For White Girls Only? Postfeminism and the Politics of Inclusion (original) (raw)
Related papers
Beauvoir and Irigaray: Philosophizing Postfeminism in Contemporary Popular Culture
This thesis contributes to contemporary feminist philosophy by establishing a definition of postfeminism and analyzing two of its central tenets: equality and sexuality. The work's central claim is that postfeminism is anti-feminist and functions as a façade that conceals the continuation of the structural subordination of women in our capitalist patriarchal society. This is evident in the latest instantiation of postfeminism, in which women sexually objectify men in the name of equality. The gynosexist argument goes that because women are objectified sexually in popular culture it is only fair men be as well. In refuting postfeminist claims, I draw from and expand upon Simone de Beauvoir's and Luce Irigaray's feminist philosophical theories of equality and sexual difference, and I focus on specific examples from popular culture (sports, movies, music videos, magazines, commercials/advertising, online writing, social media, and so on).
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 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.
Book Review 245-249 Interrogating Postfeminism: Gender and the Politics of Popular Culture
2009
In her 2006 work, "The Feminist in the Kitchen," Charlotte Brunsdon proposes that there is a genre of Ur-Feminist articles that scholars have been producing and reproducing at length in textual studies. The structure Brunsdon unpacks goes something like this: feminine text, teleological jog through feminism, "obvious feminist reading" leading to the text's inevitable failure, invocation of pleasure, and finally, complication of the text that ultimately delivers its redemption (Brunsdon, 2006, p. 44). These articles do double duty, both assigning a periodization to feminism and depicting second-wave feminism (as well as that familiar evil, the "patriarchal academy") as the oppressive logic of a bygone era in scholarship, "remak[ing] the cultural memory of the censorious feminist" and effectively claiming a disidentification from that image (Brunsdon, 2006, p. 45). Brunsdon's charge is a hefty one for feminist scholars and Yvonne Tasker ...
POSTFEMINIST FEMININITY IN POP CULTURE DISCOURSES OF THE 1990s AND 2000s
CULTURE AND ARTS IN THE MODERN WORLD
The concept of postfeminism has become one of the central and most important concepts in feminist cultural studies continually raising a lot of debates and discussions. As an important social and cultural phenomenon, postfeminism has extensively invaded popcultural and media spaces at the turn of the last century, and by doing so has drastically (re)shaped the very concept of femininity in mass culture of the 1990s and early 2000s. The controversial nature of postfeminism has created a new concept of femininity, which was located outside of both patriarchal and feminist discourses. The purpose of this article is to analyse postfeminist femininity in various popular TV series and films of the time, locate their representations of femininity within the existing contemporary postfeminist discourse and trace its impacts on the modern understanding of womanhood. The research methodology consists of comparative analysis and synthesis methods, which have made it possible to identify the ma...
2020
The following thesis is an analysis of the political messaging used by pop singersongwriters Ariana Grande and Taylor Swift to construct their careers. Specifically, it focuses on how these two artists use their experiences of gender, race, and social class to actively effect change and empower themselves, and what expectations audiences have for them to do so and why. Grande and Swift experience sexism as women in a patriarchy, but both use their positions as subjugated members of society to create a profit and satisfy the public’s demand that they take socially progressive political stances, which earns them financial and cultural capital. Grande fails to be actively anti-sexist, anti-racist, and anti-classist in her work because she fails to give credit to groups from which she takes both material and nonmaterial resources. She is empowered by the cultures of people of color by directly taking lyrics, melodies, and images, and she is empowered by women who do not adhere to normat...
Special Issue: Femme Theory & Pop Culture
"Strength and courage in a Wonderbra": Femininity, drag, and the Spice Girls, 2023
The Spice Girls were a unique pop phenomenon, promoting feminist ideology while being dismissed as proponents of postfeminism and positioned as collaborators with the patriarchy. Drawing on music videos the band released during 1997, this article suggests that the band's queer choices, regarding the spice personas the band adopted, were overlooked. This article explores the spice personas presentation of femme embodiments using drag: subverting notions of femininity as natural and monolithic, and resisting femininity as ubiquitously disempowering. By highlighting the heterosexual bias and antisex undertones in postfeminism, this analysis generates a multifaceted reading of popular femme performances as female-to-femme drag.