Breaking upwards: the creative uncoupling of Desiree Akhavan and Ingrid Jungermann

Abstract

ABSTRACTDesiree Akhavan and Ingrid Jungermann’s partnership engendered their pioneering web series 'The Slope' and launched their careers. As its second season fictionally chronicled, the couple’s breakout project coincided with their breakup—a subject each explored in her subsequent first feature: Akhavan’s 'Appropriate Behavior', about a recently uncoupled bisexual, and Jungermann’s 'Women Who Kill', about a commitment-phobic lesbian torn between her bisexual ex and a new love interest. The two continued to revisit their relationship’s afterlife with their solo forays into TV: Jungermann’s (stalled) adaptation for Showtime of her web series 'F to 7th', featuring a “homoneurotic” lesbian adrift in queerer-than-thou Brooklyn, and the now-U.K. based Akhavan’s Channel 4/Hulu co-production 'The Bisexual', about an American in London who, after ending a long relationship with her girlfriend/business partner, starts dating men. The reparative processes of relationship-mourning and self-examination portrayed in Akhavan and Jungermann’s work model a queer-feminist praxis that converts loss into cultural creation and critique. In continuing to serve as the structuring absence in each other’s fictional worlds, the ex-couple transforms their former romantic-erotic attachments into creative investments that defy masculinist and monogamist models of individualist authorship and proprietary coupling.