Unsettling Norms : Negotiating Dominant Culture in 'The Addams Family'

Abstract: This thesis examines the three most popular and acclaimed live-action versions of The AddamsFamily, those being the 1964-1966 sitcom The Addams Family, the 1993 film Addams FamilyValues, and Netflix’s 2022 series Wednesday, to understand how these popular culture textsnegotiate dominant norms and culture in American society. These iterations cover sixty years of cultural negotiation on non-conformity and each attend to a specific politics of conformity in their time. Drawing from Stuart Hall and Raymond Williams, Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, and Dick Hebdige among others understandings of culture, power, hegemony, and resistance, I form a theoretical basis through which the techniques these iterations use to negotiate aspects of the dominant culture can be analyzed. For each production, paratextual evidence is located to identify the specific negotiatory aims. The different genres, aesthetics, and references made to contemporary political discourses, are then explored and dismantled to ascertain how this negotiation occurs and what the implications are. This thesis concludes with a discussion comparing the iterations and exploring the role that experience of marginalization potentially played in how the creators chose to create negotiatory texts. This thesis ultimately finds that specific genres and techniques of negotiation, particularly satire and camp, facilitate the capacity for popular culture material to critique, transform and unsettle dominant norms.