Abstract
ABSTRACT By packaging the television show Yellowjackets as a gender-flipped Lord of the Flies meant to reveal that girls can be just as violent and predatory as boys, the Showtime series successfully tapped into the market of popular feminism. Inspired by Sayak Valencia’s discussion of “gore capitalism” in hypermasculine popular culture, this article presents a close reading of Yellowjackets in order to problematize popular feminism’s cannibalization of heteropatriarchal iterations of death and gore. A seemingly edgy and purportedly subversive stand-in for girl power, I contend that “gore power” or “gore empowerment” rhetoric incoherently portrays women’s adoption of hegemonically masculine traits as both a symbol of empowerment and a warning sign of moral decay. Transposing abject hegemony in a manner that further degrades women as unscrupulous and maladjusted monsters, such programming bolsters a necro-neoliberal regime in which women’s achieved liberation is manifested by a gender-equal—but racially hierarchized—hunger for domination, blood, and death. By interrogating the televisual coupling of indiscriminate violence with women’s empowerment, this essay provides further analysis of white feminism’s necropolitical commitments as they function rhetorically to undermine the political projects of equity, women’s leadership, antiviolence, and racial justice.
Published Version
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