Interrogating Postfeminism: Gender and the Politics of Popular CultureYvonne Tasker, Diane Negra Duke University Press, 2007 M11 2 - 344 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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... feminism than the more familiar framing concept of " backlash " allows . Feminist activism has long met with strategies of resistance , negotiation , and con- tainment , processes that a model of backlash - with its implica- tion of ...
... feminist activism . 4 Postfeminist culture works in part to incorporate , assume , or naturalize aspects of feminism ; crucially , it also works to commodify feminism via the figure of woman as empowered consumer . Thus , postfeminist ...
... feminist language as inevitably shrill , bellicose , and parsimonious . Thus , while feminism is constituted as an unwelcome , im- plicitly censorious presence , it is precisely jeminist concerns that are silenced within postfeminist ...
... feminism and living as a feminist have changed over the last few decades . If postfeminist popular culture celebrates female agency and women's powers of consumption , it also anxiously raises the possible consequences of female ...
... feminist politics should be rejected ; rather it is by virtue of feminism's success that it is seen to have been superseded . In this context , we argue that the transition to a postfeminist culture involves an evident erasure of feminist ...