Timothy, Robyn 
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0003-5955-8746
(2024)
Working title: Queering the housewife: failures of femininity in The Real Housewives of New York City.
In:
Routledge Companion on Gender and the Family.
Routledge
(In Press)
Abstract
This chapter seeks to examine the production of gender roles in the Bravo reality TV series The Real Housewives of New York City (seasons 1-15). Specifically, this research aims to use a textual analysis methodology to explore how the construction of the housewife identity is shaped and reshaped through a series of failures of femininity. To do this, I will draw on Halberstam’s (2011) work around ‘the queer art of failure’ to make visible the ways in which capitalism and heteronormativity are central to the construction of the housewife as a specifically gendered role within the family dynamic. Through understanding The Real Housewives of New York City with queer theory it is possible to demonstrate how notions of gender and the family are socially and culturally produced, highlighting how these norms and values are fluid and unstable rather than natural and rigid. An analysis of The Real Housewives of New York City offers an understanding of how gender within a contemporary media landscape is both contextual and constructed and contributes to the reproduction of wider social structures. In this sense the chapter will explain how The Real Housewives of New York City challenges traditional notions of gender and the housewife through complex failures of normative femininity. This chapter, and the research more broadly, will be interdisciplinary drawing on sociology, cultural studies, and feminist media studies.
| Item Type: | Book Section |
|---|---|
| Status: | In Press |
| Subjects: | H Social Sciences > H Social Sciences (General) H Social Sciences > HM Sociology H Social Sciences > HQ The family. Marriage. Woman |
| School/Department: | York Business School |
| URI: | https://ray.yorksj.ac.uk/id/eprint/11483 |
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