Making it Home:  Unruly Women in the Contemporary Coming-of-Age Dramedy

Elizabeith Traube - Anthropology Department, Wesleyan University

BIOGRAFIA:

Elizabeth G. Traube has conducted ethnographic work in Timor Leste and is the author and co-editor of books and articles on Timorese culture both during the colonial period and since independence. She also studies Hollywood film and television in the U.S.

RESUMO:

Postwar television’s narrative images of male breadwinner/female homemaker households were instrumental in legitimizing the gender order of industrial capitalism. As that order is transforming with the transition to postindustrial capitalism, television has experimented with gender representation. Over the early 2000s, The Sopranos inaugurated a cycle of male-centered dramas whose hypermasculine protagonists were nostalgic for the male breadwinner or family wage. Female-centered storytelling in the new millennium largely rejected nostalgia. Rejecting the 1990s figure of the “retreatist” woman who “chose” domesticity, a new cycle of dramedies and comedies extended the formula of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, the single career woman in the city who dispenses with a male breadwinner and supports herself, without damage to her femininity or any explicit need of feminism. Sex and the City, which originally aired immediately after The Sopranos, embodied an optimistic postfeminist fantasy of autonomy,  choice, and empowerment; its hyperfeminine women “had it all”, professional careers that financed their luxury consumption and left them free for the sexual and romantic adventures that were the show’s focus. Since the 2008 economic crash, postfeminist media culture has continued to emphasize individual choice, but with mounting exhortations for enterprising women to continuously regulate and improve themselves in a competitive marketplace. In this context, some feminist media critics have seen a challenge to neoliberal postfeminism in a style of dramedy initiated by Girls, in which flawed female protagonists lean back rather than in, experiencing failure, loss, and disillusionment with conventional notions of the good life. Made largely by, for, and about women, with an indie aesthetic that emphasizes the emotional textures of everyday life, shows such as Insecure, Broad City, and Fleabag feature unruly women who are stuck somewhere short of full adulthood, for whom neither heterosexual romance and marriage nor career success provides a route to fulfillment; happiness is linked, instead, to nontraditional forms of home-making and care relations. I am interested in what imaginative resources such stories offer to the audience they address, what cultural moods they tap into and shape, and what versions of feminism they draw from and augment. I will address the cycle with attention to a current HBO dramedy, Somebody Somewhere (2022- ) that offers a fantasy of queer community within a heterosexist society.

Coordenação: Maria Lo Bosco, Ana Margarida Santos, Katia Favilla (ICS-ULisboa)