Page 81 - Living Room Wars Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

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Melodramatic identifications: television

fiction and women’s fantasy

During the 1980s, American popular television fiction offered an array of strong and
independent female heroines who seemed to defy—not without conflicts and
contradictions, to be sure—stereotypical definitions of femininity. Heroines such as
Maddie Hayes (Moonlighting) and Christine Cagney (Cagney and Lacey) did not fit into
the traditional ways in which female characters have generally been represented in prime-
time television fiction: passive and powerless, on the one hand, and sexual objects for
men, on the other.
Christine Cagney, especially, and her partner Mary-Beth Lacey, are the kind of
heroines who have mobilized approval from feminists (see D’Acci 1987; Clark 1990).
Cagney and Lacey can be called a ‘social realist’ series, in which the personal and
professional dilemmas of modern working women are dealt with in a serious and
‘realistic’ way. Cagney explicitly resists sexual objectification by her male colleagues,
forcefully challenges the male hierarchy at work, and entertains an adult, respectful and
caring friendship with her ‘buddy’ Lacey.
Maddie Hayes is a little more difficult to evaluate in straightforward feminist terms.
However, while she often has to cope with the all-but-abusive, but ever-so-magnetic
machismo of her recalcitrant partner David Addison, Moonlighting, as a typical example
of postmodernist television, self-consciously addresses, enacts and acknowledges
metonymically the pleasures and pains of the ongoing ‘battle between the sexes’ in the
context of the series’ characteristic penchant for hilarious absurdism and teasing parody
(see Olsen 1987). In that battle, Maddie is neither passive nor always the loser: she fights
and gains respect (and love) in the process.
Many women have enjoyed watching series such as Cagney and Lacey and
Moonlighting, and it is likely that at least part of their pleasure was related to the
‘positive’ representations of women that both series offer. But this does not mean that
other, more ‘traditional’ television fictions are less pleasurable for large numbers of
women. On the contrary, as is well known, soap operas have traditionally been the female
television genre, while prime-time soaps such as Dallas and Dynasty have always had a
significantly larger female audience than a male one.
Personally, I have often been moved by Sue Ellen of Dallas as much as I am at times
by Christine Cagney. And yet, Sue Ellen is a radically different heroine from Cagney: she
displays very little (will for) independence, she derives her identity almost entirely from
being the wife of the unscrupulous and power-obsessed J.R.Ewing, whom she detests
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because he is never faithful, but whom she does not have the strength to leave. As a
consequence, Sue Ellen’s life is dominated by constant frustration and suffering—