Adaptation, authorship and the critical conversations of Little Fires Everywhere

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article argues for an understanding of contemporary women’s television as a twenty-first century iteration of Lauren Berlant’s concept of the ‘intimate public’ of femininity, by analysing how the production, content, and reception of Little Fires Everywhere participate in the high visibility of popular feminism by invoking intersectionality and women’s empowerment. It does this first through the collective and collaborative female authorship of the television adaptation, which is discursively constructed as a critical conversation and an intersectional success; second, through the casting of Washington as a character who in the adapted novel is not Black, heightening the tensions of class, race, and motherhood and making Mia the voice of an intersectional critic of white feminism; and third, through the historical distance of its setting in the 1990s, which is often understood in the reception of the show as uncomfortably wearing its contemporary (i.e. popular feminist) politics.