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 |
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... traditionalist ideological rubrics. For instance as Tara McPherson has observed in the context of the Women's National Basketball Association (WNBA), the promotion of black female stars as role models depends on a Introduction.
... role models depends on a linkage between their physical prowess and their safe embodiment of acceptable images of blackness and femininity (images that, as McPherson shows, often highlight a contrast between the propriety of the “black ...
... roles, these films are rarely centered within a feminist scholarship that devotes considerable energy to high- profile white action heroines such as those in the Alien and Terminator cycles or Buffy the Vampire Slayer. 53. Freeman, The ...
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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 | |