Their Bodies, Their Selves: Reflexivity and Embodiment in 2010s Women's Autobiographical Author-Performer TV Dramedies

During the 2010s, American television witnessed a growing attention to and presence of women, both in TV representation and in TV creation and production.¹ Women as writers and showrunners, from Shonda Rhimes to Jenji Kohan, and as lead stars and complex protagonists, such as Mindy Kaling and Maria Bamford, drew interest in the popular discourse around a socially and technologically changing televisual landscape. As part of that development, self-representation of women who are both the creators and the stars of their shows—such as Lena Dunham (creator and star of Girls, HBO, 2012–17), Tig Notaro (creator and star of One Mississippi, Amazon, 2015–17), Issa Rae (creator and star of Insecure, HBO, 2016–21), Pamela Adlon (creator and star of Better Things, FX, 2016–22), and Frankie Shaw (creator and star of Smilf, Showtime, 2017–19)—has been on the rise in the second decade of the twenty-first century.² In this article, I examine these five dramedies, in which women both exert authorial voices in telling their own stories and bring to bear performative embodiment in starring in these autobiographical texts.³ This textual multilayeredness, as I analyze in the following, reveals the ways in which authorship and performance operate in the realm of women's televisual representation.⁴

The women's “author-performer” dramedies analyzed in this article share attributes with similar autobiographical author-performer dramedies led by men, such as Louie (FX, 2010–15), Master of None (Netflix, 2015–17), Crashing (HBO, 2017–19), Ramy (Hulu, 2019–), and Dave (FX, 2020–), from the basic similarity of generic tone to less obvious but very explicit similarities in stylization, framing, and pacing.⁵ Still, as feminist criticism of cultural representation reveals, the gendering of women's voices and the eroticization of their bodies impact the ways that women create and are depicted. Thus it is important to consider the dominant features that are endemic to women's autobiographical author-performer dramedies, centering on gendered self-reflexivity and embodied, performative subjectivity, obvious variations among them notwithstanding.

My exploration of the tension between authorship and performance draws from Patricia Mellencamp's writing about I Love Lucy (CBS, 1951–57), not only a groundbreaking television program but also one that highlights the foundational conjunctions and disjunctions between women's authorship and performance in television (given the slippage between Lucy Ricardo, the sitcom character, and Lucille Ball, the head of Desilu Productions and the cocreator, with her husband, Desi Arnaz, of the program). In I Love Lucy, Lucy's/Lucille's creativity is both revealed and disavowed. As Mellencamp notes, whereas the narrative of the show repeatedly sets Lucy as a failed entertainer, the performative layer of the show celebrates her as a performer. According to Mellencamp,

Via her embodied stardom, Lucille Ball develops yet also critically disrupts the show's authorial voice, which catered to the conservative cultural zeitgeist of 1950s America, in which femininity is marked by aspiring toward domesticity and distancing from other pursuits. As the cocreator and studio head of the production of I Love Lucy, as well as its star performer, Ball both authored and disrupted the narrative's social order.

The complementary and contrapuntal ways in which authorship and embodied performance work together to fashion a complex text are further complicated when the authorial voice and performative body directly represent the same entity.⁷ This is prevalent in autobiographical literature, which consists of a “fundamental identification (or conflation) of two subjects—the speaking subject and the subject of the sentence.”⁸ Unlike in literary autobiography, however, the performing self of the author-performer in television autobiography is also conflated with the body of the authoring “speaking subject,” as the embodied self is not a past incarnation of the author but her present body, even if the author plays a slightly younger version of herself. In this way, the televisual autobiographer-performer looks at her past self autobiographically and at her present self performatively.

Because television representation has been historically mediated by hegemonic agents (mostly white, heterosexual, middle-class men), any subaltern identity has consequently been designed through the eyes of often privileged executives and driven largely by economic interests (likely more so than social interests). Not unlike televisual authorship, autobiography has been conventionally perceived as a masculine endeavor, with women's autobiographical writing dismissed as frivolous or trivial self-indulgence rather than perceived as an introspective exploration of the human psyche (as when men do it).⁹ Thus, though I do not wish to argue that a television series created by a woman is necessarily feminist, women's writing of the self (in any medium or artform) may in itself be perceived as an act of feminist politics in centering marginalized, trivialized women's stories and in offering, as Tess Cosslett, Celia Lury, and Penny Summerfield elaborate in their analysis of women's autobiography, “a feminist questioning of universalist assumptions.”¹⁰

Furthermore, as Nancy K. Miller notes in her exploration of the possibility of the construction of a “female critical subject” via women's authorship, the woman writer's body becomes part of her authorial destabilization of a hegemonic, modernist striving for a universal self.¹¹ This engenders the “emergence of a new social subject who would write from a socially and historically inscribed body which is not that of the unitary, narcissistic self.”¹² In this article, I focus on women's media authorship and women's mediatized, embodied performance as intertwined strategies in the articulation of a complex televisual subject.¹³

Authorship, Performance, and Self-Representation on Television

As the example of Lucille Ball demonstrates, women's televisual authorship is not a twenty-first century invention, even if women were not well represented or fully acknowledged in the early TV industry.¹⁴ From Irna Phillips and Agnes Nixon in early soap operas, to Gertrude Berg and then later Linda Bloodworth Thomason, Diane English, and Mara Brock Akil in sitcoms—to name just a few—women's authorial voices were sprinkled across perceivably feminine genres since the medium's naissance.¹⁵ Moreover, women designing an image of themselves can be seen from the aforementioned 1950s’ Ball's antic alter ego, Lucy, loosely based on herself, through 1980s’ Roseanne Barr's form of self in the character of Roseanne (Roseanne, ABC, 1988–97), which evolved from her autobiographical stand-up routine, to Ellen DeGeneres's 1990s rendering of her personal story (Ellen, ABC, 1994–98). Nevertheless, the twenty-first century has featured a growing trend of women's TV authorship and the use of the author-performer narrative form, mainly in dramedies (though not necessarily women's).¹⁶

Alongside this trend, the twenty-first century saw growing emphasis placed on self-representation, as independent creators of marginalized groups gained prominence over new and pervasive media platforms, from web series to personalized social media content, through their insistence on telling their own stories.¹⁷ If television's traditional reliance on women's stardom and performance (as in other forms of visual culture based on the display of women and their bodies as spectacle) has been designed by hegemonic gatekeepers, then women author-performers assume creative control to acknowledge representational traditions and boundaries and to chart out new modes of representation.¹⁸

Surely this trend was due in part to television executives’ growing understanding that hiring marginalized voices to tell their own stories marked networks as in tune with the times.¹⁹ In twenty-first-century American television, the growing supply of self-representation texts has been characterized by a surge of shows run by and starring women and people of color, including Girls, One Mississippi, Better Things, Insecure, and Smilf, as well as Master of None and Ramy.²⁰ Interestingly, most of these, including the programs at the heart of this analysis, are cable/streaming productions (Girls and Insecure with HBO, Better Things with FX, Smilf with Showtime, and One Mississippi with Amazon Prime Video), perceived as allowing for more artistic freedom resulting from fewer advertising constraints.²¹

Notably, the dramedies I analyze were cocreated or coproduced with men. Girls was created by Dunham, but famously executive-produced by Judd Apatow; One Mississippi, cocreated with Diablo Cody, was known and marketed as executive-produced by Louis C. K.; Better Things was cocreated with Louis C. K. and marketed as such; and Insecure was cocreated with Larry Wilmore.²² As Faye Woods demonstrates, television networks often pair women creators/showrunners with men as creators/executive producers (exemplified in the case of Girls’ executive producer Judd Apatow). This move, Woods stresses, works to capitalize on a progressive reputation achieved by granting visibility to marginalized voices, on the one hand, while on the other hand, inhibiting said progress by ensuring these voices are supervised by authoritative figures.²³ Therefore, I do not analyze the production work of showrunners but rather focus on the authorial position that is enabled via performance. Author-performer dramedies, I argue, function as a creative strategy through which women use their authorship and performance, voices and bodies, to articulate their artistic expressions despite compromised positions resulting from contradicting interests.

Another important facet of twenty-first-century American television's increase in autobiographical self-representation texts is a shift from sitcoms to dramedies. This applies to the author-performer television of women, for whom the sitcom was traditionally “the one television genre they had always called their own,” with author-performers from Lucille Ball to Roseanne Barr using the sitcom's generic comic hospitability to tell their stories.²⁴ Continuing their predecessors’ work, women author-performers in the 2010s used comedy's capacity for sneakily critical wit but also resisted the diversion, and potential consequent depoliticization, of comic pleasures by harnessing dramedy's integration of dramatic trajectories and comedic beats, thus disrupting comic resolution. This shift could also be the result of the progressive zeitgeist, under which the dramatic, unsettling aspects of women's narratives can be foregrounded without being softened by humor and narrative return to order.²⁵

The generic framework of the dramedy seems particularly appropriate for autobiographical self-representation as it allows for realism-induced immersion in a dramatic story alongside comic commentary. The punctuating of dramatic seriality by sitcom beats also works to fracture the narrative drive of the characters and their performance, as they break for laughs, ironically winking at the audience (to get in on a joke about another character or an awkward situation). This generic and tonal hybridity problematizes the tension between authorship and embodiment. Though both the dramatic continuous narrative and the comic beats are authored, the former is manifested through the dynamics of the protagonist's variable positioning vis-à-vis her interpersonal relationships and settings, whereas the latter is conveyed via the singular performance of the author-performer, essentially detaching her from the diegesis and relating her to the audience.²⁶ The genre of dramedy thus engenders a self that is both an agent in and an observer of the story, a subject position that is also produced by the autobiographical text.²⁷ The generic hybridity of the genre thus lends itself to (gendered) self-representation.

The Performative Authorship of Self-Reflexivity

That all protagonists of the dramedies examined here engage in some form of authorial or embodied artistic expression reinforces both the links and the tensions between authorship and performance. Girls’ protagonist Hannah (created and performed by Lena Dunham), is a memoirist; One Mississippi's Tig (created and performed by Tig Notaro) is a radio host who discusses her own life on her radio show; Better Things’ Sam (created and performed by Pamela Adlon) and Smilf's Bridgette (created and performed by Frankie Shaw) are actors; and Insecure's Issa (created and performed by Issa Rae) writes and performs rap. All these women occupy a subjectivity that is reflective and reflexive of women's artistic creation and agency. These women thus not only author and perform their protagonists; they also perform their protagonists’ authorship over intradiegetic narratives, unveiling the construction of the authorial voice. This again is a shared trope with most of the men's dramedies: Dave's Dave is a rapper; Master of None's Dev is an actor; both Crashing's Pete and Louie's Louie are comedians. However, as I go on to demonstrate, and as many have done before me, both authorship and performance are gendered positionalities, and their representations warrant a gender-focused examination.

The link between authorship and performance, voice and body, authority and embodiment—the former considered traditionally “masculine” and the latter considered traditionally “feminine”—surfaces an interesting tension on occasions in which the same woman occupies authorship and authority as well as performance and embodiment.²⁸ Such is the case of the five dramedies explored in this article. Though this analysis might appear to some as an essentialist endeavor that presupposes gender binarism and assumes a shared quality in all women creators, I argue, to the contrary, that the historical, institutional, and textual specificity of media authorship invites such an analysis. In this, I follow Michel Foucault's perception of authorship as a discursive function and thus examine the cultural construction of women's televisual authorship as influenced by gender, among other facets of social identity.²⁹ Furthermore, because my examination of women's televisual authorship is intertwined with embodied performance, it is associated with exposing the performativity of femininity, as that both furthers and fractures notions of authorship.

Linda Huf observes that women's writing about women's artistic creation is marked by the tension between personal identity and social obligation, “between her role as a woman, demanding selfless devotion to others, and her aspirations as an artist, requiring exclusive commitment to work.”³⁰ This gendered tension is added, Huf notes, to the tension observed by Maurice Beebe in men's writing about men's artistic creation (Künstlerroman) between personal lust and artistic aspiration.³¹ The mere aspiration to express oneself artistically is typically seen as too selfish for women, for they are expected to exhibit selflessness and nurturance, and indeed, as Gilmore notes, the “‘self’ that women represent . . . has sought identity in relationships rather than in autonomy.”³² Yet by both authoring and performing a figure of an author (Hannah), performer (Bridgette and Sam), or author-performer (Issa and Tig), the extradiegetic author-performers of these television programs are able to satisfy both social expectations and personal aspirations: the diegetic creator in their image may be selfish, but the story itself—that is, the narrative of each dramedy—follows protagonists and their families, friends, and communities, thus bestowing the extradiegetic author-performer an air of feminine selflessness. It is through the performance of her authored, televised alter ego that the woman author-performer affords a sense of the aspired selfishness of an artist while maintaining extradiegetic selflessness in writing about ensembles.³³

Thus Girls narrates the experiences of four twenty-something New York friends, following their romantic, social, and professional vicissitudes. Despite the ensemble-based premise of the show, the character of the aspiring writer Hannah, played by and based on the persona of author-performer Lena Dunham, occupies the majority of narrative time and focalization as a main protagonist and is often perceived as self-centered by those around her. In Girls's fourth season, Hannah writes a story about allowing a man to punch her in the chest during a sexual encounter. Jessica Ford addresses the reflexivity of the season 4 intradiegetic story as a way for the show to incorporate extradiegetic criticisms of the series’ authorial voice. As Hannah reads her story at the famed Iowa Writers’ Workshop MFA Program (season 4, episode 2, “Triggering”), which she enters at the beginning of the fourth season, her classmates critique the story via comments that are often aimed extradiegetically at the series itself. These comments focus on the representation of body and sex, specifically directed at author-performer Dunham's body (presented on the screen) and voice (her positioning as the authorial voice behind the series). “It's about a really privileged girl deciding that she's just gonna let someone abuse her,” one of her classmates says, and another adds, “I was struggling not to be offended because it seemed to really trivialize the very real abuse suffered by some.” A third asks, “How are we supposed to critique a work which is very clearly based directly from the author's personal experience?,” at which point the participants joke about how similar the story's protagonist is to Hannah. Finally, a fourth adds, “I definitely felt a lack of sympathy towards the male perspective and some stunted feminist idea. . . . For me it would be much more interesting if there was a complex examination about the real ways that people challenge each other sexually.”

Yet other views are offered as well. Two defenses issued in the sequence are presented as feminist and reflexive, with one coming from Hannah's own mouth as she notes that “history didn't really focus on the female perspective,” insinuating that she was interested in exploring the woman's experience in being eroticized instead of exploring the experience of the eroticizing gaze. Another is uttered by a classmate who insists that they cannot “squash her voice and what she's trying to say.” By incorporating extradiegetic criticism of Dunham and Girls via diegetic criticism of Hannah, the series positions itself as allowing for myriad voices, including critical ones, to take part in the text's meaning-making. At the same time, however, Girls positions its authorship as an utterance of a woman's voice insisting on a woman's self-interested perspective. Hannah, it is worth mentioning, does not accept her peers’ criticisms.

In Smilf, Bridgette's acting, though not occupying much plot time, similarly works self-reflexively to comment on women's creation and performance, specifically in terms of the sexualization of women's performing bodies. Smilf centers on the daily life of Bridgette, played by and drawing from the real-life experiences of author-performer Frankie Shaw, a Boston single mom trying to make it as an actor and struggling with financial difficulties, motherhood, and tense family relations. Smilf's season 1, episode 3 (“Half a Sheet Cake & a Blue-Raspberry Slushie”) opens with crosscutting between the protagonist and two other main women characters as each performs her femininity for the male gaze. Bridgette, acting for a public service announcement to raise awareness of war veterans’ PTSD, is asked to oversexualize her performance (wear fake breasts, lick her lips in the shower), which is especially ironic in a PTSD PSA. Nelson, the current girlfriend of Bridgette's ex, is shown whitening her teeth, spray tanning, and squeezing into a tight dress—all for an interview with a male athlete who addresses her femininity condescendingly and objectifies her. And Bridgette's friend Eliza is seen in lingerie on her bed, surrounded by an abundance of food that she is about to consume in front of a webcam for online adorers of her body. Here the performance of Bridgette as an actor reflects the performative aspect of embodying femininity, often accompanied by fetishization. Furthermore, though Bridgette performs as self-centered—both Eliza and Nelson are featured only as backdrops to Bridgette, assisting her diegetically and advancing her plot narratively while she takes very little interest in their existence—the authorial voice behind Smilf stresses the bond between the three women, implying that all women are subject to similar forces of eroticization and objectification, regardless of their performative attributes.

Better Things's protagonist is also an actor, similarly foregrounding performance-within-performance in her acting scenes. Better Things tells the story of Sam, played by and inspired by the life of author-performer Pamela Adlon, an LA actor and single mother raising her three daughters and trying to juggle motherhood, daughterhood, work life, and romantic pursuits. Viewers often see Sam at auditions, shoots, and recordings for commercials, movies, animated clips, and television pilots (fig. 2). The self-referential awareness of the medium is often present, though Sam, unlike many of the other women TV autobiographers, is rarely alone. Often seen caring for her children and her mother, socializing with friends, and interacting with casts, crews, or strangers on the street, Sam is far from isolated. In this case, both the series’ authorial voice and the protagonist's performative authorship of self-reflexivity construct narrative and identity, respectively, “in relationships rather than in autonomy.”³⁴ For Sam, her artistic pursuit is symbolic of the demands of the performance of femininity as selflessness, but the performer herself often seems to yearn for solitude.³⁵

Many of Sam's acting gigs show her restless and impatient, longing to be done with “shitty” directors and “asshole” producers. In one reflexive scene, Sam is teaching an acting class, telling her students, “Look, most of the work you're gonna be given as actors, it's gonna be shitty writing. . . . At best, 90 percent of the words that you're gonna read are gonna suck and have no real feeling behind it. Anyone can do a scene that's well-written. The skill you're gonna need, if you want to really work and get steady work, as steady as you can, anyway, is to make shitty writing mean something—to elevate the work.” Later, she adds, critiquing a performance by a couple of students:

Both monologues emphasize how theatrical performance stands for gender performance, demanding that Sam, in this case, dedicate herself to others. It is through this reflexive deconstruction of her craft that Sam clarifies that her work, in life as in play, is to “elevate the work,” knowing that most social scripts, including gender expectations, are “shitty writing” she must beautify. Moreover, these utterances underscore her sense of obligation to maintain a feminine performance of weakness.

While Hannah's reflexive creation is writing (a form of authorship) and Bridgette's and Sam's is acting (a form of performance), Tig's and Issa's reflexive creation is voicing (radio hosting and amateur rapping, respectively). Voicing particularly resonates with both authorship and performance, as the actors’ bodies (vocal inflection and tonality) convey their artistic expression. Insecure focuses on Issa, played by and grounded in the life experiences of author-performer Issa Rae, an LA woman in her thirties navigating her dating life, her fraught friendships, and her professional struggles. Insecure's use of the protagonist's voice is launched with the pilot, opening with her voice-over, reminiscent of the web series on which Insecure was based: Rae's Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl (YouTube, 2011–13). Julia Havas and Maria Sulimma note that

Indeed, the pilot voice-over addresses office politics surrounding Issa's experiences as the only woman of color in an all-white working environment, mapping her work life and social life. This in turn echoes Rae's position as the only woman of color in this article's study focus, given the troubling dearth, still, of BIPOC author-performers on television. Though more Black women showrunners appear behind the scenes and more Black women television stars appear on-screen in ways that challenge stereotypes, Rae is a rare example of a Black woman author-performer.³⁷ Authoring and embodying her on-screen experiences, she leans into her voice, both literally and figuratively, as the expression of extradiegetic self and artistry. The series’ pilot features Issa as she raps onstage at an open mic night. The heretofore awkward NGO rep, who is frustrated with her relationship but struggles to find an outlet for her frustrations, grows in confidence as a performer as she becomes popular with the crowd and increasingly takes pride in her stage presence and creativity. Though she sings playfully about her friend's “broken pussy,” the performative authorship of her body onstage works to reflect, through vocal artistry, her desire to express herself creatively. Playfulness notwithstanding, the use of body and voice to sing about sexual desire through the traditionally Black art form of rapping doubly reflects Issa's creative tribulations and aspirations as a woman and as an African American.

The use of voice in One Mississippi similarly works to centralize a self that exceeds the traditional autobiographical “‘self’ that women represent,” which “has frequently been white, heterosexual, and educated.”³⁸ As Insecure uses voice—which is reflective of both authorship and performance, both expression and embodiment—to construct non-white selfhood, One Mississippi uses voice to construct non-heterosexual selfhood. Played by and inspired by the life of author-performer Tig Notaro, One Mississippi follows Tig as she returns to her hometown of Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, after her mother's death, reconnecting with her brother and stepfather and trying to rekindle her romantic life. In the first season's third episode (“The Cat's Out”), Tig delivers a monologue during her radio program:

At this point, Tig takes off her shirt to reveal her unreconstructed post-mastectomy chest. She touches her real scars as she performs the character who talks about embodied performance. With this metatextual note on performativity, Tig's reflexivity, enforced by her metafictional role as radio storyteller, points to a body that resists aspiration toward a perfected normative feminine performance. Further, this addresses her identity as a gay teenager longing for self-determination vis-à-vis expectations of gender and sexual performance. Both Issa's and Tig's artistic expressions are signified by a direct address to viewers, with some shots facing the camera, essentially embodying authorship.

Of course, these instances have diegetic justifications—Issa is by herself rapping in front of the mirror (fig. 1), and Tig is alone at the studio (her producer is sitting in the next room, separated by a glass wall, though they sometimes interact through it), talking through a microphone to her radio listeners. Nevertheless, performatively, they both talk directly to their audiences. Despite the fact that both shows are invested in character investigation—Issa's friends and lovers, Tig's family and lovers—and the series’ authorial voices are, to use Huf's words, selflessly devoted to others, authorial performance is devoted to the self, to finding agency and expression. While writing the story of the self and acting the representation of the self function as metatextual artistic expressions of the autobiographical woman author-performer, the voicing of the self works to deepen the subjectivity of a woman via intersectional identities. What all these women share through gendered authorship and performance is that all are signified as women and consequently objectified as such, a positioning that runs through all these texts via self-reflexive representations.

The Authorial Performance of Women's Embodiment

Havas and Sulimma stress that 2010s dramedies centralize “female subjectivities, often in relation to body and sexuality politics.”³⁹ A key feature defining women's authoring and performing of the self in dramedies is the embodiment of a sexual body that is nonetheless not sexualized in a traditional manner. In true Mulveyan sense, these women display their bodies, but their figures do not only invert the gaze; they in a sense dismantle it. Looking at these shows’ pilots, one may observe that all five texts establish their tone by exposing the body as subject rather than object. Insecure's Issa is trying out sexual poses in front of her mirror, literally looking at herself while performing sexuality. Smilf's Bridgette is seen in the bathtub naked, but her body is not eroticized; she is bathing with her son, clutching her belly, noting, “You did this to me.” Girls's Hannah is similarly seen naked in the bathtub with her best friend, but she is eating a cupcake, and her friend is shaving her legs. Better Things's Sam is caught leaning forward on her bed, her legs on the floor with her pants drawn to her ankles, and she is looking up pornographic videos. The episode ends with her acting in a sex scene and asking the director to stop and moderate the scene's sexual nature, thereby exposing the performative aspect of her constructed eroticization. And One Mississippi's Tig addresses her mastectomized chest, embodying a female body that willingly presents itself without a central feature of sexualized femininity.

The reflexivity with which women's bodies are featured deconstructs their objectification by stressing their performativity. In insisting on these women's embodied subjectivities, these texts challenge the fetishization of women's bodies. The body is not simply there to be looked at but is rather there to feel itself, to present its abjections. Significantly, men's resistance to embodied performance of masculinity in their author-performer dramedies typically lies in rejecting activity and opting for passivity, inaction, or insecurity, usually vis-à-vis sexually insatiable women.⁴⁰

All five women's author-performer dramedies use a mode of women's subjectivity that reverts a sexualizing gaze by insisting on women's bodies as vehicles for agency rather than as instruments for the pleasure of others. Better Things offers resistant embodiment via addressing women's bodies in terms of menstruation, menopause, sweat, and excretions, with the sexuality of the protagonist gradually decentralized, until the fourth season only mentions her sexuality in terms of her desire, though not to fulfill it. Before that, Sam is rarely captured in sexual situations, and when she is, her body is not on display. In one of the more sexual moments of Sam's performance, she meets her ex-husband in a hotel room where they reenact an old sexual role-play routine, hoping that this reenactment will help rid her of sex dreams about him that have been disturbing her sleep (season 3, episode 6, “What Is Jeopardy?”). Sam puts on a pair of boots and lies on the bed by herself in her underpants, her upper body fully clothed; her ex then watches her from across the room as they both touch themselves. Even in sexual conduct, Sam's body is not on display, though she is surely objectified, both by her diegetic partner and by the camera. This distancing of the sexual scene—lacking desire in its somber and passionless tone—detaches objectification from pleasure and uses the performance of the body to look at objectification as alienating rather than arousing. In this way, Better Things offers a representation of the protagonist's body that is different from traditional fetishized representation. Further, the protagonist's romantic or sexual relationships are not followed through and lack any narrative denouement. In fact, most of the series is dedicated to the representation of the body in ways unrelated to sex. The body as abject, mothering, painful, aging—all outweigh the body as sexual, with the program thereby resisting how women's bodies are typically either eroticized or silenced.⁴¹

While Better Things uses the exhibition of the body to desexualize it, Girls often takes sexual moments to grotesque extremes—so extreme that, at times, they disrupt the realist thread of the narrative. In the tenth episode of the third season (“Show Me the Magic”), for example, Hannah plays a concupiscent married woman in an attempt to seduce her boyfriend and regain a passion she thinks has been lost from her relationship. Her role-playing is so excessive that it leads her to perform extravagant gestures that conspicuously exceed the desirous intents the character has. At one climactic point, she is screaming in the middle of the street, prompting a stranger to hit her boyfriend. Later in the episode, Hannah's sexual performance upsets her boyfriend so gravely that he interrupts their sexual encounter, to which an offended Hannah responds,

When he tells her that unlike the more organic fantasies he had concocted in the past, “coming to us in the moment,” her elaborate preorganized role-play resulted in her being “outside your body watching everything.” She insists, “So? What does it matter? If you're getting what you want, what do you care if I'm, like, in my body?” This reflexive scene exposes the double bind in which the representation of women's bodies is trapped. When fantasies originally driven by the male gaze are controlled by the woman that they objectify, the fact that she is taking control over her own sexuality suddenly exposes how controlled she and her body traditionally are. Throughout the series, Hannah exposes her body in ironic, comic, and mundane situations, seldom romanticized, almost always drawing attention to the unfamiliarity of the way the body is represented, in contrast to the traditional conventions that govern the representation of women's bodies.⁴²

Not a new notion, to be sure; exaggerating the fetishization of women's bodies defamiliarizes the subtle, romanticized objectification of their bodies.⁴³ The excessive, even violent sexualization of women points to how the more familiar, refined manners of objectification are not only as binding as the more excessive ones but perhaps even more so because they are harder to recognize as dehumanizing and therefore harder to resist. Though Dunham's body has been likely more exposed and discussed than the bodies of her counterparts, other women's autobiographical author-performer dramedies similarly expose the oversexualization of women's bodies. Like Girls, Smilf also takes sexual encounters to extremes, and they are often portrayed in ridiculous and comic ways. In the second season's fourth episode (“So Maybe I Look Feminine”), for example, Bridgette dreams that she meets Kevin Bacon at a polo match during a comically overacted scene that integrates references to romcoms (specifically through instances reminiscent of Pretty Woman and Love Actually). Later, the seventh episode (“Smile More If Lying Fails”) features Bridgette unenthusiastically going along with a sexual partner, subsequently explaining to him that the fact that she was into him sexually does not mean she wants to emulate pornographic images. Further, the second season's eighth episode (“Sex Makes It Less Formal”) opens with Bridgette in a sex toys store, shopping frantically in the colorful aisles and trying out various items in a deliberately comic tone, signifying sex as both commodity and play. And the ninth episode (“Single Mom Is Losing Faith”) is a self-contained western of inverted gender roles, portraying ironic representations of men's sexualization and women's power to point at the absurdity of sexism. These examples simultaneously, and reflexively, utilize and defy traditional representation of women's bodies. Both Hannah and Bridgette, for that matter, are portrayed through awkward and extreme representations. Their performative sexual subjectivity is trapped in their ironic authorial voice.

Insecure and Better Things also present the body, but not as revealingly as do Girls and Smilf. As I have written elsewhere, Insecure amalgamates various stylizations of sex scenes—from romantic to awkward to alienated—both representing stereotypes of objectified Black women and shattering them, so as to construct the author-performer protagonist's and her peers’ sexual subjectivity.⁴⁴ By using the mirror as a form of introspection, Issa talks with her own reflection as well as with imagined incarnations of others. In the first season's fourth episode (“Thirsty as Fuck”), she talks with imagined versions of Daniel, her ex-boyfriend who reemerged in her life, and her current boyfriend Lawrence, trying to ascertain her desires. “Mirror-Daniel,” her “what-if guy,” takes off his shirt and riffs about what could be if they were together. Before long, the mirror vision is replaced with Lawrence, manifesting Issa's guilt in imagining a life with someone else while she is in a committed relationship with him. In the next episode (“Shady as Fuck”), Issa sleeps with her ex, and it is only after looking at herself in the mirror that guilt washes over her, ending her indecision and driving her to go back to Lawrence. The leitmotif of the mirror works self-consciously to reflect both the look at Issa's body—her own look—and her desires.

Through the mirror, Issa talks to herself about herself, authoring the identity she is constructing through her performance of it.⁴⁵ The camera usually shifts angles, capturing Issa at a direct closeup as if from the mirror's point of view, crosscut with images of her and her reflection, shot over the shoulder at the reflection or at her from the side. These shifting viewpoints signify the multiple layers of the author-performer, choreographing a continuous oscillation between the viewpoint of the authorial gaze and the viewpoint of the authorial body, both representing Rae's subjectivity. Thematically, Issa's mirror raps often regard her relationships, as she is excited for new flirtations or frustrated about dramatic interactions. Moreover, her mirror soliloquies depict her performance at its most confident, contrasted with the series’ authoring of her as “insecure,” thereby using the authorship-performance amalgamation-yet-tension to present her image to appease the social expectation for timid femininity while performing said image as daring. In the second episode of the second season (“Hella Questions”), for example, Issa expresses anger at her ex for moving on, rapping, “My new name Alanis, ’cause there's shit you oughta know / I'll do whatever to win / Fuck going high, I'm going low”; and in the next episode (“Hella Open”), she motivates herself to go after a guy, uttering, “Put your doubts to the side, get his ass in the bed / Even if it's whack, you could still get some head / Go for it, go for it, go / Ho for it, ho for it, ho.”⁴⁶ The symbolic reflexivity of the mirror is used to advance the dramedy's entertaining sitcom-like direct address through Issa's confident rapping, offering comic relief from the dramatic storyline of Issa's heartbreak.

The comic interlude also amalgamates plot advancement (Issa deciding what to do next) with a freezing of “the flow of action in moments of erotic contemplation,” by which Issa is not an erotic object for someone else but is rather looking at herself, both examining and articulating her sexuality—authoring, via her performance in front of the mirror, her sexual agency.⁴⁷ Here authorial voice and performing body are tied together via reflexivity, allowing Issa (both author-performer and character) to explore the construction of identity and embodied subjectivity through both narrative and performance.

In Insecure, that identity is of course impacted by racism at least as much as by sexism. As a result of this intersection, as the raced body has been historically depicted as the subject of scandal or bearer of crisis, the sexualization of women's bodies generated a hypersexualization of Black women.⁴⁸ Resisting objectification of the Black woman's body therefore requires constructing agency that eschews fetishization and silencing as well as racial stereotyping, specifically in relation to the image of the oversexualized Jezebel.⁴⁹ In writing about Rae's proto-author-performer project (and Insecure's precursor) The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl, Rebecca Wanzo draws from Julia Kristeva's work on abjection to demonstrate how the in-betweenness of abject subjectivity allows Rae's character to be associated with racialized performance while resisting stereotyping. By self-consciously performing abjection as awkwardness, Wanzo stresses, Rae manages both to present the body and its sexuality and to reject (precisely by acknowledging) racist abjection.⁵⁰ While Insecure's authorship addresses racialized embodiment, particularly Black women's sexuality, in various and complex ways, Issa's enactment in front of the mirror authors a performative subjectivity that is daring and confident, despite occasional awkwardness, without being objectified in conventional, disempowering ways, given that the mirror sequences’ governing sexual gaze is her own, as we look at her looking at herself.⁵¹

As this suggests, the intersections of gender, race, class, sexuality, and ability are performed in women's autobiographical author-performer dramedies through both authorship and embodiment as they mutually form, de-form, and re-form one another. The body carries social identity and exposes its construction. This can be seen in One Mississippi as well. As mentioned, One Mississippi reveals the protagonist's body as a body in recovery, problematizing traditional embodiment and sexualization. This is highlighted in the first season's fifth episode (“How ’bout Now, How ’bout Right Now”), in which Tig is on a date with a woman who, when kissing her, starts to unbutton Tig's shirt, knowing that she has not reconstructed her breasts after her mastectomy. “I'm sorry,” Tig pauses, “I'm just not comfortable with my body yet,” to which her date replies, “I'm comfortable with it. . . . I love scars. . . . I just know they are so hot.” The sexualization of Tig's body without (often-fetishized) breasts works to emphasize the objectification of women's bodies and, at the same time, defamiliarize said objectification. As the scene continues, Tig mumbles, “I shudder to think what you might be like if I had tits in this moment,” and the scene cuts to Tig's envisioning of herself with voluptuous breasts and her date so disgusted that she detaches completely. The inversion of the usually eroticized body into an object of disgust reveals the arbitrariness of sexualization. Here too the tension between authorship and embodiment complicates the defamiliarization and challenging of the eroticization of women's bodies, as the exposure of Tig's body is authorized by Notaro's own authorship, yet her performance of that body exhibits discomfort. The compounding of both infuses the discontent of objectification with the authorial desire to resist objectification and the performative search for agency into the text.

By controlling both authorial and embodied power, the autobiographical author-performers of the 2010s use reflexive references to traditional representations of women's embodied performance in the visual arts, subsequently stretching these representations ad absurdum, defamiliarizing them, inverting them, or all of the above. These authors perform, through reflexive moments, bodies that are aware of their fetishization, thereby ceasing to be objects and rewriting their own subjectivity.

Conclusion: Self-Reflexive Embodied Authorship

In examining the friction points between authorship and performance, the still dominant conservative attitudes of Western culture may emerge alongside progressive sensibilities more evident in 2010s television, as fault lines in dynamics of gender and sexuality, race and region, family and nation are revealed across both authorship and performance. For example, when the narrative of Girls offers complex sexuality but the protagonist's performance exudes humor, the ironic gap between the two speaks to the aspiration toward sexual subjectivity that is so often hindered by fear of being exposed. Similarly, the fact that One Mississippi presents a very emotional setting against the backdrop of which protagonist Tig's distanced performance stands out works not only to examine a regional distinction (in which southern warmth is posed against Los Angeles alienation) but also to suggest that, though the narrative aspires toward relationships and family, the protagonist's body serves as a comment on the challenges of trusting and connecting. Further, Better Things's positioning of Sam as a sexual object, often referred to by others as someone they used to “jerk off to,” is negated by her performance as an undesirous mother who resents signifiers of feminine performativity. And Insecure's notable gap between the narrative premise hinging on a woman's insecurities (based on, as previously stated, creator Issa Rae's web series Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl, in which the protagonist proclaims herself as awkward) and the star's performance (which is, in effect, highly confident) sheds light on the assertive space women (and more so, women of color) must assume when their independent authorship is televised nationally.

By telling their personal stories in television dramedies, the five women author-performers maintain a dual function as both spectacles and observers. Embodiment becomes a form of authorship, enfolding in the body what might not be inscribed directly in the text; as Mark Zuss notes, “the body is a site of ideological inscription and codification, but is also the ground for and site of resistance.”⁵² In these cases, when the traditionally “masculine” authorial voice and the traditionally “feminine” performative body are both occupied by the same woman, the text exhibits awareness of not only the position of authorship and performance but also of the gendering of both—specifically the marginalization of women's authorship and the objectification of women's performance. Structurally, their texts enlist the hybridity of the dramedy form to introduce comic commentary alongside the dramatic flow of story—commentary incorporated flippantly through the genre's hybrid pacing and modes, as if both serious interpretation and slight dismissal are equally invited.

It is important to note that television is a collaborative medium, the products of which reflect the ethos of its many collaborators, from creators and writing staff to producers, actors, and crew members. As television is a popular, commercial medium, its industrial constraints often affect authorial voice.⁵³ More than that, the collaborative nature of television resists the patriarchal idealization of the auteur responsible for all aspects and messages of the finished artwork.⁵⁴ Still, despite the fact that television texts have many writers and directors, my focus here is on the creative visions of series creators, amplified by autobiographical ties to the authored narratives and embodied performances of protagonists. And even as others—from those who fill the many roles that are part of the labor of producing television programs to the viewers who interpret them—certainly contribute to the meaning of these programs, these creators matter in, indeed, their materiality in the industry, their performance and thus legibility of authorship, and in the possibilities thereby opened for women in television creation and representation.

The five protagonists in the dramedies I have analyzed, who are versions of the five author-performers, address their experiences of being women and artists at different stages in life. Hannah ages from her early twenties to late twenties throughout the series, Bridgette is in her late twenties, Issa is in her early thirties, Tig is in her forties, and Sam is in her late forties and early fifties. Though each has different experiences, both bodily and artistically, they all share two fundamental experiences—being perceived as feminine objects and having artistic aspirations, a pursuit that for women is often tied up with self-centeredness and self-indulgence, which are traditionally “unfeminine.”⁵⁵ By acknowledging the biases involved in perceiving women's bodies and voices, these women attempt to articulate a new language of self-representation, one that searches for its own forms of creativities and pleasures, albeit in various ways. By performing as versions of themselves, the women author-performers add an authorial layer through the performative authorship of the body and the reflexivity- and sexuality-related modes of meaning-making that accompany the complex history of the representation of women's bodies. Whether through direct authorship or through authorial performance, 2010s women's autobiographical author-performer dramedies represent women's creative work to insist on their stories and voices, and women's performative work to find new ways to perform embodied subjectivity. It remains to be seen what the 2020s may offer in terms of autobiographical author-performer texts and televisual ties to intersectional, queer, and reflexive identities.⁵⁶

I am grateful to Camera Obscura editors Patricia White, Bliss Cua Lim, and especially my shepherding editor, Lynne Joyrich, for their generous and careful readings and suggestions. Further, I wish to thank Lynn Spigel for her invaluable feedback on an early version of this article.

Notes