Women, Camp, and Popular Culture by Katrin Horn

Author:Katrin Horn
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

3.2 Contemporary TV: Postfeminist Concerns, Queer Readings

The ABC dramedy Desperate Housewives (2004–2012) dismantles, rather than celebrates, the ideals of marriage, family, and content housewives connected to retreatism . It incorporates violent themes such as suicide, murder, and (sexual) abuse into its storylines and thus relocates them from crime shows and major cities to a drama series and the suburbs, the typical scenery of the women’s film (or melodrama ). The melodrama is the Hollywood genre most closely linked to the domestic, feminine, and trivial to explore contemporary cultural issues. It is also a genre historically associated with camp —a connection never more apparent than in the work of Douglas Sirk , icon and iconoclast of 1950s melodrama. Accordingly, Desperate Housewives quotes well-known aspects of Sirk’s iconography, such as the pilot’s deceiving establishing shot which, like the one in All That Heaven Allows (1955, Dir. Douglas Sirk), is as comforting in its inconspicuousness as it is unsettling in its artificiality. Other aspects of Sirk’s distinct style enhance this initial feeling of artificiality, such as the use of mirrors to underline the multiplicity of characters and the importance of playing social roles as opposed to “being” someone, of jarring colors in the mise en scène and costume to provide implicit characterization, and a soundtrack that provides commentary as much as it transports emotions. In combination with Desperate Housewives’ melodramatic storylines and focus on women trapped by social expectations and their own high standards, these stylistic choices create an atmosphere in which camp is used as a distancing device from the moral norms portrayed. The style of the series thereby enables and enhances the show’s “satir[e of] bourgeois domesticity,” which Niall Richardson observes in his reading of Desperate Housewives (160). For Richardson, it is first and foremost the character of Bree van de Kamp (Marcia Cross) through which the series expresses its “feminist politics and […] queer agenda” (157), namely its rejection of postfeminist ideals of natural gender differences, heteronormativity , and celebration of marriage and motherhood . Bree’s “campiness” is achieved by her conscious performance of a retro-femininity evocative of the feminine mystique, yet confronted with and placed in a decisively modern, postfeminist social order. Her flawless, highly stylized appearance, perpetual smile, and embrace of traditional gender roles , contrasted with a rather unfeminine insistence on having things her way, connects her to the camp trope of the high-maintenance diva . This attention to the artifice of her femininity not only contradicts the postfeminist sensibility’s tendency to see gender as a natural bodily property, but also, Richardson claims, tarnishes her heterosexual relationships and their claims to “normality” (167–68).

Richardson’s queer reading employs parts of the same language I have outlined as problematic, namely Bree’s “knowing wink at the audience” (165). Through the show’s sinister tone, however, its “common sense” is explicitly not one of achieved equality and utopian possibilities, but of repressed desires and oppressive structures. Therefore, the effect of irony is decisively different from what McRobbie and Tasker and Negra have found

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