“L.S. Kim’s panethnic media history of domestic workers in American television illuminates the oft-overlooked figure of the intimate other while weaving a compelling tale of racialized feminized labor in the United States. Kim explores the disruptive and pleasurable acts of agency performed by these minoritized characters and the underrecognized actors who portray them, particularly how they challenge white, heteropatriarchal notions of kinship, romance, and social relations. Kim’s impeccably researched study is a vital resource for understanding the role that the formerly ubiquitous cast of domestic servants have played in various racial and national imaginaries throughout the 20th and 21st centuries.”
- Association for Asian American Studies, 2025 Book Award
“The image of the domestic servant is both recognizable and invisible at the same time…”
Rutgers University Press
MAID FOR TELEVISION examines race, class, and gender relations as embodied in a long history of television servants from 1950 to the turn of the millennium.
Although they reside at the visual peripheries, these figures are integral to the idealized American family. MAID FOR TELEVISION tells the stories of servants and the families they work for, in so doing it investigates how Americans have dealt with difference through television as a medium and a mediator. Author L.S. KIM redirects the viewer’s gaze towards the usually overlooked interface between characters, which is drawn through race, class, and gender positioning. And the book philosophically redirects the gaze of television and its projection of racial discourse.
The figure of the racialized domestic in American television engages viewers in a mode of perception about race, family, and social and individual status. Each instance of the servant character marks a particular historical circumstance through which the meaning of race is rendered. This book joins the efforts of other scholarship and commentary on race to show that race affects the daily lives of Americans. MAID FOR TELEVISION: RACE, CLASS, GENDER, AND A REPRESENTATIONAL ECONOMY expands the study of race on television by examining the textual, social, and ideological role of the domestic servant during a period (1950-2000) when families gathered together regularly to consume stories about American life. It shows that race and racial difference are defined in structures of work, family, class, and gender through the figure of the maid, that these structures are intricately intertwined yet also rationalized.
One of the scholarly concerns in this book is to understand how racial discourse operates in media culture by looking at established visual-cultural practices, so that we can intervene in and innovate how race is represented. Analyzing forms of entertainment lends insight across multiple stories and case studies – that racial representation creates an aesthetic and that race functions performatively. The goal in this examination, crossing historical and theoretical lines, is to propose a critical paradigm for studying the representation of race in television culture in order to gauge and pursue the possibility for change.
“Maid for Television is a rigorously intersectional and interdisciplinary study that places the racialized domestic servant at the center of U.S. television history. This figure is ubiquitously invisible, yet also absolutely essential to maintaining the white middle-class family as the nation’s social, economic, and political norm.”
- Chon A. Noriega, author of Shot in America: Television, the State, and the Rise of Chicano Cinema