Winner of the William M. Jones Best Graduate Student Paper Award at the 2017 American Culture Association Conference

Abstract

Winner of the William M. Jones Best Graduate Student Paper Award at the 2017 American Culture Association ConferenceThe figure of the nanny looms large in the popular imagination. From popular films and stories about nannies (Mary Poppins, The Help, The Nanny Diaries, Nanny McPhee, Supernanny) to Nannygate scandals over cheating celebrity husbands and illegitimate children (Ben Affleck, Gavin Rossdale, and Arnold Schwarzenegger to name just a few), the nanny is and long has been a site of contestation: beloved, treasured, neglected, threatening, comforting, working, and domestic woman. Although male nannies can and do exist-as do racialized, underpaid, unregulated, and/or migrant domestic workers (Leonard; Romero)-the popular imaginary prefers its nannies to be white, often British, heterosexual, and, increasingly, young and sexualized women (Leonard).Nannies are central to discussions about working families and, more specifically, working mothers. What does it mean for children, for families, and for patriarchy to have women out of the house, working? What does it mean for capitalist patriarchal societies to have often female workers entering into the domestic family space and providing paid caregiving? As recent work on recession-era western society has observed, the divides between public/private spheres, domestic/paid labor and home/work lives are becoming increasingly precarious in neoliberal societies (Weber, Reality Gendervision). The broadening insecurity of work; the rise of affective forms of labor; and the imperative to work longer, harder and in newly monetized ways have unsettled long-standing gender roles in relation to work (Negra and Tasker). As popular culture struggles to reflect and assuage these concerns, the romanticization of the nanny figure might be subsiding. A new iteration of the young white female nanny has emerged in an unlikely place-posttelevision.1Netflix's sitcom Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt (2015-), which was cocreated by Tina Fey and Robert Carlock (the same team behind NBC's 30 Rock), speaks to concerns over domesticity, entrapment, and female caregivers. Perhaps because of its unique platform, Kimmy is a comedy series that centers on a rather unpalatable premise-the aftermath of one woman's escape from captivity. Under the pretense of an impending apocalypse, Reverend Richard Wayne Gary Wayne (played by Jon Hamm) kidnapped and held four women in a bunker in Durnsville, for fifteen years before they were rescued in the first episode of the series. Upon being set free, one of the so-called Indiana Molewomen, Kimmy Schmidt (Ellie Kemper), decides to move to New York to start her new life. Her new job, however, puts her right back into another domestic setting-a rich New York mother hires her as nanny.This move from enforced domesticity to chosen (professionalized) domesticity is unique in popular representations of nannies, and could perhaps point to some of the ways in which alternative or posttelevision platforms are offering more progressive content than that screened on mainstream networks and cinemas. By breaking with common tropes that infantilize, sexualize and glamorize domestic workers, Kimmy challenges traditional conceptions of gendered labor, the pitting of mothers and nannies against one another, and the Cinderella narrative that has come to dominate postfeminist popular culture. Instead of offering retreatism as the solution to the violence faced by women everyday-both at work and at home-Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt refuses the work/home divide that is central to capitalist patriarchal logic and offers its audience a unique, if somewhat ambivalent view on working life for women in America today.Nannies and Feminism OnscreenPostfeminist popular culture is one arena in which the ambivalence toward women's working life has been depicted. Such portrayals reflect the long-standing concerns of and around western feminism of the relationship between women and work. …