Current Responses to Post-Feminist
Television
Stefania Marghitu
A show like the Second and the City depicts successful
white upper middle class women from their mid 30s onward living in New York
City. They are all for the most part in successful jobs- Carrie’s a sex
columnist, Charlotte’s a gallery coordinator/curator of some sort, Samantha’s a
high power celebrity publicist, Miranda, the least desirable and hardest
working and most educated, is a lawyer. Throughout the show we see these women
have some problems with work, but we hardly ever question the gendered dynamics
of their jobs or how they got to where they are. Besides Miranda, these jobs
are also mostly women-dominated. Miranda navigates through a male-dominated
law company as she wants to get partner. She seems to give up a lot of her
feminine wiles because of this position.
But these women are still instantly in high powered, high paying
positions, we do not see their struggle to get to that job, which is part of
the post-feminist assumption that feminism’s work is done, that equality has
been achieved because society at large has become a meritocracy and gender is
no longer an issue holding women back from their careers.
We see this in a show
like Ally McBeal, the other most
popularly written about show in terms of post-feminism, in which again the
white upper middle class protagonist already has that Harvard Law degree, and
she’s in her new job, and her ex college boyfriend and his new girlfriend are
now both their colleague!
Having it all
was not a term coined by feminists, but by the backlash of feminism that urged
women that they could never be fulfilled with a career because they had no time
to become mothers. It’s kind of like the bra burning stereotype, when feminists
actually didn’t get the fire permit and no bra bruning was done. No feminist
ever said women can have it all, but that they should be entitled to equality
to men to have what they choose to want. The Betty Friedan Feminine Mystique Second Wave and the Anne Marie Slaughter Sheryl
Sandberg Lean In brand of corporate
feminism is problematic because it is only relatable to college educated, upper
middle class, white women who can have the choice to work or raise a family,
etc. Friedan and Sandberg now fail to acknowledge women of lower income in
America who HAD to work to sustain their families, who could not think about
leaning in or these kinds of gender dynamics that also deal with race, ethnicity,
class, and so on. This doesn't even begin to scratch the surface of global feminism, but since our focus is on Anglo-American TV as well.
Post-feminist TV
attributes to me are all about female protagonists who revert to preoccupying
themselves with traditional gender expectations, that successful careers can be
easily achieved but are not a main preoccupation, with situations and scenarios
that disregard the albeit limited success of post-second wave feminism and
beyond. A series like Mad Men for me
was in some ways a feminist critique on post-feminist society’s forgetfulness
of the struggles of feminism, showing how the characters of Betty and Joan
often struggle with their roles in society based on ther femininity and
traditional gender expectations while Peggy is a rare career-oriented loner
navigating through a male-dominated field.
Sex and the City, Ally
McBeal, and Mad Men are all about
the Unberable Whiteness of Being too, and in many ways, Shonda Rhimes’ Grey’s Anatomy picked up from the
popularity of Sex and the City and ER’s popularity too, of that good
looking ensemble medical cast. Rhimes incorporated blindcasting to reveal a
diverse cast, although the central protagonists were white, which would change
with the historic black female protagonist Olivia Pope (Kerry Washington) in Scandal. In some ways, Rhimes’ series
play out like a feminist fantasy in which women get their high level positions
based on their merit, and they are less concerned, if not downright frightened,
of settling down to a home and family, unlike their male counterparts.
Over the break I
finally started watching Being Mary Jane,
created and showrunned by Mara Brock Akil. I binge watched Season 1 on Netflix
and luckily had the hindsight to begin recording Season 2 on my DVR. In many
ways, BMJ is a response to many of
these series of the past. It shows a career-driven successful late 30s black
woman with a beautiful house, luxury car. We see her exercising, eating right,
working late, having bad dates, break ups, family problems. She is single
because she states she has been so career-driven. As a broadcast journalist for
a fictional CNN competitor in Atlanta, she addresses race-related issues with
strident passion, as Akil does when she shows the disparity between her
protagonist, a single and successful career woman, and her 19-year old niece
who has two children with two different fathers and no career or education.
Butler writes:
McRobbie (2009) argues—and Foucault would surely agree—that
postfemi- nism becoming so widespread at this socio-historical moment is not a
coinci- dence; rather, it is precisely because women are now required to
participate in the labor market and the public sphere that postfeminism emerges
to re-secure the gender (and racial) order (67). In other words, as women come
forward in education and employment and gender equality is allegedly achieved,
and as women of color become increasingly visible in the academy and the public
sphere, contemporary discourses must adapt in order to reinforce gender and
racial hierarchies and ensure that the systems of compulsory heterosexuality
and white privilege remain intact.
We are in a
really fascinating era of television now in which popular press is writing
about television’s relationship with race and gender in a very real way, both
in terms of representations behind and in front of the camera. When Tina Fey’s 30 Rock first premiered in the early
2000s, very few folks were outwardly talking about the show’s relationship to
feminism, race issues, the workplace and so on.
With Fey’s latest venture Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt’s Netflix premiere in
early March, cultural critics delved into Fey’s newfound more overt feminism
but still carefully criticized her problematic take on race and ethnicity,
especially in her female characters, but also with the supporting male Asian
character, and a truly strange Native American flashback plot. Interestingly enough, the show was first a lot more darker and smarter from what I heard, it toned down for NBC, NBC still wasn't keen on it, so what we see on Netflix is more of an appeasement for NBC when its original conception could have been more apt.
We can reach a
Todd Gitlin kind of conclusion based on representations of women in popular TV
programming, but we can also see how increased visibility on the importance of
women in TV and conveying feminist attitudes, and the recent proliferation of
what scholars like Sarah Banet-Weiser are calling “popular feminism,” can
change things for future generations.
It’s a lot like what Constance Wu of Fresh Off the Boat recently said in an
interview about her character, career and the show’s significance, despite its
clear imperfection:
“Usually
I’ll be auditioning for the third lead and there will be Latina actresses,
Indian actresses, African American actresses because it will be like, ‘let’s
check off this box. We have our lead white girl, and we need an ethnic slot.’
And I've actually been told, ‘We've decided the guy’s best friend is going to
be Asian so we needed the girl’s best friend to be black because we couldn't
have two Asians. They want to check off their boxes, which in its own way is a
kind of perverted gesture.”
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