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
Results 1-5 of 45
... Studies at the University of East Anglia and the Department of Modern Culture and Media and the Cogut Center for the Humanities at Brown University , both of which generously provided material assistance during the completion of this ...
... studies , a discipline often characterized by an interest in reading popular culture against the grain , seeking out those traces of feminism that might be available to female viewers and readers . This work is rendered more complex ...
... studies to gender studies and the proliferation of academic ( and journalistic ) analyses of masculinity are a characteristic trend of the 1990s and zooos.37 In June 2004 , the cover of a supplement to the London Times asked , with ...
... studies ( Kate and Leopold [ 2001 ] , French Kiss [ 1994 ] , Some- one Like You [ 2001 ] ) . 40 Both the critical exclusion of texts directed specifically at African American women and the ways in which these films might work to nuance ...
... studies while Sadie Wearing opens up the complexities that questions of age and aging pose for feminist scholarship on popular media culture . Elsewhere Charlotte Brunsdon's analysis of the 8:00 to 9:00 pm slot and lifestyle programming ...