Generating Intimacy: Rage, Female Friendship, and the Heteropatriarchal Household on TV after #MeToo

This article looks at three post-2016, post-#MeToo television shows that depict friendships between heterosexual mothers—friendships that are forged through rage and murder: Dead to Me (Netflix 2019–22), Good Girls (NBC 2018–21), and Big Little Lies (HBO 2017–19). We situate these shows as indicative of a wider context where rage is increasingly legible in popular culture and where it holds particular kinds of political promise. We argue that the legibility of rage emerges from the specific historical, social, and economic forces of the present conjuncture, including increasing precarity and the unequal distribution of assets. In our shows, rage is directed against what Angela McRobbie calls the “lie of the postfeminist contract” and what Lauren Berlant terms the “cruel optimism of the happy ever after,” representing the possibility of subverting the heteropatriarchal household as well as politicizing social reproduction. This possibility suffuses these shows with the vitality of feminist promise, heightening the visual pleasures of intimacy between the women. The potential for subversion drives the shows’ affect—what we call their “epistemerotics of rage”: a narrative arc whose forward drive derives from watching women coming into their knowledge about men’s violence. Yet rage also recuperates the household it seems to threaten, and we argue this has to do with the racializations of that household in the American imaginary. Our attention to rage reveals a historical shift in sensibility that, though potentially radical, also risks retrenching oppressions. Though they differ in their ability to grapple with this, these shows are useful case studies for how feminist inquiry responds to rage in the contemporary moment.