What Roseanne Barr Meant to Media Studies

Abstract

After a series of vile tweets, in 2018 comedienne Roseanne Barr was summarily dismissed from her eponymous sitcom Roseanne, a self-styled reboot of the original U.S. television show (running from 1988 to 1997). While Barr’s firing may seem like a rarified event, my concern is with the vexed position of the unruly comedienne in a paradoxical cultural moment in which feminist activism has impacted the media industries, yet misogyny and xenophobia are blatantly incarnated in U.S. political leadership. Barr’s brand of unapologetic comedy served as a foundational heuristic for the development of feminist television studies, yet her politics have been increasingly revealed as abhorrent. This article examines this puzzling disconnect between progressive political gains around gender, class, body size, and sexuality in the realm of media personalities, products, and theories, and the seemingly intractable position of regressive racism, a conflation that Barr’s brand of toxic provocation both articulates and underscores.