prod2/statcomp/documents/1980-02.pdf> 6 Freda Adler, “The Rise of the Female Crook,” Psychology Today Nov. 1975: 42. 7 Qtd. in Alder 42. 8 Merrill Sheils, “The ‘Flatfoot Floozies,’” Newsweek 28 June 1976: 27. 9 Qtd. in Sheils 27. 10 Qtd. in Sheils 27. 11 A classic example of this is Dragnet (NBC 1951-1959). 12 Sue Cameron, “Police Drama: Women are on the Case,” Ms. Oct. 1974: 108. 13 Cameron 104. 14 Cameron 104. 15 Cameron 104. 236 16 Qtd. in Helen Van Slyke, “Calling on a Lady Cop,” Saturday Evening Post Dec. 1975: 51. 17 Although there is a fabric tie at the back of the neck that shows right under Dickinson’s hair, which may indicate her wearing a halter-top, its presence is minimized in favor of the bare body, which is arranged to suggest a concealment of bare breasts. In spite of the arguable presence of clothing, the overall effect is designed to indicate nudity. 18 Richard Dyer, White (London: Routledge, 1997) 91. 19 Among them, bell hooks, Lola Young, Hazel Carby, Jane Gaines, and Tara McPherson. 20 Tara McPherson, Reconstructing Dixie: Race, Gender, and Nostalgia in the Imagined South (Durham: Duke UP, 2003) 26. 21 Angela Y. Davis, “Afro Images: Politics, Fashion, and Nostalgia,” Critical Inquiry 21 Autumn 1994: 39. 22 Qtd. in Davis 37. 23 Davis 39. 24 Cameron 107. 25 José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1999) 187. 26 Qtd. in Cameron 104. 27 Cameron 104. 28 Qtd. in Cameron 104. 29 Dickinson fulfills the masculine, yet heterosexually appealing figure that is now commonly referred to in film studies as the “Hawksean woman.” This is a woman who can exist within an all-male world and hold her own, yet not compromise her womanliness. 30 Cameron 104. 31 Cameron 104. 32 Qtd. in Cameron 104. 33 Richard Dyer, Stars, 2 nd ed. (London: BFI, 1998) 43. 34 Dyer, Stars 43. 237 35 Van Slyke 51. 36 Van Slyke 51. 37 Van Slyke 51. 38 Joan B. Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1988) 147. 39 Landes 147. 40 Landes 146. 41 Landes 162. 42 Qtd. in Van Slyke 51. 43 Van Slyke 51. 44 Cameron 108. 45 Qtd. in Cameron 108. 46 Qtd. in Cameron 108. 47 Qtd. in Cameron 108. 48 Qtd. in Cameron 108. 49 Qtd. in Cameron 108. 50 Qtd. in Cameron 108. 51 Qtd. in Cameron 108. 52 Qtd. in Cameron 108. 53 Qtd. in Richard Warren Lewis, “…Then Time Out for Bible Study,” TV Guide 30 Nov. 1974: 22. 54 Qtd. in Lewis 22. 55 Qtd. in Lewis 22. 238 56 Cameron 104. 57 Qtd. in Cameron 108. 58 Qtd. in Cameron 108. 59 There is some speculation that Get Christie Love! was inspired by the blaxploitation film Cleopatra Jones (1973), which featured Tamara Dobson as Cleopatra Jones, a globetrotting black female who solved international crimes. For details of this possible connection, see Jennifer DeVere Brody’s “The Returns of Cleopatra Jones,” Signs 25:1 Autumn 1999: 91- 121. 60 Judith Mayne, Framed: Lesbians, Feminists, and Media Culture (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2000) 132. 61 Mayne 132. 62 Sasha Torres, Black, White, and in Color: Television and Black Civil Rights (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2003) 14. 63 Yvonne Tasker, Working Girls: Gender and Sexuality in Popular Cinema (London: Routledge, 2000) 5. 64 Freda Alder, “The Rise of the Female Crook,” Psychology Today Nov. 1975: 42. 65 Adler 42. 66 Adler 42. 67 Adler 42. 68 Adler 114. 69 Adler 114. 70 Adler, photograph caption, 46. 71 Adler, photograph caption, 46. 72 The centrality of the media and Hearst’s representational riches is demonstrated by its role in her trial. F. Lee Bailey, one of Hearst’s lawyers, regularly referred to popular publications like Newsweek to understand their interpretation of Hearst. As eyewitness to the trial, Shana Alexander notes this behavior and reports that Newsweek published ten cover stories on Hearst, each one breaking “all previous records for newsstand sales.” Shana Alexander, Anyone’s Daughter (New York: Bantam, 1979) 21. 239 73 Alexander 6. 74 Alexander 6. 75 “Patty and Jerry and Ron and Jimmy and Scoop and Mo and…” The Progressive May 1976: 5-6. 76 “In Our Opinion,” Militant 9 Feb. 1979: 2. 77 Alexander 16. 78 Alexander 277. 79 Alexander 196. 80 Alexander 22. Alexander scatters these references throughout her book, identifying a different figure for different pivotal days and moments of the trial. 81 Qtd. in Patricia Campbell Hearst, Patty Hearst: Her Own Story (New York: Avon, 1982) 176. 82 Qtd. in the “Tania Interview,” supposedly an autobiographical document written by Hearst that was discovered in a FBI raid on an apartment hideout used by SLA members. See Alexander for elaborate legal and personal discussions of the document. 83 Alexander 4. 84 Alexander 3. 85 Hearst 2. 86 Hearst ix. 87 Feminist literary scholars, notably Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, have theorized the particular mode of women’s writing and the protections women authors received by evoking their feminine innocence when relating “shocking” narrative elements. 88 Qtd. in Hearst 43. 89 Alexander 5. 90 The majority of the SLA members were college-educated whites who moved from the Midwest to Berkeley. 240 91 Alexander 160. 92 “Princess Patty Turns Another ‘Trick,’” The Black Panther 25 Dec. 1976: 11. 93 Richard Porton, “Patty Hearst,” Cineaste 17:1 1989: 30. 94 Porton 30. For a discussion of the relationship between fictional liberated woman and real- life male industry figure, see Chapter One of this dissertation. 95 Qtd. in Glenn Rechler, “Patty Hearst: An Interview with Paul Schrader,” Cineaste 17:1 1989: 31. 96 Luce Irigaray’s “This Sex Which Is Not One” and Hélène Cixious’ “The Laugh of the Medusa” are exemplary of this school of theory. 97 Hélène Cixious, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” Feminisms: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism 2 nd ed. Eds. Robyn R. Warhol and Diane Price Herndl. (New Brunswick: Rutgers UP) 334. 241 Chapter Four Picturing America and Its Women: The Complex Alliance of Nationalism and Feminism in 1970s America In July 1972, Ms. magazine published its inaugural full-length issue with a front cover that featured a now-iconic picture of Wonder Woman, figured larger than life, striding over a dwarfed landscape filled with chaos and warfare. With an anguished look on her face, Wonder Woman drops a crushed fighter plane from one hand while her other hand grasps her golden lasso, securing a platform upon which structures and objects symbolic of civilization, peace, and progress are built. The banner overlaying the picture reads, “Wonder Woman for President,” indicating the rightful place of this powerful female figure in American culture and expressing the goals of early Seventies liberal feminist politics. The comic book illustration indicates a much-larger geographical and cultural influence, granting Wonder Women agency over a whole miniaturized world spanning the realms of an idealized American public sphere—an idyllic main street with its church, water tower, automobiles, and happy families strolling the streets and sidewalks—and an exoticized, war-torn world of straw huts, swamps, and military war machinery of tanks, parachutes, and places. These two seemingly dissimilar, binary worlds both co-exist under and are separated by the looming body of Wonder Woman. The placement of the fantastical female’s body in this curious world indicates her literal and symbolic reach that clearly extends far beyond that of the American landscape. This dichotomous world of strife/harmony mediated by the powerful presence of an 242 Amazonian superhero figures into a larger ideological project of media representations of space, racial politics, and deployment of America’s “progressive” gender politics at a time of national insecurity. For the better part of the Seventies, America faced a time of intense ideological and economic uncertainty: an energy crisis, a general economic downturn, a perceived lack of presidential authority, a divisive multiplicity of political interests that lay bare the myth of a singular American identity, and a strained political/economic relationship with the Middle East. At the very moment America was plagued with a host of uncertainties about itself, the media found a surprising source of reassuring American-ness: the fantasy female superhero. This figure capitalized upon the Women’s Movement and media-friendly elements of liberal and cultural feminist politics while constructing an imagined geography of the nation with an attendant political coherence and global superiority. Marking a general industrial move of television, film, and print media towards an acknowledgment of the Second Wave Women’s Movement, the presence of this powerful female figure provided reassurance for a nation facing an identity crisis of ideological, social/cultural, economic, and geographical dimensions. The spaces and narratives of female empowerment attached to the fantasy female action hero effectively masked a discourse of conservative American racial politics. With a need to explain her fantastical powers through an origin myth, television created a vague space of Otherness that became effectively colonized for 243 the sake of American progress. These spaces of origin, whether an exoticized Egypt or a fantastical Amazonian island, granted aesthetic opportunities for representational novelty as well as ideological opportunities to broadcast an invented legacy of American superiority and a justification for America’s increased power. These spaces offered America a vision of itself as coherent, politically able, and benevolent in its exercise of power. These various ideological needs were all brought to bear upon the singular figure of TV’s fantasy action heroine. This chapter examines the means through which this mediated figure of liberated womanhood offered America a reinvention of itself during trying political, economic, and cultural times. In addition, this study takes into account the role network television played in disseminating feminism and the ways television joined progressive gender politics with regressive national identities. In television’s imagination of feminism, America’s powers were re-established and re-imagined through a politically acceptable cover story of a singular woman’s abilities to exist in an empowering nation-space. In order for this story to cohere, the media had to first capitalize upon the various political, aesthetic, and economic possibilities presented by the Women’s Movement. Feminism’s abilities to produce new geographies, to transform conventional genres and locations, and to demand updated images of women resulted in lucrative innovations within the television industry. Television acknowledged feminism to revise television’s business practices, to capture new 244 audiences, and to invent aesthetic principles of production in order to visualize the new figure of the liberated American woman. Fantasy Women Save the Networks By the mid-1970s, the television industry successfully formulated a representation of women’s liberation: the fantasy action heroine. This figure produced lucrative programming and reassured Americans that powerful, independent women could work in the service of the country. More importantly to networks, liberated superwomen offered them a lucrative new mode of selling their industry and its products to increasingly cynical and savvy audiences produced by the political climate of the late-Sixties and the Seventies. Television was able to respond to a new, lucrative audience of women cognizant of, if not active in, feminist politics. It accomplished this through a range of both quality and less-than-quality programming. I focus here on non-quality television programs for a number of reasons. First, these programs remain largely underexamined by media and feminist scholars alike because they seem to lack political relevance or aesthetic complexity. In challenging these assumptions, I wish to explore the productive nature of “bad” television and to account for its popularity in more complex ways. These programs demonstrate, in complicated fashion, the ways that liberated womanhood and its attendant geographies served the needs of a particular socio-historical moment in American nationhood. These fantastical programs reveal productive negotiations of gender, race, and space within terms that are even more complex and meaningful 245 than those overtly presented in contemporaneous “quality” television programs, which are often hailed as the “important” texts of television history. In economic terms, fantastically heroic women proved vital to the financial fortunes of network television. Although quality television is often credited with the renaissance of the networks in the 1970s, “trash” TV featuring heroic women played an equally vital role in TV’s re-emergence as a media powerhouse. 1 It was not just Mary Tyler Moore who embodied the spirit of Seventies womanhood and effectively captured lucrative audience shares; crime-fighting “jiggle TV” heroines also played a vital role in this project. “TV’s Super Women,” as named by a 1976 Time article, granted networks a powerful inroad into prime niche audience outreach. Even a show as degraded and popular as Charlie’ s Angels ranked “fourth among all programs in metropolitan areas, seventh among college graduates, seventh among viewers with incomes above $20,000,” demonstrating powerful audience response to all depictions of female liberation, even those that fell clearly outside the domain of quality programming. 2 With Lindsay Wagner playing the role of Jaime Sommers, a “latter- day Wonder Woman,” was enough for ABC to launch Bionic Woman, a spin-off of the Six Million Dollar Man. The program was one that “[could] do without a coherent plot,” since it was “intended mainly to display Jaime’s powers.” 1 With nothing more to recommend it than the visibility of a woman’s strength, Bionic Woman demonstrates the relationship between a representation of a powerful woman and lucrative ratings. The novelty of this onscreen female power was enough to place 246 the show consistently in the top fifteen programs in the ratings, in spite of its decidedly non-quality status. More than ever, the presence of women on television made for network success, and the innovations afforded by the fantastical nature of woman-centered plots and characters proved to be the unexpected means by which to deliver quality audiences to advertisers. With advertising time that pulled in $100,000 per minute, Charlie’ s Angels was credited with leveraging ABC into prime position to compete with CBS and NBC, through “sheer brilliance of the network’s commercial calculation.” 3 In addition to their quality-audience appeal, a key element of network business practices in the Seventies, “TV’s Super Women” activated geographical possibilities that translated into ideological and commercial power. According to Fred Silverman, then CBS’s head of programming, viewers were overly familiar with the geographies of “the entire coastline of California, every square inch of Universal Studios” and their corresponding storylines and generic conventions—“every detective plot, every pratfall.” 4 In order to attract experienced, savvy viewers to the now-depleted possibilities of the medium, television had to deliver something new. It did so in terms of the spatial and narrative possibilities enacted by women’s onscreen liberation. Just as the networks had exhausted their domestic repertoire of situations and relationships, feminism presented itself as the solution to this dilemma. As Silverman logically concluded, once television had covered all of the permutations of traditional gendered existence, “What else is left but the evolution of women in 247 society?” 5 By saving television, TV’s liberated Super Women offered viewers new landscapes and new narratives enacted within those landscapes. The new political, cultural, economic, and material mobility of women translated into a timely and pragmatic solution to television’s need for innovative programming. Visualizing America as a Feminist Nation Just as the networks used feminism as the raw material by which to explore new geographies and produce never-before-seen scenes of women in action, feminists themselves were using television to imagine a new space of politicized womanhood. In an attempt to visualize their movement across America and to make material the concept of women’s liberation, feminists deployed technologies of and discourses produced by television to mark their presence throughout the nation. Most obviously, feminists produced a powerful national presence through their desirability as a sounding board for networks and through their abilities to push for nationally transmitted, feminist-sanctioned representations of women’s liberation. Feminists were able to gauge their level of social power through media responses to their demands for better images. Rather than engage in litigation, the networks “establish[ed] women's advisory councils to their stations, a first in the history of this country’s television.” 6 Feminist protests and the force of the Women’s Liberation Movement pushed the networks to update their programming and to reach the lucrative new audience of wage-earning women by tapping into the attitudes of their in-house feminist advisory councils. The industry accommodated the protests, 248 enfolding feminist perspectives into their business structures not only to avoid punitive legal and financial measures, but also to mine the potential audience capture provided by feminist-oriented programs constructed straight from the source. This inclusion also benefited feminists, granting them power to define the terms of their visibility. To create a national presence, feminist organizations utilized nationwide television protests and the protest potential of every woman who watched television. Using regional waves of Federal Communications Committee (FCC) protests, feminists charted the progress and cohesion of the Women’s Liberation Movement across spatial distance and ideological separation. An early regional protest, the New York chapter of the National Organization of Women (NOW) filed a FCC complaint against ABC for failing to represent the interests of the local feminist community in their programming and hiring practices. This action sparked nationwide licensing challenges by feminists that accomplished two goals: placing widespread pressure on the television industry to reform its sexist practices and offering an effective mapping device for feminists interested in expanding their political presence beyond regionally constricted, localized groups. This political galvanization proved similar to the activist strategies of African-Americans who successfully challenged local television stations’ discriminatory practices, most famously in the case of Jackson, Mississippi’s WLBT-TV . Television scholar Steven D. Classen describes the 1955- 1969 activism surrounding WLBT in terms that are applicable to the media activism 249 of feminists during the 1970s; the relationship between television and political activism marked television as a “strategic battleground,” and “stressed popular entertainment as crucial to social change.” 7 Feminists clearly borrowed from the protest strategies of black freedom movements, which demanded that local stations, under the jurisdiction of the FCC, represent more inclusively and progressively the diverse identities of television viewers within the community. Throughout the 1970s, feminists filed TV-licensing challenges with the FCC, dropping the suits only after television executives promised to “upgrade the depictions of women.” 8 As feminist journal off our backs reported, local stations and metropolitan broadcasters were “under the gun” with feminist groups “across the country” filing formal complaints with the FCC, asking that they deny licenses to stations that violated FCC regulations. 9 This cross-country activism highlights the importance of regional politics, identifies the mode through which feminists can see themselves as a national collective, and demonstrates the vital importance of feminist media protests in unifying smaller populations of feminists into a larger, nationwide community. According to the complaints filed by feminists, the television stations in question violated all three conditions of the FCC’s licensing renewal standards. The first, Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, concerns equitable employment. The second condition deals with community standards that require that “local stations ascertain and meet community needs.” 10 Feminists could only make the case against 250 stations on this point if they successfully conceptualized and presented themselves to the government as a coherent community. The media’s inability to represent women according to the Movement’s politics gave feminists the means with which to define themselves as a community. The third point of contention deals with the Fairness Doctrine, a piece of regulation that calls for balance in representing controversial public issues. By asking for inclusion in media representation under this point, the Women’s Movement elevated their status by defining their political platform not simply as a radical ideological position, but also as one that represents media-worthy content and audience address. By presenting themselves to the FCC as a protest group with legitimate complaints, feminists could promote themselves as a politically viable entity. The issues involved in feminists’ FCC protests illustrate the ways in which feminists used media to define themselves as an influential political group with a growing, potentially nationwide public sphere visibility. Regional FCC protests helped feminists to map their political power through their relationships with the industrial/economic side of television and to map their growing national presence. Starting in New York City, the FCC protests moved to Philadelphia, Washington D.C., North Carolina, South Carolina, and Florida, unifying feminists under a similar political umbrella, in spite of the specificity of their regional and ideological identities. Through FCC protests, feminists looked to transform their regional interests into a national movement that would permeate “even” the so-called hinterlands of America. An off our backs article hopefully 251 anticipated that “anywhere along the countryside a TV antenna can be seen perched atop a building, there will be women complaining about what it is transmitting— sooner or later.” 11 Galvanizing activism and geographically plotting/confirming the national presence of feminists through the material conditions of television, feminist media protests promised to unify a regionally divided political movement that was largely concentrated in East and West Coast urban areas (e.g. New York and San Francisco). Television’s capacity to unify disparate spaces through its literal technological presence, along with its representational powers to transmit images that familiarized the nation with the figure of the liberated woman, worked to the advantage of the Women’s Liberation Movement. Feminism in the Heartland(?!): The Regional Realities of “Middle American” Women However successful the feminist television nation seemed, the urban focus of television’s audience address and programming content, and the concentration of organized feminist movements within major metropolitan areas situated particular regions of America beyond the reach of popular media and feminists alike. In this respect, both the Women’s Liberation Movement and popular media found it difficult to address the needs of rural and small-town populations. With different motivations, but with similar outcomes, feminists and network programmers of the Seventies often failed to apprehend rural communities as politically viable ones (and, in the case of television, economically important ones). Similar to television’s turn to 252 audience outreach and programming content that reflected, nearly exclusively, urban experiences, the feminist movement often failed to embrace spatially specific gender problems of rural women, focusing instead on either coast’s major cities and their inhabitants. In a 1972 report on the state of feminism published in feminist journal Women: A Journal of Liberation, Glenda Jones assesses the shortcomings of feminist organizations and their formal group activities. She found that the outreach of feminist politics was, in large part, determined by geographical constraints. Although feminists were well-aware of and worked conscientiously to avoid “East Coast chauvinism,” Jones points out the material realities behind the concentration of feminist groups in major urban sites in the East: “Objectively, the East Coast does have more resources: easier travel and communication between large cities, more money from constituencies, easier availability of speakers, and offices to do xeroxing, typing, mailings.” 12 This assessment leads Jones to identify the effect that this concentration of resources had on the development and presence of feminist politics in less-urban, non-East coast locations: “We have not shared such resources, nor have we helped sisters who work under greater handicaps, in more isolated situations.” 13 The mainstream media picked up on the geographical concentrations of feminist groups and often used the “underdeveloped” regions of the United States to chart the failures of feminism. The rural regions of the United States, as deployed by popular media, became a powerful tool for anti-feminist sentiments on the part of 253 mainstream journalism. Unlike Jones’s assessment, meant to correct these oversights and to create more effectively a national feminist movement with an evenly developed, transregional presence, popular print media often looked to “Middle America” (flexibly defined as non-urban spaces outside of the East or West Coasts) to gauge the success of feminism and, often to announce its failures. Typically formulated as an investigation of “real” America, these reports implicitly denounced feminism as a fantasy or indulgence of pampered and out-of-touch urban women. Yet, even within these reports on the failures of feminism, the means by which the supposedly few women in small towns came to feminist knowledge reveal the unpredictable, complex ways that media and feminism transmitted across regions. These reports, in spite of their anti-feminist rhetoric, prove highly instructive for an analysis of media’s role in constructing a feminist nation. During the 1970s, Middle America became an important conceptual space, in spite of television’s turn to niche, quality and/or urban audiences and the concentration of progressive political movements in metropolitan locations on the East and West Coasts. Popular media reports on the state of feminism assumed that Middle America was a space that could not foster progressive politics, but could only function as a place politically progressive people should ignore or from which they should be rescued. These Middle American spaces, with their omission from relevant television and their under-representation in activist movements, were constructed as a structuring absence during the Seventies. In their absence from “important” media 254 and political development during this period, rural locations like Peoria, which had “become a mass-media synonym for Middle America,” all figured the same—as a monolithic, cultural and political wasteland. 14 Journalistic coverage of American women across the country uncovered complex regional senses of space and politics, which produced pivotal expressions of feminist politics and culturally specific engagements with gender. These state-of-the-nation-through-its-women reports, an increasingly popular genre, reveal that Middle America signified a strong ideological presence in its own right. Considered a stronghold of a monolithic traditional political and social mentality, Middle America was important as an imagined, yet potent symbol of conservative politics and was deployed repeatedly and flexibly during the Seventies as a corrective force that limited progressive political activism and cultural change. Reportedly, then-President Richard Nixon measured the feasibility of his conservative political measures by asking, “How will it play in Peoria?” Yet, in spite of its imaged place as a stronghold of unthinking conservativism, Peoria and other Middle American locations served as surprisingly productive locales for feminism, challenging assumptions of a unified American heartland that did not warrant the attentions of the progressively minded media or political groups. With titles like “Report from Peoria: Women’s Lib Plays in Peoria,” “Emporium, PA. Pop. 3,074,” “The Southern Belle,” and “The New Feminism on Main Street,” print journalism reinforced the mismatching of “real” America and 255 feminism, registering shock and surprise when feminists could actually be located in such out-of-the-way and politically, culturally, and socially “retrograde” places. 15 This investment in the unchanging attitudes and identities of white American women repeatedly appears in a series of special reports on the state of feminism; these reports typically involve dispatching a journalist to some unknown and/or far-flung “Middle American” space whose conventional attitudes about gender assured readers that American (white, heterosexual, patriarchal) culture still stood firm in the literal and metaphorical heart of the nation. In a report typical of this state-of-feminism coverage, Time magazine sent a reporter to Red Oak, Iowa as part of its 1972 series on “Women’s Liberation Revisited.” Meant as a gauge of feminism’s influence, this special report was located in the magazine’s recurring “The Nation” section. By linking the state of feminism to the state of the nation, Time linked the two forces, articulating the presence of feminist politics as an issue of American-ness. The location that best expresses the nature of American identity is, not coincidentally, the same area that feminists had identified as the places that did not possess the material resources with which to foster feminist political groups. Rather than engage in an analysis of spatial arrangements, technology, and population density, as Jones did for her report in Women, Time unproblematically frames Iowa as an inherently “American” space: wholesome, uncomplicated, and honest. As such, the anti-feminist expressions found there are the true gauge of America’s attitude towards feminism and therefore gain 256 considerable authenticity and weight in the evaluation of feminism’s importance and viability. By dispatching their reporter to the small town of Red Oak, Iowa, Time promises to answer the following question: “How far, how deep run the currents of women’s new consciousness in the U.S.?” 16 In its opening lines, by evoking the rural idyll of Red Oak’s “furrowed hills” and its “19 churches, five public parks” and the quaintness of its feelings of pride in its “third largest swimming pool in the state” and its local Holiday Inn, the article searches for “The New Feminism on Main Street,” as indicated in its title. 17 By foregrounding Red Oak’s provincialism, the article assumes a condescending attitude towards the town and its inhabitants. More importantly, it uses a backwater portrait of a small town to authorize the anti-feminist sentiment it finds there. The town’s lack of sophistication implicitly indicts feminism as ridiculous and unhelpful to people with “real” problems and positions the townspeople who reject feminism as uncomplicated, straight-talking folks whose quaint, rural qualities authenticate their commonsensical rejection of feminism. In its superior attitude, indicated by the bemused tone of its opening description, Time’s condescension assures readers that the town’s population could not possibly possess complex politics, emotional lives, or political motivations. Their expressions are so transparent as to be indisputable. The article provides nearly overwhelming evidence of this Midwestern simplicity and its expression through matter-of-fact gender relationships and 257 straightforward, uncomplicated gender identities. As “Mrs. Ross Davis” reports, her husband announced, once they were married, “‘I’m Ross the Boss and don’t ever forget it.’” Davis himself adds, “‘I believe in Women’s Liberation. I think my wife should do whatever she wants—as long as she asks my permission.’” 18 This unabashed sexism, when framed by the ideologically weighty location of the small Iowan town, transmits as forthright and honest, even if politically reprehensible. Although it explicitly articulates gender issues, the article’s analysis implicitly understands the racial/ethnic elements of small town (“non”)politics as foundational. Conservativism—not necessarily in a negative sense, in Time’s perception—is summoned up through the racial/ethnic “simplicity,” which is also trustworthy. With traditionally WASPy names like “Mrs. Ross Davis” and “Jane Smith,” the women of the town are no-nonsense types who embody and express the ideals of conventional femininity. “Doctor’s Wife Jane Smith” argues against feminism through a nineteenth-century ideology of separate sphere—a gendered and racial conceptualization of labor, activity, and identity: “‘A woman’s place is in the home taking care of her children. If a woman gets bored with the housework, there are plenty of organizations she can join.’” 19 The article’s only photograph features Jane Smith with her bridge group: four card-playing white women with elaborate, outdated bouffant hairdos. This photographic evidence underscores the attitudes revealed in husband-wife interviews; together, they construct the Midwest as a space of America’s unchanging nature, at its core, about gender relationships and identities. 258 A more complex explanation for feminism’s “failure” in Middle America, the specific regional conditions of rural life in Red Oak limits the nature of women’s relationships to feminism. The pragmatic, material concerns of their often-difficult lives took precedence over the perceived intellectual abstractions of feminism. The Time article’s author interviews farmwoman Connie Bolton, who “can’t imagine getting a job somewhere.” 20 This comment suggests, like the article’s other married interview subjects, Bolton has rejected public sphere, paid employment because of her conventional understanding of gendered labor roles. However, it is the experience of her life on the farm that mitigates her relationship to feminism. Rather than rejecting feminism outright, Bolton’s particular experience of work and gender complicate the feminist call for women’s equitable participation in the public sphere. Liberal feminism’s conventional understandings of women’s progress do not apply to Bolton’s specific labor arrangements of rural farm life. The material conditions of Bolton’s labor on the farm define her sphere of activities, which Bolton describes: “‘Every time I leave home, some of the animals get out. Who do you think chases them? The liberated woman.’” 21 Bolton’s perspective complicates prevailing assumptions, as presented by media reports about rural women’s seeming lack of political interest in feminism and fundamental ideological differences among rural/urban women. Rural women’s geographical isolation and the material conditions of their day-to-day labor powerfully shaped their relationships to feminism. Often their 259 sources of information about feminism came primarily from mass media representations. Conveyed through popular media, feminism could reach across spatial distance and division, effectively bridging the literal and ideological gaps between urban and rural feminists. However, with this mediated representation, feminism often seemed like a mere image that could not be sustained in the face of difficult material realities. Often the only source of feminist political understanding for women in rural areas, feminism, as transmitted through media images, proved uneven in its influence. In an interview with Time, one woman recounts this uncertain relationship to mediated feminism. She establishes a basic connection to feminism through television: “‘I identify with Women’s Lib. I watch one of those women on Johnny Carson and I think, ‘That’s me.’” 22 Yet this identification with the image of feminism often came into conflict with the labor and the concrete terms of lived experience for many rural and/or women leading “conventional” lives. The same woman whose identification as a feminist was motivated by The Tonight Show is also the same woman who felt its uncertain effects in the face of the gendered demands of her reality: “‘I get up the next day, feed the kids and clean house and it wears off.’” 23 The tensions between the material terms of rural life, the geographical specificity of the experience of feminism, and the outcomes of mediated feminism develop across the subgenre of journalistic reports on the state of feminism within unlikely American locales. Embarking on a cross-country trip to gauge the appeal of 260 the Women’s Liberation Movement beyond the urban, metropolitan centers of the United States, Redbook journalist Vivian Cadden reports findings that suggest an ambivalent alignment between “Middle America’s” ideological outlook and that of New York City’s feminists, and the productive and limiting function of media within these relationships. As one Denver woman confesses, “Women’s Liberation? I’ve just heard about it sometimes on TV . I’m from Denver and I feel sort of isolated, like I’ve been here forever.” 24 This geographical determination of politics reveals the crucial role of television in feminism’s nationwide appeals. Television, in spite of feminists’ apprehension about mainstream media, often served as the only feminist outlet for women living in isolation from larger groups of political activism. Television’s space-binding possibilities and transmission of ideologies across distances held some promise for the Women’s Liberation Movement. Slowly trickling across the country to reach a single Denver housewife with a vague familiarity with feminism and a strong sense of isolation and abandonment, televised feminism produced a future feminist-in-training. Television’s potential abilities to articulate political identifications across disparate spaces, as evidenced by rural women’s identifications with televised feminism, reformulate conventional concepts of the relationship between television viewer and apparatus. In “Intimate (Tele)visions,” Ernest Pascucci describes a productive relationship to television’s representations of unknown geographies and identification with corresponding identities as an “intimate relationship, a visual 261 relationship, moreover a televisual relationship.” 25 Recounting his own queer engagement with spaces outside of his suburban environment through the medium of television, Pascucci challenges the Frankfurt School’s fundamental terms. In The Fall of Public Man (1974), Pascucci’s primary example of this school of thought, Richard Sennett laments the demise of public sphere activities, the privatization of inward-oriented individuals, and an increased reliance of the individual upon mass media products. This perspective privileges “real” engagement with public space and dismisses mediated engagements with space, subjectivity, and ideologies. Challenging Sennett’s and the Frankfurt School’s dismissals, Pascucci’s televisual relationship to mediations of self, space, and politics becomes a politically productive, progressive one in which “intimate (tele)visions were not inhibiting of proper interpersonal relations, but enabling of a subjectivity that I could barely recognize, a subjectivity that had no recognizable place in the ‘spaces of appearance’ available to me.” 26 Pascucci’s concept of televisual intimacies helps identify the complex political and personal identifications women had to television’s mediated feminist address. From this theoretical vantage point, television presents a powerful tool that united women who existed outside of the urban, coastal enclaves of feminist activism—even within the presumed uniform conservativism of “Middle America.” Whatever its potential, the medium of television and its abilities to draw unlike spaces, identities, and politics together must be considered within the material contexts of rural female audiences to gauge the complex nature of feminism’s 262 influence in regional terms. In 1975, Saturday Review reporter Susan Jacoby visited Peoria to figure out why, as the title of her article states, “Women’s Lib Plays in Peoria.” In part, Jacoby concludes that the absence of alternative political projects makes feminism the only game in town. As a town that lacked a Black Panthers organization and a visible gay liberation movement, Peoria required the presence of white women’s liberation to act as an umbrella organization for its various political activists. Thus, the countryside overlooked by radical political movements and mainstream media industries, through the very isolation and provincialism that made it so unappealing to these forces, becomes fertile ground for feminism. The political dynamics produced by Peoria’s geographical isolation energized white women’s liberation, which capitalized on a collection of energies of racially and sexually Othered people who did not exist in numbers large enough to form their own political organizations. Like the woman from Denver who identified “Women’s Lib” as something to be experienced through television, the liberated women of Peoria also apprehended the Women’s Liberation Movement through its media formulations. Unlike the isolated woman from Denver, this image did not operate as the lifesaver that promised to connect women to the Movement and save them from the desolate world of Middle America. Instead, Peorian women, as represented in the article, perceived media-produced versions of feminism as insubstantial. As one of the women interviewed for the article proclaims, “‘Gloria Steinem is only a streaky mane of hair 263 on a network television program.’” 27 Through their geographic isolation from the Women’s Liberation Movement, Peorian women forged their own state of feminism predicated on their own particular material realities, not on media-produced and, in their minds, fantasy images of feminism. Instead of identifying with representations of feminism they see on TV , which they largely perceive only as images, Peorian feminists identify with the material concerns of their lives, which then lead them to feminist awareness and action. These women’s financial and work realities compel them to clip coupons, exchange casserole recipes, and agitate for public sphere rights to address the economic and health problems of their hourly wage jobs. One such example comes from the workplace environment of a local industry that employed only women to answer customer service calls. Repeatedly suffering from ear infections that resulted from wearing earphones on the job, women workers voiced complaints that were ignored by both their union and the company’s management. In order to agitate effectively for improved labor conditions, these women turned to feminism for a solution and, through their Women’s Group, effectively campaigned for improved working conditions. These class-based and regional circumstances created a strong relationship between feminist politics and material conditions that were not, in the perceptions of these Peorian women, linked to Steinem and the image-based feminism transmitted through popular media. 264 Steinem’s uneven abilities to transmit successfully across a range of regional feminisms reveal the limitations of media’s projections of feminism. Additionally, Steinem’s case underscores the central role that space, race/ethnicity, and gender plays in the formulation of a unified nationwide feminist movement. Just as Steinem’s image-based feminism failed vis-à-vis physical realities facing Peorian women, the specific terms of her identity and public image did not translate well in this geographical region of America. Instead, regional identity proved more powerful. A young woman newly recruited to the feminist cause by two of her older female co-workers explains that she voted for a female union representative once she realized that feminist/female candidates “are just like us.” 28 Part of being “like us” depends upon conventional femininity and heterosexuality and, more implicitly, racial identifications of whiteness. Since the union representative possessed “beautiful silvery-blonde hair” and could “get a man,” this woman appealed to enough women to win an election. 29 The very qualities of white feminine heterosexuality and conventional beauty that successfully converted the skeptical Peorian woman to feminism and to the support of other women’s political aspirations were ones that Steinem herself famously possessed. Yet Steinem was a figure of failed identification for this very same woman. Even with her heterosexual appeals and conventional beauty (even down to her own signature blonde hair), Steinem failed to convince these Peorian women to join the feminist movement. Given these qualities, remarkably similar to 265 the ones the feminist union representative possessed, why then did Steinem fail where the other woman succeeded? The Peorian women are careful to distinguish their union representative from “‘that Gloria Stein . . .Steinberg.’” 30 This misidentification of Steinem’s identity holds the key to Steinem’s failed image and the union representative’s successful presentation of herself. If Steinem was only a “streaky mane of blonde hair” on television, her appeal, symbolized by her blonde hair, did not transmit literally or symbolically to these Peorian women. The misnaming of Gloria Steinem as Gloria “Steinberg” reveals what lies behind being “just like us”: a WASPy Iowan identity that is firmly rooted in the ideology of realism and trustworthy white womanhood. This ethnic misidentification is compounded by the literal and representational distance between Steinem, firmly identified with New York City and its attendant ethnicities, and telephone operators from Peoria. The same woman who misidentifies Steinem as Steinberg pinpoints the function of media and its failed transmission over ideological and real space: “‘I see [Steinem] on the TV news sometimes . . .[she] doesn’t seem like a real person to me.’” 31 Steinem’s uneven abilities to convey feminism gesture towards larger issues of complex ethnic, regional, and gendered identifications, which are both aided and hampered by regional relationships between spaces and the cultural, geographical, and material terms of regional feminisms. 266 Race, Space, and TV’s Fantasy Heroines As much as real-life feminists faced opportunities and challenges in media- related transmissions of their politics, television’s fictional representations of feminism proved immensely successful. Using the elements of fantasy, race/ethnicity, and nationwide unification, television formulated a viable figure of female action heroism in two popular series: Isis (CBS 1975-1977) and Wonder Woman (ABC 1975-1976, CBS 1977-1979). These programs merit investigation, not only for their mediations of feminist politics, but also for their protagonists’ articulations of liberated womanhood that are enmeshed intimately in America’s national identity, its relationship to other countries, and its use and management of race and ethnicity. The liberated status of the programs’ superheroines proves vital to their expression of American nationalism, promoting the nation by championing its democratic inclusion of all marginalized peoples, including but not limited to women. The liberated status of these women also masks less-progressive political expressions of race relations and economic conditions experienced by racially and ethnically Othered figures that the superheroines correct, save, and/or exploit. Televised during the mid-to-late Seventies, Isis and Wonder Woman coincided with the ascendancy of liberal feminism as the public face of the Women’s Liberation Movement. As Alice Echols’s detailed history of the radical feminist movement recounts, liberal feminism was, by 1975, a “major beneficiary of radical feminism’s disintegration.” 32 The forces that moved the national feminist movement of the 1970s 267 from its early roots in radical feminism to liberal feminism are too complex to consider adequately here. However, a brief overview of this process helps illuminate why liberal feminism proved so useful for conveying a nationally coherent sense of feminism, appeared to be the most successful means of converting women to the cause, and became the favored expression of feminism for media representations. The mid-70s disintegration of radical feminist groups came about through conflicts between movement leaders and particular groups, but more significantly, because of radical feminism’s hostilities to capitalism and patriarchal structures, qualities that mainstream media could and/or would not support and transmit. “Rather than working within the system,” radical feminism worked to develop “counter- institutions” to mainstream structures and embodied a “rejection of the mainstream itself.” 33 Unlike radical feminism, liberal feminism’s abilities—through media- friendly figures like Steinem, the publication of Ms. magazine, and the political presence of the NOW—to promote feminist politics in a national forum and through popular media became its strength and accounted for its central importance in transmittable representations of liberated women. The protagonists of Isis and Wonder Woman reflect the growing popularity of liberal feminism. Leading double lives, Isis and Wonder Woman are both commonplace working women and all-mighty goddess figures. Andrea Thomas, a scientist and teacher, and Diana Prince, a government employee/intelligence agent, demonstrate their abilities to compete in male-dominated occupations. With their 268 belief in women’s public sphere rights, sisterly solidarity with other women, and successful integration into existing systems of law, government, and public sphere labor, Andrea and Diana, in both incarnations of their personae, articulate foundational goals of liberal feminism. As superheroines, these women also represent a brand of cultural feminism, an ideological stance “aimed at reversing the cultural valuation of the male and the devaluation of the female” that “sought to celebrate femaleness.” 34 Successfully battling foes in domestic and international political arenas with strength derived from their origins in women’s culture, Isis and Wonder Woman repeatedly demonstrate their distinction from and superiority to men and the patriarchal cultural values of violence, war, and greed. These sentiments then become the hallmarks of America itself. Although questionable in the accuracy with which these elements reflect the politics of real life feminists, the motivations for and outcomes of these expressions of liberal and cultural feminisms prove complex and productive as objects of study. As fictional fantasy heroines, Isis and Wonder Woman demonstrate the vital function that representations of feminism, mediated through popular television, played in the re-imagination of American coherence and power during the Seventies. With its proposed valuation of women’s culture and expressions of public sphere gender empowerment, Isis’s/Andrea’s and Wonder Woman’s/Diana’s admirable deeds, both in their working lives and in their superheroic feats, are made possible only in America and through the opportunities it provides its female citizens. These feminist 269 leanings, in addition to providing motivations behind the dialogue, personae, and actions of these incredibly powerful and successful women, also authorize particular expressions of American-ness and America’s superiority over other nations. Both series represent fantasy spaces of women’s empowerment in order to harness them for America’s unique, self-contained identity and its justifiable domination of the world. Isis and Wonder Woman champion the benevolent nature of American power; their gender emancipation works in service of America’s right to dominate other countries, providing evidence of a better life under American political and cultural regimes. Much like the “progressive” racial representations produced a decade earlier in Cold War programs like I Spy, which features the cheerful racial harmony of Robert Culp and Bill Cosby as they set out on global missions to eradicate anti-American attitudes, female liberation stages American superiority on a global scale during the 1970s. 35 Unlike Cold War deployments of racial integration and male bonding, Wonder Woman and Isis utilize fantastical liberated womanhood to justify, if only to Americans themselves, the superiority of U.S. culture within a global context. These programs demonstrate that “progressive” gender politics of the Seventies occupied a key position in rebuilding America’s nationalistic pride and justifying its drive to dominate the global political landscape. Within the context of the growing visibility of America’s Women’s Liberation Movement, television successfully converted feminist sentiment to a mediated version of liberated womanhood that creates and is created by a powerful sense of 270 space. These fantasy superheroines experience their emancipated status through a new onscreen mobility, offering a convenient solution to both television’s industrial stagnation and America’s ideological concerns about its nationhood. Through her gender emancipation and missionary zeal, the action heroine is afforded influence beyond the previously conventional spaces of domesticity to instruct others to behave according to an ethos of equality. Her authority and her abilities also bear a fundamental relationship to the space of America as a nation, which is the only nation that allows her to express fully her liberated state. Television’s representation of all-American womanly strength depended upon a re-imagining of the nation through a conflation and co-existence of asynchronous time: mythical past, real present, and predicated future. It also depended upon ideologically flexible spaces: vaguely ethnicized utopias, idyllic island cultures of women, liminal spaces of transformation, and idealized professional spaces of career-oriented working women. These representations of mighty American/ized women call upon imagined and real geographies and the histories of nationalized spaces to produce a mystical figure who voluntarily serves the needs of America while effectively demonstrating her—and through extension, America’s—inherent superiority to other nations and bodies. Isis: Excavating Egypt, Producing America As a program that endows its female protagonist with impressive powers through her connection to ancient Egypt, Isis utilizes a complex sense of space and identity to express female gender liberation and to deploy it for the betterment of 271 America. Throughout the series, Egypt is figured simultaneously as real and mythological. As a real space, Egypt joins with Andrea’s present endeavors as a successful American woman scientist. In this capacity, Egypt quite literally serves as the raw material for women’s forays into a new occupational terrain, offering a wealth of archeological and historical findings for Andrea. Real Egypt figures as an economic and cultural Eden inviting American discovery of its riches through archeological and technological exploitation. From its opening montage, Isis establishes the central function of Egyptian mythology and its heritage of empowered womanhood. Playing over a series of images that evoke ancient Egypt, a male narrator dramatically recounts the source of Andrea Thomas’s strength, its lineage throughout the ages, and its benevolent outcomes. As the story goes, the ancient Egyptian Queen Hatschepsout was given a mystical amulet by her royal sorcerer, which endowed her and her descendents with the powers of the goddess Isis. This pivotal event is illustrated through hieroglyphic depictions. Represented through still shots, these hieroglyphic images, as ancient objects rendered static through the camera’s capture, indicate the historical past, “frozen” in time, even as its effects are felt in the contemporary moment. Egypt, as a national-political entity, is represented in similar fashion. The other still image in the opening montage is a photograph of pyramids that, in synedochic fashion, comes to represent the whole of Egypt, past and present. 272 By introducing Egyptian culture and location through still images signifying a mystical past, the program represents the Egyptian source of Isis’s and, through extension, Andrea Thomas’s strength as exotic and as static in both time and space. This freezing of Egyptian powers (e.g. the ancient labor behind the building of the pyramids, the mystified forces of the supernatural, the exotic nature of governing might) minimizes the importance of modern-day Egypt so that it can be replaced by the superior, “modern” state of American culture. Andrea Thomas, an American scientist and teacher, represents this modern configuration of female empowerment and nationhood. During an archeological dig in Egypt, Andrea uncovers Isis’s amulet and, as a result, realizes that she is a descendent of Queen Hatschepsout and heir to the mystical powers of Isis. This scene of discovery and excavation takes place within the opening montage, but unlike the still shots of Egypt, this event is represented through live action sequences of Andrea discovering in the Egyptian desert, “three thousand years later,” the box that contains the amulet of Isis. America’s superior abilities, exemplified through the scientific skill and talent it fosters in American women, lead to modern discovery of ancient Egypt. By positioning Egyptian power as an ancient artifact and America as the force that makes modern discoveries, America benefits from mystical Egyptian powers and is justified, because of its talent, drive, and resources, in doing so. Establishing this particular relationship to ancient Egypt, the series converts the possible threat of 273 another nation’s long-standing civilization and technological accomplishments to the gains of America. The power of a “foreign” nation and an American woman are both crucial to and unsettling to America’s identity as a powerful, yet benevolent modern nation. Therefore, the powers of Egypt and Andrea/Isis must be called upon, yet contained. As a national force, Egypt’s power is secured through the exoticized terms of its representation and by the possession of its mystical powers by an American woman who has a rightful claim to use them. As a gendered force, Andrea’s liberated woman status, exemplified by her occupational success in the male-dominated world of science, establishes America’s status as a modern nation through the advanced state of its women. Andrea’s power as a scientist and as a conduit for supernatural forces makes her a “dedicated foe of evil, defender of the weak, champion of truth and justice,” qualities that empower her and, by association, America. The program’s sequence figures the whole world as passively awaiting American needs. Vested with the authority of her Egyptian past, Andrea/Isis controls the forces of nature. The program’s opening sequence establishes as much, featuring footage of birds flying in air and gazelles bounding over grasslands, with the promise that Andrea/Isis will “command the elements of sky and earth.” The nature footage culminates in a view of Earth from outer space. This representation, with its promise of fecundity and its energies that are placed responsibly under American control, reverses the process of the ongoing depletion of environmental resources and the loss 274 of U.S. control over global resources in the 70s, reasserting the place of America from, quite literally, the perspective of outer space. Even in her more mundane position of authority of a teacher of American children, Andrea uses her influence to ensure the present and future security and superiority of America. In its ongoing narratives, the series champions the route of scientific discovery as the salvation of disempowered Americans. Andrea repeatedly saves at-risk American children through the transformative powers of scientific marvels explored in the objective, everyday space of an American science classroom. Typical of the series, along with its companion series Shazam! (1974-1976), Isis offered its children spectators moral lessons about conformity and abiding by social codes that support family and law while repressing socially disruptive emotional urges. Often, the protagonist who must learn this lesson is a young, white male adolescent. In a simple model of racial spectatorial identification, one assumes that the show is geared to a similarly raced, aged audience. If this assumption holds, then the show teaches young white Americans about the appropriate social place they must hold to ensure a benevolent, but powerful, future America. As “the weak” that Andrea/Isis is called upon to “defend,” these young boys constitute what Lauren Berlant has termed “infantile citizenship” or the “national supericonicity” of the American child as an image of American nationhood. 36 This infantile figure serves as a “stand-in for a complicated and contradictory set of anxieties and desires about national identity,” and propels, due to its innocence, a 275 host of defensive, typically conservative/reactionary strategies to protect this endangered citizen. 37 In the moment of the series’s airing, white American masculinity was facing troubling times on international and domestic fronts. By the mid-70s, America’s patriarchal culture was no longer certain of its political and economic futures in relationship to other nations, and unclear in its function within a culture transformed by feminist political gains. Berlant’s understanding of the innocent American child, the political ramifications of its iconic status, and the ideological racial/sexual/gendered dynamics of its identity is worth quoting at length here for its applicability to the recurring figure of the young, white American male as a threatened figure within the Isis series. This infantile citizen, who is “not yet bruised by history; not yet caught up in the processes of secularization and equalization; not yet caught in the confusing and exciting identity exchanges made possible by mass consumption and ethnic, racial, and sexual mixing; not yet tainted by money or war,” is “tacitly white,” and “contains the blueprint for the reproductive form that assures the family and the nation its future history.” 38 With this innocent, yet powerful status, the (white, heterosexual) American child-as-national-icon holds “ethical claims on the adult political agents who write laws, make culture, administer resources, control things.” 39 Within the context of the television series Isis, the young, white male infantile citizen justifiably demands the resources offered by Andrea and Isis, placing the energies of the American scientific community, the nurturing of American 276 womanhood, and the transnational, transtemporal resources of the entire Earth at his disposal. Although white boys structure the center of the show, the presence of non- white persons of all ages is key in conveying the series’s morality plays to the audience and justifying the superiority of white Americans. Andrea is aided in negotiating school bureaucracy by one of her “best friends” who also works as her subordinate. The role of friend/occupational subordinate was first filled by an Asian- American character, Cindy Lee, then by an African-American character, Renee Carroll. Within an American cultural paradigm of fair play and equitable responsibilities/opportunities, these ideals apparently do not apply to non-white workers, who are repeatedly thrust into tedious work in order to pave the way for Andrea’s heroic exploits. In addition to the menial jobs the woman sidekick cheerfully performs, she also represents the infiltration of the mystical and irrational world into Andrea’s science classroom that must be judged negatively in comparison to Andrea’s rationality and intellectualism. Taken with superstition and poorly informed scientific hypotheses, these sidekicks represent conventional racist stereotypes. Several episodes feature Cindy Lee or Renee Carroll foolishly believing in ESP or witchcraft, only to be righted by Andrea’s scientific debunking of these beliefs. In contrast to these undisciplined racial approximations of science, which create chaos 277 and confusion, Andrea's scientific practice is always geared to moralizing, supporting the disciplining lessons Isis delivers both to children and to childlike racial Others. Andrea/Isis does embody and deploy mystical leanings. However, they prove insightful and powerful rather than foolish and superstitious. She often calls upon ancient wisdom or a powerful mystical ability to control nature in order to bring about an improved social situation in America. Emerging from a vaguely Egyptian past, her mysticism marks a key resource in fantasies of America’s abilities to harness the powers of particular exotic and unknowable geographies. Middle Eastern space and power is crucial in understanding the importance of Isis’s endorsement of Egyptian ethnicity over African- or Asian-American identities. Isis predates slightly the pinnacle of America’s fascination with Egypt, the traveling museum exhibition The Treasures of Tutankhamun (1977-1979). However, like America’s Tut-mania, Isis reveals the nation’s commercial and ideological investments in Egypt as it attempts to define itself both in comparison and contrast to Middle Eastern power during the 1970s. Melani McAlister helpfully analyzes America’s fervor over all things Egyptian in the very moment of economic crisis and dependence upon the Middle East. With the 1973 oil crisis, the “rising media fascination with Middle East terrorism” and a series of conflicts between Arab and Israeli factions in the late- 1960s and early-to-mid-1970s, the Middle East registered as an economic, ideological, and political threat to Americans facing their own domestic uncertainties. 40 In both the Tut museum exhibit and in the television program Isis, 278 Egyptian mythology and iconography is “used to suggest something longed for, something that, in the proper context, could be possessed and circulated.” 41 Through Isis’s allegiance to saving American children one-by-one and Andrea’s commitment to American rationality and the implicit racial politics involved in this rationality, Isis deploys Egyptianness in the service of (white) American national power. If only the vital, mystical powers of Egypt—rendered politically innocuous through a nostalgic and imagined past—could be utilized in the name of American discipline and racially defined might, then the problems of domestic and foreign strife could be managed effectively. The troubling implications of this stance are managed through the presence of seemingly progressive gender politics. Although the racial implications of the program are often masked by a color- blind liberal political stance, racial difference continually intrudes upon the narrative, threatening to lay bare the mythical nature of American equality. In several episodes, the presence of a black male body throws the show into an anxious management of racism. Often the program resolves this anxiety through its companionate ethnicizing and its ultimate deracialization of Isis herself. Much like the cultural battle waged over the racial categorization of Tut, the Egyptianness of Isis is ultimately asserted as white in the series. 42 Egypt is claimed, not as the ancient seat of black civilization and an extension of ancient Africa, but as “one of the early stops in the great westward march of white civilization.” 43 In this interpretation of Egypt as the origin 279 of “Western” civilization, it becomes a mythological space of heroic whiteness, made evident through Isis’s clear superiority to other black characters. She eschews any racial overtones in her Egyptian identity and implicitly urges overtly racialized characters to conform to American/white ideals via scientific rationalism. A seeming non-issue that is never addressed directly, Andrea/Isis’s racial heritage is “saved” from the possible (and probable) category of blackness through her conformity to the implicitly white category of “American.” In spite of this ultimate claim of whiteness, the show offers up racial difference as a key component to Isis’s past life. The wall paintings depicted in the program’s opening most certainly represent Isis as non- white and the show’s lead actor, JoAnna Cameron, does not signify whiteness indisputably. By introducing, then refusing racial difference, the show offers America a sense of itself as an inclusive space while it demonstrates its abilities to successfully tame powerful and intriguing ethnicity through inclusion in the racial non-category of whiteness. In short, racial difference stands as an all-important structuring absence in America’s identity as a benevolent power. In one of the series’s most explicit dealings with race and America’s rightful place in the global order, the episode “Rockhound’s Roost” asserts nationality through the management of black and white masculine harmony orchestrated by Andrea/Isis. Featuring an unlikely set of students, which includes a white American suburban boy and a black African prince, the episode deals with a long-anticipated geology trip and each boy’s encounters along the way. As always, the show does not 280 explicitly draw attention to race, but demands its presence as a structuring force to bolster white American power and moral right. The episode opens with a remarkable show of spectacular racialized violence. Africanized through a mild accent and modified dashiki clothing, Thomas, a young black male, rides through a peaceful suburban neighborhood, only to be accosted by a young white male, Kevin McCauley. Knocking Thomas off of his bike, Kevin assaults him, yet this act is constructed as one generic anti-social act among many committed by a troubled rebellious youth. The individualization of the act and the on-going explanation of a father-son familial conflict powerfully overwrite the political weight of the moment. Racism is summoned up in shocking fashion, especially for a children’s show, only to be dismissed as a red herring. However, this dynamic bears serious representational weight, especially after the televisual catalogue of white-on-black violence broadcast during the Civil Rights struggle. Audiences could easily make a connection of this moment to a larger social problem of America’s brutalization of black male bodies, yet are asked to move quickly past this episode to focus on the peril of the white boy. The violent episode serves only as an indication of how troubled and at-risk this young white American male truly is and motivates the attentions and energies of women and racially Othered characters who must come to his rescue. Playing the role of dutiful son that Kevin will not, Thomas helps Kevin’s father to take in the garbage and engages him in a conversation about geology, an 281 interest that binds them together. This scene paints a progressive picture of sensitive masculinity and patriarchal conformity of surrogate black African son and white American father, yet the show is quite careful not to overvalue African society. White American patriarchy is ultimately restored through the help of the black male, but the African culture that produces a potentially preferable “good” son is ultimately rendered too patriarchal. In order for Thomas to attend the field trip, Andrea must first ask permission from his country’s embassy. In a conversation with Kevin that cements their friendship, Thomas admits that he is having more fun in America than in his homeland, where his parents will not allow him to have any fun at all. This strict childrearing is part of his training as a future ruler of the country. This confession reassures the American audience that its form of childrearing, especially in contrast to the discipline of other countries, is democratic, loving, and ultimately successful, even though it may not always be clear (as in the case of Kevin’s rebellious actions). Working hand-in-hand with America’s abilities to produce superior future leaders, capitalism and commodity culture prevail over other nations in microcosmic examples of national identity. America demonstrates its good production of citizens and young people with initiative through the pleasures of American-styled consumption. As Thomas points out, America is superior because of its hamburgers, pizzas, and ever-present opportunities to play and to purchase entertainment items. Presumably, America’s economics make a productive counterpart to the rigid social 282 and economic systems of the rest of the world. If this favorable comparison holds true, then America need never worry about its position in the world, even if it is caught in a vulnerable moment. As the episode assures its audience, future princes of African countries will always be ready to help America because America has demonstrated its superior, enjoyable way of life. Ultimately, Thomas is compelled to save Kevin from certain death on the field trip when he is treed by a mountain lion. Instinctively, because of his African nature, Thomas knows instinctively how to deal with wild animals and is willing to put this knowledge to work for the less-disciplined, but still-superior American boy. The episode concludes with Kevin’s reassurance by Andrea who, once aware of the dangerous situation, arrives on the scene to soothe Kevin. The episode concludes with Kevin’s safe return to his father and Kevin’s reformation as a devoted, obedient son and future patriarch-in-training. As a white American male, Kevin’s position as an infantile citizen motivates a series of ideologically significant outcomes: African resources are activated for his security, white liberated womanhood is re-placed into a nurturing function, and the integrity of and succession within white male patriarchy is restored. This episode, and the Isis series more generally, serves as an instructive lesson on national identity, allegorized through personalized racial and gender dynamics. America, through the powers it grants women and the independence it affords “wounded” white males alike, becomes an effective, seductive cultural 283 presence to other awe-inspired nations. Although white boys can learn from “raced” and/or “foreign” boys, they ultimately will gain dominance in the relationship because of their inheritance of American masculine values and capitalistic superiority. This process of gaining allegiances of other nation’s children, not coincidentally, works in conjunction with a restoration of American patriarchy, rendered “good” though its moderation and its potential to extend beyond national borders to embrace young men across the globe. America’s Model Immigrant: Wonder Woman as an Amazonian-American Citizen With her job in a male-dominated industry and her secret identity sourced in historical/mystical time and space, Diana Prince’s/Wonder Woman’s public sphere empowerment and her “ethnic” identifications parallel that of Andrea Thomas’s/Isis’s. Like Isis, Wonder Woman is able to transform herself from the workday world of her occupation as a government worker to become a superheroic force. Calling upon the powers of her homeland, Paradise Island, removed from real time and space, Wonder Woman evokes supernatural powers through her Amazonian origins in order to restore America’s security and strength. A completely unverifiable space, Wonder Woman’s homeland becomes even more abstract than Isis’s mythical Egyptian past. This abstraction both conjures up racial/ethnic exoticism while safely removing it from real countries. By framing Paradise Island in this way, America is rescued time and time again by a beautiful, powerful female “immigrant,” but not by 284 a foreign power that would expose America’s increasing reliance on global cooperation in the 1970s. Instead, the all-woman Amazonian island produces a fantasy origin myth, linking America to an appropriately progressive female empowerment and acknowledging globalism, while maintaining America’s hegemonic status and its myths of self-reliance and independence. The flexibility of liminal fantasy spaces such as Paradise Island serves the needs of America in its search for a national identity in the Seventies. Part of American-ness depends upon America’s advanced gender politics and its distance from other powerful nations who oppress their own citizenry and other nations. Wonder Woman repeatedly points out the injustices women face at the hands of foreign societies, then praises the American way of life and its gender politics. This proved particularly successful in the original ABC series, The New Original Wonder Woman (1975-77), which was set in the 1940s. Preoccupied with World War II upheavals, the series often identified Nazi Germany as the true oppressors of womankind, contrasting this political regime to America’s. Clearly, 1970s America was not experiencing the threats of Hitler’s regime, yet the TV series evoked the historical timeframe of the original 1940s comic book. This historical setting not only presented a nostalgic set piece for America’s benevolent and long-running embrace of liberated women, but also carefully delineated liberal white Americans from deadly, overly white Europeans. 285 Unlike Nazi women, Wonder Woman’s womanly strength can never fully derive from an overtly white racial source. As Richard Dyer illustrates in White, the very source of white power evokes feelings of death and terror in the white subject. Whiteness’s absence of sexual desire, lack of physicality and presence—elements that ideologically elevate it above all other racial identities—produce anxieties about what whiteness can(not) signify on a representational and material plane. In order to manage the horrific underbelly of whiteness, representations of whiteness obsessively evoke comparisons between “extreme whiteness,” as “exceptional, excessive, marked” in contrast to “ordinary whiteness,” which then becomes normal, healthy, and positive. 44 Powerful Nazi women, as “extreme” whites, excise the concerns about white American colonizing power, as embodied by Wonder Woman. Her “ordinary” whiteness exists in opposition to “extreme” whiteness, which necessarily “functions in relation to the ordinary, is even perhaps a condition of establishing whiteness as ordinary.” 45 Vanquishing the evil whiteness of Nazis, Wonder Woman champions America’s superiority and extends her patriotism and belief in equality under American democracy to an argument for women’s empowerment. This position supercedes the ethnic/racial problems of whiteness. According to the various speeches she offers her Nazi foes, Wonder Woman sees women as inherently powerful beings who will join forces across national boundaries in sisterly solidarity, defeating fascism through a color-blind mentality of gendered bonds. Nazi women 286 can never achieve this global place of liberation until they, like American women, are freed from fascism, which, in its masculine constraints, denies gender difference and women’s powerful femininity. The sexism, not the racism, of Nazism is revealed as the real problem, which can be amended by the gendered liberations of America. Nowhere is this more evident than in “Fausta, the Nazi Wonder Woman.” In this episode, Wonder Woman encounters her equal in Fausta, a brilliant yet ruthless pawn of Nazi Germany. Unlike Wonder Woman’s natural superiority that originates in the Amazonian space of Paradise Island and finds a welcoming home in America, Fausta’s false empowerment comes through an attachment to brutal Nazi men and their racist, extreme whiteness. She rises through the ranks of the Nazi army, only to find that she must adhere to a masculine standard of mindless conformity, which also includes taking orders from unworthy male superiors. After the Nazis capture Wonder Woman, she is interrogated, not for the top- secret American government information she potentially possesses, but for the source of her incredible powers. These female powers presumably prove more threatening to the Nazi regime than American military power. Blinded by his masculine pride and arrogant superiority, the male Nazi Commander fails to understand the means of communicating successfully with Wonder Woman; Fausta alone, the only other woman in the room, knows to use Wonder Woman’s golden lasso to gain truthful, reliable information. This knowledge proves the essential identity of and bonds between women, in which race/racism plays no role. In the interrogation scene, the 287 Nazi Commander, either misinterpreting or fearful of Fausta’s singular abilities to understand Wonder Woman’s abilities, accuses Fausta of challenging his authority. Fausta responds, “I have no desire to usurp your authority. As long as the Fatherland benefits, I don’t care who gets the credit.” This womanly devotion to the nation, beyond the petty quibbling and bureaucratic posturing of male authorities, parallels Wonder Woman’s own relationship to America. Yet, unlike Wonder Woman, Fausta is driven only by her desire to fight for “the Fatherland,” a patriarchal, “extreme” white state. Fausta’s bad nationalism blinds her to her own abilities, compels her to act according to masculine standards, and places her under the overbearing command of sexist male superiors. Unlike America’s relationship to its women, Nazi Germany does not permit Fausta gender empowerment and autonomy. In fact, the sexism of Nazi men prevents them from understanding and defeating their American foes, as represented by their failure to interrogate Wonder Woman successfully. The Nazi Commander asks Wonder Women where she comes from and she tells him that she comes from Paradise Island. Incredulous, with his voice rising to a high-pitched squeal, he asks, “Paradise Island?!?! And this is on the map?” When Wonder Woman informs him that Paradise Island does not appear on any map, he interprets this response as a deliberate lie. Of course the audience and Fausta know better; the nationspace of Wonder Woman is quite real, but like her distinctly female empowerment, it falls outside of the sexist understanding of Nazi men who cannot imagine a female-run 288 nation. Again, Fausta alone knows to treat Wonder Woman’s claims of her homeland seriously, asking her about the source of her strength. Wonder Woman responds by calling upon the idyllic homeland of women warriors and woman-centered culture: “On Paradise Island, there are only women. Because of this pure environment, we are able to develop our minds and our physical skills unhampered by masculine destructiveness.” The Commander, threatened by this response, demands that she stop, denounces her story as “utter rubbish,” and directly addresses Fausta, asking her, “Can’t you see she is trying to make fools out of us?!” For the first time, Fausta coldly contradicts the Commander, telling him that Wonder Woman forwards an “interesting theory.” This vision of womanly solidarity and “true”/pure female sources of strength, removed from the authoritarian control of men—which is distanced conveniently from American culture and displaced onto the fascism and the corresponding blind sexism of Nazism—is the catalyst for converting powerful womanhood on a global scale to the superior way of American life. This vision of America is articulated by, improved upon, and secured by an immigrant to America who willingly uses her superior womanly abilities for the good of the nation. Wonder Woman’s outsider status proves America’s democratic embrace of all people, and its abilities to “let” its women perform important duties independent from male control, converting a potentially dangerous all-female “foreign” society into a benevolent force. In order to accomplish this progressive picture of America within an international frame, 289 Paradise Island must be envisioned as a real space (as attested to by Wonder Woman’s concrete details of its advanced culture), yet as an unverifiable nation (it cannot be mapped, therefore it can never pose a threat to America’s bid for control over all other nations). Wonder Woman chastises Fausta for her blind race/national loyalty and urges her to unleash her inherent feminine strength and join in the sisterly and, not coincidentally, American fight for democracy. After Wonder Woman escapes, rescues love interest/co-worker Steve Trevor, and is recaptured by Fausta, the real problems of Nazism come into focus. Unlike America, Nazi Germany’s nationalism depends upon the subjection of its women, who are not allowed to express their natural feminine capabilities. After Fausta traps Wonder Woman and Steve in an electrified water pit, she realizes that the Commander will usurp her victory, claiming that his invention of the water trap makes him as the true hero of the capture. Wonder Woman asks Fausta, “[N]ow do you see your true enemies? Now do you see how little you mean to them?” This appeal, which conflates sexism with Nazism—again positioning American sexism as unthinkable (since America is using all of its military resources, including a powerful superwoman, to battle the evils of Nazism)—finally empowers Fausta. Discarding her incorrect national allegiances, Fausta converts her womanly strength to an all-female effort that, in spite of its representation as a womanly alliance that crosses the “manmade” boundaries of nations, ultimately works in service of an American military victory. Together, 290 Wonder Woman and Fausta use their martial arts abilities to physically overpower the Nazis, rescue Steve, and escape from the Nazi prison. As the series constantly reminds viewers, ethnic attachments lead to fascism, which then leads to the annihilation of gender differences, which then leads to a diminishment of women’s powers. Though never overtly stated, this chain of events leads to the unspeakable social trauma of the Holocaust, as alluded to the historical setting of Nazi Germany. In place of this visible insistence of ultra-whiteness and its devastating gender politics, Wonder Woman offers, diegetically, to the world and, extradiegetically, to American audiences, an American model of female power. This idealization of equity, fostered under the ideological system of democratic inclusion and fairness, allows women their femininity and their inherent powers, presumably granted by their status as American women whose white racial status is a non-issue. Racial ideologies are made invisible in America and white women are freed from the unhealthy ethnic obsessions experienced by Nazi Germany’s white women. America’s color-blind racial politics work in tandem with the nation’s abilities to preserve femininity and to forward the progress of women without sacrificing their essential “female” identities. This all-American womanhood is credited with saving America from degradation at the hands of its enemies and from falling into similar patterns of hatred and ethnic violence. Because of America’s willingness to allow women their racially innocent, feminine empowerment, America gains superior nation status. 291 Later, once the series was picked up by CBS and became The Return of Wonder Woman (1977-1979), the series moved to the present time of the mid-1970s. This contemporary setting provides Diana Prince increased occupational autonomy and prestige, granting her a promotion that makes her Steve Trevor Jr.’s workplace equal. Unlike the original series and the distance it worked to create between 1940s Nazi Germany and America, the updated series promoted American culture on its own terms. It repeatedly evoked a version of white American culture, popular during the Seventies, that celebrated California beach and entertainment culture. 46 In several episodes, such as “My Teenage Idol is Missing,” “Amazon Hot Wax,” “The Deadly Dolphin,” and “Skateboard Wiz,” Diana demonstrates her professional prestige and personal empowerment by traveling to California to cut a record album, to save dolphins used to sabotage oil tankers in the Pacific Ocean, and to skateboard through the scenic, sunny world of Southern California beach communities. This move to the laid-back culture of 1970s California situates Diana Prince/Wonder Woman far from the negative racial implications of her white empowerment and the project of colonizing the world in the name of American democracy. With its modern outlook, California suits her growing independence while effectively de-ethnicizing and de- politicizing Wonder Woman as a figure of all-powerful white superiority. The space of California carries with it significant histories and significations of immigration, race relations, and the promise of modernity/reinvention of self. Mike Davis understands the significance of Los Angeles as a Californian space 292 through its “construction/interpretation of the city myth, which enters the material landscape as a design for speculation and domination.” 47 Los Angeles’s city myth, as a place of fantasies fulfilled and unbounded opportunity for improvement and success, produces a space that is “infinitely envisioned.” 48 That is to say, L.A. depends upon a regional self-production that works primarily as an image, a fantasy made real. This fantasy is a complex one that relies upon a simultaneous expression of dystopian and utopian elements or the balance between “sunshine or noir,” as Davis identifies it. 49 It wholly depends upon racial subjugation, personal and political corruption, and immigrant labor forces, yet must disavow these material foundations in its fantasy image. As an immigrant to America, Wonder Woman expresses a ethnic/racial presence within California, yet even as she introduces these troubling terms, she masks them through her interactions with California’s idealistic opportunities for pleasure, potential stardom, and leisure pursuits, which are presumably available to all. Foundations of modern California culture were built upon a fantasy of its urban spaces, astoundingly enough, as a “refuge from the ‘immigrant problems’ that plagued other cities.” 50 In Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight, Eric Avila documents the historical drive to constitute L.A.’s city myth as an all-white urban ideal. In the founding of the city, “officials concocted elaborate but ultimately ineffective ‘Americanization programs’ to minimize the region’s social and cultural diversity.” 51 This fantasy of white escape from other races proved enduring, even 293 during radical demographic shifts in the decades since its founding and initial growth. As post-WWII economics brought an influx of non-white workers, primarily black Americans, into the area, the spatialization of the city became more intense. At this point, the increased suburbanization of Los Angeles became the haven for white culture, which pushed outside of the urban center, to include Orange County and beach areas. This white flight, in order to sustain the founding city myth an all-white refuge, created a split between “chocolate cities” and “vanilla suburbs.” 52 Through her activities staged on the beaches of Southern California and in the spaces of its culture industry (e.g. recording booths, Hollywood sets, Malibu and the Hollywood Hills, and record launch parties), Wonder Woman reconstitutes this vision of an all-white California, yet masks the racial implications of this city myth through the “progressive” activities these spaces afford women. These particular California spaces stage the abilities—swimming, skateboarding, singing, and, of course, fighting criminals—that save Americans through Diana’s intellectual acumen and Wonder Woman’s physical feats. As an immigrant from a foreign land, Wonder Woman’s/Diana’s presence in California threatens to overturn the all-white city myth of Southern California by revealing its clear reliance upon ethnic/racial/national immigrants for their labor force and multi-cultural contributions. However, this particular immigrant proves idealized, not only fitting into the white spaces of Southern California, but also ensuring the betterment of its fundamental ideological forces: democracy, capitalism, and cultural institutions. Her affiliation with 294 California simultaneously underscores and Americanizes her troubling status as an Amazonian ethnic immigrant. Much like Isis, Wonder Woman’s “foreign” status, when transposed onto American culture, works to defend innocent (white) Americans. In the case of Wonder Woman, her efforts align with the foundational myths of Southern California, specifically to affirm its status as “the nation’s ‘white spot,’” and to help fabricate a post-WWII segregated L.A. cityspace that constructs a “mythic space for the construction of a new ‘white city.’” 53 Feminist Media Activism and Media’s Liberated Woman: Formulating America’s “Imagined Community” Although unlikely companions in the project of nation-building, feminist activism and popular media representations of feminism proved central in the reconceptualization of America during a particularly turbulent period in its history. Feminism helped rebuild an image of America that accommodated a new sense of gender and proved a visible sign of America’s progressive politics and culture. Conversely, in order to formulate national coherence, feminists used American ideals of inclusion and fairness to press for their equitable representation in media, an activist strategy that envisioned a unification of women across the country. In the interconnections between media and feminism, whether inaugurated by feminist groups or by media industries, expressions of women’s liberation formulated a version of American nationhood through “imagined communities.” This conceptualization of nationhood, as theorized by Benedict Anderson, is constructed 295 not according to material connections among people, but through imagined connections among citizens. Popular media play a crucial role within the construction and maintenance of imagined communities. People’s daily rituals of interacting with nationally transmitted media (e.g. reading the morning paper, watching television) provide them with “complete confidence in their steady, anonymous, simultaneous activity” with other, unseen citizens throughout larger communities, which then builds cultural coherence necessary for nationhood. 54 During the 1970s, feminism performed vital linking among disparate individuals and charted the progress and cohesion of a nation through its function as an “imagined community” aided by and transmitted across media lines. The material practices of engagement with popular media make concrete the abstraction of national identity, and citizens are “continually reassured that the imagined world is visibly rooted in everyday life.” 55 Feminists felt that they could unite women across the nation through their television viewing practices and their eventual rejection of the sexist images they saw onscreen. Media industries also turned to the image of the liberated woman onscreen to provide a coherent national identity within a context of international and domestic challenges to the foundational racial and gendered terms of America. Mediated representations of feminism masked the troubling failures of Americanism, its domestic traumas, and the dependence upon and possible inferiority to other nations, reassuring the American citizen of a viable relationship to the nation. 296 However productive representations of feminism via the liberated woman seemed, it is equally important to consider the failures of the imagined community and to consider the continuing influence of differences—regional and ideological— among Americans. Certainly the terms of the unifying representation of the Americanized liberated woman, as in the case of Isis and Wonder Woman, relied upon a conventional sense of Othering. As Patrice Petro argues, “the ‘new’ or ‘modern woman’ was never simply an emancipated woman or protofeminist icon but always (and simultaneously) a national racial ideal.” 56 While representations of liberated women promised a vision of a coherent America, they did so through an idealization of a very racially and sexually specific type of woman that marginalized other American identities. Finally, the material realities of women within specific regions of America challenged feminists’ attempts to rally women around a nationwide movement. The shortcomings and successes of “America” as imagined through its liberated women and feminists, reveal the need for a theorization of nationalism and gender that accounts for the particular regional contexts that influence media reception and alter the significations of a universalized national imaginary. 297 Notes 1 See, for instance, discussions of quality programming and TV’s industrial shift in Erik Barnouw, “ Elder,” Tube of Plenty, 2 nd Ed. (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1990): 341-490 and MTM “Quality Television,” Eds. Jane Feuer et. al (London: BFI, 1984). 2 “TV’s Super Women,” Time 22 Nov. 1976: 67. 3 “TV’s Super Women” 68. 4 “TV’s Super Women” 68. 5 “TV’s Super Women” 68. 6 Fran Pollner, “Turn On, Tune In and Take Over,” off our backs (31 Oct. 1972): 2. 7 Steven D. Classen, Watching Jim Crow: The Struggles over Mississippi TV, 1955-1969 (Durham: Duke UP 2004) 2. 8 “TV: Do Minorities Rule?” Newsweek (2 June 1975): 78. 9 Candy, “TV & Women,” The Great Speckled Bird (20 Nov. 1972): 16. 10 Pollner 4. 11 Pollner 4. 12 Glenda Jones, “Our Vision and How It Failed,” Women: A Journal of Liberation (1972): 56. 13 Jones 56. 14 Susan Jacoby, “Women’s Lib Plays in Peoria,” Saturday Review (February 8, 1975): 10. 15 Shalmon Bertnstein and Angela Wilson, “Emporium, Pa. Pop. 3,074: ‘Land of the Endless Mountains,’” Ms. (April 1975): 70+. Gail Godwin, “The Southern Belle,” Ms. (July 1975) 4:1 49+. Marguerite Michaels, “The New Feminism on Main Street,” Time 20 March 1972: 32. 16 Michaels 32. 17 Michaels 32. 18 Qtd. in Michaels 32. 298 19 Qtd. in Michaels 32. 20 Qtd. in Michaels 32. 21 Qtd. in Michaels 32. 22 Qtd. in Michaels 32. 23 Qtd. in Michaels 32. 24 Vivian Cadden, “‘Women’s Lib? I’ve Seen It on TV” Redbook (Feb. 1972): 96. 25 Ernest Pascucci, “Intimate (Tele)visions,” Architecture of the Everyday Eds. Steven Harris and Deborah Berke (New York: Princeton Architectural, 1997) 46. 26 Pascucci 46. 27 Qtd. in Jacoby 10. 28 Jacoby 11. 29 Jacoby 11. 30 Qtd. in Jacoby 11. 31 Qtd. in Jacoby 11. 32 Alice Echols, Daring to be Bad: Radical Feminism in America 1967-1975 (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P 1989): 284. 33 Echols 16, 15. 34 As Echols points out, cultural feminism did share some common ground with radical feminism in its critique of the fundamental private sphere arrangements of sexuality, family, and divisions of labor. However, cultural feminism, in its “mature” expressions of the mid- 70s and beyond, had become a separatist movement that, unlike radical feminism, did not seek to challenge the capitalist structure of the male-dominated public sphere. Echols distinguishes between the two groups as follows: “[R]adical feminists were typically social constructionists who wanted to render gender irrelevant, while cultural feminists were generally essentials who sought to celebrate femaleness. Thus we find radical feminists mobilizing women on the basis of their similarity to men and cultural feminists organizing women around the principle of female difference.” Echols 6. 35 I refer here to Mary Beth Haralovich’s study of I Spy and message of American superiority during the Cold War. Haralovich identifies the utopian anti-racist relationship of Robert 299 Culp and Bill Cosby as an international ambassadorship that, within the diegesis, persuades citizens of other countries that America deserves to dominate the globe. Race becomes yet another weapon in the U.S.’s Cold War arsenal, employing a rhetoric of civil rights to demonstrate that the United States is superior to Communist countries, while defending itself against charges of racism. See Mary Beth Haralovich, “I Spy’s ‘Living Postcards’: The Geo- Politics of Civil Rights.” Eds. Mary Beth Haralovich and Lauren Rabinovitz, Television, History, and American Culture (Duke: Duke UP, 1999): 98-119. 36 Lauren Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (Durham: Duke UP, 1997) 6. 37 Clearly, the most obvious real-world manifestation of this endangered citizen and protective measures come in the form of challenges to legal abortion. See Berlant, especially Chapter 3: “America, ‘Fat,’ the Fetus.” 38 Berlant 6. 39 Berlant 6. 40 Melani McAlister, Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, and U.S. Interests in the Middle East, 1945-2000 (Berkeley: U of California P, 2001): 126. 41 McAlister 154. 42 For a discussion of this process in the case of Tut, see McAlister, pages 148-154. 43 McAlister 145. 44 Richard Dyer, White (London: Routledge, 1997): 222. 45 Dyer 222. 46 Several contemporary programs capitalize on this California craze, including Charlie’s Angels, Police Woman, Get Christie Love!, and The Bionic Woman. Popular consumer products, such as Sunkist and its “Good Vibrations” marketing campaign, sold themselves primarily through an explicit connection to California beach culture. 47 Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (New York: Vintage, 1992): 23. 48 Davis 23. 49 Davis uses these terms to describe a contradictory, yet simultaneous state of understanding Los Angeles. It serves as the title of City of Quartz’s Chapter One (Davis 17-97). 300 50 Eric Avila, Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight: Fear and Fantasy in Suburban Los Angeles (Berkeley: U of California P, 2004): 20. 51 Avila 20. 52 Avila 21. 53 Avila 66. 54 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, 2 nd Ed. (London: Verso, 1991): 26. 55 Anderson 35-36. 56 Patrice Petro, “The Hottentot and the Blonde Venus,” Aftershocks of the New: Feminism and Film History (New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2002): 148. 301 Conclusion The 1980s: The End of the Liberated Woman? At the beginning of the 1980s, concurrent with the election of Ronald Reagan to the U.S. Presidency, the liberated woman as a national symbol, cultural imaginary, media image, and productive source of media industries’ improvements no longer proved necessary. Effectively displacing mainstream media’s uncertain embrace of the liberated woman, Reaganite culture and politics formulated iconographies of gender, sexuality, and race that proved viable, productive, and amenable to foundational ideologies of Americanism and patriarchy. Unlike its 1970s turn to feminism and the troubling “ruptures” it posed to fundamental representational systems, the no-nonsense masculinity and Americanism of the 1980s proved a more hospitable image for hegemonic systems of subjectivity, geography, and representational logic. Feminists, aware of this shift, articulated their perspectives on the era as something to be endured. Typical of feminists’ outlook on the Eighties, a 1981 off our backs article decisively declares “Reagan’s victory devastating for women.” 1 In an even more succinct assessment of the decade, in her memoir of her life as a feminist activist, Sheila Tobias pointedly titles one chapter “Surviving the 80s.” 2 But beyond the obvious gendered image prevalent during the 80s, fostered through the “machismo that Reaganism consciously played to,” the era’s articulation of masculinity brought with it particular, nuanced terms of visibility that effectively 302 reversed the cultural, geographical, economic, national imaginaries produced by the liberated woman figure of the 1970s. 3 The Turn from Therapy By the 1980s, therapeutic culture became suspect, in large part because of its feminized emphasis on feelings, inwardness, and contemplation. Within media constructions of Reaganite culture, material accumulation, action, and heroic/stoic masculinity replaced the therapeutic ethos of the 1970s. Nowhere was this more evident than in Jimmy Carter’s public Presidential image. Carter’s downfall came about due to the public perception of his “soft,” feelings-oriented policies, personal life, and public persona. Typical of popular media coverage of these aspects, a 1977 Vogue article titled “Jimmy Carter…and Women” featured Carter as a man mindful of women’s plight through his personal relationships with strong female family members and whose “sensitivity to the needs of women depends on his life-long experience of them.” 4 In the portrait accompanying the Vogue article, Carter is photographed surrounded by his mother, wife and daughter. In the visual logic of the picture, Carter’s physical proximity to the women and their domination of the photographic space renders him reliant and dependent upon their influence. 5 Carter understood gendered oppression in nuanced, materially based, and regionally specific terms. This perspective not only threatened to undermine ideologies of American equality and national unification, but also illustrated the responsibilities men could and should feel towards women living and working within 303 a patriarchal culture. This understanding became a point of identification for Carter, which he expresses in a personal understanding of and compassion for women’s disempowerment: “‘As one who comes from a family and a region where almost all the women work, at least in one job, I understand the special discrimination that has hurt women for so long in this country.’” 6 Carter’s emotional perspective on women, as evidenced in media coverage of his “appreciation and empathy” of his wife, daughter, and mother, proved a liability in his public image, not only for the value he placed on women, but also for the therapeutic framework of emotional outreach he used to express it. Reagan’s corrections to Carter’s Presidency became conceptualized in gendered terms, typically as a rejection of the emotional, empathetic outlook and the feminized “weakness” associated with the cultural turn from patriarchal standards of masculinity. As an allegorical figure for the ills of a culture negatively influenced by feminism and therapeutic leanings, Carter figured as an indecisive and weak leader who could not command respect from other nations or from Americans themselves. Carter was so interested in investigations of the therapeutic that he invited Christopher Lasch, author of The Culture of Narcissism, to the White House for dinner and a discussion of his theories. According to feminist historian and psychoanalytic scholar Mari Jo Buhle’s interpretation of the event, this exchange helped to bring about Carter’s downfall and paved the way for Reagan’s and Reaganite culture’s ascendancy: 304 Although the historian John Demos cherished “the picture of Mr. and Mrs. Carter and Professor Lasch sitting around the table in some homey corner of the White House discussing narcissism,” the majority of Americans did not. The president’s subsequent speech on the “national malaise” proved a political disaster. Resurgent Republicans, from neoconservative Jewish intellectuals to evangelical Protestant spellbinders, took Carter’s televised address as an admission of the failure of secular, oversexed, self-indulgent liberalism, which in their view only a mixture of military outlay, welfare cuts, and patriotic rectitude could remedy. 7 Revitalizing Media Industries, Saving America: “Hard Body” Masculinity After a period of experimentation during the late-1960s through the 1970s that included “improved” representations of women and racial and sexual minorities, Hollywood film definitively resolved its post-studio system uncertainties with the blockbuster, a genre that featured action-driven plots and male heroism. The “incoherent text,” as film scholar Robin Wood identifies it, prevailed during the 1970s, a “period when the dominant ideology almost disintegrated.” 8 By the 1980s, this incoherence gave way to nostalgia, fantasy, and childish films that “paper[ed] the cracks” of cultural and political uncertainty, and reestablished patriarchy and heterosexuality in an “era of recuperation and reaction.” 9 Originating in the mid-to- late-70s, the ideological and economic terms of the blockbuster were perfected in the 1980s. 10 The fantasies of these films were primarily those of reconstructing the “failures” of the 1960s-1970s, including Vietnam, the fissures in patriarchal authority, and the perception of women’s and racial minorities’ growing empowerment. 305 Reagan’s media image proved vital to the rejection of the incoherent texts of the 70s. A powerful media figure, Reagan drew upon his Hollywood career and borrowed from narratives and characterization of his own movies to reformulate masculinity and the political arena. Reagan’s relationship to Hollywood masculinity offered him “a secure frame of reference in the insecure world he now found himself in, and it was the prime source of anecdotes,” which he used to build his public image and foster new scripts of gender, sexuality, and American citizenry. 11 With Reagan’s election, a new figure appeared on the representational scene and promised to consolidate the nation and guarantee domination over other nations. Unlike the female superheroism of the Seventies, which promised to do the same, masculinity proved a more effective, uncomplicated tool by which to express American might and right. The liberated woman of the 1970s became what Susan Jeffords has termed the male “hard body” of the 1980s. 12 By constructing an American nationalism through gendered, sexual, and raced terms, the Hollywood hard body, evidenced in action-adventure films of the 80s offered a “sense of social cohesion” 13 The hard body male “portrayed many of the same narratives of heroism, success, achievement, toughness, strength, and ‘good old Americanness’ that made the Reagan Revolution possible.” 14 Highly successful Hollywood action movies (e.g. the series/franchises of Rambo, Terminator, Die Hard, Lethal Weapon) featured male hard bodies that “won” Vietnam, “resolved” American race relations, and “corrected” gender confusions. These figures accomplished this primarily by dividing race and 306 gender according to strict, oppositional delineations between the “soft body”—“the errant body containing sexually transmitted disease, immorality, illegal chemicals, ‘laziness,’ and endangered fetuses”—and the “normative body that enveloped strength, labor, determination, loyalty, and courage […] that was to come to stand as the emblem of the Reagan philosophies, politics, and economics.” 15 A Return to the Rural and a New Urban Landscape Television’s top network programs of the 1980s, in many respects, signaled a return to the “hayseed programming” of 1960s. Trading on ideologies of simplistic country folk and their loyalties to patriarchy, Christian morality, and conventional family life, shows such as The Dukes of Hazzard and Little House on the Prairie placed consistently within Nielsen’s top ten programs of the early 80s. 16 Hollywood films of the 80s also returned to the rural, staging gender dramas and conflicts within small town, “Middle American” settings. In doing so, they called upon the ideological assumptions about these geographies and their provincial attitudes to justify onscreen violence against women (Urban Cowboy, 1980), to authorize men’s infidelity and to model unwavering faithfulness on the part of their wives (Terms of Endearment, 1983), and to rewrite America’s painful racist histories through nostalgic tales of women’s struggles to save the family farm and/or the family itself (Places in the Heart, 1984). Television did retain its interest in urban settings. However, unlike the 1970s version of TV’s urban locations that signaled relevance by representing issues of 307 racism and economic difficulties, 1980s urban locations became a showplace for visible, excessive wealth and capitalist fantasies. With highly popular programs set in glamorized, big city, corporate worlds (Dallas, Falcon Crest, Dynasty, L.A. Law, and Knots Landing), television turned to fantasies of consumerism to mark its distance from the “problems” of race and gender represented in Seventies television programming. 17 Media Feminism, 1980s Style: The Yuppie Woman and the Working Woman In spite of a shift away from the liberated woman, mediated images of feminism never disappeared wholly in post-70s media. Rather, the energies of gender liberation became largely subsumed under the domain of an accelerated consumerist culture. The media creations of the “yuppie woman” and the “working woman” replaced the “liberated woman.” These new permutations of liberated womanhood were placed within a world of endless consumerist possibilities/achievements and self-improvement, which also translated into consumption. Just as Reaganite culture affected the representations of masculinity in action films, it produced fantasies of consumerism upon which television capitalized. Jane Feuer, like Jeffords, identifies Reagan’s relationship to popular media as fundamental in the sweeping success of his political and cultural restructuring of America during the 1980s. In Seeing through the Eighties, she identifies Reagan as the “ultimate media-constructed image of the time” and, as such, a figure who shaped the content of television through “the fantasies of unlimited wealth and unlimited visual pleasure that came into office with 308 him.” 18 The capitalist fantasies formulated by and through popular media, including TV and print journalism, centered around a key central figure of the 1980s: the yuppie. Feuer identifies the primary, gendered traits of the yuppie as follows: 1. Career obsessiveness, especially for women. But unlike the 1950s corporate culture, work for baby boomers has to be personally meaningful. 2. A busy life. Yuppies are always busy, so that just as work becomes personal, personal life becomes work… 3. Emphasis on the two-career childless couple… 4. Materialism expressed in home decoration, food, and restaurant culture. 5. Physical fitness as work. 6. Equality for women; sensitivity for men. 19 The nearly impossible standards of appearance and consumerist knowledge that the yuppie figure demanded positioned women under a new lens of scrutiny and surveillance. These exacting standards either pressed women to conform to a new concern with home, embodiment, and happiness or to experience frustrated, psychologically burdened states of anxiety and guilt, and a lack of “real” fulfillment. Television was quick to explore these possibilities, most notably in the series thirtysomething, in which “yuppie culture is deeply contradictory.” 20 This was especially for women, who, in spite of the modern drive of yuppie-ism, were re- situated in conventionally feminine ways. Charged with the labors of appropriate consumerism and faced with the responsibility of sustaining the family (or with not having one), the yuppie woman’s “contradictory” desires and emotions were expressed as happiness in a life filled with beautiful objects and enhanced by 309 elevated consumerism, but also as guilt about a rejection or embrace of motherhood and anxiety about what constitutes proper domesticity. Feuer investigates a thirtysomething episode in which Hope, the primary female protagonist, encounters this very problem of conflictual yuppie femininity and the complex politics surrounding the yuppie woman figure. Hope, wanting to keep her weekend free to pursue her own interests, “refuse[s] to play mommy” to her friends’ immature needs and also declines to host a Thanksgiving dinner for these same friends who constitute her extended family. She, along with the audience, learns a valuable lesson about having it all as a yuppie woman, after realizing that “these goals [having her own time and hosting Thanksgiving dinner versus nurturing everybody involved] prove to be mutually obtainable.” 21 As Feuer explains it, “this was not your mother’s Thanksgiving dinner; rather it was a sixties-inspired tribal dream of a new kind of family constituted by a circle of friends. This utopian reconfiguration of the nuclear family around a chosen family has been a part of the yuppie dream at least since The Big Chill.” 22 Although Feuer locates the “progressive” ideological possibilities of this scenario that provide “an alternative to the Reagan era’s glorification of the traditional family,” the burden of this utopian possibility still falls upon the yuppie mother figure. 23 A companionate figure contemporary to the yuppie woman, the working woman was an equally powerful and complex figure of female empowerment. Representing the goals of liberal feminism, the working woman fit into the culture of 310 consumption through her outward display of public sphere success. This externalization of success made for an ideal, media-friendly figure of representation that addressed women, compelled them to participate in capitalism, and pushed them to compete with other women for an approximation of “masculine” success. 24 Typified by films such as Working Girl (1988) and Baby Boom (1987), the working woman figure also addressed male audience desires. In the case of Baby Boom, successful working woman J.C. Wiatt (Diane Keaton), in spite of her powerful status within the working world and her masculine sexual drives (self- sufficiency, “selfishness,” and a lack of romantic intuition/needs), comes to understand her true fulfillment after adopting a child, running a successful jam- making business, and finding romance with a rugged Vermont man. Even more complex than this updated back-to-the-kitchen romance, Working Girl instructs women on how to gain public sphere power without compromising their real power: feminine heterosexual appeals. In the world after feminism, the modes of representing women’s sexuality were altered and limited, at least to politically conscious audience members. The “successful” working woman, in her drive to dress and present herself appropriately, served as a complex manifestation of a woman’s “to-be-looked-at-ness” concealed within the rhetorical appeals of a narrative generated by a woman’s progress and upward mobility. Tess McGill (Melanie Griffith) patterns herself after her working woman boss Katharine Parker (Sigourney Weaver). The film features the working woman’s version of the Cinderella 311 transformation story, in which Tess learns to assume the professional speech, behaviors, and appearance of an upper-class career woman. However, the film is careful to reassure the audience that, unlike the masculine and calculating Katharine, Tess is an updated version of a “true” woman, enjoying the best of both the public and private spheres. With a “head for business and a bod for sin,” Tess is a working woman whom the camera “captures” in a candid moment vacuuming in black lace lingerie and high heels, and, even after a promotion to a corner office, needs her lunch packed for her by boyfriend Jack Trainer (Harrison Ford). Within the world of television, the crime-fighting police woman (e.g. Angie Dickinson), the woman on the urban street (e.g. Christie Love), and the overtly political figure (e.g. Maude) was replaced by the working woman, which Anna Gough-Yates identifies in “the power-dressed and business-like assertiveness of characters such as Sue Ellen and Pam from Dallas (1978-81) or Krystle and Alexis in Dynasty (1981-89).” 25 Unlike the mediated public sphere politics of the 70s liberated woman, the 80s working woman “reflected a general Zeitgeist for women’s self-improvement.” 26 As much as these women expressed themselves within the world of business and possessed public sphere power, Barbara Ehrenreich’s critical perspective on this figure reveals a distinctive difference between feminist politics and the possibilities/goals of the working woman. Published in 1978, Ehrenreich’s “Combat in the Media Zone” identified the seeds of the cultural shift that would take full effect by the 80s. Replacing the politics of media’s liberated woman, who 312 expressed feminist politics, albeit it in mediated terms, the working woman’s “self- improvement” ultimately compromised her political efficacy: “Unlike her militant predecessor, the media’s New Woman is never aggressive (only ‘assertive’).” 27 The industrial state of television played a fundamental role in the establishing the importance and centrality of the 1980s working woman figure. Unlike the reliance on network broadcasting of previous decades, the 1980s saw the rise of cable TV , narrowcasting to more minutely identified demographics, and the widespread use of VCRs. These technologies shifted television’s sense of audience address and the range and types of programming they could produce. No longer confined to network television’s “hybrid series,” a term used by Jackie Byars and Eileen Meehan to describe primetime programs that “blended elements of serial melodrama into traditionally male genres” to capture women and men viewers alike, cable television could produce programs specifically directed to wage-earning women. 28 With narrowcasting and a guaranteed niche audience of working women, programs could represent the working woman figure and, in the process, divert the energies of feminism into expressions of lucrative female consumerism. Or, as Jane Feuer describes it, “bourgeois feminism” “could be sold to a ‘select’ audience as programs for ‘working women,’ thereby avoiding the ‘F’ word.” 29 The Scholarly Stakes of Mediated Feminisms, Past, Present, and Future… Even within the 1980s, a period of intense conservativism, feminism proved important for media industries and the ongoing revision of their products. In some 313 respects, the onscreen yuppie woman and working woman were similar to the liberated woman of the 1970s, but their energies were managed to a different degree. This ongoing engagement with feminism suggests that, rather than a straightforward “backlash” as theorized by Susan Faludi—which has become a popular explanatory narrative about the radical shifts in gender politics from the 70s to the 80s— feminism continued and continues still to influence mainstream culture and to operate as a viable media force. 30 More importantly, the ongoing negotiations of feminism and popular media in the 1970s, the 1980s, and beyond reveal the continued need for feminist scholarship, in spite of the current anxieties about the professional viability of conducting such scholarship and the larger cultural perception of a “postfeminist” age. 31 Although a historically and culturally specific figure, the liberated woman holds valuable insights beyond her moment. She reveals the techniques by which media, in its never-ending drive to engage with disruptive, yet desirable cultural forces, fears, contends with, and embraces social discontent and revolutionary politics. By understanding these methods, feminists today—as did their 1970s counterparts—can exploit mainstream media’s dependence upon them to formulate improved representations, to announce their cultural presence and power, and to reach successfully a larger community of women. 314 Notes 1 Allegra, “Reagan’s Victory Devastating for Women,” off our backs 30 June 1981 Gender Watch, Proquest, U of Southern California, USC Libraries, 11 Nov. 2006 <http://proquest.umi.com/>. 2 Sheila Tobias, Faces of Feminism: An Activist’s Reflections on the Women’s Movement. (Boulder: Westview, 1997): 242. 3 Tobias 242. 4 “Jimmy Carter…and Women,” Vogue Jan. 1977: 108. 5 This perception was a widespread one. Numerous contemporary and retrospective accounts of Carter’s Presidency vilify him for relying on the advice of wife Rosalynn. 6 Qtd. in “Jimmy Carter…” 108. 7 Mari Jo Buhle, Feminism and Its Discontents: A Century of Struggle with Psychoanalysis (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1998) 304. 8 Robin Wood, Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan (New York: Columbia UP, 2003) 69. 9 Wood 162. 10 Histories of the blockbuster and “New Hollywood” have gained relatively recent popularity within media studies. For examples of this type of scholarship, see: Steve Neale and Murray Smith, eds., Contemporary Hollywood Cinema (London: Routledge, 1998); Justin Wyatt, High Concept: Movies and Marketing in Hollywood (Austin: U of Texas P, 1994); and Julian Stringer, ed. Movie Blockbusters (London: Routledge 2003). 11 Susan Jeffords, Hard Bodies: Hollywood Masculinity in the Reagan Era (New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1994): 4. 12 Jeffords coins this term in Hard Bodies. Jeffords 13. 13 Jeffords 19. 14 Jeffords 15. 15 Jeffords 24-25. 16 According to Nielsen ratings, Dukes of Hazzard placed #9 (1979-1980), #3 (1980-1981), and #8 (1981-1982); Little House on the Prairie placed #16 (1979-1980) and #9 (1980- 1981). <http://www.nielsenmedia.com> 315 17 These programs proved lucrative to network television. In the Nielsen ratings, Dallas ranked #1 and/or #2 for several seasons (1980-1984) and ranked in the top 20 throughout the 1980s, Falcon Crest placed #10 (1981-1982) and #8 (1982-1983) and stayed in the top 20 through 1985; Dynasty placed #5 (1982-1983) and #5 (1983-1984) and stayed in the top 20 through 1986; Knots Landing placed #11 (1983-1984) and stayed in the top 20 through 1986. <http://www.nielsenmedia.com> 18 Feuer 1. 19 Feuer 51. 20 Feuer 77. 21 Feuer 76. 22 Feuer 76. 23 Feuer 76. 24 I am thinking here of John Malloy’s Women’s Dress for Success, a best-selling style manual that micromanaged the details of a woman’s garment and appearance, evoked comparisons to male standards of business dress, and encouraged judgment of other female workplace competitors to see how well they measured up to the single, exacting standard of appearance. 25 Anna Gough-Yates, “Angels in Chains? Feminism, Femininity and Consumer Culture in Charlie’s Angels,” Action TV: Tough Guys, Smooth Operators and Foxy Chicks, ed. Bill Osgerby and Anna Gough-Yates (London: Routledge, 2001) 96. 26 Gough-Yates 96. 27 Barbara Ehrenreich, “Combat in the Media Zone,” Seven Days 10 Mar. 1973: 13. 28 Jackie Byars and Eileen R. Meehan, “Once in a Lifetime: Constructing ‘The Working Woman’ through Cable Narrowcasting,” Television: The Critical View, 6 th ed. ed. Horace Newcomb (New York: Oxford UP, 2000) 151. 29 Feuer 54. 30 In her highly influential book, Backlash, Susan Faludi proposes that feminist gains are always met with an equally strong anti-feminist force. While a highly persuasive concept, the dramatic pendulum swing between feminism and anti-feminism may not be as clear-cut or as dramatic as Faludi proposes. Regardless, backlash, when theorized as so complete and all-powerful, threatens to become a point of political paralysis for feminists. 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Asset Metadata

Creator Clark, Jennifer Susanne (author)

Core Title Mapping feminism: representing women's liberation in 1970s popular media

School School of Cinema-Television

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Cinema-Television (Critical Studies)

Publication Date 04/28/2007

Defense Date 12/11/2006

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag 1970s Women's Liberation Movement,film,Geography,OAI-PMH Harvest,popular media,Television,therapeutic culture

Language English

Advisor Polan, Dana (committee chair), McPherson, Tara (committee member), Modleski, Tania (committee member)

Creator Email jennifsc@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-m470

Unique identifier UC1176518

Identifier etd-Clark-20070428 (filename),usctheses-m40 (legacy collection record id),usctheses-c127-499125 (legacy record id),usctheses-m470 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-Clark-20070428.pdf

Dmrecord 499125

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Clark, Jennifer Susanne

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Repository Name Libraries, University of Southern California

Repository Location Los Angeles, California

Repository Email cisadmin@lib.usc.edu