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
... male working environments and the celebration of surgical and other disciplinary techniques that “enable” (i.e., require) women to maintain a youthful appearance and attitude in Introduction: Feminist Politics and Postfeminist Culture.
... celebration of female achievement (whether on the playing field, in the concert arena, or in the boardroom) within traditionalist ideological rubrics. For instance as Tara McPherson has observed in the context of the Women's National ...
... celebration of the young woman as a marker of postfeminist liberation and the continuing tendency to either ex- plicitly term or simply treat women of a variety of ages as girls. To some ex- tent, girlhood is imagined within ...
... celebration of pleasure or consumption, however transgressive we may feel it to be.50 In this volume, Lisa Coulthard's discussion of violence, action, and feminism through Tarantino's high-profile Kill Bill movies addresses these ...
... celebrating icons of postfeminist culture: the self as a project; kick-ass, working-out women as expressions of agency; or freedom as the freedom to shop or have cosmetic surgery. Our responsibility as feminist critics is to approach ...
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 | |