Core Response #2 by Eileen DiPofi

        For this week’s response, I am interested in how “Betty, Girl Engineer” sustains hegemony in the way Gitlin describes: “by domesticating opposition, absorbing it into forms compatible with the core ideological structure” (264). This process, as I see it, takes place through the alternative Betty poses to a hetero-patriarchal system of norms. For one, she takes on what the other characters consistently emphasize is a “male job.” As Doyle Hobbes makes clear, her taking on this role is a threat to his own masculinity. He states that it would be a “dirty trick” for her to take a man’s job; her “place is in the home.” By becoming an engineer, Betty usurps the man’s place as breadwinner and as such threatens the traditional order of the family unit. However, beyond just taking a man’s job, she actually begins to take his place entirely: she dresses like a man, even borrowing her brother’s boots, and takes a man’s name (B.J.) Thus, Betty/B.J.’s challenge is not only a usurpation of man’s authority within the family unit; by becoming masculine, she threatens to eliminate him entirely. Within the threat of her feminism lies a threat of queerness/transness, and I was honestly quite shocked at just how far the episode was willing to take her gender-nonconformity. Her mother “feels as though we don’t have a daughter anymore,” a refrain that might be heard from a parent concerned about having a butch daughter or trans son. Whether we read her opposition as a feminist or queer one (and these, of course, are not mutually exclusive), Betty/B.J. clearly threatens a family unit that sustains itself through both male authority and heterosexual reproduction. However, through Gitlin, we can see that Betty’s transgressions ultimately facilitate, rather than undermine, the “cultural reproduction” of this set of relations (251). 

        In his discussion of television’s “format and formula,” Gitlin contends that the “commercial” interests of television are inseparable from its “production” imperatives; both are oriented towards the “week-to-weekness” of the program (254). Gitlin insists that these commercial structures create programs whose production sustains narrative and character stasis—the promise that the show will return at the same time and place next week also demands that the same characters and diegesis return as well. These commercial and production norms demand that characters are “preserved intact” for next week’s episode; on an economic level, “it is far easier for production companies to hire writers to write for standardized, static characters than for characters who develop” (254). This standardization imposes a limit on “Betty, Girl Engineer”—essentially, regardless of what happens during the episode, Betty must end the episode as she began it: a feminine, heterosexual, and domesticated young woman. When Father Knows Best returns next week, “B.J.” cannot return with it. Paradoxically, however, the imperatives of standardization that ensure that B.J. is eradicated are also the condition of his possibility: it is only because of the promise that Betty will be restored by the episode’s end that B.J. is allowed to temporarily take her place. Betty’s gender transgressions operate as what Gitlin calls “legitimated forms of opposition”—transgressions that are not only excused, but are actually required, by liberal capitalism: its hegemonic system routinely “frames” alternative forms, “incorporat[ing]” them and thereby neutralizing their threat (264). By allowing Betty to realize the error of her ways, Father Knows Best both accommodates difference and uses that dissenting voice to promote its dominant ideology: Betty/B.J.’s transgression is “framed” as a temporary exploration that leads her back to her proper role as the feminine counterpart to the re-masculinized Hobbes. This “absor[ption]” of Betty/B.J.’s non-conformity works “to convey images of social steadiness” across a broader timescale as well (263, 254), as Betty’s return to her “proper” domestic role creates an inter-generational continuity. While B.J. raises the specter of pro-feminist social progress— “Did it ever occur to you the world might be changing?”—this possibility is foreclosed when Betty takes up the position modeled by her mother. From Margaret to Betty, hetero-patriarchy is naturalized as a social order that persists despite generational shifts. As Hobbes makes quite explicit, men are looking for “somebody who reminds [them] of [their] mother.” 

        While my analysis of the episode is mostly consistent with Gitlin’s paradigms, I do think it is important to recognize, as Hirsch and Newcomb do, that by raising the question of gender deviance, the show opens room for dissent. I agree with their point that “our emotional sympathy is with Betty throughout this episode”; two minutes of resolution does not entirely diminish that which the other 23 minutes raise (565). The fact that for the majority of the episode we are actually invited to identify with Betty’s feminist, cross-dressing exploits opens a space for female and/or queer viewers. When Betty returns next week, for some viewers the memory of B.J. will come with her, even if the show does not acknowledge it.