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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... figure of the “ bored woman worker ” in such films as The Good Girl ( 2002 ) . In the increasingly privatized context of the United States and the United Kingdom , access to education , health care , and 12 Yvonne Tasker and Diane Negra.
... Woman [ 2005 ] ) that adopt distinct strategies in compari- son to those retreatist rom - coms that have thus far attracted critical attention within feminist media studies ( Kate and Leopold [ 2001 ] , French Kiss [ 1994 ] , Some- one ...
... woman. In short, we wish to ask: is it possible to bring into being a postfeminist critical prac- tice that expands feminism as much as it critiques it? Accordingly, some of the essays in this volume point to the ways in which the ...
... Woman's Movement since 1970 ; Charlotte Brunsdon's The Feminist , the Housewife , and the Soap Opera ; and most recently Susan Douglas's and Meredith Michaels's The Mommy Myth : The Idealization of Motherhood and How It Has Undermined ...
... woman as a marker of postfeminist liberation and the continuing tendency to either ex- plicitly term or simply treat women of a variety of ages as girls. To some ex- tent, girlhood is imagined within postfeminist culture as being for ...
Contents
1 | |
27 | |
Some Reflections on Postfeminist Girls and Postfeminisms Daughters | 40 |
The Magic of Postfeminist Sisterhood | 73 |
Adultery Boredom and the Working Girl in TwentyFirstCentury American Cinema | 100 |
Feminisms Postfeminisms and Processes of Punk | 132 |
Rethinking Feminism and Film Violence | 153 |
Camp Postfeminism and the Fab Fives Makeovers of Masculinity | 176 |
8 Whats Your Flava? Race and Postfeminism in Media Culture | 201 |
Governing the Self in What Not to Wear | 227 |
African American Women in Postfeminist and PostCivilRights Popular Culture | 249 |
Aging in Postfeminist Culture | 277 |
Bibliography | 311 |
Contributors | 331 |
Index | 335 |