Review: The Aftermath of Feminism: Gender, Culture and Social Change by Angela McRobbie, Sage Publications, 2009, 192 pages (original) (raw)
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The exploitation of sex and sexuality as an instrument of commerce has long been blamed for silencing women’s desire via visual representations of women as passive objects for male pleasure and consumption (Gill, Figuring Female Sexual Agency, 38). Though, in recent years, visual advertising has moved away from such straightforward depictions of women as objects under the male gaze, instead emphasizing feminine empowerment and sexual agency, dominant discourses of contemporary heterosexuality has nevertheless maintained a narrowing definition of appropriate femininity. Informed by postfeminist and neoliberal rhetoric, society continues to prescribe successful femininity as a commodity for male consumption as a consequence of manufactured hyper-feminine symbols such as, “the Midriff” and “the vengeful sexy woman” (Gill, Figuring Female Sexual Agency, 46), used to promote false notions of empowerment. They achieve this by positioning acceptable femininity as a bodily property that one may only be achieved through self-surveillance and discipline in favour of this model.
Teaching and Trending Feminismin the 21st Century
Šolsko polje, 2020
I s feminism a new trend in popular culture? If so, is this a good or a bad thing? And, besides, what kind of feminism does this entail? Thus, to start, it is appropriate to identify some of the most prominent moments that have helped define "feminism" (understanding the term very generally here, hence the use of the quotation marks) as we know it today, to start exploring and exposing both the feminist and post-feminist characteristics, to think about the renegotiation between the two, and reflect on their influence on children and young adults. It is clear that quite specific images of womanhood/girlhood are being marketed through the media and that they are causing the repackaging of not only girlhood or womanhood but also of feminism itself (see e.g. Becker et al., 2016). 1 However, my aim is not to offer of a typology of contemporary "subforms" or "reformed" kinds of "feminism": there are many of them and elaborating on them would be a somewhat tedious job or, at least, a complicated issue (so I will refrain from doing it) (see also Rottenberg, 2018, p. 166 ff). Let me just name a few of them: "choice feminism", "power feminism", "celebrity feminism", "hashtag feminism", "marketplace feminism" and others, even "lifestyle feminism", "feminism lite" or "gateway feminism". 2 No, one of my objectives is to point out that there is something awry with the dominant, media-regulated forms of "feminism", which 1 This repackaging also "encourages girls to exchange political power for purchasing power" (Becker et al., 2016, p. 1218). 2 But wait, there is more, such as "tough cookie feminism" (which is Camille Paglia's formulation, quoted in Moi, 2006, p. 1737). Still, all this is not to be confused with different contemporary strands of feminist theorizing such as e.g. feminist materialism, corporeal feminism, post-human feminism ... (see also Lykke, 2010, p. 131).
Post‐feminism and popular culture
Feminist Media Studies, 2004
This article presents a series of possible conceptual frames for engaging with what has come to be known as post-feminism. It understands post-feminism to refer to an active process by which feminist gains of the 1970s and 80s come to be undermined. It proposes that through an array of machinations, elements of contemporary popular culture are perniciously effective in regard to this undoing of feminism, while simultaneously appearing to be engaging in a well-informed and even well-intended response to feminism. It then proposes that this undoing which can be perceived in the broad cultural field is compounded by some dynamics in sociological theory (including the work of Giddens and Beck) which appear to be most relevant to aspects of gender and social change. Finally it suggests that by means of the tropes of freedom and choice which are now inextricably connected with the category of "young women," feminism is decisively aged and made to seem redundant. Feminism is cast into the shadows, where at best it can expect to have some afterlife, where it might be regarded ambivalently by those young women who must in more public venues stake a distance from it, for the sake of social and sexual recognition. I propose a complexification then of the backlash thesis which gained currency within forms of journalism associated with popular feminism (Susan Faludi 1992). The backlash for Faludi was a concerted, conservative response to the achievements of feminism. My argument is that post-feminism positively draws on and invokes feminism as that which can be taken into account, to suggest that equality is achieved, in order to install a whole repertoire of new meanings which emphasise that it is no longer needed, it is a spent force. This was most vivid in The Independent (UK) newspaper column Bridget Jones's Diary, then in the enormously successful book and film which followed. 1 For my purposes here, post-feminism permits the close examination of a number of intersecting but also conflicting currents. It allows us to examine shifts of direction in the feminist academy, while also taking into account the seeming repudiation of feminism within this very same academic context by those young women who are its unruly (student) subjects. Broadly I am arguing that for feminism to be "taken into account" it has to be understood as having already passed away. This is a movement detectable across popular culture, a site where "power … is remade at various junctures within everyday life, (constituting) our tenuous sense of common sense" (Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau & Slavoj Zizek 2000, p. 14). Some fleeting comments in Judith Butler's short book Antigone's Claim (2000) suggests to me that post-feminism can be explored through what I would describe as a "double entanglement". This comprises the coexistence of neo-conservative values in relation to gender, sexuality and family life (for example, George Bush supporting the campaign to encourage chastity among young people, and
The reactionary turn in popular feminism
Feminist Media Studies, 2024
This paper considers the rise of "reactionary feminism" within popular culture, suggesting a possible departure from, or mutation of, the hegemony of neoliberal and postfeminisms of recent decades. It locates reactionary feminism as key to the growing backlash against "liberal feminism," pointing to emergent popular feminist discourses of "brutal truths," "material conditions," and women as a "sex class." I analyse three seemingly diverse iterations of the reactionary feminist turn: its political-intellectual articulation by anti-progressive, "post-liberal" feminists; secondly, its manifestation within the "femosphere"-the online, female-centric communities which mirror those of the manosphere-focusing specifically on the "Female Dating Strategy;" and thirdly, "dark feminine" dating influencers on TikTok and YouTube, sometimes framed as "Andrew Tate for girls." Reactionary feminism appears to have certain similarities with leftist, intersectional feminism; it has a strong critique of liberal feminism, and explicitly centres issues such as misogyny, the devaluation of women's work, gendered economic inequality, and the politics of care. However, I argue that while it purports to oppose misogyny and the manosphere, it mirrors many of its regressive logics, and is characterised by an aggressive sense of fatalism, bio-essentialism, and a deep animosity towards liberationist feminism and any form of social hope.
The Single Girl Gets a Centerfold: The Rhetorics of Marketplace Feminism
The Journal of Popular Culture, 2017
HEN COSMOPOLITAN'S HELEN GURLEY BROWN DIED IN 2012 at the age of 90, a vigorous debate was already underway as to her legacy, particularly in terms of feminism. After decades of being viewed by movement feminists with suspicion and derision, Jennifer Scanlon's Bad Girls Go Everywhere (2009), a project semiauthorized by Brown, offered a corrective. Scanlon, a professor of gender and women's studies, saw her book as a sort of revision of feminist history. She reframed and reclaimed Brown as an unheralded feminist heroine, a practitioner of what she calls "Gurley Gurl feminism," and a bridge between the second and third waves of American feminism. Absent from Scanlon's analysis is one of Brown's most famous decisions: to publish the first nude male centerfold for women in 1972. This article uses Scanlon's outline of Brown's unique feminist ideology, her marketplace feminism, to reconsider that centerfold. The image, a nude Burt Reynolds on a bearskin rug, was and is the subject of parody, but it is also a calculated expression of Brown's marketplace-oriented feminism. The centerfold is a polysemic text, but looking closely at the debates surrounding its creation and reception allows us to understand how the surface appearances of a marketing gimmick for Cosmopolitan (hereafter Cosmo), covers a rich and historically situated symbol. By carefully selecting her centerfold subject and controlling the context in which it was presented, Brown created a sex symbol for women that was familiar, approachable, and fun. Through reduction and simplification, she boldly translated the idea of sexual agency for women into commercial culture. I argue
Reassembling feminism, Alyssa D. Niccolini
Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education,, 2014
If indeed we live in what Brian Massumi (2002) describes as image-saturated late capitalism, where Billboard’s ‘Woman of the Year’, Katy Perry, cheerily disclaims being a feminist while championing ‘the power of women’ (Berlatsky, 2012), and where learning and living interface more rapidly within digital and virtual media spaces, educational research is in dire need of some new tools. As curricular and feminist scholar, Janet L. Miller (2013), notes, as ‘mass migrations, mass media, fragmentations, interdependencies and hybridities’ shape postmodernity, our research methodologies must, following Whitlock (2006), similarly remain ‘in transit’ potentially ‘build[ing] upon and utiliz[ing], for example, the extensive and unprecedented power and speed of cultural exchanges in the present’ (Miller, 2013). How do we get up to speed in our readings of the complex interplays of media, pedagogy, and gender, and how do we map their movements and effects within educational theory and policy? Putting to work an array of feminist, poststructural, psychosocial, and posthumanist theorists, particularly the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1984, 1987), as well as an impressive coalition of educational scholars, Jessica Ringrose (2013) has begun to assemble such a toolkit in this book, Postfeminist Education? Girls and the sexual politics of schooling. Ringrose’s book offers ‘new sociological/philosophical tools for mapping the intricacies of flow of affect and ruptures of normative capture, offering new ways of thinking about, researching and interpreting feminine subjectivity’ (p. 69). The Deleuze– Guattarian figuration of the assemblage that she deploys throughout her book is an apt conceptual framework to describe her own compilation of media and cultural analysis, policy critique, empirical work on teenaged girls, and the digital and virtual worlds they navigate, and the ways these disparate forces ‘plug into’ (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012) educational discourses.