Kim Akass's "Mothers on American Television"

Kim Akass is Professor of Radio, Television and Film at Rowan University.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Mothers on American Television: From Here to Maternity, and reported the following:

Page 99 of my book concludes Ruth Fisher’s narrative journey in Six Feet Under which, at first glance, seems to disprove the page 99 theory. However, at the end of this page I quote E. Ann Kaplan (from her book Motherhood and Representation: The Mother in Popular Culture and Melodrama) and that beautifully sums up the aims of the book as a whole: ‘the Mother offers a possible way to break through patriarchal discourses since she has not been totally appropriated by dominant culture’ (11). Following this quote, I argue that the death of the patriarch in the pilot episode of Six Feet Under allows representations of mothering, especially the middle-aged mother of adult children, to become reconfigured which problematizes many assumptions about maternity and motherhood along the way.

In many ways the Page 99 Test works as my book focuses on how mothers and mothering are represented in a selection of quality American television series and argues that what we see onscreen reveals much about societal hostility towards mothers and motherhood as well as how women continue to be linked with, and oppressed by, their biology - as the overturning of Roe vs Wade confirms. By closely analyzing series like Sex and the City, The Sopranos, Deadwood, The Handmaid’s Tale and Big Little Lies (among others) what is revealed is that, unless feminism gets to the bottom of how mothers are (dis)regarded, women will never achieve equality in a modern world. Looking at the way mothers are represented onscreen; my book offers a pathway through patriarchal discourses by utilizing feminist psychoanalytic theories revealing how the unconscious of neoliberal patriarchal America works.”

Follow Kim Akass on Twitter and Facebook.

--Marshal Zeringue