Woke women of the 90s return: Toxic white feminism and the Murphy Brown and Roseanne reboots

Abstract

Two feminist icons of the 1990s returned to network television in 2018: Murphy Brown and Roseanne Conner. Neither rebooted character survived the reboot's first season. Despite their attempts to demonstrate that they were “woke,” the acting styles and strong personas of these two icons were, this paper argues, not appealing to a younger generation of television viewers and feminists and, simultaneously, too progressive for the older and more conventional audiences of the networks on which they aired. Moreover, both leading characters demonstrated the narrowmindedness associated with a toxic white feminism that overlooks issues of class and race.