Agent Peggy Carter applies anesthetizing lipstick, employs clever copywriting skills. They get ahead by being smart and playing (mostly) by the rules. Less politely, pill-popping follows her own not-quite-moral code, fixer manipulates in the White House and scheming Claire Underwood aims to trump her husband, the president.
All of these powerful female characters look out for themselves, whether saving democracy, saving a patient or saving an account. Some are clearly more virtuous than others.
They are TV’s wish-fulfillment babes who suffer the indignities of misogynist male colleagues only to rise above.
The ranks of strong women in prime time is growing. But just because there are more female characters taking center stage on TV doesn’t mean they are all proud feminists or expressing feminist ideals.
“You have to look at them in terms of specific characteristics within the environment of the show,” said Janet Robinson, film theory instructor at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
“I think that the new crop of female-centered television programming opens up new and exciting doors, but we should acknowledge that just because a show has a female lead does not automatically make the show ‘feminist.’ “
Historically, Robinson said, “mainstream television has offered male characters access to transformative epiphanies,” Robinson said, “while female characters have filled supporting roles.” A feminist character, in Robinson’s view, is one who “acts, makes decisions, and uses information, strength and power not just for the greater good (or for the government or her company or her family) but also for herself, so that she is allowed personal transformation.”
A horde of current female TV characters qualify as having epiphanies of their own.
Taylor Nygaard, a postdoctoral scholar in the Media, Film and Journalism Studies department of the University of Denver, said these shows are contributing to what she calls a new form of “popular feminism.” She thinks TV is helping rebrand the feminist movement for a new generation.
“These representations reflect a really important corrective to the lack of strong female protagonists across media historically,” she said.
They also provide “important alternatives to the narrow definition of the affluent, white, heterosexual, and conventionally feminine womanhood/girlhood that has dominated media for so long,” Nygaard wrote in an e-mail. “It’s so great to see a variety of identities and perspectives on female identity beyond affable housewives, nagging girlfriends and damsels in distress.”
Nygaard enjoys TV’s complicated, flawed women more than the super heroines, she said, because they tend to disrupt norms and conventions even more.
Nygaard teaches a course called “Girl Power?: Gender in the Media,” exploring the new representations of strong women in popular entertainment. She cites the Irish serial murder thriller with Gillian Anderson playing detective Stella Gibson, as a prime example, noting Stella “spouts explicitly feminist rhetoric to her sexist colleagues with an enviable confidence and ease.”
For Robinson, “Game of Thrones” offers a favorite example: Within the usually sexist genre of fantasy, the character Daenerys Targaryen (also known as ), played by Emilia Clarke, is a feminist role model. Daenerys is beautiful but strong, smart, not gullible. Her guiding principle is fairness, but she can also be brutal. That’s a mix, Robinson believes, that television has not depicted before.
Those who study and teach such things say the measure of feminist power is this: Is the woman a three-dimensional character? Does she have access to making decisions or acting, not just for the greater good, but for herself, her own growth, her own identity?
Is she offered transformation? Is there some arc to the character, whether breaking bad or breaking good, so that she evolves from the beginning to the end of the story?
The answer itself is evolving as strong female characters occur in greater numbers.
Who counts as feminist?
Cookie Lyon (Taraji P. Henson) on “Empire” is an ex-con, so her status as a role model is debatable, but beyond being the sassiest character of the season, she is a forceful feminist. She doesn’t merely react. She instigates and drives the narrative.
A ditzy woman in a goofy show can be a strong feminist, depending on her trajectory: in the comedy “VEEP,” (returning tonight on HBO), Julia Louis-Dreyfus plays Selina Meyer, the country’s first female president. Insipid though she is, Selina regularly ends up one step ahead of rivals. This politician is not much on issues — or scruples — but she plays to win.
Similarly, Claire Underwood on “House of Cards” may be a frosty, murderous climber, ultimately more self-serving than Lady MacBeth. “But if anybody goes mad on that show, it will be Frank,” Robinson ventured. Claire knows herself and knows her husband better than he knows himself. She represents a new, more ruthless female antagonist on TV, a character that becomes “more clear if you binge-watch,” Robinson said.
Whether running a law firm like Alicia Florrick (Julianna Margulies on “The Good Wife”), or bonding with clone sisters like Tatiana Maslay, who plays a dozen strong women on “Orphan Black,” (returning April 18 on BBC America), these women don’t just want equal pay, they demand to take action.
Happily, they’re breaking out of TV’s too-familiar box of the harried working mom, terrific at her job but inept at everything else. These women aren’t stereotypes like Debra Messing’s mom-cop, who could arrest any mischief on the streets but was powerless against the kids in her kitchen. The newer female types are competent all around.
Wait, there are more
“Supergirl,” starring due this fall on CBS, will be the DC Comics’ bid to catch up with Marvel’s distaff “Agent Carter.” Supergirl may sport a spandex body suit, but she’ll exert some control.
“Agent Carter,” played by Hayley Atwell, is a nod to the historic roots of feminism. Demurely serving coffee and answering phones for male colleagues, she keeps her know-how under wraps (and 1940s foundations). She wouldn’t know the word “feminism” but she exhibits it in the way she forcefully solves problems.
Beyond telling stories of women in prison and examining race and privilege, “Orange is the New Black” deserves credit for disrupting traditional ideas of female beauty with its large and diverse female cast. “Madam Secretary” offers a more mainstream feminist role model, a blond Téa Leoni often in pantsuits, balancing sensitivity with a steely edge, recalling a certain real-life former secretary of state who is the presumptive Democratic nominee for president.
After a season of drug abuse, adultery and other transgressions, “Nurse Jackie” returns for a final season tonight (April 12) on Showtime. When we encounter Jackie (Edie Falco), the ER nurse and addict is locked up in a holding cell in Queens, in withdrawal from opiates and seemingly as low as she can go. For Jackie, good and evil have always been about context: She has saved people or let them die based on her own code of ethics outside the law. Where does her trajectory go from here? Things can’t get much worse … can they? On the plus side, she at least has a trajectory.
And let’s not forget the violent “Vikings” heroines on the History Channel. They’re warrior-princesses who don’t just stand around looking sexy while male characters push the narrative forward.
“Girls” trouble
A more nuanced case is Lena Dunham’s Hannah on “Girls” who this year finally turned away from the toxic boyfriend to pursue a seemingly healthier relationship. Now in its fourth season, the show is divisive: it stands accused of championing an ugly millennial version of nihilism more than feminism; it is also perfectly relatable to younger women. Adrift and uncaring, the women in this show are unlike the more established (i.e., “older”) women of “Sex and the City,” who had careers and fixed identities from the start. While the “Girls” season finale was titled “The Girls Grow Up,” the evidence was unconvincing.
To Nygaard, “Girls” presents an unhappy picture of “a post-feminist dystopia.” The girls embraced sexual freedom and equality in a big way, only to run into failure and disappointment. We can argue endlessly whether “Girls” is post-feminist, anti-feminist, or something else entirely. The fact that it challenges easy categorization makes it interesting.
While the trend toward more diverse women’s roles on TV is positive, Nygaard believes, she stops short of saying these shows or characters are making real strides towards “breaking down patriarchy.”
Media representations are important in changing cultural expectations, she said, but they’re not yet changing the inequalities that touch real women’s lives.
Joanne Ostrow: 303-954-1830, jostrow@denverpost.com or twitter.com/ostrowdp
