Interrogating Postfeminism: Gender and the Politics of Popular Culture (Console-ing Passions) - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822340321 ISBN 13: 9780822340324

Verlag: Duke University Press, 2007

Inhaltsangabe

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

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Yvonne Tasker is a professor of film and television studies at the University of East Anglia. She is the author of Working Girls: Gender and Sexuality in Popular Cinema and Spectacular Bodies: Gender, Genre, and the Action Cinema as well as the editor of Action and Adventure Cinema.

Diane Negra is a professor of film and television studies at the University of East Anglia. She is the author of Off-White Hollywood: American Culture and Ethnic Female Stardom; the editor of The Irish in Us: Irishness, Performativity, and Popular Culture; and a coeditor of A Feminist Reader in Early Cinema, the latter two of which are both also published by Duke University Press.

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"This is a benchmark text: rich, authoritative, timely. Bringing together work by key authors on most of the significant phenomena and genres of 'postfeminist' culture, it will convince readers of the necessity of confronting the term."--Patricia White, author of "Uninvited: Classical Hollywood Cinema and Lesbian Representability"

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INTERROGATING POSTFEMINISM

Gender and the Politics of Popular Culture

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2007 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4032-4

Contents

Acknowledgments............................................................................................................................................................viiIntroduction: Feminist Politics and Postfeminist Culture YVONNE TASKER AND DIANE NEGRA....................................................................................11. Postfeminism and Popular Culture: Bridget Jones and the New Gender Regime ANGELA MCROBBIE..............................................................................272. Mass Magazine Cover Girls: Some Reflections on Postfeminist Girls and Postfeminism's Daughters SARAH PROJANSKY.........................................................403. Living a Charmed Life: The Magic of Postfeminist Sisterhood HANNAH E. SANDERS..........................................................................................734. "I Hate My Job, I Hate Everybody Here": Adultery, Boredom, and the "Working Girl" in Twenty-First-Century American Cinema SUZANNE LEONARD..............................1005. Remapping the Resonances of Riot Grrrl: Feminisms, Postfeminisms, and "Processes" of Punk ANNA FEIGENBAUM..............................................................1326. Killing Bill: Rethinking Feminism and Film Violence LISA COULTHARD.....................................................................................................1537. Queer Eye for the Straight Guise: Camp, Postfeminism, and the Fab Five's Makeovers of Masculinity STEVEN COHAN.........................................................1768. What's Your Flava? Race and Postfeminism in Media Culture SARAH BANET-WEISER...........................................................................................2019. The Fashion Police: Governing the Self in What Not to Wear MARTIN ROBERTS..............................................................................................22710. Divas, Evil Black Bitches, and Bitter Black Women: African American Women in Postfeminist and Post-Civil-Rights Popular Culture KIMBERLY SPRINGER.....................24911. Subjects of Rejuvenation: Aging in Postfeminist Culture SADIE WEARING.................................................................................................277Bibliography...............................................................................................................................................................311Contributors...............................................................................................................................................................331Index......................................................................................................................................................................335

Chapter One

Angela McRobbie

Postfeminism and Popular Culture BRIDGET JONES AND THE NEW GENDER REGIME

Complexification of Backlash?

This article presents a series of possible conceptual frames for engaging with what has come to be known as postfeminism. It understands postfeminism to refer to an active process by which feminist gains of the 1970s and 1980s 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 Anthony Giddens and Ulrich Beck) that 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 that 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 that gained currency within forms of journalism associated with popular feminism.

The backlash for Susan Faludi was a concerted, conservative response to the achievements of feminism. My argument is that postfeminism 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 emphasize that it is no longer needed, that it is a spent force. In Britain this was most vividly seen in a newspaper column, "Bridget Jones's Diary," and in the enormously successful book and films that followed. For my purposes here, postfeminism 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 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." Some fleeting comments by Judith Butler suggest to me that postfeminism can be explored through what I would describe as a "double entanglement." This comprises the coexistence of neoconservative values in relation to gender, sexuality, and family life (e.g., George W. Bush supporting the campaign to encourage chastity among young people and in March 2004 declaring that civilization itself depends on traditional marriage) with processes of liberalization in regard to choice and diversity in domestic, sexual, and kinship relations (e.g., gay couples now able to adopt, foster, or have their own children by whatever means and, in the United Kingdom at least, full rights to "civil partnerships"). It also encompasses the existence of feminism as at some level transformed into a form of Gramscian common sense, while also fiercely repudiated, indeed almost hated. The "taken into accountness" permits an all the more thorough dismantling of feminist politics and the discrediting of the occasionally voiced need for its renewal.

Feminism Dismantling Itself

The impact of this "double entanglement," which is manifest in popular and political culture, coincides, however, with feminism in the academy finding it necessary to dismantle itself. For the sake of periodization, we could say that 1990 (or thereabouts) marks a turning point, the moment of definitive self-critique in feminist theory. At this time, the representational claims of second-wave feminism come to be fully interrogated by postcolonialist feminists such as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Trinh Thi Minh-ha, and Chandra Talpade Mohanty, among others, and feminist theorists such as Judith Butler and Donna Haraway, who inaugurated the radical denaturalizing of the postfeminist body. Under the prevailing influence of Michel Foucault, there is a shift away from feminist interest in centralized power blocs (e.g., the state, patriarchy, and law) to more dispersed sites, events, and instances of power...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Duke University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2007
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0822340321
• ISBN 13: 9780822340324
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 354
• Herausgeber: Negra
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Friedensallee 273; Hamburg; 22763; Deutschland