Women in Neoliberal Postfeminist Television Drama

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-ix

   PDF

2. Relative Tensions

   • Cat Mahoney

   Pages 1-20

3. Finding a Feminine Space in Female Ensemble Drama: Postfeminist Visions of Female Liberation in Land Girls

   • Cat Mahoney

   Pages 21-44

4. The Horror of Transgressive Femininity in The Bletchley Circle

   • Cat Mahoney

   Pages 45-69

5. Marvel’s Agent Carter: [Peggy Punches Him in the Face]

   • Cat Mahoney

   Pages 71-100

6. Home Fires: Deconstructing the Domestic Ideal

   • Cat Mahoney

   Pages 101-129

7. Back Matter

   Pages 131-134

   PDF

“In this insightful book, Cat Mahoney offers a fascinating analysis of contemporary TV dramas such as Home Fires, Land Girls and The Bletchley Circle. Developing the idea that history is told through the preoccupations of the present, she argues compellingly that these are postfeminist dramas which work through troubling ideas about heteronormative romance, domesticity, beauty and whiteness, while reinforcing the idea that feminism as a political movement is not necessary. A bold and original contribution to television studies, gender studies and popular history.”

 

̶  Rosalind Gill, City, University of London, UK

 

By examining contemporary television drama set during and immediately after the Second World War, this book illustrates the ways in which postfeminism has shaped representations of women in contemporary culture. Mahoney offers a new perspective to debates that have previously been concerned with questions of historical accuracy. She argues that depictions of women from the past in modern television drama spawn from the neoliberal postfeminist media climate which originated in the 1990s. These depictions respond to a cultural need to naturalise and de-historicise a version of neoliberal postfeminist femininity that is compatible with the current media climate and far more reflective of the concerns of the present than any “real” or lived experience of women in the past. The result of this process of naturalisation is the assertion that postfeminist values are natural and eternal, rather than a product of the 1980s economic turn and the present political moment. By identifying and interrogating postfeminist norms within four television drama series produced since the 2008 financial crash, this book argues that postfeminism is a dominant structuring force in their depiction of female characters and of the past.

• Television
• Modern History
• Gender
• Postfeminism
• Representation
• Popular Culture

“Mahoney’s Women in Neoliberal Postfeminist Television Drama continues a fascinating vein of current feminist television scholarship … . Mahoney clearly maintains that the primary goal of her research is the demonstration of a postfeminist sensibility … . The tightness of the book’s focus is one of its most enduring strengths. … Mahoney’s work stands as a good model for those who wish to consider the intersections of history, ideology and feminist politics through the richness of the televisual text.” (Daniel Martin, Critical Studies in Television, Vol. 16 (2), 2021)

• University of Liverpool, Liverpool, UK

  Cat Mahoney

Cat Mahoney is a Research and Impact Administrator at the University of Liverpool, UK. She has published on the representation of female participation in the Second World War in Frames Cinema Journal as well as the edited collection The Past in Visual Culture: Essays on Memory, Nostalgia and the Media of which she is co-editor.

Policies and ethics