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.

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