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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The limits of this construction and the challenges it poses for feminist scholarship are questions we return to below . Postfeminism does not always offer a logically coherent account of gender and power , but through structures of ...
... crudely : emotional isolation for women ( a preoccupation that neatly sidesteps questions of women's economic instability ) ; and loss of power for men ( again , a formulation premised on the somewhat tenuous assumption that all men ...
This book attempts to ( re ) open those questions . ... for us the question of chronology , and of change , is pressing in a somewhat different manner since postfeminist culture speaks both to and against the very feminism within which ...
In fact , the question is more complex than this since , as Sarah Projansky makes clear , postfeminist discourse deploys a variety of positions with respect to feminism , at times celebratory and at times laying blame for contemporary ...
than willing to make use of the " angry black woman " as a type , the 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 schedules ...