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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Yet , as Bill Readings and Bennet Schaber suggest with respect to postmodernism , the posting of feminism means that feminism itself remains in the frame . They write : " We all have heard the word postmodernism . It is in the news .
... that postfeminism means different things in these national and cultural contexts.36 One of the goals of the collection is to explore the intersections between British and American configurations of popular feminism as postfeminism .
... few publications have explored the subject in detail , and postfeminism's increasing ubiquity and political and cultural ambiguity mean that a good deal more concerted scholarly work in the field needs to be undertaken .
... empowerment rhetoric with traditionalist identity paradigms ( in cinema , The Princess Diaries , What a Girl Wants , and Mean Girls ; in television , Ally McBeal and Joan of Arcadia ; in music , Britney Spears and Avril Lavigne ) .