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It Takes a Classless, Heteronormative Utopian Village: Gilmore Girls and the Problem of Postfeminism
Danielle M. Stern
a a

Department of Communication, Christopher Newport University, Newport News, Virginia, USA Version of record first published: 16 Aug 2012

To cite this article: Danielle M. Stern (2012): It Takes a Classless, Heteronormative Utopian Village: Gilmore Girls and the Problem of Postfeminism, The Communication Review, 15:3, 167-186 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10714421.2012.702005

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The Communication Review, 15:167186, 2012 Copyright Taylor & Francis Group, LLC ISSN: 1071-4421 print/1547-7487 online DOI: 10.1080/10714421.2012.702005

It Takes a Classless, Heteronormative Utopian Village: Gilmore Girls and the Problem of Postfeminism
DANIELLE M. STERN
Department of Communication, Christopher Newport University, Newport News, Virginia, USA

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Just as the television industry faces pressure to maintain competitiveness in an increasingly fragmented market, feminist scholarship faces its own imperatives to stay relevant among conicting denitions of feminism and identity in the study of media texts. Through an intersectional analysis of family narratives on the popular television series Gilmore Girls, the author demonstrates how the programs utopian, postfeminist ideology reects a narrow vision of family that excludes the diverse body of feminisms today. Specically, the author identies 3 intersecting narrative strategies in Gilmore Girls as representative of the postfeminist effect on popular culture: heteronormative sensibility, upward class mobility, and post-race relations. By interrogating the gendered, classed, and raced contradictions in the seriesas well as in academic arguments aboutGilmore Girls, the author provides an example of how critical intersectionality can expose and break down normative ideals of the family in popular culture and reinvigorate feminist scholarship. Beginning in the 1990s, cultural studies took a turn toward womens resistance and empowerment through the rhetoric of agency. According to Riordan (2001), a problem arose regarding the appropriation of these issues into mainstream popular culture, including television:
One specic concern is that women may feel empowered at the individual level, without any compulsion to act as a collective body . . . the
Address correspondence to Danielle M. Stern, Department of Communication, Christopher Newport University, 1 Avenue of the Arts, Newport News, VA 23606, USA. E-mail: danielle.stern@cnu.edu

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rhetoric of empowerment contributes to rearticulating dominant patriarchal and capitalist values, while not substantially disrupting power relations (p. 282).

Riordan identied third-wave feminists as experts in cultural production and consumption (p. 284) who grew up in the electronic era. Through representations on television and in other popular media, this generation witnessed women achieving power through their appearance and sexuality. This sexual power is often identied with capturing male affection. Further, this normalized heterosexual desire has been closely linked to consumption practices (Dow, 1996; Sender, 2004). American televisions proclivity for recreating narratives of heterosexual fairytale endings in order to boost viewer satisfaction to likewise increase consumption is important to analyze given the mediums contribution to the collective conscious of viewers (Lotz, 2006) as well as identity formation. The identity politics implicated by televisual feminism rests in the success of postfeminist ideology. Postfeminist ideology supposes that secondwave feminist gains in the workplace and other realms have eliminated the need for an organized political movement against sexism. As such, personal choices and struggles in the private and public spheres have taken center stage. Postfeminists may argue that women have carved an empowered space in the popular culture landscape, but the recreation of the same stories of femininity and heterosexual love, as well as narrow representations of class and race, continue to complicate feminist identities on the small screen. This illusion of feminisms presence on the small screen is described best by Rabinovitz (1999): Television allows for the expression of a feminist critique but represses feminisms potential for radical social change (p. 145). This article is founded upon the feminist understanding that subjectivities are intertwined and cannot be separated into distinct identity categories (hooks, 1984; Press, 1991). Similarly, discourse about feminism cannot be separated from discourse about sexuality, race, class and other identity markers. McCall (2005) dened the complex approach of intersectionality as the relationships among multiple dimensions and modalities of social relations and subject formations (p. 1771). Intersectionality sees identity markers as mutually constitutive (Shields, 2008) and interdependent, in that identities (man/woman, straight/queer, Black/White, middle class/working class) must be understood as dependent on the relationship of marginalities and privilege (Crenshaw, 1989). In the popular culture landscape today, perhaps no image is more ready to be analyzed from an intersectional lens than that of the family. As Douglas (2003) explained, [E]xamination of the family on television may enhance our understanding of life and relations in real families (p. 13). He drew from a number of studies to argue for more research on television families in order to provide a picture of the evolution of the American

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family. Cantor (1991) went one step further by looking to televisual family life for models of acceptable behaviors and moralsto both viewers and the advertisers who pay network bills. Despite portrayals of alternative nonnuclearfamilies and mothers working outside the home prominent on the primetime schedule, many problems persist. The need to please advertisers not only has led to limited feminist progress on television (Dow, 1996; Meehan, 2002) but also to conning, unrealistic discussions of sexuality and class (Press & Strathman, 1993) as they intersect with the family. Gilmore Girls, a television program founded upon class differences and the evolving modern family, praised by critics, audiences, and scholars alike as feminist and forward thinking, offers an exemplary outlet for intersectional feminist critique. This article takes to task the role of the feminist critic argued by Probyn (1997) as moving beyond textual interpretation to interrogate the larger discourse of the re-articulation of the feminine and the home in the name of post-feminism (p. 136). Intersectional analysis of family discourse illuminates the utopian, postfeminist ideology of the popular television series Gilmore Girls as well as its reection of a narrow vision of family that excludes the diverse body of feminisms today. Specically, I identify three intersecting narrative strategies in Gilmore Girls as representative of the postfeminist effect on popular culture: heteronormative sensibility, upward class mobility, and postrace relations. According to Dow (1996), the heuristic value of feminist television criticism rests in its capacity to engage our thinking about the political implications of discursive practice (p. 5). Gilmore Girls rose to popularity during the Bush II, pro-family era. What type of family did audiences nd so powerful and endearing? Moreover, what type of family was excluded from the discourse? This article responds to scholars calls to engage textual criticism beyond the text by incorporating historical and institutional constructions of cultural representation (Lotz & Ross, 2004), in this case the institutional landscape of feminist television criticism. By interrogating the intersection of the gendered, sexed, classed, and raced identity markers in Gilmore Girls, this article provides one example of doing critical intersectionality scholarship as a theoretically grounded, methodological response to postfeminism. Scholars have argued that we inhabit a postfeminist culture, and therefore a postfeminist televisual landscape (Brooks, 1997; Lotz, 2006), that empowers women on the basis of the success of liberal feminist issues such as labor and childcare. However, popular media still has plenty of room for feminist scrutiny because of these representations (Levine, 2008; Tasker & Negra, 2007). The contradictory narratives of so-called family-friendly identities in popular culture today leave little room for feminist role models to emerge. Feminism as an academic and political movement still thrives. However, popular culture often praised as feminist might actually espouse postfeminism and demonstrate less of a need for organized efforts against institutional discrimination based

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on intersecting marginal identities. These limited textual practices may not overtly threaten feminism, but they quietly remind communication and popular culture scholars that the postfeminism of television is anything but after feminism.

INTERSECTING FEMINISM AND THE FAMILY IN ACADEMIC DISCOURSE

More than a decade after Hillary Rodham Clintons bestselling book It Takes A Village stirred controversy among profamily advocates, the inuence of individuals and institutions outside of the family on childrearing is perhaps more controversial than ever, especially considering contemporary discourse on topics such as gay marriage and reform to health care and public aid. In short, Clintons message was that society raises children just as much, if not more than, parents and extended family. Schools, government, extracurricular activities, neighbors and the media are all implicated in raising children today. The successful primetime television dramedy Gilmore Girls brought a ctionalized version of Clintons vision to millions of viewers, as single mother Lorelai Gilmore seemingly relied on neighbors, friends, and estranged family to help raise teenage daughter, Rory. Gilmore Girls became one of the former WB networks successful offerings of familyfriendly fare.1 In 2000, it was the rst network program to be funded by the Family Friendly Programming Forum, a collective of major advertisers, including Proctor & Gamble, aimed at bringing family themes back to the family hour of primetime (Gay, 2001). Although Gilmore Girls usually performed in the bottom fourth of network ratings, it was one of the most successful in the WBs history, averaging around 5 million viewers weekly in the middle of its run (de Moraes, 2007). It has remained a staple on ABC Familys syndicated circuit for years and now airs on the SOAP network. When Gilmore Girls began, Rory, at age 16 years, was the same age Lorelai was when she gave birth to Rory. Despite the absence of a nuclear family, the inclusion of family-friendly narratives surrounding single working mother Lorelai, her afuent parents and precocious daughter, as well as the notable presence of strong role models and father gures for Rory and near absence of sex talk, made Gilmore Girls a complicated mash-up of feminist and postfeminist ideals for seven seasons and 154 episodes. Despite continued arguments that popular culture scholars should seek out multiple modes of investigation (text, audience, institutions), Lotz and Ross explained the value of a complex, layered textual approach to feminist analyses of television:
All but the nal season of Gilmore Girls aired on the WB, when that network merged with UPN to form the CW in 2006.
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[T]extual analyses can be conducted in such a way as to peripherally attend to or be cognizant of the historical and the institutional, and it is this broader awareness of the cultural construction and distribution that becomes characteristic of feminist television criticism (p. 192).

Scholars have examined the popular appeal of Gilmore Girls in various book collections, including chapters on feminism (McCaffrey, 2008; Skipper, 2008) relationships (Manning, 2010), gender (Boyle & Combe, 2008; Nathan, 2010), audience response (Mabry, 2010; Diffrient (2010); SmithRowsey, 2008), race (Chung, 2010) and class (Buckman, 2010). However, the only articles about the program published in academic journals are a linguistic study (Bednarek, 2011) and an analysis of the portrayal of midwifery in a single episode (Kline, 2007). No published studies have explored the complicated intersections of multiple identity markers in the portrayal of single mother and maid-turned-entrepreneur, Lorelai Gilmore, her daughter, Rory, and the many other supporting characters, mostly women, who own businesses in the ctional small town of Stars Hollow. Moreover, as one of the few primetime shows in the 2000s to rarely discuss sex or sexuality, investigation of the heternormative2 narrative implications on the family is needed. Intersectionality affords the most thorough point of departure to examine the complex family politics of Gilmore Girls. Feminists across the humanities and social science disciplines have encouraged scholars to see intersectionality as not only an ontological, categorical framework (McCall, 2005) but as an empirical, paradigmatic method of feminist research (Hancock, 2007; Nash, 2008; Shields, 2008). In short, intersectionality is not just a theory, but also a method of doing research. Just as McKerrow (1998) explained corporeal rhetoric (rhetoric of the body) as an attitude and a method of doing rhetorical studies, intersectionality approaches popular culture representation and discourse with a systematic, critical eye. In its basic form, intersectionality is concerned with the subjectivities of one or more of three major groups, depending on ones methodological approach: (a) audiences who consume popular media, (b) content creators of these popular texts, and (c) the researchers analyzing the cultural forms. The former two approaches have been used most readily within the context of Halls (1980) encoding/decoding model that establishes circuits of meaning based on the experiences and subject positions of producers and audiences.3 The latter approach has been increasingly used in feminist scholarship and autoethnographic approaches, but is gaining ground
2 Heteronormative discourse assumes heterosexuality, and therefore families led by heterosexual parents, as the norm. 3 I do not mean to imply that Hall, nor any researcher using his model, is separated from the method. However, Halls model is expressly concerned with the production and consumption of mediated texts, not the reexive process of researching.

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in media studies (Hills, 2007). This article expands intersectionality as a subjective approach to production, consumption and criticism of texts to the actual text. Regarding the textual spaces of popular culture, intersectionality can explore how intersecting identities in the text are constructed through the narrative mode of popular media, in this case television, and how these narratives represent normative truths that scholars and audiences alike must challenge. The remainder of this article interweaves academic, feminist discourse about Gilmore Girls with textual examples from Gilmore Girls at the series level, rather than the seasonal or episodic level,4 to uncover how the program functions narratively as a heteronormative, classless, mostly White, small-town utopia where the Protestant work ethic and traditional values, specically the nuclear family, prevail.
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IN THE NAME OF THE FATHER: HETERONORMATIVE SMALL-TOWN LIVING

Primetime programs usually situate their characters in glamorous big cities like New York, Los Angeles or Miami, but according to Lotz (2006), modern family-centered dramas take place in small towns or suburban communities, specically New England residences. Gilmore Girls is no exception. According to creator Amy Sherman-Palladino (2003), Stars Hollow, Connecticut, is based on the bedroom community of Washington Depot, Connecticut, a town of about 3,500 in the western part of the state. Throughout the run of the series, 16 small businesses are identied. A third of these are owned and operated by women, including the Independence Inn, where Lorelai worked after leaving home at age 16 years, and later The Dragony, the inn Lorelai opens with her best friend and business partner, Sookie St. James, in Season 4.5 The many woman-owned and operated commercial spaces paint a postfeminist landscape that obscures the gendered implications of where Lorelai and Rory actually spend much of their on-screen time: at Lukes Diner. For example, Gilmore Girls does not historicize or elaborate on the comfortable, happy space cultivated by these businesses. In true, postfeminist style, the program presents the plethora of woman-owned businesses as the norm, absent from the reality of gendered struggles to make small businesses succeed. Although Gilmore Girls
Dow (1996) addressed and used this inductive approach of series as artifact in her multiseries analysis of various primetime programs: [I]t becomes possible to do the kind of close reading that reveals patterns of plot and character, recurring rhetorical strategies, and ultimately, repetitive rhetorical function . . . (p. 22). 5 These include the Independence Inn, Kims Antiques, Miss Pattys Dance Studio (where weekly town meetings are held), Westons Bakery, Gabbys Garage and Gabbys Flowers. By Season 4, the elderly owner (and onetime surrogate grandmother to Rory) Mia sells the Independence Inn, leading the way for Lorelai and Sookie to open The Dragony.
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does address the nancial struggle Lorelai and Sookie face in raising capital to open their own inn, the end result is that money comes through from Lorelais father as well as her friend and sometimes lover, Luke Danes (a textual implication expanded on in the section on class). This is presented as a personal accomplishment, not an institutional problem of the nance industry. In addition, these many woman-centered spaces are side dishes to the main course that is Lukes Diner. The diner is the most prominent small business in Stars Hollow. Many Gilmore Girls scenes include Lorelai and Rory meeting for coffee or burgers and discussing relationships or family issues. The rst scene of the series is tellingLorelai walks into Lukes Diner to meet Rory before school. At one time or another, Luke employs many of the shows secondary characters. Over the years Luke has assumed a surrogate father role for Rory, been a love interest for Lorelai, as well as her Mr. Fix-it.6 This type of modied nuclear family unit, with Luke operating as a father gure to Rory and romantic partner to Lorelai, is not new to primetime television. According to Rabinovitz (1999), feminist sitcoms in the 1970s and 1980s readily dealt with absent fathers by introducing father gures:
Although the father was erased or marginalized in all these cases, the nuclear family was maintained through the regular reinscription of symbolic fathers, patriarchal gures who, although not the legal or biological father of the families, served to authorize the womens positions as simultaneously unmarried/married (p. 146).

Throughout Gilmore Girls run, despite Lorelais sometimes-committed relationships with other men, Luke never wavered as the surrogate father and husband. Many references are made to Lorelai not being able to sustain a long-term relationship because she is either holding out for Christopher Hayden, Lorelais high-school love and Rorys father, to come back into their lives or because her heart belongs to Luke.7 Lukes role as a shadow husband to Lorelai reminds viewers that she is not quite available for mens pleasure and thereby precludes substantial story arcs of a single womans sexual availability. At the same time, Lorelais other almost husband, Christopher, comes in and out of the womens lives
In Season 2s A-Tisket, A-Tasket [2.03], Luke bids on Lorelais picnic lunch basket in a Stars Hollow annual fundraiser. The two eat lunch together and laugh about how Luke saved Lorelai from a number of less worthy suitors. In Season 4, Luke assumes responsibility for moving Rorys belongings to Yale and lends Lorelai $30,000 to complete construction on the Independence Inn. 7 Christopher does occasionally return to Stars Hollow, which makes Luke visibly jealous, especially in Season 6 when he and Lorelai are planning their wedding. Around the same time, Luke learns he has his own adolescent daughter, April, by an ex-girlfriend. The ensuing drama results in a Luke and Lorelai break-up, with Lorelai running into Christophers arms for comfort. In Season 7, the nal season, viewers are nally treated to an exploration of the 6-year-long what-if possibility regarding the union of Lorelai and Christopher, as the two spontaneously marry while on a trip to Paris.
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to build dramatic romantic tension. In the nal season, after series creator Sherman-Palladino stepped down due to contract negotiation disagreements (de Moraes, 2006), the writers and executive producers tried to reclaim audiences with a revisit to the tried-and-true heterosexual love triangle storyline. A number of scholars have described the proliferation of heterosexual desire and concurrent absence of homosexual desire in American media (Lotz, 2001, 2006; Rich, 1980; Sender, 2004; Wilkinson & Kitzinger, 1993). Jane Ussher (1997) described it as the heterosexual romantic dream. Although this article does not argue that Gilmore Girls need to have included a GLBTQ relationship for a primary character or major story arc to claim an empowered televisual feminist presence, the continued reliance on heterosexual desire and privilege does not move the conversation forwardneither in popular culture nor in feminist academic discourse. According to Sherman-Palladino (2003), the character of Luke was originally written as a woman. However, network executives, whom she did not name, said there was a lack of testosterone on the program and strongly encouraged her to add a central male gure. Meehan (2002) explained this type of male-friendly programming on the modern network dial as one of offering seemingly empowered, feminist characters, but only if they do not alienate the male audience. Here, it appears that executives were not only adding testosterone for the sake of male viewers, but also privileging potential romantic narratives. As evidenced by this move as well as the aforementioned love triangle trope,8 it is difcult for feminists in media industries to gain substantial representational ground. The heteronormativity embedded in American broadcast television, while slowly changing, has been the driving force of relational plot development for the majority of the history of network television, especially women-centered programming (Lotz, 2001). More telling is viewer desire for primetime stories devoted to romantic love over family dynamics. In her analysis of online fan comments to Gilmore Girls blogs, Mabry (2010) found that viewers overwhelming focused on Lorelai and Luke storylines compared to plot development between the shows main protagonists, Lorelai and Rory.9 In addition, Manning (2010) analyzed the heavy volume of fan response

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8 While this article privileges the Lorelai plot devices, as her character has been articulated by critics and fans as the ideal postfeminist mom, story lines surrounding the teenage characters sexual choices and their consequences also point to a corrective, heteronormative ideology. For example, Rorys decision to sleep with her married, ex-boyfriend Dean is met with deep disappointment by her mother. Rorys friend Paris is denied an Ivy league admission in the same episode Paris loses her virginity to her boyfriend. Most telling, though, is the immediate pregnancy with twins that results from Lanes rst time having sex with her husband, on their honeymoon. 9 As of March 2008 the Lorelai and Luke thread at TWoP [Television Without Pity] has more than 1,590 pages with more than 23,800 posts, compared with the 117 pages and just over 1,700 responses in the Lorelai and Christopher, Lorelai and Rory, and Lorelai and Emily threads combined. (Mabry, 2010, p. 288)

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to the multiple love triangles involving Rory and Lorelai across 13 different message boards devoted to Gilmore Girls. He found that message board contributors established an emotional connection to the characters, rooted especially in fan desire for Lorelai to nd true love after enduring such personal struggle outside of her love life. The comfort and ease with which audiences can consume normal heterosexual love and lust, and likewise the commercial products associated with this emotion, often preclude nontraditional narratives of desire. As Meehan (2007) explained, understanding the economic imperative is crucial in any critical analysis of popular media. Television executives do their best to recreate storylines and character dynamics that have worked over time (Gitlin, 1983). Producers of popular television would likely not admit that they would not know how to assess the ratings potential of a show without a clear romantic interest for the lead character. Still, it would have been interesting to see how the writers would have created and maintained a woman-operated space as the centerpiece of Gilmore Girls. It is clear that they would have had to work in another male role model and love interest for the show to have had the successful chemistryespecially in advertisers eyesit maintained for 7 years. The next section moves from the already gendered, heteronormative space of Gilmore Girl to its limited class politics.

UPWARD MOBILITY: CLASS IN THE (POST)NUCLEAR FAMILY

Throughout the Gilmore Girls rst three seasons Lorelai functions as a successful inn manager for the inn she once worked for as a maid when she broke off her relationship with her boyfriend and dropped out of high school upon getting pregnant. The series rmly establishes Lorelais decision to not marry Rorys father as her own, despite pressures from both sets of parents. This personal choice rests neatly in the postfeminist politics of individual decision-making separated from institutional constraints, in this case the family and socioeconomics. The message is that Lorelai did not want to ruin Christophers college and career goals, which Lorelai says in various ways on many occasions. Through much hard work and self-determination, Lorelai advanced quickly from unwed teen mom to entrepreneur. While I do not argue against the logic and necessity of working to provide for ones family, nowhere in Gilmore Girls discourse are struggles that millions of single mothers face daily. Press (1991) has argued that televisions exclusion of the real lives of working women normalizes the status quo, which only exacerbates the problem. Scholars have articulated similar arguments regarding portrayals of race and sexuality (Becker, 2006; Gray, 2000). As in other primetime programs centered on single mothers, in Gilmore Girls memories of the welfare and unemployment lines are noticeably absent. Lorelai, determined and hardworking though she may be, has been able to provide a

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solid foundation for Rory in large part because of the kindness of strangers, including the owner of the inn, as well as friends, such as Luke, who has likely saved Lorelai thousands of dollars in home repairs. And while the Clintonian ideal of it taking a village to raise a child is hopeful, the undercurrent of Gilmore Girls narratives is time and again about individual hard work and perseverance. But when hard work does not provide the desired outcome, the ctional utopia of Stars Hollow provides Lorelais estranged, wealthy family to deliver. A recurring theme of socioeconomic difference in Gilmore Girls rests in the foundational plot from the series inception.10 Lorelai symbolically sweeps her pride under the rug and asks her parents for a loan for Rorys private education, which she declares she fully intends to pay back.11 In an argument with her mother, Lorelai exclaims: I worked my way up. I run the place now. I built a life on my own with no help from anyone! [Pilot 1.01]. Lorelais words represent a resounding triumph of the will that contradicts the stories of the Stars Hollow community helping in the success of Lorelais career and Rorys upbringing. Postfeminist individualism takes center stage again. A (post)nuclear family has emerged that appears strikingly similar to the values of the traditional nuclear family. The aforementioned dialogue and plot development highlight the difference between Lorelai and Rorys life in Stars Hollow and that of Lorelais dreams for Rory. No matter how hard Lorelai has worked to provide for her daughter, she does not have the money to provide Rory with a way out of their small town existence. On the surface, this is a rare moment of class warfare played out in a lighthearted way on a television network devoted to young viewers. However, instead of developing this all-too-true struggle, Gilmore Girls takes the easy way out by having Lorelais wealthy parents save the day. In his study of primetime television over a 25-year period, Chesebro (2003) explained that producers have augmented entertaining narratives with persuasive value systems. He dened values as the basis for endorsing

In the pilot, Rory has been accepted to the prestigious Chilton School, a private, expensive academy for the brightest students. However, when Lorelai receives the tuition bill, she thinks twice and calls Chilton to work out a payment plan. When that option fails, Lorelai must turn to her estranged parents, whom she and Rory visit only at holidays, despite living 30 min away. At various times throughout the series Lorelai explains that she wants Rory to have as normal a life as possible, without the pressures that high society and wealth bring to already troubling adolescence, from which Lorelai rebelled and ended up pregnant at 16 years of age. 11 The Gilmores agree, but on one conditionthat Rory and Lorelai join them weekly for Friday night dinners. As Emily explains, Education is the most important thing in the world. Next to family. During the rst of what are to become these regular torture fests for Lorelai, she argues with Emily, after Mr. Gilmore, Richard, talks about the success of Rorys father (who is out in California and visits periodically) and refers to Lorelais place of employment as a motel rather than the more respectable inn. Lorelai tells Emily that she will not tolerate Friday night dinners being used as an opportunity to attack her on a regular basis, especially if the attacks involve comparisons between Christophers success and her own.

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or rejecting experiences and phenomena encouraged in everyday interaction (p. 390). By examining Gilmore Girls as a cultural text situated in a specic place and time, the values promoted and paid for by the Family Friendly Programming Forum provide a particular picture of upwardly mobile postfeminism in the 21st century. According to Chesebro, primetime television series in the mid-to-late 1990sthe period immediately preceding Gilmore Girlsfavored alternatingif not paradoxicalvalue systems of individuality and authority (p. 409). The residents of Stars Hollow clearly contributed to a nontraditional family unit in raising Rory,12 but the unfolding of the text mostly gives sole credit to the hard-working Lorelai for this venture. While audience analysis (Diffrient, 2010) of Gilmore Girls demonstrates fans appreciation of a single mother sacricing her own young ambitions for her daughters livelihood (or rather, life, as the alternative to not keeping her baby is not presented on the series) feminists cannot ignore the fact that most single working mothers do not have the luxury of afuent parents, nor a fairy godmother at a country inn to provide a job and discounted living space when sacrice is not enough. Scholars have explored the juxtaposition of feminist portrayals of women excelling in the workforce against archaic representations of the nuclear family (Press, 1991). Gilmore Girls provides another example of the unscathed nature of the traditional family structure despite womens gains outside the domestic sphere. On one hand, Lorelais single mom status is a disruption to the traditional, nuclear family unit. Upon closer examination, however, the deep pockets13 of the elder Gilmores function as a link to the old world family structure. When combined with the symbolic father and recurring romantic partner who also provides domestic and nancial support to the protagonists, Luke, Lorelais parents solidify a heteronormative family free from any actual worries about debt.

AMERICANIZING THE OTHER: (POST)RACE RELATIONS

In addition to carefree class relations, Stars Hollow residents rarely deal with racial tensions and the lived struggles of ethnic minorities. Throughout
12

Stars Hollow mayor and owner of the town market, Taylor Doose, proclaims following Rorys graduation from Chilton that the Stars Hollow community birthed her from our collective womb [Let the Games Begin 3.08]. 13 When Rory is accepted into Yale, Lorelai decides she must delay putting money down on a bank loan with Sookie to purchase an old property to renovate into an inn. Family, specically Rorys education, takes priority over fullling her individual dream. Hard work is important, but in the fulllment of keeping the family intact. However, this time, Rory goes against her mothers wishes and asks her grandparents for her own loan. They oblige, with the same conditions they did with her mother four years before. In the same episode, Richard surprises Lorelai on her birthday with a check for $75,000 from an investment he made in her name at her birth. She uses it to pay back the Chilton loan, which ceases her and Rorys obligation of Friday night dinners. Emily is furious but able to quickly rebound with Rorys request.

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seven seasons, Gilmore Girls featured only ve non-White primary and recurring characters: Rorys best friend, Lane Kim; Lanes mother, Mrs. Kim; hotel attendant Michel Gerard; mechanic Gypsy; and Oscar, a cook at Lukes Diner. Mrs. Kim is the hardworking immigrant mother, and Lane her rebellious second-generation teenager. The Kims are the only ethnic minorities developed over the course of the series, whereas Michel, Gypsy, and Oscar operate as one-dimensional nondynamic characters. Diffrient (2010) described the latter portrayal as minorities conned to the background (p. xxv). Chung (2010) deftly examined the authenticity and tensions of the Kims Korean and Korean American identities. She explained how the framework of Saids orientalism is:
useful in understanding the logic (or rather, illogic) of Asian representations in Gilmore Girls, which frequently uses minority characters as mere window dressing or as silent witnesses to the main characters quirks.

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As the only ethnic minority character featured in multiple plots and directly connected to major characters story arcs, it is unfortunate that Lane is written as a foil to her to stereotypically overbearing and traditional Korean mother. Lane wants desperately to be a normal, rock-loving, American teenager, but Mrs. Kim does not allow Lane to listen to rock music or date American boys.14 Mrs. Kims role as a Christian Korean woman with strict rules and very conservative dreams for Lane to nd a good Korean husband play into what Chung (2010) argued as mythical ideals (p. 185):
Koreanness, in this context, can be dened as a set of ideals, values and lifestyles that are in direct opposition to the ones denoting or connoting Americanness. For Lane to fully claim her American identity necessitates an escape from Korea, something that she literally and guratively does at various junctures throughout the series (p. 185).

The tensions between the Kims play out as a generational divide of new and old worlds, with small-town America clearly being the mythical ideal to which to aspire. Lane is simply a rebellious teenager striving to be a successful musical artist, unchained from her overbearing, no-frills mother. More relevant to race politics is Lanes efforts to pass as White, or at least, not Asian. Lanes choices rest comfortably in the postfeminist landscape of Stars
14

The irony is that Lane, secretly a drummer in a garage band, ends up marrying Zack, the slacker American lead singer, and becomes pregnant on her honeymoonher rst time having sex. Over the course of the series run, Lane discloses the truth to her mother about being in the band. Mrs. Kim eventually warms up to Zack.

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Hollow, where individuality and personal choices eclipse actual institutional discrimination or geopolitical tensions (Chung, 2010). Although Mrs. Kim is often portrayed as a caricature of an overprotective, immigrant mother, she establishes a balance to Lorelais more relaxed style of parenting and provides another example of hard work triumphing over the hardships faced by many immigrants today. For example, while it is ironic that Lorelai manages and then owns a successful inn but cannot keep her own house clean, Mrs. Kim is very organized and particular about how Lane keeps her room. Mrs. Kim can readily identify the location of any piece of furniture tucked away in a hidden corner of the antique shop she operates out of her home. In addition, Mrs. Kim is known to ground Lane for weeks at a time for what Lorelai considers minor offenses of talking to boys. Moreover, Gilmore Girls sets up Mrs. Kim as the sole disciplinarian by never visually introducing Mr. Kim, though Lane does reference her parents home, plural, on occasion. The absent Mr. Kim and rigid, asexual Mrs. Kim epitomize the denition of hooks (1992) the other. In direct opposition to Mrs. Kims otherness, Lane, appears invisibly White and postracial for the key demographic of Generation Y. According to Banet-Weiser (2007) representational visibility no longer has the same urgency (p. 223) it once claimed. Absence of diversity might alienate minority viewers, or at least vastly misrepresent the rich heritages of the viewing population. However, Banet-Weisers argument about the decreased importance of popularly mediated ethnic visibility connects to postfeminisms tenant that institutional equality has been achieved. Since Generation Y has been raised on a televisual landscape of racial ambiguitywhere, according to Banet-Weiser (2007), White characters can represent all races since essentially were all the same, similar to the postfeminist discourse that gender equality has been achieved in public life. In turn, the underlying message is that we no longer need liberal feminist activism, nor a political movement eliminating institutionalized racism or ethnic discrimination. Stars Hallow is a decidedly postracial and postfeminist town. The more visibly relevant issue, then, is the politics embedded in the characters family lives. What do the postracial politics of Stars Hollow mean culturally? Gilmore Girls does not narratively recognize the intersectionally privileged space occupied by Lorelai. Most teenage single moms are not in a position to rise rapidly from hotel maid to small-business owner. A disturbing antiabortion billboard erected in New Yorks SoHo neighborhood in winter 2011 demonstrates the continued racial divide in public dialogue about race, class, and family. A Black child stands below the words: The Most Dangerous Place For An African American Is In The Womb (Bershad, 2011). The invisible raced privilege of the White teen mom from a wealthy home in Gilmore Girls is especially problematic, considering that the postfeminist protagonists and family of the series have been praised as feminist, though admittedly complicated (Calvin, 2008).

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IMPLICATIONS FOR ACADEMIC FEMINISM

Halfway through the Gilmore Girls run, thenFCC commissioner Kevin Martin (2003) advocated strongly for the networks to create a Family Viewing Hour and applauded the WB for its efforts thus far. It is odd that Martin did not specify what a family viewing hour might look like regarding portrayals of gender or sex, just that it should be something that parents and children could watch together. In turn, limited gender discourse only leads to limited narratives of other identities, including that of the family. For as intersectional scholars (hooks, 1984; Nash, 2008) remind us, marginal identities do not exist in a vacuum. At the same time, according to Harwood and Anderson (2002), the amount of television airtime devoted to specic identity groups (e.g., age, ethnicity, gender) is a direct indicator of that groups vitality in society (p. 83). Analysis of media contentand contextnot only helps explain representations in one program or genre of programming but also provides a backdrop for intergroup relations in society. The absence of discussion of sexuality outside the preferred heterosexual norm in such a popular program aimed at teenagers, young adults and their families, surely does not help advance political discourse regarding sexuality and the family; nor does the lack of honest, multidimensional portrayals of class and race move feminism forward. Had Gilmore Girls recognized the incredibly privileged space occupied by Lorelai and Rory, rather than wrap up plots of economic and relational hardships so easily, this would be an entirely different article. To be clear, narratives of class struggle do surface occasionally for Lorelai, but her dilemmas work out nicely within one or two episodes. Furthermore, when Lorelais lack of nancial wealth becomes problematic in the text, the solution most certainly reafrms her dominant positions of gender, race, and sexuality. With her wealthy parents (or surrogate mother gure in one case) or devoted Luke as her economic saviors, Lorelais participation in and need for the traditional family unit is constantly reestablished. As such, the postfeminism of Gilmore Girls leaves no room for a renegotiation of family values. Hardly any space exists for a single working mom to succeed without the help of a relative or sometimes romantic (heterosexual) partner. While the cultural space of compulsory heterosexuality (Rich, 1980) Gilmore Girls occupied is no different from most other contemporary television programs (Kim et al., 2007), what makes its use of the romantic narrative especially important for feminist analysis is the popular understanding of the text as a decidedly progressive, sometimes feminist, sometimes postfeminist text. The rise of postmodernism and postfeminism has challenged traditional critical devices. While the denition of postfeminism remains contested, feminist media scholars (Arthurs, 2003; Gerhard, 2005; Moseley & Read, 2002; Orr, 1997) have pointed to postfeminist television as that which implies the

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liberal feminism of the second-wave achieved much of its societal goals and that individual women of the small screen are now free to behave as men. According to Orr (1997), postfeminism assumes that the womens movement took care of oppressive institutions, and that now it is up to individual women to make personal choices that simply reinforce those fundamental societal changes (p. 34). Individual happiness and the search for love and friendship, absent larger political and social implications, are all offered up by postfeminist television. Gilmore Girls operates publicly as a postfeminist text, proof that feminism has worked and that hard work and individual sacrice, regardless of historically and culturally specic oppressions of class, gender or race, surely pay off for women. Upon closer critical, feminist , exploration, however, this postfeminist stance of Gilmore Girls actually does more to restrict representations of gender, identity and feminism than it does to open up necessary dialogue. Despite my critique here, there is no denying Gilmore Girls place in viewers hearts as a refreshing model of mothers and daughters as friends rather than a hierarchical family relationship. I am one of the millions of viewers who watched the show week after week not to follow the storylines of the main characters love lives but to absorb the chemistry between Lorelai and Rory. On one hand, Gilmore Girls provided an outlet for escaping the sexually driven or crime-centered primetime dramasand increasingly the outlandish menu of reality programmingthat continue to dominate the evening channel lineup. On the other hand, by nearly eliminating sexual discourse altogether, Gilmore Girls may have helped contribute to a heteronormative understanding of relationships to millions of young viewers. Moreover, relationships were always heterosexual pairings. In sum, when sexual relationships were the rare focus, procreative sex by married couples was the preferred norm (please revisit footnote 8). The audience studies cited earlier demonstrate the ease with which viewers connected to the postfeminist characters of Stars Hollow looking for love and individual accomplishment. Fans have been noted to have seen through the utopian nature of the setting (Diffrient, 2010). However, because audience members posting online embraced the fantasy world rather than challenged it, more critical analysis like the present study is necessary. While this article has provided but a few examples from seven seasons worth of family friendly discourse, these textual devices demonstrate Gilmore Girls role in solidifying the traditional, nuclear, family as the most important social unit. Although the series expanded the family unit beyond the domestic setting most familiar in primetime, Gilmore Girls demonstrated that families can remain intact and thrive despite the pressures of work and a societal movement toward less rigid familial styles. The message is that the nuclear familyand the values and ethics inherent in this modelis still the preferred domestic unit. Sure, the physical family is changing, but certain roles, such as the surrogate father, must be maintained. The illusion of the

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metaphorical nuclear family is in fact still a reality in popular primetime television. The fact that the Stars Hollow residents, most of whom either own or work for small business, could likely not afford to live in a real life Stars Hollow seems irrelevant to viewers all too ready to enter the fantasy land and consume the love triangles. Women have carved spaces in a ctional, classless, nearly raceless environment. Is this progress? Just as the television industry faces pressure to maintain competitiveness in an increasingly fragmented market, feminist scholarship faces its own imperatives to stay relevant among conicting denitions of feminism and identity in the study of popular culture. From the parodies on latenight television of Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin to the morning news coverage of Henry Louis Gates arrest and state referendums on gay marriage, feminist scholars must continue to engage the intersecting, multiple identities within popular culture. Studying just gender, or just race, or just class will not sufce. Feminism has already moved beyond dismantling categorical gender inequalities in practice. The movement must do the same in theory. More textual explorations of intersectionality are necessary to advance feminisms place in popular culture research. Race, class, sexuality, and gender complicate the family politic not just as categorical markers for television audiences to relate to (the goal of the subjective approach of intersectional ethnographic analysis), but as layered narratives of what constitutes family today (the goal of this article toward an intersectional method of analyzing text and narrative). Or rather, the way families would look in an ideal societyfree from class struggle, void of race politics, and impervious to sexuality outside heterosexual, procreative acts. If we continue to televisually idealize the postwar nuclear family, then feminism has failed not only the postwar generation who rst beneted from the second-wave of liberal feminist lobbying but also the current generation who postfeminist ideology might lead to believe that the success of certain second-wave goals precludes the future need for feminist activism. We no more live in a postfeminist society than we do a postracial or postclass society. By breaking down these normative ideals of intersectional family identity in one acclaimed popular culture text using feminism as the theory and intersectionality as the method, I hope I have provided a relevant response to the postfeminist media discourse in a eld in which feminism still matters.

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