Interrogating Postfeminism: Gender and the Politics of Popular CultureDiane Negra, Yvonne Tasker Duke University Press, 2007 M11 2 - 360 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
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... social and economic emphasis on showplace domesticity, virtuoso parenting, and technologies mobilized in the name of family cohesion. It may very well be one of the ideological connectors between a contemporary sense of unfettered ...
... social change with respect to gender norms has been experienced, concretized even, through the passage of time. Indeed, one of postfeminism's key functions is to negotiate the failure of contemporary institutions and the prospect of social ...
... social and economic fields of contemporary Western cultures, and the highest-profile forms of postfeminist femininity are empowered to recharge a culture defined by exhaustion, uncertainty, and moral ambiguity. Thus, the postfeminist ...
... social problem spots. In concert with this, as many of the essays in the volume show, postfeminism evidences a distinct preoccupation with the temporal. Women's lives are regularly conceived of as time starved; women themselves are ...
... social behaviors and trends, including (among others) the explosive growth of the bridal industry, the emergence of “chick lit” as a staple form on best-seller lists,26 the heightened importance of the day spa and the nail salon within ...
Contents
Some Reflections on Postfeminist Girls and Postfeminisms Daughters | |
The Magic of Postfeminist Sisterhood | |
Adultery Boredom and the Working Girl in TwentyFirstCentury American Cinema | |
Feminisms Postfeminisms and Processes of Punk | |
Rethinking Feminism and Film Violence | |
8 Whats Your Flava? Race and Postfeminism in Media Culture | |
Governing the Self in What Not to Wear | |
African American Women in Postfeminist and PostCivilRights Popular Culture | |
Aging in Postfeminist Culture | |
Bibliography | |
Contributors | |
Index | |
Camp Postfeminism and the Fab Fives Makeovers of Masculinity | |