“Genre as Feminist Platform: Diagnosis,Anger,and Serial T.V.”

White Postfeminist Media Culture as Mood Disorder

Crazy Ex-Girlfriend (2015–2019) critiques white PFMC’s treatment of romance through the musical genre. Season 1’s theme song establishes the story (Rebecca quits NYC law firm to stalk high-school ex-boyfriend in West Covina, CA) and then alternates between chorus/cast singing “She’s the Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” and Rebecca responding “No I’m not!”; “that’s a sexist term”; “it’s more nuanced than that”; and finally, “Ok!” The song voices BPD’s resistance strategies and the series’ narrative/diagnostic arc from denial to acceptance. Rebecca answers back to a diverse, mostly working-class Latina/o, Black, Native American and white “chorus” who make up her West Covina community. The series title and opening song center her as the show’s ostensible protagonist not because of her exemplary qualities and accomplishments but from her being “crazy.” We ultimately learn that all CXG’s songs are in Rebecca’s head and that many, like this one, stage BPD arguments she has with herself about her impulsive/destructive behaviors.

The musical genre’s intertextuality and reflexivity enables CXG to situates its protagonist’s internal agonistic dynamic within explicit allusions to PFMC’s analogously agonistic messages about gender and romance. “The Sexy Getting Ready Song” (CXG 2015, episode no. 1), for example, depicts Rebecca getting ready for a date. It performs and demolishes key elements of PFMC’s sensibility, including “the makeover paradigm,” female “self-surveillance” and “discipline,” and a subject making herself a sexual object, by showing, graphically, how the “sexy” is made (Gill 2007, 147–48). Slinking out in black bra and skimpy silk wrap, Rebecca sings, “It’s the sexy getting ready song,” as cutaways reveal the body modifications she makes to be soft, smooth, with that “hourglass silhouette” boys like. She sands her skin, painfully plucks brows and nose hairs and rips off an anal depilatory strip that splatters blood on white bathtub. A back-up singer squeezes her into a more-than-skin-tight body-shaper juxtaposed with a shot of “how the guys get ready” depicting her disheveled date snoring on his couch.

Nipsey Hussle surveys the bloody detritus in Rebecca’s bathroom and exclaims: “[T]his is how you get ready? . . . this is horrifying, like scary movie, like nasty-ass patriarchal bullshit.” Showing what “must never be disclosed,” this musical number reveals “sexy’s” invisible means of production—the labor (“getting ready”) and tools (razors, depilatory strips, tweezers, body compressing hosiery) necessary to render the normal female body culturally “ready” for feminine spectacle and objectification (Gill 2007, 155). It makes humorous (and disgusting) a feminist reveal: PFMC’s mandate that female subjects practice “intense” self-regulation to produce themselves as “feminine,” while they completely disavow that regulation (Gill 2007, 155).

Rebecca, played by star/writer/songwriter Rachel Bloom, sings in first person, her dual diegetic/extradiegetic “I” merging musical character with creator’s “emotional autobiography” and critical perspective (Eley 2017). ⁴ The musical’s reflexivity also blurs character/star/creator’s diagnosable experience with popular culture’s contradictory messages concerning romance and sexuality (Feuer 1982, 71). CXG maximizes the resulting critical effects by wedding its romantic musical plot, built from myriad cultural references (from Fatal Attraction to Beyonce), to a BPD case history. Conveying knowledge of BPD with and through musical comedy’s rich repertoire of pleasures (song, dance, humor, romance), the show makes dialectically complex entertainment that familiarizes audiences with mental illness’s distress while also exposing and diagnosing analogous pathological cultural stereotypes concerning romance, sexuality, embodiment, and women’s rage. In diagnosing Rebecca, CXG progressively diagnoses PFMC over four seasons.

Season 2′s Busby Berkeleyish theme song features Rebecca singing: “I’m just a girl in love. I can’t be held responsible for my actions” (CXG 2016, episode no. 1). The chorus then reiterates Rebecca’s “borderline” logic (love alleviates responsibility) with a perverse syllogism voiced as popular wisdom: “They say love makes you crazy, therefore you can’t call her crazy, cause when you call her crazy, you’re just calling her in love.” While Berkeley musicals equated “lovemaking” with “showmaking” (Feuer 1982, 72), CXG equates media romance tropes to BPD behavior. Season 3 begins with Rebecca jilted, enraged and seeking revenge. Its theme song, “You Do, You Don’t Want to be Crazy,” begins with Rachel/Rebecca as country star breaking car windows with a bat, singing, “Crazy is when I go off the rails, this is what you do to me,” ⁵ followed by her pop singer in flowing gown crooning, “Crazy is how your love makes me feel, this is what I want to be” (CXG 2017, episode no. 1). As male rocker, she growls, “I like when a girl gets crazy in bed,” followed by her as rapper warning, “Don’t mess with the bitch who’s crazy in the head!” The song culminates with rocker and pop singer exclaiming “you do want to be crazy” and rapper and country singer responding “you don’t want to be crazy,” as Rebecca, watching the videos on her cell phone, says “What??”

This music video pastiche serializes familiar romance tropes (of female rage, loss of self, sexual passion, and frightening behavior) that also capture Rebecca’s BPD experience and behavior. Here she feels, thinks and performs within these tropes, while also beginning to question them when confronted with her own toxic behaviors as musical entertainment. CXG thereby borrows from BPD’s most effective treatment, Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), to shape its feminist platform and address. DBT brings together “seemingly opposite strategies of acceptance and change” with DBT therapists “accepting clients as they are, while also acknowledging they need to change (Behavioral Research and Therapy Clinics n.d.). CXG plots Rebecca’s recovery in Season 4 accordingly, while the show itself “accepts” (and employs) the guilty pleasures of romance discourses, while creatively underscoring that these discourses need to change. Its feminist critique operates through dialectical entertainment, its songs and dance “deconstructions of the implicit content of their chosen [music] genre—the fantasy narratives and social values that [they’re] selling under the surface” (Wilson 2018).

CXG effects this dialectical feminist entertainment-as-critique through its insistent doubling/embedding of characterization (Rebecca’s BPD) and narration (Rebecca/Rachel). Season 4’s theme song introduces two Rebecca’s, an idealized, highly self-regulated version and a normal version, played by a dressed down Bloom, who is described as “a generous friend” and also “kinda mean” (CXG 2018, episode no. 1). It ends with Bloom coming on camera, yelling, “perfection is an illusion,” capping the show’s narrative, lyrical, diagnostic, and feminist progression from Season 1 to Season 4, that culminates in Rebecca’s breakdown and her ultimate recovery. The series ends with Rebecca eschewing romance and deciding to take a year off and become a songwriter. Emily Nussbaum astutely observes, “[Rebecca] had to find a way to become Rachel Bloom” (Nussbaum 2019). This auto-generic temporality, of fictional BPD Rebecca’s aspiration to become what real-life creator Rachel Bloom already is, a showrunner/songwriter, resolves both the BPD diagnostic and the romantic musical coupling narrative. It also sustains the show’s critique of PFMC. Rebecca’s commitment to be an imperfect, uncoupled and creative self is also a commitment to rewriting and reframing toxic cultural scripts for women. Rebecca goes from producing herself (as object) to being herself (as subject). Her eschewal of “perfect” Rebecca signals a setting aside of the burdens, double-binds and exemplary sickness that is normative white postfeminist femininity.

“Shame, Rinse, Repeat”: Neoliberalism as Consumptive Gender Disorder

Similarly focalized around a diagnosable protagonist angry and at war with herself, Physical (2021), a domestic sitcom set in Southern California in 1981, brings a historical dimension to its generic engagement with PFMC. Focused on marriage and parenting, its first season narrates the suppressed rage and self-revulsion that drove an epidemic of bulimia in white feminist-inflected domestic culture of the 1980s. ⁶ Centered on bulimic housewife Sheila Rubin (Rose Byrne), its story arc interweaves her progressive husband Danny’s (Rory Scovel) run for local public office in Reagan’s America with her involvement in the aerobics craze. After Danny loses his college lecturer job, Sheila instigates his run for office, offering better advice, which he ignores, than his campaign manager. He loses his race, while her initial dabbling with aerobics becomes enormously successful, as presaged by a flashforward to 1986. In the final episode, he watches her lead a mall aerobics class of 300 women, his male gaze registering not desire, but envy of her albeit spectacularized talent and accomplishment.

This narrative embeds its showrunner’s lived experience within unmistakable references to Jane Fonda’s biography that includes her massively successful (public) 1982 “Workout” video, her (private and decades-long) struggles with bulimia, and her marriage to activist and politician Tom Hayden (Fonda 2006, 87–9, 386–91, 400–406). He was envious and critical of her success, though the profits from the aerobics tape funded their political action committee (Fonda 2006, 398). Like Fonda, Sheila moves from ballet to aerobics and ultimately appropriates her teacher’s exercise routine (Fonda 2006, 387–390–91). Physical’s referential field (Fonda, Reagan) cannily presents a gendered 1980s cultural history through a particular sit-com “situation” we have not seen before. Focalizing a secretly tormented Southern California housewife and her family, Physical draws a straight line from white middleclass wives’ suppressed anger and eating disorders to the aerobics craze and neoliberal politics.

Sheila is an apparently “perfect” wife and mother, beautiful, thin, sexy and caring. Despite outward appearances, her critical inner voice insistently and angrily details failings in her face, age, weight, exercise, demeanor, and behavior toward others. She has reasons to be angry: Danny takes credit for her ideas, manipulates her sexually and gratuitously criticizes her. Nevertheless, she saves much of her anger for herself. Her reflexive inner viciousness, while giving viewers access to misery other characters cannot see, also renders Sheila unlikeable and untrustworthy. As she regards her luminous face in the mirror, she excoriates flaws and wrinkles that are pointedly not there. The insistence and intensity of her negative self-regard derives from false perceptions, isolating and alienating her perspective from other characters and viewers. While she outwardly performs feminine graciousness, her inner voice relentless prompts and evaluates her performance. She positions herself as bad object, self-admonishing in second-person: “Today you will eat clean, healthy foods, do full [ballet] class without a break.” Triggered by the ballet studio being closed, Sheila binges (Physical 2021, episode no. 1).

Physical realistically represents a bulimic’s self-tormenting experience while also illustrating the disorder’s “regulatory” function as a pragmatic, if self-harming, mode of self-production that sustains the appearance of ideal feminine physical and emotional comportment. ⁷ Sheila consumes and then vomits up enormous amounts of food in secret. Binges temporarily calm her anger, appease her appetites (physical, intellectual, aspirational) and keep her thin. They also keep her utterly self-critical and self-involved, her labor, energy and critical acumen taken up by highly disciplined self-surveillance and loathing. This account of diseased women’s anger refuses and reframes standards of female beauty by narrating their production costs—physical, emotional, perceptual and social. Angela McRobbie observes of such self-harming practices: “They speak a kind of normative pathology. . .of the impossibility of femininity in its struggle for autonomy” (McRobbie 2009, 108). In their normalized pathology, eating disorders, “symptoms of gender distress,” are individuated, medicalized “rather than subjected to sustained social scrutiny” (McRobbie 2009, 112). Physical’s sit-com plot animates a feminist, entertainment-based version of such “sustained social scrutiny.”

The show provides critical context for reactionary elements of 1980s’ femininity to be writ large: the turn back to the erotic, spectacular female body rationalized through empowering exercise, the self-medication provided by aerobic endorphins, and the ideological and aspirational dismantling of feminism wrought by convergent forces of postfeminism and neoliberalism. Indeed, Physical’s dramedy of bulimic Sheila’s possible recovery through aerobic entrepreneurialism acts out the link between the two. Whether intentionally or not, it charts an emergent PFMC sensibility that focalizes “choice,” “being oneself” and “pleasing oneself” by particularizing one highly generative moment in its inception—the aerobics craze (Gill, 153). PFMC’s soft self-imperatives tellingly resonate with overarching neoliberal values of “privatization and personal responsibility,” the latter underwritten by mandates to “self-esteem and independence” (Duggan 2003, 12, 14). Sheila’s story dramatizes “how seeking to achieve a feminine identity makes women. . .ill” (McRobbie 97). She “cures” that illness by monetizing aerobics (one reviewer calls her a “natural capitalist”) and rationalizing politics. Her plotline underscores PFMC’s essential contribution to the neoliberal project—the toxic, narcissistic containment of women’s talents, rage and (possibly feminist) energies to the futile pursuit of feminine perfection (Hale 2021). The show historicizes and materializes PFMC’s crucial intervention within and for neoliberal politics—promoting “a ‘sexy body’. . .as women’s key (if not sole) source of identity” (Gill 149).

Physical situates Sheila’s “sexy body” on a socio-physical continuum. Normal-bodied Bunny (Della Saba), a Lebanese immigrant, makes a precarious living teaching the class that introduces Sheila to aerobics; she has no evident body size issues, though she dyes her hair to assimilate and appear American. Fellow housewife, plump and wealthy Greta, eats food with relish while openly unhappy about her weight. Sheila’s spectacularly thin body, whose attainment necessitates anemic, dishonest personal relationships, becomes progressively less “attractive,” beginning to appear anorexic and emaciated compared to Bunny and Greta’s bodies. At the same time, her relationships with men illustrate her and PFMC’s larger agency. She deflects her political talents to serve Danny and, at real estate developer John Breem’s suggestion, she redirects and “heals” her addictive, self-harming eating to neoliberal capitalist aims by compulsive exercise and building an aerobics empire.

As disordered PFMC heroine, Sheila mediates between different gendered positions and commitments: between Danny and John (politics vs. business) and between affluent Greta and precarious Bunny (ideal embodiment vs. aspirational economic security). Sheila’s PFMC sensibility and plot, wherein these gendered commitments converge, resolve through economic inequality (her white, feminine, spectacular embodiment overrides Bunny’s immigrant ingenuity) and pro-business activism (aerobics as female self-improvement/empowerment prevails over politics for environmental/community protection). Sheila “takes” the business from Bunny while she sets aside Tyler’s environmental activism in favor of a “smart development,” a more pragmatic, “third way” politics.

If only by situation rather than intent, Physical dramatizes the illness and distress PFMC levies on all bodies, promoting white middleclass feminine norms discreetly linked to neoliberalism’s toxic economic and political effects; this “femininity” ultimately is “the ideal disciplinary subject of neoliberalism” (Gill 164). PFMC’s privatization and depoliticizing of women’s aspirations (deflected wholesale to a white, identity-based, commodified narcissism) sidelined while appropriating the force of Black, of color, class-sensitive and intersectional feminisms. Their story, as entertainment or otherwise, was largely left untold.

“Writing to Not Feel Afraid”: Creativity and Rage

Like CXG and Physical, Michaela Coel’s half-hour sitcom, I May Destroy You (2020), focalizes protagonist Arabella Essiedu’s (Michaela Coel) inner experience and diagnosis (Post-Traumatic-Stress-Disorder/PTSD). If the show, as one critic asserted, exists in a tradition of autobiographical T.V. comedy that stretches from the Arnaz’s I Love Lucy to Lena Dunham’s Girls, IMDY replaces their “situations” (marriage, urban/career/single) with a traumatic event and its aftermath (Pinke et al. 2014). Arabella’s diagnosis of PTSD directly results from her (and Coel’s) experience of a drug-facilitated rape (Carr 2020). Unlike the chronic disorders that Rebecca and Sheila suffer and hide, Arabella’s PTSD has a direct trigger and her friends help her remember and reconstruct the assault. Thus, Arabella’s trauma and flashbacks, rather than shameful secrets and performances of feminine perfection, inform the doubled narrational structure of IMDY. Indeed, trauma brings Arabella’s femininity, as gender-based danger, to the fore, where previously she had been “busy being Black and poor” (Stanford 2020). As identities, Blackness, poverty, and femininity, in that order, are traumatic conditions with which Arabella grapples.

Accordingly, the feminine-performance-enhancing behaviors at the heart of, if also critiqued by, the other two shows—shopping, grooming, aerobics, competition for men, spectacular body presentation—are either non-existent, contingent or therapeutic in IMDY. Arabella shops once, after running out of sexually deceitful guy’s apartment dressed in bare feet and a large shirt. She runs into a shop, emerging clad in boots, jeans and shirt. She and BFF Terry take yoga and extreme aerobics class for her PTSD, shots of Arabella’s body conveying her strength and flexibility. In a Roman bar she joins and disrupts the eroticized performance of female dancers and she never expresses body/beauty envy of or competition with any female friends. Rather than seeking an idealized, commodified gender identity, Arabella and Terry aspire to be artists.

The doubling structured by autobiographical genre and diagnosis in IMDY concerns Arabella’s PTSD and her writing. Each episode’s title sequence features “I MAY DESTROY YOU,” typed in full, the final word then highlighted and erased. It signals Coel/Arabella writing and editing the episodes as we see them. Sound cues, point-of-view shots and visual distortions give viewers access both to Arabella’s physical/emotional experience of trauma and, at the same time, to her creative account of it, in and as the show. In Episodes 11 and 12, Arabella’s bedroom becomes a writing room, walls papered with character/story post-it notes. As she sticks some of them on the wall, flashbacks depict key, often traumatic moments from previous episodes. Embedded in this entwined autofiction of recovery and creative consciousness, Arabella’s racialized trauma and rage rewrite the other two shows’ feminist schema. Rather than exploring white generic femininity’s relation to and as illness, IMDY interweaves legal/forensic, therapeutic and creative investigations of Arabella’s assault and PTSD, focusing on difficult questions of consent, harm, self-harm and care. Rigorously intersectional, the show distributes positions of vulnerability and culpability among and within all its diverse characters. The destroyer referenced in the series title, Coel has observed, may be Arabella’s sexual assailant, her own self-destructive behaviors, or the harm that she, as a traumatized person, visits upon others (Garcia 2020).

IMDY opens with Arabella pulling an all-nighter to finish a draft of her second book. She takes a break and drinks shots with friends at a bar. Suddenly, the image blurred, she staggers forward and blacks out. The next day, Arabella cannot recollect what happened but cannot rid her mind’s eye of a white man above her, pelvis thrusting in a bathroom stall. With her roommate, she consults the internet about consciousness, “the biggest riddle in nature,” to understand “how the brain produces images of something you’ve never seen” (IMDY, episode no. 1). Her research, prompted by denial (she believes she is imagining not remembering this man), also implicitly queries the nature of autobiography and creativity. Throughout, the series ponders different kinds of consciousness—everyday, traumatic, and creative—detailing how they inform but diverge from and are not coextensive with the body’s lived experience. Arabella ultimately understands that the recurring images are flashbacks: someone spiked her drink and orally raped her after friend Simon left her at the bar.

Bella’s closest friends, Terry (Weruche Opia) and Kwame (Paapa Essiedu), support her as she grapples with PTSD. She goes to therapy, paints, joins a support group, and quits drinking and drugs. Her friends’ lives parallel hers. She and Kwame, who is gay, have sex with partners (Zain and Malik) who remove condoms secretly (Bella) or forcibly (Kwame). Initially these events irritate Bella and hurt and devastate Kwame, but neither realizes that what has happened to them is rape under U.K. law. ⁸ Arabella discovers a Reddit tutorial detailing how men can remove condoms and feign ignorance (“I thought you knew”), using the same words Zain said to her. Kwame belatedly grasps that he too has been sexually assaulted but when he reports it, the police, supportive with Arabella, refuse to accommodate the different forensic circumstances gay male sexual assault poses—Kwame knows his assailant’s address but not his real name.

Through these instances, in which characters do not consciously or immediately understand a sexual experience as harm (due to a predator’s drugs or gaslighting, their own internalized shame, and/or others’ external cultural bias and denial), IMDY complexifies and never generalizes its intersectional accounts of sexual assault. Additionally, the parallels IMDY establishes between Bella and Terry engage whiteness as an ongoing source of “soft” racialized harm that is often, similarly, not consciously discerned. Both women interact with white employers or evaluators whose nervous conviviality is brittle with hidden intent and implicit judgment. These “daily onslaughts of (unintended but still exhausting) racism” notably distort Arabella and Terry’s (self) perceptions (Pickens 2016, 17). In an audition with two white female casting agents, Terry nails her lines and, as she prepares to leave, they ask her about her hair and if she could remove her wig. She politely refuses their gratuitous request. Later than night, Kwame asks how her audition went. Terry answers, “I was really shit” (IMDY, episode no. 2). She clearly wasn’t, this incident illustrating how the casting agents’ behavior distorted Terry’s self-assessment. We later learn that since then she has been unable to show up for subsequent auditions.

Arabella’s recovery includes rage, public outing of a predator, being a savior and benefiting from lessons she receives from others. Learning that her assault investigation closed due to insufficient evidence, Arabella breaks into her ex-boyfriend’s apartment, seeking solace. She explodes in pent-up rage when he locks her out. Writing and the sea provide a respite and quasi-baptism. Bella becomes a social media survivor-guru, sharing truth and rage at #IHSWG (I hate straight white guys). But she self-righteously abuses Kwame and Terry, which leads her to an emergency session with her therapist, Carrie. Carrie advises Bella to quit social media and challenge binaries that underlie her consciousness and judgment: “bad from good, friend from foe, woman from man, black from white, criminal from victim, god from devil” (IMDY, episode 9). Arabella and the series “take” her advice. Arabella quits social media, forgives Terry and others for betrayals, including Zain, erstwhile, repentant rapist. He helps her outline her second creative non-fiction book on her bedroom walls. The series, too, avoids judgment and melodrama, exploring creativity to repair trauma in ways the law does not and cannot address.

The doubled trauma/recovery and book-writing plots resolve in these lessons, converging in the final episode. The episode presents three different endings to the trauma/recovery plot, aligning and contrasting different traumatic affects and possible outcomes: rage/revenge; forgiveness and legal consequence; and romance with role reversal. It then culminates in Bella’s second book publication whose end we do not know. The doubled narration and suspended outcome make a space for the provisional, the particular, the unresolved, a possibly “other” feminism whose capacious imagination, wit and creativity in the face of racial and sexual trauma defies naming.

Conclusion

The diagnosable female anger I have discussed ranges from protagonists Rebecca’s projected and overt rage at others to Sheila’s angry self-loathing, both critically implicated in normative strictures of white bourgeois femininity. Rather than pathologizing or demonizing individual characters, the shows sympathetically explore the behaviors, family situations, social and cultural imperatives, and internal suffering that animate and inform their characters’ respective diagnoses. This diagnostic/generic storytelling, inflected by autobiographical experience, produces genuinely critical feminist entertainment—not post or popular feminism, but salient, viable critique through their creatively auspicious mobilization of diagnostic/hermeneutic and generic storytelling structures (Banet-Weiser 2018, 1–23). Their framing references critical interventions that feminism has made historically in women’s health and mental health, implementing those activist/clinical insights within diagnostic generic serial TV. Rather than denying diagnosed individuals’ misery by asserting “we always thought BPD was an individual sickness but it turns out it is femininity as social disorder,” the shows articulate a both/and perspective that exposes how femininity as disorder has infused everything from our individual psyches to our culture, politics and entertainment. As DBT suggests, these showrunners accept that dialectic, make serial generic TV out of it and, in doing so, indicate reparative directions: individuals, entertainment and feminism can do better. That is a diagnostic, not a generic or narrative insight.

IMDY goes further, exploring Arabella’s femininity as a mode of gender-based trauma, conditioned by or contingent upon race and access or lack thereof to resources to live, flourish and create. Its intersectional complexity (of genre/social world, racialized anger, and diagnosed character) dramatizes specificities of situation, affect and trauma that illuminate several limitations and toxicities of idealized white femininity different from those critiqued by the other two shows. IMDY mobilizes Black female rage, diagnosis and creativity to dramatize intersectional traumas to which some are especially vulnerable, others especially culpable, but from which no one is immune. Taken together, these shows’ genres, diagnoses, and angry protagonists provide trenchant creative feminist platforms for refusing and reframing cultural norms concerning white femininity, instead asserting, with specificity, anger and spirit, women’s aspirations, sexuality, appetite, and creativity across a racial and resource spectrum.