Interrogating Postfeminism: Gender and the Politics of Popular CultureThis 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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Finally , we thank Ken Wissoker ( the definition of a kind , thoughtful , and supportive editor ) and the staff at Duke University Press , as well as the press's readers , who furnished the best kind of reports , those that blend ...
3 The limits of the kind of gender equality enacted within contemporary popular media culture are profound : they are marked by the valorization of female achievement within traditionally male working environments and the celebration of ...
It is thus also a strategy by which other kinds of social difference are glossed over . The limits of this construction and the challenges it poses for feminist scholarship are questions we return to below . Postfeminism does not always ...
Publications of this kind mark a new space of convergence between journalism , popular fiction , and academic analysis . Despite the emergence of accessible accounts such as these , postfeminism nevertheless works to invalidate systemic ...
We believe that postfeminism has become so installed as an epistemological framework that in many ways our culture has stopped asking the kinds of questions that it appears to " settle . " This book attempts to ( re ) open those ...