Televising popular feminism

ABSTRACT

Recently, televisual programs such as TV Land’s Younger (2015), Freeform’s The Bold Type (2017), The CW’s Charmed reboot (2018), and Netflix’s Sex Education (2019) joined consumer culture’s era of popular feminism by hailing audiences through feminist appeals. Pilot episodes sell series to network executives and viewers – establishing series’ central tensions. Thus, we analyze how feminism operates in these series’ pilots, attending to their narrative premises and televisual styles. Situating this analysis within the frameworks of postfeminism, girl power, and popular feminism, we trace an overlapping continuum of feminist iterations, from individualized feminism on Younger to corporate feminism on The Bold Type and then collective feminism on Charmed’s reboot and an everyday feminism on Sex Education. Analyzing this television cycle, we argue that while imperfect, these pilots’ iterations of popular feminism represent a transformation from postfeminist entertainment toward politically engaged feminism.

KEYWORDS:

• popular feminism
• television
• femininity
• postfeminism
• politics

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Jacob E. Nyenhuis Faculty Development Grant;

Notes on contributors

Sarah Kornfield

Sarah Kornfield is an Associate Professor of Communication and Women's & Gender Studies at Hope College. She is the author of Contemporary Rhetorical Criticism and her research focuses on how gender is performed, produced, and constructed in U.S. television.

Elizabeth Bassett

Elizabeth Bassett is a Hope College undergraduate student pursuing a major in Communication and a minor in Organizational Leadership. Her research interests include televisual feminism and the function of feminism in popular media.