Where the Aunts Are: Family, Feminism, and Kinship in Popular Culture

Introduction: What’s Up with Aunts?

1 INTRODUCTION What’s Up with Aunts? The aunt is a familiar, often well-loved, and sometimes notorious character in popular narratives about family, femininity, and kinship: maternal Aunt Bee from The Andy Griffith Show, matriarchal Aunt Vivian from The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, malevolent Aunt Petunia in the Harry Potter books and movies, breakfast icon Aunt Jemima, eccentric Auntie Mame, and the magical aunts who instruct Sabrina, the Teenage Witch, to name a few. Well-loved aunts are not always well behaved, and, while their small transgressions do not make them feminist revolutionaries, we believe that these intriguing female characters deserve critical attention. Accordingly, this book is a feminist “aunting” foray against the force of conventional ideologies about femininity, mothering, family, and domestic life in popular media narratives . We will examine how popular aunt characters afford us both critical insights into the limits of prevailing cultural norms and hopeful re-visions of gendered justice in everyday life. After all, we live in a postfeminist culture, a culture where many people believe we have achieved equality and self-determination for all women, regardless of race, class, or sexuality. Yet we labor under impossible ideals of perfect motherhood, the cultural pathologization of single womanhood, intersecting oppressions based in sex, race, 2 WHERE THE AUNTS ARE class, and other social and material differences, and social and legal discrimination against families that cannot enact the nuclear family norm. Our popular culture landscape is dominated by neotraditional gender ideologies that call women back to inequitable roles and ambitions in the name of individual empowerment, romantic love, and the inevitability of maternal urges. These ideologies are especially visible in the ubiquitous domestic narratives available across popular entertainment media, including television, film, websites, popular fiction books, and even marketing images. In many of these narratives, aunts play secondary but vital roles seemingly as complicit characters in the conventional stories of family life. Seen from one angle, aunts in recent mainstream popular culture are conservative characters. However, from a critical feminist perspective, these same figures are surprisingly unconventional and progressive—they surreptitiously transgress the cultural norms with which they seemingly comply. In other words, aunts prove to be “double agents” in popular narratives about family, femininity, and culture because, while they conform, they also subtly call into question social and cultural conventions and ideologies. This “double agent” status requires a feminist “re-visioning.”1 Our analysis focuses on aunt characters in mainstream media because these figures imaginatively “embody” the aunt in stereotypic, readily recognizable, and broadly familiar performances that offer a visible and accessible focus for feminist critique. But we are critical of the ways their narrative performances reproduce what have been called “postfeminist” discourses of femininity, choice, individualism, and the end of feminism. Nonetheless, we have faith in popular culture aunts as perceptive guides to alternative ways of understanding and doing gendered lives: these figures inspire us to recognize multiple possibilities for feminine identity and domestic life. Given ongoing public discussions over glass ceilings and wage inequities, violence against women, changing family configurations,2 women’s reproductive rights, alternative arrangements and sexualities in marriage and parenting,3 and the fate of feminism,4 it is timely to offer a hopeful, progressive, and concrete feminist re-vision of women’s possibilities in the guise of a familiar family figure: the aunt. The figure of the aunt INTRODUCTION: WHAT’S UP WITH AUNTS? 3 in popular culture provides us with productive sites—even political rallying points—for advancing social justice. Here’s why: the aunt may exceed or transgress normative feminine roles—an aunt character can be more maternal than the mother or a living enactment of everything the mother forbids; she may be a witch, hysteric, seductress, or eccentric. Each of these figures offers a readily apparent narrative of feminine identity and empowerment and a model of extended family relationships set within specific historical and cultural contexts. Each is embroiled in the tensions, contradictions, and struggles that riddle lived experiences of identity, family, domesticity , and community. Each is engaged in the question motivating the narratives characterizing “women’s culture”: How do we overcome everyday trials and personal disappointments (in life under patriarchy) to realize a good life (complete with husband, children, and home)?5 For the most part, the narratives offer widely accepted, familiar, and readily consumable answers. We acknowledge that there is pleasure in the very conventionality of such narratives. But we think...