Writing on Gender in Popular Culture

GENDER AND POPULAR CULTURE : KING OF QUEENS AND GENDER STEREOTYPING

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Teacher 's name

Writing on Gender in Popular Culture

May 4 , 2008

Popular culture is one of the richest mines for finding what a society thinks is important and for making meaning out of disparate threads of that society . Television and sitcoms in particular , have long been considered empty entertainment , completely devoid of any meaning designed to make you laugh at the end of a long day . The King of Queens has never tried to be a meaningful show

, or even to have very special episodes ' which is what makes it so valuable as a repository of gender stereotypes

One of the longest-running and highest rated sitcoms of the latter part of the 20th century , King of Queens averaged 11 million viewers over its nine year run (Ryan . The King of Queens revolves around Carrie and Doug Heffernan , a working-class couple living in Queens , New York . Doug works as a delivery person for IPS , a package delivery company , and Carrie works as a legal secretary . They do not have any children , but Carrie 's widowed father , Arthur Spooner , lives with them . The only other significant recurring characters are Doug 's group of male friends , who will be discussed later . Much of the humor comes from the tension of the relationships between Carrie , Doug , and Arthur , as well as the general stagnation of the main characters . An additional common source of humor is the supposed dichotomy between Doug (overweight and uninterested in his appearance ) and Carrie (thin , beautiful , and fashionable . Critics believe that this is outweighed by Doug 's easygoing nature and Carrie 's demanding one (Karnasiewicz . The New York Times characterized their relationship as such

The greatest challenge to Doug 's modus Vivendi comes from Carrie , and the result is the series ' elegant equilibrium . Exuberant , open-book gluttonous Doug is married to a woman of cosmetics , schemes and guile His inertia , it turns out , is their shared honesty but her guile is their ambition , and it 's what allows them to keep moving (Heffernan

The episodes revolve around minor , innocuous incidents , which are resolved in 22 minutes . I chose two episodes to analyze from the end of the third season , Class Struggle ' and Do Rico . These episodes exemplify two of the gender stereotypes that King relies on : that men are the pursuers in sex , and that female friendships are impossible due to competition between women . Both of these stereotypes rest on a claim of being natural women are naturally uninterested in sex , naturally jealous of each other , and naturally competitive . Their very existence in an innocuous sitcom gives credence to this natural ' argument presenting gender stereotypes as fact . This is precisely the reason why critically analyzing popular culture is so important - because it is through popular culture that ideas and ideals are transmitted . In Joanne Hollows ' work on feminism and popular culture , referred to

what is at stake in feminist cultural studies : by analyzing the ways in which different forms...