In June 2018, a stand-up comedy show called Nanette dropped on Netflix. Written and performed by the Australian comedian Hannah Gadsby, it would go on to attract overwhelmingly positive reviews in international media, to win a plethora of high-profile awards, including two Emmys, and to launch Gadsby into a transnational orbit of celebrification and adulation. Part of the popular appeal and emotional power of Nanette stems from the ways that it voices Gadsby’s experiences of misogynistic and homophobic abuse, while also challenging some of the foundational assumptions about what a stand-up comedy should be.
The show begins with fairly standard comedy fare (including jokes about her Tasmanian hometown, her coming-out story, and her introvert’s dislike of parties). However, part-way through, we are presented with a powerful narrative twist: Gadsby reveals, on-stage, that she is quitting comedy. This need for departure is because she needs to ‘tell my truth’; as a queer woman who has experienced misogyny, homophobia, sexual abuse, and rape, she reveals that comedy is an inadequate and, moreover, a harmful cultural form for telling her story:
I built a career out of self-deprecating humour….And… I don’t want to do that anymore. Because…do you understand what self-deprecation means when it comes from somebody who already exists in the margins? It’s not humility. It’s humiliation. I put myself down in order to speak, in order to seek permission to speak. And I simply will not do that anymore. Not to myself or anybody who identifies with me.
This gesture of refusal – or what Sara Ahmed calls a ‘feminist snap’, ‘that moment when she does not take it any more’ – was central to the emotional force of the show. In the context of the #MeToo movement that – in 2018 – was at its zenith of media visibility, Nanette was heralded as emblematic of the flood of women’s anger and trauma that seemed to be pouring out into public culture. Rolling Stone proclaimed that Gadsby was riding ‘the crest of the MeToo wave’; meanwhile, the Guardian described the emotional response it had provoked in its audiences as a kind of ‘mass bloodletting’. Gadsby’s rapidly rising celebrity was generated in part, then, through Nanette’s affinities with a media culture newly awash with stories of women’s rage and trauma. A range of aqueous metaphors – floods, tsunamis, waves, and bloodletting – were employed, implying that this great unleashing of rage would lead organically and ineluctably to social change.
Nanette was widely seen as a magisterial, politically impeccable takedown of heterosexist norms in comedy; mainstream critical reviews of the show were overwhelmingly positive, and frequently rapturous. The reviews aggregator Rotten Tomatoes (2018) reported a 100% rating from its approved critics. Underpinning the rhapsodic praise for Nanette was a sense that it was unequivocally, positively contributing to the cause of gender justice, and many reviewers noted how it spoke to, affirmed and deepened their own sense of feminist rage. Glamour magazine’s review, for example, read: ‘Gadsby forces her audience to bear witness to her pain and her rage, and is a massive victory for funny, angry women—those who are pissed off, who want revenge, who want our abusers to feel the same way they made us feel.’ From a feminist perspective, it seemed incredibly encouraging that Netflix had enabled the popularisation of this media-motor of feminist anger. In contradistinction to earlier periods where women’s rage has been considered ugly and taboo, it now seemed that feminist anger could – somewhat incredibly – be commercially popular, and Nanette seemed both to epitomise and catalyse this shifted state of affective affairs.
However, there were other assessments of Nanette that were much more critical, of both its political potential and its political implications. Peter Moskowitz in The Outline, from a critical queer perspective, argued that Nanette belongs to the ‘wokeness industrial complex’; he wrote that it allows straight, white liberals to feel ‘comfortably woke’ without being ‘challenged in any meaningful way to act’, because its focus is on individual trauma and the need for mutual respect, rather than on structural forms of oppression. Gadsby’s radical claim that she was refusing to self-humiliate for her audience’s benefit was undermined, for him, because she was still ‘exploiting personal tragedy for an audience’. Moskowitz also argued that ‘comedy can be radical; it’s just that when it is, it’s not typically on Netflix’.
In an article entitled ‘Your trauma is your passport’, the writer Yasmin Nair argued that Nanette must be understood as a ‘globalized media event’—as part of Netflix’s algorithmically enabled, all-consuming orientation to profit (original comedy shows are exponentially cheaper to make than original dramas, and this is the context in which we need to understand Netflix’s commitment to the form). Nair also argued that Nanette is emblematic of a ‘vomitous culture of constant revelation’ in which women and queers are only permitted to enter into public discourse by first demonstrating evidence of their emotional wounds. For Nair, those unable or unwilling to disclose their stories of abuse are now effectively excluded by this ‘global aesthetic of trauma’. Ultimately, Nair argues, ‘Nanette plays a harmful role in further disseminating the idea that only trauma can authenticate women and queers’.
Lauren Berlant (2001) has critiqued the ways in which, under neoliberalism, contemporary subjectivity is achieved precisely through a ‘proximity to trauma’. Berlant notes how the practice of ‘speaking out’ so often operates according to individualised models of selfhood, rather than collective, radical forms of care. The individual ‘mourning self’ has come to displace collective political action – attachment to one’s traumatic story therefore forecloses the possibility of social transformation. In her germinal article ‘Wounded attachments’, Wendy Brown (1993) suggests that subjectivities that are constructed around ‘logics of pain’ are ultimately doomed to political failure, trapping the wounded identity in an ‘eternal repetition of its pain’.
Nanette, and the deeply divergent responses to it – as either incontestable evidence of pure feminist progress, or as an insidiously conservative and politically harmful capitalist media event – highlight enduring, and now intensifying, problems for feminism. That is: how to develop a public politics around the trauma and harms incurred by patriarchy without centring personal woundedness as the exclusive focus of feminism? How to ‘speak out’ about abuse and trauma using the communicative tools and media architectures that are available under capitalism, and how to ensure that trauma is not converted into media spectacle or commodity? The irreconcilability of these paradoxes for feminism seems inherent to the logics of late capitalism, and has earlier roots in the ambivalent implications of commercialised television talk shows for feminism – those which feminist television scholars debated in the 1990s and early 2000s (Helen Wood gives a useful overview of these).
These problems and paradoxes are only intensifying in a context of globalised media ecology that seems increasingly attuned to identity politics and social justice concerns – what Molly Fischer calls the ‘great awokening’ of pop culture – and yet which is also constitutive of the transnational capitalist media that is hollowing out democracy. What to make of the Netflixification of social justice?
Nancy Fraser identifies two different dimensions of justice that, she argues, feminism must integrate and combine – as a movement that seeks both cultural and materialist/economic transformation. The politics of recognition foregrounds the emotional grounds of suffering that arise from disrespect, and this is a strand of feminism that has split off from the feminist demand for material redistribution, and which has become far more dominant, having much more affinity with neoliberal logics. For Fraser, the politics of recognition is essential to emancipation—but it must always be linked to a broader left movement and rendered non-amenable to the possibility of recuperation by neoliberalism. In a similar vein, Catherine Rottenberg argues that a powerful form of neoliberal feminism has become ‘unmoored’ from its grounding in collective politics and social ideals such as justice, equality and liberation.
It seems to me that Nanette can help us think through the specific kinds of political potential that might be found in the ‘wokeness-industrial-complex’, as well as its limitations and active role in skewing the media terrain further and further away from the possibility of a shared commons, and further towards enclosure and private profit.
In my book Gender, Media and Voice, I argue that contemporary media is characterised by ‘communicative injustice’ – we are increasingly offered the thrilling promise of voice, but this seductive optimism works to conceal a profound lack of meaningful voice. Communicative justice, I argue, is not only about individuals ‘taking back control’ of their stories, but also about collective and democratic ownership and control of the means of communicative production.
The great flowering of female-centred narratives and the popularisation of progressive gender politics presents thorny questions for feminism. In the era of #MeToo – just as with the earlier, ambivalent gender politics of television talk shows – the voicing of individual stories and the sharing of painful trauma cannot simply be dismissed as narcissistic attachment to a personal wound, or as irredeemably undermined by its mediation, spectacularisation and commercialisation – as some critiques of Nanette and of other kinds of mediated ‘identity politics’ would have it.
It is widely acknowledged in therapeutic practice that in order to recover from trauma, the traumatised subject needs to develop a coherent narrative about what happened to them. Developing a clear narrative is essential to recovery, because it offers the restoration of meaning and identity that come from a traumatic shattering of one’s sense of self. Gadsby herself has discussed how, in order for trauma to be overcome, ‘you need the world to also acknowledge your narrative’ – and how Nanette and her more recent show Douglas have helped her with this (she never did quit comedy, in the end!).
But a feminist politics that does not go beyond the cultural politics of recognition – in order to also consider the political economy of the media architectures within which these discourses are produced and circulate, as well as the broader economic conditions within which gender injustice is flourishing – will remain politically weakened. The Netflixification of social justice, or the rise of the wokeness-industrial-complex, highlights the ways in which two different dimensions of justice have become increasingly detached from one another. The task for feminism is – as Nancy Fraser shows – to re-energise the materialist politics of redistribution, but without dismissing or displacing the politics of recognition.
Jilly Boyce Kay is a lecturer in Media and Communication at the University of Leicester. She is author of Gender, Media and Voice: Communicative Injustice and Public Speech (Palgrave 2020). She has also written about Hannah Gadsby and Nanette in the new book Gender and Australian Celebrity Culture edited by Anthea Taylor and Joanna McIntyre. She co-leads the Media and Gender research group, and edits the ‘Cultural Commons’ section of the European Journal of Cultural Studies.
