Drawn to Light: Gendered Electricity and the Climate Unconscious in <i>Yellowjackets</i>

Compared to other forms of energy consumption, electricity has long been either a symbol of technological progress and modernity, most recently in the coming transition to greener energy futures; or, contrarily, rarely considered at all because of its seeming invisibility in the background. In a marked contrast with early electricity users, contemporary use is characterized through a “magical relationship of invisible ease, of forgetfulness, of electricity without ‘seeking’” (Bakke 134; see Lieberman)—at least as long as the grid does not fail. This article draws on representations of electricity in a female-centered television series, Yellowjackets (2021–), where the stark contrast between the presence and absence of electrical power unfolds along gendered dimensions. We base our argument on understandings of electrical infrastructures, electricity consumption, or energy transitions as particularly gendered, racialized, and classed. In other words, discourses surrounding electricity are also discourses surrounding power relations and societal injustice. For example, the privilege of not needing to see or think about energy infrastructures and ignoring our vulnerable dependence on them is intrinsic to the Global North, while many worldwide live in a situation of “energy poverty.”1 When turning toward electricity as a guiding metaphor, we seek to explore what Sage Gerson describes as “the unjust cultural and imperial power relations that surround energy systems, [… as well as] the already disastrous impacts climate change has had on the power grid” (“Reading California’s Power Grid”; see Gerson, “Siphoning and Sabotage”). By foregrounding the conditions under which electricity can be taken for granted and those under which its fragility must be confronted, we explore a recent television series as unconscious reflection on climate crisis and the potential loss of energy infrastructures. Forms of energy consumption are rarely at the forefront of fictional television—and we do not argue that they should be—hence, the television series we turn to, Yellowjackets, is not a show about electricity in a narrow sense. Rather, we argue that focusing on electricity as an analytical lens enriches our understanding of popular culture and the gendered and ecological meanings it creates during the present era of climate change. We demonstrate how Yellowjackets links the presence and absence of electricity to the gendered vulnerabilities of the climate crisis, revealing television’s capacity to imagine alternative forms of collective survival in the form of the serialized hive. A tale of survival on two timelines, the female-centered series Yellowjackets intertwines two narrative threads: in one thread, in 1996, a plane carrying New Jersey’s champion high school girls’ soccer team crashes in the remote Canadian Rockies, leaving a group of teenage girls to survive nineteen months in the wilderness. The second story arc takes place in 2021 and introduces four survivors of this group, with each season serially expanding the cast by adding more survivors to both timelines. Despite their trauma and the media frenzy surrounding the disaster, the adult women attempt to continue their lives while concealing the exact circumstances of their survival. The show takes inspiration from controversial disaster stories that involved cannibalism, such as the nineteenth-century Donner Party in the Sierra Nevada mountains or the 1972 Andes Flight disaster, whose survivors included teenage rugby players from Uruguay. In viewer conversations and interviews with showrunners and actors, these historical events arise frequently, along with intertextual references to novels, TV series, and movies with survival themes.2 Yellowjackets is a fascinating case study because its primarily female cast and its almost instant feminist and queer cult status allow us to address how questions of gender matter in the energy humanities. From an ecofeminist perspective, this connection between energy and gender reveals how systems of power entwine environmental exploitation with the marginalization of women, particularly in the context of domestic labor and energy consumption. After all, “women do not appear very often in histories of energy, but when they do, their relation to energy seems very different than men’s” (Moore and Sandwell 4). Electrification especially has historically been heralded as liberating for women, promising ever more technological innovations with a seeming empowering impact for those in domestic care or reproductive work (see Sandwell 33). In addition to electricity’s promises for gendered notions of labor, leisure, and living, electrification has helped script new gendered energy identities—from domestic femininity to more authoritarian notions of masculinity. To conceptualize how gender politics are embedded in energy politics, Cara Daggett coins the notion of “petro-masculinity” to describe how “burning fossil fuels can come to function as a knowingly violent experience, a reassertion of white masculine power on an unruly planet that is perceived to be increasingly in need of violent, authoritarian order” (34). Recent aggressive reassertions of authoritarianism through fossil fuels compensate patriarchy in part by linking it to a perceived crisis of gender roles. Questions of how other gender formations relate to capitalist petrocultures follow from Daggett’s conceptualizations. Can there be an analogous petro-femininity invested in maintaining the fossil-consuming status quo or are female-identified bodies resigned to the status of mere commodities within neoliberal petrocultures? With its depictions of female-centered consumption of electricity—and the diametrically opposed position of the female consumer off the grid, stranded in the Canadian forest without electricity, Yellowjackets offers a revealing entry point into the question of how gendered energy identities are produced, negotiated, and contested. To investigate gendered discourses of electricity in television, we begin from the methodological starting point of the “unconscious” indebted to Fredric Jameson’s The Political Unconscious (1981), which we conceptually expand through Yellowjackets’s serially developed metaphor of the hive. Reworking the Freudian notion of the individual, Jameson argues that cultural and literary texts contain a complex, hidden ideological-political unconscious to be recovered through his Marxist aesthetic framework. Jameson’s work has been of interest to the environmental humanities, as evident in a series of reformulations of the concept: Lawrence Buell’s “environmental unconscious,” Patricia Yaeger’s “energy unconscious,” Roman Bartosch’s “petroleum unconscious,” Harry Pitt Scott’s “energopolitical unconscious,” Mark Bould’s “Anthropocene unconscious,” and Julia Leyda’s “climate unconscious.” Despite their differences, these conceptions share an interest in foregrounding the energy- and environment-related absences of a text that are central to its production and reception. This concept of the unconscious as a reading strategy and a theoretical lens is particularly helpful to explore the impact of climate crisis in screen culture and popular culture. As Leyda writes, “a widespread awareness of climate change worms its way into every form of media, to the extent that contact with media means it cannot be avoided” (5). Hence, this reading method informed by the environmental and energy humanities makes legible the changed viewing position of television audiences during times of climate change. Building upon such conceptualizations, we argue that electricity lends itself to an analysis of the climate unconscious because of how often it is understood as an invisible entity or force, specifically in a gendered way. Among the “sometimes surprising and banal ways” (Leyda and Negra 79) that practices of energy consumption and energy infrastructures manifest in television series are subtle, taken-for-granted aspects. For example, as we argue elsewhere, television shows may depict futures without air conditioning to signify changed climates and energy consumption (see Leyda, “Post-air-conditioning”) or highlight mobility and controversial air travel practices through frequent location changes (see Sulimma, “The Plane”). The following sections explore how Yellowjackets engages with electricity as a narrative and symbolic force. Each examines a distinct aspect—temporal and spatial dynamics related to electricity uses or absences in the different timelines, sources of light as a key interest of film and television studies, and the hive metaphor in connection to serial media—to trace how the show’s energy aesthetics reflect broader cultural climate imaginaries. Further, we extend notions of the climate unconscious through Yellowjackets’s swarm metaphor as a layered figure for collectivity, energy transfer, and decentralized networks. 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