Postfeminist Spectres: What Is Haunting Television Heroines?

Abstract

Postfeminism is frequently analyzed and conceptualized as a time or sensibility haunted by the ghost of feminism that it wants to (purports to) relegate to the past. It is also a crucial concept in understanding the ways of portraying and constructing female characters prevalent in the American media. The article considers the hauntings (literal but predominantly fgurative) experienced by selected prominent women protagonists of postfeminist American mid-brow television series of the late 1990s, 2000s and early 2010s, from the ghostly child of Ally McBeal to haunting spaces and times of Sex and the City and Any Day Now, to the multiple familial hauntings of Grey’s Anatomy, to compare the spectres narratives assign to these female protagonists, their signifcations and ways of containing them or exorcizing them within the narrative.