Post‐feminism and popular culture

doi:10.1080/1468077042000309937

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Post‐feminism and popular culture

Journal Article•DOI•

Post‐feminism and popular culture

01 Sep 2004-Feminist Media Studies (Taylor and Francis Ltd)-Vol. 4, Iss: 3, pp 255-264

TL;DR: The authors presents a series of possible conceptual frames for engaging with what has come to be known as post-feminism, which is defined as an active process by which feminities change over time.

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Abstract: 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 femini...

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Journal Article•DOI•

Postfeminist media culture: Elements of a sensibility

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Rosalind Gill¹•Institutions (1)

London School of Economics and Political Science¹

01 May 2007-European Journal of Cultural Studies

TL;DR: This article argued that postfeminism is best understood as a distinctive sensibility, made up of a number of interrelated themes, including the notion that femininity is a bodily property, the shift from objectification to subjectification, an emphasis upon self-surveillance, monitoring and self-discipline, a focus on individualism, choice and empowerment, the dominance of a makeover paradigm, and a resurgence of ideas about natural sexual difference.

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Abstract: The notion of postfeminism has become one of the most important in the lexicon of feminist cultural an alysis. Yet there is little agreement about what postfeminism is. This article argues that postfeminism is best understood as a distinctive sensibility, made up of a number of interrelated themes. These include the notion that femininity is a bodily property; the shift from objectification to subjectification; an emphasis upon self-surveillance, monitoring and self-discipline; a focus on individualism, choice and empowerment; the dominance of a makeover paradigm; and a resurgence of ideas about natural sexual difference. Each of these is explored in some detail, with examples from contemporary Anglo-American media. It is precisely the patterned articulation of these ideas that constitutes a postfeminist sensibility. The article concludes with a discussion of the connection between this sensibility and contemporary neoliberalism.

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1,395 citations

Cites background from "Post‐feminism and popular culture"

...The scenarios are profoundly classed and gendered -- and, as Angela McRobbie (2004) points out, racialised too, if largely through exclusion, since the kind of hostile judgments routinely made of white working-class women would risk being heard as racist if made by white experts about black bodies,…...
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...Angela McRobbie (2004)has referred to this as the contemporary 'double entanglement' of neoliberal values in relation to gender, sexuality and family life and a feminism that is that once part of commonsense, yet also feared, hated and fiercely repudiated....
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...The scenarios are profoundly classed and gendered -- and, as Angela McRobbie (2004) points out, racialised too, if largely through exclusion, since the kind of hostile judgments routinely made of white working-class women would risk being heard as racist if made by white experts about black bodies, practices and lives....
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...Angela McRobbie notes the following comments from her viewing of What Not To Wear: ‘'What a dreary voice', 'look at how she walks', 'she shouldn't put that ketchup on her chips', 'she looks like a mousy librarian', 'her trousers are far too long', 'that jumper looks like something her granny crocheted, it would be better on the table', 'she hasn't washed her clothes', 'your hair looks like an overgrown poodle', 'your teeth are yellow, have you been eating grass?...
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...They choose, for example, white weddings, downsizing, giving up work or taking their husband's name on marriage (McRobbie, 2004)....
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Journal Article•DOI•

Post-postfeminism?: new feminist visibilities in postfeminist times

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Rosalind Gill¹•Institutions (1)

City University London¹

23 Jun 2016-Feminist Media Studies

TL;DR: The authors argue for the importance of being able to "think together" the rise of popular feminism alongside and in tandem with intensified misogyny and highlight the multiplicity of different feminisms currently circulating in mainstream media culture, which exist in tension with each other.

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Abstract: This article contributes to debates about the value and utility of the notion of postfeminism for a seemingly “new” moment marked by a resurgence of interest in feminism in the media and among young women. The paper reviews current understandings of postfeminism and criticisms of the term’s failure to speak to or connect with contemporary feminism. It offers a defence of the continued importance of a critical notion of postfeminism, used as an analytical category to capture a distinctive contradictory-but-patterned sensibility intimately connected to neoliberalism. The paper raises questions about the meaning of the apparent new visibility of feminism and highlights the multiplicity of different feminisms currently circulating in mainstream media culture—which exist in tension with each other. I argue for the importance of being able to “think together” the rise of popular feminism alongside and in tandem with intensified misogyny. I further show how a postfeminist sensibility informs even those m...

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479 citations

Journal Article•DOI•

Top Girls? Young women and the post-feminist sexual contract

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Angela McRobbie

01 Jul 2007-Cultural Studies

TL;DR: In the last decade, particularly in the UK, an address by government to young women in the 'advanced democracies' of the west, and in this case in the US, entails the provision of what might be understood as a new sexual contract.

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Abstract: This article argues that, particularly in the last decade, an address by government to young women in the 'advanced democracies' of the west, and in this case in the UK, entails the provision of what might be understood as a new sexual contract. In the post-feminist guise of equality, as though it is already achieved, young women are attributed with capacity. They are urged to become hyper-active across three key sites where their new found visibility then becomes most manifest. Within the field of consumer culture this takes the form of the 'post-feminist masquerade' where the fashion and beauty system appears to displace traditional modes of patriarchal authority. Likewise the emergence of the 'phallic girl' appears to have gained access to sexual freedoms previously the preserve of men, the terms and conditions of which require control of fertility and carefully planned parenthood. The new sexual contract is also embedded within the fields of education and employment. Here too young women (top girls) are now understood to be ideal subjects of female success, exemplars of the new competitive meritocracy. These incitements to young women to become wage-earning subjects are complex strategies of governmentality, the new 'career girl' in the affluent west finds her counterpart, the 'global girl' factory worker, in the rapidly developing factory systems of the impoverished countries of the so-called Third World. Underpinning this attribution of capacity and the seeming gaining of freedoms is the requirement that the critique of hegemonic masculinity associated with feminism and the women's movement is abandoned. The sexual contract now embedded in political discourse and in popular culture permits the renewed institutionalisation of gender inequity and the re-stabilisation of gender hierarchy by means of a generational-specific address which interpellates young women as subjects of capacity. With government now taking it upon itself to look after the young woman, so that she is seemingly well-cared for, this is also an economic rationality which envisages young women as endlessly working on a perfectible self, for whom there can be no space in the busy course of the working day for a renewed feminist politics.

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478 citations

Cites background from "Post‐feminism and popular culture"

...I have argued that emerging from largely First World scenarios, the attribution of apparently post-feminist freedoms to young women most manifest within the cultural realm in the form of new visibilities, becomes, in fact, the occasion for the undoing of feminism (McRobbie 2004)....
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Journal Article•DOI•

“Having it All” on Social Media: Entrepreneurial Femininity and Self-Branding Among Fashion Bloggers

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Brooke Erin Duffy¹, Emily Hund²•Institutions (2)

Temple University¹, University of Pennsylvania²

01 Jul 2015-Social media and society

TL;DR: In the context of the widespread individualization of the creative workforce, various genres of social media production have emerged from the traditionally feminine domains of fashion, beauty, and sport as mentioned in this paper.

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Abstract: Against the backdrop of the widespread individualization of the creative workforce, various genres of social media production have emerged from the traditionally feminine domains of fashion, beauty...

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315 citations

Cites background from "Post‐feminism and popular culture"

...The infectious rhetoric of personal branding has been linked to gendered discourses and, more specifically, the contemporary logic of post-feminism, which celebrates individual choice, independence, and modes of self-expression rooted in the consumer marketplace (Banet-Weiser, 2012; Gill, 2007; McRobbie, 2004)....
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Journal Article•DOI•

The romance of work: Gender and aspirational labour in the digital culture industries

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Brooke Erin Duffy¹•Institutions (1)

Temple University¹

01 Jul 2016-International Journal of Cultural Studies

TL;DR: The authors argue that the discourses of authenticity, community building and brand devotion that they draw on are symptomatic of a highly gendered, forward-looking and entrepreneurial enactment of creativity that they term "aspirational labour".

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Abstract: Despite widespread interest in the changing technologies, economies and politics of creative labour, much of the recent cultural production scholarship overlooks the social positioning of gender. This article draws upon in-depth interviews with 18 participants in highly feminized sites of digital cultural production (e.g. fashion, beauty and retail) to examine how they articulate and derive value from their passionate activities. I argue that the discourses of authenticity, community building and brand devotion that they draw on are symptomatic of a highly gendered, forward-looking and entrepreneurial enactment of creativity that I term ‘aspirational labour’. Aspirational labourers pursue productive activities that hold the promise of social and economic capital; yet the reward system for these aspirants is highly uneven. Indeed, while a select few may realize their professional goals – namely to get paid doing what they love – this worker ideology obscures problematic constructions of gender and class su...

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255 citations

Cites background from "Post‐feminism and popular culture"

...These features reaffirm social and historical constructions of gender while tapping into the contemporary ethos of post-feminism, which celebrates individual choice, independence and modes of self-expression rooted in the consumer marketplace (e.g. Banet-Weiser, 2012; Gill, 2008; McRobbie, 2004)....
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References

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Open Access

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Book•

Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature

[...]

Donna Haraway

12 Dec 1990

TL;DR: Simians, Cyborgs and Women as mentioned in this paper is a collection of ten essays written between 1978 and 1989 by Haraway that analyzes accounts, narratives, and stories of the creation of nature, living organisms, and cyborgs.

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Abstract: Simians, Cyborgs and Women is a powerful collection of ten essays written between 1978 and 1989. Although on the surface, simians, cyborgs and women may seem an odd threesome, Haraway describes their profound link as "creatures" which have had a great destabilizing place in Western evolutionary technology and biology. Throughout this book, Haraway analyzes accounts, narratives, and stories of the creation of nature, living organisms, and cyborgs. At once a social reality and a science fiction, the cyborg--a hybrid of organism and machine--represents transgressed boundaries and intense fusions of the nature/culture split. By providing an escape from rigid dualisms, the cyborg exists in a post-gender world, and as such holds immense possibilities for modern feminists. Haraway's recent book, Primate Visions, has been called "outstanding," "original," and "brilliant," by leading scholars in the field. (First published in 1991.)

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6,863 citations

Journal Article•DOI•

Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema

[...]

Laura Mulvey

01 Oct 1975-Screen

TL;DR: This paper used psychoanalysis to discover where and how the fascination of film is reinforced by pre-existing patterns of fascination already at work within the individual subject and the social formations that have moulded him.

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Abstract: This paper intends to use psychoanalysis to discover where and how the fascination of film is reinforced by pre-existing patterns of fascination already at work within the individual subject and the social formations that have moulded him. It takes as its starting-point the way film reflects, reveals and even plays on the straight, socially established interpretation of sexual difference which controls images, erotic ways of looking and spectacle. It is helpful to understand what the cinema has been, how its magic has worked in the past, while attempting a theory and a practice which will challenge this cinema of the past. Psychoanalytic theory is thus appropriated here as a political weapon, demonstrating the way the unconscious of patriarchal society has structured film form.

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5,533 citations

"Post‐feminism and popular culture" refers background in this paper

...…feminism into account by showing it to be a thing of the past, by provocatively “enacting sexism” while at the same time playing with those debates in film theory about women as the object of the gaze (Laura Mulvey 1975) and even with female desire (Rosalind Coward 1984; Teresa de Lauretis 1988)....
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Book•

Bodies that matter

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Judith Butler

01 Jan 1993

TL;DR: The concept of "sex" is itself troubled terrain, formed through a series of contestations over what ought to be decisive criterion for distinguishing between the several sexes; the concept of sex has a history that is covered over by the figure of the site or surface of inscription as mentioned in this paper.

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Abstract: The category of “sex” is, from the start, normative; it is what Foucault has called a “regulatory ideal.” In this sense, then, “sex” not only functions as a norm, but is part of a regulatory practice that produces the bodies it governs, that is, whose regulatory force is made clear as a kind of productive power, the power to produce – demarcate, circulate, differentiate – the bodies it controls. The concept of “sex” is itself troubled terrain, formed through a series of contestations over what ought to be decisive criterion for distinguishing between the several sexes; the concept of sex has a history that is covered over by the figure of the site or surface of inscription. The relation between culture and nature presupposed by some models of gender “construction” implies a culture or an agency of the social which acts upon a nature, which is itself presupposed as a passive surface, outside the social and yet its necessary counterpart.

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2,635 citations

"Post‐feminism and popular culture" refers background in this paper

...…produce them as subjects whilst ostensibly merely describing them as such, inevitably means that it is a problematically “she,” rather than an unproblematically “we,” which is indicative of a turn to what we might describe as the emerging politics of post-feminist inquiry (Butler 1990, 1993)....
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Book•

Individualization: Institutionalized Individualism and its Social and Political Consequences

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Ulrich Beck, Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim

28 Aug 2001

TL;DR: In this article, the authors describe a life of one's own in a runaway world individualization, globalization, and politics beyond status and class, where women on the way to the post-familial family from a Community of Need to Elective Affinities Division of Labour, Self-Imaging and Life Projects New Conflicts in the family Declining Birthrates and the Wish to Have Children Apparatuses Do Not Care for People Health and Responsibility in the Age of Genetic Technology Death of One's Own, Life of One' Own Hopes from Transience Freedom

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Abstract: Losing the Traditional Individualization and 'Precarious Freedoms' A Life of One's Own in a Runaway World Individualization, Globalization and Politics Beyond Status and Class? The Ambivalent Social Structure Poverty and Wealth in a 'Self-Driven Culture' From 'Living for Others' to 'A Life of One's Own' Individualization and Women On the Way to the Post-Familial Family From a Community of Need to Elective Affinities Division of Labour, Self-Imaging and Life Projects New Conflicts in the Family Declining Birthrates and the Wish to Have Children Apparatuses Do Not Care for People Health and Responsibility in the Age of Genetic Technology Death of One's Own, Life of One's Own Hopes from Transience Freedom's Children Freedom's Fathers Zombie Categories Interview with Ulrich Beck

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2,475 citations

Journal Article•DOI•

Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture

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Mike Gonzalez, Cary Nelson, Lawrence Grossberg

01 Mar 1990-British Journal of Sociology

1,166 citations

"Post‐feminism and popular culture" refers background in this paper

...At this time the representational claims of second wave feminism come to be fully interrogated by post-colonialist feminists like Spivak, Trinh, and Mohanty among others, and by feminist theorists like Butler and Haraway who inaugurate the radical de-naturalising of the post-feminist body (Judith Butler 1990; Donna Haraway 1991; Chandra T. Mohanty 1995; Gayatri Spivak 1988; T. Minha Trinh 1989)....
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...…feminists like Spivak, Trinh, and Mohanty among others, and by feminist theorists like Butler and Haraway who inaugurate the radical de-naturalising of the post-feminist body (Judith Butler 1990; Donna Haraway 1991; Chandra T. Mohanty 1995; Gayatri Spivak 1988; T. Minha Trinh 1989)....
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...As Gayatri Spivak (1999) has argued in the impoverished zones of the world, governments and NGOs also look to the minds and bodies of young women for whom education comes to promise enormous economic and demographic rewards....
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