Feel-Bad Postfeminism

Impasse, Resilience and Female Subjectivity in Popular Culture

Catherine McDermott

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781350224995
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Film e video

In Feel-Bad Postfeminism, Catherine McDermott provides crucial insight into what growing up during empowerment postfeminism feels like, and outlines the continuing postfeminist legacy of resilience in girlhood coming-of-age narratives. McDermott's analysis of Gone Girl (2012), Girls (2012–2017) and Appropriate Behaviou r (2012) illuminates a major cultural turn in which the pleasures of postfeminist empowerment curdle into a profound sense of rage and resentment. By contrast, close examination of The Hunger Game s (2008–2010), Girlhood (2014) and Catch Me Daddy (2014) reveals that contemporary genres are increasingly constructing girls as uniquely capable of resiliently overcoming and adapting to unforgiving social conditions. She develops an affective vocabulary to better understand contemporary modes of defiant, transformative and relational resilience, as well as a framework through which to expand on further modes that are specific to the genres they emerge within. Overall, the book suggests that exploration of the affective dimensions of girls' and women's culture can offer new insights into how coming-of-age, girlhood and femininity are culturally produced in the aftermath of postfeminism.

Part One Impasse

1 Feel-bad postfeminism in Gone Girl

There have always been efforts to contradict, oppose and undermine the relative cultural dominance of postfeminist femininity. Gillian Flynn’s crime thriller Gone Girl is especially notable because it introduces a mainstream audience to the idea that postfeminist norms and ideals might be potentially damaging to women’s sense of self and subjectivity. Here, I examine how the novel dismantles two defining features of postfeminist culture – an insistence on limitless choice and the capacity for self-transformation – and exposes these ideas as perniciously harmful illusions. Gill observes that ‘the notion that all our practices are freely chosen is central to postfeminist discourses which present women as autonomous agents no longer constrained by any inequalities’ (2007: 153). In this vein, postfeminist culture offers a catalogue of what Gill and Christina Scharff call ‘new femininities’ (2011: 8) for women to adopt. Gone Girl articulates these femininities through its ‘types’ of girl, with its protagonist, Amy, reeling off an inventory of endlessly recyclable identities available to perform and discard at will: ‘Amazing Amy. Preppy ’80s Girl. Ultimate-Frisbee Granola and Blushing Ingenue and Witty Hepburnian Sophisticate. Brainy Ironic Girl and Boho Babe (the latest version of Frisbee Granola)’ (Flynn 2012: 266). We can therefore situate the novel within a cultural period in which narratives and images of girls have become ‘hypervisible’ (Gonick et al. 2009: 1; Handyside and Taylor-Jones 2016: 1). According to Amy Shields Dobson, this postfeminist cultural period tends to ‘construct and address girls and young women as strong, confident, capable, and fun-loving subjects in contrast to earlier models of weak femininity’ (2015: 29). Later in this chapter I will discuss the central ‘Cool Girl’ figure, who embodies precisely these highly desirable attributes and, as such, is the primary identity through which the protagonist achieves her social status.

The figure of the girl has special resonance within postfeminist culture. As Sarah Projansky puts it:

Girlness – particularly adolescent girlness – epitomises postfeminism. If the postfeminist woman is always in process, always using the freedom and equality handed to her by feminism in pursuit of having it all (including discovering her sexuality) but never quite managing to attain full adulthood, to fully have it all, one can say that the postfeminist woman is quintessentially adolescent … no matter what her age. (2007: 45)

A ‘quintessentially adolescent’ postfeminist womanhood is neatly captured by Gone Girl’s 38-year-old female protagonist who, despite having long reached the age of majority, must enact various types of girlness to attain viability as a feminine subject. What drives Amy’s characterization throughout the novel is the unbounded belief in the power of self-transformation – the ability to rewrite one’s own story, thus changing one’s generic outcomes in the process. Gone Girl explores the destructive impact of the postfeminist mode of address. The novel therefore provides an entryway to the impasse of postfeminism, as well as playing a key role in a significant cultural turn wherein postfeminism begins to be imagined as a feel-bad genre that does not produce the satisfaction it promises.

While such a turn cannot be dated precisely, it occurs in rough alignment with the 2008 financial crisis and subsequent global economic downturn. As Tasker and Negra note, postfeminism ‘reads differently now that the economic bubble has burst’ (2014: 6–7). Indeed, the postfeminist aspiration to ‘have it all’ feels especially unattainable (though evidently no less desirable) during a post-recession era characterized by precarity and insecurity. A slew of films such as Girl Most Likely (Springer Berman and Pulcini 2012), Bridesmaids (Feig 2011), Bachelorette (Headland 2012), Young Adult (Reitman 2011) and Trainwreck (Apatow 2015) began to find that despite their investments in postfeminist promises of fulfilment, the protagonists found themselves mired in an unhealthy – even toxic – relationship with postfeminist aspiration. Bachelorette makes an interesting intertextual reference point for Gone Girl. Whereas Gone Girl explores the destructiveness of postfeminist femininities through a single protagonist, Bachelorette does so through distinctive ‘types’ as embodied by the film’s four thirty-something protagonists, all of whom have been profoundly damaged by their deeply internalized investment in postfeminist culture. Regan’s character sums up the shattered postfeminist promise thusly: ‘You know what I keep thinking? I did everything right. I went to college. I exercise. I eat like a normal person. I’ve got a boyfriend in med school. And nothing is happening to me’ (2012). Despite following the ‘rules’ and getting a good degree from a good school, finding herself a good boyfriend and a good job, Regan isn’t just unhappy with her life – she’s stuck. The film stresses the gap between ambition and reality, and how ill-equipped otherwise privileged young women are to adjust to lowered social and professional expectations. McRobbie (2008) argues that postfeminism promises elevated status and upward mobility in exchange for meeting the punishing demands of heteronormative femininity. Regan is the very embodiment of the postfeminist aspiration of having it all; she has regimented her mind, body and life trajectory, yet in the end, everything she has amounts to little of substance.

Capturing the mood of a post-2008 generation,¹ Gone Girl is primarily concerned with the effects of the recession on the privileged, White middle classes. Flynn’s dual protagonists, Nick and Amy, are formerly successful writers in New York ‘cut loose’ (2012: 5) from their careers, their job losses wrought by the declining economy and advent of internet media. Driven to surrender their wealthy upper-middle-class lifestyle, the couple relocate to Nick’s midwestern hometown. Envisioned as ‘a miniature ghost town of bank-owned, recession-busted, price-reduced mansions, a neighbourhood that closed before it ever opened’ (2012: 4), the Missouri setting evokes the omnipresence of loss, debt and dispossession structuring the contemporary American psyche. Likewise, while it is the driving force of Gone Girl’s narrative, the desire to maintain social viability within a postfeminist paradigm proves devastating to its protagonist. The novel acknowledges the feel-good power of the postfeminist ‘promise of happiness’ (Ahmed 2010), while ultimately formulating postfeminist ways of living as incapable of producing happy or fulfilled female subjects. Kendra Marston similarly reads Gone Girl as a novel about dissatisfaction with the postfeminist promise of fulfilment, though her interest lies in analysing melancholic White femininity, making the argument that Gone Girl, along with films like Blue Jasmine (Allen 2013) and The Virgin Suicides (Coppola 1999), deploys melancholia ‘as a tool through which to distance female protagonists from white patriarchal power structures’ and therefore ‘position the heroines’ race privilege and affluence as disabling sicknesses of the contemporary political and cultural moment’ (2018: 4). Postfeminist self-fulfilment remains aspirational in Gone Girl but is demonstrably unattainable without incurring great personal cost. In a post-recession landscape, the price of postfeminism has finally begun to register within mainstream media culture. My primary aim, therefore, is to examine the notion that postfeminist empowerment discourse is no longer fully legible as a feel-good genre and detail the ways in which it has begun to collapse from within.

Gone Girl distinguishes itself from the typically homogenous psychological thriller through its formulation and critique of a culturally celebrated style of femininity: the figure of the Cool Girl (Petersen 2014). The Cool Girl is the primary method by which the novel presents postfeminist tropes and ways of living within a feel-bad mode of address. Opening on the morning of their fifth anniversary, present-day scenes told from Nick’s perspective as he realizes his wife his missing are alternated with Amy’s diary entries dating back to their first meeting seven years earlier. The first half of the novel uses these alternating perspectives to paint a contradictory picture of their marriage: whereas Amy’s diary suggests Nick is lazy, aggressive and potentially violent, Nick’s narration portrays Amy as irrationally perfectionist, obsessive and highly strung. The second half of the novel further unravels the conflicting narrative perspectives by revealing that Amy is alive, in hiding and, having successfully faked her death, is now working to frame Nick for her murder. The diary chapters, which create a seamless version of postfeminist femininity, are shown to be entirely fabricated to incriminate Nick. Through the much-quoted Cool Girl monologue, the novel exposes this fun-loving and easy-going type of girlhood as an artificial construction:

Men always say that as the defining compliment, don’t they? She’s a cool girl. Being the Cool Girl means I am a hot, brilliant, funny woman who adores football, poker, dirty jokes, and burping, who plays video games, drinks cheap beer, loves threesomes and anal sex, and jams hot dogs and hamburgers into her mouth like she’s hosting the world’s biggest culinary gang bang while somehow maintaining a size 2, because Cool Girls are above all hot. Hot and understanding. Cool Girls never get angry; they only smile in a chagrined, loving manner and let their men do whatever they want. Go ahead, shit on me, I don’t mind, I’m the Cool Girl. (2012: 250–1)²

Just as Amy assures Nick that she is a ‘cool girl’ (2012: 250), the diary entries work to deceive both the reader and the fictional police detectives that Amy is simply a loving wife trapped in a failing marriage and afraid for her life. The fundamental artifice at the core of postfeminist femininity is deeply woven into both narrative content and structure.

Reiterative and defiant agency

Postfeminist empowerment genres are those in which compliance with postfeminist norms and ways of living (such as those outlined by Gill) ultimately leads to happiness and fulfilment. This sense of fulfilment is often achieved by linking narrative closure to traditionally postfeminist objects of desire like heterosexual romance, marriage and motherhood. As Ahmed explains, ‘Happiness functions as a promise that directs you toward certain objects, as if they provide you with the necessary ingredient for the good life’ (2010: 54). Monogamy, marriage, family and gender compliance are prime examples of socially privileged ways of living, with happiness promised to those who align themselves with these normative institutions (Ahmed 2010). For example, the final episode of television series Sex and the City delivers closure through the reconciliation between protagonist Carrie Bradshaw and her emotionally unavailable love interest ‘Mr Big’. This is especially notable because, as Emily Nussbaum notes in her New Yorker article, in most of the series ‘Big wasn’t there to rescue Carrie; instead, his “great love” was a slow poisoning’ and their relationship provoked ‘as much anxiety as relief’ (2013). Sex and the City had therefore successfully demonstrated that the affections of a prototypical leading man are not only unsatisfying for women but also actively harmful. In light of this, the final episode feels regressive, a turning back to romantic comedy tropes the series had previously sought to undermine, or at the very least interrogate. By producing traditional romance as the primary object through which narrative closure is achieved, the series assures its audience that dominant gender norms remain intact. Moreover, despite its compounding and contravening of the romantic comedy genre, Sex and the City ultimately produces postfeminist ways of living as capable of delivering satisfaction for feminine subjects.

In blunt contrast, Gone Girl reminds us that postfeminist scripts of romance and marriage might very well produce a subject in alignment with societal norms, yet they also prove overwhelmingly incapable of producing this subject as happy or fulfilled. Whereas the goals of social viability and happiness were seamlessly united in postfeminist empowerment texts, Gone Girl marks a fundamental separation between the two. Ahmed argues that gendered ‘happiness scripts’ provide ‘a set of instructions for what women and men must do in order to be happy’ (59). The concept of gendered happiness scripts is particularly apt in relation to the novel, as one of its chief preoccupations is with social roles, scripts and performances. Flynn’s dual protagonists are painfully aware of social and generic convention, and both feel subsequently worn down by the cultural expectations they have absorbed. With postfeminist feminin...