"Good Girls, Bad Girls, and Motorcycles" (Alicia Skipper)

1950’s sitcoms became a means of coping with a world in which women were ill equipped to change
June Cleaver, Donna Stone, even situation comedies like One Day at a Time and Alice…these independent women are not thriving or prosperous without a male counterpart

Representations of single motherhood on television are few and far between- even less are unwed mothers, regardless of the fact that they are clearly present in the population…And the gap between THEORY and PRACTICE prevails… why is that these days film theory seems to represent a paradigm that has shifted? Why doesn’t it seem as applicable and poignant as it once was?
Despite the changing face of the American family, television shows still insist upon representing the traditional American family unit with a mother and a father…

MUST READ LISA JOHNSON: “ Portraying women as either domesticated victims of male patriarchy or angry man-hating feminists doesn’t permit the nuances of real women’s lives to continue to come into clear view, just as assumptions that single women who long to be married must be ‘unfeminist’ obscures a more complete picture of contemporary women’s psyches” (pg 83 “Good Girls, Bad Girls, and Motorcycles”)

As of late I have been having an immensely difficult time attempting to reconcile with these concepts. Unfortunately, I feel myself becoming increasingly skeptical of the foundations upon which the film theory that I have been so personally invested in is founded upon. In the context of academics it seems to ring true but when applied to the situation of real life, of real people, of my life, of my experiences, it feels so contrived. There is a blatant disconnect that I can’t ignore anymore… I feel like feminist discourses are stuck, they seem to be still so invested in notions that were prevalent in the 50’s and 60’s but have since changed and it seems the fundamentalist approach that the subject seems to require doesn’t allow for the recognition of that change…

The binaries of feminist and anti-feminist seem archaic, I believe that now more than ever the notion of gender and sexuality as a spectrum is being embraced… What does it mean to be a contemporary feminist? What space am I supposed to occupy, as a heterosexual upper class white female, within this discourse? It’s becoming increasingly obvious to me that there might not be one…