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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... women and girls ; free- dom of choice with respect to work , domesticity , and parenting ; and physical and particularly sexual empowerment . Assuming full economic freedom for women , postfeminist culture also ( even insistently ) ...
... women's powers of consumption , it also anxiously raises the possible consequences of female independence , crudely : emotional isolation for women ( a preoccu- pation that neatly sidesteps questions of women's economic instability ) ...
... women . —are promulgated in a context in which women's actual social health is extremely problematic . If liberation is linked to consump- tion and aspiration , what of the pressing economic and social issues that have to do with the ...
... women may nonetheless feel disenfranchised by political discourse.32 In this context , we argue that postfeminism ... women's physical health , just as feminist issues , including sexual and domestic violence , re- main urgent sites of ...
... women of color and working - class women . In this volume , Sadie Wearing and Martin Roberts demonstrate the sharply drawn class parameters of the fashion makeovers en- acted in the British shows 10 Years Younger ( 2004-5 ) and What Not ...