Bad Feminism: On Queer-Feminist Relatability and the Production of Truth in Fleabag

"It is no longer a question of imitation, nor duplication, nor even parody. It is a question of substituting the signs of the real for the real, that is to say of an operation of deterring every real process via its operational double, a programmatic, metastable, perfectly descriptive machine that offers all the signs of the real and short-circuits all its vicissitudes."¹

—Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation

Phoebe Waller-Bridge's Fleabag (2 series, 2016–2019) follows a young woman through comically endless sexual, familial, and personal struggles after the separate deaths of her mother and her best friend. She speaks directly to the camera (or to the audience in the stage play version) and lets us in on countless jokes at the expense of herself and others. Her glances become an archive of sorts that catalogues sorrow, triumph, anger, and hope. As the first season progresses, the comedy transforms into dramedy, with key moments in the show providing little humor at all and instead a truly affecting despair. The play was originally performed and written in 2013 and became a TV show in 2016, yet it was only with the explosion of the second season onto the scene in 2019 that Fleabag became wildly popular, especially among in-the-know millennials who felt that the show said something very contemporary, very relatable, and very feminist. Critical reception was equally laudatory, with Waller-Bridge winning multiple Emmy Awards and countless other accolades.

When I watched Fleabag for the first time, I knew that it was a sensation, but I had done no further research into its development or the creator's intentions.

Figure 1.

Sian Clifford as Claire (l.) and Phoebe Waller-Bridge as Fleabag (r.) in Fleabag, written and created by Phoebe Waller-Bridge. Courtesy Amazon Prime Video.

I experienced the critic's or historian's worst fear: I loved the show for the same reasons everyone else did, and the reason that everyone else loved it was exactly because of its appeal to individual relatability—a community of people relating in the same way, but differently. Fleabag's hysterical comedy of manners and empathetic, frank discussions of (female, at times queer) sexuality converge to create a millennial Keeping Up Appearances (5 seasons, 1990–1995) of sorts, if Hyacinth Bouquet had been a quirky, hip gal who loves sex (and, who knows, she very well could be). Though it was not an art historical or even critical attachment per se, I thought I had found my personal entry point into the show, a connection that was unlike anyone else's, in the first season's centering of love-induced suicide. Though my suicide attempts were not the result of a friend's betrayal, I felt a communion with Fleabag's best friend, Boo, in the peripheral nature of our suicides to someone else's story. I too have tried to kill myself in order to make a man feel guilty, to try to make myself matter in someone else's story. Boo's death is a framing device, the raison d'être of the narrative, but we do not even find out about the depth and magnitude of her suffering until the last episode of the first season, from which point onward we only hear from her rarely. This is not a criticism by any means, or an indication that there is fault in giving one character a different measure of attention, which is, after all, what narrative has to do by nature of its difficult relationship to simultaneity. There is a compelling intimacy with which Waller-Bridge writes the relationship between Fleabag and Boo that indeed might be a source of envy for viewers who feel that such closeness does not exist in "real" life. It nurtures the archetypal need many of us have to emulate friendships onscreen.

At the same time, I felt I might have some sort of different and privileged relationship to Fleabag in my internal translation of its themes of sexual longing...