Introduction: Anger, media and feminism: the gender politics of mediated rage

Over the last few years, we have been witnessing an extraordinary new visibility of women’s anger. Since the election of Trump in the US and the unprecedented disclosures of gendered abuse that characterised #MeToo, female anger seems to be registering in ways that it has seldom done in recent decades. As Rebecca Traister (2018, 2) puts it in her bestselling book Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger—itself a part of the remarkable boom in publishing on female fury—“The contemporary reemergence of women’s rage as a mass impulse comes after decades of feminist deep freeze.” Significantly, this new registering of rage is occurring not only in the sphere of politics and protest as they are normatively understood; women’s anger is increasingly legible within popular and commercial cultural forms. Rage, it seems, is becoming all the rage. In relation to television, the feminist writer Laura Bates (2018) has pointed to “a plethora of furious female on-screen heroines, from tough-talking survivor Jessica Jones to rebel handmaid Offred.” Elsewhere, I have suggested that we are witnessing a “celebritisation” of anger, in which globalised media culture appears to be newly accommodating of (certain kinds of) female fury in the wake of #MeToo, as part of popular culture’s broader turn to “wokeness” (Jilly Boyce Kay Forthcoming).