[csaa-forum] CFP - Beyond the messy millennial woman: televising perfection, imperfection and resilience

Tue Feb 6 15:15:03 ACST 2024

*Call for Papers: ‘Beyond the messy millennial woman: televising
perfection, imperfection and resilience’*

Abstracts are sought for a proposed special journal issue, for which strong
interest has been secured from a Q1 cultural studies journal.

Special issue editors: Dr Laura Minor (University of Salford) and Dr Claire
Perkins (Monash University)

*Deadline for abstracts: March 28, 2024.*

Over the past decade, ‘imperfection’ has emerged as one of the most
recognisable themes in Western television focused on and driven by women.
Some of the most popular, debated and acclaimed series that have found
recent transnational success centre on the lives of 'messy' millennials who
are anxious, hedonistic, emotionally chaotic, hetero-pessimistic and
self-destructive – from *Girls* (2012-2017) to *Fleabag* (2016-2019),
*Broad* *City* (2014-2019), and *This Way Up* (2019- ). Television has
become a key cultural form in foregrounding these representations, where
increasing numbers of series that feature female leads and creators and
attract female audiences are actively diverging from traditional, masculine
notions of ‘quality’ TV (Lagerwey, Leyda & Negra, 2016). As part of this
shift, popular discourse attending to the rise in female-driven content
tends to value both creators and their work as ‘feminist’ based simply on
the perception of creative agency and women-centred issues, thereby
positioning contemporary television as both an important and fraught space
for evolving understandings of what feminism is and does (Cattien 2019;
Perkins & Schreiber 2019; McHugh 2023; Perkins et al 2023).

As a trope responding to the social conditions of gendered neoliberal
capitalism in the second and third decades of the twenty-first century, the
‘imperfect’ woman attempts to express dissatisfaction and exhaustion with
contemporary postfeminist imperatives to be confident, body positive,
entrepreneurial and, in Jia Tolentino's phrase, ‘always optimizing’ (2019).
The  ‘affective dissonance’ (Dobson & Kanai, 2019) of her negative emotions
holds the potential to challenge and critique these conditions. However,
like earlier postfeminist themes and tropes, this figure ultimately works
to govern women and feminine identities. As Angela McRobbie has observed,
discourses of imperfection might respond to the unviability of a perfect
aspirational model of femininity, but they ultimately exist in a binary
relationship to this model – allowing us to authentically embrace ‘who we
are’ only insofar as this presents an opportunity to repair and recover
through the strategy of resilience. As a technology of the self, the
imperfect is interwoven with the perfect in its neoliberal promise of
self-care, comprising what McRobbie calls a ‘dispositif for the management
of emerging feminisms’ (2020: 43).

The millennial creators of series featuring ‘imperfect’ women, who often
appear as their own protagonists, are seen as socially and politically
conscious and the first to come of age with the internet and technological
devices at their disposal. As an effect of this media saturation,
millennials ‘create a sense of irony about the very possibility for
authentic communication’ (Kaklamanidou and Tally, 2014: 4). This
sensibility differs from the representation of disaffected women/girls of
Generation Z, who tend to be more vulnerable, sincere and buoyant in their
presentation and more afraid of being judged and ‘getting it wrong’ (Gill
2023), i.e. Christine from Greta Gerwig's *Lady Bird *(2017) or Kayla from
Bo Burnham's *Eighth Grade *(2018). ‘Messy’ millennials have been described
in academic literature and mainstream media as ‘antiheroines’ (Tally,
2016), as well as ‘unruly’ (Rowe, 1995; Petersen, 2017), ‘nasty’ (Robinson,
2016), ‘unlikeable’ (Rodgers, 2019) and ‘difficult’ (Pinedo, 2021). Yet
these terms often simplify women's experiences by emphasising their
visibility, overlooking the regional distinctions and diverse social
identities that typify female-driven TV (see Minor, 2023 & forthcoming). As
a result, with the notable exception of key figures such as Michaela Coel,
Issa Rae and Mindy Kaling (see Sobande 2019), women who are defined in
these ways are, more often than not, white, middle-class,
cisheteronormative and American or British.

With this special issue, we are calling for explorations of how the
televised imperfect woman and her expression of the
perfect-imperfect-resilience dispositif function both within and *beyond *this
homogenised model of ‘messiness’. Simidele Dosekun (2020) argues that
postfeminism itself is transnational, its subjects ‘scattered’ or
‘dispersed’ on television screens across the globe. The postfeminist woman
of colour is, therefore, not an ‘impossible or derivative sight’, and by
situating her as such, Dosekun argues that we reify, recentre, and make
white women the definition of postfeminism itself (2020: 10). With this in
mind, this special issue calls for investigations of what this ‘imperfect’
figure can show about how gendered neoliberalism both governs and damages
women across a range of national and social contexts. Where and how does
she appear in television series that may not be prioritised for global
distribution and discussion? How does she convey specific concerns of
class, race, sexuality, gender identity and ability that are overlooked in
a dominant mode of imperfection that falls under the umbrella of what
Taylor Nygaard and Jorie Lagerwey term ‘Horrible White People’ shows
(2020)? Further, how exactly does this figure – in all her permutations –
present opportunities and imperatives for resilience? How is this
impression reinforced through media discourses and paratexts? Are there
instances where such figures are able to escape or subvert the
perfect-imperfect-resilience dispositif? In exploring these questions, we
call for a range of methodological strategies, including textual analysis,
media industries studies, authorship approaches and audience evaluation.

Possible areas for discussion include:

 - imperfection and intersectionality

 - updated models of feminine 'unruliness'

 - postfeminism and whiteness

 - imperfection beyond the 'dramedy'

 - imperfect women in national and regional communities

 - global iterations of 'imperfection'

 - imperfect women and disability

 - imperfect women and neurodivergence

 - imperfect women and ageing

*Please submit a 350 word abstract and 100 word bio by March 28 2024 to: *
*beyondmessymillennials at gmail.com* <beyondmessymillennials at gmail.com>

*Once abstracts have been received a full proposal will be submitted to the
interested journal by end of April 2024. *

*References *

   - Cattien, Jana. 'When 'feminism' becomes a genre: Alias Grace and
   "feminist" television'. *Feminist Theory* 20.3 (2019).
   - Dosekun, Simidele. *Fashioning Postfeminism: Spectacular Femininity
   and Transnational Culture*. Illinois: University of Illinois Press,
   2020.
   - Gill, Rosalind. *Perfect: Feeling Judged on Social Media*. Cambridge:
   Polity, 2023.
   - Kaklamanidou, Betty and Tally, Margaret. 'Introduction: The
   Twenty-First Century Generation and the ABC Family Brand.' In *The
   Millennials on Film and Television: Essays on the Politics of Popular
   Culture*, edited by Betty Kaklamanidou and Margaret Tally, 1-14.
   Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2014.
   - Lagerwey, Jorie, Julia Leyda and Diane Negra. 'Female-Centered TV in
   an Age of Precarity'. *Genders* 1.1 (2016).
   - McRobbie, Angela. *Feminism and the Politics of Resilience: Essays on
   Gender, Media and the End of Welfare*. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2020.
   - McHugh, Kathleen. 'Genre as Feminist Platform: Diagnosis, Anger and
   Serial TV'. *Television and New Media* 24.5 (2023).
   - Minor, Laura. 'Alma's (Not) Normal: Normalising Working-Class Women
   in/on BBC TV Comedy'. *Journal of British Cinema and Television. *20.2
   (2023).
   - Minor, Laura. *Reclaiming Female Authorship in UK & Irish Television
   Comedy*. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming.
   - Nygaard, Taylor and Jorie Lagerwey. *Horrible White People: Gender,
   Genre and Television's Precarious Whiteness. *NY: NYU Press, 2020.
   - Perkins, Claire and Schreiber, Michele. 'Independent women: from film
   to television'. *Feminist Media Studies* 19.7 (2019).
   - Perkins, Claire and Jodi Brooks, Janice Loreck, Pearl Tan, Jessica
   Ford, Rebecca J. Sheehan. ‘Doing film feminisms in an age of popular
   feminism’. *Australian Feminist Studies *113 (2023).
   - Petersen, Anne Helen. *Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud. The Rise and
   Reign of the Unruly Woman. *New York: Scribner UK, 2017.
   - Pinedo, Isabel C. *Difficult Women on Television Drama: The Gender
   Politics of Complex Women in Serial Narratives*. London & New York:
   Routledge, 2021.
   - Robinson, Joanna. 'The Nasty Women of TV Comedy Have Arrived Just in
   Time'. Accessed November 16, 2023.
   https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2016/10/samantha-bee-obama-female-anger-tv-comedy
   .
   - Rodgers, Barry. 'Contemporary TV Shows Are Bringing out the Unlikeable
   Side of Female Leads'. Accessed November 16, 2023.
   https://www.grazia.co.in/people/contemporary-tv-shows-are-bringing-out-the-unlikeable-side-of-female-leads-4016.html
   .
   - Rowe, Kathleen. *The Unruly Woman: Gender and the Genres of Laughter*.
   Texas: Texas University Press, 1995.
   - Sobande, Francesca. 'Awkward Black girls and post-feminist
   possibilities: Representing millennial Black women on television in Chewing
   Gum and Insecure'*. Critical Studies in Television* 14.4 (2019).
   - Tally, Margaret. *The Rise of the Anti-Heroine in TV's Third Golden
   Age.* Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016.
   - Tolentino, Jia. 'Always Be Optimizing'. *Trick Mirror: Reflections on
   Self Delusion*. NY: Random House, 2019.

-- 
Dr Claire Perkins
Director, Bachelor of Media Communication

School of Media, Film & Journalism
Room B436, Caulfield Campus
Monash University
Victoria 3145
AUSTRALIA
+61 3 9903 1239
claire.perkins at monash.edu

Website: https://research.monash.edu/en/persons/claire-perkins

Series co-editor, *Screen Serialities
<https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/series-screen-serialities-html.html>
*(Edinburgh
UP)

We acknowledge the Traditional Owners, and Elders past and present, of all
the lands on which Monash University operates.
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