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    Maid for Television
    Race, Class, Gender, and a Representational Economy

    L. S. Kim (Author)

    9781978826991

    Paperback / softback, published 11 August 2023

    224 pages, 30 B-W images
    23.5 x 15.6 x 2.5 cm, 0.05 kg

    "Maid for Television is a rigorously intersectional and interdisciplinary study that places the racialized domestic servant at the center of U.S. television history. This figure is ubiquitously invisible, yet also absolutely essential to maintaining the white middle-class family as the nation's social, economic, and political norm."
    — Chon A. Noriega, author of Shot in America: Television, the State, and the Rise of Chicano Cinema

    "L.S. Kim's panethnic media history of domestic workers in American television illuminates the oft-overlooked figure of the intimate other while weaving a compelling tale of racialized feminized labor in the United States. Kim explores the disruptive and pleasurable acts of agency performed by these minoritized characters and the underrecognized actors who portray them, particularly how they challenge white, heteropatriarchal notions of kinship, romance, and social relations. Kim's impeccably researched study is a vital resource for understanding the role that the formerly ubiquitous cast of domestic servants have played in various racial and national imaginaries throughout the 20th and 21st centuries."— Honorable Mention for the Association for Asian American Studies Book Award in the Media, Performanc

    "Maid for Television is a rigorously intersectional and interdisciplinary study that places the racialized domestic servant at the center of U.S. television history. This figure is ubiquitously invisible, yet also absolutely essential to maintaining the white middle-class family as the nation's social, economic, and political norm."
    — Chon A. Noriega, author of Shot in America: Television, the State, and the Rise of Chicano Cinema

    Honorable Mention -- Association for Asian American Studies Book Award in the Media, Performance, and Visual Studies category

    Maid for Television examines race, class, and gender relations as embodied in a long history of television servants from 1950 to the turn of the millennium. Although they reside at the visual peripheries, these figures are integral to the idealized American family. Author L. S. Kim redirects viewers' gaze towards the usually overlooked interface between characters, which is drawn through race, class, and gender positioning. Maid for Television tells the stories of servants and the families they work for, in so doing it investigates how Americans have dealt with difference through television as a medium and a mediator.The book philosophically redirects the gaze of television and its projection of racial discourse.
     

    1 
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
    Introduction: The Figure of the Racialized Domestic in American Television 
     
     
     
     
     
     
     

    2 
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
    Domesticating Blackness: African Americans in Service in Comedy and Drama
    3 
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
    Shades of Whiteness: White Servants Keeping Up a Class Ideal
    4 
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
    Unresolvable Roles: Asian American Servants as Perpetual Foreigners
    5 
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
    Invisible but Viewable: The Latina Maid in the Age of Nannygate
    Epilogue 
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     

    Acknowledgments
    Notes
    Bibliography 
     

    Index
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