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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... issues of class , nationality , and ethnicity.29 In her work on fantasies of “ downshifting ” to idealized domesticity , Joanne Hollows indicates the importance of these issues in the British context.30 Writing on retreatism within ...
... issues , including sexual and domestic violence , re- main urgent sites of gender politics . Yet in arguing that barriers to equality are as much cultural as legislative we seek here to address the distinct issues posed by a ...
... a repeated trope of postfeminist culture. As this suggests, one of the central issues with which we are dealing here is the relationship between postfemi- nism ( as a popular idiom ) and third - 1 Yvonne Tasker and Diane Negra.
... issue here; those examples most often cited in critical and journalistic writing are selected as significant on the basis of factors such as widespread commercial appeal, top box-office performances, and so on. While this is both ...
... - round employment earned 76 per- cent of male income . On gender and aging , see the special issue of Feminist Economics 11 : 2 ( July 2005 ) . 29. For a discussion of the complex interdependencies between first Introduction 23.
Contents
1 | |
27 | |
Some Reflections on Postfeminist Girls and Postfeminisms Daughters | 40 |
The Magic of Postfeminist Sisterhood | 73 |
Adultery Boredom and the Working Girl in TwentyFirstCentury American Cinema | 100 |
Feminisms Postfeminisms and Processes of Punk | 132 |
Rethinking Feminism and Film Violence | 153 |
Camp Postfeminism and the Fab Fives Makeovers of Masculinity | 176 |
8 Whats Your Flava? Race and Postfeminism in Media Culture | 201 |
Governing the Self in What Not to Wear | 227 |
African American Women in Postfeminist and PostCivilRights Popular Culture | 249 |
Aging in Postfeminist Culture | 277 |
Bibliography | 311 |
Contributors | 331 |
Index | 335 |