American Quarterly

Welcome to the Dreamhouse is interdisciplinary feminist cultural studies at its best. A collection of ten essays (half new, half reprinted) by cinema-television scholar Lynn Spigel, the volume is divided into five parts: "TV Households," "White Flight," "Baby Boom Kids," "Living Room to Gallery," and "Rewind and Fast Forward." Each part begins with a previously published essay and follows with a new essay on a related topic. In this way, the collection both traces the development of Spigel's thinking about postwar media in the 1990s and makes a sustained argument about the ways media and the suburbs have participated in the reconfiguration of our notions of private and public space. Examining television, comic strips, toys, magazines, and other kinds of visual culture, Spigel discusses U.S. postwar media in relation to ideals about domesticity and family life.

Spigel is concerned with both the mass media and postwar suburbs as "engineered spaces"—spaces in which meanings are created and people make sense of their social relationships and the larger world. In this way, her scholarship bridges the gap between humanities scholarship concerned with ideologies and representation and social science scholarship primarily concerned with the economic and political structures we inhabit. Her essays illustrate again and again how [End Page 359] language and culture give shape to social institutions even as material circumstances shape what it imaginable and nameable.

The introductory essay alone is a historiographical tour-de-force. In it, Spigel situates her own work in relation to several disciplinary traditions—media studies, art history, architecture, cultural history, sociology, and critical geography—and provides a map to conceptually organize a vast and wide-ranging field of related scholarship based on disciplinary origins, assumptions about evidence, and methods of research. The scope of this essay and its ability to concisely summarize a field and its critical debates testify to Spigel's wide reading and long acquaintance with the field: she is a professor of cinema-television at the University of Southern California, author of Make Room for TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America, and co-editor of several media anthologies.

At the center of this collection are ways of thinking about public and private space and the imbrication of these ways of thinking with gender and sexuality, race/ethnicity, class, and nation. Spigel's goal is (in part) to reframe the popular and scholarly conversations we have about the media by thinking more broadly and historically. Spigel takes issue with two major strands in television criticism of recent years: (1) the idea that the mass media are a threat to democratic life and institutions, since they replace a public sphere characterized by free, rational discourse with passive consumption of prepackaged information in the home; and (2) that the media are a threat to "family values," that they bring contamination from the public world into the private sanctuary of the home. ¹ Both arguments, Spigel maintains, are underwritten by some problematic assumptions about the naturalness of the division between public and private life. She explains:

I begin, then, with the premise that the division of spheres is an ideology, and as such has operated as a means of social control and power—not as a natural way that people live their lives. As distinct from critics who argue that a once-secure private sphere existed, or that media and consumer culture are now threatening to destroy both private and public life, I see the division of spheres as a historical phenomenon, and one that has changed its character over time. In other words, the division of spheres is a socially and politically motivated way of organizing social space, rather than a response to universal human needs. (9)

Spigel sees the profoundly ideological division of space into public and private...