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My So-Called Felicity and the City: Coming of Age with and Through Feminist Media Studies

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Abstract

This essay uses autoethnography to investigate the intersection of the dual identities of feminist scholar and media consumer as one mode of investigating television’s role in women’s identity construction. I draw on my experiences with the popular television programs My So-Called Life, Felicity, and Sex and the City as examples of becoming intertwined with the main characters’ relational and purchasing choices on screen. I examine how women of the third wave, raised on television, have come to define our identities by the presence of a man, due in part to the limited, heteronormative media choices available to young women today. The essay closes with a discussion of how the author’s own coming of age as a feminist media scholar parallels the “coming of age” of the discipline of feminist media studies.

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Notes

  1. Names have been changed to protect identities.

  2. For example, from the latest crop of successful woman-centered prime-time programs, ABC’s Nashville and Fox’s The New Girl both rely on the heterosexual love triangle device.

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  1. Christopher Newport University, 1 Avenue of the Arts, Newport News, VA, 23606, USA

    Danielle M. Stern

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  1. Danielle M. Stern
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Correspondence to Danielle M. Stern.

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Stern, D.M. My So-Called Felicity and the City: Coming of Age with and Through Feminist Media Studies. Sexuality & Culture 17, 417–433 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12119-013-9188-z

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