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 |
From inside the book
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... questions we return to below . Postfeminism does not always offer a logically coherent account of gen- der and power , but through structures of forceful articulation and synergis- tic reiteration across media forms it has emerged as a ...
... questions of women's economic instability ) ; and loss of power for men ( again , a formulation premised on the somewhat tenu- ous assumption that all men previously occupied equally elevated positions of social and economic power ) ...
... questions that it appears to " settle . " This book attempts to ( re ) open those questions . Postfeminism and the ... question of chronology , and of change , is pressing in a somewhat dif- ferent manner since postfeminist culture ...
... question is more complex than this since , as Sarah Projansky makes clear , postfeminist discourse de- ploys a variety of positions with respect to feminism , at times celebratory and at times laying blame for contemporary anxieties at ...
... question of why she might be angry remains unspoken . And , as Paul Gilroy writes with respect to the domestic makeover so central to British television sched- ules , " By exploring the process of changing private space and refining the ...