Serial housewives: the feminist resistance of The Real Housewives’ matrixial structure

Abstract

Featuring wealth, glamour and excess, The Real Housewives (Bravo, 2006—) has been frequently slammed for its reinforcing of hierarchical gender and class distinctions, promotion of capitalist values and perpetuation of social stereotypes. Though not denying the fact that the series possesses a dominant hegemonic tone, this paper contends that the show’s structure conceals subversive instances that undermine the very normativity the show perpetuates. The paper will analyse the form by which the seven installments of the franchise are aired—read as a matrixial configuration—arguing that reading the franchise’s televisual form engenders a reinterpretation of the narratives’ representations of feminine performance. This work will thus suggest that the structure of the series promotes feminist resistance by creating textual disorder that has the potential to disrupt not only narrative but also patriarchal order.

Notes

1. Created by Scott Dunlop. 2006—. US: Bravo.

2. The Real Housewives franchise can be categorized as a docusoap, ‘a reality format that combines observational documentary techniques with serial narrative techniques of soap opera’ (Hill 2005, 23).

3. See Wilhelm (2013) and Lee and Moscowitz (2013).

4. See Cox and Proffitt (2012); Lee and Moscowitz (2013); Lauren Squires (2014); Silverman (2015).

5. Though not all cast members are literally ‘housewives,’ insofar as some of them work outside the home, the show bears a domestic focus. Lieber (2013) notes that The Real Housewives’ ‘narrative arcs [focus] on the trials and tribulations of marriage, motherhood, and female friendship’ (114).

6. According to a press release from Bravo, ‘building off the success of the original series “The Real Housewives of Orange County”, Bravo is heading to the big apple for its newest installment, “The Real Housewives of New York City”. The series will feature an elite and powerful set of New York socialites as they juggle their careers and home lives with busy calendars packed with charity fund-raising galas, the social whirl of the Hamptons, and interviews for elite private schools’ (Futon Critic 2008).

7. The Real Housewives’ matrix form presents a structure distinguished from Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s model of the rhizome ([1980] 2003), as the conceptualization of the rhizome addresses the model’s lack of causality or genealogy and stresses that its disorder is effected in every direction, whereas the matrix’ textual disorder stems from the configuration of its airing schedule, and reading it from different angles (rather than according to the order of original airing dates) may yield different interpretations.

8. See Linda Williams for a discussion of the vertical and horizontal axes of television melodrama (2012).

9. As my work will focus on textual analysis, it will not be analysing issues pertaining to reception space, target and actual audiences, viewing practices, or production mechanisms.

10. A preview special of the New York City installment was aired in January, some two months before the rest of the season started running.

11. As was the case with Orange County’s ninth season and New York City’s sixth.

12. Reruns are also interlaced in between new episodes in varying schedules throughout the week.

13. Lieber (2013) contextualizes the franchise as part of a tradition of fiction aimed at women.

14. According to John Fiske, the genre’s ‘infinitely extended middle means that soap operas are never in a state of equilibrium, but their world is one of perpetual disturbance and threat’ (1987, 180).

15. Allen (1985) notes that the move to television forced the genre of soap opera into ‘“opening up” its textual structure.’ This opening up, he adds ‘allows for reader negotiation and reader resistance to its normative perspective’ (179).

16. This echoes Allen’s articulation that the soap opera is ‘a living organism […] which grows by regular increments to enormous proportions’ (77).

17. By way of Bill Nichols, Misha Kavka and Amy West suggest that all reality television is ‘confined to playing out a “perpetual now”’ (2004, 137).

18. One would assume that airing the New York preview special immediately following the Orange County finale stems from production’s desire to lure in Orange County viewers to watch the New York show, but once the two were thusly joined, they essentially turned into two incarnations of a common media entity.

19. During the first half of the season, episodes of the Orange County installments came in between the two as well, and the three installments aired Sundays (New Jersey), Mondays (New York) and Tuesdays (Orange County) throughout June and July of 2012.

20. Kuhn notes that ‘performance is an activity that connotes pretense, dissimulation, “putting on an act”, assuming a role. In other words, in the notion of performance a distance of some sort is implied between the “act” and the “real self” concealed behind it. Performance proposes a subject which is at once both fixed in, and called into question by, this very distinction between assumed persona and authentic self. Performance, in other words, poses the possibility of a mutable self, of a fluid subjectivity’ (Kuhn 1997, 200).

21. According to Coles (2000), docusoaps’ ‘narrative structure often uses editing to draw parallels between associated themes and propose resolutions […] intercut to produce comparisons’ (34). The matrixial narrative structure of The Real Housewives, I would like to propose, draws parallels between the various ‘housewives,’ across installments and not only within episodes.

22. ‘Performing one’s gender wrong initiates a set of punishments both obvious and indirect, and performing it well provides the reassurance that there is an essentialism of gender identity after all. That this reassurance is so easily displaced by anxiety, that culture so readily punishes or marginalizes those who fail to perform the illusion of gender essentialism should be sign enough that on some level there is social knowledge that the truth or falsity of gender is only socially compelled and in no sense ontologically necessitated’ (Butler 1988, 528).

23. See Lee and Moscowitz for an elaborate discussion of de Lesseps’ characterization.

24. Though Lee and Moscowitz (2013) address only the New York installment, many of their analyses are relevant to the franchise as a whole, most certainly in terms of the text’s often conscious scapegoating and mockery of cast members, specifically pertaining to those ‘who transgress the traditional gender roles of supportive friend, nurturing mother, doting wife, and ceaseless caretaker’ (65).

25. The show birthed ‘sister’ shows outside the US, as well as many spinoffs starring cast members.

26. Bradley Schauer (2007) notes that in a cinematic franchise, the cumulative nature of a character’s design makes it more ‘three-dimensional’ for those familiar with the codes and conventions of the franchise, while ‘critics and the average moviegoer see cardboard stereotypes’ (199). The Real Housewives’ matrix carries a similarly cumulative value that works to complicate representations, although critics and viewers who are not well acquainted with the franchise as a whole may only see depictions of superficial stereotypes.