Abstract
This article identifies an important conversation about the politics of female anger in older age in the CBS show The Good Fight (2017–). By centring the narrative around the emotional life of a woman in her 60s, the show offers older femininity as a site for discussing social and political changes that have occurred in the USA in the aftermath of the election of Donald Trump. Through a close analysis of the four seasons that were released before the Covid-19 pandemic, this article maps the emotional journey of Diane Lockheart through her personal, economic, and political crises, showing how different emotions are connected with Diane’s engagement—and at times disengagement—with politics. Ultimately, the article contributes to the field of feminist cultural studies by exploring the way The Good Fight offers female anger in older age as key to feminist engagement and political change.
Introduction
The CBS fictional show The Good Fight (2017–) has received international acclaim for its witty and critical portrayal of current political and social issues affecting the USA and beyond, among these, sexism and misogyny (Nicholson 2018). A spin-off and sequel of the popular CBS show The Good Wife (2009–2016), it similarly centers on a female lawyer in Chicago and her entourage, this time shifting the focus from a woman in her 40s to one in her 60s, Diane Lockheart (Christine Baranski). While gender issues were significant in The Good Wife (see, e.g., the special issue of Television & New Media by Nygaard and Lagerwey [2017]), The Good Fight appears to engage with gender issues and feminist politics more explicitly, mainly through the narrative arc and emotional journey of Diane, a longstanding feminist.
I argue that throughout seasons 1 to 4, the show offers an insight into the female politics of emotion after the election of Donald Trump in 2016. By engaging with recent scholarship in the field of feminist cultural studies that have dealt with female emotion in the media, this article maps the emotional journey of Diane Lockheart through her personal, economic, and political crises, showing how different emotions are connected with Diane’s engagement—and at times disengagement—with politics. By centering the storyline and emotional life of a woman in her 60s, The Good Fight offers an alternative to dominant discourses and narratives about “growing older” that follow a standard narrative of decline—whereby older age is understood to be a time of winding down, of narrowing possibilities—framing it instead as a time for personal, social, and political development. Thus, the article contributes to current debates in the field of feminist media and cultural studies by exploring the way The Good Fight challenges dominant discourses about older femininity by offering female anger in older age as key to feminist engagement and political mobilization.
The visibility accorded to feminism in the show is representative of the way in which gender issues have been increasingly included in popular culture, especially as production has shifted from television broadcasting to on-demand digital services. Indeed, the economic and distribution model of streaming services has favored the inclusion of issues relating to gender, age, race, class, and disability within some of their texts (Christian 2020; Molina-Guzmán 2016). Hence, in the post-network era, popular culture is now more than ever an important “site of struggle over meaning” (Hall 2011). Through the analysis of The Good Fight from its beginning to season 4 (which had to be interrupted because of the Covid-19 pandemic), this article explores how the show engages in a conversation over the meaning of feminism in the aftermath of Trump’s election, as articulated through the narrative arc of Diane Lockheart.
More specifically, the analysis presented here is inspired by Sedgwick’s (2003) formulation of “reparative reading,” as opposed to the more common approach described through the term “hermeneutics of suspicion” (Felski 2011; Ricoeur 1970; Sedgwick 2003). Critique as often employed in much feminist cultural studies’ scholarship represents this hermeneutics of suspicion, aiming to expose and reveal the hidden and sinister workings of power. Reparative reading is offered as a way to approach cultural objects with love rather than suspicion (Crozier 2008). The two approaches are not contradictory, but can work together to draw a more complete picture of the object of study. In the words of Crozier (2008, 53) “[c]ritical love . . . marks a reparative effort to take already well-critiqued formerly suspect cultural objects and make them over as a resource for the self.” Hence, a reparative reading of The Good Fight does not preclude a more critical approach to this and similar texts, but makes a conscious effort to highlight what is new and politically productive, as opposed to stressing the ways in which dominant relations of power are reinforced.
The article begins with a review of the scholarship developed in regards to what (Scharff 2016) has called “the psychic life of neoliberalism,” exploring the role that emotions have played in post-recessionary media texts. The following section frames The Good Fight in terms of a “site of struggle over meaning” (Hall 2011), looking specifically at the show’s self-reflexive engagement with widespread discourses of female empowerment that can be found in popular feminism (Banet-Weiser 2018) and neoliberal feminism (Rottenberg 2018). The article then moves on to an in-depth analysis of the emotional dispositions that characterize Diane’s engagement and—at times—disengagement with politics. The article concludes with a discussion of female anger in older age, highlighting how The Good Fight challenges dominant representations of older femininity by depicting it as future-oriented and always in the process of “becoming.”
Affect, Emotion, and the Psychic Life of Neoliberalism
Since the “affective turn” in the late 1990s and early 2000s, attention to affect and emotion has been integrated within media and cultural studies. Attending to affects and emotions challenged previous approaches to media and media texts that relied on a postructuralist attention to the discursive over the embodied or the affective (Hipfl 2018). As a result, several scholars have conceptualized media as being mainly involved in the production and capitalization of affect, and more so since the emergence of social media and other digital technologies (Hipfl 2018; Papacharissi 2015; Shaviro 2010). Lünenborg and Maier (2018, 1) borrow Hochschild’s (1979) terminology to describe media as “institutions establishing ‘feeling rules’”, a concept that aptly describes the way media texts depict, while at the same time normalize, appropriate displays of emotions in specific contexts.
As part of this attention to affect and emotions, Orgad and Gill (2022) offer a historical analysis of the emergence of a therapeutic culture in Western cultural industries and its connection to neoliberalism. They argue that neoliberalism relies on the self-governing subject, one who is invested not only in making the right choices about their life and livelihood, but also in developing the right affective dispositions to navigate an increasingly precarious and uncertain economic and social context. Hence, in the past five years or so, research in the field has become increasingly focused on the “psychic life of neoliberalism” (Scharff 2016), paying attention to the psychological dispositions that have become normative for women within neoliberalism, among these, entrepreneurialism (Scharff 2016), confidence (Gill and Orgad 2017), and resilience (Dobson and Kanai 2019; Gill and Orgad 2018; McRobbie 2020).
Despite the overwhelming reliance on positive psychological dispositions such as confidence and resilience in much of contemporary culture, Dobson and Kanai (2019) offer an analysis of post-recessionary television made by and about young women that departs from the “positive feelings” described above. By exploring “affective dissonances” such as anger, insecurity, anxiety, and misplaced confidence, the authors argue that these texts may open avenues to challenge the individualizing discourses of neoliberal governmentality and offer opportunities for “affective divestment” in neoliberalism (Dobson and Kanai 2019, 777). However, they are also careful to avoid generalizations about the role of affective dissonance, claiming that these “ugly feelings” may as well be re-incorporated in neoliberal discourses that privilege the individual over the collective and capitalist success over economic redistribution.
The issue I identify with the literature above is the oversight of the intersection of gender and age in media representations of emotions. Indeed, the “grumpy old woman” stereotype is a longstanding one in popular culture, whereby older women are often depicted as sad, depressed, dissatisfied, and/or aggressively unhappy (Dolan and Tincknell 2012; Hant 2007; Segal 2013). Conversely, happiness in older age for women is depicted through anti-aging discourses that focus on beauty and attractiveness, as well as suggestions to maintain a positive attitude to avoid being perceived as “grumpy” (De Vuyst 2022). De Vuyst (2022, 5) offers a different reading of “negative” emotions in older age in media culture, by highlighting how “grumpiness can be embraced in a strategy of resistance against dominant happiness scripts.”
Nonetheless, I would guard against a dichotomization between “positive” and “negative” feelings in contemporary media representations, as feelings of injury, anxiety, and anger are the presupposition onto which resilience, confidence, and entrepreneurialism are often built (Banet-Weiser 2018). However, this does not negate the possibility of political action to emerge instead, or at the same time, as explored below.
The Gendered Politics of Emotions in the Trump Era
Hall (2011) famously described popular culture as a site of struggle over meaning, by which he meant that popular culture is a site of negotiations between dominant interests and resistance to them. The Good Fight, and its relation to The Good Wife, clearly illustrate the tension between dominant and subordinate cultural forces and the shifting equilibrium between them within popular culture over time, and how this is also related to changes in the production and distribution of content due to the emergence of digital technologies. Indeed, The Good Fight appears to self-reflexively challenge some of the discourses that The Good Wife embraced and does mostly so through the narrative arc of the main character, Diane Lockheart.
Orgad (2017), Rottenberg (2018), and Sykes (2021) have explored the way The Good Wife reproduced popular feminist and neoliberal feminist discourses of personal emancipation that centered on white, economically privileged women and their trajectory of capitalist success in corporate America, at the expense of a thorough engagement with intersecting patterns of inequality and disadvantage. According to Orgad (2017) and Rottenberg (2018), the central figure of The Good Wife, Alicia Florrick, represents the normative subject position made available to women in neoliberalism: the balanced career woman, capable of crafting “a felicitous equilibrium between work and family” (Rottenberg 2014, 115). Orgad (2017) identifies two key issues in her reading of the show: (1) The focus on combining motherhood with high-powered waged work as constitutive of individual liberation and empowerment; (2) The framing of self-confidence and “leaning in” corporate culture as key to professional success, at the expense of an engagement with structural inequality in the workplace. Sykes (2021) agrees with this reading and argues that, although the show makes references to sexism and other inequalities, it upholds a meritocratic view of workplace success that is exclusionary (white, heterosexual, and middle-class) and fails to acknowledge and dismantle wider structures of inequality.
Diane Lockheart was shown to belong to this neoliberal framing of feminism. Diane’s involvement with feminism was part of her characterization from the beginning of The Good Wife: she belonged to the US feminist organization “Emily’s List,” whose objective is to get Democratic women elected to office; she was vocally pro-abortion; she was inspired by and had a picture of Hillary Clinton in her office; and she wanted to build a female-only law firm. Diane’s approach to feminism was the “lean in” approach of Sheryl Sandberg—critiqued by Rottenberg (2018)—whereby having women in positions of power in work and politics is considered enough to reach gender equality (Sykes 2021).
The Good Fight challenges this discourse by exploring a tension between top-down approaches to improve social equality and grassroots mobilization, and through specific emotional investments on behalf of Diane. By centering a woman in her 60s in the narrative, the show can engage with the failure of liberal feminism to change the status quo, as well as its failure to address intersecting patterns of inequality. Indeed, the defeat of Hillary Clinton and the election of a racist, misogynist, right-wing populist president exposed the “bankruptcy of liberal feminism” (Arruzza et al. 2019, 4) and offered an opportunity for other feminisms to emerge. Diane’s relationship with Hillary Clinton, one based on similarity of worldview and political means, makes her an ideal character to articulate the disillusion with (neo)liberal feminism in the aftermath of Trump’s election.
Unlike The Good Wife, The Good Fight was not broadcast on the CBS network but was made available to audiences through CBS All Access and other streaming platforms. This allowed the show extra freedoms in terms of content and form, including the freedom to swear (discussed below) and, possibly, the freedom to challenge the hegemony of neoliberal and popular feminisms. Indeed, the different economic and distribution model of streaming services compared to network television has created opportunities to develop texts that offer more critical perspectives in regards to gender, age, race, class, and disability (Christian 2020; Molina-Guzmán 2016).
However, despite being critically acclaimed, the show has not been as popular as The Good Wife, nor won any substantial awards. It has also been described as a “passion project” by the creators, Michelle and Robert King, who have also claimed that the show caters to a “niche” audience (Canfield 2021), presumably one more aligned with the progressive politics depicted in the show, as well as its “feeling rules.” Indeed, the politics of emotion that run throughout the show can be seen as representative of the political crisis of the white liberal élite in the aftermath of Trump’s election and the struggle over the meaning of feminism that followed. This narrative is driven by Diane’s emotional state in relation not only to Trump’s election, but to a series of crises she experiences throughout the show; these are explored in more detail below.
Crisis and Resilience
According to Sykes (2021, 19) “The Good Fight interrogates the politics of its predecessor, introducing storylines and characters who openly critique the complacency of white Democrats like Diane and slowly undercutting the surety of her worldview.” Throughout seasons 1, 2, 3, and 4 the audience witnesses Diane’s struggle to come to terms with a world she no longer recognizes, where the lines between good/bad, fiction/reality, lawful/unlawful have become blurred. Diane’s political crisis is accompanied by both personal and economic ones. The Good Wife ended with the discovery that Kurt, Diane’s Republican husband, had an affair with one of his former students. The Good Fight picks up this narrative thread: Diane and Kurt are separated, and their relationship is negotiated throughout seasons 1 and 2. Furthermore, the show begins with Diane’s announcement that she is retiring from her legal firm; however, Diane’s dreams of retiring in France are quickly shattered, as we discover that the trust fund owner and friend who managed her investments has been running a Ponzi scheme and that she has lost all her savings.
In the first episode (S1:E1), the audience is presented with the unraveling of Diane’s life: she has no money, has no job, may need to sublet her home, and is utterly alone. During an encounter with her husband, the audience is shown the cracks in the strong, invulnerable woman she projects into the world, and her despair about her professional, personal, and economic situation:
I signed my exit agreement and. . . they. . . they won’t. . . My God, this is my life. . . And it’s over. . . It’s gone. I’m losing my apartment. I’m unemployable, how is that possible? How is my life suddenly so fucking meaningless!? [. . .] How can you work so hard every single day of your life and have nothing to show for it? Not a friend!’
The audience is shown Diane at her most vulnerable, as she cries and is consoled—however briefly—by her husband. Nonetheless, she is resilient in the face of adversity, as—within the time of the first episode—she manages to negotiate a partnership position in a new firm.
Bracke (2016, 53) argues that “[r]esilience [. . .] has become a force to be reckoned with in the realm of hegemonic ethics of and truth about the self.” The author maps the emergence of the term and its different understandings, arguing that it is the slipperiness of the concept that provides it with power in the current context. Indeed, it may relate to the capacity of an object, individual, material, population, or system to return to its original state after a shock, but it may also indicate the ability to adapt to a new situation by “creatively” responding to the shock or trauma. Ultimately, Bracke (2016, 57) situates resilience in relation to security, or lack thereof, arguing that “[i]n precarious times, resilience is the new security.” This formulation allows for an analysis of the central role of resilience for the endurance of neoliberalism, becoming instrumental for sustaining austerity measures in the aftermath of the 2007/2008 economic crisis that further eroded forms of social support provided by the welfare system (Bracke 2016; Gill and Orgad 2018; Negra and Tasker 2014).
Diane’s resilience is shown through her drive to find and negotiate the terms of new employment. As feminist solidarity wavers in the aftermath of the financial scandal, which ensnares her after recommending that several feminist colleagues invest with the trust fund, Diane finds herself alone, fending for herself. She meets up with colleagues from different firms to find employment, failing to do so. Eventually, she is offered a lifeline by Adrian Boseman, head of Riddick and Boseman. At this point, Diane is desperate as her life is falling apart, nonetheless, she manages to negotiate with Adrian a partnership position. Diane’s crises are important for her representation as resilient, as in her capacity to “bounce back” from difficulties and shock, all by herself. Indeed, Diane refuses to let her temporarily estranged husband help her; instead, she suggests they divorce, so that his patrimony may not be affected by her financial situation.
The turn inwards of feelings of alienation, insecurity, and precariousness are also symbolically shown through Diane’s “extra-curricular” activities in season 2. She begins by micro-dosing psilocybin, a drug found in psychedelic mushrooms, to manage her alienation from a world unrecognizable to her (S2:E1). When Adrian is shot in the chest, she takes up Aikido, a Japanese defensive martial art, which offers her not only a way to defend herself, but a way to spiritually heal and regain control, as she tells her instructor (S2:E12):
How are you feeling?
Good
Why?
Because I’m in control.
How long will it last?
As long as I want it to.
Both the use of psychedelic drugs and the Aikido practice can be understood through the colonial logic of appropriating and commodifying non-Western religious and cultural practices, which circulates widely in the wellness industry. Gill and Orgad (2018, 488) argue that this consumption of Otherness represents a kind of “spiritual neoliberalism [. . .] in which Western women are incited to achieve enlightenment or resilience through consuming the histories, struggles, and religions of Others, stripped of any history or context.” Diane’s engagement with Aikido can be seen as a way to build resilience in the face of the challenges she faces at work and in society at large. However, season 2 ends with Diane’s epiphany that being resilient is not enough, but she needs to take the fight into her own hands (S2:E13), as explored below.
Vulnerability and Political Action
The inward directionality of resilience is challenged by the show at the beginning of season 3 (S3:E2), when Diane has a problematic exchange with her Aikido instructor. During a class, he offers to re-adjust her energy and proceeds to instruct her to forget what is happening “outside” and focus instead on the here and now. He then goes on to list the things to forget, including George Soros and the Jewish conspiracy to control the media, which is what prompts Diane to leave the Aikido gym and pick up axe throwing instead. 1 While these events are portrayed humorously, they also signal a shift in Diane’s approach to the personal and political threats that surround her. Indeed, throughout these shifts, Diane is faced again and again with the limitations of the law and “traditional” politics, becoming more and more disillusioned with these institutions, and allowing for a more Machiavellian approach to political change, whereby the ends justify the means. This change in Diane’s outlook leads her to join a female-only activist group that engages in underground guerilla tactics to undermine Trump’s chances for re-election, called “Book Club” (S3:E3). 2 This is an important moment in the character development of Diane, as “resistance” enters the space of the show alongside “resilience.”
Butler et al. (2016) argue that vulnerability is often understood as the opposite of agency and as an obstacle to action against dominant and harmful power relations. The authors challenge this notion and open a space to imagine vulnerability as “one of the conditions of the very possibility of resistance” (Butler et al. 2016, 1). Diane experiences a heightened sense of vulnerability through the overarching narrative of season 2, which sees several lawyers being murdered by disgruntled clients, and then the Trump’s administration attempts to personally attack her firm, her husband and herself. Indeed, season 2 ends with Diane’s decision to act (S2:E13):
This past month I’ve been feeling at peace and in control. And I realised it’s not enough.
Why not?
Because people are out to get me. It’s time to fight.
Ultimately, Diane’s decision to take the fight into her hands and join an activist group is directly related to feeling vulnerable and under threat, in a way that supports Butler et al.’s (2016) argument about the connection between vulnerability and political action.
However, it is important to stress how Diane’s vulnerability is temporary and individual, rather than structural. Indeed, it is not a concern for the collective, but the direct actions moved against her and her firm that solicit her active engagement with the Book Club. While the outcome is collective struggle, as opposed to the focus on the self of resilience, it nonetheless points toward the privileged position of Diane as a middle-class, heterosexual, cisgender, white, and wealthy woman. The normalization of vulnerability for women in recent years has been remarked by Orgad and Gill (2022) and Ciccone (2020), who highlight how vulnerability is often represented in “confidence cultures” as necessary for self-improvement, self-development, and growth. At the same time, Orgad and Gill (2022, 75) stress how it is mostly white, heterosexual, and middle-class women who are entitled to show vulnerability, arguing that: “even the turn away from the tyranny of the perfect and the confident Wonder Woman toward the embrace of vulnerability and imperfection seems to be a site of privilege. After all, in times of such sharp and divisive inequalities, insecurity, and precarity, very few individuals can afford to be seen to be weak, vulnerable, and lacking control and to deliberately refuse the confidence imperative.” In such a way, they argue, vulnerability is detached from structural inequality, being framed more often as individual vulnerability.
The individualization of vulnerability is also echoed by the political strategies of the Book Club. Indeed, the centrality of Trump to both Diane’s crises and newfound activism is important, as it nods to an individualization of structural sexism and racism that runs parallel to individualizing responses to these systems of inequality. Indeed, policy attempts to tackle racism and sexism within institutions have tended to understand discrimination as the result of actions by individual people, often people who have yet to be educated about their misplaced assumptions (Bourne 2019; Jackson 2018; Noon 2018; Pető 2017). This has the effect of portraying systems of inequality as remnants of a problematic past, which tailored interventions—such as unconscious bias training—may eradicate, failing to account for the ways in which sexism, racism, homophobia, classism, ableism, are power relations reproduced by and within social institutions. In this context, the fight against Trump becomes an easy cause behind which many people across the political spectrum may stand, without further interrogation of the intersecting systems of inequality that continue to regulate society.
The Good Fight appears to embrace this approach to gender inequality in season 3, when the Book Club attempts to undermine Trump’s electoral support by any means necessary, including planting malware in the voting machines in US states characterized by black voter suppression (S3:E7). The guerrilla strategies used by the group to remove Trump from the presidency reflect the strategies used by Trump and his election base; however, these are shown to fail as the group becomes too extreme and causes the death of a Republican politician. Ultimately, these strategies are portrayed as “going too far,” in a way that reminds of Lorde’s (1984) famous essay “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House.” In this essay, Lorde (1984, 122) urged white feminists to examine their own implication in racist patriarchal structures, arguing that working within and with the tools offered by the dominant system will not bring about the changes needed, “[f]or the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.” Ultimately, the tactics employed by the Book Club are not only rejected by Diane, but turned against her to force her into silence, showing the violence and danger of employing the “master’s tools” to achieve political change. Indeed, season 3 concludes with the invasion of Diane and Kurt’s home by a SWAT team that has been “tipped off” by the Book Club, the same strategy that provoked the death of the Republican politician (S3:E10).
The rejection of the guerrilla tactics goes hand in hand with the rejection of the individualizing strategies of neoliberal feminism. The failure of neoliberal feminism, which individualizes not only female empowerment, but also sexism and misogyny, is articulated best in the first episode of season 4, which is directly connected with the Book Club’s attempt to punish Diane. The episode, which fully consists of a parallel universe where Hillary Clinton won instead of Donald Trump, occurs while Diane is unconscious after the SWAT team’s home invasion. This alternative reality reflects the “lean in” approach to gender equality mentioned above, where the assumption that gender equality has been achieved rests solely on the fact that a woman is now president of the United States. Through the “dream,” Diane realizes that the eradication of Trump and Trumpism would not solve the issue of gender inequality; on the contrary, Trump may have been crucial for fostering discontent, for making women angry enough to take to the streets and social media to voice their grievances. As Diane is confronted by Hillary Clinton’s aide for her attempt to show that gender inequality—in the form of sexual harassment and assault—continues to exist, she is asked by the Clinton’s administration to keep quiet:
You are trying to suggest women get angry about abuse, right?
Diane: Yes.
That’s not the message that helps us in 2020. Hillary only gets re-elected if men don’t feel women are leading with their anger.
But women are angry.
No, they’re not. Women are making advances now. And they’re doing it through competence, not through grievance.
But what about women who are abused? Who have been abused?
They will find support from Hillary. From this administration.
So you’re asking them to shut up?!
No, I’m asking them to get a woman re-elected to the highest office in the land. If Hillary doesn’t win, Trump wins. Then what do we have?
In the episode, Diane is confronted with the failure of the feminist politics she engaged with in The Good Wife, characterized by a celebration and glamorization of women’s achievements in work and politics, at the expense of a wider critique of systemic inequality. At the same time, the episode highlights the importance of anger, portraying it as the key affective dissonance for fighting sexism, as it is explored in more detail below.
Anger, Femininity, and Older Age
The inclusion and celebration of female anger is a novelty in western media culture, as traditionally women’s anger has been constructed as devious, monstrous, or taboo. Since the election of Trump and the #MeToo movement, women’s anger has become increasingly common in popular and commercial cultural forms (Brüning 2021; Kay 2019). Kay (2019, 591) argues that “we are witnessing a ‘celebritisation’ of anger, in which globalized media culture appears to be newly accommodating of (certain kinds of) female fury in the wake of #MeToo.” Diane’s anger is palpable throughout the show. For example, in season 2 (S2:E7) the partners are invited to compete against other firms in a bid to impeach the president by the Democratic Party. The following exchange between Diane and the only Republican lawyer in the firm occurs:
I’m tired of “when they go low, we go high.” Fuck that! When they go low, we go lower. . .. No, what we agreed is that impeachment isn’t just about the law, it’s about persuading people. And if there’s one thing we’ve seen this past year, it’s that lies persuade. . .
Oh God. . .
Truth only takes you that far! And then you need lies.
Uh, this is deranged. This is the Trump Derangement Syndrome. You’re just as bad as you’re accusing him of being.
No, I’m just done with being the adult in the room, done with being the compliant and the sensible one, standing stoically by while the other side picks my pockets, while the other side gerrymanders Democrats out of existence. . . a three-million-person majority and we lost the presidency. A Congress that keeps the Supreme Court justice from being seated because he was chosen by a Democratic president!
That’s not what happened.
That’s exactly what happened Julius!
Okay then, take to the streets! Man the barricades. Because if that’s what you really think, you’ve given up on the law. You’ve gone well beyond any. . .
Actually, you don’t know! I have a Smith & Wesson 64 in my desk, and I’m this close to taking to the streets.
In the shot, Diane is visibly angered: she stands up while talking to Julius; she interrupts him; she raises her voice; she throws her glasses on the table in anger; and goes as far as suggesting using violence to achieve her political ends (“Smith & Wesson 64” is the model of a gun).
While anger is not inherently progressive or constructive, there is a long tradition in black feminist theory and practice that places feminist anger as central to progress and change (see, e.g., Ahmed [2017]; Hooks [1991]; Lorde [1984]). Responding to the social contempt toward black women in the shape of the “angry black woman” stereotype, black feminists have worked toward an exploration of anger for anti-sexist and anti-racist political ends. Ahmed (2010) has explored how cultural injunctions toward “happiness,” and attachments to “happy objects,” have the effect of holding responsible those who raise “unhappy” claims concerning structural inequality for creating a problem in an otherwise harmonious space. In her later work, Ahmed (2017) offers the “feminist killjoy” as a figuration through which our feminist demands may originate, embracing—rather than rejecting—anger. Drawing on Lorde’s work Ahmed (2017, 175) argues that anger is both a position against something perceived to be wrong, while at the same time for “something that has yet to be articulated or is not yet.” Thus, anger can be reactive and productive: it is a reaction to the injuries of structural inequality and a vision for the future.
The orientation toward the future of political anger within the show challenges dominant representations of older age as a time of winding down, narrowing possibilities, and physical and cognitive decline. The field of cultural gerontology has been vocal in challenging cultural discourses that follow a standard narrative of decline, whereby growing older is understood in terms of a downward trajectory toward increasing physical and cognitive deterioration (Dolan and Tincknell 2012; Gullette 2004; Whelehan and Gwynne 2014a). More specifically, feminist scholars in the field have remarked on the gendered dimension of aging, whereby the menopause is culturally understood as the end of women’s contribution to society due to the end of their reproductive capacity (Whelehan and Gwynne 2014b). Furthermore, the framing of the menopause in terms of a medical condition, and the overall association of hormone fluctuations with female emotion throughout the life course, participate in normative discourses about the irritability of women in older age (Irni 2009). These discourses manifest culturally through the stereotype of the “cranky” or “grumpy” older woman, characterized as unhappy, difficult, and angry (De Vuyst 2022; Dolan and Tincknell 2012; Hant 2007; Segal 2013).
Feminist critics such as Greer (1999), Gullette (1997), Steinem (1994), and Woodward (2002) have offered a different reading of anger in older age, remarking on “the possible galvanizing effects of anger for stimulating personal and social change” (Woodward 2002, 56). Furthermore, empirical research in organizations has shown how organizational practices contribute to constructing the older female worker as cranky and difficult, but—at the same time—how embodying this subjectivity may offer liberation from constraining sexist and ageist norms about “feeling” and “behaving” (Cutcher et al. 2022; Irni 2009; Jack et al. 2019). In this context, it is interesting how older women describe a “fuck it” disposition about other peoples’ opinions and expectations, and their effects on one’s sense of self (Jack et al. 2019). I would argue that this “fuck it” disposition characterizes Diane’s narrative arc, and is made explicit through her recurrent use of swearing, especially the word “fuck” and its derivatives.
However, it must be noted that not all women have equal access to anger, and this is recognized within the show too. Indeed, the stereotype of the “angry black woman” is discussed in season 2 (S2:E7), where Liz, one of the black partners, plays to the stereotype to land the impeachment trial mentioned above. Another, highly relevant, episode where inequality—this time in the shape of seniority differences within the firm—is highlighted is in the oneiric first episode of season 4 (S4:E1), when Diane finds herself representing the Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein against the women who accuse him of sexual assault. 3 As the judge denies the discovery request by the women’s lawyer, on the basis that the “casting couch” is a dated cliché, Diane reflects on the role of the cultural context in the working of the law:
Justice is an equation. Justice equals the law times the zeitgeist. The law on its own doesn’t stand up, you need the mood of the time on your side. . . .
Diane we just won. The zeitgeist worked for us.
But against women.
The president is a woman. How is it against women?
In my dream, women got together and held a march and said no more.
Yeah, well, that’s the thing with dreams. You can make them anything you want. My guess is that only the female partners got to say no more, we – associates – we can’t risk it.
Hence, the episode not only frames anger as an important emotion for political engagement, but through the character of Lucca, a mixed-race woman in her 30s, also highlights how younger women and black women (as well as other women who hold a disadvantaged social positioning) may not have the privilege to stand up and show anger when experiencing inequality.
Notwithstanding Diane’s privileged access to anger, her engagement with politics in older age includes a disposition toward the future that challenges common assumptions of older people as resistant to change, and, consequently, politically conservative. Indeed, one of the most widespread assumptions among both social scientists and the lay public about political preferences throughout the life-course is that people become more conservative as they age (Peterson et al. 2020). Part and parcel of narratives of decline, political conservativism in older age refers to looking back, rather than forward, and thus being “stuck” in the past. Diane’s shifting politics and her engagement with different political tools involve an orientation toward the future that challenges widespread assumptions about older age. Hence, the representation of Diane is effective not only in challenging dominant (and individualizing) discourses of female empowerment that circulate in media culture, but also in breaking with narratives of decline by depicting “the menopausal body [as] not something that ‘has been’, marked as ‘past it’ [. . .]; [but as] always in becoming, with an eye to the future, but with unpredictable and undefinable outcomes” (Jack et al. 2019, 139). Ultimately, Diane’s anger and the way it propels her into a different worldview and different political tools frame older age as a time of personal, social, and political development.
Conclusion
As Sykes (2021) argues, The Good Fight self-reflexively challenges some of the fantasies of empowerment its predecessor, The Good Wife, engaged with. In doing so, it problematizes the predominance of popular feminist (Banet-Weiser 2018) and neoliberal feminist (Rottenberg 2018) discourses in mainstream culture, highlighting their limitations in tackling structural inequality. This article builds upon Sykes’s (2021) argument to show how this shift is articulated more explicitly through the narrative arc and emotional journey of Diane, a woman in her 60s. Indeed, Diane’s characterization in the aftermath of the election follows what (Dobson and Kanai 2019) have described in terms of affective dissonance apropos of post-recessionary television, where anger, insecurity, and anxiety work to articulate counter-discourses to the predominant “happy feelings” of neoliberalism. The Good Fight takes the argument further, showing Diane’s feelings of alienation, hopelessness, confusion, powerlessness, and anger as prompting her to self-reflexively challenge her own feminism and political strategies, and engage in forms of grass-root mobilization to achieve political change.
Through a reparative reading of The Good Fight, which attends to what may be politically productive in a text, as opposed to what reinforces dominant power relations, I have identified three emotions in the show that differently relate to political engagement (or lack thereof): resilience, vulnerability, and anger. Initially, Diane’s experience of personal, economic, and political crises supports a discourse of feminine resilience that does little to challenge wider systems of inequality. However, as the narrative progresses, a heightened feeling of vulnerability prompts her to act by joining an all-female guerrilla group to undermine Trump’s chances for re-election. However, the guerrilla strategies are shown to fail, as not only do they use the same destructive tools as the status quo, but also fail to tackle sexism as a structural, rather than individual, issue. Ultimately, anger is identified as the key emotion from which collective action against structural sexism may arise. None of these emotions, and the actions that they enable, are mutually exclusive and taken together they point to the “feeling rules” of feminist political engagement in the aftermath of Trump’s election.
Through centering the emotional journey of a woman in her 60s in the narrative, The Good Fight challenges traditional representations of older women in the media, who have been mostly associated with emotions such as unhappiness, depression, fastidiousness, and anger (De Vuyst 2022). Challenging these stereotypes, “negative” emotions appear to be the catalyst for much of Diane’s political change and grassroots mobilization, reframing the longstanding association of these emotions with older femininity, by making them politically productive. Thus, The Good Fight challenges the emphasis on young femininity of much feminist cultural studies scholarship by mapping cultural and political change through the character development of a woman in her 60s. Furthermore, it troubles dominant narratives of decline by representing older age as a time of personal and political growth, with an eye to the future, rather than the past.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I wish to acknowledge the anonymous reviewers for their enthusiastic and engaged response to the article. I would also like to thank Emily Hogg, Peter Simonsen, and Bryan Yazell for their comments on previous drafts of the paper.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
