My So-Called Felicity and the City: Coming of Age with and Through Feminist Media Studies

This essay uses autoethnography to investigate the intersection of the dual identities of feminist scholar and media consumer as one mode of investigating television’s role in women’s identity construction. I draw on my experiences with the popular television programs My So-Called Life, Felicity, and Sex and the City as examples of becoming intertwined with the main characters’ relational and purchasing choices on screen. I examine how women of the third wave, raised on television, have come to define our identities by the presence of a man, due in part to the limited, heteronormative media choices available to young women today. The essay closes with a discussion of how the author’s own coming of age as a feminist media scholar parallels the “coming of age” of the discipline of feminist media studies.