Working Nine to Nine: The New Women of Prime Time

Contemporary psychoanalytic gender theory has posited two psychic structures typical of the heterosexual family's gender arrangements: male defensive autonomy and female relational submissiveness. This essay looks at recent television shows that normalize defensive autonomy in women. These shows, and the young women they reach, are products of a “stalled” feminist revolution and an impoverished cultural imaginary that offers its subjects, male and female, only these two split positions.