The Unruly Women of Postfeminist Television by Jennifer L
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“OBVI WE’RE THE LADIES”: THE UNRULY WOMEN OF POSTFEMINIST TELEVISION _______________ A Thesis Presented to the Faculty of San Diego State University _______________ In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Arts in Rhetoric and Writing Studies _______________ by Jennifer L. Roche Summer 2015 iii Copyright © 2015 by Jennifer L. Roche All Rights Reserved iv DEDICATION For my husband Alex and my father John. Thank you for your unending support and for your appreciation of complicated and unruly women. v ABSTRACT OF THE THESIS “Obvi We’re the Ladies”: The Unruly Women of Postfeminist Television by Jennifer L. Roche Master of Arts in Rhetoric and Writing Studies San Diego State University, 2015 In recent years, the attention of the public and the media has turned back to issues affecting women around the world. During the postfeminist backlash of the 1990s and into the early part of the twenty-first century, women’s issues were pushed to the backburner and “feminism” became a word loaded with negative connotations. Today, people are seeing the effects of this unfortunate backlash, and activists, politicians and entertainers are returning their attention to issues of equality. This renewed interest in equality has created a kairotic moment for Hollywood to change the dialogue about women on screen. This study analyzes two of the top rated, most highly acclaimed shows on television that were created and written by women and investigates, through a feminist lens, how the leading female characters in these shows represent rhetorical constructions of women and of feminism. Using the shows Girls on HBO, written, starring and created by Lena Dunham and Scandal on ABC, written, produced and directed by Shonda Rhimes, this paper traces issues of character development and story arcs; body image and notions of beauty; positions in both the private and public spheres; and personal relationships, and argues that today’s leading lady is a postfeminist version of the unruly woman. Postfeminism’s unruly woman, though progressive in some ways, is symbolic of a rhetorical crisis of representation facing women as creators of media. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS PAGE ABSTRACT ...............................................................................................................................v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS .................................................................................................... vii CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION .........................................................................................................1 2 LITERATURE REVIEW AND METHODOLOGY .....................................................5 Television’s Symbolic Influence .............................................................................5 From The Good Wife to Women with Something to Prove .....................................7 Woman on Top: The Unruly Women of Primetime ..............................................10 Postfeminism and the Politics of the Micro-Mini ..................................................12 Complicating the Issue: Television and the Third Wave .......................................14 3 GIRLS ...........................................................................................................................17 The Girls of Girls ...................................................................................................18 Unflattering and Unabashed: The Rhetorical Use of Nudity .................................20 Making the Private Public: Girls and the Public Sphere .......................................22 Love and Lust ........................................................................................................24 4 SCANDAL ....................................................................................................................28 The Scandal of Scandal .........................................................................................30 Brave and Beautiful: The Rhetorical Use of Perfection ........................................31 Making the Personal Political: Combining the Public and Private Spheres ..........33 Love and Loss ........................................................................................................35 5 CONCLUSION ............................................................................................................38 BIBLIOGRAPHY ....................................................................................................................45 vii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to take this opportunity to express sincere gratitude to Dr. Glen McClish, Dr. Richard Boyd, Dr. Ellen Quandahl, Dr. Suzanne Bordelon and all of the Department of Rhetoric and Writing Studies faculty members for their guidance and support. I also wish to thank Dr. Patricia Geist-Martin and Dr. Charles Goehring from the School of Communication and Dr. Martha Lauzen from the School of Television, Theater and Film for their advice, insight and knowledge. 1 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION In recent years, the attention of the public and the media has turned back to issues affecting women around the world. During the postfeminist backlash of the 1990s and into the early part of the twenty-first century, women’s issues were pushed to the backburner and “feminism” became a word loaded with negative connotations. Today, people are seeing the effects of this unfortunate backlash, and activists, politicians and entertainers are returning their attention to issues of equality. In film and television, there has been a resurgence in public interest as mainstream media have focused in on how women are represented both on and off-screen. Certain actors, directors and feminist advocates are working to draw attention to the representation of women in media and are seeking to prove that the way in which women are portrayed in entertainment is important in shaping our culture. In 2011, former actress Jennifer Seibel Newsom directed and produced the film MissRepresentation, which provides a startling look at the misrepresentation, underrepresentation and trivialization of women in media and seeks to illustrate how this representation affects its audience. The film asserts that the media’s limited and often disparaging portrayals of women and girls “make it difficult for women to achieve leadership positions and for the average woman to feel powerful herself.” The film, which screened and won multiple awards at film festivals around the world, sparked renewed interest in the representation of women across the media. As a result of this type of advocacy, television networks have begun to expand their programming to include female-led series, and 2 entertainment television content has broadened, particularly in the sit-com genre, to portray more women on screen. HBO alone has picked up five female-led series since 2011.1 Though female-centric programming on prime-time television has increased in recent years (female characters now make up nearly 40% of the speaking roles on prime-time television), there is still an underrepresentation of women in power roles on television (Smith and Choueti).2 More discouraging than that are the low numbers of women behind the screen in power roles. Women currently hold only 5% of clout positions in telecommunications, entertainment, publishing, and advertising (The Representation Project).This means that although women are being portrayed on the small screen in greater numbers, female characters are still being created predominantly by men. Precisely because so few women have broken through the barriers to become writers, producers and directors, it is important that we start the process of looking to the few women who have achieved these positions of power in order to gain insight into the struggle for parity in entertainment and to understand how women in Hollywood view themselves and the characters they create. Put in Aristotelian terms, what means of persuasion do women see as available to them in creating female characters? When it comes to television, it has been proven that when women are in positions of power behind the screen, more women end up working on the show both on screen and off. Though the numbers of women in power positions in television remain consistently low the female writers, directors and show-runners who have broken through are pushing the boundaries and creating shows that capture audiences and revenue. Many of the most watched shows on both primetime and nontraditional networks, such as HBO and Netflix, feature women in the lead roles both behind and in front of the screen. Though it is clear that when women have power behind the screen, they show up more frequently on the screen, it is still unclear how the leading characters created by women differ from other television characters. Are female show-runners and creators empowering women on screen as much as 1 Girls, Veep, Enlightened, Getting On and Doll & Em 2 The ratio of men to women in STEM fields and power roles was 5.4 to 1 in 2012 (Smith and Choueti). 3 they are off screen, or are they disempowering women with tired tropes of clichéd femininity and objectification? The germinal body of scholarly feminist ideological criticism analyzing female characters on television was done in the 1980s and 1990s. This ideological and narrative analysis of entertainment television identifying rhetorical constructions of power and hegemony was sparked by shows depicting women in new roles. In her book Prime-Time Feminism, Bonnie J. Dow argues that television characters