Conclusion: The Persephone Complex

Abstract

What is the value of the Persephone myth in post-feminist television for women? Persephone’s resonance in the feminist imaginary provides a strong clue to her function in stories about women, but the particular circumstances of the new context — post-feminist heroine television — presents a unique situation, where questions about feminine sexuation are animated in a space presumed to be ‘beyond’ such ideas. Where heroine television has historically distilled ‘the agenda that feminism has made public’ (Brunsdon 1997, 34), it is now triangulated with critical, popular, and political discourses, such that heroine television begins to ‘make public’ what these discourses think about feminism. A traditional feminist critique that looks for feminist ideas — ‘the current state of feminist thinking’ or the cumulative effect of developments ‘in feminist’s conceptual and theoretical agenda’ (Brooks 1997, 4–7) — in the text finds it absent and in its place, a ‘resurgence in ideas of natural sexual difference’ (Gill 2007, 255). Feminist scholars develop a range of hypotheses regarding why, but few engage with post-feminist revisionism as a legitimate critique of feminism and, consequently, assume where feminism is absent its opposite must be present — patriarchy. This is the post-feminist impasse.