"Living Happily" In A "Home With Kids"

This article selects a dozen of family drama from 1990 s to 2010 s,which serve as empirical text of popular culture.We will analyze the following aspects,including the direct description of the family planning policy,the change of family pattern(from the family with many children to "421" family),how are the conflicts related to fertility resolved(bearing or not,which family is more important,who has the power to educate the next generation),and highlights the social phenomenon(and economic importance of the improvement of women's status has been increasingly emphasized),to explore the interaction between this kind of presentation with the family planning policy.The theoretical framework I will adopt contains of Louis Pierre Althusser's Ideological State Apparatuses,Antonio Gramsci's Hegemony and Michel Foucault's Bio-Power,answer the research questions:how does popular culture represent the "family planning" ideology,is there any difference with the official discourse.This part of empirical text comes from People's Daily's 945 reports with "family planning" in title from 1957 to 2018.The study shows that,as a form of popular culture,TV dramas adopt two different paths to represent family planning ideology.First,in the representation of narrow family planning policy,it aims to emphasize the broad recognition,absolute correctness and authority of the policy,these characteristics are consistent with the official utterances.Second,in the wider representation of the family planning,the reinforcement of ideology seems to be more osmosis,different from the official discourse,they used family conflicts and social phenomenon related to the policy to imagine the reality,reflecting the "family planning" ideology,including(1)it's still taken for granted that fertility behavior is important,however we need to chase for quality but quantity(2)the limitation of birth number makes family pattern leads to the nucleation of family pattern,(3)the parents who have only child have set up the consciousness of "independent endowment",(4)we should use a more scientific way to educate the next generation(5)"less birth and less education,better birth and better education" is scientific and conforms to the law of social and economic development.As we can see,although the representation of the ideology of "family planning" is different from that in the official discourse,the power behind both come the government,and the reality the constructed is also same as the official's appeal.Another point is that,during the representation of ideology,there is also an active shield of state authority.This reinforces the view of cultural studies that the ideology is essentially the "state machine",which serves the meaning of hegemony.