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Abstract

Although viewers might want to see a story about a self-liberated woman as a “feminist” tale, by privileging Esty Shapiro’s individualist behavior above all else, the Netflix series Unorthodox (2020) paradoxically closes a door on a central tenet of feminism: collective activism. Because collectives are figured almost unwaveringly as negative, the heroine, and the series, imagine the “struggle for individuality,” as writer and creator Anna Winger called it, as a struggle against collective power, even that of the oppressed. Thus, unlike The Handmaid’s Tale, the individualist feminist series Unorthodox both relegates to the periphery the systemic oppression of women and fails to call for the collective action necessary for systemic change.

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