Post-feminist impasses in popular heroine television

Abstract

The political, social, and cultural development of what has become known as ‘post-feminism’ has redefined female citizenship within a network of contradictory discursive technologies that, Angela McRobbie has argued, encourage young women to relinquish a traditional feminist critique in order to count as ‘sophisticated’, knowing citizens. Concurrent with this phenomenon is an unprecedented growth in female-centred drama that Amanda Lotz argues, has become a key industrial product of the post-network era. In this paper, I argue that the heroines of female-centred dramas in the post-feminist era – from Ally McBeal to more recent series – stage the silencing of feminist discourses in their positioning as knowing, ‘sophisticated’ citizens. In turn, this creates a crisis in feminist media scholarship, which has traditionally investigated the TV heroine for her particular feminisms. For the discourses that have shaped the discipline of feminist media criticism – philosophies of feminine identity – are foreclosed in post-feminist discourses. I present this impasse as a site for analysis that, in its rupture of the old approach, could propel the field of feminist media studies towards a new era.

Acknowledgements

I thank The University of Melbourne for funding the initial presentation of this paper at the 2011 Consoling Passions conference, in addition to the Australian Postgraduate Award that supported the research from which this paper derives. My sincerest gratitude to Dr Dion Kagan for his generous feedback and advice on this project, as well as Jasmine McGowan and Louise Sheedy for their positive criticism during the early stages of development.

Notes

^1. Notably, earlier television programming expressing post-feminist discourses, such as Murphy Brown (1988–1998), positioned the ‘feminist’ heroine Murphy at odds with the ‘feminine’ concerns articulated by the character Corky. In Ally, this duality exists in the same character: Ally.

^2. A clear example of this is the reality series Ladette to Lady (2004–2008), which deliberately constructs this uncanny figure.

^3. As Evans (1996, 178) notes, ‘sexual difference’ is not a term used by either Freud or Lacan, but was developed in the debate amongst feminists over the question of feminine identity .

^4. Marxist feminisms, for example, understand women's oppression as a consequence of the political and economic structures of the State (Tong 1992, 39), downplaying the place of sexual difference in inequality.

^5. Though not Tong's (1992, 217) ‘postmodern’ French (post)feminists .

^6. I would add here, a range of other feminisms informed by ‘post’ theories, such as black, Chicana and eco feminisms, or ‘womanisms’.

^7. A theme reminiscent of McRobbie's (2009) ‘double entanglement’ theory.

^8. In addition, Ally dreams she is featured on the cover of Time Magazine as the ‘face of feminism’ in an episode airing after the infamous ‘Is Feminism Dead’ cover in 1998.

Additional information

Funding

Funding

This work was supported by The Research and Graduate Studies Funding Scheme in the School of Culture & Communication at The University of Melbourne.

Notes on contributors

Alison Horbury

Alison Horbury received her doctorate from the school of Culture and Communication at The University of Melbourne in 2013. Her thesis examined post-feminist heroine television in the post-broadcast era, and her research interests include feminist epistemologies and psychoanalytic criticism within the fields of popular culture and television studies. She lectures and teaches in the Media and Communication department at The University of Melbourne and has worked on the editorial team of the journal Screening the Past at La Trobe University.