Abstract
This article examines how the media define women's experience of time in the postfeminist context through analysis of the popular Food Network program 30 Minute Meals. In a context in which women attempt to “have it all,” the media expose anxieties about and offer solutions for how women should balance home and work demands. Contemporary representations of domesticity on television present the home as radically affected by the temporal logic of the working world. By interrogating 30 Minute Meals's real-time narrative structure alongside the marketing strategies of stores like Crate and Barrel, this article argues that postfeminist media propose contradictory remedies to the contemporary “time crunch” in the form of rational and efficient time management and nostalgia for an imagined past in which women had endless amounts of time. Studying how the media represent women's time is crucial to understanding definitions of femininity and women's labor and leisure in the postfeminist context.
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