Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgements
- The Contributors
- Introduction: Still Crazy After All These Years? The ‘Special Relationship’ in Popular Culture
- Part One ‘[Not] Just a Girl, Standing in Front of a Boy . . . ’: Feminism, Women and Transatlantic Romance
- 1 Atlantic Liners, It Girls and Old Europe in Elinor Glyn’s Romantic Adventures
- 2 ‘World Turned Upside Down’: The Role of Revolutions in Maya Rodale’s Regency-set Romances
- 3 Bridget Jones’s Special Relationship: No Filth, Please, We’re Brexiteers
- 4 Sharon Horgan, Postfeminism and the Transatlantic Psycho-politics of ‘Woemantic’ Comedy
- Part Two Love Beyond Borders: The Global City, Cosmopolitanism and Transatlantic Space
- 5 ‘British People Are Awful’: Gentrification, Queerness and Race in the US–UK Romances of Looking and You’re the Worst
- 6 Catastrophe: Transatlantic Love in East London
- 7 On the Fragility of Love Across the Atlantic: Cosmopolitanism and Transatlantic Romance in Drake Doremus’s Like Crazy (2011)
- 8 The Mise-en-scène of Romance and Transatlantic Desire: Genre, Space and Place in Nancy Meyers’s The Parent Trap and Holiday
- Part Three Two Lovers Divided by a Common Language: ‘Britishness’, ‘Americanness’ and Identity
- 9 ‘American, a Slut and Out of Your League’: Working Title’s Equivocal Relationship with Americanness
- 10 ‘It’s the American Dream’: British Audiences and the Contemporary Hollywood Romcom
- 11 Business-like Lords and Gentlemanly Businessmen: The Romance Hero in Lisa Kleypas’s Wallflowers Series
- 12 Imagine: The Beatles, John Lennon and Love Across Borders
- Part Four Political Coupledom: Flirting with the Special Relationship
- 13 ‘Political Soulmates’: The ‘Special Relationship’ of Reagan and Thatcher and the Powerful Chemistry of Celebrity Coupledom
- 14 ‘I Will Be with You, Whatever’: Bush and Blair’s Baghdadi Bromance
- 15 Holding Hands as the Ship Sinks: Trump and May’s Special Relationship
- 16 ‘Prince Harry has gone over to the dark side’: Race, Royalty and US–UK Romance in Brexit Britain
- Index
4 - Sharon Horgan, Postfeminism and the Transatlantic Psycho-politics of ‘Woemantic’ Comedy
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2020
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgements
- The Contributors
- Introduction: Still Crazy After All These Years? The ‘Special Relationship’ in Popular Culture
- Part One ‘[Not] Just a Girl, Standing in Front of a Boy . . . ’: Feminism, Women and Transatlantic Romance
- 1 Atlantic Liners, It Girls and Old Europe in Elinor Glyn’s Romantic Adventures
- 2 ‘World Turned Upside Down’: The Role of Revolutions in Maya Rodale’s Regency-set Romances
- 3 Bridget Jones’s Special Relationship: No Filth, Please, We’re Brexiteers
- 4 Sharon Horgan, Postfeminism and the Transatlantic Psycho-politics of ‘Woemantic’ Comedy
- Part Two Love Beyond Borders: The Global City, Cosmopolitanism and Transatlantic Space
- 5 ‘British People Are Awful’: Gentrification, Queerness and Race in the US–UK Romances of Looking and You’re the Worst
- 6 Catastrophe: Transatlantic Love in East London
- 7 On the Fragility of Love Across the Atlantic: Cosmopolitanism and Transatlantic Romance in Drake Doremus’s Like Crazy (2011)
- 8 The Mise-en-scène of Romance and Transatlantic Desire: Genre, Space and Place in Nancy Meyers’s The Parent Trap and Holiday
- Part Three Two Lovers Divided by a Common Language: ‘Britishness’, ‘Americanness’ and Identity
- 9 ‘American, a Slut and Out of Your League’: Working Title’s Equivocal Relationship with Americanness
- 10 ‘It’s the American Dream’: British Audiences and the Contemporary Hollywood Romcom
- 11 Business-like Lords and Gentlemanly Businessmen: The Romance Hero in Lisa Kleypas’s Wallflowers Series
- 12 Imagine: The Beatles, John Lennon and Love Across Borders
- Part Four Political Coupledom: Flirting with the Special Relationship
- 13 ‘Political Soulmates’: The ‘Special Relationship’ of Reagan and Thatcher and the Powerful Chemistry of Celebrity Coupledom
- 14 ‘I Will Be with You, Whatever’: Bush and Blair’s Baghdadi Bromance
- 15 Holding Hands as the Ship Sinks: Trump and May’s Special Relationship
- 16 ‘Prince Harry has gone over to the dark side’: Race, Royalty and US–UK Romance in Brexit Britain
- Index
Summary
In her multiple roles as performer, writer, director, producer and showrunner, Sharon Horgan has become one of the most influential television comedy figures on both sides of the Atlantic in the 2010s. Her success in breaking into the notoriously difficult US context as an Irish artist with a track record of writing for British television is striking, not least because of her markedly unapologetic, ‘in-your-face’ style. She is often revered as a ‘queen of difficult women’ (Wiseman 2016), and her work in shows such as Pulling (2006–9), Catastrophe (2015–) and Divorce (2016–) depicts what critics refer to as the ‘brutal’ (Blake 2016), ‘bleak’ (Wollaston 2016) existence of ‘brittle’ (Gray 2016) women who regularly ‘f*** up’ (Horgan, in Armstrong 2016). Horgan's comedies tackle complex and uncomfortable aspects of contemporary heterosexual womanhood that seemingly resonate for some women on both sides of the Atlantic in ways that I will link to the popular discursive ‘postfeminist sensibility’ (Gill 2007) that is highly evident across US/UK cultural contexts. The shows grapple with the postfeminist emphasis on heterosexual ‘romance’ as a key arbiter of selfhood, offering relief through humour from the paradoxical pressures of postfeminism while navigating the imperatives of relatedness at the same time. Looking primarily at Catastrophe and Divorce, this chapter interrogates the idea of ‘romance’, and its tropes that are so familiar in both the US and UK (and beyond), as symptomatic of the complex entanglement of heterosexual womanhood with postfeminist imperatives, with the aim of exploring how romantic television comedy can unravel the psychological knots associated with the postfeminist experience.
When commenting on her work, Horgan has remarked that it amounts to a kind of personal therapy (Wiseman 2016). She draws on her own lived experience of relationships as well as that of trusted friends, suggesting that comedy works here as a form of therapeutic engagement not only for the writer, but also, perhaps, for audiences at home on both sides of the Atlantic. Despite the fact that Horgan usually co-writes her series, in press coverage of the work, she is usually singled out as lead author, and this chapter follows this logic, taking Horgan as its focus.
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- Love Across the AtlanticUS-UK Romance in Popular Culture, pp. 69 - 88Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2020