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Articles

Vol. 14 No. 1 (2020): Audiences and Paratexts

"Fleabag", "Jane the Virgin", and Feminist Media on Television’s Textual Edges

DOI
https://doi.org/10.14288/cinephile.v14i1.198204
Submitted
May 13, 2023
Published
2020-03-01

Abstract

Film and television accolades traditionally elicit praise for those found deserving, empathy for those who missed out, and scorn for the selection process no matter the results. The year 2020 was no exception. The announcement of the Golden Globe film nominees prompted headlines including “If there’s a theme to the 2020 Golden Globe nominations, it’s ‘all men, all the time’ (McNamara) and “The Golden Globes didn’t nominate any women for best director. Or screenplay. Or motion picture” (Rao). However, the smaller screen Globe nominations told a different story. Of the ten Best Television Series nominees, six featured women-centric stories—Big Little Lies (2017- ), The Crown (2016-), Killing Eve (2018- ), The Morning Show (2019-), The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel (2017-), and Fleabag (20162019). The eponymous titling of these series highlights the centrality of female characters to their respective stories; Eve, Mrs. Maisel, and Fleabag invoke their leads, while The Crown metonymically refers to Queen Elizabeth II. Building from that titular recognition, this paper argues that the potential for feminist mediamaking extends beyond the visual paradigm of spectacle and spectatorship into the (para) textual. Analyzing the award-winning Fleabag’s humorous and descriptive end credits alongside Jane the Virgin’s (2014-2019)1 manipulation of its title card reveals feminist possibilities within seemingly inconsequential industrially-codified spaces. In addition to a politics of representation, these two shows invite a feminist onomastic; how women name themselves and how they name others. Simultaneously, the ephemerality of these spaces demonstrates the continuing challenge of formulating feminist critique within a hegemonic industry.