Rejecting the Collective

Although viewers might want to see a story about a self-liberated woman as a "feminist" tale, by privileging Esty Shapiro's individualist behavior above all else, the Netflix series Unorthodox (2020) paradoxically closes a door on a central tenet of feminism: collective activism. Because collectives are figured almost unwaveringly as negative, the heroine, and the series, imagine the "struggle for individuality," as writer and creator Anna Winger called it, as a struggle against collective power, even that of the oppressed. Thus, unlike The Handmaid's Tale , the individualist-feminist series Unorthodox both relegates to the periphery the systemic oppression of women and fails to call for the collective action necessary for systemic change

Feminism · Individualism · Political science · Sociology · Gender Studies · Law · Political Economy and Marxism