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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... reality television , with several focusing on the significance of the makeover as a recurrent trope of postfemi- nist media.22 With its particular capacity to articulate the ordinary , reality Tv provides a rich nexus of the desire for ...
... reality Tv , for example , dedicate themselves to staging rejuvenating trans- formations and the fantasy that aging can be managed away . The ambivalence about aging that strongly characterizes such fictions is also extended to femi ...
... the Straight Guy , British dramas such as Life Begins ( 2004 ) , British reality shows such as Wife Swap ( Channel 4 , 2002- ; Abc , 2004 ) , or " specials " such as Britain's Worst Husbands ( 14 Yvonne Tasker and Diane Negra.
... Reality Tv , and Holmes and ]ermyn , Understanding Reality Television . 23. For analyses of another category of postteminist Anglo - American transit text , the nanny series ( in which British child - raising experts train American ...
... reality television , and the celebrity personae of domestic sensualists such as Nigella Lawson . See Hollows's " Can I Go Home Yet ? " 31. Negra , " Girls Who Go Home . " 32. One sign of the political estrangement of American women is ...