‘Some Normal, Apple-pie Life’: Gendering Home in Supernatural

Abstract

As Lorna Jowett and Stacey Abbott have pointed out, the US TV serial Supernatural owes much of its success to the way it combines horror with family drama, strengthening the affective involvement of viewers in the lives of its protagonists, the monster-hunting Winchester brothers. The notion of home – presented variously as a domestic, feminine space from which the Winchesters and their compatriots are excluded; a mobile and contingent space of masculine bonding; and a hybrid space which allows for self-expression outside prescribed gender norms, but which also holds the potential for danger – is central.

Heather L. Duda has pointed to the ways monster hunters are excluded from the normative institutions of their societies, and this is certainly true of the Winchesters, who live in their family car and are unable to maintain ‘normal’ homes. Later seasons give them a home in the form of an underground bunker, not designed as a domestic space, but nonetheless a place where their hypermasculine behaviours can be relaxed. This chapter examines the tensions that emerge in this apparent move from a traditional narrative of the home as feminine space under threat to something more ambivalent, where masculine identity itself may be in danger.

Citation

George, J. (2019), "‘Some Normal, Apple-pie Life’: Gendering Home in Supernatural ", Gerrard, S., Holland, S. and Shail, R. (Ed.) Gender and Contemporary Horror in Television (Emerald Studies in Popular Culture and Gender), Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 187-199. https://doi.org/10.1108/978-1-78769-103-220191016