Rejecting the Collective: ‘Unorthodox’ and the Problem of Individualist Feminism

Although viewers might want to see a story about a self-liberated woman as a “feminist” tale, by privileging Esty’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 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.