Weeds: Correcting Social Oppression Through Laughter

I wrote this paper in 2016 for a Women and Gender Studies class.

Weeds is an American dark comedy drama created in 2005 which ran for eight seasons. It won many awards, including two Emmys and a Golden Globe. It centers around Nancy Botwin, a suburban mother of two who begins to deal marijuana in order to get by after her husband passes away from a sudden heart attack. Weeds is a show made for suburban people to watch what it would be like to have a more “dangerous” lifestyle. By doing so, it attempts to make white people uncomfortable by challenging assumptions that they may have about race, class, sexuality, weight, and other important areas. The messages it conveys on these topics are clearly empowering for white, thin mothers like Nancy Botwin. However, it perpetuates social oppression for all other minorities concerned by using stereotypes. This stereotyping becomes so evident that it becomes political satire, made to push the audience to realize different levels of privilege and oppression in white suburban society. Drawing upon the works of Launius and Hassel, Tolman, Roberts, Hooks, Martin and Kayzak, and Kent, I will show how Weeds is empowering for white middle classed women and how it makes political satire by stereotyping minorities. Although Weeds has many subplots on different minorities in its eight seasons on air, I will focus on the representation of African Americans, overweight people, and the LGBTQ community,

Weeds was created for a white audience, specifically for a female audience that lives in the same kind of suburban neighborhood as the show portrays. Its goal is to poke fun at a specific kind of society in order to be able to showcase its faults. It makes fun of the oppressive rules imposed by these “safe” and “family friendly” neighborhoods, illustrated by its opening theme song Little Boxes by Malvina Reynolds that goes “Little boxes on the hillside, little boxes made of ticky tacky, little boxes on the hillside, little boxes all the same”. The premise of the show is to make fun of a place where conformity is so widespread that people become “all the same”. It does so by putting Nancy, a white suburban mother, in positions that white suburban mothers should not be in. By dealing pot, Nancy puts herself in dangerous situations such as nearly getting arrested, having to use her sexuality to get what she wants, and even having sex with people of different social classes and races. By making people uncomfortable with what Nancy does, Kohan shows that white people in these kinds of environments are socially not allowed to do certain things, thus pointing out society’s faults.

Nancy Botwin is the incarnation of a white, well placed, soccer mom. When she was younger, she was a dancer, but she gave up her career to spend time with her kids once her husband became an engineer and bought her a beautiful suburban house in the Californian valley. She adopts the typical, expected role that society expects of her. However, this all shifts when her husband dies. On p. 51, Launius and Hassel write that “traditionally male characteristics (are) … self-assuredness, assertiveness, daring, and authoritative and commanding”. When Judah Botwin dies, the head of the Botwin household disappears, and despite a brief power struggle with her son, Nancy Botwin becomes the new figure in charge of the family. She learns to embrace all of these seemingly male characteristics. The reason that she begins dealing drugs is in order to provide for her family, and even as the show complicates and they move to different areas, she is still the more traditionally masculine and dominant figure of the family. This reversal of gender roles is empowering because it shows women that they can be leaders.

Nancy’s character is traditionally attractive and dresses provocatively, notably getting nicknamed “MILF” throughout the first and second season. On page 13 of her analysis Getting Beyond “It Just Happened”, Tolman writes that “desire is not only incompatible but at odds with society's conceptions of femininity”. Women are meant to be desired, but they are never meant to desire. To some extent, Nancy Botwin is only the incarnation of how women are supposed to be desirable and pretty, notably always wearing provocative clothing and flirting with most men around her.

However, Jenji Kohan goes one step further with this by not only making Nancy desired, but also by making her desire. Tolman defines sexual subjectivity as “a person’s experience of herself as a sexual being, who feels entitled to sexual pleasure and sexual safety, who makes active sexual choices, and who has an identity as a sexual being” (p. 5-6). Nancy illustrates this concept because she makes active sexual choices from the very beginning of the show that prove that she has sex for her own pleasure, not because of societal pressure. This is set very early in the show, when for example there is implication of her masturbating several times in the first season, with even one scene in which she is shown reaching for her vibrator in her desk drawer.

Shortly after (still in the first season), she has sex with a drug dealer of Latino descent in an alley. By having a white suburban mother desire a Latino man of lower social standing, Kohan goes against the societal assumption that those two categories of people cannot be attracted to each other. Also, Nancy does not have sex with him out of fear, she does it because she wants to, and the scene shown of them doing it shows that she is clearly enjoying it. On p. 41, Launius and Hassel write that “female compliance, cooperation, and passivity are scripted” in gender socialization. Nancy Botwin is anything but passive, and anything but compliant, whether it be through how actively she desires and enjoys sex, or through how difficult she makes the life of every single lover that she has throughout the show.

Nancy Botwin is therefore empowering to women like her because she explores areas that people of her kind aren’t supposed to, notably sexual subjectivity. Through her character, Kohan shows us that women are allowed to be leaders and they are allowed to want sex, two dominantly male features in our society. A priori, one could argue that Weeds is empowering for all women. However, the show is empowering for women like Nancy: white, thin, feminine women, aka. the intended suburban audience of the show. The show is not remotely empowering in the same way for its African American characters, which fall into “Black stereotypes”.

African American men in Weeds are shown the way that white suburban mothers expect them to be: animalistic, sexual, and violent. When Celia cheats on her husband Dean in the first season, it is seen as more hurtful given that she sleeps with an African American man. In the evening, when she decides to tell him, she says “I fucked a black man”, as if the “black” part would matter. When Nancy gets affiliated with African American gangs, all of the men are intimidating and sexual, for example with one of them (Marvin) telling her that “all them bitches be crazy” because his ex girlfriend assaulted him after he “only fucked her sister, which gave him crabs”. The portrayal of African American men as such threatening, sexual beings only perpetuates the fear that white people have for African Americans in our society. This perpetuates prejudices that lead to police brutality against these men. With her characters, Kohan only enforces the stereotype that white people should be scared of African American men, because they are violent, sexual, and very involved in heavy drug use, literally having Snoop Dogg as a guest star in the second season rapping about how Nancy is such a “hot MILF”.

The African American male representation, although mostly stereotyped throughout the show, still has the character of Conrad in the first few seasons, an African American man who is not as threatening as the rest, and who seems to have more complexity as a character despite his race. He even has a short romantic venture with Nancy. However, he is not a central character because his character leaves the show early on. Unlike the wide array of white characters with drastically different personalities throughout the show, he is the only African American male character with substantial character development. On the other hand, African American women throughout the show do not have any complex characters. All African American female characters that are in any way important to the plot are stereotypes.

In her paper, Hooks writes that all African American women going to the movies “are all acutely aware of cinematic racism- its violent erasure of black womanhood” (p.119). By perpetuating obvious stereotypes, no African American women go to the movies knowing that they will be accurately represented. The two African American female characters in Weeds are Heylia and Vaneeta. Both represent stereotypes in their own way. On one hand, Heylia is a modern representation of the classic “Mammy” character from Gone With The Wind. She is an overweight, sassy, loud, wise African American woman. It is ambiguous whether or not she has children, or which characters are related to her, because she treats everyone as her child, including Nancy, a white woman. Most of her scenes take place in her kitchen, with her making food. It is hard to affirm that she has no personality, given that she has such a loud mouth, but she has no depth. Her sole purpose is to be the token “sassy Black woman” that provides comic relief.

On p.14 of Killing the Black Body, Roberts writes that “While whites adored Mammy, who dutifully nurtured white children, they portrayed Black slave mothers as careless and unable to care for their own children”. This is showcased through Vaneeta’s character, a young African American woman related to Heylia who is pregnant when the show starts and ends up having a baby. Her relationship with her child is shown in a very careless way, with her notably having to constantly ask Heylia what to feed the baby. As a character, Vaneeta is not nurturing, she curses constantly, and she is barely shown with her child. This further on perpetuates the idea that African American women are not fit to be mothers in our societies, unless they become “Mammy”.

In contrast to how white people are portrayed, African American people in Weeds are mere stereotypes, with the exceptions of Conrad, who leaves the show early on. Fundamentally, Kohan gives us the impression that African Americans and white people are simply incompatible because of cultural differences. This is showcased in the last episode that Conrad is a central character to the plot, when he does not recognize “Fire on the Mountain” by The Grateful Dead when Nancy sings it. In that moment, they look at each other, realizing that they cannot be together because of their lack of similarities. On one hand, this can be simply because the two characters in themselves are not incompatible. However, given that Conrad is the only substantial African American character, Kohan seems to be saying something larger on the incompatibility of white and Black relations.

Indeed, by putting Nancy into these unlikely situations for a white suburban mother, Kohan underlines the difference of privilege amongst different races, notably with Conrad telling Nancy in the first season: “It always makes my day to work with over privileged white women”. Although this is intended to be a joke, it has a very real message behind it: African Americans do not have the same lives as the white people in their little boxes on the hillside. When Nancy is in Heylia’s home, and a gang drives by and shoots into their kitchen, all of the African American characters get back up when it’s over and keep doing what they were doing, whereas Nancy begins to cry and ask whether they should call the police. In that moment, Heylia says that “white folks get soda pop and n... get bullets”. Although Kohan might be perpetuating the African American stereotype characters, she does so in such an obvious way that it becomes a criticism that is meant to underline the clear differences in privilege. This is actually quite useful and interesting, because Kohan is writing for a white audience. If the show centered on complex, African American characters from different backgrounds, white people would be less prone to watch it. Instead, she slips in an empowering message in conventional stereotypical characters, making more of a satire of social privilege.

Depending on how you choose to watch it, Weeds can therefore be either a show perpetuating stereotypes, or a show that makes accessible political satire underlining different levels of privilege amongst African Americans and white people. There is a similar attitude towards another minority: overweight people, specifically overweight girls. Celia Hodes, a friend of Nancy’s from the elementary school’s PTA, has an overweight daughter called Isabelle. Celia does not let her daughter feel beautiful, or valid because of her weight. Hoping to push her to lose weight, Celia puts laxatives in Isabelle’s candy stash, making her defecate in front of her entire classroom at school. When Celia’s husband reprimands Celia for doing such a thing, she tells him “Excuse me for wanting my girl to be thin and attractive so that the world is her oyster (...) I know that you think that she’s beautiful but this is America. It is cold and cruel out there for fat girls”. In exactly the same way as in the case of African Americans, Kohan showcases an extreme stereotype in order to point out a bigger problem with society.

In Fighting Abjection, Kent writes that “fat bodies are fragmented, medicalized, pathologized, and transformed into abject versions of the horror of flesh itself” (p. 132). This is illustrated in Weeds by the way that Celia weighs her daughter every single day, pointing out her every flaw, and nicknaming her “Isabelly”. Kohan makes her character so incredibly ridiculous that it becomes humorous, making the audience laugh at how ridiculous social expectations are in the first place. Celia becomes a hateable character in the first couple seasons, but she embodies social expectations. She takes laxatives every day, leads the PTA, and is the ultimate protective soccer mom, notably putting a video camera in a teddy bear that she gives her daughter in the pilot. In the context of the show, she continues to be a joke, thereby indirectly making the audience think that social expectations are a joke. In a way, Kohan is almost tricking us to believe that society’s expectations are wrong.

There is one exception: LGBTQ minorities. There is not only a lack of positive depiction of LGTBQ minorities, but the existing depiction does not feel like political satire. It feels like the plot makes homosexuality seem ridiculous as a concept and not as legitimate as straight love. Isabelle begins to show interest in girls in the first few seasons. Celia equates her equates her homosexuality with her being overweight, notably telling her “You cannot become a lesbian just because you don’t want to lose weight. The only woman that you should be seeing is Jenny Craig. But hey I get it, you see people like Rosie O’Donnel and you think “if she can find love…””. Obviously, saying this is intended to make the audience laugh, showing how ridiculous it is to equate homosexuality with being overweight. Yet still, Isabelle is never shown to have a meaningful real relationship with any girl. In the third season, she becomes infatuated with a girl at school, but the shots of her staring at the girl, leering, make it feel like Kohan is transferring the sexual “male gaze” onto her. Nothing ever comes of this infatuation.

The other character who is homosexual is Sanjay, Nancy’s Indian errand boy. Sanjay as a character is meant to provide comical relief. He is cowardly, skinny, weak, and ridiculous. His homosexuality seems to be a continuation of his ridiculous personality. It does not seem like satire. He ends up impregnating a promiscuous African American woman who sleeps with him to “turn him straight”. This obviously does not happen, because Kohan realizes that homosexuality is not a choice, but it doesn’t seem as legitimate either. Nancy herself has a relationship with a woman when she goes to prison at the end of Season 6. However, the only reason that she has this relationship seems to be because there are no men around. The second that she comes out of prison, the relationship she had with the woman turns into a joke, and Nancy deliberately avoids the woman in question who developed real feelings for her, and even sleeps with her brother behind her back.

Martin and Kayzak show in their piece “Hetero-romantic Love and Heterosexiness in Children’s G-Rated Films” (p. 158), that real sex is solely heterosexual because “hetero-romantic relations are simultaneously magical and natural”. Any “magical” relationships throughout the series are heterosexual. Homosexuality is dismissed, a joke, not as real. In the last episode, it is mentioned that Isabelle is now a “he” in a comical way, implying that transexuality is something trivial that did not actually matter to the plot. Although Kohan does effective political satire with African American identities and overweight people, she somehow dismisses homosexuality and makes it feel less legitimate.

In conclusion, Weeds is a show that makes its audience laugh in order to correct suburban society’s faults. It empowers the white women watching it through Nancy’s character, who is a leader with sexual subjectivity. It underlines existing stereotypes about African Americans and overweight people in order to make its audience laugh at how ridiculous certain levels of privilege are in white society. The only exception is the way that she confronts LGTBQ issues, making homosexual relations seem less legitimate and not as essential to the plot as straight relationships (she makes up for it in Orange Is The New Black!). However, given that Weeds ran for eight seasons and confronted many different minorities in its politically satirical voice, it still remains an important show to watch. Nancy, as a white middle classed suburban mom, is the perfect character to make the show accessible to privileged classes, who through the show’s satire can realize that there is something wrong with the fundamental way that society works. The show therefore embodies the Latin saying castigat ridendo mores of the very first comedians in the 17th century, translating to “one corrects customs by laughing at them”.