Independent women: from film to television

ABSTRACT

“Independent Women: From Film to Television” explores the significance for feminism of the increasing representation of women on and behind the screen in television contexts around the world. “Independent” has functioned throughout film and television history as an important euphemism for “feminist,” and this special issue investigates how this connection plays out in a contemporary environment that popular feminist discourse is constructing as a golden age of television for women. The original essays offer keen insight into how post-network television is being valued as a new site of independent production for women, and examine how the connotations of creative control that attend this orients perceptions of both female creators and their content as feminist. Together, they provide a compelling perspective on the feminist consequences of how independence and “indie” have intensified as cultural sensibilities that coincide and engage with the digital transformation of television over the past decade.

KEYWORDS:

• Television
• feminism
• independence
• independent film
• gender and media

This special issue of Feminist Media Studies is motivated by our observation of a critical shift in the profile of women’s television work over the course of the twenty-first century’s second decade. In conjunction with the well-documented transformation of television to a non-linear, internet-delivered medium governed by the logic of the showrunner (Amanda Lotz 2018; Mareike Jenner 2018; Aymar Jean Christian 2018; Amanda Lotz 2017; Jason Mittell 2015; Michael Z Newman and Elana Levine 2012), a swell of popular discourse is currently recognising women’s agency as creators in the “Peak TV” landscape and commending the content they are producing as feminist. This discourse is substantially centred on US creators and content but, largely as a result of the rise of global streaming platforms such as Netflix and Amazon and the transnational flows of content they have enabled, is also bringing to visibility the work of women from elsewhere around the world, most notably the UK, Australia and Europe. It is evident in books (Emily Nussbaum 2019a; Joy Press 2018), podcasts,¹ and, most prominently, the endless reviews, recaps, and think-pieces that characterise online television criticism’s climate of microanalysis² and, like other contemporary expressions of popular feminism, is deeply ambivalent.

The discourse, which, in its broadest remit, is constructing a perception of the current cultural moment as a golden age of television for women, understands and promotes the increasing representation of women on and behind the screen as a positive development for feminism. These changes are seen to combat the long-held masculinism of quality television as a system of evaluation that prioritises darkly realistic dramas premised upon male anti-heroes and the sexist and abusive treatment of women. Further, in centring “imperfect” and “vulnerable” women who are openly struggling with the commands of gendered neoliberalism that structure twenty-first century life, these representations push back—to an extent—against the postfeminist expectation for women to be resilient above all else (Rosalind Gill 2017; Rosalind Gill and Shani Orgad 2018; Amy Shields Dobson and Akane Kanai 2018). The mere presence of this discourse is important in drawing attention to entrenched issues around gender representation and norms in global television industries, and the conversations around individual series and creators contribute to critical debates on the rise of “women-centric” media over the past decade (Kristen Warner 2019). Both of these effects are reinforced and contextualised by the ways that these discussions have intensified in the wake of growing attention to issues of sexism and inequality in media industries as a result of the #MeToo and TimesUp movements (Emily Nussbaum 2019b, Jen Cheney 2018; Arielle Bernstein 2018).

In perpetuating assumptions that much of contemporary scripted television is straightforwardly “feminist” as a result of its agency and content, though, this discursive work is limited. As commentary that emerges primarily from Anglo-American media outlets, it attends overwhelmingly to Anglo-American material and, in doing so, frequently reinforces postfeminist ideas around achieved progress for women in media production by working to canonize individual showrunners and those who orbit them. Further, in making figures such as Lena Dunham, Jane Campion, Jill Soloway, Ava DuVernay and Phoebe Waller-Bridge visible to a large, popular audience, conversations around women’s television work also render the creators and their work accessible in an example of what Sarah Banet-Weiser calls popular feminism’s “feedback loop” (Sarah Banet-Weiser 2018, 10). This creates a situation whereby these figures are popular because they are visible, and the more visible they become the more self-evident the feminist content of their work is made to appear. Jana Cattien touches on this when she identifies the ease with which many recent Anglo-American television series attain the “’feminist’ stamp of approval” (Jana Cattien 2019, 322), an effect that contributes to feminism being turned into a “genre” of television. As Cattien argues, when the signifier is forced to unify across a range of series that are substantially different in style, content and focus, not only does “feminism” become a fixed, descriptive category but its application removes from the series the ability to take feminism itself as an object of critique (2019, 324).³

With “Independent Women: From Film to Television” we are seeking to engage critically with this current popular discourse on television by, for and about women, beginning from the position that it has not yet been substantially examined or qualified in the way other expressions of popular or neoliberal feminism have (Sarah Banet-Weiser 2018; Catherine Rottenberg 2018; Rosalind Gill and Shani Orgad 2017). Despite its limitations, the discourse represents a significant shift in the valuation of women’s television work which, historically, has been considered “bread and butter” labour for female filmmakers around the world. For decades, women have taken on roles in the production, writing and direction of both broad- and narrow-cast series as a way of supporting their “real” and hard-won work in feature filmmaking, with television jobs rarely considered part of their professional profile by themselves or others. Insofar as it is paid employment that is not seen or valued at a symbolic or material level in the same way as the development of a film, this type of women’s television work functions as a form of invisible labour, and an important aspect of feminist television history lies in its excavation.⁴ In the current moment though, both this labour and its products are, in the contexts described, achieving not only visibility but also popularity.

Why “independent” women?

As a way into this discourse, which, like all contemporary media trends, is defined by the qualities of what Mark Andrejevic calls “infoglut” (Mark Andrejevic 2013), this special issue mobilises the topos of “independence.” It seeks to explore how this concept can contextualise the terms of women’s agency and representation in and on television in the current moment. In television history, the term independent has functioned as an important euphemism for feminist, with, for instance, the influential trope of the “new woman” and the category of the feminist sitcom both anchored by images of women functioning outside dominant representational channels (Lauren Rabinovitz 1999; Bonnie Dow 1996; Julie D’Acci 1994). The connection is evident too in the history of women’s independent filmmaking, which has always revolved around a conception of independence as both limiting and generative. Lesley Stern summed this “double movement” up well in the late 1970s in relation to the Australian context as “a struggle to gain access for women to the means of production … and a struggle on the level of meaning-production … of a point of view radically different to that offered by the dominant patriarchal perspective” (Lesley Stern 1979, n.p).⁵

This struggle to become at once visible and resistant is especially relevant to popular television feminisms of the current moment, as women practitioners negotiate how to pursue female-centric and feminist content within mainstream channels. In nominating the theme of independence, then, we are seeking to detail some specific instances of this struggle along two key lines of enquiry. The first uses the lens of independence to examine the shifting dynamics of television as a gendered industrial landscape. A large proportion of women who are coming to visibility as creators in the current popular discourse have career pathways identified with independent film production, as the vast majority of women filmmakers do. This includes not just creators linked to the “indie” circuit in the US (Linda Badley, Claire Perkins and Michele Schreiber 2016) but women who have worked with, and against, the state subsidised film funding systems of the UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and various European nations. While neither of these pathways are strictly independent in a financial sense they are both circuits that have been discursively constructed as existing outside of a monolithic, male-dominated “mainstream” that has historically been almost impossible for women to break into. As such, the notion of an independent sector has long been understood as a space that is more accessible for women. This is a perception that is supported, to a degree, by the available statistics on women’s creative participation in screen production. Martha Lauzen’s most recent reports on the US context out of the Center for the Study of Women in Film and Television show that women comprised 32% of all directors, writers, producers, executive producers, editors and cinematographers working on independent films in 2018–19 (Martha M. Lauzen 2019a), as against only 20% of these roles on the top 250 domestic grossing films of the same period (Martha M. Lauzen 2019b). In a less positive sense, it is also a form of popular rhetoric that functions to obscure the reality of working conditions for female filmmakers, where, to draw on the same set of statistics for US independent film, men still occupied more than twice as many key behind the scenes roles as women (68%) over the past year (Martha M. Lauzen 2019a).⁶

With significant numbers of women filmmakers whose careers have followed these independent pathways now working with agency in cable and streamed television environments, this double-edged discourse substantially informs the popular conversations around women’s television work described above. Television, in short, is being understood as a new site of independent production for women, with amplified connotations of freedom and authorial control. By looking closely at a range of television case studies driven by women identified—in various ways—with independent sectors of production, the essays in this issue investigate the possibilities of television conceived this way. In devising the issue, a key motivation was to test this rhetoric: to reflect on if and how the rise of digital platforms has allowed women to exercise more control and singularity of vision than has historically been offered in television production. Extending from this, we were also keen to explore the strategies by which female filmmakers working in television both promote and resist traditional authorial practices and discourses. In framing these questions, the trope of independence offers a valuable perspective from which to investigate and understand women’s work as creators and producers of post-network television.

The issue’s second line of enquiry seeks to think through how these connotations of independence orient perceptions of contemporary women’s television as feminist. Can the logic of independence—as an industrial, textual and critical trope—focalize exactly if and how this work is resisting gendered norms of representation and shifting historically masculinist understandings of quality television around the world? One of the effects of the digital television environment is the rise of so-called “indie TV,” a term that typically refers to the ways a hyper-narrowcast, non-linear environment spanning both corporate platforms and web productions provides a place for niche and often lo-fi themes, characters and modes of address in a way more traditional schedules do not. Writing in The New Yorker in 2014, Emily Nussbaum described the “new school of indie-inflected TV” as “a set of lyrical outliers that stop and start, using music and montages to suggest ideas without fully explaining them (Emily Nussbaum 2014).” To what extent does this serial space both offer and disavow the potential for the “alternative images” of the second sense of independence described above—specifically, for a point of view that is fundamentally different to a dominant patriarchal perspective?

In this sense, we were keen to explore exactly what can be identified as formally and thematically independent in individual examples of women’s television work of the current moment, and in how these qualities translate to a perception that the material is feminist. Given the crossover of practitioners from film to television described above, we were interested in how different creators and series are producing work that tangibly links back to antecedents in women’s independent filmmaking, both recent and more distant. We were also interested in how current series are expanding and transforming the television type of the “independent woman” for the contemporary era. The connotations of independence across different series are here numerous, ranging from images of empowered women that fit squarely into the context of neoliberal feminism (Catherine Rottenberg 2018) to images that appear to offer some resistance to this system by foregrounding qualities of imperfection (Angela McRobbie 2015), “difficulty” (Jia Tolentino 2019) and unruliness (Anne Helen Petersen 2017). Across both lines of enquiry, then, the special issue aims to offer a perspective on the feminist consequences of how independence and “indie” have intensified as cultural sensibilities that coincide and engage with the digital transformation of television over the past decade.

Jessica Ford begins the issue with her article that speaks directly to the intersections between the aesthetic and narrative conventions associated with American independent cinema and a cycle of women-centric television dramedies that she sees as drawing inspiration from Lena Dunham’s Girls (2012–2017). Using Pamela Aldon’s Better Things (2016 -) and Jill Soloway’s Transparent (2014-) as case studies, Ford argues that these shows’ non-spectacular aesthetics and portrayal of emotion in addition to their feminist sensibility puts them in a category best described as “women’s indie television.” In contrast to the spectacular big-budget, male-associated shows normally defined as “cinematic”, these two female-helmed shows and others like them emphasize ordinary and mundane realities of interpersonal relationships.

Jodi Brooks also addresses how domestic and ordinary spaces associated with women are employed in compelling ways in the HBO limited series Olive Kitteridge (2014), directed by indie film stalwart Lisa Cholodenko. Brooks’ analysis considers Olive Kitteridge as an outlier in the world of women-centric prestige television in its almost radical meditation on female-associated containment, both in the narrative itself as well as in the show’s original broadcast strategy. HBO aired the show over two nights in four 60-min episodes, and she argues that this confined time frame, broken up into chapters, contributes to Kitteridge’s portrait of the decidedly unlikeable eponymous character, (Frances McDormand) who suffers from depression, belches frequently and treats those around her with disdain. Brooks argues that the series resists the usual conventions that might explain away Olive’s problems or see her reach some cathartic moment of likeability, instead allowing the show to live with and in “the rhythms and uncomfortable intimacies of the domestic space” which provide an illuminating lens through which to view the television medium itself as that which has historically been associated with women and the home.

Francisco López-Rodríguez and Irene Raya Bravo’s piece highlights how many contemporary global television programs gesture toward traditional “feminine” narrative forms, such as the soap opera, that have historically been associated with women viewers. Specifically, they offer a case study of Spanish television producer Teresa Fernández-Valdés and her show Las chicas del cable/Cable Girls (2017-), which focuses on a group of women working for a telecommunications company in the 1920s and balances more conventional notions of female archetypes and heteronormative storylines of soap operas with a more progressive exploration of queer sexuality and trans identity. The show is one of the first in Spain to be co-produced with Netflix, which was a coup for Fernández-Valdés’s company Bambú Producciones but, as López-Rodríguez and Raya Bravo argue, has served to both bolster and hamper Fernández-Valdés’s creative independence. The partnership has allowed for Bambú to continue their global reach, which they found first with their Netflix-distributed show Velvet (2014–2016), however it also necessitates that they continue the popular, period-drama formula of the earlier show which drew Netflix’s attention in the first place. López-Rodríguez and Raya Bravo’s piece along with that by Concepción Cascajosa Virino demonstrates Spain’s growing global presence in the media industry and how this affects the creative output of a female practitioners. Virino examines the industry from a slightly different angle focusing on film director Mar Coll, who crossed over into television with the series Matar al Padre/Killing the Father (2018) on the pay-tv platform Movistar+. The network sought her out because of her strong vision as a member of “the other Spanish cinema” group of filmmakers, and the series was branded as an extension of her two films chronicling Catalan bourgeois family life. However, according to Virino, despite the prestige billing Coll received, there was still a struggle for creative control over the series and once distributed, it was not well-received. Virino suggests that this case study of Coll’s failed crossover into television is a testament to the challenges still faced by women media practitioners in Spain.

On the flipside of Virino’s portrayal of a failed collaboration between Coll and Movistar+ is Maria San Filippo’s consideration of Desiree Akhavan and Ingrid Jungermann’s relationship and how their failure as a romantic and creative couple proved to be generative, offering “transformative potential” for thinking through masculinist, heteronormative concepts of authorship. Akhavan and Jungermann, former romantic partners and creative collaborators, moved from web series production to feature films and then into television. They have explored multiple permutations of coupledom and have turned to serialized television as a way to explore queer sexual and romantic entanglements in a fluid form that resists the closed, prescribed resolution of the heteronormative couple. Mihaela Mihalova also examines the form and content of television programs, in this case, animated shows, produced in independent, non-legacy television spheres. Mihailova focuses on the work of Natasha Allegri (creator of Bee and Puppycat (2013–2016)) Shadi Petosky (Danger & Eggs (2017-)), and Rebecca Sugar (Steven Universe (2013-)), all of whom have entered television through non-traditional “independent” channels and how their representation of diverse characters attracts a strong fan base of viewers often neglected by the animation industry.

Elizabeth Alsop also discusses the ways in which female-driven television work can build a sense of female solidarity both within and outside of television texts. Alsop examines how discourses around female collaboration, support, and solidarity in and around peak television shows such as Big Little Lies (2017-), Glow (2017-), Orange is the New Black (2013–2019) and Top of the Lake (2013-), reflects the political conversations in light of the #MeToo Movement. She argues that while female solidarity is not new, it is in the midst of a reinvigoration in the contemporary media landscape in which intersectional ally-ship is front and centre in mainstream popular discussion.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Claire Perkins

Claire Perkins is Senior Lecturer in Film and Screen Studies at Monash University, Melbourne. She is the author of American Smart Cinema (2012) and co-editor of six collections including (with Michele Schreiber and Linda Badley) Indie Reframed: Women's Filmmaking and Contemporary American Independent Cinema (2016), Transnational Television Remakes (2016) and US Independent Film After 1989: Possible Films (2015). Her writing has also appeared in journals including Camera Obscura, Critical Studies in Television, The Velvet Light Trap and Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies. E-mail: [email protected].

Michele Schreiber

Michele Schreiber is an Associate Professor in the Department of Film and Media Studies at Emory University. She is the author of American Postfeminist Cinema: Women Romance and Contemporary Culture (2014) and co-editor (along with Linda Badley and Claire Perkins) of Indie Reframed: Women’s Filmmaking and Contemporary American Independent Cinema (2016). E-mail: [email protected].

Notes

1. Many women-centric series of recent years have generated dedicated podcasts in which hosts recap and discuss material episode by episode, frequently focusing on popular feminist themes. Some relevant examples include “Insecuritea” (on Insecure) and the numerous shows on The Handmaid’s Tale (“Eyes on Gilead,” “Red All Over: A Handmaid’s Tale Podcast,” “The Red Resistance: The Handmaid’s Tale Podcast,” “Mayday: The Handmaid’s Tale Podcast”) and Killing Eve (“Evesdropping: A Killing Eve Podcast,” “Well Well Well Villanelle: A Killing Eve Podcast,” “Spilling Eve: A Killing Eve Podcast”).

2. Expressions of popular feminism discussing how contemporary women’s television is calling out female oppression and resisting patriarchal norms can be identified in practically any review of any female-driven series of the current moment. Jana Cattien documents a number of these examples in her article on Alias Grace (2019) and series including Fleabag (see Priscilla Frank 2016), Queen Sugar (see Sabienna Bowman 2017) and Get Krack!n (see Anna Krien 2017) also attract this type of reflection in high volume. The discourse is evident too in commentaries that expand beyond individual series to take a broader perspective on the feminist possibilities of current television by, for and about women (see Zeba Blay 2015; Sarah Hughes 2018; ‘Screen Queens’ 2019) and in profiles of creators like Lena Dunham (see Allison Davis 2018) and Sharon Horgan (see Eva Wiseman 2016).

3. This position is to some extent evident within popular discourse itself, in examples such as Angelica Jade Bastien’s piece for The Outline titled “Calling a TV Show ‘Feminist’ Doesn’t Make it Feminist” (Angelica Jade Bastien 2016).

4. This process is discussed by Moseley, Wheatley and Wood and evident in several essays on the British context in their collection Television for Women: New Directions (2017). Work is evident too in Thumin (2004) and Baehr and Dyer’s collection Boxed In: Women and Television (1987).

5. Stern’s terms were drawn upon by Therese Davis and Jodi Brooks to frame a generative discussion of women and independence in the 21^st century in a public forum featuring screen scholars and practitioners that opened the 2018 Melbourne Women in Film Festival. Many of the points raised in that discussion resonate with the themes of this special issue. See Jodi Brooks, Therese Davis and Claire Perkins 2018.

6. An awareness of the masking effect this type of rhetoric creates in the television context is finding some expression in the same spaces that popular feminist themes are being reinforced. See, for instance, British TV writer Lisa Holdsworth’s article “Yes, Women Wrote Fleabag and Derry Girls. But Men Still Dominate TV” (2019).