Every Pamela is political. Romantic intensities, sociosexual traditions and television series

Abstract

The successful series Pam & Tommy (Hulu, 2022) promises a feminist vindication of Pamela Anderson: a stereotype that obsessed heterosexual capitalism in the 90s. However, that apparent critical view can be questioned, as the narrative does not seem to abandon a traditional idea of love. Around the proposals of Eva Illouz and Fredric Jameson, the category of romantic intensities will collaborate with the interpretation of this crossroads, shedding light on our cultural idea of the love experience: affectivity that, even incorporating the mutations of postmodernity, clings to the great myths of love-passion and its institutions. That intensity will be verified in one of the common places that Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee synthesize: the rockstar couple, which proves to be conservative due to its protection in the bourgeois and reproductive family and in the canonical roles of protective masculinity and progenitor femininity. The objective of this article is thus to corroborate how in our mass culture romantic love is still maintained as one of the favorite and contradictory utopías of capitalism.