“They were too fragile”: questioning feminist resilience in Russian Doll

Abstract

ABSTRACT A significant number of half-hour comedy-dramas led by resilient (yet precarious – see Wanzo, 2016) women have sprung up on US TV in the past years. Some of the most recent examples of such programmes have situated their female leads within time loops and parallel universes, such as Undone (Amazon Prime Video, 2019–2022), Russian Doll (Netflix, 2019–2022), and Slip (The Roku Channel, 2023—). Therefore, this article will explore how the fluctuating meaning and the role of individual resilience in the context of neoliberal feminism is articulated through the time loop trope in women-centric television. In addition to capturing the overwhelm of managing the self and navigating around neoliberal life trajectories in times of crisis, Russian Doll allows us to see a form of resilient resistance that favours community over individualism and relational selves over sovereign selves (McRobbie, 2020). This article will engage with scholarship on the resilient, bounce-backable (Orgad and Gill, 2018) woman in contemporary television (for example, Gorton, 2021) to contextualize televisual renderings of the work that goes into resilient self-management. Russian Doll exemplifies the current televisual tendency to render resilient feminist subjects in a way that draws attention to and questions the merits and meaning of resilience.