An IASH Work-in-Progress seminar, delivered by Professor Ann Brooks (Visiting Research Fellow 2022)
“Big Little Lies” – Feminist or Postfeminist Fiction? The Subversion of the Love Discourse in Liane Moriarty’s Novel and in the Series
The seminar will focus on research undertaken for the edited collection The Routledge Companion to Romantic Love which I recently edited. I am currently building on the theoretical and conceptual debates for the forthcoming monograph The Sociology of Emotions: Feminist, Cultural and Sociological Perspectives (Bristol University Press, forthcoming).
The novel Big Little Lies by Australian novelist Liane Moriarty (2014) was the first work of fiction by an Australian to top The New York Times Top 10 Best Seller List. The subsequent HBO series, set in California, and fronted by some of Hollywood’s most powerful women actors, gave the novel virtual cult status. What it also did was to raise the profile of a number of feminist and postfeminist discourses about issues which were at the same time reflecting a reality in US society which exposed the dark underbelly of abuse in Hollywood and the film and media industries. Issues such as domestic abuse and violence were laid bare, and the series, although not the novel, exposed the fact that domestic abuse was perpetrated by women and men. At the same time US society was seeing the exposure of media moguls for their harassment and sexual abuse of women (see Brooks 2021; Farrow 2017) for which the series was seen as a metaphor. In addition the differences between the novel and the series brought issues of class and race in Australian and US society to the surface. Moriarty’s development of characters gave huge scope to the actors and director of the series to amplify interesting aspects of relationships within marriage and between women.
The seminar is divided into three sections. Section 1 considers the differences between the novel and the series and how significant feminist and postfeminist issues are raised and how the series takes these issues forward. Section 2 explores the theoretical and conceptual debates around postfeminism and its relationship to the recent growth of interest in feminism. This is of interest in relation to issues raised by Big Little Lies and the broader context in which feminist debates have currency. The intersection of postfeminism and neoliberalism has revitalized interest in concepts of class, race and sexuality. Specifically the relationship between neoliberal capitalism and feelings has been dubbed by Eva Illouz (2007) as ‘emotional capitalism’, who shows how the self is changed in the context of emotional capitalism. Section 3 considers postfeminist discourses in Big Little Lies and discusses feminist and postfeminist discourses in the novel and the series.
References
Brooks, A. (2021) (ed.).The Routledge Companion to Romantic Love. London/New York: Routledge.
Farrow, R. (2017). ‘From Aggressive Overtures to Sexual Assault: Harvey Weinstein’s Accusers tell their Stories’. The New Yorker, Oct 23, 2017.
Illouz, E. (2007). Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism. Cambridge: Polity.
Moriarty, L. (2014). Big Little Lies. Sydney: Pan/Macmillan.
Please click the link below to join the webinar:
https://ed-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/81322391722
Passcode: Vr8f3ew2