Representing Agency and Coercion: Feminist Readings and Postfeminist Media Fictions

Abstract

This chapter is an account of a single television show, Misfits (E4, 2009–present), a low budget comedy ‘teen’ drama shown on the UK youth oriented E4 channel, which I am using here as a lens to explore some aspects of how agency and coercion are represented in contemporary UK popular culture. In particular, I’m interested in examining how the working class female characters are portrayed as problematically agentic subjects and in situating this representation within a cultural and political context, notable for its particularly vicious characterisation of a section of the British working class. The chapter draws on a conceptualisation of contemporary media culture as marked by discourses of postfeminism and asks to what extent the postfeminist emphasis on tropes of agency, predicated on assumptions of individualism, entitlement, and consumption, is complicated by the series’ interest in interrogating the stereotypes proliferating in sections of the media of young working class people as feckless, tasteless ‘chavs’. Given this media preoccupation, the chapter asks what feminist readings are plausible in relation to the series’ representation of female sexuality as simultaneously agentic and coerced and how this representation (mis) fits with a wider cultural and critical preoccupation with young women’s sexual subjectivity. My reading of the series draws attention to the ways that tracking how fictions represent certain figures as explicitly agentic subjects might grant an insight into the circulation of cultural anxieties, which simultaneously resist and reproduce class, gender, and race formations.