Southern belles and southern buildings: The built environment as text and context in designing women

Abstract

In Designing Women, a situation comedy that chronicles a female‐owned and ‐operated Atlanta interior design firm, a Victorian house, functionally reconstituted as studio and store, signifies a track of contemporary American cultural issues—the interrelated meanings of work, gender, and the South—that frame the series' narrative discourse, aesthetic text, and ideological framework. This article argues that Designing Women exploits shared but stereotyped signs and symbols—the house as a model of domesticity and the city as a signifier of regionalism—that allow Americans to communicate architectonically. Constructs of sense of place and meaning of place are blurred, fostering an assimilation of Southern heritage into a larger North American culture. Designing Women's architectural imagery serves hegemonic ends, suggesting that television's imagistic use of the built environment mirrors a consensus narrative of traditional American senses of place and space.