Research Seminar - Mrs America’s Prosthetic Feminist Memory: The ‘Discovery’ of a Cool Feminism for Postfeminist Times
Mrs America’s Prosthetic Feminist Memory: The ‘Discovery’ of a Cool Feminism for Postfeminist Times
Presented by: Dr Marg Henderson and Dr Anthea Taylor (USyd)
Date: Friday 10 September 2021
Time: 12–1pm
Location: Online via Zoom
Abstract
In the conclusion of her study of feminist history in popular culture, Dana Heller called for feminists “to seize aggressively onto and restock the cultural memory banks” to counter a historical amnesia and a retrograde historical revisionism bedevilling feminism in popular memory (2002, 97, 96). The Emmy-nominated FX on Hulu television drama Mrs America (2019) is a major attempt to do this restocking in relatively culturally hospitable, but politically difficult, times. Across its nine episodes, Mrs America offers a new televisual rendering of American second-wave feminist history, refracted through the women who mobilized for and against the Equal Rights Amendment (hereafter, the ERA), and one woman in particular, Phyllis Schlafly—the series’ eponymous anti-heroine.
This paper examines the series as an example of a televisual feminist prosthetic memory—a mnemonic device that supplements, counters, and is a phantom spare rib for feminist and non- or anti-feminist cultural memory alike. We are particularly interested in the impact of postfeminism as context of production and reception for the tropes and devices mobilised to make this phantom limb. Today I discuss the ways in which the series constructs (or maybe discovers?) a cool feminism for contemporary times in its casting, production design, and retrofitting of contemporary feminist and postfeminist themes and ideologemes. As such, the 1970s American women’s movement receives a makeover, providing a cautionary lesson about cool in the present, and expressing implicitly and explicitly modern American feminism’s debt to African American women and its part origins in the Civil Rights movement.
Presenters
Margaret Henderson lectures in literary studies in the School of Communication and Arts; Anthea Taylor teaches in the School of Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney. They are authors of Postfeminism in Context: Women, Australian Popular Culture, and the Unsettling of Postfeminism (2019).
About Research Seminar and Workshop Series
School of Communication and Arts Research Seminar Series
The research seminar and workshop series occur each semester, each with a different topic and guest speaker from UQ or otherwise.
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Friday, 25 August Hybrid: Online via Zoom and in person at the | Promoting children’s environmental responsibility in the EFL classroom | Dr Valentina Adami |
Friday, 1 September Hybrid: Online via Zoom and in person at the | Portraying Asian-diasporic identity beyond the limits of the literary label Asian-Australian | Catriona Arthy and Olivia De Zilva |
Friday, 8 September Hybrid: Online via Zoom and in person at the | Exploring Digital Humanities through the Lens of Journalism: A Case Study of Reader Comment Analysis | Dr Lujain Shafeeq |
Friday, 15 September Hybrid: Online via Zoom and in person at the | Carly-Jay Metcalfe and Bianca Millroy | |
Friday, 22 September Hybrid: Online via Zoom and in person at the | Coping with eco-anxiety: A guided journal trial | Dr Ans Vercammen and Dr Skye Doherty |
Friday, 13 October Hybrid: Online via Zoom and in person at the | Prof. Jason Jacobs and Dr Matthew Cipa | |
Friday, 27 October Hybrid: Online via Zoom and in person at the | ‘Digital storytelling’ probably doesn’t mean what you think it means | Dr Leah Henrickson |