Top of the Lake (2013), Jane Campion's first television offering since Angel at my Table (1990), is a study of what it means to be female in a patriarchal world structured around male sexual violence against women. The richness of Campion's vision lends itself to a multiplicity of readings but, this chapter will argue, the central concern of the series is an exploration of the meaning of feminism(s) for each of the female characters struggling to articulate her subjectivity within patriarchy. Campion's ambiguous, ambivalent, often thorny relationship to feminism and the question of whether her works engage with feminist politics is well-documented; indeed, it has become almost trite to state this. But although Campion has previously stated that her ‘orientation isn't political or doesn't come out of modern politics’ (Cantwell 1999, 158), I argue that Top of the Lake represents a marked shift from this assertion, as does Campion's own engagement in the discourse around the show. This chapter seeks, then, to read Top of the Lake as representative of a discursive shift in Campion's oeuvre. As in all her work, the female experience is central to the meanings generated by and reflected in the series but this time, feminism itself is the organising framework within which the narrative functions.

This may seem a bold claim to make about a director who has periodically problematised the idea that telling female stories is or should be a feminist endeavour. Of After Hours (1985), the short she developed with the Australian Women's Film Unit, Campion states, ‘[it] had to be openly feminist since it spoke about the sexual abuse of women at work. I wasn't comfortable because I don't like films that say how one should or shouldn't behave’ (Ciment 1999a, 35). Yet as Dana Polan notes, for all Campion's disavowal of After Hours, and her seeming antagonism towards (its) feminist politics, the film encompasses the stylistic and thematic concerns of her earlier student films as well as prefiguring the narrative structures and motifs of her work to date (2001, 76–84). Indeed, this early negation of openly feminist politics is itself an engagement with those politics, leading to a body of work underpinned by representations of the power dynamics between men and women explored in early films such as After Hours.