Complex Female Characters: The Makings of Maeve

The smartest girl in school, Maeve (Emma Mackey) embodies a libertarian female agency that rejects objectification by others and explores a shift to subjectivity by a new Self. Yet her relationship with feminism is complicated. Because she is white, straight, educated and able-bodied, her self-determination skirts selfishness and resembles that of the second-wave feminism of the 1960s. In the first two seasons of Sex Education (2019-23), moreover, instead of overt allyship, she runs a sex counselling service at Moordale that is more concerned with making a profit than with care, which means that her sex positivity is exploitative and she is barely aligned with third-wave feminism either. Initially, she performs an identity that draws on the riot grrrl punk subculture of the early 1990s and upholds femininity as a bodily property, but she is awkwardly positioned in relation to fourth-wave feminism by the series’ lack of any social and political context for her rebelliousness, meaning that her potential intersectionality is blunted by self-absorption in her own disadvantaged upbringing. Duly excluded from the postfeminist queer utopia of Cavendish Sixth Form College in the fourth and final season, she seeks a sense of identity and belonging by postmodernist means, overcoming her marginalisation and fragmentation by following the example of authorship set by numerous women writers.