%0 Journal Article
%T California and Irony in Mad Men
%A Rodney Taveira
%J Cultural Studies Review
%D 2012
%I UTS ePRESS
%X The combination of melodramatic and art cinematic techniques and influences in AMC¡¯s television series Mad Men (2007 ¨C) reveals how a melodramatic televisuality can image novel modes of social and intimate relations and an alternative to the archetypal American narrative of the self-made man. Set in 1960s¡¯ America, the series uses a contemporaneous and cosmopolitan California to triangulate the formal and narrative insistence of the past on the present. This triangulation is played out by Don Draper¡¯s relations with his family, women, and his former identities and by the representation of homosexuality throughout the series. The application of Lee Edelman¡¯s concept of ¡°sinthomosexuality¡± and Richard Rorty¡¯s ¡°liberal ironist¡± reveal a queer, visual rhetoric to the show¡¯s narrative and formal structures, forming a queer irony that allows the show to straddle the aesthetic extremes of ¡°quality TV¡± (Jane Feuer) and soap opera, which, in turn, queers the exemplary American heterosexuality of Don Draper.
%K television studies
%K popular culture
%K homosexuality
%K men
%K California
%U http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/csrj/article/view/2769