Feminist Theory, Ahead of Print.
The Good Wife takes a seemingly feminist approach to the well-known media narrative of the disgraced politician and his stoic forgiving wife. The CBS series is widely understood as embodying neoliberal feminism akin to that of Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead. While The Good Wife predates the publication of Lean In, its protagonist Alicia Florrick (Julianna Margulies) is a proto-Sandberg who thrives in a cut-throat corporate environment thanks to her capacity to bring the skills she cultivated as a mother and political wife into her restarted law career. Alicia’s corporate success is enabled by her defence of her husband’s actions in the media, capacity to emotionally manipulate colleagues and clients, influence over jury members and witnesses and the suppression of her feelings for the benefit of her employers, clients and family. This article argues that The Good Wife makes apparent the centrality of emotional labour to neoliberal feminism, whereby traditionally feminised ‘soft’ skills like care work, emotion management, negotiation, relationship building and persuasion are put to work for capitalist success. In The Good Wife, ‘managing expression’ and ‘hand holding’ are key to Alicia’s corporate success, highlighting how under neoliberal feminism, emotion is both labour and liability.