Interrogating Postfeminism: Gender and the Politics of Popular CultureDiane Negra, Yvonne Tasker Duke University Press, 2007 M11 2 - 360 pages This timely collection brings feminist critique to bear on contemporary postfeminist mass media culture, analyzing phenomena ranging from action films featuring violent heroines to the “girling” of aging women in productions such as the movie Something’s Gotta Give and the British television series 10 Years Younger. Broadly defined, “postfeminism” encompasses a set of assumptions that feminism has accomplished its goals and is now a thing of the past. It presumes that women are unsatisfied with their (taken for granted) legal and social equality and can find fulfillment only through practices of transformation and empowerment. Postfeminism is defined by class, age, and racial exclusions; it is youth-obsessed and white and middle-class by default. Anchored in consumption as a strategy and leisure as a site for the production of the self, postfeminist mass media assumes that the pleasures and lifestyles with which it is associated are somehow universally shared and, perhaps more significantly, universally accessible. Essays by feminist film, media, and literature scholars based in the United States and United Kingdom provide an array of perspectives on the social and political implications of postfeminism. Examining magazines, mainstream and independent cinema, popular music, and broadcast genres from primetime drama to reality television, contributors consider how postfeminism informs self-fashioning through makeovers and cosmetic surgery, the “metrosexual” male, the “black chick flick,” and more. Interrogating Postfeminism demonstrates not only the viability of, but also the necessity for, a powerful feminist critique of contemporary popular culture. Contributors. Sarah Banet-Weiser, Steven Cohan, Lisa Coulthard, Anna Feigenbaum, Suzanne Leonard, Angela McRobbie, Diane Negra, Sarah Projansky, Martin Roberts, Hannah E. Sanders, Kimberly Springer, Yvonne Tasker, Sadie Wearing |
From inside the book
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... argue that the transition to a postfeminist culture involves an evident erasure of feminist politics from the popular, even as aspects of feminism seem to be incorporated within that culture (and how feminism itself is understood within ...
... argued that aspects of postfeminism appeared in popular media as far back as the early 1980s, it was during the 1990s that the term became concretized, both as a discursive phenomenon and as a buzzword of U.S. and U.K. journalism. Since ...
... argue that postfeminism increasingly operates as a rationale for the brutalities of the emergent “New Economies” of ... arguing that barriers to equality are as much cultural as legislative we seek here to address the distinct issues ...
... argued in a discussion of the trend toward “masculinist” television programming, late 1990s and early 2000s popular culture frequently deployed ironic humor to allow “regressive, recidivist masculinity to emerge unscathed from ongoing ...
... argument is that postfeminism positively draws on and invokes feminism as that which can be taken into account, to ... arguing that for feminism to be “taken into account” it has to be understood as having already passed away. This is a ...
Contents
Some Reflections on Postfeminist Girls and Postfeminisms Daughters | |
The Magic of Postfeminist Sisterhood | |
Adultery Boredom and the Working Girl in TwentyFirstCentury American Cinema | |
Feminisms Postfeminisms and Processes of Punk | |
Rethinking Feminism and Film Violence | |
8 Whats Your Flava? Race and Postfeminism in Media Culture | |
Governing the Self in What Not to Wear | |
African American Women in Postfeminist and PostCivilRights Popular Culture | |
Aging in Postfeminist Culture | |
Bibliography | |
Contributors | |
Index | |
Camp Postfeminism and the Fab Fives Makeovers of Masculinity | |