265 Address correspondence to Rachel Dubrofsky, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Institute of Communication Research, 228 Gregory Hall, 810 S. Wright St., Urbana, IL 61801. E-mail: dubrofsky@uiuc.com The Communication Review, 5:265–284, 2002 Copyright © 2002 Taylor & Francis 1071-4421/02 $12.00 + .00 DOI: 10.1080/10714420290099453 Ally McBeal as Postfeminist Icon: The Aestheticizing and Fetishizing of the Independent Working Woman RACHEL DUBROFSKY University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Introduction The Fox television show Ally McBeal began its fifth and final season in the fall of 2001. The show is about a single woman, Ally McBeal (Calista Flockhart), in her early 30s who works for a seemingly unconventional law firm, “Cage and Fish.” The firm takes on unusual cases (a woman who wants to sue a tree!) and there are some unique aspects to the firm (men and women share the same bathroom—the “unisex”). The show and its characters are quirky: One of the partners in the firm, John Cage (Peter MacNicol), has been known to walk around with his prize- winning pet frog, Stefan, stuck to his face, and Ally sometimes sees unicorns in her office. Part of the attraction of the show lies in the fact that it imagistically illustrates what is going on in the characters’ minds. In previous seasons, for ex- ample, when a character lusted after another, a cartoonish tongue would reach out of the person’s mouth to make contact with the object of desire. The show focuses on Ally’s trials and tribulations as a lawyer and in trying to manage her personal life—much of which centers around trying to find “true love.” As a lawyer, Ally is very competent, but as a woman she is torn between her desire to be an indepen- dent career woman and her desire for a husband and children. The show also deals with political and moral issues through the cases the lawyers argue in court, and the intersection of these with the personal lives of the characters. Ally McBeal is an interesting television show because of its unique quali- ties—the idiosyncratic nature of its main character, the oddness of the cases the law firm takes on, the imagistic representation of inner desires and feelings, the bizarre characters and so forth—and it is particularly interesting in terms of the