Bedeviling (feminist) protest.

In the She-Devil series, I was intrigued, puzzled and troubled by the intersections of political protest and misogyny, a radical critique of patriarchy, nature and femininity on the one hand; and masochism on the other. And these intersections seem to occur in more ways than one. Virtually every act performed by Ruth and Mary is open to these dualities and duplicities. I feel that the series does a good job of illustrating the ways in which patriarchy constantly casts women in competitive positions. Through a scathing representation of the character of Bobbo, it also demonstrates the ways in which discourses of 'sexual liberation' (and its 'values' of freedom, honesty, its acknowledgment of how desire and marriage did not always overlap) did not dent upon the institution of marriage in anyway, or did very little to challenge prevailing norms of feminine beauty. During the break, we had a conversation about how the appeal (sexual or otherwise) of Bobbo seems inexplicable and yet the women seem to be obsessed with him in one way or another. This points toward the representation of a kind of monolithic British, white masculinity within the series (despite the characters of Garcia and Father Ferguson), and Bobbo seems to stand for this 'type' rather than signifying an individual 'character'. This probably explains why there is no valid alternative to Bobbo - he is all men. It is into him that Father Ferguson will collapse, and so will the surgeons.
While the lead male character seems to be an exploration of a type, the two female characters seem to mirror each other in interesting ways. Both are shown to be agents of distinct kinds of cultural reproduction - Mary (sitting in her ivory tower) writes romance novels, while Ruth is the entrepreneurial hand behind Vista-Rose which 'frees' women from domesticity. However, both these enterprises are haunted by ideological ambivalences. Mary's representations of beauty, romance and love are both the products of an insulated life shaped by her own 'desirability', as well as themselves the commercial forces that sustain that world of ideals. Ruth's commercial agency on the other hand, in its actual dealings, is shown to 'free' women through experience and disillusionment by first placing them within exploitative situations. This movement of a kind of doubleness culminates in the killing off of an isolated Mary in a kind of a mythic storm, and her resurrection through Ruth's surgical mimesis of her. However, this completion of 'revenge' (and feminist protest) by becoming the Other remains deeply problematic. It seems to be a strategy of protest that articulates itself by an unflinching and perverse obedience to the patriarchal injunction of 'beauty' imposed upon women. And in doing this it seems to signal a shift of power to the woman after she has violently managed to inhabit the norm (in a way that is reminiscent of Madonna - and her 'power' to manipulate/monopolize the male gaze), and the husband is rendered a castrated spectator.