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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... sexual empowerment . Assuming full economic freedom for women , postfeminist culture also ( even insistently ) enacts the possibility that women might choose to retreat from the public world of work . Postfeminist fictions frequently ...
... sexual servility in the name of em- powerment , Akass and McCabe , who are both academics , have produced an anthology that mixes fan - style appreciations of Sex and the City with feminist critique . Publications of this kind mark a ...
... sexual and domestic violence , re- main urgent sites of gender politics . Yet in arguing that barriers to equality are as much cultural as legislative we seek here to address the distinct issues posed by a postfeminist culture in which ...
... to questions of race , sexuality , class , and age . While these concerns are present in current thinking , this anthology insists on the potential of a diverse feminist politics ( one that addresses class and race Introduction 15.
... Sexuality in Popular Cinema ; Sharon Willis's High Contrast : Race and Gender in Contemporary Hollywood Films ; Jacinda Read's The New Avengers : Feminism , Femi- ninity , and the Rape - Revenge Cycle ; Bonnie J. Dow's Prime - Time ...