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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... Masculinity STEVEN COHAN 8. What's Your Flava ? Race and Postfeminism in Media Culture SARAH BANET - WEISER 176 201 9. The Fashion Police : Governing the Self in What Not to Wear 227 MARTIN ROBERTS 10. Divas , Evil Black Bitches , and ...
... masculinity and wives holding down the home front . " 33 In the new climate of fear and vulnerability that is ushering in a rollback of civil rights , both the state and exalted popular culture franchises offer fantasies of patriarchal ...
... masculinity . Indeed , the shift from women's studies to gender studies and the proliferation of academic ( and journalistic ) analyses of masculinity are a characteristic trend of the 1990s and zooos.37 In June 2004 , the cover of a ...
... masculinity is thus rendered comic - albeit temporarily and under certain circumstances — and straight women can be included in the joke , even as they are discussed in traditional sexist evaluative terms as " hot " by the queer guys or ...
... masculinities " lies largely outside of our purview . It is worth observing , however , that postfeminist representation typically cele- brates women's strength while lightly critiquing or gently ridiculing straight masculinity . It ...