Adaptation, authorship and the critical conversations of Little Fires Everywhere
Adaptation, authorship and the critical conversations of Little Fires Everywhere
This article argues for an understanding of contemporary women’s television as a twenty-first century iteration of Lauren Berlant’s concept of the ‘intimate public’ of femininity, by analysing how the production, content, and reception of Little Fires Everywhere participate in the high visibility of popular feminism by invoking intersectionality and women’s empowerment. It does this first through the collective and collaborative female authorship of the television adaptation, which is discursively constructed as a critical conversation and an intersectional success; second, through the casting of Washington as a character who in the adapted novel is not Black, heightening the tensions of class, race, and motherhood and making Mia the voice of an intersectional critic of white feminism; and third, through the historical distance of its setting in the 1990s, which is often understood in the reception of the show as uncomfortably wearing its contemporary (i.e. popular feminist) politics.
316-336
Cobb, Shelley
5f0aaa8a-b217-4169-a5a8-168b6234c00d
28 February 2024
Cobb, Shelley
5f0aaa8a-b217-4169-a5a8-168b6234c00d
Cobb, Shelley
(2024)
Adaptation, authorship and the critical conversations of Little Fires Everywhere.
New Review of Film and Television Studies, 22 (1), .
(doi:10.1080/17400309.2023.2264711).
Abstract
This article argues for an understanding of contemporary women’s television as a twenty-first century iteration of Lauren Berlant’s concept of the ‘intimate public’ of femininity, by analysing how the production, content, and reception of Little Fires Everywhere participate in the high visibility of popular feminism by invoking intersectionality and women’s empowerment. It does this first through the collective and collaborative female authorship of the television adaptation, which is discursively constructed as a critical conversation and an intersectional success; second, through the casting of Washington as a character who in the adapted novel is not Black, heightening the tensions of class, race, and motherhood and making Mia the voice of an intersectional critic of white feminism; and third, through the historical distance of its setting in the 1990s, which is often understood in the reception of the show as uncomfortably wearing its contemporary (i.e. popular feminist) politics.
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Adaptation authorship and the critical conversations of Little Fires Everywhere
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Submitted date: 31 August 2023
Accepted/In Press date: 30 September 2023
Published date: 28 February 2024
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Local EPrints ID: 486647
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/486647
ISSN: 1740-0309
PURE UUID: 49899c6a-319d-4abf-9dbf-5e70fcafac22
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Date deposited: 30 Jan 2024 17:53
Last modified: 05 Apr 2025 01:42
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