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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... texts combine a deep uncer- tainty about existing options for women with an idealized , essentialized femi- ninity that symbolically evades or transcends institutional and social prob- lem spots . In concert with this , as many of the ...
... texts . Postfeminist representational culture is , of course , acutely age conscious ; a variety of " chick " fictions from Bridget Jones's Diary ( 2001 ) and How Stella Got Her Groove Back ( 1998 ) to Sex and the City ( 1998-2004 ) and ...
... texts as Bridget Jones's Diary , Sex and the City , I Don't Know How She Does It , Bergdorf Blondes , and ( as Martin Roberts analyzes in this volume ) What Not to Wear . Indeed , many of the most prominent texts in female - centered ...
... texts within differ- ent critical and cultural contexts . We have been guided by what we regard as the necessity of looking beyond journalistic canons of postfeminist culture ( which are reliant on high - profile television series such ...
... texts directed specifically at African American women and the ways in which these films might work to nuance feminist accounts of contemporary popular culture are relevant here . To this extent , our aim is that this anthology will ...