Kelly has been adamant throughout her public career that she does not identify as a feminist. I am sharing a FLOW article one of my close friends Kathy, who is a PhD student at UT Austin, wrote about how Kelly was framing the #MeToo movement on her NBC daytime talk show.
Here is the piece's intro (which is just **chef's kiss**):
Television journalist Megyn Kelly is not a feminist. She has been emphatic about this point in several media interviews and dwells on it at length in her 2016 memoir Settle for More. In addition to characterizing feminism a “zero-sum game” that demands women’s rights at the expense of men, she calls the contemporary feminist movement “exclusionary and alienating.” Why dwell on “divisive issues” like abortion, she asks, when women could “do better simply to unite on female empowerment?” [1] This ethic of general female boosterism sans politics is key to Kelly’s worldview. It is also a critical component of Angela McRobbie’s theorization of post-feminism and its focus on “female achievement predicated not on feminism, but on ‘female individualism,’ on success which seems to be based on the invitation to young women by various governments that they might now consider themselves free to compete in education and in work as privileged subjects of the new meritocracy.” [2]Megyn Kelly Today, a talk show nested within NBC’s long-running morning news program Today and which debuted chaotically in 2017, is suffused with this post-feminist world view. Given particular industrial factors, it also relies on the true crime genre as a hook for its desired audience of young female viewers. Kelly’s dogged coverage of the #MeToo movement—loosely defined by the scope of relevant segments as the wave of sexual assault and misconduct allegations that swept through Hollywood in 2017—represents a unique confluence of post-feminism and true crime with potentially damaging ends. [3]
Loved this article, Jackie — thank you for sharing! While I am by no means an expert on intersectionality and identity politics, I couldn't help but notice an interesting connection between Kathy's articulation of Megyn Kelly's individualized notion of a post-feminist meritocracy, and Jennifer Esposito's account of post-racialism as it appears on other broadcast programs like "Ugly Betty". Again, it appears as though broadcast hegemony, both on Megyn Kelly Today and Ugly Betty, dictates the tone and formal mechanisms which allows itself to be distanced from any sort of self-criticism or examination. Kathy seems to get it right on the mark in the final note of her article, which notes how Kelly's post-feminist rhetoric "skirts real solutions in favor of a discourse that threatens to reproduce the sort of predatory criminal behavior the genre, and programs that rely upon it, requires as fodder". It would seem as though this would apply more broadly beyond just the genre of true-crime, and speak truth to the nature of hegemonic ideology on broadcast networks.
ReplyDeleteHell, even last night on The Bachelor seemed to imply that Hannah Ann and Madison's bold individualism was the best, if not the only way to push back against an overly prescriptive, heteronormative game-show.