Feminist analysis of women's role in the film Desperate Housewives
Journal: Region - Educational Research and Reviews DOI: 10.32629/rerr.v5i4.1414
Abstract
Desperate Housewives, an American sitcom aired in 2004, takes American housewives as the theme, sets in the middle-class area of Wisteria Lane, and tracks the lives of four housewives with different personalities, Susan, Lynette, Bree and Gabrielle, following the plight they face: all kinds of pressures in life, and the contradiction between the shackles of tradition and the demands for independence and freedom of modern women, which make these housewives almost desperate. In this paper, the reasons for the female plight in the context of the times will be analyzed, and feminism in Desperate Housewives will be explored based on intersectionality theory, feminist media study theory, and post-feminism. Finally, the female plight hidden in the opening animation will be analyzed through multimodal theory.
Keywords
feminism media study theory; intersectionality theory; post-feminism; Desperate Housewives
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[2] Scott J. 2018. Life at the top in America isn't just better, it's longer. The Inequality Reader. Routledge, 614-621.
[3] Veblen T. 2005. The theory of the leisure class: an economic study of institutions. Aakar Books.
[4] Davis K. 2008. Intersectionality as buzzword: a sociology of science perspective on what makes a feminist theory successful. Feminist Theory, 9(1):67-85.
[5] 2013. The Routledge Companion to Media & Gender. Routledge.
[6] Johnson-Odim C, Mba NE. 1997. For Women and the Nation: Funmilayo Ransome-kuti of Nigeria. University of Illinois Press.
[7] Beltrán MC. 2002. The Hollywood Latina body as site of social struggle: media constructions of stardom and Jennifer Lopez's "Crossover butt". Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 19:71–86.
[8] Mastro DE, Behm-Morawitz E. 2005. Latino representations on primetime television. Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, 82(1):110-127.
[9] Loughrin SM. 2015. Queer Chicano Families: the importance of converging literature on queer families, Chicano families, and Chicano queers. Sociology Compass, 9(3):224-234.
[10] Degirmenci N, Kaya B. 2018. The socio-political status of women in the zeitgeist of Recep Vedk films as a reflection of neo-lberal turkey. DOI:10.17361/UHIVE.
[11] 2018. Feminist Approaches to Media Theory and Research. Springer.
[12] Wiesner CR. 2021. The feminist war on crime: the unexpected role of women's liberation in mass incarceration by Aya Gruber. Feminist Formations, 33(1):279-282.
[13] Whelehan I. 2000. Overloaded: Popular Culture and the Future of Feminism.
[14] Hill L. 2010. Gender and genre: situating Desperate Housewives. Journal of Popular Film & Television, 38(4):162-169.
[15] Johnson L, Lloyd J. 2004. Sentenced to Everyday Life: Feminism and the Housewife. Berg.
[16] O' Halloran KL. 2011. Multimodal discourse analysis. Companion to Discourse. London and New York: Continuum.
[17] Friedan B. 2010. The Feminine Mystique. WW Norton & Company.
[18] Brooks A. 2002. Postfeminisms: Feminism, Cultural Theory and Cultural Forms.
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