Confessions of a Free Woman: telling feminist stories in postfeminist media culture

Abstract

Since its inception in late 1980s, the notion of postfeminism has been a highly contested term. While today circulating as an established description of “prime time feminism,” a highly visible media discourse of gender and sexuality that foregrounds individualism and consumerist tropes of choice and empowerment, its meanings for feminism as political agenda and cultural criticism nevertheless remain a point of disagreement. Is postfeminist discourse of gender and sexuality to be seen as a sign of second-wave feminism being partially incorporated into mainstream narratives? Or, rather, does it articulate a historical shift within feminist thought and cultural imaginary itself, or even a break-up with or a rejection of feminist historical legacy? In this article, these issues are investigated through a reading of a six-hour documentary Flying—Confessions of a Free Woman 1–6 (Jennifer Fox 2007, Easy Films, Denmark and Zohe Film Productions, USA) as a case of highbrow postfeminist television. Investigating how the documentary constructs an account of “the modern female life” in a global perspective, the article argues that Flying both articulates a sense of historicity and denies it. While never uttering the f-word, in its refiguring domestic ethnography as a mode of autobiographical self-interrogation, the documentary series evokes, albeit implicitly, a number of key tropes of 1960–1970s radical feminism: the notion of personal as political, the investment in consciousness-raising as a form of activism, the emphasis on shared experiences and emotions, and the idea of global sisterhood. As a consequence, it is argued, feminist critique is acknowledged and actualized only as an incitement to communication (sharing) and community-building in an affirmative sense. In this postfeminist story of feminism, hence, dissonant and critical voices are excluded as politics is reduced to an affect.