MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

In the past two years, Netflix debuted a pair of sitcoms focusing on women struggling with a painful past and lingering emotional trauma. Tina Fey’s Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt depicts a young woman coming to terms with her years of underground imprisonment by a cult leader, while Maria Bamford’s Lady Dynamite portrays the creator’s own past and present battles with bipolar disorder. Both shows deserve recognition for addressing women’s mental health not merely in a dramedy, a la Nurse Jackie or The United States of Tara, but within the sitcom format. Such developments expand the venues where women’s perspectives can be expressed and understood. Even though these shows take a silly, often absurd approach to their material, they are both thoughtful in the ways they tie women’s pain to forms of patriarchal repression. The therapeutic recovery of Kimmy Schmidt and Maria Bamford rejects this repression and conceives alternatives to such cruel relationships. Far from addressing gender in a vacuum, these shows consider the ways that sexism is tied to other forms of oppression, including racism and homophobia. Although at times these programs inadvertently subordinate people of color in their redemption of white womanhood, I argue that they offer a vision of feminism that can be truly intersectional.