Adaptation, authorship and the critical conversations of Little Fires Everywhere

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.

KEYWORDS:

• Popular feminism
• authorship
• adaptation
• melodrama
• intersectionality
• postfeminism

Acknowledgments

Many thanks to Sarah and Stefania for their ongoing patience and their helpful feedback on the draft. I am grateful to the University of Southampton who awarded me research leave to write this article. And all my gratitude to Neil whose constant encouragement and proofreading helped me complete this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. ‘Women’s novels’ in this context does not exclusively refer to novels authored by women, though that is most often the case.

2. The Handmaid’s Tale might seem an outlier in this list, but as several critics have shown it is set in a post-Obama-era-like future dystopia brought on by a right-wing, religious political coup and the protagonist is clearly marked as a feminist hero meant to invoke the rise in popular feminism during the Trump era; see Hendershot (2018).

3. See Smyth’s article in this special edition for more on Witherspoon’s popular feminism.

4. Notably it is not only voiced through Mia but reinforced through Elena’s husband, who is more liberal and aware than her throughout the series, a common trope of postfeminist media texts. See: Modleski (1991) and Hamad (2013).

5. See also Orgad and Gill (2019).

6. See Cobb (forthcoming) 2025.

7. Other reviews that make this point include: Horton (2020) and Kang (2020).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Shelley Cobb

Shelley Cobb is Professor of Film and Feminist Media Studies at the University of Southampton. She is the principal investigator for the large AHRC-funded ‘Calling the Shots: Women and Contemporary Film Culture in the UK’. She is also the author of Adaptation, Authorship and Contemporary Women Filmmakers (Palgrave-Macmillan, November 2014), and co-editor of First Comes Love: Power Couples, Celebrity Kinship and Cultural Politics (September 2015). She publishes widely on gender, popular screen culture, authorship and EDI policy the film industry, including articles and chapters on black women filmmakers’ rom coms; gender, masculinity and celebrity; adaptation theory; chick flicks; and women and ageing in the British film industry.