Oh my God, that pool party: Shrill and fat femininity in a postfeminist media culture

ABSTRACT

The Hulu original comedy Shrill is a communicative text for understanding fat women’s subjectivity in line with discourses of neoliberalism and postfeminism. Based on interviews with twenty-five women who watch the series, I argue that Shrill offers an avenue through which audiences reckon with expectations of the female body and celebrate resistance to those expectations; in a media landscape that has routinely erased fat women completely or made their bodies a site of comic relief, Shrill engages with rhetorics of body positivity and self-acceptance. While it pushes back against neoliberal, postfeminist discourses of the disciplined female subject, it simultaneously reifies notions of the “right” kind of fat femininity, one that is marked by class (middle- to upper-class) and race (white).

KEYWORDS:

• Television
• media audiences
• postfeminism
• neoliberalism
• fatness