Post-feminist Impasses in Popular Heroine Television

"Alison Horbury investigates the reprisal of the myth of Persephone - a mother-daughter plot of separation and initiation - in post-feminist television cultures where, she argues, it functions as a symptom expressing a complex around the question of sexual difference - what Lacan calls 'sexuation', where this question has been otherwise foreclosed. She takes four television heroines dramatizing this Persephone symptom - Ally McBeal, Sydney Bristow, Veronica Mars, and Meredith Grey - to show what is unconscious in this symptom, and identifies an impasse in feminist cultural criticisms as they respond to post-feminist cultures where ideas about feminine sexuation conflict with poststructuralist thought on the topic of 'woman'. She introduces psychoanalytic approaches to the novel to rethink the engagement of audiences with long-form serial narrative, and suggests that post-feminist discourses manifesting in Persephone's story offer us a cultural symptom that, when analysed, offers us new reflections on feminism today"--