Amy flick md8/11/2023 I argue that the turn to interiority is a product of the US cultural context, but also that this examination evidences the malleability and longevity of postfeminist ideology. I analyse this shift through a comparative analysis of the television shows Sex and the City, Girls and The Mindy Project. Drawing on the theoretical critiques of postfeminist retreatism and girlie femininity, this turn is characterised by a concern with interior spaces – reviving domesticity and the importance of finding and securing a home – as well as internalised consumption – replacing forms of material consumption with the quest for self-actualisation, particularly through eating and expressions of the authentic self. In this article, I discuss a postfeminist ‘turn to interiority’ which takes place in US postfeminist television from 2005 onwards. By focusing on the classed and racialised dynamics of the MBB-by examining who exactly is permitted to be hedonistic, and how-and by considering the MBB's limited and partial imagining of progressive social change, the article concludes by emphasising the urgency of creating more connections between such discourses and 'parents behaving politically'. Asking what work this figure does now, in a later neoliberal context, it argues that the mother behaving badly is simultaneously indicative of a widening and liberating range of maternal subject positions and symptomatic of a profound contemporary crisis in social reproduction. The title gestures towards a popular British sitcom of the 1990s, Men Behaving Badly, which popularised the idea of the 'new lad' and this article suggests that the new lad's counterpart, the ladette, is mutating into the mother behaving badly, or the 'lad mom'. These contexts are: a neoliberal crisis in social reproduction marked by inequality and overwork the continual if contested role of women as 'foundation parents' and the negotiation of longer-term discourses of female hedonism. After identifying the social type of the mother behaving badly (MBB), the article locates and analyses it in relation to several different social and cultural contexts. All these media texts include representations of, first, mothers in the midst of highly chaotic everyday spaces where any smooth routine of domesticity is conspicuous by its absence and second, mothers behaving hedonistically, usually through drinking and partying, behaviour that is more conventionally associated with men or women without children. This article focuses on the significance of the plethora of representations of mothers 'behaving badly' in contemporary anglophone media texts, including the films Bad Moms, Fun Mom Dinner and Bad Mom's Christmas, the book and online cartoons Hurrah for Gin and the recent TV comedy dramas Motherland, The Let Down and Catastrophe. The comic hyperbole of Schumer's character's abjections, combined with her uncritical complicity, invokes for the viewer feminist solutions. In short, the condition of postfeminism is one of abjection. But Schumer inverts this construction: in her show's sketches, postfeminism as an ideological formation materializes in an array of comic abjections to which Schumer's persona is subject. Postfeminism casts feminism as abject, as the "repulsive and disgusting" monster that perpetually endangers the "empowered" postfeminist woman of today. This essay analyzes how Schumer develops a feminist critique of the knotty problems of postfeminist ideology. It is precisely this ideological double bind that the comedian Amy Schumer confronts. In a corresponding mode, postfeminist cultural objects derive their power in part by preempting feminist critique with irony. Postfeminist ideology "takes feminism into account" by framing liberal feminist principles as already achieved, thus preempting a more radical feminist politics that it constructs as both unpleasant and irrelevant.
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