The Unruly Women of Postfeminist Television by Jennifer L

Home , Ally McBeal, Ally McBeal (season 2), A Door Marked Exit, Calista Flockhart, Cybill, Darby Stanchfield

“OBVI WE’RE THE LADIES”: THE UNRULY WOMEN OF

POSTFEMINIST TELEVISION

______

A Thesis

Presented to the

Faculty of

San Diego State University

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In Partial Fulfillment

of the Requirements for the Degree

Master of Arts

Rhetoric and Writing Studies

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Jennifer L. Roche

Summer 2015

iii

DEDICATION

For my husband Alex and my father John. Thank you for your unending support and for your appreciation of complicated and unruly women.

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.

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

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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.

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 like Mary Tyler Moore and shows like Designing Women were progressive in their constructions of women working toward and achieving gains in their access to the public sphere. Dow argues that Mary Tyler Moore as a female character embodied the ideals of feminism and was meant to viewed as “a single young woman with something to prove” (116). The work being done in the 1970s and 1980s both on screen and in the women’s movement was so successful that there emerged a shift in the perception of equality and it seemed as though the struggle for parity, on television at least, had been won. Then came the 1990s. In her highly acclaimed book Backlash, Susan Faludi posits that the feminist advances in American society led to a media driven “backlash.” Faludi’s sweeping argument stretches across media and suggests that the “backlash” succeeded in creating situations and personae that: “shaped much of Hollywood’s portrayal of women” (5). Faludi makes the case that the perceived progressivism of certain female characters, and of the women’s movement as a whole, led to aggressive assaults on television against feminist tropes which led to the postfeminist television movement. Are we still in the backlash, or has the emergence of television created by women changed the postfeminist dialogue? This study will analyze two of the top rated, most highly acclaimed shows on television that were created and written by women and will investigate, 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, I will look at character development and story arcs; body image and notions of beauty; positions in both the private and public spheres; and personal relationships, and will argue that contrary to the female leads of the 1970s, today’s leading lady is a single woman with absolutely nothing to prove. Rather than trying to gain access to the public

4 sphere or “make it on her own,” as Mary Tyler Moore’s theme song says, these women are, in Lena Dunham’s words, free to “fuck up as much as any man” (“After the Show”). Hannah Horvath and Olivia Pope respectively have either given up on or conquered the public sphere, all the while making a mess of their personal lives. These characters are hyperbolic representations of women who, in one way, or in all ways, simply cannot get their lives together and they constitute a rhetorical construction of women in a postfeminist world as both lost and highly damaged. Though women are characterized in new ways, traditional archetypes still pervade televisual texts and today’s unruly characters like Hannah and Olivia have lost the political and social motivation that was once the driving force of television’s unruly women. The goal of this paper is emphatically not to criticize the work of women in media, or to denigrate their achievements and contributions to the positive representation of women in Hollywood, but rather to begin examining the rhetorical choices women make in producing other women, ultimately leading to more discussion about the representation, underrepresentation or misrepresentation of women in entertainment television. I suggest that in contemporary culture, women are facing a crisis of representation and this crisis must be addressed in order to aid in the evolution of female representation on screen. By looking at female rhetors and their narratives about women, we can extend the field of feminist criticism to understand women as both communicators (rhetors) and as the narrative means of communication or symbolic representation.

CHAPTER 2

LITERATURE REVIEW AND METHODOLOGY

TELEVISION’S SYMBOLIC INFLUENCE Scripted television functions as a non-discursive rhetorical medium, meaning that writers and rhetors must use implicit arguments and situational strategies in order to persuade. The influence of TV is generated through symbols that then influence audiences based on the audience’s own values and experiences. The audience is thus led by personal experience to view the symbols in a particular way. As Kenneth Burke puts it, “Critical and imaginative works are answers to questions posed by the situation in which they arose. They are not merely answers, they are strategic answers, stylized answers” (1). Television is thus a way of “bringing before the eyes” (Kennerly 269) events and ideas the audience does not necessarily experience first-hand. The narrative of the lives of characters in a television series brings the audience into the story and allows them a privileged look at the characters presented (McClish 151). As with any narrative work, audience involvement with the characters and plotline become essential constitutive aspects of its persuasive power (Fisher 12), and the stylized method through which situations are presented offers a specific way of viewing reality. Television is both made and understood within the context of the larger culture surrounding its production. As with any artistic medium, television can and should be understood as art, reflecting and reflective of cultural attitudes and ideas as well as integral to shaping those attitudes. Newcomb and Hirsch explain in their germinal work on television criticism: Contemporary cultures examine themselves through their arts, much as traditional societies do via the experience of ritual. Rituals and the arts offer a metalanguage, a way of understanding who and what we are…. In its role as a cultural medium [television] presents a multiplicity of meanings…. It often focuses on our most prevalent concerns, our deepest dilemmas. (458 - 459)

Television is thus a “cultural forum” (Newcomb and Hirsch 1), and is a medium that begs for rhetorical analysis as a contributor to the cultural conversation. Entertainment programming has increasingly been acknowledged as disseminating unintentional messages about a wide variety of topics from health to politics. Through cultivation theory, the effects of these unintentional messages have been demonstrated (Gerbner et al.; Gerbner and Gross ). Gerbner and his colleagues established television as a powerful tool for influencing how people perceive their surroundings and proved, for example, that viewers who spend more time in front of the TV tend to perceive the world as more violent than those who watch less television. In a study about breastfeeding on fictional television, Katherine Foss argues that “Considering that television has been found to disseminate information, normalize behavior, and influence public perception, even outside of formal public health campaigns, it is likely that this medium influences knowledge and cultural attitudes” (331). The information distributed by entertainment television influences perceptions of reality among viewers and shapes understandings of culture including understandings of femininity and masculinity. Television programming contributes to cultural conversations on a variety of topics including gender and notions of femininity and masculinity. The ways in which audiences understand and make sense of television provide insight into intertextual culture and gender attitudes. As Denise Mann and Lynn Spigel put it, “By attending to television’s textual systems and to the specific historical frameworks in which television is received, we might better understand how mass media help to produce, transmit, and at times transform the logic of cultural fantasies and practices” (89). Televisual narratives do more than entertain. They are a method of persuasion and with the growth of feminist criticism in general, feminist criticism of television as a persuasive medium has also increased. Those who seek to understand cultural notions of hegemony and equality have turned to television as a signifier of gender and lifestyle because if offers a stylized view of culture that is perceived by many as normative. Just as television informs cultural views of reality, it informs about gender. Feminist rhetorical criticism asks the question eloquently posed by Dow: “what view of symbolic reality about women is encouraged by television text?” (Dow, “Femininity,” 144). The symbolic reality of television has led to analysis of female characters throughout the decades that has categorized women on television into different archetypes. Though these

7 archetypes have grown and transformed, often in concert with feminist movements, they offer insights into the methods of persuasion available to creators of televisual content. Feminist criticism of television since the 1970s has provided ways of understanding and reading television through a feminist lens and has shaped rhetorical understandings of women on television.

FROM THE GOOD WIFE TO WOMEN WITH SOMETHING TO PROVE In the 1980s, feminist issues began to emerge more predominantly in the field of communication as scholars like Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, Sonja Foss and others brought to the forefront issues of the inappropriate trivialization of women as communicators (Dow, “Femininity”). Scholarship then broadened to include analysis of female rhetors. Dow notes that while this type of criticism served to “expand understanding of American public address, and provide(d) a vocabulary with which to understand women’s rhetorical practices” (“Femininity,” 143), it also limited rhetorical criticism to criticism of the rhetoric of feminists. This limitation, Dow argues, led to the need for rhetorical analysis to expand beyond the criticism of feminists to the “rhetorical analysis of communication about women” (“Femininity,” 143). In 1983, D. M. Meehan explored female characters on television in the 1950s, 60s and 70s and outlined several archetypes characterizing the women of primetime. Meehan argues, “television women had few moments of glory. As heroes they were imps, sort of kid sisters to the powerful male heroes, and as villains, they were generally petty and puny. Rarely were women portrayed as classic heroes – brilliant egocentric peers of the male heroes” (57). The seven archetypes Meehan delineates have oft been used to describe and categorize female television characters and have been reimagined over the years to form new iterations of similar archetypes. Some of the pervading archetypes that characterize women on television in the 1960s and 1970s include “the imp,” “the goodwife,” “the bitch,” and “the witch” (Meehan). Each of these character types situated women in specific roles and limited their power as characters in various ways. “The goodwife” was a “paragon in the home” (Meehan 34), but her role was strictly limited to family and house and “while males conquered dragons in government and

8 industry, females vanquished dustballs in playrooms and closets” (Meehan 34). Where “the goodwife” derived her limited power from running the family and from her competence in that setting (think June Cleaver or Donna Reed), “the bitch” and “the witch” were characters whose power was either petty villainy or derived from the supernatural. “The bitch” was strong-willed, selfish and destructive yet ultimately only powerful enough to cause moderate trouble for male characters. Bea Arthur as Maude or the female villains on Dragnet are prime examples (Meehan 57-59) and “the witch” possessed special powers that “presented difficulty for the man who had to live with her” (Meehan 95). While the often pathetic bitch character was defeated or taught a lesson, “the witch” was made to conceal her powers or use them subversively, as in the cases of the female leads on Bewitched and I Dream of Jeannie, and thus real power was taken away from each. Throughout the 1950s, 60s and 70s, the character archetypes Meehan demonstrates were promulgated again and again on television and the categories for female characters were so typified that we still see many of these characters on television today. As scholars continued closer examinations of rhetoric about women, they uncovered numerous trends and ways of interpreting female characters on television. By using various theories of feminism to examine persuasive forms and strategies in communication about women on TV, television’s importance in contributing to attitudes about women was proved (Dow, Prime-Time Feminism). Through careful analysis of situational comedies, hegemonic ideas and attitudes became apparent even in the most progressive characters, and a wealth of scholarship ensued that analyzed prime-time television dramas and sitcoms through a feminist framework. The height of the Third Wave of feminism produced not only a plethora of analyses, but also a body of television works that sought to dramatize and showcase feminist values and tropes, breaking free from powerless archetypes. Many of the primetime shows produced from the 1970s through the early 1990s led to scholarship tracing the development of feminism in entertainment, and more specifically, television. Shows like Designing Women, Murphy Brown, Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman, Roseanne, Cybill, Ellen, Grace Under Fire and others received critical attention from the press, the public and the academy for their feminist implications. Though many feminist theories and frameworks have been used in discussion of feminism in entertainment, liberal feminism has most often been applied to the analysis of

9 female television characters since the 1980s. Liberal feminism emphasizes the position of women in the public sphere and argues for the expansion of dominant cultural rights and privileges to women. Female characters like Murphy Brown, and Mary Tyler Moore were natural models for analysis through the lens of liberal feminism because they were both women perceived as progressive in their “access to the public sphere” (Jaggar 188), and some new archetypes began to emerge for female characters. In 1970, The Mary Tyler Moore Show debuted as one of the most original examples of programming on television. The show was one of the first to feature a single working woman and to “assert that work was not just a prelude to marriage, or a substitute for it, but could form the center of a satisfying life for a woman in the way that it presumably did for a man” (Dow, Prime-Time Feminism 24). Mary Tyler Moore is often cited as the first popular show to feature a feminist character and to show the influence of the feminist movement. Moore’s character, Mary Richards, was also unique as a multidimensional character. Mary worked as a producer, a largely male-dominated profession at the time, in a local newsroom surrounded by men. She was shown both in the home and in the office and held relationships and certain positions of power in each setting. Dow describes her as “a woman in a man’s world, and her primary function is to enhance the lives of others in ways a male supposedly cannot” (Prime-Time Feminism 44). That the show ran for seven seasons and maintained its popularity proved that the dynamics of the show were successful and Mary Richards resonated with audiences. A likeable character, Richards was both successful as a vision of feminism and as a female character who cared for those around her. Dow claims, “for the most part, Mary is the classic ‘goodwife’ in a new location; she solves the problems of her ‘family’ through her superior insight and personal skills” (Prime-Time Feminism 50). Despite her ‘goodwife’ qualities, the feminist implications of the show have been celebrated and analyzed at length and presented a template and catalyst for growth of future female characters. As Dow explains, “Mary Tyler Moore’s lasting contribution to feminism on television is its inauguration of a tradition of feminist representation built around the single woman with something to prove” (Prime-Time Feminism 45). The woman with something to prove is the quintessential feminist model and became the template for many feminist characters that would follow.

WOMAN ON TOP: THE UNRULY WOMEN OF PRIMETIME In the late 1980s and early part of the 1990s, a growing number of women began to take their place behind the camera as producers and writers. This early group of powerful female creators of content produced female characters and shows that embodied feminist principles and were viewed largely as symbols of feminist advances. Linda Bloodworth- Thomason and her husband, Harry Thomason, teamed up to create Designing Women, one of the first workplace sitcoms dominated by women, and Diane English produced Murphy Brown with her husband, Joel Shukovsky. Rounding out the sitcom trio was Roseanne, a show starring comedienne Roseanne Barr that she both co-produced and co-wrote. All of these sitcoms were often discussed as examples of television programming made by, about and for women. In 1989, Newsweek featured a cover story about the “Networking Women” of television and the representations of women these sitcoms offered. Waters and Huck argue that “womanpower” was personified on television by the characters of Murphy Brown and Roseanne. They argue that these programs created: an imprint on both sides of the camera, reshaping the male and female images on the screen as well as the sexual makeup of the industry that manufactures those images. No two ways about it: TV women have come a long, long way since Mrs. Cleaver whipped up her last breakfast for the Beav. After decades of network mistreatment, they're rallying to the war cry of the inimitable Roseanne: “I am woman. Hear me ROAR!” (49) The sweeping generalizations made by this article based on a very small percentage of television programming have been criticized by Dow (“Femininity”) and Marjorie Ferguson among others, but the perception of powerful female characters taking over the television changed cultural understandings of what women on television could do. The representations of a new type of woman on screen led to the creation of a new archetype for female characters taking its roots in literary and social history. The “unruly woman” is “a topos of female outrageousness and transgression” (Rowe 75), and is characterized by excess. Often associated with sexual inversion, the unruly woman has been equated, by Kathleen Rowe, with Natalie Zemon Davis’ notions of ‘the woman on top” in which sexual inversion is really the inversion of social and political order in which what traditionally belongs below (woman) takes the position above. Rowe argues that this idea of inversion becomes apparent when women become excessive either in body or speech,

11 becoming large or loud enough to violate conventional gender norms. She claims that “Through body and speech, the unruly woman violates the unspoken feminine sanction of ‘making a spectacle’ of herself” (410). The unruly women of television were thus characterized by their violation of conventional norms and disruptive power. Murphy Brown, Roseanne Conners and the women of Designing Women were characterized by these traits and by their ability to make a spectacle: Murphy Brown was too powerful, too opinionated and too personally flawed. Roseanne was too fat and too loud and the women of Designing Women were too political, too confident and too independent. In one way or in many ways, these women took up more space than women were expected to occupy and their unruly natures both surprised and intrigued audiences. Murphy and Roseanne, in particular, became synonymous with unruliness. Walters and Huck show that the networking women of television represented ideals of powerful disruption and claim that they served to prove to women “it’s OK to work,” “it’s OK to be alone,” “it’s OK to mess up,” and “it’s OK to mouth off.” This highlights the notion that these tropes were traditionally considered to be “above” or “on top” and outside of the domain of women on television. The unruly women of television were, in effect, flipping the script. Unruly women, by virtue of their disruptive nature, elicit controversy and criticism. The unruly women of television were no different and the characters of Roseanne and Murphy Brown were polarizing figures (Murphy even engaged in a public fight with then Vice President Dan Quayle3). Despite their polarizing and disruptive natures, these characters were not solely incendiary. Murphy Brown was an icon for working women and comparisons were regularly made between Murphy and Mary Richards of The Mary Tyler Moore Show. Murphy Brown was even described in a USA Today headline as “Mary Tyler Moore Updated for the 80s” (Dow, “Femininity,” 145) Roseanne, on the other hand, for better or for worse, became a beacon for the middle-class woman. Both characters tackled issues of politics,

3 On May 19th, 1992, Quayle made a speech calling out the television series for its portrayal of Murphy as a single mother. The reference was highlighted on the show and in various interviews and media appearances by Candace Bergen and others involved with the production of Murphy Brown

12 gender, lifestyle, success, money, ambition, addiction, sexuality, parenthood and love, and both characters were viewed from a multifaceted lens as powerful and flawed individuals. Though they demonstrated it in utterly different ways, Murphy and Roseanne, like Mary Richards, had something to prove.

POSTFEMINISM AND THE POLITICS OF THE MICRO-MINI The attention given to female characters and creators who “took up space” (Rowe) on television was so great in the late 1980s and early 1990s that the late 1990s showed a shift in the public perception of equality. Constructions of women working toward and achieving access to the public sphere became common enough that it seemed as though the struggle for parity, on television at least, had been won. In her highly acclaimed book Backlash, Susan Faludi posits that the feminist advances in American society led to a media driven “backlash.” Faludi’s sweeping argument stretches across media and infers that the “backlash” succeeded in creating situations and personae that “shaped much of Hollywood’s portrayal of women.” She argues, In typical themes, women were set against women; women’s anger at their social circumstances was depoliticized and displayed as personal depression instead; and women’s lives were framed as morality tales in which the “good mother” wins and the independent woman gets punished. And Hollywood restated and reinforced the backlash thesis: American women were unhappy because they were too free; their liberation had denied them marriage and motherhood. (5) Faludi makes the case that the perceived progressivism of certain female characters, and of the women’s movement as a whole, led to aggressive symbolism on television against feminist tropes. Representations of women often returned to the hyper-sexualized ‘jiggle television’ harkening back to the 1970s or to reifying images of women returning to the private sphere to find happiness. Dow frames the postfeminist “backlash” as the emergence of a divergent and unfortunate form of lifestyle feminism. She argues that contemporary postfeminist entertainment television and media understand feminism as a matter of identity rather than politics. Rather than symbolizing the reality of the political struggle for equality, female characters in the late 90s “perform the postfeminist trick of making the political into the personal” (“Lifestyle Feminism” 261). Thus, female characters were relegated to a postfeminist permutation of women who had gained access to the public sphere via the Third

Wave of feminism, but were now unhappy in their personal lives. The rhetorical constructions of the female character thus, unfortunately, transformed into what Dow calls a “narrative quest for personal happiness” (“Lifestyle Feminism” 261). The tropes of personal happiness for many female characters on television created the narrative of a quest for contentment, implicitly assuming that equality and professional success are no longer a struggle for women. Moreover, by turning the political into the personal, these representations create a distinction between professional success and personal happiness and symbolically assert that though women now have access to the public sphere, they are unable to balance that access with personal happiness and a fulfilling home life. Female characters created during this time, such as Ally McBeal, celebrated tropes of objectification and trivialization like pornography, prostitution and the male gaze while lamenting their professional success and romantic failure. Ally’s most significant political gain was in winning a court case that allowed her to wear micro-mini skirts in the courtroom. As Dow puts it, “Such women [who came of age after the second wave of feminism] have not had to struggle for independence, or to fight for an elite education. They have benefited from the breaking down of professional barriers to women, and with these battles won are free to obsess about their relational lives” (“Lifestyle Feminism” 261). In other words, the postfeminist woman seemed to take for granted the gains made by those who came before and television characters reflected the new perceived reality that women no longer needed to work toward tropes of professional success. The new working woman archetype of characters like Ally McBeal led Time Magazine to run a cover story positing the question “Is Feminism Dead?” with a photo of Ally McBeal actress Calista Flockhart juxtaposed with feminist icons Susan B. Anthony, Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem. The article espoused the view that the character of Ally McBeal was a representation that signified the end of the women’s movement and that feminism was no longer relevant to women in the late 1990s (Bellafante).

COMPLICATING THE ISSUE: TELEVISION AND THE THIRD WAV E In 2007, Merri Lisa Johnson answered the question posed by Time Magazine and others in her introduction to the book Third Wave Feminism and Television. Johnson argues that feminists like herself were not dead or in a coma, as comedian Wanda Sykes questioned, but sought to view television in a more holistic way. She explains of her project, “The forced march through a landscape marked by sexism is the ‘once again’ which third wave feminists avoid . . . we seek a rhetorical strategy designed to liberate other kinds of meanings from texts” (13). In other words, Johnson and the other authors in the book seek to do more than look to television for the binary of sexist vs. feminist tropes, but rather wish to engage in work that does not restrict the range of viewing positions and acknowledges that television is about more than hegemonic narratives. Embracing the same advice Dow offers that “we need to appreciate the media for what it can do in giving us images of strong women; yet, at the same time, we need to maintain a very keen sense of the limitations of media logic” (Prime-Time Feminism 214), Johnson and other third wave critics recognize that “all the shows on television today contain a mixture of feminist, postfeminist, antifeminist, and pseudo feminist motifs” (19). More than that, television is not only a site for criticism, but a site for pleasure. Indeed, Charlotte Brunsdon, Julie D’Acci and Lynn Spigel argue that “Since the 1970s, feminists have become increasingly interested in television as something more than a bad object, something that offers a series of lures and pleasures, however limited in its repertoire of female roles” (1). They maintain that much of the programming on television features strong women in various roles and that how those roles emerge on screen do more than simply represent good or bad, but rather they represent a complex female and feminist culture that must be examined in all of its intricacies. One show often analyzed for its feminist implications and for the effect it had on young audiences in the early 2000s was Buffy the Vampire Slayer. As a show, Buffy featured a back-and-forth between traditional feminist and anti-feminist ideas, illustrating the difficulty in maintaining either narrative completely. Buffy as a character was both tough and feminine, soft and aggressive. The show featured a lesbian character and was praised for its progressive arguments about acceptance. The intersectional tropes the show took on led

15 scholars to complicate their own interaction with TV texts and to move away from the “good feminist” vs. “bad feminist” binary. Patricia Pender, in her analysis of Buffy, explains the problem with feminist television criticism as furthering this polarity. Pender argues that: The model of feminist agency usually employed to analyze Buffy dictates that Buffy is ‘good’ if she transgresses dominant stereotypes, ‘bad’ if she is contained by the cultural cliche. Yet the binary logic itself works to restrict a range of possible viewing positions and to contain Buffy’s political potential. (38) In other words, criticism that understands Buffy only in terms of her heightened femininity miss the point. Her character is about more than her girliness and debates that put her on the binary miss other crucial components of her character that give her political appeal. Carol Siegel argues that the shows grappling with sexuality and its intersectionality of gender and sexuality are what makes the show a feminist text. She says: Certainly the Buffy series does important feminist work in reminding the young women who have gained from feminism’s previous wave considerable freedom to define their sexualities and sexual activity still carries dangers for women radical third wave feminism correctly insists that women have a right to express such feelings without being punished for them. (86) Spiegel argues that Buffy cannot be viewed as a binary and television, as a whole, must be considered in less rigid ways that the feminist binary has in the past. Thus third wave feminists argue that feminism on television is not dead, it simply must be considered differently. Television must be looked at as a text negotiating various ideas of identity that all contribute to its representation of the feminine lifestyle. So the question now becomes is feminism really dead on television as Time asserted in 1997 or is it just different? Has the rise of more powerful women-run programming led, once again, to the creation of complex characters who have something to prove and who are the unruly women of television back to disrupt the postfeminist narrative? This paper will examine Olivia Pope and Hannah Horvath, two of television’s most talked about leading ladies, who were created by some of television’s most talked about female visionaries, to analyze how women are constructed through televisual texts and to consider how women created by other women are challenging patriarchal norms, maintaining hegemonic equilibrium (or perhaps a bit of both), in order to gain a clearer picture of where the ladies of primetime stand today. The goal of such work is to encourage more scholarship of this kind

16 and to begin to ascertain how women as producers of media and as representations in media utilize and understand their methods of persuasion.

CHAPTER 3

GIRLS

The HBO series Girls, created by and starring 27-year-old Lena Dunham, tells the story of four women navigating their early twenties in New York City. Unlike its HBO predecessor Sex and the City, the four female leads are portrayed as struggling in nearly every way and are rarely successful in their endeavors professionally or personally. Dunham, who characterizes herself as “an oversharer” (Not That Kind of Girl xi) has said she created Girls to explore truths affecting women in their twenties and in the pilot episode, Dunham’s character Hannah Horvath announces, “I think that I may be the voice of my generation. Or at least a voice. Of a generation.” Together, Hannah and her friends explore tropes of emerging adulthood, female friendship, nuanced relationships, sexuality, intimacy, drugs, money woes, body image, ambition, abortion, STIs, mental illness and more. As a rhetor, Dunham’s aim can be understood as portraying a feminine lifestyle that she feels is not being depicted on television. As one of the youngest creators in the business, Dunham has been described, and sees herself, as an innovator and thus her project is to further the cultural understanding of struggles facing the millennial generation. Created in 2012, the show depicts women who left college following the economic recession and was picked up by HBO to reach a younger generation of viewers who came of age after Sex and the City. The show is emblematic of a group of adults entering a different world; a world that has been influenced by a changing economy, updated visions of success and a new cultural dialogue. As both the creator of the content and the star of the show, Dunham, as a rhetor, argues that millennial women are at the same time lost, creative, self- involved, lazy and ill-equipped to handle the pressures of the real world. That Girls has import for shaping views of both women and of the millennial generation seems to be true. While Hannah and her friends, in many ways, represent the oppositional values and notions of success to progressive characters of the past, they also say something important about how

18 young women view the world and their resistance to cultural norms is precisely what makes them stand out among women on television as noteworthy. Girls has received critical acclaim since its debut in 2012. Dunham herself has received eight nominations for Emmy Awards as a writer, director, actress and producer and has won two Golden Globe Awards. Dunham is also the first woman to win a Directors Guild Award for Outstanding Director in a Comedy Series. Girls has received considerable critical acclaim and has become one of HBO’s most talked about series since Sex and the City. From its extremely well-publicized debut, the dramedy has been criticized for its lack of cast diversity in a setting as culturally diverse as New York City and its emphasis on the problems of young, middle-class, white women, which has consistently been described as “privileged whining” (Holmes; Wortham). Nevertheless, the series was lauded by critics for Dunham’s unapologetic representation of life as a twenty-something female in the 21st century, viewed as more rooted in realism than other portrayals of women on prime-time television (Goodman; Holmes; Whipp). In his review of the first season, Tim Goodman of The Hollywood Reporter raves that “Dunham manages to convey real female friendships, the angst of emerging adulthood, nuanced relationships, sexuality, self-esteem, body image, [and] intimacy in a tech-savvy world that promotes distance.” Seemingly, to many, Dunham presents young women in a more honest light than most other shows on television and explores issues that Goodman argues are often left unexplored. Critically, both Dunham and the series continue to receive award nominations. In her 2013 Golden Globe acceptance speech for Best Television Series--Musical or Comedy, Dunham stated, “This award is for every woman who has ever felt there wasn’t a space for her. This show has made a space for me.” Though audiences and critics alike have remained polarized in discussions of the show’s content and representations, it is evident that the series continues to provoke conversation.

THE GIRLS OF GIRLS Hannah Horvath is flanked in her shenanigans by her three female friends: Marnie, Jessa and Shoshanna. Marnie, Hannah’s best friend from college, starts as Hannah’s polar opposite in a friend. Traditionally beautiful, Marnie is uptight, highly organized and quick to

19 judge her friends for their shortcomings. She begins the series as a curator in an art museum and dating her college boyfriend. Her type A personality leads her to plan most of the girls’ social gatherings and she is often hurt when her plans are upended. At the start of the series, Hannah idolizes Marnie and comments frequently on how beautiful and perfect Marnie is; however, as the first season moves on, Marnie’s life is upended when she is laid off and she breaks up with her boyfriend, and she and Hannah begin to drift apart as Marnie tries to find herself. Marnie and Hannah are often presented in contrast with one another. When Marnie breaks up with a boyfriend, Hannah enters into a new relationship; when Hannah finds a paying job, Marnie loses hers. Though they represent opposing ends of a spectrum, neither are successful in their endeavors. Jessa and Shoshanna are cousins, and also represent opposing ends of a spectrum of femininity. Jessa is a college dropout with a heroine addiction who has traveled the world and considers herself a free spirit, while Shoshanna is a hyper-girly NYU student who begins the series a virgin living in a pink apartment covered in Sex and the City posters. In the second episode of the series, Jessa and Shoshanna are juxtaposed to one another as Shoshanna admits to Marnie and Hannah that she is a virgin in the waiting room of an abortion clinic while Jessa fails to show up for her own abortion because she is having sex with a stranger in a bar. Each of the girls represents a different version of the feminine lifestyle and exhibit different ideals of success, yet each of them is shown to stand in her own way of achieving any type of success professionally or personally. That the girls are depicted as hyperbolic contrasts to one another is indicative of a statement being made by the creators that women of this generation do not fit into neat boxes. In their own ways, each of these characters represents a challenge to the traditionally portrayed woman of television. Collectively, they resist ideals of beauty, professional success, morality and propriety often shown on television. Hannah, in particular, is unapologetic in her excesses and, in this way, I argue, she represents a postfeminist version of the unruly woman.

UNFLATTERING AND UNABASHED: THE RHETORICAL USE OF NUDITY One of Dunham’s most often used and compelling strategies in the narratives of the show is her use of taboos to highlight her “truths” about women and the feminine lifestyle. Dunham argues, through her characters, that typically feminine acts and values are to be challenged. No topic is off-limits for the show’s characters and virtually no behavior is forbidden for the girls of Girls. Where the ladies of Sex and the City meet for a posh brunch each episode, episode two of Girls, entitled “Vagina Panic,” depicts the ladies meeting at an abortion clinic and chat casually about sex, their lives and careers. Shoshanna even brings snacks and Hannah jokes to Marnie, “How could she [Jessa] ruin the really good abortion that you threw?” when she doesn’t show up. The taboo nature of the location and the notion of planning a party around the abortion shows the audience that these are not the female characters we’ve come to expect on television. For these women abortion, discussion of STIs and even sex itself is not private or shameful, but rather open, messy and fraught with uncertainty. Similarly, nudity on the show is presented in a way that challenges taboos and is designed to persuade the viewer that the reality of female body image and of nudity is different than typically shown on television. Dunham, consciously, has used taboo portrayals of nudity in order to showcase a different kind of feminine lifestyle. Dunham opposes the presentation of nudity as solely to appease the “male gaze” and presents female nudity in unlikely ways and unflattering instances. Nudity on Girls is not hypersexualized nudity, but instead simply the presentation of skin – liberated female flesh. Characters are often half or fully naked in a variety of non-sexual scenes on the show. In the season two episode “It’s a Shame about Ray,” the character of Jessa finds Hannah naked in the bathtub. In a distraught state, Jessa tells Hannah not to get out, but instead disrobes and joins her sobbing and, even to Hannah’s surprise, blows her nose with her hand and rinses it off in the bath water. Hannah exclaims, “Jessa, you just snot-rocketed in the tub!” expressing her disgust. This instance presents nudity simply as part of the larger story. Jessa’s distressed state is the highlight of the scene, while the nudity is merely circumstantial. Not only is the nudity unexpected in this instance, but it challenges notions of ladylike behavior and how women

21 interact with one another. The taboo behavior by Jessa of blowing her nose indicates that ideals of femininity, such as social decorum and politeness, are to be rejected. In other taboo presentations of the female form, unflattering instances of nudity function as rhetorical devices for challenging normative notions of the female body as for the “male gaze.” In season one episode seven entitled “Welcome to Bushwich a.k.a. The Crackcident,” Shoshanna accidentally smokes crack, thinking it is marijuana, and the episode depicts her running through the streets of Brooklyn with her bottom half entirely uncovered. While nudity on television is almost always presented as highly sexually and from the waist up, Girls flips the script and portrays nudity in a non-sexual situation from the waist down, indicating once again that to Dunham, taboo forms of nudity should be part of the cultural narrative. As the show’s creator and star, Dunham not only embodies the argument made by the script as a talented actress normally might do, but her body itself is part of the dialogue both on and off the screen. Stefania Marghitu and Conrad Ng argue that Dunham’s “often-naked appearance, which falls between normative Hollywood standards of attractiveness and those of comically asexual overweight actresses” (1) has been the subject of most of the debate and controversy surrounding the show. As an actress who does not fit into the traditional mold of Hollywood beauty, Dunham has used her body subversively to engage the audience in debate about body image and gender performance. As a performer and creator, she offers a presentation of the female form that rarely exists in media. Though Dunham is not the only woman on television whose body type falls outside of traditional Hollywood norms, Dunham performs her nudity and gender role differently than others. Rather than hiding or covering, Dunham flaunts her form through nudity and costume choices, body language and camera framing and even in dialogue. Hannah, like the other characters, is often shown nude in nonsexual scenes, in fact 64% of the nudity on the show is performed by Dunham (Pietzman), indicating that her nudity is most important. When clothed, she dresses in short shorts, bare midriff tops and skimpy dresses or rompers, all clothes that typically would be off-limits to actresses with Dunham’s body type. When on screen, Hannah is framed up close and takes up space with her body. She is often shown sprawled out or laying down and she is usually shot from a lower angle which is generally considered less flattering. Dunham’s character also makes reference to her body through

22 dialogue making her body part of the show’s narrative. In the episode “All Adventurous Women Do,” following sex, Hannah’s boyfriend, Adam, plays with the folded skin on her belly. He remarks, “I think your stomach is funny,” to which Hannah responds, “Well maybe I don’t want my body to be funny, has that ever occurred to you?” Her response displays Dunham’s agency as the creator. Dunham opposes the role of the comically asexual overweight actress, and when pressed further by Adam goes on to state, “No, I have not tried a lot to lose weight, because I decided I was going to have some other concerns in my life.” Hannah, though aware her physical frame may not fit into the culturally defined box of “the perfect body,” objects to the notion that her stomach fat defines her and in this way she embodies ideals about the feminine lifestyle as Dunham sees it. Just as Rowe argues that Rosanne Barr’s “ease with her body, signified by her looseness, triggers much of the unease surrounding her” (79), Dunham’s comfort showing off her figure “reveals what Pierre Bourdieu describes as ‘a sort of indifference to the objectifying gaze of others which neutralizes its powers’ and ‘appropriates its appropriation’” (79). Harkening back to the unruly women that preceded her, Dunham challenges the idea that women should not occupy too much space and she occupies plenty of space both in body and in language.

MAKING THE PRIVATE PUBLIC: GIRLS AND THE PUBLIC SPHERE Each of the characters on Girls starts the series by having to face truths of the real world after college. While Shoshanna is still in college at the start of the show, Hannah, Marnie and Jessa all cycle through a series of jobs and job interviews that function both comedically and dramatically to demonstrate the economic and employment struggles facing privileged millennials. In the first scene of the “Pilot” episode, Hannah, an aspiring writer, is cut off from her parents financially two years after graduating college. While she sits eating pasta in a fancy restaurant, her parents tell her that they “can’t keep bankrolling her groovy lifestyle” and that she will have to support herself. Hannah, incredulous, responds that her job is an unpaid internship and that her parents should be happy she is not a drug addict or that she hasn’t had two abortions like her friend Sophie. She says, “Do you realize how lucky you are?” This beginning to the series demonstrates in many ways how Dunham views the

23 millennial woman. At once smart and self-entitled, Hannah is shocked that her parents will no longer support her and offended that they would cut her off. Yet, at the same time, the humor and satire in the scene indicate Dunham’s understanding as creator that privileged entitlement is both real and a flaw that will be explored further throughout the season. Hannah, though educated and smart, does not wish to work and enter the public sphere and, at twenty-three, is unprepared to do so. In the second episode of season one entitiled “Vagina Panic,” Hannah interviews for a writing job with a trade journal. The interview is going extremely well and she develops a rapport with the interviewer, but as they are finishing the interview, Hannah takes the casual nature of the interview too far by asking the interviewer where he went to college and then making the joke, “I just read that Syracuse has the highest incidence of date rape of any university, which weirdly went way down the year that you graduated.” After the awkward silence that follows, Hannah tries to explain the joke, but the interviewer cuts her off and voices the obvious opinion that “maybe you’re not used to office environments like this, but jokes about rape or race or incest or any of that kind of stuff, it’s not office OK and so I just don’t think this is going to work out.” In this way, it is hyperbolically and comedically illustrated that though Hannah has access to the corporate world, she is woefully unprepared and does not take the idea of working seriously. Season two shows Hannah gaining some traction in her writing career as she gets a book deal to publish an e-book of her essays. The pressure of having deadlines for her writing proves to be too much and Hannah suffers a breakdown caused by her obsessive- compulsive disorder. By season three, Hannah has her health in check, but a string of bad luck (and some bad decisions) kills her book deal and she is left without a deal and without ownership of the book she wrote. Desperate for work, Hannah takes a job writing advertorials with GQ Magazine. The job at GQ is clearly a highly sought after job and Hannah begins to see some of the perks of working such as a good paycheck, free snacks and health benefits, yet she struggles with the idea that she is giving up her dreams as a “real” writer. In season three episode six, entitled “Free Snacks,” Hannah tells her colleagues that she is “no offense, like a writer writer, not like a corporate advertising, working for the man kind of writer.” Thus Hannah sees herself as above her job and assigns a romanticized notion of meaningful writing only to poets or novelists rather than corporate writers. When she finds

24 out her colleagues are all poets and authors, or “writer writers,” she vows to maintain her creativity by using her nights and weekends to work on her own writing, but is shown continuously getting distracted by her personal life. Towards the end of the season, Hannah’s relationship with her boyfriend hits a rough patch and in season three episode eleven, entitled “I See You,” Hannah impulsively quits her job. Rather than resigning in a professional manner, she blows up in the middle of a meeting, causing a scene and storms out of the office: Hannah: What the fuck are we doing here? No seriously, what are we doing here? This is all bullshit, you guys, we are supposed to be professional writers and what’s happening here is seriously the biggest squanderization of talent I’ve ever seen in my life…. Am I seriously the only one of us who prides herself on being a truly authentic person? This is tripping me out. I just expect more from life. Seriously, it’s just like I want everyday to be exciting and scary and a roller coaster of creative experiences if I’m making a new life for myself in France. Boss: Maybe this just isn’t the place for you. Hannah: Maybe this isn’t the place for me, maybe this isn’t the place for any of us. Did you guys seriously think you would grow up and be working in a sweatshop factory for puns? Boss: Hannah, you’re fired. Hannah: Ok, well Janice you can’t fire me because actually I’m quitting.

In the Inside the Episode interview following the show, entitled “Episode 31: I Saw You,” on HBO, Dunham describes the scene and says she was aiming to show Hannah as empowered. She explains, “We wanted the scene where Hannah decides to quite feel really real and honest…. Though there are self-sabotage elements, she is being really honest and saying, I don’t want to end up like all of you, I want to be my best creative self.” Though Dunham was trying to show empowerment in Hannah choosing to stay true to her creative principles, she does so in an extreme and immature way which, ultimately, detracts from the stand Dunham perceives Hannah as making.

LOVE AND LUST In season one of Girls, Hannah begins dating Adam (played by Adam Driver). Their relationship is a source of confusion for Hannah as she never sees Adam outside of his apartment and though she thinks he is her boyfriend, the relationship is almost entirely physical and the sex is portrayed as degrading and only pleasurable for him. In season one

25 episode four, entitled “Hannah's Diary,” Hannah tells Adam she wants to stop seeing him because she wants a serious relationship. He then kisses her and she takes that to mean that they are in a relationship. When she goes to see him again in season one episode five, entitled “Hard Being Easy,” it is clear she has misread the signs: Adam: You said you didn’t want to do this anymore. Hannah: Yes but then you kissed me. Adam: Because you looked sad… These things have an expiration date on them. Six months or until someone stops having fun. Hannah: But I’m having fun! Adam: No, you’re not, you’re like all secretly sad and it’s not cool for you and it’s not fun for me. It’s a bummer, but people do outgrow each other. Hannah: But I don’t want to outgrow each other. Adam: Well that’s on you kid, because I’m done growing up. Hannah ends up staying with Adam in the relationship as he wants it, indulging his sexual fantasies and quirks without getting what she wants. Hannah and Adam experience a number of ups and downs, but eventually come together and by season three, Adam has “rescued” her from her OCD and they are living together. Hannah struggles with Adam’s lack of ambition and his inability to hold a job, but they seem happy. As the season goes on, Adam lands a part in a Broadway play and he begins to pull away from her. He moves out of their apartment in order to focus on his performance and though Hannah begs him to come back, he determines how the relationship progresses: Adam: I can’t do this, I have to focus, Ray said I could stay with him for a while… just through the rehearsal process so I can think about the play and not have to deal with all of this drama. Hannah: What drama? This is just me. Adam: Exactly. (“I Saw You”) Though Hannah expresses her unhappiness in the situation, Adam continues to control the dialogue and he underplays her importance in the relationship, indicating that Hannah is not strong enough to take an active role in her own happiness. This theme is repeated in other story lines and with the other characters as well. Each of the girls’ romantic encounters end with the man figuratively on top. In season one, Marnie is dating her college boyfriend, Charlie. After she breaks up with him, he finds a new

26 girlfriends and becomes professionally successful founding his own company. Marnie is jealous and begs for him back only to have him leave her and break her heart. Shoshanna falls in love with Ray, but dumps him because he is unemployed and unambitious. He then opens his own coffee shop and finds success. Shoshanna begs for him back and he rejects her. As Hannah and Adam’s relationship develops throughout the series, Adam’s career begins to take flight. His role in the Broadway play starts to make Hannah question their future. When she tries to spice up their sex life in the season three episode “Role Play,” Adam chastises her, “"I have a job to do now. I'm trying to focus. I'm not here to fill up your life with fucking stories for your fucking twitter." Putting aside issues of heteronormativity these narratives suggest, they also represent dated patriarchal versions of love and relationships that reinforce the notion that women do not know what they want. These narratives further show that while girls cannot get their lives together, men on the show are able to professional success and take control over their personal relationships. Though the depiction of the relationships on the show mirrors many dated ideals of romance, the female characters of Girls engage in sex in a different way than is often seen on television. Like nudity on the show, many of the sex scenes do not conform to traditionally sensuous or even pleasurable televisual narratives. Sex on the show is mostly awkward, is often casual and is, at times, dark and haunting. Hannah’s encounters with Adam depict Hannah as trying to please him with sexual games and role play, though she is often uncomfortable. Adam’s sexual idiosyncrasies are further highlighted when he is with other women. During the season two episode “On All Fours,” Adam demands that his new girlfriend Natalia crawl across his filthy apartment floor to his bedroom. He commands, “Get on all fours. Crawl to my bedroom.” Once in his room he proceeds to have intercourse with her as he roughly situates her in various sexual positions and barks, “You like the way I look? You really like me?” Natalia is visibly uncomfortable and as the scene reaches its climax, so does Adam. The scene unfolds and viewers watch as a clearly distressed Natalia pleads, “No. No. Not on my dress, not on my dress!” As he cleans off her chest with his t- shirt, she immediately confesses, “I don’t think I liked that. I like really didn’t like that.” Though most sex scenes don’t include those elements of force, the inclusion of this scene proves that there are few issues Dunham is afraid to tackle. She highlights discomfort on the part of the female characters during sex scenes and shows the women making poor

27 choices when it comes to sex and sexual partners. Many critics have argued that Dunham portrays uncomfortable sex on Girls for the sole purpose of highlighting how real sex is often uncomfortable. Joy Press of The Los Angeles Times contends that “Sexual realism is central to ‘Girls’”, while New York Magazine has called the show “ a revelation” for presenting sex as both “hilarious and real” (Nussbaum 2). Others, however, critique the sex scenes as too awkward. Katie Roiphe argues that sex on Girls is unrealistic and is “a bit darker or more awful or embarrassing than those of many girls actually running amok in New York City” (3). The controversy generated by Dunham’s depiction of sex and sexual encounters proves that Dunham is once again flipping the script in her representation of the feminine lifestyle. Rarely is bad sex shown on TV as it sometimes occurs in real life. Rather than depicting the literal “woman on top” and writing women who are sexually assured and confident, or showing sex as pleasurable and romantic, Dunham portrays sex, as Melissa Anderson put it, “as is often is: physically uncomfortable, emotionally complicated, and politically imbalanced.” Dunham resists traditional roles for her female characters and taboos of talking about and showing sex as anything but sensual.

CHAPTER 4

SCANDAL

ABC’s Scandal, written and created by Shonda Rhimes, is a political thriller that tells the story of Olivia Pope, a character depicted as the most powerful woman in Washington, D.C. Rhimes is known for creating characters of depth in other hit series Grey’s Anatomy and its spin-off series, Private Practice. She was celebrated as one of TIME Magazine’s “100 People Who Help Shape the World” in 2007, and Scandal has generated buzz for its diverse cast and bold plotline. The lead character, Olivia Pope, played by actress Kerry Washington, is itself historic as she is the first black woman in 38 years to play the lead in a non-cable primetime television drama.4 Olivia, a highly educated and accomplished female character, runs the crisis management firm Pope & Associates and is referred to as “the most powerful fixer in Washington.” Her team is called upon by everyone who is anyone inside the beltway, including the President and his Chief of Staff. Olivia is partially based on former George H.W. Bush administration press aide Judy Smith, who serves as a co-executive producer for the show. While the character loosely follows Smith’s career path, her success and importance are highly exaggerated for dramatic effect. Olivia Pope, depicted as in her late 30s, serves as a confidante to the President, Supreme Court Justices, Senators and world leaders. Olivia is firmly entrenched in the public sphere and is a business-owner and political power player. Much like her unruly predecessor Murphy Brown, Olivia Pope enters the scene in the very first first episode as an uncontested leader in her field and a force to be reckoned

4 Since Diahann Carroll's portrayal of "Julia" 1968-1971. NBC Network.

29 with. The pilot episode of the show, “Sweet Baby,” opens with a young woman (Quinn Perkins played by Katie Lowe) finding herself in an unexpected job interview at a bar. The man interviewing her (Harrison Wright played by Columbus Short) works for Olivia Pope, and Olivia’s credentials are established in the first five minutes of the episode when Harrison says, “[this is] best job you’ll ever have, you’ll change lives, slay dragons, live more than you’ve ever dreamed because Olivia Pope is as amazing as they say. . . . I’m a gladiator in a suit because that’s what you are when you work for Olivia, a gladiator in a suit.” The gladiators, who are all lawyers, function more like a public relations and crisis management firm, cleaning up the messes of Washington’s most powerful. Scandal premiered on ABC in 2012, shortly after Rhimes’ other drama Private Practice ended its run. Scandal follows the wildly successful Grey’s Anatomy on Thursday nights and was promoted heavily by the network leading up to its premiere. The show was billed as a drama with plenty of twists and turns that was picked up to maintain the high ratings and large audience Grey’s Anatomy still drew after eight seasons on the air. Audiences and critics alike tuned in to see what Rhimes, a proven creator of exciting entertainment, would do in her first political thriller. Like Rhimes’ other shows, this thriller is filled with plot twists and what critic Verne Gay calls “All the tropes, clichés and (especially) soap conventions . . . The hairpin plot twists. The whiplash character reveals. The bumptious moralizing. The Strong Woman/Wronged Woman character type, and its direct corollary, Weak, Middle-Aged, Married Man Who Secretly Likes Hookers.” With extremely fast paced dialogue and plotlines, the show was compared to political dramas like The West Wing, but sensational plot twists and love stories also garnered comparison to daytime soap operas and cable dramas like Revenge. Alessandra Stanley of the New York Times argued of the pilot episode “While there are moments that are downright laughable, Scandal has flair and even sophistication.” Though reviews have been mixed about story arcs and character choices, consensus regarding the watchability and entertainment of the show has largely been favorable. It is the intersection of sensation and sophistication that makes this show worth investigating. Olivia Pope is both smart and highly flawed, competent and overly dramatic, and professional and disruptive.

THE SCANDAL OF SCANDAL Olivia Pope is surrounded by a team of highly skilled attorneys and fixers who do the work of Pope & Associates. Abby Whelon (played by Darby Stanchfield) is a fast-talking redhead who Olivia saved from an abusive marriage and hired to help run the firm. Abby often butts heads with Olivia and usually receives her comeuppance at the end of the episode for disagreeing with the all-knowing Olivia. Though she often speaks of Olivia as her best friend, Olivia rarely confides in her or treats her as such. Huck (played by Guillermo Diaz) is a former military special ops officer whom Olivia rescued from homelessness and took in to Pope & Associates. His skills run the gamut from gun-for-hire to computer hacking and even torture when necessary. His history is developed throughout the show’s run as his PTSD is explored and his violent background is revealed. Huck is vehemently loyal to Olivia and does anything she asks, no matter the consequence. Finally, Quinn Perkins rounds out the team as the good girl gone bad. Quinn is brought into Pope & Associates in the pilot episode and throughout the season, her character is developed. It is revealed that she was accused of a bombing and Olivia saved her and gave her a new identity. After being acquitted of the crime, Quinn begins to explore the darker side of her personality and by season three, has become Huck’s protégé in espionage and violence. The work Pope & Associates engages in ranges from covering up affairs to reshaping elections. They are called upon often by the President of the United States and his team and the pilot episode, entitled “Sweet Baby,” shows the President’s Chief-of-Staff Cyrus Beene (played by Jeff Perry) asking Olivia to help handle a young intern threatening to expose her affair with the President. As Olivia delves into the case, she is finally forced to speak with President Fitzgerald Grant (Fitz) himself (played by Tony Goldwyn), and it is revealed that Olivia is the President’s mistress and that he is still in love with her. The run of the rest of the series is set in this moment and story arcs for the entire show revolve around Olivia and Fitz. They come together and drift apart and are both conflicted by politics and family. Fitz’ wife, Mellie Grant (played by Bellamy Young), becomes part of the show’s drama, at times hurt and at times spiteful of Fitz’s love for Olivia. In season two, Jake Ballard (played by Scott Foley) is introduced. Jake is a former confidante of the President and is hired by Fitz to look out for Olivia. Though she finds out that he is spying on her and videotaping her every move, Olivia and Jake begin a relationship and as seasons two and three progress, Olivia falls in

31 love with Jake. Their relationship is complicated by a number of dramatic and outlandish outside factors, but in the end, Olivia simply cannot choose between Jake and Fitz and she is caught between the two men, in love with both and unable to settle for either one. Olivia Pope is much like “unruly woman” Murphy Brown in many ways she is immediately established as highly successful with few others her equal. Her professional qualifications and talent are rarely questioned and it is clear she has full access to the public sphere. She is also portrayed as paying a price for this success with a messy personal life and very few close relationships. Rhimes, however, challenges this unruly archetype in some ways. While Olivia is portrayed as powerful and successful, her success is so exaggerated that it becomes almost fantastic, which undermines the character’s true power. Like Murphy, it is Olivia’s success and characteristics of that success that seem to keep her from personal happiness, yet unlike Murphy, Olivia is not just a victim of her success, but rather the cause of her own personal unhappiness. Olivia is in control of relationships and of her personal existence, yet she chooses to complicate her own situation. It is in this way that she diverges from the traditional working woman archetype and proves herself a different kind of unruly woman.

BRAVE AND BEAUTIFUL: THE RHETORICAL USE OF PERFECTION Olivia’s meteoric rise to fame and success is never really outlined, but it is explained that she was hired by Fitz to run his campaign for President and then left his administration to start her own agency. Olivia’s employees are depicted as wholly deferential. She is portrayed as completely in charge of every professional situation and as she says, “my gut is never wrong” (“Pilot”). She rescued each of her employees from trouble prior to hiring them and is their savior. She often likens herself and her colleagues to the good or honorable cowboy in old western films and tells them to put their “white hats” on, thus giving herself a tough masculine persona when it comes to her work. Huck tells Quinn in “Sweet Baby,” the pilot episode, “you’re here because you worship her, you want to be her, you think that if you’re near her, if stand in her light then you’ll finally do stuff that matters.” In each of their interactions, it is clear that Olivia’s decisions are never to be questioned and that she is the lifeblood of the company.

Pope & Associates is hired by some of the world’s biggest political leaders and is the go-to agency for crisis management. Olivia takes control of every situation and is shown not only working for, but standing up to the most powerful men in the world. In the season one episode “Enemy of the State,” Olivia is hired by a dangerous and brutal dictator from South America to find his missing wife. When she finds that the wife purposely left him, along with their children, after years of abuse, Olivia helps her plot her escape and publicly confronts the dictator: Dictator: You know that the Hague convention guarantees that custody must be decided by the parents’ home country right? Olivia: I know, and I know that she is your wife and that she is the mother of your children and that she seems weak now, but she is smart and powerful and smart, powerful women like Catalina don’t curl up and hide when they’ve been attacked, they strike back. By writing memoirs and appearing on talk shows and at benefits and on red carpets talking about women’s rights in the developing world and about how her children were ripped from her arms by a brutal dictator who can’t run a family let alone a country. Then one day out of nowhere, she’s not just the mother of your children anymore, she’s a hero and people everywhere, here, and in your country, people love a hero, General, people rise up and fight for a hero and I will make it my personal mission that the rest of the world is behind them when they do. So you need to tread very lightly because what you do today will determine your political survival. This woman can either be the mother of your children or the face of your opposition, now which would you prefer? Clearly unafraid of men in power, Olivia boldly stands up for the weak and uses her power in pursuit of justice. The fast pace of the dialogue and preachy nature of the speeches delivered serve to portray Olivia as smart and quick on her feet. There is rarely an occasion she cannot find her words and her dialogue is almost always delivered in fast rhythm and with a great deal of emotion. In this way, Olivia is again depicted as the savior or cowboy in the white hat, standing up for the innocent and giving the powerless a voice. In season two episode five, “All Roads Lead to Fitz,” Olivia is hired by the Governor of Maryland after he shoots a man in his home. Confident in her abilities to diffuse the situation, she says to him, Olivia: Governor, I know this is a terrible time for you, and I understand how you feel about me. But if we’re going to work together, if I’m going to help you here, you follow my rules. It’s up to you—you know what’s at stake, you’ve seen what I can do. Governor: You’re the best. Don’t I know it. Olivia: Do you want to survive this governor? Do you want your career to survive?

Governor: Of course I do. Olivia: Then let me do my job. Olivia is the pinnacle of success, but it is a success that is so meteoric and so great that it is perceived as almost angelic. The character of Olivia is dominating the man’s world, but her domination is so extreme that it is comes across as fantasy rather than as the characterization of a real woman in power. To further the depiction of Olivia as always in control, she is portrayed as ready for every occasion. The conventionally beautiful Kerry Washington is perfectly dressed, coifed and made up at all times, highlighting traditional tropes of womanhood where appearance comes first. Usually dressed in white to accent her role as both savior and feminine goddess, Olivia is always shot in soft, flattering light and camera angles accentuate her face. Sex scenes on Scandal are not nearly as graphic or explicit as those on non-cable networks like HBO due to restrictions placed on network television, but when Olivia is in a sex scene, she is shot in a flattering way and is always enjoying herself to the fullest. Unlike on Girls, sex on Scandal is depicted as sensuous and steamy and always mutually pleasurable. Olivia’s sex appeal and beauty are important to the show’s storyline and in this way, she often reinforces stereotypical notions of value placed on women. She is regularly compared to Helen of Troy as “the face that launched a thousand ships” for her hold on Fitz and though her professional success is highlighted frequently as part of her charm, it cannot be extricated from her beauty and the physical embodiment of perfection she is meant to represent.

MAKING THE PERSONAL POLITICAL: COMBINING THE PUBLIC AND PRIVATE SPHERES While it clear that Olivia commands attention in a board room or at a press conference, her political and professional success are both challenged and reinforced by her personal life. Olivia has no friends or family who are not a part of her professional world and her entire personal life is intertwined with her job and her work in politics. Her only friends are her subordinates and her clients and she is never seen with anyone on a purely personal level. When Olivia is shown in her home, she is accompanied by, or on the phone with colleagues or the President and is usually on her way out or called into work. She navigates the difficulties of her personal life while doing her job and dialogue flows between the two

34 worlds with both Fitz and Jake. When discussing her relationship with Fitz in season two episode two, entitled “The Other Woman,” Olivia uses his guilt over being unable to be with her or to leave his wife in order to make professional demands: Fitz: What do you want me to do Liv? Tell me to do and I’ll do it. Olivia: Let me go. Fitz: Anything but that. Olivia: Okay, I should go. Fitz: Liv? Mellie is going to see the Pastor’s wife tomorrow to pay her respects. I just thought you should know. Olivia: Great. Thanks for the heads-up. You know what I need?? I need you to shut down the autopsy on Pastor Drake I need you to shut down the US attorney for me. Fitz: Liv I cant just— Olivia: THAT IS WHAT I WANT! Fitz: Consider it handled. In season three, Olivia uses both Jake and her father to negotiate deals for the President’s administration and it is revealed that Fitz may have been responsible for her mother’s death twenty years earlier. Every aspect of Olivia’s life is both played out and revealed within her work and thus it is implied that her professional success was gained at the expense of a normal personal life, and perhaps in spite of her personal flaws. Indeed, every character on the show seems to have materialized out of nowhere with no friends or family outside of the beltway. Each character’s love life and professional life are intertwined and romantic relationships are regarded as part of the work. Quinn dates two men who are part of an investigation into Fitz’s election, and both end up dead. She then moves on to date both Huck and the firm’s former CIA enemy. Abby falls in love with the district attorney who becomes a client and ultimately the United States Attorney General. Cyrus Beene is married to a White House reporter who is also killed for his connections to the election scandal, and Mellie ultimately has her own affair with the Vice President. While all of these storylines function dramatically to further the outrageous plotlines, they also function to depict characters who are one-dimensional and whose only existence is within their working lives. Olivia and her friends are unable to conduct lives in the private sphere and thus, everything that would be private is made public and political.

LOVE AND LOSS Love and romance on Scandal are messy affairs. Like in Girls, the characters on the show are never successful in their relationships and often choose partners who are not good for them, yet unlike in Girls, characters on Scandal are portrayed as deeply passionate, unable to control their emotions or feelings and driven to destruction by their relationships. As Olivia says in season three , “I don’t want normal, and easy, and simple. I want painful, difficult, devastating, life-changing, extraordinary love” (“Crash and Burn”). Olivia does her best to find pain and devastation in her romantic relationships. In the pilot episode, “Sweet Baby,” during Olivia’s first on-screen encounter with Fitz, she reveals their affair and the reasons she left: Fitz: You left me Olivia: Because you were married, because you said you wanted to dedicate yourself to your marriage, because you are the leader of the free world and I wanted you to be a better man, I wanted you to be the man I campaigned for, I wanted you to be the man I voted for. Don’t touch me, do not touch me. (they kiss). This conversation is repeated over and over in many different ways throughout the series. Fitz professes his love, Olivia objects, but in the end they are unable to control their feelings and end up in a sexual situation. Olivia recognizes that the relationship is impossible, yet she is unable to give it up and unable to leave Fitz behind. Though she hold the power in every other situation, she is powerless when it comes to Fitz. Their relationship moves entirely on Fitz’s terms as he summons her to meet him in various places, calls her on the phone late at night and blames her for leaving him even though he is married and knows that, politically, he could never be with her while he is still President. What remains consistent in their interactions is Olivia’s need to rescue Fitz and keep his reputation in tact. Again and again, she echoes the phrase that she wants him to be a better man, but rarely mentions wanting to be a better woman herself. The guilt for the relationship rests with her, yet it is his career she wants to protect. Olivia, like Hannah, is depicted as being completely overwhelmed by her love for the primary man in her life and their relationship is dictated largely by his needs and desires. In episode eight of season two entitled “Happy Birthday, Mr. President,” Olivia sums up her feelings about their relationship: Fitz: We were together. That’s all that matters.

Olivia: Really?! Because I’m feeling a little—I don’t know—Sally Hemmings, Thomas Jefferson about all of this… Fitz: You’re playing the race card with the fact that I’m in love with you? Come on, don’t belittle us. It’s insulting and beneath you. And designed to drive me away, I’m not going away. Olivia: I don’t have to drive you away. You’re married, you have children, you’re the leader of the free world. You are away, by definition you’re away. You’re unavailable. Fitz: So this is about Mellie? Olivia: No, no. This is [laughs]. I smile at her and I take off my clothes for you. I wait for you. I watch for you. My whole life is you, I can’t breathe because I’m waiting for you, you OWN me, you control me, I belong to you. Olivia and Fitz fantasize about a life together where they move to Vermont and live peacefully. Olivia claims she will make jam and Fitz will write and they will live happily and quietly. It is clear from the beginning that this is a fantasy which could never be, yet Olivia repeats over and over again, “I want Vermont with Fitz” (“A Door Marked Exit”). She cannot let go of this dream and, though she meets other men who are available, she cannot let go of Fitz. When she begins seeing Jake in season three episode five entitled “More Cattle, Less Bull,” she confesses, “I love him. Fitz. I love him. And I felt something with you last night and that feels like betrayal.” Though Olivia clearly has feelings for Jake and their relationship does progress, she is controlled by the relationship she cannot have and thus she chooses a personal drama that cannot be resolved. Jake is available and in love with her, yet she cannot commit to him. Fitz often offers to give up his presidency and commit to Olivia, yet she is unable to commit to that either. She loves both men, yet does not want to be happy with either one. In the winter finale of season four entitled “Where the Sun Don’t Shine,” Olivia admits to Jake that she cannot choose: Jake: Man, do I love you. Olivia: I want Vermont with Fitz. Jake: Oh, okay. Olivia: I also want the sun with you. Jake: So... Olivia: I'm not choosing. I'm not choosing Jake. I'm not choosing Fitz. I'm choosing me. I'm choosing Olivia. And right now, Olivia is dancing. Now, you can dance with me or you can get off my dance floor. I'm fine dancing alone.

This dialogue which at first seems to empower Olivia as choosing herself, is quickly diminished as Jake agrees to her lack of commitment and the love triangle continues as before. Olivia does not truly choose herself; she chooses to continue loving two men she will never truly have and, in that way chooses her own unhappiness and heartache. Though Rhimes portrays a woman who claims she is comfortable being along, she is truly so frightened of being alone that she chooses chaos with two different men, reinforcing the notion that professionally successful women cannot or choose not to achieve personal success.

CHAPTER 5

CONCLUSION

The narratives presented by these two shows seem, at first, to be appealing and progressive constructions of female characters who are unafraid to take on the world. In many ways, the characters of Olivia and Hannah are very different from other female characters on television. They are both outspoken and take up both figurative and physical space; they are unapologetic in their opinions and they are shown as struggling to exist in a messy world. Indeed, both characters make mistakes and are portrayed as playing an important role in their own happiness and unhappiness. However, when comparing Olivia and Hannah to some of their unruly predecessors, it becomes clear that while third wave notions of intersectionality have become more prominent in today’s unruly characters, the underlying problems in the representation of women on screen have remained largely unchanged and, in many ways, it seems that women as creators of media are facing a crisis of representation and are still struggling to emerge from the backlash of the 1990s. Discussions of feminist scholarship often highlight the multiple roles, identities and competing interests that pervade the rhetoric of feminists in understanding their own experiences in the world (Campbell; Anzaldúa; Johnson). Valerie Renegar and Stacey Sowards argue that feminists of the third wave in particular “have often used contradictions as a way to navigate through a world that does not necessarily accommodate their values or rhetorical practices” (3). They maintain that contradictions allow third wave feminists a sense of agency in understanding identities that are themselves, filled with contradictions, and further argue that the use of contradictions is a rhetorical strategy that “enables marginalized perspectives to find voice” (3). In this sense, the contradictions inherent in the portrayals of identity on Girls and Scandal can be viewed as a strategy and an act of agency on the part of the creators to represent the difficulty of the female identity and role. Where Olivia is strong and powerful in the public sphere, she is weak and submissive in her personal life. Where

Hannah is bold and brave in her sexuality and her resistance to cultural norms, she is lost and unsuccessful in most of her endeavors. Rory Dicker and Alison Piepmeier explain that “One way that the third wave distinguishes itself from the second wave is through its emphasis on paradox, conflict, multiplicity, and messiness” (16). As rhetors, Rhimes and Dunham certainly position themselves squarely in this messy third wave category. Their characters are complicated, paradoxical and held back only by their personal failures and flaws. Hannah and Olivia are not struggling for access to the public sphere, or seeking equality as women, but instead, are largely focused on the problems of their roles in the private sphere. They are representations of Dow’s conception of lifestyle feminism where the quest for love and personal happiness is ongoing while the idea of equal access to the public and political sphere is assumed or resisted. As Hannah and Olivia juggle their intersectional identities, they are represented as caught in a messy struggle that sends the message that there is a price to pay for the space they take up as unruly women. Much like the unruly women of the 1980s, Olivia and Hannah are strong, powerful and progressive in some ways, yet are punished for that power in many others. Olivia Pope, like Murphy Brown, has reached the height of professional success and is regarded by others with respect and admiration for that success. Olivia and Murphy are highly competent and will stop at nothing to achieve their goals, yet they are both depicted as being entirely unable to conduct themselves on a personal level. While Dow (“Femininity”) argues that Murphy had very little personal life to speak of, Olivia’s personal life is fraught with heartache and complications. Both women struggle to connect with friends and colleagues at a meaningful level and both women leave behind a trail of failed romantic relationships. Though the trials of their personal lives are portrayed very differently, as Murphy Brown is a sitcom and Scandal is a drama, the message is the same: highly successful women cannot manage their personal lives. Scandal, however, goes a step further than Murphy Brown did. Murphy Brown’s professional success and personal failure were both rooted in realistic notions of female power and the feminine lifestyle. Murphy’s rise to her professional position was explained and her position was appropriate for her age. This was highlighted by intertextual comparisons made on the show between Murphy and real life counterparts such as Katie

Couric, Diane Sawyer and Connie Chung. Olivia Pope, on the other hand, is so hyperbolically successful and so outlandishly venerated by her peers that there is no grounding in reality and no real life counterpart to which she can be compared. While this dramatic choice by Rhimes highlights the needed representation of powerful women, the exaggerated nature of this success actually detracts from Olivia’s influence as a character. Her success is so unbelievable that it undermines her unruliness by insinuating that a woman taking up that much space in the public sphere is strictly a fantasy with no basis in reality. Similarly, Murphy’s personal life, though shown lacking as punishment for her personal success, is portrayed as secondary to her professional life, while Olivia’s personal life is deeply intertwined with her professional existence. Often, it is her personal and romantic relationships that allow her to be successful professionally. She uses her sexuality and her influence over the President as a means to achieve success for her clients, and her professional endeavors are rarely separated from her personal relationships. Where Murphy has trouble stepping away from the public sphere to conduct her personal life, Olivia’s messy personal life is so deeply entrenched in her work that she cannot separate the two worlds. Thus, where Murphy Brown represents the embodiment of a difficult binary experienced by women in their everyday lives, Olivia Pope’s existence and contradictions are so extreme that she cannot be taken seriously as a representative of a woman in power, and whatever space she seems to take up on screen does not cross over into a symbolic reality of female empowerment. Dunham’s Hannah Horvath is unruly in nearly every way, violating cultural expectations of how women should look and behave. The similarities between Hannah and Dunham and their unruly predecessors Roseanne and Roseanne Barr are striking. As comediennes who write their own material and who are outspoken in their opinions about almost everything, Dunham and Barr resist stereotypical conceptions of femininity and have, in their creations of the characters of Hannah and Roseanne, made space for divergent female identities on television. As women who do not fit into the standard cultural model of beauty, both Barr and Dunham occupy more physical space than women on television are typically expected to occupy and both women are open and bold when it comes to their sexuality in ways that defy cultural expectations. While Roseanne as a character enjoyed an active sex life with her husband and was openly sexual in her language, Hannah embodies her sexuality

41 physically and displays her body frequently. Hannah’s sex life, though not always as enjoyable as Roseanne’s seemed to be, is extremely active and she is shown with multiple sexual partners and many different sexual situations. Though Hannah and Roseanne are both progressive in the sense that they use their bodies and their language in unexpected ways, they differ in their goals for such unruliness. The show Roseanne uses contradiction as a means of agency and excess in order to say something about both women and socio-economic class. As Rowe explains, the contradiction Roseanne continuously plays with is “representing the unrepresentable. A fat woman who is also sexual; a sloppy housewife who’s a good mother; a ‘loose’ woman who is also tidy, who hates matrimony and loves her husband, who hates the ideology of ‘true womanhood’ yet considers herself a domestic goddess” (82). Barr, as a rhetor, acknowledged that her show and the character Roseanne was developed consciously as a unique perspective on ethnicity, gender and social class. Roseanne is a character who loves her family and who struggles with the political realities of life in a lower-middle class community. Hannah and her friends seem to have no such political struggle. The characters of Girls are hindered only by their personal flaws and in this way “perform the postfeminist trick of making the political into the personal” (Dow, “Lifestyle Feminism” 261). Hannah is not denied access to the public and political sphere, but rather chooses not enter it, or is too lazy to take her place within it. She is college educated and capable of working, but her personal struggles prevent her from success both professionally and in her relationships. Unlike Roseanne, whose personal relationships were loving and supportive, Hannah’s relationships are largely unsupportive and characterized by selfishness. Hannah battles truths today’s millennial generation can identify with, including the difficulty upper-middle class millennials face in entering a workforce unprepared, but the extreme version of the millennial persona and the hyperbolic portrayal of young women relegates the difficulties young women face to petty personal struggles and thus undermines the millennial feminine lifestyle. The “messiness” infused into new constructions of the unruly woman, in some ways, mirrors the realities of competing master narratives and gender identities experienced by today’s woman, yet because the characters of Hannah and Olivia are so exaggerated in both their power and their messiness, they offer a problematic representation of contemporary women. I argue that the unruly women of the 1980s were unruly precisely because they were

42 taking a stand. Murphy Brown and Roseanne Connor were taking their place on top in order to present ways in which women at the time were responding to feminist struggles and political realities. They were, as Dow (Prime-Time Feminism) described Mary Tyler Moore, women with something to prove. Hannah and Olivia, on the other hand, seem purposely to have nothing to prove. Today’s unruly woman is struggling, it seems, with her own unruliness and her conflict and drama is purely personal. As creators of media, Dunham and Rhimes resist many of the stereotypical tropes of female representation. Dunham seeks to push against the traditional notion in Hollywood that audiences are only interested in men and typically attractive women, but ultimately shows that the only means available to her to do this are satire and hyperbolic countering in her characters. Hannah is nothing like the perfect woman, but instead of giving her more balanced qualities, Dunham is so far on the opposite end of the spectrum from the powerful woman that it appears Dunham views her means of representation of women only as satire and parody. Whether subconscious or recognized, Dunham indicates, through her characters, that she feels representations of women (symbolic realities) will only be accepted by audiences as comedic extremes. On the other hand, by presenting Olivia Pope as hyperbolically powerful only in her professional life and hyperbolically muddled in her personal relationships, Rhimes is symbolically feeding into the argument that audiences will not respond to a professionally powerful woman unless she is exaggerated and personally weak. This type of representation feeds the hegemonic notion that the second wave of feminism, while allowing women equal access to the public sphere, forced them to give up traditional feminine roles and tropes of happiness. In this way, the crisis of representation becomes more apparent. What are the means by which women as creators of media depict women and should that depiction uplift women or mirror struggles faced by women in the real world? Rhimes and Dunham both want to portray female characters who have as strong voice, who take up space on screen and who challenge certain hegemonic norms, yet the representations they have chosen are so extreme and so exaggerated that they symbolically assert that women cannot, or should not, be unruly. Their means of persuasion and representation whether for dramatic or comedic effect are satire and fantasy, and thus the characters they have created do not hold the same kind of power on screen that unruly women of the past were starting to show (Dow Prime-Time

Feminism; Rowe). The backlash seems to have succeeded in not only impeding but setting back the progress of unruly women. This paper is not meant to be an exhaustive analysis of the female characters created by women, nor is it intended as a critique of Shonda Rhimes and Lena Dunham as artists. In fact, I applaud the creation of new unruly women on television and believe that representations of women “taking up space” on television is an important step in the right direction for women in media. Rather, I wish to begin the work of examining how female television creators understand the methods of representation available to them in depicting women and to encourage further exploration of how these representations can be moved forward and expanded. Women like Dunham and Rhimes are helping to pave the way for more women to assume positions of clout in Hollywood. Ideas about what audiences will and will not accept are already beginning to change as more and more female-led series and films draw audiences and make money, and as more women both create and play leading roles, it is my hope that the unruly with something to prove woman will become more ubiquitous. As Lara Stache explains, “Media narratives rhetorically construct representations of female empowerment in popular culture, and these depictions need to be better. Men and women both need to see depictions of powerful women…” (175). I concur and further believe that women as rhetors are at a kairotic moment when they can do the work of depicting non-satirized powerful women who are not held back by their success or unable to take control of their lives inside or outside of work. By analyzing how these pioneers in television represent their female characters, I wish to encourage more scholarship and study so that future producers and creators of female characters can break molds in new ways and continue the work Dunham and Rhimes have begun of portraying complex and powerful symbolic representations of today’s modern woman. Though this study is concerned entirely with the invention of female characters and the rhetoric of representation, future scholarship that investigates the reception of these characters with audiences would further the understanding of televisual representation by providing further insight into how feminine tropes are read by audiences. This analysis focuses solely on representation of gender with a feminist lens, but there are many intersectional aspects to these shows, as well as other female-created shows, that are worth investigating. Issues of race, sexuality and socio-economic class would provide a more rich

44 understanding of representation and are ripe for analysis in these shows. With this type of continuing work, it is my hope to revive and evolve the unruly woman both on screen and off, and further the critical work being done by women who are unafraid to take up space.

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WORKS CONSULTED

Bewitched. By Sol Saks. ABC. Television. Buffy the Vampire Slayer. By Joss Whedon. WB. Television. Cybill. By Chuck Lorre. CBS. Television. Designing Women. By Linda Bloodworth-Thomason. CBS. Television. Doll & Em. By Emily Mortimer, and Dolly Wells. HBO. Television Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman. By Beth Sullivan. CBS. Television. Dragnet. By Jack Webb. NBC. 1951-1958. Television Ellen. By Neal Marlens, and Carol Black. ABC. Television. Enlightened. By Mike White, and Laura Dern. HBO. Television. Getting On. By Mark V. Olsen, and Will Scheffer. HBO. Television. Grace Under Fire. By Chuck Lorre. ABC. Television.

Grey's Anatomy. By Shonda Rhimes. ABC. Television. I Dream of Jeannie. By Sidney Sheldon. NBC. Television. Julia. By Hal Kanter. NBC. Television. The Mary Tyler Moore Show. By James L. Brooks, and Allan Burns. CBS. Television. Murphy Brown. By Diane English. CBS. Television. Private Practice. By Shonda Rhimes. ABC. Television. Revenge. By Mike Kelley.ABC. Television. Roseanne. By Matt Williams. ABC. Television. Sex and the City. By Darren Star. HBO. Television. VEEp. By Armando Iannucci. HBO. Television. The West Wing. By Aaron Sorkin. NBC. Television.