‘Restrained Glamour’: Joe Wright’s Anna Karenina, Postfeminism, and Transmedia Biopolitics

Abstract

Feminist scholars have bemoaned the post-political character of contemporary media presentations of femininity, which also carry contradictory messages as to what is socially expected from post-millennium women (Gill, 2007). As an adaptation of a nineteenth-century text, Joe Wright’s Anna Karenina (2012) uses the ‘exotic’ backdrop of Russian society to address the conundrums of contemporary femininity. With its intermedial focus on theatricality and performance, the film responds to the now clichéd postfeminist emphasis on performativity and addresses the manifold expectations women confronted in the nineteenth century and still encounter today. While Joe Wright’s film may be read as a reflection on the conflicted femininities of today, it envisions Karenina’s femininity as destructive to the family, and thus to the whole society. What it offers as a solution to the traps of postfeminist womanhood is an idealized version of fatherhood as the new ideal.