JAC 2000-4214 Journal of AESTHETICS & CULTURE Vol. 1, 2009 xxx PUBMED Abbreviation PUBMED Abbreviation Anu Koivunen

*Correspondence to: Anu Koivunen, Department of Cinema Studies, Stockholm University Stockholm Sweden

Department of Cinema Studies Stockholm University

Stockholm Sweden

Journal of AESTHETICS & CULTURE Confessions of a Free Woman Since its inception in late 1980s, the notion of postfeminism has been a highly contested term. While today circulating as an established description of “prime time feminism,” a highly visible media discourse of gender and sexuality that foregrounds individualism and consumerist tropes of choice and empowerment, its meanings for feminism as political agenda and cultural criticism nevertheless remain a point of disagreement. Is postfeminist discourse of gender and sexuality to be seen as a sign of second-wave feminism being partially incorporated into mainstream narratives? Or, rather, does it articulate a historical shift within feminist thought and cultural imaginary itself, or even a break-up with or a rejection of feminist historical legacy? In this article, these issues are investigated through a reading of a six-hour documentary Flying—Confessions of a Free Woman 1–6 (Jennifer Fox 2007, Easy Films, Denmark and Zohe Film Productions, USA) as a case of highbrow postfeminist television. Investigating how the documentary constructs an account of “the modern female life” in a global perspective, the article argues that Flying both articulates a sense of historicity and denies it. While never uttering the f-word, in its refiguring domestic ethnography as a mode of autobiographical self-interrogation, the documentary series evokes, albeit implicitly, a number of key tropes of 1960–1970s radical feminism: the notion of personal as political, the investment in consciousness-raising as a form of activism, the emphasis on shared experiences and emotions, and the idea of global sisterhood. As a consequence, it is argued, feminist critique is acknowledged and actualized only as an incitement to communication (sharing) and community-building in an affirmative sense. In this postfeminist story of feminism, hence, dissonant and critical voices are excluded as politics is reduced to an affect. documentary television feminism postfeminism intimacy gender confession The first episode of Flying—Confessions of a Free Woman opens, like all the other episodes, with Jennifer Fox's first-person voice-over narration and an image track featuring both shots of her as an adult sitting in a small airplane and a montage of home movie footage from her childhood. Both the image track and the voice-over introduction are repeated with mild alterations in the beginning of all episodes: I never wanted to be a girl—the way girls were supposed to be. I grew up practising takeoffs and landings with my father on Sunday mornings in a small two-seater plane. My dad was everything to me. He could do anything. He left the house early in the morning and got to explore the world. He built buildings, had important meetings with interesting men and travelled everywhere. I adored my father. I wanted to be a boy. They could do anything they wanted. My mother was stuck at home with us kids. And she kept having more, one baby after another until she had five. I decided I would never have children, and I said to my mother that I would never get married like her. Nobody would ever tell me what to do. I wanted to be like my father. I wanted to be free. This account of childhood family provides the viewers with an explanation of the film's title and, at the same time, it introduces the narrative dilemma of gender identity. It is also presented as a backdrop for Jennifer Fox's description of her contemporary self: So there I was, a free woman, 42 years old, living the life I thought I wanted in New York City. I travelled around the world alone, I made a career as a filmmaker and teacher. I slept with whom I chose and fell in love with those I wanted. I knew I didn't fit into common roles but I didn't care. It was more important to be free. And I thought life would go on forever like that. The opening sequence is followed by a video diary-like shot of Jennifer Fox looking at a positive pregnancy test result, with the voice-over narrator contending: “I was pregnant and I didn't know what to do.” What follows is an investigation of this dilemma in a series of discussions with her friends and her family. In this way, the documentary invites to be watched as domestic ethnography. As Michael Renov has argued, domestic ethnography is a “vehicle of self-examination” where authorial subject interrogates her contemporary self “through recourse to the familial other.”25 In Flying, both biological family and the chosen family of friends serve as “familial others” for Jennifer Fox's self-interrogation that is focused on issues of want and choice.26 The first few minutes of the film establish the narrative suspense for the whole series: what will Jennifer do? What does she want and why? What will happen? In other words, the key question is the one summarizing much of postfeminist media culture: “what a girl wants,” to quote the title of Diane Negra's recent monograph on the subject.16 The questions Jennifer discusses with her “familial others” concern her choices: Which one of her two lovers will she choose? How will she solve the dilemma of career and motherhood? As the story unfolds into a drama of miscarriages, disclosures of past abortions, and plans for in vitro fertilization or adoption, the self-interrogation bears another trademark of postfeminist culture, “a distinct preoccupation with the temporal.” As Yvonne Tasker and Diane Negra have argued, in postfeminist media narratives “women's lives are regularly conceived of as timestarved, women themselves are overworked, rushed, harassed, subject to their ‘biological clocks,’ etc. to such a degree that female adulthood is defined as a state of chronic temporal crisis.”14 ^, 16 In reviewing her life trajectory and re-evaluating her choices, Jennifer Fox meets Bridget Jones, Ally McBeal, and all other professional single women protagonists in mainstream films or television series. Yet, it is the very focus on self-interrogation, the emphasis on “me” and “my problems,” in Flying that most clearly frames it as a postfeminist media narrative.19 As the introductory voice-over contends, the authorial subject views herself as “a free woman”: we learn that she is a filmmaker and teacher, we see her traveling around the world, but her project of self-interrogation takes places without any discussion of conditions or resources, economic, social, or cultural. The childhood family and the early established gender identifications are the only context offered for analyzing “wants” and “choices.” In other words, the first-person narrator presents herself as a subject of choice as if in empty time, albeit gendered and sexualized, but occupied by an excavation into her childhood, and investing in consumerist discourses of self-actualization and self-transformation. As such, she enacts the ideology of individualism: the questions of want and choice are crucial for “an individualised project in which the self is both the subject and object.”27 ^, 28 Critics of postfeminist rhetoric of freedom—the title word recurring in Flying—have pointed out how the emphasis on individualism entails constant self-surveillance and an internalized discipline through the “language of personal choice.”19 ^, 23 Characterizing this development as a “fall of the public woman” and as “feminist tragedy,” Angela McRobbie has argued that it fundamentally entails loneliness for the postfeminist female subject.29 While Flying reiterates features of postfeminist media culture, indeed addressing its audiences as a real-life, fortysomething version of Sex and the City, it nevertheless repudiates many of the criticisms through its recourse to the key tropes of 1970s radical feminism: it reframes the self-interrogation as a politicization of the personal, it evokes the political practice of consciousness-raising through its aesthetics, and it extends the domestic ethnography and the focus on individual into a global discussion of sisterhood, thereby contesting the reading of postfeminism as loneliness. As a documentary project, Flying represents what Anne Jerslev has termed “TV of feelings” (følelses-tv),30 a discourse of intimacy permeating contemporary television featuring video diaries, eyewitness genres, personal documentaries, reality programs, game shows and docusoaps. Intimacy, here, entails confession, and in terms of its themes and narration, Flying is a paradigmatic case of confessional media. Jennifer Fox and her friends share secrets, traumatic memories, shameful experiences, conflicting emotions, and speak candidly about sexuality. In the spirit of television as a therapy machine,31 the participants seek purification, unburdening, and liberation through acts of confession, while at the same time acting as authorities for one another, requiring confessions, appreciating them, and intervening in one another's disclosures.32 Focusing, hence, in its themes and aesthetics on “the staging of social and aesthetic transparency,”30 Flying establishes an emotional contract with its audience: the narration promises and delivers authentic talk situations, confessions of intimate issues and real emotions for the viewers to engage in with compassion.33 Terming these talk situations as “sharing,” Jennifer Fox documents discussions with her friends “passing the camera” among discussants. This technique of filming encounters and discussions with friends by implying a “shared textual authority”25 —allowing her subjects to shoot one another as well—enhances a sense of true dialogue taking place on the screen. As Michael Renov has argued, domestic ethnography is a modality of autobiography34 that highlights “intersubjective reciprocity,” one in which “authorial subjectivity is explicitly in question or on display”.25 While the narration of Flying is dominated by the consistency and force of the first-person voice-over narration and by the determination with which the question of “women's choices today” is pursued in relation to the narrative dilemma concerning the choices of the authorial subject, the aesthetic strategy of “passing the camera” is not without importance. This aesthetic strategy was emphasized by the documentary website call for viewers to submit their own confessions and discussions to result in a ”7th episode” to the series.35 While the use of video diary aesthetics undermines the radical effect of other subjects filming the author and subjecting her to their gazes, in Flying the notion of “passing the camera” contributes to framing the confessional talk, often dismissed as merely therapeutical, as political action. In my reading, “passing the camera” gives an aesthetic form to the notion of talking as “sharing,” evoking a principle of communication used in consciousness-raising as a radical feminist strategy to undo hierarchies and to “give voice” to all participants. Indeed, Flying evokes the radical feminist practice of consciousness-raising in the very first episode by reframing Jennifer Fox's private dilemma as a general issue of gender and sexuality, mirrored in her friends and new acquaintances and their respective experiences and investigated in their discussions. As a practice, consciousness-raising is intimately linked with the notion of “personal as political.” In a famous defense of this form of action as political rather than mere personal therapy, Carol Hanisch argued in 1969: “one of the first things we discover in these groups is that personal problems are political problems.”36 This evoking of consciousness-raising is enhanced by the insistence of Flying on establishing a sense of globally shared experience of gender. The documentary unfolds as a celebration of confessional “girltalk,” a “global slumber party” 37: Jennifer Fox's personal dilemmas are reframed as a transnational discussion of gender identities, female–male relationships and heterosexuality. The voice-over narrator expresses both amazement and delight in detecting cross-cultural, cross-generational commonalities: My work life meant I had girlfriends all over the world. I brought my camera everywhere and passed it between us. (…) It was surprising to me how similar our lives were. My girlfriends came from different cultures, classes and backgrounds. Yet it seemed as if we were all sharing the same confusions. Evoking the ethos of Robin Morgan's famous 1984 anthology, Sisterhood is Global, 38 the liberal, middle-class Jewish filmmaker travels around the world and discusses questions of gender, sexuality, and power with women in India, Pakistan, South Africa, Cambodia, Britain, Germany, Russia, and USA. Each episode of the documentary features enacts this sense of global sisterhood as scenes of “girltalk” in Africa, Asia, North America, and Europe are sewn together by scenes of Jennifer Fox traveling on an airplane. This rhetoric of a global reach and ”women's world” permeated the promotional, educational and interactive website framing the release of the series.39 In Flying, the combination of aesthetics of authenticity (passing the camera, the variety of talk situations) with the nomadic first-person narrator attempts to establish a sense of “shared worldview and emotional knowledge,” creating thus an “intimate public sphere of femininity” to quote Lauren Berlant.40 In her analysis, intimate publics are founded on a particular affective economy, a sense of sharing as an assumption, which enables the participants to voice complaint and seek reassurance in “an experience of shared emotion.” It is this emphasis on community and sharing that both unites Flying with 1970s feminism—and marks a definitive distance. The intimate public Flying caters to is founded on affirmation of gender identity, not questioning it unlike in the radical political agendas. As characteristic for genres of self-inscription and confessional mode in general, Flying enacts as a narrative of becoming and reinventing the self. In its narrative trajectory, the documentary serves as a female coming-of-age story, a feminist Bildungsgeschichte. While the series starts with a definite identification with the father, over the course of six episodes the childhood family album is revised and the child's understanding of her parents relationship transformed. In the final episode, in one of the concluding scenes, Jennifer Fox is shown rediscovering her female genealogy in a literal manner: she accepts and acts her assigned feminine role in going shopping with her mother and her aunt, the two women she had previously rejected as identificatory possibilities. In the case of authorial subject, the coming-of-age entails both an understanding of her own issues as not merely personal problems and a sense of reconciliation with her childhood family. While coming to terms with her mother and her aunt as appropriate “familial others” in her project of self-interrogation and while seeking “intersubjective reciprocity”25 with women in different countries, Jennifer Fox remains importantly silent about feminism as a framework for identity politics. Curiously, then, the documentary returns to the 1960–1970s tropes of both radical and woman-centered, gynocentric feminism in its aesthetics, themes and address, but makes no acknowledgement of past feminist subjects. Even though alluding, in its title, to Erica Jong's bestseller novel Fear of Flying, 40 ^, 41, Jennifer Fox's Flying is markedly devoid of any explicit references to feminist culture or critique. It can be argued that in describing herself as a “free woman,” the first-person narrator takes feminism for granted, regarding it as a thing of the past. In this respect, Flying reiterates the rhetoric of Bridget Jones's Diary in granting feminism nothing but a “spectral, shadowy” existence, to quote Angela McRobbie. In Flying, however, feminism does not figure as “a psychic policewoman,” “disallowing girls from the pleasure of imagining the pleasures of pre-feminist womanhood.”23 Instead, both the authorial subject and her friends discuss their personal, political problems without any sense of historicity—of the issues of gender, sex, relationships, and reproduction being classic and contested topics within feminism. In Flying, the women subjects—the implied network of global sisterhood—are subjects of their narratives as daughters of their mothers, not the previous generation feminists. There is only a biological, not a political genealogy. While having concerns and envisioning solutions similar to feminists of previous decades, as Angela McRobbie phrases it, “never is the word spoken, they must live out their sexual and emotional lives without recourse to sexual politics. This is the condition of existence of these popular narratives, they must cast the possibility of a new feminism aside, they must muddle through without it.”23 Instead of passing as yet another simple case of “failed reproduction of feminist consciousness, a failure of generational reproduction, with younger women refusing to inherit their feminist legacies,”21 Flying both articulates a sense of historicity and denies it. On the one hand, the aesthetic of intimacy and the emotionally charged rhetoric of personal documentary draw on second-wave feminist critique of individualism and on the second-wave feminist reframing of intimacy, sexuality, and familial relations as fundamentally political questions. On the other hand, this critical legacy is merely present in Flying as a form and an affect: the narrative situation and the sense of “sharing.” As always, the telling of feminist stories24 and envisioning of feminist subjectivity is highly affective issue. And, as always, affects operate politically42 ^, 43. Mirroring the postfeminist condition through 1970s feminist tropes and articulating questions about late modern life politics in an language evocative of 1970s radical feminism, Flying constructs a story about feminism that does not leave room for disagreements, dissonances, or conflicts. In the spirit of “sharing,” the documentary is committed to dialogue and discussion as community-building, as a process of seeking and finding commonalities, enhancing the positive emotions of solidarity, respect, and trust. As a consequence of this insistence, Flying omits all acknowledgements of breaches in the imagined women's community. In this “intimate public,” there is no room for deconstruction or critique, both of them hence rejected as “unfamilial others,” unwelcome to the ongoing process of self-interrogation. 1. Flying – Confessions of a Free Woman 1–6. Directed by Jennifer Fox. Denmark and USA: Easy Films and Zohe Film Productions, 2007. 2. Jeannette Catsoulis, ‘Talking About Her Issues, Taking Them on the Road (Movie Review: Confessions of a Free Woman 2006),’ New York Times, July 4, 2007, http://movies.nytimes.com/2007/07/04/movies/04flyi.html (accessed December 22, 2009) 3. Liz Hoggard, ‘Sex and the cities. “Confessions of a Free Woman”,’ The Independent, August 13, 2008. http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/features/sex-and-the-cities-confessions-of-a-free-woman-892687.html (accessed December 22, 2009) 4. Dorte Hygum Sørensen, “En såkaldt fri kvinde”, [A so-called free woman] Politiken, August 12, 2007. See also Nanushka Yeaman, ‘Om kvinnors liv och hemligheter,’ [About women's lives and secrets] Dagens Nyheter October 28, 2007; Kirsikka Saari, ‘Sinkkuelämän sotkuisempi puoli,’ [The messier side of Sex and the City] Anna, July 31, 2007. For more Flying: Confessions of a Free Woman Press Kit. Online http://www.flyingconfessions.com/about_Press-kit.php (accessed December 22, 2009). 5. Svenska Akademien, ‘Nobel Prize in Literature for 2007’, press release, October 11, 2007, http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2007/press.html (accessed December 22, 2009) 6. Judith Stacey, ‘Sexism by a Subtler Name? Postindustrial Conditions and Post-Feminist Consciousness in the Silicon Valley’, Socialist Review 17, no. 6 (1987): 7–28. 7. Ann Brooks, Postfeminisms: Feminism, Cultural Theory and Cultural Forms (London: Routledge, 1997). 8. Ann Braithwaite, ‘The Personal, The Political, Third-wave and Post-feminisms’, Feminist Theory 3, no. 3 (2002): 335–44. 9. Amanda D. Lotz, ‘Postfeminist Television Criticism: Rehabilitating Critical Terms and Identifying Postfeminist Attributes’, Feminist Media Studies 1, no. 1 (2001): 105–21. 10. Rachel Moseley and Janice Read, ‘“Having it Ally”: Popular Television (Post-)feminism’, Feminist Media Studies 2, no. 2 (2002): 231–49. 11. Yvonne Tasker and Diane Negra, eds., ‘In Focus: Postfeminism and Contemporary Media Studies’, Cinema Journal 44, no. 2 (2005): 107–33. 12. Lisa McLaughlin and Cynthia Carter, ‘Post-Feminism? Editors’ Introduction’, Feminist Media Studies 6, no. 2 (2006): 125–7. 13. Rosalind Gill and Jane Arthurs, ‘New Femininities? Editors’ Introduction’, Feminist Media Studies 6, no. 4 (2006): 443–51. 14. Yvonne Tasker and Diane Negra, eds., Interrogating Postfeminism: Gender and the Politics of Popular Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007). 15. Bonnie J. Dow, Prime-time Feminism: Television, Media Culture and the Women's Movement Since 1970 (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996). 16. Diane Negra, What a Girl Wants? Fantasizing the Reclamation of Self in Postfeminism (London: Routledge, 2009), 47ff. 17. Nigella Bites, Channel 4, 2000–2001 18. Helen Fielding, Bridget Jones's Diary (London: Picador, 1996). 19. Rosalind Gill, ‘Postfeminist Media Culture. Elements of a Sensibility’, European Journal of Cultural Studies 10, no. 2 (2007): 147–66, at 153–55, 155–7. 20. Joanne Hollows, Feminism, Femininity, and Popular Culture (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000). 21. Lisa Adkins, ‘Passing on Feminism. From Consciousness to Reflexivity?’, European Journal of Women's Studies 11, no. 4 (2004): 427–44, at 430. 22. Rachel Moseley & Janice Read, Janice, “'Having it Ally’: popular television (post-)feminism”, Feminist Media Studies 2, no. 2 (2002): 231–49. 23. Angela McRobbie, ‘Postfeminism and Popular Culture’, Feminist Media Studies 4, no. 3 (2004), 255–64, at 262, 134–5. 24. Clare Hemmings ‘Telling Feminist Stories’, Feminist Theory 6, no. 2 (2005): 115–39. 25. Michael Renov, ‘Domestic Ethnography and the Construction of the “Other” Self’, in Collecting Visible Evidence, ed. Jane Gaines and Michael Renov (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 140–55, at 141–2, 146, 143. 26. Elspeth Probyn, ‘Perverts by Choice. Towards an Ethics of Choosing’, in Feminism Beside Itself, ed. Diane Elam and Robyn Wiegman (New York: Routledge, 1995), 261–81. 27. Anne M. Cronin ‘Consumerism and “compulsory individuality”. Women, will and potential’, in Transformations: Thinking Through Feminism, ed. Sara Ahmed, Jane Kilby, Celia Lury, Maureen McNeil, Maureen McNeil and Beverley Skeggs (London: Routledge, 2000), 273–87, at 273ff. 28. Beverley Skeggs, ‘Exchange, Value and Affect: Bourdieu and “the Self”’, in Bourdieu, Feminism and After, ed. Lisa Adkins and Beverley Skeggs (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), 75–97. 29. Angela McRobbie, ‘Top Girls? Young Women and The Post-feminist Sexual Contract’, Cultural Studies 21, nos. 4–5 (2007): 718–37, at 723, 734. 30. Anne Jerslev, Vi ses på TV. Medier og intimitet [We'll see on TV. Media and Intimacy] (Köpenhamn: Gyldendal, 2004), 17 and 19. 31. Mimi White, ‘Television Therapy, and the Social Subject; or The Televisual Therapy Machine’, in Reality Squared. Televisual Discourse on the Real, ed. James Friedman (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002), 313–22. 32. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality. trans. Robert Hurley, vol. 1 (New York: Pantheon, 1978), 61–2. 33. Minna Aslama and Mervi Pantti, ‘Talking Alone. Reality TV, Emotions and Authenticity’, European Journal of Cultural Studies, 9, no. 2 (2006): 167–84. 34. Michael Renov, ‘First-person Films: Some theses on self-inscription’, in Rethinking Documentary. New Perspectives, New Practices, ed. Thomas Austin and Wilma de Jong (Maidenhead: Open University Press, 2008), 44. 35. “The 7th episode”, http://www.flyingconfessions.com/pass_See.php (accessed December 22, 2009) 36. Carol Hanisch, ‘The Personal is Political’ (1969/1970), http://scholar.alexanderstreet.com/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=2259 (accessed October 9, 2006). 37. Jeannette Catsoulis, ‘Talking About Her Issues, Taking Them on the Road (Movie Review: Confessions of a Free Woman 2006),’ New York Times, July 4, 2007, http://movies.nytimes.com/2007/07/04/movies/04flyi.html (accessed December 22, 2009) 38. Robin Morgan, ed., Sisterhood Is Global: The International Women's Movement Anthology (New York: Feminist Press, 1984). 39. Flying: Confessions of a Free Woman. http://www.flyingconfessions.com/womens_world/ (accessed December 22, 2009). 40. Lauren Berlant, The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008). 41. Erica Jong, Fear of Flying (Austin, TX: Holt, Rinehart, & Winston, 1973) 42. Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004). 43. Anu Koivunen, ‘An Affective Turn? Reimagining the subject of feminist theory’, in Disturbing Differences: Working with Affect in Feminist Readings, ed. Marianne Liljeström and Susanna Paasonen (London: Routledge, 2010).