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SUCH a smart article: what does it mean to see oppressive ideologies arise in media that you love? Especially when those ideologies are directed at identities you hold?

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Ableism runs rampant throughout mass media; in 2013, hopes were high for MIchael J. Fox’s latest sitcom, which dealt openly and honestly with his Parkinson’s disease, but it only lasted a single season.

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No discussion of “Designing Women” is complete without Julia’s legendary monologue - it’s maybe one of the most famous scenes from the entire show! Moreover, it’s SUCH an interesting moment for Julia (who is characterized as unabashedly feminist and left-leaning) to so vociferously defend her sister Suzanne, whom she always criticizes as shallow, ignorant, and materialistic. The video appears in this list: http://jezebel.com/5218613/top-10-lessons-learned-from-80s-sitcom-heroines

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In “Ladies’ Choice” (November 10, 1992), Roseanne and Jackie are astonished to learn that their friend and business partner, Nancy, is a lesbian. During the course of its run, “Roseanne” had numerous queer characters: here are the top 5 most lesbian moments of “Roseanne”: http://www.afterellen.com/general-news/107161-the-top-5-most-lesbian-moments-of-roseanne

And while we’re at it: “How “Roseanne” Helped Make it Okay to Be Gay on TV”: http://splitsider.com/2010/12/how-roseanne-helped-make-it-ok-to-be-gay-on-tv/

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I mention it in some of the above links, but - “The Golden Girls” has always had a reputation for its gay following!    <3

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The due date for this project is fast approaching!

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For much of Delta Burke’s run on “Designing Women,” tabloids speculated about her weight fluctuations. The show finally addressed this issue in “They Shoot Fat Women, Don’t They?” (December 11, 1989), when Burke’s character, Suzanne attends a class reunion and is upset to hear endless gossip about how she’s gained weight. TV still has a hard time representing the lives and experiences of people of size - and furthermore, the media still treats it with absolutely no sensitivity, as seen in this atrocious article from Marie Claire about Melissa McCarthy’s sitcom “Mike & Molly”: http://www.marieclaire.com/sex-love/a5559/overweight-couples-on-television/

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Factory worker, shampoo girl, waitress, businesswoman...Roseanne filled all of these roles during the run of the series. For a brief time, she worked at a fast-food chicken restaurant, where her boss was a teenager (Best line: “My boss was so nasty today - like it’s my fault he didn’t get into Northwestern!”). She gets scheduled for weekends, invites him to her house to try to persuade him to change the schedule...and promptly gets fired. “I’m not working there because I don’t got enough allowance,” she tells him. “I’m paying a mortgage and trying to buy clothes and put food on the table for three kids.”

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Sitcoms enjoy a few nods here and there - “Moesha,” “Spin City,” etc. I am now determined to find episodes of the show “Roc” someplace!

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Blanche is miserable in “End of the Curse” (September 27, 1986) because she is going through menopause; during a conversation with a psychiatrist, she reveals that she sees menopause as a point at which men will stop seeing her as sexually desirable - a point which Dorothy refutes.

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Roseanne is “Looking for Loans in All the Wrong Places” (October 20, 1992)! Trying to open a restaurant with her sister Jackie and their friend Nancy, Roseanne goes to the Small Business Administration and...has very little luck.

Some favorite lines:

“Why do you call it the Small Business Administration? Why not just call it the ‘Get Your Own Damn Money’ Administration?”

“Y’all don’t understand nothing about people like us. The problem with people that work for the government - y’all have jobs!”

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Look at how young Mario Lopez is!   <3      This scene appears at the end of “Dorothy’s Prized Pupil,” (March 14, 1987), in which Dorothy’s student (Mario Lopez) writes a prize-winning essay about what it means to be an American. Shortly thereafter, the Department of Immigration and Naturalization Services determines that Dorothy’s student is in the country “illegally” and must be deported. I can’t think of another sitcom from this era that addresses the problematic nature of U.S. immigration policy and citizenship.

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Feminist theorists and scholars have, for decades, debated the place of pornography in U.S. culture. In “Julia Drives Over the First Amendment,” (May 22, 1989), a newsstand carrying pornographic magazines sets up shop across the street from Sugarbakers‘ Design Firm. Upset by the newsstand’s pin-up posters, Julia runs over the stand with her car not once, not twice, but three times. Here, she confronts the magazine’s female publisher; see this article for a fuller discussion of how feminism has historically thought about pornography: http://msmagazine.com/blog/2014/06/10/feminist-debates-1-pornography/

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As much as one might applaud “The Golden Girls” or “Roseanne” for their willingness to represent queer people, it must be noted that those representations are almost entirely White. This lack of QPOC on TV and in film has real-life consequences for social policy, as this article demonstrates.

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“The Golden Girls” gets a shout-out in this video about representations of gay people in 1970′s and 1980′s sitcoms!

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More evidence for why critical media literacy is essential to social justice work - “It seems that TV can subconsciously induce racism.”

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Roseanne talks about the fraught creative process behind “Roseanne,” and what it meant to her to produce a sitcom that embodied working-class feminism: “I honestly think Roseanne is even more ahead of its time today, when Americans are, to use a technical term from classical economics, screwed.”