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Article Excerpt
ALTHOUGH NOT A SHOW "that goes in for 'very special episodes' about abortion or bulimia," following reviewer Rebecca Traister's phrasing, The Sopranos has tackled some women's issues that may be even more uncomfortable." (1) Given the regularity of scenes on HBO's six-season gangster drama that correspond to recognizably feminist issues--for example, Janice claims the identity of feminist despite letting Richie fuck her while holding a gun to her head; Dr. Jennifer Melfi is brutally raped and subsequently experiences symptoms of post-traumatic stress; Meadow's roommate, Caitlin, suffers from an anxiety disorder and self-medicates with Absolut Vodka; Carmela grapples with mixed feelings about her husband's adulterous relationships--The Sopranos clearly qualifies as a site of "primetime feminism," fulfilling quality television's role, formulated eloquently by Bonnie J. Dow, as "an important ideological forum for public discourse about social issues and social change." (2) In its representations of rape, battering, and spousal murder, the third season of The Sopranos, even more than the series as a whole, persistently took up the feminist cultural work of examining "the economic and social roots of violence," mirroring a key tactic in cutting-edge cultural studies. (3)
The graphic nature of those scenes, however, prompted critics and fans alike to ask whether The Sopranos went too far. (4) Others asked why the charge of going "too far" came up only in relation to violence against women, while the more prevalent violence against men on the show frequently went unchallenged. These inquiries into the sexual politics of The Sopranos recall similar critical conversations about the 1980s cult TV phenomenon, Twin Peaks. "What's new about television exploiting our love affair with the interfaces of sex and death, or our hunger for seeing women dead or maimed or mutilated or suicidal or raped or helpless, especially if they're sexually active?" asked Diana Hume George in an essay cleverly titled "Lynching Women" (a pun on film auteur David Lynch's name). "Prime time business as usual," she answered, "only a little worse because even feminists let it go by, behaving like charmed backsliders involved with a man so charismatic that we just couldn't think straight." Hume George directed this charge in part at her own fanship as she sheepishly admitted to being a "Peaks freak" and struggled to come to terms with the conflict between her viewing pleasure and her "objections to its sexual ethic, which [she] regard[ed] as reptilian." She wrote also in response to Randi Davenport, who proposed that "Twin Peaks is informed by, rather than at odds with, recent feminist discussions about sexual violence." Their stalemate evinces a "crisis of spectatorship" in feminist media studies, a point Judith Halberstam made in relation to gay and lesbian critical responses to the 1991 film, Basic Instinct: "We simply do not know how to read imagined violence: all too often representations of the pernicious effects of homophobia, racism, and sexism are collapsed by the viewer into homophobia, racism, and sexism themselves." The texts as well bear responsibility for this crisis, given the nature of media imagery "as a field of contestation with forces of domination and resistance, repression and struggle, co-optation and upheaval," as Douglas Kellner described contemporary media culture. A tight weave of competing political energies--feminist, antifeminist, and pseudo-feminist--riddles recent films and cable series. (5)
It is within the context of these debates over how to read gendered violence in media culture that I wish to situate my reading of episode 32 of The Sopranos, "University," in which Ralphie, a disgruntled Sopranos crew member, brutally murders his pregnant girlfriend, Tracee, a stripper at the Bada Bing! Although I concede at the outset the difficulty of distinguishing between representations of violence against women that reinforce sexism and representations of violence against women that critique sexism, the following analysis trades the "too clearly identifiable patriarchal villain" of 1970s film theory in for a postmodern map of intersectionality, tracing the intersecting oppressions that structure the settings and psyches of each character. (6) Indeed, the feminist cultural work of The Sopranos resides specifically in the show's attention to intersectionality, well represented by the richly textured portraits of Tracee and Ralphie, and productively brought to the surface through the critical lenses of sex-worker feminism and feminist masculinity studies.
THE STRIPPER AS RESISTING READER
Throughout the episode, "University," two stories are carefully interwoven. One narrative strand follows Tracee, a dancer at the Bada Bing! strip club, as she attempts to create a traditional family dynamic in her life. In the opening scene she approaches Tony with a gift of homemade datenut bread and is gently reprimanded for trying to shift roles within the binary of good and bad womanhood.
In Tony's layman's terms, "You can't be doing stuff like this."
Silvio, Tony's consigliere, dismisses her more abruptly with an ironic jab at the ludicrousness of a stripper who bakes. "Let's go, Betty Crocker," Silvio instructs as he taps his watch, sending Tracee back to her assigned position as working girl.
When Tracee discovers she is pregnant, she entertains hyperreal fantasies of a future homelife with her gangster lover, Ralphie Cifaretto, despite his domineering personality and erratic behavior. Tracee's domestic desires measure the extreme distortions produced by the dominant ideology of family values, as she pictures a stereotypical 1950s conclusion for her story: a loving marriage, a fulfilling motherhood, and a well-run house--all tidily poised at the end curve of a New Jersey cul-de-sac. Tracee's actual experiences of the nuclear family as a violent space--her mother burned Tracee's hand on the stove when she was a child, and she repeats the act by burning her infant son with cigarettes--are erased by her media--driven nostalgia for home. This narrative strategy of contrasting the cultural imagery of home as safe, peaceful, comforting, and fulfilling with the frequent reality of home as violent, artificial, coercive, and lonely constitutes a major element of this episode. Tony's oft-cited nostalgia for 1954 can be grouped with Tracee's delusions as part of this series-wide pattern. (7) Like Tracee, Tony longs for a pastoral domestic space from a past that never existed. Indeed his own home in 1954 was far from peaceful, complete with a borderline personality mother threatening to stick a fork in his eye and mobster father cutting off a man's pinky finger in front of him, then spending the night with his mistress while his wife suffers a miscarriage. (8) In its contrapuntal line of nostalgic delusion and nightmarish memories, The Sopranos reenacts a widespread cultural wrestling match with the "miscarriage" of family, home, and the American dream. This popular subgenre characteristic of HBO original series--the "it's not TV" of family drama--produces a paradoxically utopian relief from empty master narratives of family values. "University" mobilizes this contrast between utopian and dystopian visions of home in the service of Tracee's complex characterization as a fallen woman with class-driven aspirations to redeem herself in the eyes of her gangster boss and boyfriend, thereby gaining access to the good life.
It is in fact a commonplace of the feminist movement against domestic violence that classism is responsible for the misleading idea of home as a safe retreat from the dangers of the public world. Middle- and upper-class homes are not necessarily free of spousal abuse and other sexist social ills. Through strategic editing, "University" echoes this insight, repeatedly collapsing the violence of strip club spaces against the performed comfort of home life to underscore the continuities between stigmatized and socially sanctioned arenas, asserting that they are not as separate or opposite as our symbolic register suggests. For example, in his capacity as manager of the Bada Bing! Silvio slaps Tracee and slams her down on the hood of his car after she misses three days of work, as Ralphie laughs vindictively from the window of his house. The scene change uses his laughter as its transitional element, melding seamlessly into laughter at the family dinner table with his high-status mob-widow girlfriend, Rosalie Aprile, and their guests. The dinner party conversation is structured by stereotypical dialogue from the "war between the sexes," as the women trade cliched complaints about empty milk cartons in the fridge and "the football trance." Men have, as Rosalie says, "the attention span of children." This rehearsal of the popular men-are-from-Mars discourse red flags a lethargic antagonism beneath the surface of everyday domesticity, a tension amplified significantly by the previous scene. Ralphie's laughter, an obviously false performance of warmth and hospitality, replicates the disingenuous facade of "family values" often used to demonize strip clubs and justify violence toward the women who work there. Tracee's disposability, signaled by her exclusion from the dinner party and by Ralphie's approval of Silvio's corporal punishment, is dramatized as a sacrifice to the social-ladder-climbing, middle-class family--her eventual death at Ralphie's hands a back alley abortion of sorts. By positioning Tracee's murder at the intersection of sexism and classism in this way, the episode exposes the cold and calculating ideological construction work behind the bourgeois family, returning to the critical Marxist connection between "family as haven" and "heartless world." (9) One necessitates the other-the "brutal world of commerce" creates our need for an emotionally supportive retreat within the family--and the Sopranos dinner party shows the precise conceptual sites where "haven" borders on "heartless."
The second narrative strand follows Meadow, Tony's daughter, as she negotiates romantic mythologies and imperfect relationships in her first year at Columbia University. Fully aware of the limitations of family, Meadow often embodies a perspective within the show that sees through the barriers Tony erects between blood family and business. Meadow's savvy subverts our expectations that daughters are sheltered and naive while strippers are worldly and cynical. In a brief essay on the father-daughter dynamic on The Sopranos, psychologist Josephine Gattuso Hendin argued that "Meadow and Tony are a matched pair,...
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