Core Response #3

I found Dr. Susan Fraiman's lecture this week, "Bathroom Realism in Cable TV," as part of the Tania Modleski Lecture Series, interesting in both its sense of range and its implicit limitations. Focusing on the representations of women as they relate to their apartments' bathrooms (and a few others as well) in the TV series Broad City, Insecure, and Girls, Fraiman drew a link between these disparate comedies and demonstrated how each representation of the interactions the main characters had within their restrooms contributed the shows' sense of "reality" of these different characters. Though Broad City's Ilana and Abbie, Insecure's Issa, and Girls' Hannah (and her friends) all exist in separate metropolitan spaces, each with their own quirks and scopes, Fraiman sees a shared sense of the feminine, rooted in concerns of the real as invoked by material objects, platonic feminine intimacies, and the expression of interior feelings.

Generally speaking, the lecture was argued well, and the particularly pointed invocation of turn-of-the-century literature written by women, with their freely-dismissed approach to the quotidian, was quite canny. However, some lingering questions remain from it, especially in terms of the relatively narrow scope of the lecture. Though Fraiman specifically limited the scope to cable TV, notably shows created and run by their lead actors, this leads to a certain myopia when it comes to the proclamations of the general feminine. All three shows are comedies rooted in an insistently contemporary moment, and while this leads to a renewed focus on representation, it also come across as self-congratulatory if the context of televisual history is not taken into account.

Additionally, the framing of the lecture itself provided for some illumination of the academic (in a cultural sense) approach to postfeminism, specifically Modleski and Fraiman's resistance to it. A relatively large portion of the lecture was devoted to the pageantry of introductions, including Fraiman's fairly detailed survey of Modleski's entire career. Of course, these proceedings are to be expected and carried their own sentimentality, but it provided a clear portrait of a certain amount of camaraderie present in the proceedings, which of course dovetailed with the series discussed. Even in a lecture setting, interpersonal bonds are made manifest.