Fleabag is Embracing Imperfect Feminism and the Female Gaze
Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s critically acclaimed television series, Fleabag, provides insight into the inner-workings of a flawed and self-destructive nihilistic feminist character, who the show is named after. The character Fleabag, and writer-director Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s outright refusal to appeal to the standard male-gaze, explores a narrative of imperfect, self-destructive feminism, that so many women resonate with. The series provides a fresh take on imperfect feminism, one that critics and theorists have labelled dissociative or nihilistic feminism. This fresh take on the feminine experience is one that seems to be mirrored by the show’s roaring cult following, and introduces a performance centered around the female gaze. The show has had a large impact on modern depictions of feminine imperfection and the wider reframing of modern media to be consumable for female audiences. The male-gaze, a term first coined by Laura Mulvey in her paramount essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, refers to the power struggle present on screen between the dominant viewer, being male audiences, and visual consumption of media. Mulvey thought that the spectral pleasure and over-sexualization of women in media was rooted in the inherent power that male audiences held, and still hold, over visual media. In recent years, there has been a boom in popularity in online discourses calling out the toxic masculinity associated with the male-gaze, and a subsequent introduction of the female-gaze. Although, as Sarah Banet-Weiser argues, feminism has grown in popularity, its future certainly remains insecure and has not rapidly become hegemonic, with these themes remaining present in film and television.
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