Kneel! Hot Priests and Confessional Affect in Fleabag

The BBC-Amazon drama Fleabag (2016-19) received increased attention in its second series for the introduction of the so-called ‘hot priest.’ This article argues that Priest is just one of several additions to the second series of the show that confirms and extends creator and star Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s interest in and use of confession, which is broad and secular in the first series but specific and institutional in the second. Using Anna Poletti (2011, 32) to point to the normative “confessional affects” upheld by the show and, I argue, all ‘hot’ TV priests, I argue that Fleabag attaches old and fundamentally normative ideas through the supposedly transgressive mechanism of confession, privileging confession as a feminist form of truth production and testimony but fails to account for the ways in which confession reinforces troubling binaries of guilt and salvation, sick and healed, oppressed and liberated.