Reese Witherspoon’s popular feminism
Adaptation and authorship in Big Little Lies
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 21783349 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Sarah Louise Smyth (0000-0003-2979-5030, University of Essex, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2024 |
| Volume | 22 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 296-315 |
| Publication date | 2024-01-02 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | New Review of Film and Television Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1740-0309 • E-ISSN: 1740-7923 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/17400309.2023.2263690 |
| OpenAlex | W4392305167 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 43 |
Through her programmes, including Big Little Lies (2017Lies ( -2019)), The Morning Show (2019-), and Little Fires Everywhere (2020), Reese Witherspoon has been central to the recent rise of women-centric television. Witherspoon's media company, Hello Sunshine, and her book club, Reese's Book Club, aim to 'shine a light' on women's work, vocalising an explicitly feminist approach to authorship and adaptation. Identifying Witherspoon's politics as a form of popular feminism, this article uses Big Little Lies (BLL) as a case study to investigate the various strategies Witherspoon and Hello Sunshine deploy to articulate this feminism. Identifying sisterhood as a key strategy, this article points to the limits of popular feminism by revealing who is excluded from this female collective: director Andrea Arnold, whose creative control was allegedly undermined when directing BLL's second season; and BLL's Black female characters, who are narratively excluded from this construction. This article, then, calls for feminist critics to be attentive to the selective and exclusionary nature of popular feminism in television as it obscures the material conditions of women working in television production roles and the sexist and racist structures governing women's representations
Aesthetics · Art · Art history · Feminism · Sociology · Gender Studies · Gender, Feminism, and Media · Media, Gender, and Advertising · Psychology · Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Literary Criticism
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Girlfriends and Postfeminist Sisterhood
Gendering the Recession
On Not Narrating the History of Feminism and Film
Postfeminism and Popular Feminism
The Rise of Neoliberal Feminism
The Promise of Happiness
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Television and the “Honest” Woman
Broadcasting Quality
Theorizing Television’s Writer–Producer
Home is where the hate is
Exposing the “lie”
Recycling melodrama
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Independent women
Sorority flow
Women’s indie television
Intersectionality in quality feminist television
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Women’s Lived Experience and the Male Gaze in Big Little Lies
Legitimating Television
Post‐feminism and popular culture
Empowered
Post-postfeminism
Postfeminism, popular feminism and neoliberal feminism? Sarah Banet-Weiser, Rosalind Gill and Catherine Rottenberg in conversation
Feminist Theory
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| Citations per year | 1 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2025 - 2025 (1) |
| Highly cited | No |