(Un)fashionable Feminists: The Media and Ally McBeal

Abstract

Popular representations of feminism in the media sell: whether in music, film or television, images of independent women appeal to a wide audience.¹ One has to only look at recent chart hits such as Destiny’s Child’s ‘Independent Woman’ (2000), or Kelly Clarkson’s ‘Miss Independence’ (2003), films such as Charlie’s Angels (2000) or Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2001), or popular fictions such as Bridget Jones’s Diary (1996) to appreciate that women’s ‘liberation’ is a marketable commodity. Throughout these representations it is implied that women have achieved the goals of second wave feminism — financial autonomy, a successful career, sexual freedom — and, therefore, that the demands associated with the movement of the 1970s have been superseded. Indeed, this image is so widely acknowledged that the cover of the 29 June 1998 issue of Time magazine declared feminism to be dead. One rhetorical mechanism through which the media have articulated this distorted perspective is by the construction of a ‘then’ and ‘now’: two distinct feminisms, one representing women ‘today,’ and the other, either labelled ‘second wave’ or ‘seventies’ feminism, depicting feminisms of the past. These two interpretations of feminism are set against each other, with an implication that women have either moved to a less politicised and less effective feminism; or, more generally, that there is no more need for feminism.