The Politics of Female Anger in Older Age: The Good Fight,Older Femininity and Political Change

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:

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):

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):

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:

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:

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:

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.