549 PREVIOUSLY ON “You gotta let them know what kind of guy you are, then they’ll know what kind of girl to be”: Gendered Identity and Fantasy in Mad Men Sarah French Matthew Weiner’s television series Mad Men (2007-) provides a contemporary critique of the gender politics of 1960s middle-class America. Focusing on the theme of fantasy, this chapter argues that the series reveals femininity and masculinity to be highly constructed, performative and mimetic categories that adhere to the coordinates of patriarchal fantasy. The characters’ constructions of gendered identity are situated within a rigid patriarchal ideological framework that imposes severe limitations upon their subjectivities, as a result of which each of the protagonists are shown to be inherently damaged, unstable or lacking in agency. The role of fantasy is ultimately to conceal and overcome this inherent instability through the construction of stable yet fantasmatic identities. In the title sequence that opens each episode of Mad Men a series of visual motifs are used to express this central theme of fantasy. The sequence depicts a silhouetted man who stands in for the series’ protagonist Don Draper (Jon Hamm). As he enters his corporate offce, the objects and furniture lose their solidity and begin to fall through the foor. The offce itself then disappears and the silhouetted man falls with the other objects towards the ground, passing the skyscrapers with their billboard advertisements of wholesome family life and sexually objectifed women. The advertisements appear as mimetic fragments, simulacra of a life-world constructed on ideological fantasies. The falling objects and silhouette point to the illusory and impermanent nature of the world of Mad Men and Don Draper’s similarly illusory role within this world. Yet despite the fact that Don and his world are in the process of disintegrating internally, the fnal moments of the title sequence present us with Don’s silhouette sitting in a relaxed pose with a cigarette. This fnal image is of a constructed external reality where everything appears to be solid and dependable and Don himself is the image of confdence and composure. This title sequence encompasses one of the key ideas of Mad Men: beneath the fantasy-construction that upholds reality exists an internal instability that threatens to rupture the American Dream. This analysis of Mad Men draws upon Slavoj Zizek’s (1989:123) defnition of fantasy as “the frame through which we experience the world as consistent and meaningful.” In Mad Men fantasy is not depicted as an escape from reality, rather, fantasy functions in the Zizekian sense as a suturing mechanism that forms the fabric of social reality. As Zizek (1989: 45) explains: Ideology is not a dreamlike illusion that we build to escape insupportable reality; in its basic dimension it is a fantasy-construction which serves as a support for our ‘reality’ itself: an ‘illusion’ which structures our effective, real social relations and thereby masks some insupportable, real, impossible kernel . . . The function of ideology is not to offer us an escape from reality but to offer us the social reality itself as an escape from some traumatic kernel.