Reese Witherspoon’s popular feminism: adaptation and authorship in Big Little Lies

Abstract

ABSTRACT Through her programmes, including Big Little Lies (2017–2019), The Morning Show (2019–), and Little Fires Everywhere (2020), Reese Witherspoon has been central to the recent rise of women-centric television. Witherspoon’s media company, Hello Sunshine, and her book club, Reese’s Book Club, aim to ‘shine a light’ on women’s work, vocalising an explicitly feminist approach to authorship and adaptation. Identifying Witherspoon’s politics as a form of popular feminism, this article uses Big Little Lies (BLL) as a case study to investigate the various strategies Witherspoon and Hello Sunshine deploy to articulate this feminism. Identifying sisterhood as a key strategy, this article points to the limits of popular feminism by revealing who is excluded from this female collective: director Andrea Arnold, whose creative control was allegedly undermined when directing BLL’s second season; and BLL’s Black female characters, who are narratively excluded from this construction. This article, then, calls for feminist critics to be attentive to the selective and exclusionary nature of popular feminism in television as it obscures the material conditions of women working in television production roles and the sexist and racist structures governing women’s representations.