The Social Construction Of Family Life In The Sunday Comics: Race As a Consideration

Abstract

Using the Sunday comics as cultural artifacts, this research examines three cartoon families, “Dennis the Menace,” “Calvin and Hobbes,” and “Curtis.” All of the families are nuclear; the fatheris a white-collar worker; the mother remains at home. Each family has a male child who is the central character. A major difference is that the first two cartoons depict white families whereas the third describes an African American family. Using content analysis, the location of characters, activities, relationships between characters, and central themes are examined. Evidence of both family unity and social engagement is greater in the African American family than in either of the two white families. The portrayal of the two white families suggests a traditional pattern of neighbourhood containment in the older comic and isolation both within the family and between the family and community in the more contemporary one.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 11 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.