LEONARD, Suzanne

Marriage as Franchise in Bethenny Ever After

 

Reality television star Bethenny Frankel’s rise to the status of media and corporate mogul, as captured in her twin realities series, Bethenny Getting Married, and Bethenny Ever After, illustrates a lucrative monetizing of marriage and motherhood—the reference standards of female postfeminist culture. As much business opportunity as personal milestone, the coupling of Bethenny with her husband Jason Hoppy illustrates a keen corporatization of a type of union thought to be sacrosanct from public corruption. Relatedly, the relationship between marriage and business is itself a site of discursive struggle, and as evidenced by the fact that the recent season of Bethenny Ever After actively negotiates the question of whether Hoppy with work for Skinnygirl (and hence join the family brand) even as the couple struggles to keep their fledging and often contentious relationship intact.

This paper will examine Frankel and Hoppy as examples of a celebritized economy of marriage, and will be attentive to the way this coupling is explicitly negotiated as a form of revenue generation. It asks, to what extent does celebrity culture make transparent the economic exchanges that are mystified by romantic or companionate marriage models? In what ways is the celebrity marriage itself, rather than either of the participants in it, a franchise? Finally, how is this pairing in keeping with recessionary trends which posit wives as more astutely navigating the tides of a shifting economy, while un- or under-employed husbands struggle?

 

Dr. Suzanne Leonard is an Assistant Professor in English and Co-Director of the Interdisciplinary Minor in Cinema and Media Studies, Simmons College, Boston, MA.