"Absolutely Fabulous"

Paper Summary:

The paper discusses the television show "Absolutely Fabulous" which presents us a world in which misrule is allowed to continue and in which the inverted order of power (i.e. one in which women are allowed to have a significant degree of power) is allowed to continue, to be normalized. The paper examines episodes of the show which set the entire issue of the inversion of power in terms of gender within the context of comedy. It also explores the two main female characters, Edina and Patsy, whose roles disrupt traditional engendered rules of power.

From the Paper:

"What makes the female characters in "Absolutely Fabulous" especially compelling is that they are not simple representations of the "unruly" in the way that a character like "Roseanne" was: These are not characters created simply to violate our ideas about the norms for gendered behaviour. Roseanne, an entirely grotesque character, exists as a anti-woman, an exemplar of all of those things that we consider to be the anti-thesis of femininity. Edina and Patsy, on the other hand, violate some traditional expectations that we have of the feminine, but play in more sophisticated and ambiguous ways with other ones, as Waddell (1999) suggests."

More papers on "Absolutely Fabulous":

• Essay # 6877 : "Absolutism in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries"
• Argumentative Essay # 89004 : "Soviet Absolutism "
• Essay # 70746 : "Mass Media"

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