Domesticating Politics: The Representation of Wives and Mothers in American Reality Television
Everybody controls their own future.
—-Heather Wopperer, "Trading Spouses," Episode 205
Reality TV, as a television genre, has been defined by Oulette and Murray as a fusion of popular elements of televisual entertainment with a discourse of the "real."Reality TV shows make the claim that viewing audiences will receive non-scripted access to the actual lives of the shows' characters, an "unmediated, voyeuristic, yet often playful look into the 'entertaining real'" (Oulette and Murray 2). Reality TV as a genre can be traced as far back as American quiz shows of the 1950s, Allen Funt's Candid Camera shows in the 1960s, and An American Family, the groundbreaking documentary first shown on PBS in 1973 (Oulette and Murray 81). In recent years, American reality TV has featured many titles that purport to reveal various aspects of gender roles in society, particularly women's roles as wives and mothers. This essay explores four of these shows: ABC's Wife Swap and Supernanny, and the FOX Network's Trading Spouses and Nanny 911. I will argue that these shows reveal contemporary American socioeconomic anxieties and simplify complex political issues as they reify a historically conservative definition of women's roles in the domestic sphere.
Jennifer Maher, in an analysis of programming for women on The Learning Channel (e.g., Wedding Story, A Baby Story), argues that reality shows often function to "indoctrinate women into traditional gender roles" (199). By presenting a "traditional female life narrative," these shows reproduce traditional roles for female audiences who can vicariously relive important moments, such as getting married or giving birth. Reality TV then, for Maher, can "soothe the pain of the dissimilarity between experience and fantasy by watching another episode that evokes the same romance fantasy and which of course serves to sustain the fantasy" (199). Similarly, the shows examined here, such as Wife Swap, allow audience members to "soothe the pain of dissimilarity"; however, they do so by observing how the fantasy of motherhood and marriage can be reinvigorated through willful reframing of their own experiences (Wife Swap and Trading Spouses) or even through the application of rationalized technique (Supernanny, Nanny 911). Either way, audience members can believe that their own experience will eventually be reconciled with the familiar expectations of indoctrination and fantasy. Unlike wedding/baby stories, however, the "spouse swapping" shows analyzed here don't directly revisualize the mythic moment (a baby being born, a marriage proposal); instead they acknowledge the fantasy/reality breakdown through scenes of discord, but proceed to refute that breakdown by portraying alienated experience as an attitudinal problem: a woman just has to work harder, or look at things in a different way, and marriage/motherhood can be restored to its mythic purity. We can see how this is accomplished through a closer examination of the basic narrative structure, premises, and ideological assumptions employed by each show. [End Page 49]
Swapping Spouses
Wife Swap and Trading Spouses, Supernanny and Nanny 911 each purport to expose the backstage view of family life by allowing cameras access to average family interactions that are apparently spontaneous and unscripted. Shows like Trading Spouses and Wife Swap also compare to more recent reality programs such as The Real World, in that the entertainment value of the program derives from the mixing of people of extremely different backgrounds in one location for a period of time1 to see how the interactions change everyone involved. Inevitably, the experience leads to self-reflection and change for the families, who afterwards have a "better" perspective on their own family's values and norms. This kind of interaction of course is closer to scripted drama than nonfiction documentary.2 As Helen Piper writes, Wife Swap and other similar examples of reality TV "evacuate any premise of 'the real' from [everyday] settings by...
