The Personal and The Political: Feminism on The Good Wife

The online forum In Media Res holds weekly themed discussions between academics, independent scholars and other interested parties on a wide range of topics dealing with popular culture, film, television, and the media. This week, IMR's topic is CBS's television show The Good Wife and yours truly contributed a post about feminism and gender politics on the show ("Between the Political and the Personal: The Lawyer, Her Boss and Their Investigator"), which I conclude with the following questions:

From the beginning of the show, Alicia’s role as Peter Florrick’s wife has been a salable and essential part of her identity as a lawyer, whether she liked it or not. If Alicia is no longer the “good wife,” does that preclude her ability to be a good lawyer? At what point does the political become personal? And, on a deeper level, does the recent scheming and disquietude between Alicia, Kalinda and Diane necessarily evince a “bad” gender politics on the part of the show or can we chalk it all up to episodic television’s compulsive need to disrupt and/or destabilize relationships regardless of gender?

You can read my entire post, as well as access the excellent and insightful posts by other contributors, here.

And here's the Youtube video I made to accompany my post: