Northern Lights: Film & Media Studies Yearbook - Women and Girls in Popular Television in the Age of Post-Feminism, Jun 2022

Popular television has always been fascinated by military life and the male soldier. However, the image of the female soldier tends to attract less attention, despite her significant role on the battlefield, in military operations, and as part of army life. Hence, the question of the female soldier’s inclusion in military TV series calls for special attention. The cultural militarism prevalent in Israel and Serbia presents a unique opportunity to investigate how female soldiers are represented in popular TV series. In order to decode the televised female soldier, a post-feminist inquiry of two popular TV series – one from Israel and one from Serbia – was conducted. This analysis suggests that in both the popular TV series, female soldiers are attractive, well-groomed women who succeed in maintaining a feminine aesthetic, even in moments of severe military crisis. At the same time, they adhere to their female individuality and freedom of choice. And perhaps most importantly, they epitomize the dilemmas of contemporary feminism by hybridizing ‘me’ with ‘we’, individuality with collectivity, a moral stand with personal commitment and femininity with masculinity.

The feminist heroine Supergirl aired in the CW Television Network and the series illustrates how a turn to the past or retro look can create new realities, although not necessarily authentically aligned with its original version. This article shows the evolution of the heroine from the pages of DC Action Comics in May 1943 through different mediums to the present day, discussing the impact of the different times and contexts of writers, producers and audiences.

Anti-intellectualism in America not only has a long and established history but has seen an increasing rise in recent years. The figure of the ‘genius’ archetype on popular television has frequently been presented through a lens of anti-intellectualism, leading intellectualism to be read as an illness or disorder. The works of Aaron Sorkin have taken a different position, and, rather than distancing the audience from these geniuses by presenting their differences as traits that need to be corrected, the genius in works such as The Newsroom (2012–14) is held up as the ideal for society at large. Although genius has been predominately presented as a male characteristic, in popular culture there has been an increasing number of female geniuses and Sorkin’s writing foregrounds this as an important revision because the images that we see in popular culture influence the way we view the world around us. In this article, I consider the history and continued relevance of anti-intellectualism as notably examined by Richard Hofstadter, Jack Nachbar and Kevin Lause and Daniel Rigney. I also explore the rise of the genius on-screen, as closely examined in the writing of Ashley Lynn Carlson and David Sidore. I examine the way that Sorkin’s works actively counters anti-intellectualism and through exemplary Sorkin characters such as Sloan Sabbith (Olivia Munn) in The Newsroom and Molly Bloom (Jessica Chastain) in Molly’s Game (2017), wherein he opens up the traditionally masculine space of the genius to his female protagonists.

This article explores female occupational identity construction by looking at the issue of media representations of women’s police work in the United Kingdom. The example, television representation, discussed here, is the character of Sergeant Catherine Cawood in Happy Valley, a UK police drama written by a UK-based playwright, Sally Wainwright. As the lead character in Happy Valley, Sergeant Catherine Cawood’s on-screen portrayal will be the focus of the discussion in this article. Building on findings from previous research undertaken by the author, which explored how gendered identities of women police professionals are represented in the media, this article argues that television representations of UK female police work portray a particular form of professional femininity, one which I argue is still highly ‘gendered’, mainly because such representation of women’s police work relies on narratives centred on the effective and competent use of ‘emotional labour’.

The focus of this article is the science fiction series Westworld (2016, 2018, 2020), inspired by the film of the same name from 1973 (Crichton). In the modern version of Westworld, the dominant characters are Dolores and Maeve, female androids, and the narrative is centred on their awakening and emancipation. The feminist turn may positively indicate the transformations that occurred in the society of the spectacle. Back in 1973, gender-based stereotyping of women was still a firm division point between acceptable female roles of a good and obedient daughter, a faithful wife or a self-sacrificing mother and unacceptable roles of sexually promiscuous rebels and prostitutes. However, Dolores is both a good daughter and a rebel/killer, and Maeve is a prostitute and a self-sacrificing mother. These roles are not evaluated, which suggests that the series overcome the traditional gender dualisms. Unlike female androids, such a change is not visible in the characterization of other female or male human characters. Analysis of the Westworld series is presented through radical feminist lenses and questions whether Westworld’s feminism is really for everybody.