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ABSTRACT
This article critically interprets the NBC television program Parks and Recreation, analyzing its main character Leslie Knope as emblematic of an emerging rhetorical figure in public culture: the impossible woman. The impossible woman informs the possibilities for subjectivity and political engagement among audiences drawn to feminist messages as it mediates between the competing demands of feminism and neoliberalism through narrative structures that evoke what I have termed sexist realism, the presumption that, strive as we must to resist it, there is no alternative to patriarchy. I explore how the impossible woman is at once a product of and response to sexist realism as popular feminist rhetoric has made a virtue of feminist striving. The proliferation of the impossible woman in public culture celebrates this feminist virtue even as it cannot imagine collective feminist outcomes.
Acknowledgement
The author thanks Casey Kelly, Meredith Neville-Shephard, Ryan Neville-Shephard, Jenna Hanchey, and Graham Slater for their suggestions and is grateful for Karrin Vasby Anderson’s and the anonymous reviewers’ thoughtful feedback and recommendations. Many thanks to Kristina Lee for her careful attention to my citations.
Notes
1 Erika Engstrom, “‘Knope We Can!’ Primetime Feminist Strategies in NBC’s Parks and Recreation,” Media Report to Women 41, no. 4 (2013): 11.
2 Kelsey Wallace, “A Big Feminist Yep to Leslie Knope,” Bitch Media, October 5, 2009, https://www.bitchmedia.org/post/a-big-feminist-yep-to-leslie-knope.
3 Parks and Recreation, season 1, episode 1, “Pilot,” aired April 9, 2009, NBC.
4 Sarah Banet-Weiser and Laura Portwood-Stacer, “The Traffic in Feminism: An Introduction to the Commentary and Criticism on Popular Feminism,” Feminist Media Studies 17, no. 5 (2017): 884, doi:10.1080/14680777.2017.1350517.
5 Banet-Weiser and Portwood-Stacer, “The Traffic in Feminism,” 885–6.
6 Banet-Weiser and Portwood-Stacer, “The Traffic in Feminism,” 886.
7 Kenneth Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form, 3rd ed. (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1974), 293–304.
8 Barry Brummett, “Burke’s Representative Anecdote as a Method in Media Criticism,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 1, no. 2 (1984): 164, doi:10.1080/15295038409360027.
9 Brummett, “Burke’s Representative Anecdote,” 164.
10 Bonnie J. Dow, Prime-Time Feminism: Television, Media Culture, and the Women’s Movement since 1970 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996), xv.
11 Dow, Prime-Time Feminism, 7.
12 Dow, Prime-Time Feminism, 7.
13 Dow, Prime-Time Feminism, 8.
14 Meg Tully, “Constructing a Feminist Icon through Erotic Friend Fiction: Millennial Feminism on Bob’s Burgers,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 35, no. 2 (2018): 195, doi:10.1080/15295036.2017.1398831.
15 Michelle Rodino-Colocino, “The Great He-Cession: Why Feminists Should Rally for the End of White Supremacist Capitalist Patriarchy,” Feminist Media Studies 14, no. 2 (2014): 343–7, doi:10.1080/14680777.2014.887818.
16 Dow, Prime-Time Feminism.
17 Dow, Prime-Time Feminism, 100.
18 Laurie Ouellette, “Victims No More: Postfeminism, Television, and Ally McBeal,” The Communication Review 5, no. 4 (2002): 332–3, doi:10.1080/10714420214689.
19 Mary Douglas Vavrus, “Putting Ally on Trial: Contesting Postfeminism in Popular Culture,” Women’s Studies in Communication 23, no. 3 (2000): 413–28, doi:10.1080/07491409.2000.11735776.
20 Dow, Prime-Time Feminism, 93; Angela McRobbie, “Post-feminism and Popular Culture,” Feminist Media Studies 4, no. 3 (2004): 255–64, doi:10.1080/1468077042000309937.
21 See Mary Douglas Vavrus, Postfeminist News: Political Women in Media Culture (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2002).
22 Banet-Weiser and Portwood-Stacer, “The Traffic in Feminism”; Catherine Rottenberg, “The Rise of Neoliberal Feminism,” Cultural Studies 28, no. 3 (2014): 418–37, doi:10.1080/09502386.2013.857361.
23 Rodino-Colocino, “The Great He-Cession,” 344.
24 Rottenberg, “The Rise of Neoliberal Feminism.”
25 Banet-Weiser and Portwood-Stacer, “The Traffic in Feminism,” 886.
26 Rosalind Gill, “The Affective, Cultural and Psychic Life of Postfeminism: A Postfeminist Sensibility 10 Years On,” European Journal of Cultural Studies 20, no. 6 (2017): 607, doi:10.1177/1367549417733003.
27 Angela McRobbie, “Notes on the Perfect: Competitive Femininity in Neoliberal Times,” Australian Feminist Studies 30, no. 83 (2015): 12, doi:10.1080/08164649.2015.1011485.
28 Akane Kanai, “On Not Taking the Self Seriously: Resilience, Relatability and Humour in Young Women’s Tumblr Blogs,” European Journal of Cultural Studies 22, no. 1 (2019): 60–77, doi:10.1177/1367549417722092.
29 Rosalind Gill, “Post-Postfeminism?: New Feminist Visibilities in Postfeminist Times,” Feminist Media Studies 16, no. 4 (2016): 618, doi:10.1080/14680777.2016.1193293.
30 Kanai, “On Not Taking the Self Seriously,” 67.
31 Rebecca Traister, Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018), 209.
32 Traister, Good and Mad.
33 Brittney Cooper, Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2018), 204.
34 Robin James, Resilience & Melancholy: Pop Music, Feminism, Neoliberalism (Winchester: Zero Books, 2015), 86–7.
35 James, Resilience & Melancholy, 7.
36 James, Resilience & Melancholy, 11–12.
37 James, Resilience & Melancholy, 84–5.
38 Nancy Fraser, Fortunes of Feminism: From State-Managed Capitalism to Neoliberal Crisis, 1st ed. (Brooklyn, NY: Verso, 2013), 239.
39 Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution, Reprint ed. (New York: Zone Books, 2017), 105.
40 Sarah Kornfield, “Fixating on the Stasis of Fact: Debating ‘Having It All’ in U.S. Media,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 20, no. 2 (2017): 253–89, doi:10.14321/rhetpublaffa.20.2.0253.
41 Olivia Lofton, Nicolas Petrosky-Nadeau, and Lily Seitelman, “Parents in a Pandemic Labor Market,” Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, Working Paper Series (2021), doi:10.24148/wp2021-04; Tim Smart, “In One Year, Coronavirus Pandemic has Wreaked Havoc on Working Women,” US News & World Report, March 8, 2021, https://www.usnews.com/news/economy/articles/2021-03-08/in-one-year-coronavirus-pandemic-has-wreaked-havoc-on-working-women.
42 Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Winchester: Zero Books, 2009), 2.
43 Parks and Recreation, season 3, episode 3, “Time Capsule,” aired February 3, 2011, NBC.
44 Parks and Recreation, season 3, episode 2, “Flu Season,” aired January 27, 2011, NBC.
45 Parks and Recreation, season 1, episode 4, “Boy’s Club,” aired April 20, 2009, NBC.
46 Kathleen Kuehn and Thomas F. Corrigan, “Hope Labor: The Role of Employment Prospects in Online Social Production,” The Political Economy of Communication 1, no. 1 (2013): 21.
47 Brooke Erin Duffy, (Not) Getting Paid to Do What You Love: Gender, Social Media, and Aspirational Work (New Haven, CT & London: Yale University Press, 2017), 4.
48 Parks and Recreation, “Time Capsule.”
49 Parks and Recreation, season 5, episode 19, “Article Two,” aired April 18, 2013, NBC.
50 Parks and Recreation, “Boy’s Club.”
51 Parks and Recreation, season 1, episode 2, “Canvassing,” aired April 16, 2009, NBC.
52 Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2011), 176–7.
53 Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 6.
54 Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 176–7.
55 Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 1.
56 Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 2.
57 Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 2.
58 Parks and Recreation, season 4, episode 22, “Win, Lose, or Draw,” aired May 10, 2012, NBC.
59 Parks and Recreation, season 5, episode 18, “Animal Control,” aired April 11, 2013, NBC.
60 Parks and Recreation, “Animal Control.”
61 Karrin Vasby Anderson, “‘Rhymes with Rich’: ‘Bitch’ as a Tool of Containment in Contemporary American Politics,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 2, no. 4 (1999): 599–623, doi:10.1353/rap.2010.0082; Karrin Vasby Anderson, “‘Rhymes with Rich’ Redux: The ‘Bitch’ Metaphor and Campaign 2020,” Spectra, August 4, 2020, https://www.natcom.org/communication-currents/rhymes-rich-redux-bitch-metaphor-and-campaign-2020.
62 Parks and Recreation, season 6, episode 11, “Second Chunce,” aired January 9, 2014, NBC.
63 Ijeoma Oluo, Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America (Seal Press, 2020), 4.
64 Parks and Recreation, season 6, episode 15, “The Wall,” aired March 6, 2014, NBC.
65 Mark Neocleous, “Resisting Resilience,” Radical Philosophy 178 (2013): 4, https://www.radicalphilosophy.com/commentary/resisting-resilience.
66 Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation (New York: Autonomedia, 2004).
67 Parks and Recreation, season 2, episode 15, “Sweetums,” aired February 4, 2010, NBC.
68 Denise Martin, “Making Bureaucracy Work,” Los Angeles Times, November 19, 2009, https://www.latimes.com/et-parks09-story.html.
69 Brown, Undoing the Demos, 39.
70 Robert Asen, “Neoliberalism, the Public Sphere, and a Public Good,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 103, no. 4 (2017): 332, doi:10.1080/00335630.2017.1360507.
71 Asen, “Neoliberalism, the Public Sphere,” 334.
72 Parks and Recreation, season 5, episode 22, “Are You Better Off?,” aired May 2, 2013, NBC.
73 Kate Manne, Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny (Oxford University Press, 2019).
74 Parks and Recreation, season 5, episode 12, “Ann’s Decision,” aired February 7, 2013, NBC.
75 Henry A. Giroux, “Beyond the Biopolitics of Disposability: Rethinking Neoliberalism in the New Gilded Age,” Social Identities 14, no. 5 (2008): 593–4.
76 Kornfield, “Fixating on the Stasis of Fact.”
77 Michelle Colpean and Meg Tully, “Not Just a Joke: Tina Fey, Amy Schumer, and the Weak Reflexivity of White Feminist Comedy,” Women’s Studies in Communication 42, no. 2 (2019): 162, doi:10.1080/07491409.2019.1610924.
78 See the chapters by Valerie Renegar, Lacy Lowrey, and Kirsti Cole, Mary Douglas Vavrus, Tasha N. Dubriwny, and Alyssa Samek in Karrin Vasby Anderson, Women, Feminism, and Pop Politics: From “Bitch” to “Badass” and Beyond (Peter Lang Publishing, Incorporated, 2018).
79 John Fiske, Television Culture, 2nd ed. (London & New York: Routledge, 2010); Lisa Glebatis Perks, “Polysemic Scaffolding: Explicating Discursive Clashes in Chappelle’s Show,” Communication, Culture & Critique 3, no. 2 (2010): 270–89, doi:10.1111/j.1753-9137.2010.01070.x; Lisa Gring-Pemble and Martha Solomon Watson, “The Rhetorical Limits of Satire: An Analysis of James Finn Garner’s Politically Correct Bedtime Stories,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 89, no. 2 (2003): 132–53, doi:10.1080/00335630308175.
80 Perks, “Polysemic Scaffolding,” 271.
81 Parks and Recreation, season 2, episode 14, “Galentine’s Day,” aired February 11, 2010, NBC.
82 Parks and Recreation, season 2, episode 22, “Telethon,” aired May 6, 2010, NBC.
83 Parks and Recreation, season 3, episode 4, “Ron and Tammy Part 2,” aired February 10, 2011, NBC.
84 Karrin Vasby Anderson, “‘Yes We Can’t Not. Knope’: Parks and Recreation and the Promise of Comic Feminist Parody,” in Women, Feminism, and Pop Politics: From “Bitch” to “Badass” and Beyond, ed. Karrin Vasby Anderson (New York: Peter Lang, 2018), 297.
85 Parks and Recreation, season 4, episode 8, “Smallest Park,” aired November 17, 2011, NBC.
86 Parks and Recreation, season 3, episode 1, “Go Big or Go Home,” aired January 20, 2011, NBC.
87 Parks and Recreation, season 4, episode 10, “Citizen Knope,” aired December 8, 2011, NBC.
88 Robyn Stacia Swink, “Lemony Liz and Likable Leslie: Audience Understandings of Feminism, Comedy, and Gender in Women-Led Television Comedies,” Feminist Media Studies 17, no. 1 (2017): 22–4, doi:10.1080/14680777.2017.1261832.
89 Swink, “Lemony Liz,” 24.
90 Parks and Recreation, season 5, episode 14, “Leslie and Ben,” aired February 21, 2013, NBC.
91 Parks and Recreation, season 5, episode 10, “Two Parties,” aired January 17, 2013, NBC.
92 Amy B. Wang, “‘Nevertheless, She Persisted’ Becomes New Battle Cry after McConnell Silences Elizabeth Warren,” Washington Post, February 8, 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2017/02/08/nevertheless-she-persisted-becomes-new-battle-cry-after-mcconnell-silences-elizabeth-warren/.
93 Shane Goldmacher and Astead W. Herndon, “Elizabeth Warren, Once a Front-Runner, Drops Out of Presidential Race,” New York Times, March 5, 2020, sec. U.S., https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/05/us/politics/elizabeth-warren-drops-out.html.
94 Danielle Tcholakian, “Democrats Say They’ll Support a Woman for President. Here’s How We Know They’re Lying,” The Daily Beast, June 17, 2019, sec. politics, https://www.thedailybeast.com/democrats-say-theyll-support-a-woman-for-president-heres-how-we-know-theyre-lying.
95 Karrin Vasby Anderson, “Every Woman is the Wrong Woman: The Female Presidentiality Paradox,” Women’s Studies in Communication 40, no. 2 (2017): 133, doi:10.1080/07491409.2017.1302257.
96 Lisa Lerer and Susan Chira, “‘There’s a Real Tension.’ Democrats Puzzle Over Whether a Woman Will Beat Trump,” New York Times, January 5, 2019, sec. U.S., https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/05/us/politics/women-candidates-president-2020.html.
97 Asen, “Neoliberalism, the Public Sphere,” 340.
98 Colpean and Tully, “Not Just a Joke,” 162.
99 Emily VanDerWerff, “The Democrats’ Not-so-Secret Closing Argument: Hillary Clinton is Leslie Knope,” Vox, July 28, 2016, https://www.vox.com/2016/7/28/12306978/hillary-clinton-leslie-knope-dnc.
100 For more on the whiteness and homogeneity of the contemporary entertainment television industry, see Rachel Alicia Griffin and Michaela D. E. Meyer, eds, Adventures in Shondaland: Identity Politics and the Power of Representation (Rutgers University Press, 2018); Taylor Nygaard and Jorie Lagerwey, Horrible White People: Gender, Genre, and Television’s Precarious Whiteness (New York University Press, 2020); David Chison Oh, “‘Opting out of That’: White Feminism’s Policing and Disavowal of Anti-Racist Critique in The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 37, no. 1 (2020): 58–70, doi:10.1080/15295036.2019.1690666.
101 Dow, Prime-Time Feminism, 161.