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Start Date
25-6-2022 12:00 AM
End Date
25-6-2022 12:00 AM
Abstract
The 7th and final season of Veep follows fictional former US Vice-President and President Selina Meyer’s quest for re-election. Airing in 2019, it was the only season written and filmed during the Trump presidency. As the showrunners state, the aim of the show is to explore a political sensibility or Zeitgeist, rather than drawing explicit direct comparisons between Selina Meyer and Donald Trump. Selina Meyer stands in stark contrast to many of the other (post)feminist heroines of quality television, who often make their mark through being very competent at their jobs (e.g. Diane Lockhart in The Good Fight, Alicia Florrick in The Good Wife or Leslie Knope in Parks and Recreation). Their Hillary Clinton-like characters serve “to problematize the rhetoric of certainty structuring mainstream narratives of women’s success at work that are intrinsic to Clinton’s place in the popular imagination” (Sykes, 2021: 314). In many ways, Selina Meyer is the anti-Hillary Clinton. Meyer’s mismanagement of her campaign and workplace is fundamental to the construction of her as incompetent and is in stark contrast to the ‘girl boss’ image she tries to convey to prospective voters. Both in television and media and political life more broadly, women have been constructed as saviours of democracies in crisis. This paper argues that Veep does not offer the same “fantasy of female empowerment” (Orgad, 2017: 175) that other quality television shows offer. Veep’s gender and workplace politics can thus be understood as a critique of the narrative of the White woman saviour and thus demonstrates the limitations of White mainstream liberal feminism in the age of populism.
References:
Orgad, S. (2017) ‘The Cruel Optimism of The Good Wife: The Fantastic Working Mother on the Fantastical Treadmill’, Television & New Media 18 (2): 165-183.
Sykes, R. (2021) ‘Imagined Hillarys: Feminism, Fantasy, and Fictional Clintons in The Good Wife and The Good Fight’, Journal of American Studies 55 (2): 312-335.
“I took a dump on the glass ceiling”: Veep, (the Absence of) Competence and Populist Political Culture
The 7th and final season of Veep follows fictional former US Vice-President and President Selina Meyer’s quest for re-election. Airing in 2019, it was the only season written and filmed during the Trump presidency. As the showrunners state, the aim of the show is to explore a political sensibility or Zeitgeist, rather than drawing explicit direct comparisons between Selina Meyer and Donald Trump. Selina Meyer stands in stark contrast to many of the other (post)feminist heroines of quality television, who often make their mark through being very competent at their jobs (e.g. Diane Lockhart in The Good Fight, Alicia Florrick in The Good Wife or Leslie Knope in Parks and Recreation). Their Hillary Clinton-like characters serve “to problematize the rhetoric of certainty structuring mainstream narratives of women’s success at work that are intrinsic to Clinton’s place in the popular imagination” (Sykes, 2021: 314). In many ways, Selina Meyer is the anti-Hillary Clinton. Meyer’s mismanagement of her campaign and workplace is fundamental to the construction of her as incompetent and is in stark contrast to the ‘girl boss’ image she tries to convey to prospective voters. Both in television and media and political life more broadly, women have been constructed as saviours of democracies in crisis. This paper argues that Veep does not offer the same “fantasy of female empowerment” (Orgad, 2017: 175) that other quality television shows offer. Veep’s gender and workplace politics can thus be understood as a critique of the narrative of the White woman saviour and thus demonstrates the limitations of White mainstream liberal feminism in the age of populism.
References:
Orgad, S. (2017) ‘The Cruel Optimism of The Good Wife: The Fantastic Working Mother on the Fantastical Treadmill’, Television & New Media 18 (2): 165-183.
Sykes, R. (2021) ‘Imagined Hillarys: Feminism, Fantasy, and Fictional Clintons in The Good Wife and The Good Fight’, Journal of American Studies 55 (2): 312-335.
Bio
Nathalie Weidhase is a Lecturer in Media and Communication at the University of Surrey. Her research focuses on (post)feminism and femininity in popular culture, and she has published on women in popular music, celebrity feminism, and Brexit and the royal family. Her current work is concerned with the intersections of populism and gender in popular culture and media.