In a year where many people are confined to our homes, Netflix offers its latest distraction in the Utah-based Dream Home Makeover type of design show, or, as I keep slipping on and calling it for reasons my Mormon friends will understand, "Dream Housewife In some ways, it's the latest installment of the cultural fantasy that remodeling a house can remodel a life, a fantasy of interference through design that has feminist predecessors like Woolf and Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Utah or LDS, the career of the show's star Shea McGee, an influencer who turned the talents she learned upgrading her California home into a Utah-based design studio business, potentially offers an additional fantasy: a path to monetization of learned skills to realize.
I'll confess: I find myself dreaming about how I would emulate Shea McGee. For all the potential dispensation, Dream Home Makeover hangs for women on an economic-cultural nexus that always leaves them without a place, yet it also inadvertently shows the emotional and economic distortions that arise from the stresses they face. Particularly in early episodes, admirable attempts to seek personal success through monetization of chores seem to risk inadvertently preying on the insecurities and pocketbooks of other women caught up in the same systems and often making up the target market.
Stars: Shea McGee, Syd McGee
I understand from personal experience how living in a very poorly designed or cramped space can add rather than reduce work or make daily tasks much more difficult. I know the pleasure of acquiring an object that makes me happy after years of saving because it reflects my taste and affirms that I care the most for the children I care for. I know that families grow and want changes. What's more troubling, however, are the moments within the show when the kind of learned dissatisfaction that Wagner articulates so well intersects with McGee's understated but visible profit motive.
Episode 1, "Forever Home," as an example, highlights a family hoping to intentionally solve the problem that they don't like their outdated and spatially unoptimized living room so much that they don't want to invite people into it. , a phobia i felt while living in my current 1960s home. However, we would like to wonder how such a large number of people became ashamed of our homes in the first place. How the desire to excel has become a source of dissatisfaction and social shame. Watching the show, it's hard to shake the feeling that the will of a specific aesthetic is eclipsing itself from time to time instead of helping it function in ways that are likely to help the appearance industry and anyone else. McGee herself, for example, focuses at one point on installing a nice-looking tub in her own home that she rarely intends to use. For me, I'm convinced my own occasional obsessions with remodeling stem most from emotions that I'm undervalued, alone, and in need of personal goals while raising my kids as they're doing since my space issues. Improving my home, I hope, could improve my relationships and provide needed care in the absence of a transparent career.
Watch Dream Home Makeover 2022 Tv Series Trailer
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