[Core Post] Bathroom postfeminism

I really enjoyed Susan Fraiman’s talk. She was punny, wore theory lightly, and delivered what I thought was a compelling argument. I find myself particularly interested in the way in which she framed “realism” as a usable, even fresh concept despite its long and contested – almost jaded – history in literary scholarship. Banet-Weiser denotes this reliance on discourses of the real as an investment in ideas of “flava,” and indeed we could locate some of Fraiman’s concerns somewhere along the axes of flava as Banet-Weiser lays it out. For instance, while Fraiman gave TV’s emerging “bathroom realism” a positive valence, describing it as a site where “the feminine ordinary” is recuperated from its place of cultural irrelevance and re-made into a locus of power, there is a sense in which this is nothing but the same old ‘power’ of ‘conduct of conduct’ or politically non-neutral care of the self. This is to say that what Fraiman sees as cultural gains – the depiction of female bodily fluids, scenes of heightened character interiority, etc. – has an inevitable flip side. The bathroom, in the shows that Fraiman references, functions as a key site of postfeminist irony and an entitled lack of history. Just as postfeminism is marked by its sense of non-obligation to feminism’s historical struggles and a corresponding shift to a politics of the individual, these shows heighten their scrutiny of feminine interiorities (scenes of women gazing meaningfully at their reflections in bathroom mirrors) and present their characters’ struggles as crises of self. Characters succeed or fail to the extent that they are able to manage their emotions, to the extent that they can achieve ‘correct intimacy’ with the people in their lives. Rather than champion these as simply a mark of TV’s embrace of unruly femininities, though, we should also be wary of the excessive interiorization of female crises. By staging crises in the intimacy and enclosure of the bathroom, ‘bathroom realism’ inaugurates a free-floating, detached postfeminism that cites its close attention to the minutiae of female bodies and emotional grooming as a feminist gain, curating an image of femininity as urban, liberated, wearing feminism like a flava.