Postfeminism: Cultural Texts and Theories 9781474411240

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POSTFEMINISM

POSTFEMINISM Cultural Texts and Theories 2nd Edition

Stéphanie Genz and Benjamin A. Brabon

Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cutting-­edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: edinburghuniversitypress.com © Stéphanie Genz and Benjamin A. Brabon, 2018 First edition published by Edinburgh University Press in 2009. Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road, 12(2f) Jackson’s Entry, Edinburgh EH8 8PJ Typeset in 11/13 Bembo by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire and printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 4744 2968 9 (hardback) ISBN 978 1 4744 1124 0 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 4744 1123 3 (paperback) ISBN 978 1 4744 1125 7 (epub) The right of Stéphanie Genz and Benjamin A. Brabon to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).

Contents

Acknowledgements vi Introduction 1   1 Postfeminist Contexts 23   2 Backlash, New Traditionalism and Austerity-­Nostalgia 87   3 New Feminism: Victim vs. Power 105   4 Girl Power and Chick Lit 119   5 Do-­Me Feminism and Raunch Culture 139   6 Liberal Sexism 155   7 Postmodern (Post)Feminism 166   8 Queer (Post)Feminism 187   9 Men and Postfeminism 198 10 Cyber-­Postfeminism 216 11 Third-­Wave Feminism 227 12 Micro/Macro-­Politics and Enterprise Culture 237 13 Postfeminist Brand Culture and Celebrity Authenticity 254 Bibliography 267 Index 295

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Edinburgh University Press for their continued support and patience. This book is for Maximilien, whose love is a constant source of inspiration.

Introduction

As we embark on this second edition, we are struck by how much the world has changed since we first investigated the cultural, academic and political conundrum that is postfeminism. The 2009 version of this book was motivated by an inclusive and inquisitive ethos to bring to light the various meanings, uses and constituencies of postfeminism in an attempt to unpack the contradictions and intersections of the term and highlight distinct postfeminist patterns, while opening up the category for future sites of investigation and ramifications. To this end, we adopted a contextualising and genealogical approach to demarcate a postfeminist landscape that takes into account successive modifications in meaning, allowing for different postfeminist strands to coexist, overlap, build upon, revise and replace others. Here, postfeminism emerged as a complex and dynamic analytical category – a ‘frontier discourse’ made up of an array of relationships and connections within/between social, cultural, academic and political arenas. For us, the relevance and usefulness of postfeminism rest precisely in its ability as a critical concept to complicate and blur long-­standing binary distinctions and expose the paradoxes of a late twentieth- and early twenty-­first-­century setting in which old certainties of selfhood/citizenship and erstwhile notions of progress, hope and freedom – what Henry Giroux (2014) calls ‘the promises of modernity’ – have been reconfigured and increasingly appear to be under threat. In effect, risk and uncertainty now seem to be our continual watchwords, defining and delimiting our everyday moves and our understanding of who we are and our position in the world. We seem to be living in a perpetual state of crisis and anxiety, and those points of reference and identification that provided a sense of security and directed our ways of being and seeing – in

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social, cultural, political and economic terms – continue to be evaporated and replaced by a sense of menace and foreboding. Gone are the days of social optimism, mobility and safety (or the perception thereof) as we learn how to adapt and cope with the stress and trauma of a seemingly interminable economic crisis – reinforced for British citizens by the referendum decision to leave the European Union in 2016 – and the ensuing atmosphere of austerity and anger at corporate greed; the rollback of opportunities and transfer of risk to culture at large; and a global terrorism that feeds a generalised climate of fear through increasingly random and sadistic acts of murder and torture – most recently with multiple extremist attacks across Europe and the US during what has now been dubbed the ‘summer of terror’ of 2016. The current political and cultural moment is also complexly gendered, fears abounding that we are witnessing ‘the end of men’ and a concomitant ‘rise of women’, a trend not borne out by economic reality and rising numbers of unemployed women (Rosin 2010; Barrow 2012). On the whole, these diverse social, economic and political factors – and their resultant mediatisation and effects on cultural forms and ­­representations – ­require that we question and re-­examine how, or even whether, postfeminism is still relevant at this historical juncture and in touch with a precarious post-­millennium context. In other words, have postfeminism and its associated themes and conceptual vocabulary exhausted their critical usefulness, or does its inherent generativity and adaptability ensure its continuing importance and applicability? How might we categorise this ‘new’, post-­boom postfeminism that responds to this complicated moment in time? In short, new debates need to be charted and new questions need answering as we contemplate the possibility of a ‘bust’ postfeminist stance that engages with a disillusioned and indeterminate recessionary environment characterised by deepening inequalities, dashed hopes and constantly lurking fears. In some ways, given its undeniable links with the entrepreneurial boom culture of conspicuous consumption and individual gratification that dominated Western economies in the late twentieth and early twenty-­first centuries, critical calls that proclaim the redundancy and outdatedness of postfeminism appear logical and even reasonable. While postfeminism has always been the object of widespread critique, recent investigations have queried not only its social limitations and political allegiances but its intrinsic validity and raison d’être. In Charlotte Brunsdon’s eyes, postfeminism has become a ‘baggy’ concept (1997: 389), while Imelda Whelehan (2010) has commented on the ‘boredom and ennui’ which burden critics attempting to ‘make sense of the postfeminist distractions of popular culture’ (159). For her, postfeminism is ‘frustrating to analyse because its message requires little unpacking’ – u ­ ltimately, it is an ‘empty signifier’ that is ‘overburdened’ with meaning. Similarly, Hanna Retallack et al. (2016) note in their examination of Instagram feminism

Introduction 3 that postfeminism is now potentially ­redundant – ­a sentiment that is echoed by Meredith Nash and Ruby Grant (2015) in their comparative analysis of the US television series Sex and the City (1998–2004) and Girls (2012–present). While the former has been elevated to the status of postfeminist ­canon – ­with its celebration of designer femininity and stylish ­sexuality – ­the latter has come to exemplify the millennial ‘Boomerang Generation’ who, faced with an increasingly competitive and cut-­throat job market and armed with little apart from a sense of entitlement and an illusory expectation of success, end up returning home to live with their parents and/or depending on them for continued financial support (see, for example, Marsh 2016). As Dean DeFino (2014) suggests, this underlines ‘a deep generation divide’ between the two programmes whereby ‘[Carrie Bradshaw’s] generation is self-­assured because they have already achieved career success. When they graduated from college in the yuppie heyday of the late 1980s, opportunities were everywhere’ (190). By contrast, post-­millennium girls have had to become used to a vastly diminished labour market in which their (human) capital is no longer necessarily a sought-­after, lucrative asset but an unprofitable commodity to shift. In this respect, then, it is not surprising that there have been calls for a revised or updated postfeminism, a millennial rearticulation that reflects a recessionary context infused with anxiety. For example, Nash and Grant (2015) propose the term ‘post? feminism’ to characterise the entitled yet unambitious heroines of Girls whose ‘emotional and experiential sexual fumbling’ is in marked contrast to the heterosexy, ‘perfectly posed’ femininity of Sex and the City (982–3), emblematic of white privilege and an upper-­middle-­class consumer lifestyle. As they note, ‘Girls embodies a distinctive post-­feminist sensibility by re-­ articulating and complicating existing notions of post-­feminism and by mobilising femininities and anti-­feminist/feminist attitudes in nuanced ways’ (987). For them, the inclusion of a question mark creates a platform for ‘new debate’ and symbolises that ‘feminist engagement with post-­feminism is multiple and shifting’ (988). In a similar vein, Rosalind Gill (2016) has recently investigated the relevance of the concept, asking ‘Are we now post-postfeminism?’ (2). For her, this question is motivated by what she perceives as the ‘new visibility of feminism’, a resurgence of interest in feminist issues and debates in corporate/neoliberal arenas, celebrity culture as well as (online) forms of activism (1). Focusing more directly on the recession as a frame of reference, Diane Negra and Yvonne Tasker (2014) also query the pertinence and suitability of postfeminism to connect with the profound political, social and cultural shifts inaugurated by the 2007–8 economic crisis: ‘Postfeminism has shown itself to be significantly related (if not reducible) to the “bubble culture” of the twenty-­ first century’s first decade’ that celebrated the ‘postfeminist female consumer’ as ‘an icon of excess as much as a­ dmiration’ (4, 6).

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At the same time, belying its supposedly out-­of-­touch disconnection, there has been a veritable explosion of postfeminism in the last few years across a range of fields, indicating what Gill calls a ‘postfeminisation of culture’ (2014: 523). Without doubt, popular culture remains a key resource for scholars of postfeminism, with the postfeminist ‘chick’ or single woman still attracting considerable attention (Harzewski 2011; Taylor 2014). Postfeminism’s analytical scope has also expanded significantly with an upsurge in publications about masculinity (Abele and Gronbeck-­Tedesco 2015; Hamad 2014); ageing (Whelehan and Gwynne 2014; Jermyn and Holmes 2015); body politics (Elias et al. 2016; McRobbie, 2015; Gill and Scharff 2014); race and class (Jess Butler 2013; Chatman 2015). Postfeminism is now discussed as a global and transnational phenomenon, travelling across borders to become meaningful and localised in various, non-­Western settings (Lazar 2011; Chen 2012; Kapur 2012; Gwynne 2013; Salmenniemi and Adamson 2014). As Simidele Dosekun (2015) has observed, ‘post-­feminism is readily transnationalized, that is rendered transnational culture, because it is a fundamentally mediated and commodified discourse and set of material practices’ (961). As such, postfeminism sells transnationally – ‘from “Beyoncé” to “boob jobs” to “Brazilian waxes” ’ – and it is seen to be available to ‘globally “scattered” feminine subjects who have the material, discursive, and imaginative capital to access and to buy into it’ (966). Moreover, the term has gained prominence outside representational and media culture and is now discussed in relation to education (Ringrose 2013; Pomerantz and Raby 2017); health (Dubriwny 2012; Reed and Saukko 2012); digital culture (Dobson 2015) and work (Kelan 2009; Gill 2014; Lewis 2014), to name but a few current sites of investigation. Rather than its tiredness or redundancy, what this signals to us is postfeminism’s intrinsic productivity, its ability as a conceptual tool to make meaningful the paradoxes that characterise our ways of inhabiting and making sense of millennial existence and culture. As we concluded in the 2009 edition of this book, ‘an expanded and nuanced understanding of postfeminism opens ­up – ­rather than closes ­down – ­critical debates on the state of contemporary feminisms and the work of the feminist cultural critic’ (Genz and Brabon 2009: 178). At the same time, we were mindful that ‘postfeminism as a conceptual category and discursive system is still under construction and cannot escape a certain amount of confusion and contradiction’ – yet hopeful that other critics would ‘give themselves up to this postfeminist disarray’ (179). The ever growing and diverse corpus of postfeminist scholarship does indeed point towards a critical willingness to engage with postfeminism’s ‘fertile site of risk’ (179), or, in some cases, inability to avoid its ‘productive irritation’ (Fuller and Driscoll 2015: 253). Yet, what also seems to have happened in the course of this proliferation and expansion is a hardening and embedding of the term as

Introduction 5 postfeminism is consolidated into a kind of contemporary master discourse, a postfeminist grand narrative. Instead of ‘reconsider[ing] their analytical strategies and methods of enquiry’ (Genz and Brabon 2009: 179), at times critics have evaluated and accepted postfeminism as a foregone conclusion, a predictable framework to demarcate their distinct analyses. For example, Angela McRobbie (2015) refers to the ‘post-­feminist stranglehold’ that potentially is in the process of being exploded by the ‘blossoming of new feminisms across so many different locations’ (9). In a slightly different manner, Gill (2016) argues for the continued importance of the critical idiom of postfeminism as ‘regrettably, we are a long way from being post-­postfeminism’ (17). Here the argument for ‘keeping, rather than jettisoning, the notion of postfeminism’ (16) is based on the assumption of a ‘postfeminist sensibility in which “all the battles” are supposed to have been won, and accusations of sexism come always already disenfranchised: been there, done that, it’s all sorted!’ (Gill 2014: 511). Conversely, we have sought to unsettle this notion of a ‘sorted’ ­postfeminism – ­postfeminism as fait accompli – and instead have advocated a ‘broaden[ing] of our interpretive frameworks’ in order to ‘accommodate the complicated entanglements that characterize gender, culture, theory and politics in late modernity’ (Genz and Brabon 2009: 179). Our invocation of postfeminism has underlined its intrinsic generativity, its ability to permutate and respond to changing historical conditions and contexts. To this end, we trace a postfeminist genealogy and critical history that encompasses its various uses, continuities and ruptures, from 1980s expressions of backlash to the notions of postfeminist micro/macro politics and its current recessionary formats. From this point of view, the meaning of postfeminism is less stable and consistent than one might suppose; rather, it appears as a multilayered analytical category that is dynamic in its capacity to change and absorb cultural, political and economic messages, without being amnesiac about previous articulations. This allows for an understanding of a complex postfeminist landscape where ‘new’ ideas do not simply replace or wipe out older ones, but instead meanings are being reworked in such a way that they overlap, modify and even contradict one another. Here we can rephrase McRobbie’s (2009) often quoted formulation and we submit that postfeminism takes itself ‘into account’, adopting a stance of (self-)criticality that calls up various postfeminist tenets in order to scrutinise them. We see this, for example, in the case of Girls, which explicitly and self-­consciously addresses postfeminist i­ssues – f­or instance in relation to representations of the female b­ ody – a­nd anticipates and inscribes criticism within the narrative itself. Yet, as we will discuss later in our case study, while the series clearly distances itself from some postfeminist ­ideas – ­particularly with respect to consumer, fashionable femininity and savvy ­sexuality – ­it

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r­easserts others, most notably an individualistic sense of entitlement that eschews accountability and expects to be r­ewarded – ­both in financial and personal ­terms – f­or self-­branding ‘work’. In this sense, then, for us there is no need to coin neologisms to reflect this undoubtedly more serious, less carefree moment in ­history – r­ather, it is now time to ask: what has changed? How has postfeminism evolved and what does post-­boom ­postfeminism – o ­ r bust postfeminism, if you ­like – ­imply? Before we outline what we see as the shifting parameters of a post-­boom postfeminist stance, it is important to reiterate that, of course, our understanding of postfeminism’s productivity should not be mistaken for an indiscriminate belief in its positivity. Our intention here is not to mount a defence or vindication of postfeminism, or even to take up a postfeminist position; instead, our purpose is to continue to ‘build up a comprehensive view of the varied and multifarious texts, contexts and theories that contribute to and inform the postfeminist landscape’ (Genz and Brabon 2009: 178). As the dissemination and abundance of analyses of postfeminism indicate, such a task is fast becoming unfeasible and we clearly cannot do justice to the wealth of postfeminist scholarship that is emerging within and across multiple sites. What we seek to do then in this new edition is to add to and expand the critical history of postfeminism that we have set up, without displacing or invalidating previous postfeminist articulations. In this day and age, the notion of Girl Power, for example, might be alien to a new generation of young women and men who did not experience the 1990s heyday of postfeminist rhetoric and its optimistic embrace of (consumer) ‘freedom’, ‘choice’ and ‘empowerment’. The perceived light-­heartedness that characterised that particular postfeminist moment has disappeared undeniably and, some would argue, irrevocably, and therefore nowadays can appear flippant and even frivolous. This would explain, for instance, why the self-­indulgence and overconsumption displayed in the postfeminist sequel Sex and the City 2 (2010) – in which the four friends head to an all-­expenses-­paid holiday in Abu Dhabi despite the economic downturn and encourage the burka-­clad local women to remove their veils to reveal that they are wearing New York-­style ­fashions – m ­ et with vitriolic criticism, highlighting the film’s datedness and casual obliviousness to recessionary concerns, alongside the protagonists’ race and class privileges (see Bradshaw 2010). Nowadays it is precisely this type of ‘fun’ consumer ­postfeminism – ­which sells ‘girlyness’ as a form of ‘freedom’ and, importantly, the ‘right’ to ­consume – ­that is being called upon and invoked reflexively in contemporary narratives such as New Girl (2011–) and Two Broke Girls (2011–). With this in mind, we need to engage with a new postfeminist vocabulary that pre-­recession was marked by optimism, aspirationalism and opportunity to prosper, but which post-­recession becomes unquestionably more

Introduction 7 p­ essimistic and less congratulatory. The interplay of economic uncertainty and gender further intensifies a number of (post)feminist dilemmas and points of contentions and casts doubt on the discourses of self-­regulating entrepreneurship and choice that have been the hallmark of celebratory postfeminism of the 1990s and early 2000s and that are embodied in the image of the ‘empowered, assertive, pleasure-­seeking, “have-­it-­all” woman of sexual and financial agency’ (Chen 2013: 441). For example, Michelle Lazar’s suggestion that ‘the postfeminist subject . . . is entitled to be pampered and pleasured’ needs to be problematised in a recessionary environment that no longer guarantees (economic) success and reward to even the most hard-­working individuals (2009: 372). This has a more general effect on postfeminist popular culture and its depiction of fictional characters: where, for example, in the case of late twentieth- and early twenty-­first-­century heroines, failing might have been conceived as a ‘virtue’ (McRobbie 2009) – epitomised by the professional ineptness and persistent blundering of Helen Fielding’s Bridget ­Jones – ­such underachievement and incompetence are no longer held up as endearing signs of female identification and imperfection but now turn out to be equivalent to economic suicide as countless, qualified professionals compete in an ever more aggressive and merciless job market. In this sense, the prospect of prosperity and entrepreneurship that may have been viewed with confidence in the pre-­recession decades appears less as an individual entitlement than a corporate obligation in times of austerity that masks the rollback of opportunities under the rhetorical guise of necessity, self-­restraint and self-­care. Consequently, it is plain to see that the larger cultural climate and ethos of postfeminism need to be recalibrated and reassessed in the aftermath of the 2008 economic crisis. In this recessionary context, the neoliberal/postfeminist mantra of choice and self-­determination is still present but becomes inflected with the experiences of precarity and risk and the insistence on self-­responsibilisation. Lauren Berlant’s (2011) theorisation of the ‘good life’ is useful here as she analyses the shrinking or ‘fraying of fantasies’ of ‘upward mobility, job security, political and social equality, and lively, durable intimacy’ (3). In Berlant’s words, the ‘lived precarity of this historical present’ undermines the promise of the ‘good life’ (3) – the collective as well as personal hopes and aspirations that structure what is perceived to be a meaningful and sustainable ­existence – ­and translates into a set of ‘dissolving assurances’: ‘meritocracy, the sense that liberal-­capitalist society will reliably provide opportunities for individuals to carve out relations of reciprocity that seem fair and that foster life as a project of adding up to something and constructing cushions for enjoyment’ (196). The pressures and stress of everyday living bring about ‘the emergence of a precarious public sphere’ (3) and ultimately result in the ‘slow death’ of life ­itself – a­ process of attrition, a ‘physical wearing out’ and

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‘­deterioration’ of people (2007: 754) that in times of economic downturn affects primarily poorer and socially disenfranchised populations that bear the brunt of contemporary austerity regimes. Despite, or maybe because of, these conditions of economic and intimate contingency, people remain bound to their situation of profound threat and uncertainty, holding on and hoping against themselves that their fantasies will come good. Berlant (2011) describes this affective state, this feeling of our times, as a ‘cruel optimism’ whereby we are encouraged to believe in the idea of a better and happier f­ uture – ­the ‘good life’ – while such attachments are, simultaneously, obstructed by the precarities and instabilities of daily life (see also Littler 2013). In the broadest sense, then, we need to allow for a shift in postfeminist tone or ­register – ­from excess to frugality; carefree spending to economical thrift; light-­hearted pleasure to nervous ­anguish – w ­ hich can be witnessed, for example, in recessionary chick flicks such as Bridesmaids (2011) that now feature unemployed women and strain to ‘resolve female downward mobility through bridal fantasy’ (Tasker and Negra 2007: 352). This is in sharp contrast to boom postfeminist representations that hailed young women in particular as free and confident agents with supposedly infinite choice. Variously known as ‘can-­do girls’ (Harris 2004), ‘top girls’ (McRobbie 2007) or ‘supergirls’ (Ringrose and Walkerdine 2007), they were held up as the ideal postfeminist subject who is ‘flexible, individualised, resilient, self-­driven, and self-­made’ (Harris 2004: 16). As Lazar summarises this optimistic fantasy, ‘women today enjoy full equality and can “have it all” if they put their minds to it’ (2009: 372). Failure is simply not an option for the ‘can-­do’ girl who is instructed by the individualistic and entrepreneurial mantra of a neoliberal boom economy to view instability as opportunity, with the implication that she has only herself to blame if she fails to invest in her human capital. In McRobbie’s (2007) words, this amounts to a ‘new sexual contract’ that places young women at the heart of a meritocratic economic system that incites them to become wage-­earning subjects while locking them in a kind of prison of activity, without that entailing real political involvement. Thus, women are encouraged to ‘recognize themselves as winners instead of losers’ (Pomerantz et al. 2013: 191), and failure is neutralised or avoided altogether by urging them to participate in an endless project of (self-) improvement and endeavour to be at their ‘best’ at all times. This is symptomatic of a particular mode of neoliberal governmentality that fosters market rationality and discipline in all aspects of social life and involves creating self-­ regulating and self-­responsible citizens who are ‘enabled’ by their individual entrepreneurial ‘freedoms’ (see Harvey 2011). This kind of determined, self-­ motivating individual can be found across postfeminist culture and feature prominently in television makeover shows that focus on body management,

Introduction 9 discipline and self-­surveillance under the guise of fashion, fitness and beauty regimes (e.g. What Not to Wear (BBC 2001–7; TLC 2003–13), Snog, Marry Avoid? (BBC Three 2008–3), Love, Lust or Run? (TLC 2015–), The Swan (FOX 2004), Bridalplasty (E! 2010–11) and Shedding for the Wedding (The CW 2011)). This fosters a principle of competition that is both s­ ocial – ­compelling individuals to constantly evaluate and compare their own self-­enterprise with others – as well as self-­directed, promoting ‘the idea that we should strive for a style of existence characterized by a certain way of working upon ourselves in the name of freedom’ (Rose 1999: 61). Even those who fail to live up to this ideal of self-­enterprising success can be brought on board by appealing to notions of choice and independence as well as refashioning normative definitions of femininity. Pre-­recession postfeminist narratives dealt with the prospect of professional/public failure by following, for example, a ‘Bridget Jones’ formula that reframes it as a sign of loveable clumsiness and offsets it with private success in romance and/or friendship. Here, the ‘cute klutzy’ girl turned into a recognisable and familiar trope in film (e.g. Princess Diaries [2001], Miss Congeniality [2000], Leap Year [2010]) and television (e.g. New Girl [2011–]). Key to this type of empowerment is a rearticulation and resignification of hegemonic femininity/domesticity that comes to acquire meanings of (sexual) agency, self-­determination and freedom (see Genz 2009b). Prior to the economic downturn, this ‘modern’ ­femininity – ­or, postfemininity (Genz 2009b) – was also tied to consumer culture and enabled by the consumption of a range of female-­oriented products, giving a boost to, for instance, shoe/handbag fetishism and ‘shopaholic’ behaviour. As Chen (2014) notes, the ‘tension or opposition between consumer and entrepreneur is collapsed’ in this way and consumption comes to be seen as ‘a source of building up confidence and individual identity, as well as having the competitive edge in a marketised arena of dating and working’ (442, 444). This is a recurring pattern in boom postfeminism whereby consumers are encouraged not only to choose to buy consumer goods because they are entitled to do so, but also to use these commodities to work on or update their own brand and express their confidence and sexual empowerment, while constantly competing with other self-­entrepreneurs. This type of consumer p­ ostfeminism – e­ xemplified by the urban glamour and shopping sprees of Sex and the City – is at odds with a context of austerity in which enterprising individuals might have earned the ‘right’ to consume but now find that their consumer ‘freedom’ is curtailed by limited funds and the value of their self-­commodity is progressively in decline. The much touted recipe for s­uccess – s­elf-­work – i­s no longer necessarily delivering the promised rewards in a fiercely competitive recessionary m ­ arketplace – ­or, as Giroux calls it, a ‘Darwinian shark tank’ characterised by a ‘survival of the

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fittest’ ethic (2011b: 592) – that renders those incapable of capitalising on their investment by turning themselves into a profitable self-­brand increasingly redundant and disposable. In short, if consumption is the key to ‘having it all’ and unlocking the individual’s ‘value’ – following the consumerist mantra of L’Oréal’s famous tagline ‘Because you’re worth it’ – then those who cannot ‘spend it all’ might have to forgo their ‘freedom’ and undersell their ‘assets’ in neoliberal capitalist consumer cultures. Of course, this glaringly undemocratic fact does not arise solely as a result of the r­ ecession – a­ fter all, in a climate of competition, every success story necessarily entails another story of failure, as inequality is inherently relational and there can only be winners because there are losers. Yet, the recession crystalises this neoliberal injustice and brings to the fore the brute ethos of self-­interest that underlies it. In this sense, while consumption might have been central in early postfeminist texts to ‘the working and romantic lives of . . . subjects and their subsequent empowerment’ (Dejmanee 2016: 122), the ability to consume is now much more constrained and consumer behaviour that is deemed to be irresponsible and undisciplined becomes the focus of criticism and ­censure – ­for example, in the romantic comedy Confessions of a Shopaholic (2009), the main character is berated for her pathological and frantic consumption and must learn to overcome her shopping addiction that causes her to drown in debt and define herself reductively in relation to the luxury labels she wears – ‘I am what I buy.’ Of course, this is not to say that consumption disappears from postfeminism’s thematic inventory, nor does it mean that all recessionary narratives adopt a censorious tone. As Negra and Tasker remind us, ‘the postboom period is a complex one, involving competing discourses of anger, nostalgia, denial and loss’ (2014: 15). Instead of spendthrift compulsive shopaholics, this era puts the spotlight on responsible, budget-­conscious, efficient consumers who turn their consumption into a bargain-­hunting exercise or, even better, a productive and potentially lucrative enterprise, for instance in the case of social media self-­brands and fashion bloggers who construct an online (consumer) identity as a product to be consumed by others (see Marwick 2010; Page 2012). In the context of austerity regimes, ‘thrift’ is no longer necessarily indicative of poverty but it is promoted as a source of cultural value and a site of ­distinction – ­as Tracey Jensen (2012) puts it, it is not ‘a matter of survival, but . . . a matter of transforming the relationship of the self to itself’ (13). Media culture has provided a raft of lifestyle programmes, and thrift guides extol the rewards of ‘smart-­shopping’ and instruct viewers in consumer know-­how and ­responsibility – f­or example, Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is (BBC 2008–), Eat Well for Less? (BBC 2015–), Gok’s Fill Your House for Free (Channel 4 2016–), Extreme Couponing (TLC 2010) and Extreme

Introduction 11 Cheapskates (TLC 2012–14) supply the cash-­strapped recessionary shopper with expert advice and strategies to continue buying and consuming despite the downturn. This is replicated online with a whole range of money-­saving apps and websites designed to provide ‘thrifty . . . tips as well as lifestyle and entertainment ideas to make the most of your budget at home and away’ (www.superscrimpers.com). Here, the answer to recessionary experiences of (economic) hardship is not, as logic might dictate, to opt out of consumption practices but to seek ‘thrift wisdom’, exemplified by a nostalgic re-­embrace of wartime propaganda and slogans of self-­sufficiency and ingenuity – ‘Keep calm and carry on’, ‘Waste not, want not’, ‘Make do and mend’ and so on. – that encourage downshifting, up-­cycling and repurposing. As Elizabeth Nathanson observes, conspicuous consumption now has to ‘accommodate a modesty that respects the economic times; through the rhetoric of functionality and versatility, frugality is transformed into a new taste culture’ (140). While the cultural turn to ‘thrift’ clearly speaks to a contemporary disillusionment with consumerism, it also gives rise to a ‘new cultural politics of wanting’ whereby austerity is presented not only as stylish, smart and fun, but also ‘as a source of personal self-­esteem and thus of national transformation’ (Jensen 2012: 13). No one showcases this recessionary consumer competence and inconspicuous conspicuous consumption more fashionably than the contemporary figure of the recessionista who embodies what Rebecca Bramall (2013) calls ‘austerity chic’, shunning flashy displays of wealth in favour of parsimonious spending and fashion economising. Michele Obama and the Duchess of Cambridge (aka Kate Middleton) have been celebrated in the US and UK popular press as the role models of austerity fashion, frequently recycling outfits and mixing high-­end designer labels with high-­street bargains (see White 2012). Here, a more understated, less extravagant but nonetheless enterprising and normative postfeminist femininity combines with the ‘necessity’ of ­reuse – ­which, given both women’s prominent and privileged positions, is rather ­unlikely – ­and ‘the self-­conscious performance of thriftiness in a bid to further one’s cultural capital’ (Bramall 2012: 23). What this demonstrates is that austerity itself can be commodified and marketed as a trend in consumer ­culture – ­this is not so much about saving money as it is about appearing to engage with a cultural moment that demands that we all downshift. As Sarah Banet-­Weiser puts it in relation to a Levi’s advertising campaign, the 2008 economic crash has not resulted in the ‘death of capitalism’ in the least; rather companies have worked to ‘brand the crisis’ in such a way that it becomes possible for consumers to buy into it (2014: 85). What has proven particularly appealing to the recessionary shopper is ‘vintage’, nostalgia-­led merchandise that takes inspiration from the past, in particular the ‘make do and carry on’ ethos of

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the 1940s wartime period. ‘Simulating a world of rationing’ (Hatherley 2010: 9), ‘austerity nostalgia’ has proven a powerful affective register that allows for displays of ostentatious/ostensive frugality and maintains its ‘pleasure-­based consumptive appeal’ through a variety of ‘retro-­chic’ commodities (fashion, furniture, food, etc.) (Potter and Westall 2013: 155). In popular culture, this often amounts to a rose-­tinted view of the past that sanctions an escape from the (economic) realities of the present and a retreat to simpler and safer times, particularly apparent in ‘comfort narratives’ that focus on cooking and other domestic activities. Post-­recession television programmes like The Great British Bake Off (BBC 2010–16; Channel 4 2017–) and The Pioneer Woman (Food Network 2011–) – which offer fantasies of pastoral Englishness and an enduring American Frontier myth r­espectively – a­ llow us to indulge in a, quite literally, sugar-­coated escapist fiction that promotes the traditional pleasures of cooking/baking, symptomatic of hegemonic, homely domesticity. In some ways, this ‘downsizing’ trend has long been a part of postfeminism’s ‘new traditionalist’ rhetoric (see Chapter 2), yet what is new is how this return to the home is now depicted as a way of handling and possibly overcoming economic hardship and exploiting a potentially profitable source of ­income – ­both the Bake Off and Pioneer Woman franchises have spawned a range of related products, from cookbooks to tableware, with British supermarket Sainsbury’s, for example, reporting a 30-­per-­cent increase in the sale of flaked almonds after Bake Off judge Mary Berry featured florentines in an episode. As Pamela Thoma points out in relation to the contemporary chick flick, ‘foodie romances’ like Julie & Julia (2009) reassure audiences that they ‘possess the resources for weathering economic turmoil’ by redefining entrepreneurial labour in terms of domestic femininity (2014: 108). In this sense, then, the emphasis in postfeminist popular culture shifts somewhat from ‘winning’ to ‘coping’ as far as female subjects are concerned, as women prove that they can adapt to changing economic circumstances and respond to cuts in the public sector by capitalising on their ‘traditional’ homemaking skills. By contrast, men seem to be faring less favourably in recessionary culture and ‘failure’ is represented as a distinct and, at times, unavoidable risk, as large numbers of male w ­ orkers – p­ rimarily employed in cyclically sensitive industries such as construction and ­manufacturing – ­are seen to be losing their breadwinner role. In this context, we need to investigate the gendering of the current recession, in particular journalistic claims that the economic downturn has had a disproportionate effect on men, leading to a ‘he-­cession’ or ‘man-­cession’. As Hannah Rosin vocalised such fears in her much quoted 2010 article ‘The End of Men’, ‘for the first time in human history’ Man is no longer ‘the dominant sex’ and ‘the working class, which has long defined our notions of masculinity, is slowly turning into a matriarchy’. As we will inves-

Introduction 13 tigate more fully in the chapter on ‘Men and Postfeminism’, these assumptions rest on an established trope of ‘masculinity in crisis’ that predates the recession. At the same time, it would be wrong to assume that the economic downturn has affected and is experienced by men and women in the same way. As Diane Elson rightly asserts, These crises are gendered, in the sense that they have arisen out of gendered economic processes, in which women were virtually absent, from key sites of decision making in the financial sector; and in which neither private nor public finance was equitably distributed, and failed adequately to address the requirements of women as producers and as carers. The impact of these crises is gendered, too. (2010: 202) When the economy crashed in 2008, male workers suffered the greatest impact in terms of redundancies, with men bearing ‘78% of the total job losses in the EU, the same percentage accounted by men in the US’ between 2008 and 2009 (McKay et al. 2013: 112). This led to fears that, if this downward movement were to continue, employed women could end up outnumbering employed ­men – i­n Rosin’s (2010) words, ‘the U.S. economy is in some ways becoming a kind of traveling sisterhood: upper-­class women leave home and enter the workforce, creating domestic jobs for other women to fill’. As McKay et al. (2013) note, these c­ ommentators – ­who lament men’s increased joblessness that supposedly puts recession-­robust women at an unfair ­advantage – ­miss the essential point that ‘all economic recessions tend to be mancessions’ in the initial phases (122). In effect, more recent investigations have highlighted that ‘women’s . . . economic status has rendered them ­particularly vulnerable to the impact of the Great Recession’ – occupying low-­ paid service sector jobs and being overrepresented in part-­ time and casual e­ mployment – ­with the result that ‘the apparent recovery becomes a ­“womancession” ’ (Christensen 2014: 1; McKay et al. 2013: 120). Despite the fact that headlines proclaiming a ‘he-­cession’ do not hold up to economic reality, they nevertheless have influenced cultural representations and storytelling, reinforcing Banet-­Weiser’s point that ‘cultural meanings are organized by economic exchange’ (2014: 83). In this way, recessionary male characters tend to be less successful, less resilient and unable to face the actualities of the post-­boom period. They shy away from responsibility and often fail to display the determined aspirationalism that drives, for example, the American Dream and the economic myth of the ‘self-­made’ man. This is the case primarily with male characters who are either troubled and tormented by the recessionary concerns of redundancy and ­downsizing – ­for example in the ‘corporate melodrama’ The Company of Men (2010), which ‘situates a hard-­working male hero against forces which stand for a ruthlessly ­unyielding

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economic context’ (Tasker and Negra 2013: 354). Or, alternatively, they willingly retreat into a perpetual state of teenage a­ dolescence – ­as is the case with male ‘slacker’ comedies in which ‘young men who cannot get jobs have neither the incentive nor the means to marry’ and instead ‘sit around in [their] underwear, play video games [and] hang out with [their] friends’ (Leonard 2014: 40; 43). Here, men purposefully adopt a stance of unheroic and flawed masculinity, flaunting their own lack of success and status as a ‘loser’ – in Knocked Up (2007) and Ted (2012), men simply ‘refuse to grow up’ and then ‘must be disciplined into recognizing the implicit rewards of hard work and normative familial commitments’ (Leonard 41; 43). Other ‘buddy’ comedies or ‘bromances’ like The Hangover (2009; 2011; 2013) or Grown-Ups (2010; 2013) celebrate ‘a temporary flight from the sort of responsibility which defined traditional breadwinner masculinity’ (Tasker and Negra 2013: 355), as middle-­aged men happily relinquish any maturity that age might bring for the joys of male bonding, symbolised by puerile humour, excessive drinking and juvenile ‘goofing’ around. In sum, we could argue that some of these recessionary trends continue to explore a range of issues and ­themes – f­or example in relation to consumption, gendered identities, retreatist domesticity and individualistic notions of choice and a­ gency – t­hat have been prominent components of postfeminist culture prior to the recession. The changed economic, social and political environment undoubtedly intensifies some of these debates, specifically in relation to the self-­responsible ‘can-­do’ girl and the neoliberal entrepreneur of the self who sees consumption and empowerment as complementary. Here, postfeminism gets a ‘reality-­check’ as the ‘right’ to be self-­reliant now turns into a ‘risk’ and the promise of upward mobility is increasingly prohibited by the harsh post-­boom climate that surrenders those who lack competitive edge – ‘failed’ consumers and w ­ orkers – t­ o a ‘politics of disposability’ (Giroux 2011b: 592). As Jim McGuigan asserts, in this context i­ndividualisation – ­understood not so much as a bourgeois ideal of personal freedom but as the ‘agonistic choices on which way to go at nodal points along [a] life-­course trajectory’ – becomes ‘a matter of institutionalised obligation, not free choice’ (2014: 23–4). Nowadays, external obstacles and social positioning which severely limit life choices and negate the expectation of success for a large majority of citizens can no longer be obfuscated by the seductive rhetoric of self-­entitlement that penalises the individual for failure and condemns him/ her to ‘freedom and lonely responsibility’ (234). As we have already noted, some postfeminist strands address this regulatory illusion of freedom and specific recessionary concerns of redundancy and loss of direction through the use of humour and comforting narratives of retro-­nostalgia, domestic femininity and male re-­juvenilisation – ­in this

Introduction 15 way, extending and updating long-­standing postfeminist debates and tropes that have emerged over the last thirty years of the concept’s critical history. In what follows, we will address these post-­boom issues and anxieties through a range of new sections/case studies that have been added to already existing ­chapters – ­for example, Chapter 1 on ‘backlash and new traditionalism’ will now include a section on austerity-­nostalgia that engages with the complex cultural mechanisms dealing with an uncertain present of economic downturn. Beyond these enduring postfeminist matters, we propose that bust postfeminism also gives rise to distinct recessionary patterns and themes of heightened visibility in order to lay bare and illuminate the structural inequalities and power dynamics that have become so glaringly obvious and impossible to ignore in the harsh post-­Noughties climate. We maintain that visibility emerges as a discernible post-­boom postfeminist motif that can be witnessed both in popular c­ ulture – w ­ here it takes the form of sexual sensationalism and liberal sexism that is unapologetic and blunt in its portrayal of gendered abuse (see Chapter 6) – as well as in relation to contemporary forms of feminism and activism (see Chapters 3 and 12). Here, we revisit the notion of sexual micropolitics and examine its macro-­political expansion in the form of ‘sextremism’ – exemplified, for instance, by the global ‘SlutWalk’ movement and the Ukrainian activist group F ­ EMEN – w ­ hich uses the topless female body as a means of visibility in order to address and disrupt gender expectations, including images of femininity/sexuality and feminist stereotypes. A number of critics have commented on the increased visibility of feminism more b­ roadly – a­ s McRobbie writes, ‘after a long period of castigation and disavowal, feminism somehow makes a comeback. . . . [F]eminism once again has a presence across the quality and popular media, and similarly in political culture and in civil society’ (2015: 4). Similarly, Gill detects a ‘new visibility of feminism . . . circulating in mainstream media culture’, making it appear ‘desirable, stylish, and decidedly fashionable’ (2016: 1–2). This kind of feminist visibility materialises in a range of contexts and forms, from online campaigns that target sexism (e.g. everydaysexism.com) and seek to raise the profile of feminism (whoneedsfeminism.com) to a more corporatised, high-­ profile version that takes the shape of business self-­help for female workers, as is the case with Sheryl Sandberg’s best-­selling Lean In: Women, Work and the Will to Lead (2013). The last in particular has been criticised as a neoliberal colonisation of feminism, in which a new feminist subject is being mobilised: Individuated in the extreme, this subject is feminist in the sense that she is distinctly aware of current inequalities between men and women. This same subject is, however, simultaneously neoliberal, not only because she disavows the social, cultural and economic forces producing this

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Postfeminism inequality, but also because she accepts full responsibility for her own well-­ being and self-­ care, which is increasingly predicated on crafting a felicitous work­–family balance based on a cost­–benefit calculus. The neoliberal feminist subject is thus mobilized to convert continued gender inequality from a structural problem into an individual affair. (Rottenberg 2013: 420)

While the intricacies of neoliberal (post)feminism will be investigated in more depth later on (see Chapters 1, 3 and 12), what this also highlights is that ‘visibility’ does not always function in the same w ­ ay – i­n fact, there might be different kinds of (un)critical visibilities in diverse cultural and political ­contexts – a­ nd ‘seeing’ does not necessarily lead to social change (see Casper and Moore 2009). Here we need to interrogate the nature of visibility itself and its relation to critique whereby making a (political) issue ‘visible’ or ‘speakable’ might not be enough as an act of emancipation and political awareness. This is problematic for a range of liberal activist s­tances – ­including feminism and gay r­ights – ­that have adopted a ‘politics of visibility’ to foster reconsiderations of gender, race, embodiment and power. As one of the key terms of identity politics, visibility has been pursued as a tactic and goal by historically marginalised and ‘invisible’ groups that have demanded to be recognised and ‘seen’ in order to establish and legitimise their subject/citizen status. Here, visibility is a key stage in the process of e­ mancipation – i­t is about the development of ‘a righteous critique of power from the perspective of the injured’ (Brown 1995: 27). Yet, as we will discuss in relation to corporate/neoliberal feminism, sexual macro-­politics and sexually sensationalist popular culture (see Chapters 3, 6 and 12), it might no longer suffice to expose and make visible the practices of (patriarchal) subjugation and victimisation, as visibility as a tool of (political) critique becomes questioned and ­questionable – ­most notably in the case of the HBO series Game of Thrones (2011–), which adopts a relentless strategy of ‘making visible’ sexist abuse and violence without providing a critical viewpoint from which to challenge these, with the result that here sexism is at once hyper-visible, and yet not seen (see Chapter 6). If visibility is one of the recessionary motifs that define bust postfeminism, then authenticity is another key term that we seek to investigate in this second edition. We suggest that the blunt and precarious post-­boom milieu also engenders a more interiorised and affective postfeminist stance that encourages subjects to look inward and focus in on themselves in order to search for meaning/value in these uncertain times. Here, we need to move away from the assumption that postfeminist culture and politics act upon individuals from the outside in order to socialise them, for instance in terms of compulsory heterosexiness, responsibilisation and entrepreneurialism. Instead, post­feminism

Introduction 17 is involved in the complex processes of individuation whereby subjects construct their identity, express their agency and actively self-­govern in spite of structural/collective barriers. In Zygmunt Bauman’s (2001) words, ‘[t]o put it in a nutshell, “individualisation” consists in transforming human “identity” from a “given” into a “task”, and charging the actors with the responsibility for performing that task and for the consequences (and also the side effects) of their performance’ (124). Accordingly, the ‘problem of identity’ has changed its shape and content, with the ‘precariousness of solitary identity-­building’ and the risk of making the ‘wrong’ choice even more acute in a stark recessionary context (126, 129). As Bauman explains, ‘the confidence of being in control of one’s destiny, is what men and women in our type of society most conspicuously lack’ – the struggle that confronts contemporary identity-­ builders then is not ‘how to get there’ but rather ‘where could I, or should I, go? And where will this road I’ve taken bring me?’ (127, 126). The search for identity propels individuals on an obligatory, never-­ending and open-­ended pursuit of self-­actualisation where they can experience their ‘authentic’ self and become ‘who they are’ or ‘who they are meant to be’. This ‘turn to interiority’ also has an effect on postfeminism (Dejmanee 2016), giving rise to a process of intensified individuation that situates postfeminism at the heart of the individual’s psyche, what Catherine Rottenberg (2013) calls ‘interiorized affective spaces’ (432). As Stéphanie Genz (2014) has argued, we now need to ‘expand our understanding of the intimate connections between culture and subjectivity’ and supplement ‘examinations of what postfeminist subjectivity entails’ with ‘an interrogation of how postfeminism engages subjects in the perplexing double binds of discipline and choice’ (545­ –6). This line of argumentation owes much to sociological and philosophical theories of affect that examine the cultural dimensions of capitalism and the psychosocial aspects of contemporary ­life – ­the ways ‘feeling is negotiated in the public sphere’ (Gorton 2007: 334). As Sara Ahmed (2004) has noted, one of the reasons that societies maintain particular hierarchies of gender, race and class is the strength of our affective attachments to social norms (11–12). In fact, ‘feelings might be how structures get under our skin’ (Ahmed 2010: 216). Ahmed (2010) focuses on attributions of happiness to examine ‘how social norms and ideals become affective, as if relative proximity to those norms and ideals creates happiness’ (11). Always taking the shape of perpetual abstraction, happiness is a promise that directs us towards certain life choices and away from others, thus performing a type of affective and moral ­work – ­what she calls the ‘happiness duty’ – that assures us that we will be made happy by living our lives in the ‘right’ way. This injunction to be happy is used to redescribe social norms as social goods, commanding power over us and compelling us to live in a constant state of desire (2). In times of crisis, the ‘language of

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Postfeminism

­ appiness acquires an even more powerful hold’ (7) as the inability (or imposh sibility) to accumulate happiness is articulated as a personal failure to follow social ­ideals – ­in other words, we keep asking: where have we gone wrong and lost our happiness wealth? As Ahmed has shown, this is ‘how happiness becomes a disciplinary technique’ as ‘[w]hat is at stake here is a belief that we can know “in advance” what will improve people’s lives’ (8). This shift inward underlines postfeminism’s affective dimension that works from within to penetrate not only the intimate links between subjects but also the relationship of the individual with him/herself. As Genz (2014) writes, postfeminism ‘taps into emotion and affect as crucial elements in the construction, marketing and consumption of . . . subjectivity’ (546). As we have discussed, one of the reasons for postfeminism’s continued appeal particularly in popular culture is its promotion of self-­goals like ‘confidence’, ‘independence’ and ‘empowerment’, linked to consumerist and neoliberal imperatives that demand that we work on the self as the means to achieve these aims. As a result of more intense external pressures that weigh down on the individual post-­recession, these goals now become more inner-­directed and internalised, focusing on deeply rooted psychological desires to develop and enhance our sense of self. As Tisha Dejmanee points out, ‘the postfeminist subject is called inwards, to shelter from and counteract the failures of her [his] socio-­cultural environment’ (2016: 120). As we will discuss in Chapter 12, authenticity emerges in this respect as a marker of meaning and value whereby individuals seek to maintain or re-­valorise their s­elf – ­for instance as an effective and indispensable citizen/worker/consumer/­producer – i­n the current climate of ‘economic Darwinism’ that throws away resources, people and goods deemed ‘worthless’ and redundant (Giroux 2011b: 595). Many are barred from the ‘rewards’ of material consumption at this particular moment of downturn when the postfeminist/neoliberal discourses of self-­regulating entrepreneurship become, not so much a prerogative, but an institutionalised burden. Accordingly, they turn to affective spaces of selfhood in an effort to validate the self and mine meaning (i.e. value) from their individual experiences and attributes (creativity, originality, resourcefulness, etc.). This kind of self-work can be discussed as a type of ‘immaterial labour’ whereby the individual engages in a form of internalised consumption that ‘uses’ the self in order to produce (socio-­economic) added ‘value’ (see Cova and Dalli 2009; Lazzarato 2006). This kind of productive consumption is exemplified, for instance, by lifecasters and bloggers who draw on their life-­ narrative to construct affective relations with others that could potentially be exploited financially (see Marwick 2010; 2013). Key to the success of such (online) labour is a perception of authenticity whereby bloggers provide personal information in order to create intimate bonds between themselves

Introduction 19 and their audiences. As Nathanson (2014) notes, ‘blogs cultivate a sense of intimacy; the reader is positioned as confidant or friendly listener’ (145). Lifecasting or lifestreaming, in particular, emphasises a sense of autobiographical ‘realness’ and ‘truthful’ self-­expression, involving a continual broadcast of events in a person’s life through digital media. Here the idea is that everyday life should not only be documented but also ­screened – ­exemplified by YouTube’s tagline ‘Broadcast yourself’ – and every detail of this life acquires a significant meaning that, it is hoped, will be of interest to others. This situates such affective labour more broadly within contemporary brand culture that entails the ‘making and selling of immaterial t­hings – f­eelings and affects; personalities and ­values – ­rather than actual goods’ (Banet-­Weiser 2012). As Banet-­Weiser (2012) has discussed, in the twenty-­first century, spaces that we would like to perceive as ‘authentic’ – self-­identity, creativity, politics, ­religion – h ­ ave been increasingly subject to the process of branding to the extent that it impacts ‘the way we understand who we are, how we organize ourselves in the world, what stories we tell ourselves about ourselves’ (5). Within brand culture, traditional distinctions between the ‘authentic’ self and the ‘commodity’ self are collapsed with the result that ‘we take it for granted that authenticity, like anything else, can be branded’: ‘authenticity is not only understood and experienced as the pure, inner self of the individual, it is also a relationship between individuals and commodity culture that is constructed as “authentic” ’ (13–14). This implies that the recessionary move to affect and ­authenticity – ­which, as we have argued, is often motivated by an individual’s ‘failure’ to adapt to the demands of changing ­economies – a­ lso involves a (at least to some degree) paradoxical return to enterprise that reinscribes the self within economic structures and turns it into a ‘product’ that has a ‘different value’ in this ‘affective, experiential landscape’ (Banet-­Weiser 2012: 71). Rather than opposed to the logic of capitalism, affect needs to be understood in this context as an outgrowth of the ­market – ­not in its unappealing corporate form of ‘big business’ and multinational banks, but internalised by the self that is now experienced and sold as an authentic ‘self-­brand’. As Genz (2015b) writes, authenticity ‘acts as an affective commodity in a crowded neoliberal market’ (547), reinforcing a well-­established corporate logic whereby consumers tend to ‘reject mass-­ produced and mass-­marketed commodities in favour of products and services that can claim to be in some way authentic’ (Lewis and Bridger 2000: 4). What this also reveals is that this kind of branded authenticity needs to be recognised by others in order to be legible/saleable within the confines of a capitalist economy. For example, Nathanson (2014) succinctly notes in relation to social media that ‘blogs need an audience’ (145) – in other words, others need to ‘buy into’ our authenticity so that we can capitalise on our ‘authentic’

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self-­work. In this sense, we are confronted here with a kind of ‘outer-­directed self-­presentation’ that requires that ‘[t]o be authentic to yourself, one must first be authentic to others’ (Banet-­Weiser 2012: 80). That this is not always an easy task is exemplified for instance by the main protagonist, Hannah, of the HBO series Girls who struggles to get others interested in her life-­narrative, the memoir that she fills with material from her would-­be bohemian life as an aspiring author. As we will discuss in our case study later on (see Chapter 4), here the quest for authenticity starts to dictate events as Hannah orchestrates a range of at times (sexually) objectifying experiences in the hope that she will become the ‘voice of my generation, or at least a voice of a generation’ (‘Pilot’). What becomes apparent in this case is that the pursuit of authenticity is often tied to a deeply individualistic stance characteristic of neoliberal enterprise culture (see Chapter 12). As Jeremy Gilbert (2013) reminds us, ‘[w]hat defines the regularity of neoliberalism as a discursive formation is precisely the persistence of an individualistic conception of human selfhood and of the idea of the individual both as the ideal locus of sovereignty and the site of governmental intervention’ (11). Within brand culture, the individual is promoted yet again as a c­ ommodity – r­ einforcing neoliberalism’s ‘project of the self’ (Giddens 2008 [1991]) – and building a (self-) brand is understood as ‘a moral obligation to oneself’ (Banet-­Weiser 2012: 60). As Banet Weiser (2012) writes, ‘self-­branding is seen not as an imposition of a concept or product by corporate culture but rather as the individual taking on the project herself as a way to access her “true” self’ (61). In the case of Girls, the incitement to be authentic also engenders an intensely individualistic and solipsistic attitude that authorises entitlement, self-­involvement and lack of ­responsibility – ­representative of a post-­millennium group of young adults that psychologist Jean Twenge (2006) refers to as ‘Generation Me’, who are tolerant, confident and open-­minded but also disengaged, narcissistic and anxious. As Hannah is told repeatedly by her friends and family, she is ‘spoilt’, ‘callous and disconnected’ (‘Dead Inside’) – ‘a fucking narcissist . . . who thinks their own life is so fucking interesting’ (‘Beach House’) – which is offset by her own persistent plea: ‘Am I . . . the only one . . . who prides herself on being a truly authentic person?’ (‘I Saw You’). If authenticity is refracted through the discourse of (neoliberal) individualism, it is also associated with specific definitions of femininity that align it more closely with postfeminist sensibilities. As Genz (2015b) has examined, authentic self-­work and ‘emotive consumption intersect with gender ­identity . . . and give rise to distinctly ­regulated – ­entrepreneurial, classed and ­sexualized – ­formations of feminine identity’ (546). In her eyes, postfeminism can be discussed as ‘a gendered brand space’ that makes a range of ‘brand promises and agency claims’ that are maintained by ‘a gendered and m ­ ediated

Introduction 21 form of authenticity’ (546–7). In a similar manner, Banet-­Weiser (2012) argues that postfeminism is a ‘particularly rich context for girls and young women to build a self-­brand’ (56). She focuses on social media, which give rise to a number of ‘girl entrepreneurs’, ‘the ultimate self-­inventing young woman who represents a fantasy of achievement accomplished by good ideas, hard work, and self-­confidence’ (56). Analogous to the pre-­recession ‘cando’ girl, interactive postfeminist subjects are encouraged to be self-­reliant and empowered within the context of brand culture, constructing a ‘postfeminist self-­brand’ through ‘public bodily performances and the production of user-­ generated content’ (64). In order to achieve and maintain visibility in this vast online space, self-­branded women often resort to the conventional advertising rationality of ‘sex sells’ to promote their self-­as-­commodity. Popular lifecasters like Justine Ezerik, for instance, undoubtedly capitalise on the appeal of a hetero-­feminine ­body – r­ emarkably, a short clip in which she reflects on the ‘difficulties’ of ordering a cheeseburger, clad in a pink tank top and flicking her blonde hair, currently (2017) has over 7 million views on YouTube. Here, the sexualised female body is clearly a conduit for branded subjecthood and ­empowerment – ­characteristic of long-­standing postfeminist debates around ‘do-­me’ feminism and raunch culture (see Chapter 5). As Banet-­Weiser comments, ‘ “hotness” [is] an important factor in self-­branding of white, middle-­ class girls, where the “hotter” one is, the more one will be noticed’ (83). In this sense, brand culture acts as a limited and normalising context for the construction of female identity, circumscribed by hegemonic definitions of femininity and female sexuality. In what follows, we will examine the gendering of authenticity in relation to celebrity culture and reality television that give rise to a whole range of self-­branded individuals. As Randall Rose and Stacy Wood (2005) emphasise, the consumption of reality programming represents a ‘sophisticated quest for authenticity within the traditionally fiction-­oriented entertainment paradigm’ (284). In particular, celebrity versions of the reality format rely on a perception of authenticity and staging of intimacy to foster para-­social interactions and navigate what Graeme Turner (2004) calls ‘the ordinary/extraordinary’ ­paradox – n ­ amely celebrities claim to be ‘like us’ but at the same time, they are not ‘like us’. As we will investigate in our case study on the reality sitcom Keeping Up with the Kardashians (2007–), authenticity acts as a gendered capital that sells ‘the currency of “realness” . . . harnessed to neoliberal and postfeminist expressions of self-­branding, entrepreneurship and feminine agency’ (Genz 2015b: 547; see Chapter 13). This involves a number of contradictions and tensions that have played a prominent role in debates on postfeminism, particularly in relation to feminism and femininity; subject and object; emancipation and empowerment.

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Postfeminism

In addition, we have suggested that in recessionary expressions of postfeminist culture, new problematics and questions ­emerge – ­for instance with regard to visibility, sexism, authenticity, consumption and self-­branded ­identities – ­that need to be investigated. We put forward that the post-­boom environment engenders a more ‘critical’ postfeminism that takes itself ‘into account’ and anticipates critique, calling up postfeminist t­ropes – ­for example in relation to the heterosexy body and conspicuous over-­consumption – ­in order to scrutinise them. This underlines that, at this stage in its critical history, postfeminism as an analytical category is attuned to potential criticism, generating its own internal critique and adopting a self-­reflexive stance that repositions and transmutes individualism into authenticity; consumption into ‘thriftyness’; sexism into liberalism; emancipation into self-­care, and so on. Ultimately, what this reveals in our eyes is that we cannot afford to be complacent in our efforts as critics to understand and dissect the complexities, enticements and dangers of this particular cultural and political ­moment – ­nor can we be assured that our analytical frameworks and modes of interpretation remain fit for purpose and do not require revision. We submit that ‘visibility’ in particular becomes questionable as a critical tool and goal, giving rise to, for example, a ‘liberal sexism’ that is non-­ironic, blatant and unapologetic (see Chapter 6). Here, we need to admit that, in Sara Ahmed’s (2013) words, ‘we are implicated in the worlds that we critique; being critical does not suspend any such implication’ – in sum, critique can become ‘a way of redoing by appearing to undo’. What we need then is a kind of ‘internal critical gaze’ (Rottenberg 2013: 432), new terms of critique that acknowledge that it is through us, our subjectivity, that postfeminist/neoliberal governmentality is able to speak to us and operate. For us, this need not amount to what Giroux calls the ‘death of critical thought’ (2011a: 167), yet it highlights the cultural, political and ideological challenges that any form of substantive contemporary critique of gendered, sexist, class and economic power dynamics has to face.

1 Postfeminist Contexts

Postfeminism is a concept fraught with contradictions. Loathed by some and celebrated by others, it has emerged in the late twentieth century in a number of cultural, academic and political contexts, from popular journalism and media, to feminist analyses, postmodern theories and neoliberal rhetoric. Critics have claimed and appropriated the term for a variety of definitions, ranging from a conservative backlash, Girl Power, third-­wave feminism and postmodern/ poststructuralist feminism. In popular culture, it is used as a descriptive marker for a number of (particularly) female characters that have emerged from the 1990s onwards, with Helen Fielding’s chick-­lit heroine Bridget Jones and the Spice Girls often held up as the poster girls of postfeminism. In academic writings, it sits alongside other ‘post-’ ­discourses – ­including postmodernism and ­postcolonialism – ­and here, it refers to a shift in the understanding and construction of identity and gender categories (like ‘Woman’, ‘Man’ and ‘Feminist’). Likewise, in political philosophy and social theory, postfeminism has been read as indicative of a ‘post-­traditional’ era characterised by dramatic changes in basic social relationships, role stereotyping and conceptions of agency (Gauntlett 2007; Mann 1994). More recently, postfeminism has been anchored within neoliberal society and consumer culture that cultivates individualistic, competitive and entrepreneurial behaviour in its construction of a self-­regulating and enterprising subject whose consumption patterns come to be seen as a source of power and choice. Linked to this, postfeminism has also been discussed in relation to contemporary brand culture that shapes not only consumer habits but wider political, cultural and civic practices (see Banet-­Weiser 2012; Genz 2015b). Here, postfeminism acquires ‘affective relational qualities’ (Banet-­Weiser 2012: 9),

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emblematic of contemporary ‘experience economies’ where consumers no longer merely consume goods and services but they are looking for memorable events that engage them in a personal way (see Pine and Gilmore 1999). At this juncture, we might also want to investigate how current political changes and the end of a boom-­and-­bust economic model have affected the larger cultural climate and ethos of postfeminism. Certainly, if late twentieth- and early twenty-­ ­ first-­ century postfeminism was characterised by optimism, entitlement and the opportunity of prosperity, then indisputably such ­articulations have become more unsustainable and uncertain in a post-­2008 recessionary environment that complicates, and possibly nullifies, boom-­market mind-­sets and Noughties confidence in (consumer) ‘choice’ and ‘freedom’. While commentators have found fault with postfeminism’s interpretative potential and fl ­ exibility – V ­ icki Coppock et al. (1995) and Sarah Gamble (2001), for example, deplore that ‘postfeminism remains a product of assumption’ and ‘exactly what it constitutes . . . is a matter for frequently impassioned debate’ (Coppock et al. 1995: 4; Gamble 2001: 43) – they also have acknowledged its significance and impact. The term continues to be divisive and contradictory, causing some critics to reject it because, as Susan Douglas (2010) notes, ‘it has gotten gummed up by too many conflicting d­ efinitions’ (10). At the same time, the cultural presence, resonance and l­ongevity of postfeminism have become hard to ignore, specifically as it ­continues to evolve with changes in the political, cultural and economic ­environment. As Rosalind Gill has recently acknowledged, the term’s ‘continued relevance’ and importance cannot be denied and ‘[t]here is, as yet, no parallel for postfeminism’ (2016: 3; 2007: 250). This book endeavours to take stock of the postfeminist phenomenon that has confounded and split contemporary critics with its contradictory meanings and pluralistic outlook. It provides an overview of postfeminism’s underpinnings and critical contexts, different perceptions of and theories related to it, and popular media representations that have been characterised as ‘postfeminist’. Rather than implementing a single frame of definition, we discuss diverse manifestations of postfeminism in order to highlight the term’s multiplicity and draw connections between these postfeminist expressions. In this chapter, we trace postfeminism’s genealogy and critical history by considering its position within feminist histories and its emergence in popular culture, academia and politics. We outline the differences and similarities between these postfeminist contexts in order to present a comprehensive view of postfeminism as a critical and analytical category. From here, we examine a range of theories and texts that have appeared in postfeminist contexts and we analyse a number of case studies, from popular icons like David Beckham and Kim Kardashian to the underground punk movement Riot Grrrl and

Postfeminist Contexts 25 the controversial ‘topless’ activist group FEMEN. The following chapters are dedicated to specific postfeminist s­trands – ­including new traditionalism, do-­me feminism, (neo)liberal sexism and micro/macro-­politics – ­and they engage with popularised conceptions of postfeminism, prominent in media and consumer culture, as well as more theoretical and political articulations. Importantly, however, we do not want to impose a value judgement and hierarchical structure that privileges one version/location of postfeminism over ­another – ­indeed, as we will see, in some critical evaluations this involves a denigration of popular postfeminism in comparison to (supposedly) more complex academic/political ideas. It is a founding premise of this book that all articulations of or movements associated with postfeminism are valid and they inform one another. In this sense, we argue against a polarised understanding of postfeminism that separates its theories, texts and contexts into disparate and disconnected postfeminist versions and locations. The contextualising and genealogical approach that we adopt allows us to explore the different uses and ramifications of postfeminism, making explicit how its various contexts, texts and theories are linked. Perplexing and troubling for some, postfeminism is also a compelling and provocative feature of contemporary culture, society, academia and politics that demands our critical attention and scrutiny. Post-­i ng Feminism Before we go on to examine the intricacies and contents of postfeminism, it is essential that we address the semantic confusion surrounding a ‘post-­ing’ of feminism. While the prefix ‘post’ has long been the subject of academic and theoretical analyses (in particular in its expression as postmodernism, poststructuralism and postcolonialism), it has achieved particular notoriety and ferocity ever since it attached itself to the social and political phenomenon that is feminism. The disagreements over and multiplicity of postfeminism’s meaning(s) are to a large extent due to indefiniteness and precariousness of the ‘post’ prefix whose connotations may be complex if not contradictory.1 Proponents and detractors of postfeminism have deliberated over the uses of the prefix and vied for their respective take on how a ‘post-­ing’ of feminism can be effected and understood. What these debates centre on is exactly what this prefixation accomplishes (if anything), what happens to feminist perspectives and goals in the process and what the strange hybrid of ‘post-­feminism’ entails. We choose to omit the hyphen in our spelling of postfeminism in order to avoid any predetermined readings of the term that imply a semantic rift between feminism and postfeminism, instantly casting the latter as a negation and sabotage of the former. Also, by forgoing the hyphen, we seek to credit and endow postfeminism with a certain cultural independence and

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critical history that acknowledges its existence as a conceptual entity and analytical category in its own right. Regardless of our spelling, it is not so much the hyphen but the prefix itself that has been the focus of critical investigations. As Misha Kavka (2002) observes, the question that has ­haunted – ­or enlivened, depending on your point of v­ iew – t­ he discussions can be summarised as ‘how can we make sense of the “post” in “postfeminism” ’ (31). Even though the structure of postfeminism seems to invoke a narrative of progression insisting on a time ‘after’ feminism, the directionality and meaning of the ‘post’ prefix are far from settled. ‘Post’ can be employed to point to a complete rupture, for as Amelia Jones (1990) declares, ‘what is post but the signification of a kind of t­ermination – a­ temporal designation of whatever it prefaces as ended, done with, obsolete’ (8). In this prescriptive sense, postfeminism acquires deadly and even murderous connotations as it proclaims the passing of ­feminism – ­feminism as ‘homeless and groundless’, ‘gone, departed, dead’ (Hawkesworth 2004: 969). For example, this is the case in the numerous obituaries for feminism that have appeared in some political and media quarters, announcing if not the death but at least the redundancy of feminism.2 In this context, postfeminism signals the ‘pastness’ of ­feminism – ­or, at any rate, the end of a particular stage in feminist ­histories – ­and a generational shift in understanding the relationships between men and women and, for that matter, between women themselves. As we will see, postfeminism is often evoked by a generation of younger feminists as indicative of the fact that ‘we are no longer in a second wave of feminism’ (Gillis and Munford 203: 2). This awareness of feminist change has resulted in a number of bitter ownership battles and wrangling, often cast in familial terms as mother–daughter conflicts. This largely pessimistic interpretation is also prominent in early media articulations of postfeminism that link it to anti-­feminist and media-­driven attempts to turn the clock back to pre-­feminist times, fuelled by the conservative governments that defined 1980s Reaganite America and Thatcherite Britain (see Chapter 2). From this point of view, postfeminism can be read as a ‘backlash’ and hence primarily a polemical tool with limited critical and analytical value (see Faludi 1992; Whelehan 2000). However, such readings have been superseded increasingly from the 1990s onwards in favour of more complex accounts that argue for a nuanced understanding of postfeminism that takes into account the term’s diverse entanglements with feminism and other cultural and political theories. Diametrically opposed to the view of ‘post’ as ‘anti’ or ‘after’ is the idea that the prefix denotes a genealogy that entails revision or strong family resemblance. This approach is favoured by advocates of another ‘post’ ­derivative – ­postmodernism – and here, the prefix is understood as part of a process of ongoing transformation. As Steven Best and Douglas Kellner write in their

Postfeminist Contexts 27 analysis of postmodern theory, the ‘post’ signifies ‘a dependence on, a continuity with, that which follows’ (1991: 29). In this sense, the ‘post-­ing’ of feminism does not necessarily imply its rejection and eradication but it means that feminism remains in the postfeminist frame. A third, and perhaps more problematical, interpretation locates the ‘post’ in a precarious middle ground typified by a contradictory dependence on and independence from the term that follows it. This is the viewpoint taken by Linda Hutcheon who detects a paradox at the heart of the ‘post’ whereby ‘it marks neither a simple and radical break . . . nor a straightforward continuity . . . it is both and neither’ (1988: 17). As Gamble (2001) puts it, ‘the prefix “post” does not necessarily always direct us back the way we’ve come’ (44). Instead, its trajectory is bewilderingly uncertain, making it impossible and even redundant to offer a single definition of any ‘post’ expression as this reductive strategy narrows the critical potential, the instructive ambiguity and contradictoriness of the prefix. Adding to this interpretive struggle is the fact that the root of postfeminism, feminism itself, has never had a universally accepted agenda and meaning against which one could measure the benefits and/or failings of its post- offshoot. As Geraldine Harris (1999) emphasises, feminism has never had ‘a single, clearly defined, common ideology’ or been constituted around ‘a political party or a central organization or leaders or an agreed policy or manifesto, or even been based upon an agreed principle of collective action’ (9). At best, feminism can be said to have a number of working definitions that are always relative to particular contexts, specific issues and personal practices. It exists on both local and abstract levels, dealing with specific issues and consisting of diverse individuals while promoting a universal politics of equality for women. Feminists are simultaneously united by their investment in a general concept of justice and fractured by the multiple goals and personal practices that delineate the particular conception of justice to which they aspire. In this way, the assumption that there ­is – ­or ­was – ­a monolith easily (and continuously) identifiable as ‘feminism’ belies its competing understandings, its different social and political programmes sharply separated by issues of race, sexuality, class and other systems of social differentiation. Thus, we cannot simply ‘hark back’ to a past when feminism supposedly had a stable signification and unity, a mythical time prior to ‘the introduction of a ­particular vigorous and invasive weed [postfeminism] into the otherwise healthy garden of feminism’ (Elam 1997: 55). For many feminist media critics in particular, it is postfeminism’s relationship with f­eminism – ­as a critical and political ­paradigm – ­that is paramount and they focus on how, to varying degrees, postfeminist culture incorporates, commodifies, depoliticises and parodies feminist ideas and terminology, resulting in the worst case in an ‘undoing’ and ‘othering’ of feminism. Angela McRobbie (2009) has described

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this discursive process as a ‘double movement’ that takes feminism ‘into account’ only to repudiate it. For us, it is important not to fall into a critical trap that takes for granted the meanings of ‘post’ and ‘feminism’ and instead allow for contradictory and evolving notions of feminism and postfeminism that can coexist at the same moment. As Gill has noted, we need to ‘think together feminism with anti-­ feminism, postfeminism, and revitalized misogyny’ in order to underscore postfeminism’s ‘force’ as an analytical category (2016: 16). Moreover, we would add that we need to consider the possibility that postfeminism now takes itself ‘into account’, demonstrating the ability to self-­critique, rearticulate and interrogate its significations, uses and constituencies for a millennial generation. Indeed, postfeminism has acquired multiple, contested interpretations in its critical ­history – ­from backlash and Girl Power to (neo)liberal feminism and ‘affective’ self-­brand – a­ nd it is inflected differently in different historical, cultural, political and social contexts. Specifically, as we have already discussed, post-­boom postfeminism becomes more strained and turns ‘inward’, attaining a hard edge that is in line with a recessionary era of uncertainty and risk. From this perspective, the attempt to fix the meaning of postfeminism looks futile and even misguided as each articulation is by itself a definitional act that (re) constructs the meaning of (post)feminism and its own relation to it. There is no original or authentic postfeminism that holds the key to its definition. Nor is there a secure and unified origin from which this genuine postfeminism could be fashioned. Instead, we understand postfeminism as a dynamic critical concept capable of adapting to changing historical conditions and bringing to the fore a range of contradictions that continue to speak to and inform current generations of women and men. In particular, we argue that postfeminism has to be assessed dynamically in the relationships and tensions between its various manifestations and contexts. Postfeminism exists as a journalistic buzzword and theoretical stance as well as a more generalised late twentieth-­century ‘atmosphere’ and ‘aura’ – what Gill calls ‘a postfeminist sensibility’ (2007: 254) – that is characterised by a range of entanglements within the social, cultural, political, academic and discursive fields (Mazza 2006: 17). Rather than being tied to a specific epistemological framework, postfeminism emerges in the intersections and hybridisation of mainstream media, consumer brand culture, neoliberal politics, postmodern theory and, significantly, feminism. Due to its inherently ‘impure’ status and multiple origins, postfeminism has often been criticised for its disloyalty and bastardisation, for ‘feeding upon its hosts’ (Dentith 2000: 188). It has been d­ enounced – ­particularly by feminist c­ ritics – ­as a contaminating presence, a parasite charged with infiltration and appropriation. Commentators have often applied a generational logic to discard postfeminism as a corruption and ‘failed reproduction of feminist

Postfeminist Contexts 29 consciousness’, condemning a generation of younger feminists for ‘forgetting their feminist legacies, and in effect not allowing feminist political consciousness to be passed on’ (Adkins 2004: 429–30). A particular point of contention has been postfeminism’s commercial appeal and its consumerist implications that are viewed by many as a ‘selling out’ of feminist principles and their co-­option as a marketing device. Here we can identify distinctive postfeminist strands that connect feminist notions of gendered empowerment and choice with cultural practices of commodification and individualism. This thread also brings postfeminism into close political alliance with neoliberal ideas and tendencies that promote competitive individualism and entrepreneurship in consumer-­citizens. As we will discuss, these ideas and accusations resurface, for instance, in examinations of popular postfeminist ­strands – ­like Girl Power, chick lit and (online) self-­branding – ­that combine an emphasis on feminine fun and female friendship with a celebration of (mostly pink-­coloured) commodities and the creation of a market demographic of (self-­branded) ‘girlies’ and ‘chicks’. The end result of this mainstreaming and c­ ommoditisation – i­t is f­ eared – i­s a ‘free market feminism’ that works ‘through capitalism’ and is ‘based on competitive choices in spite of social conditions being stacked against women as a whole’ (Whelehan 2005: 155). In the most denunciatory accounts, this leads to a perception of postfeminism as a retrogressive, anti-­feminist backlash that retracts and invalidates the gains and social transformations brought on by or through the feminist movement. While we do not wish to deny the importance and relevance of such critiques, we want to counter the assumption of causality that underlies many of these predominantly early investigations and forces postfeminism into a fixed and delimited structure of analysis and definition. The understanding of postfeminism as an unfaithful reproduction of f­eminism – o ­ r, worse, ‘a ritualistic denunciation’ that renders feminism ‘out of date’ (McRobbie 2008b: 258) – is problematic for a number of reasons: it presupposes a distinction between a more ‘authentic’ and unadulterated feminism on the one hand, and a suspect, usually commercialised postfeminism on the other; it assumes that feminist engagements with postfeminism are uniform and it does not take into consideration the range and scope of issues involved in feminist identification; it adopts a one-­dimensional reading of the ‘post’ – and by implication the ‘post-­ing’ of ­feminism – a­ s ‘anti’ feminism; it glosses over some of the overlaps and contradictions that mark postfeminist contexts, thereby foreclosing the interpretative possibilities of postfeminism; it does not allow for an expansive and adaptable postfeminist ethos and new directions across a range of sites, for example in terms of transnational and intersectional perspectives. In this book, we endeavour to present a more nuanced and productive ­interpretation of

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the prefix ‘post’ and its relations to feminism, whereby the compound ‘postfeminism’ is recognised as a junction between a number of often competing discourses and interests. We understand postfeminism’s plurality and ‘impurity’ as symptomatic of a contradiction-­prone late modernity and a changed social/cultural environment characterised by complex discursive and contextual interactions. For example, we are interested in the intersection of feminism with popular/ consumer culture and neoliberal politics and we pose a number of questions propelled by these positionings: What does the category of popular feminism imply? Can feminism be political and popular at the same time? What are the consequences and implications of feminism’s incorporation into neoliberal corporate culture? Has feminism become a ‘handmaiden of neoliberal capitalism’ in its adherence to entrepreneurial forms of individualism (Fraser 2013)? Once feminism has become ‘neoliberalized’ as a commodity, does it still have the power to enforce collective social change? What kind of politics can appear in a ‘representation nation’ where media display is paramount (see Klein 2005)? Likewise, we also investigate the convergence of feminism with a range of anti-­foundationalist ­movements – i­ncluding postmodernism and ­postcolonialism – ­and we examine the identity, gender and agency positions available to individuals in a critical and cultural space that is no longer circumscribed by fixed boundaries and hierarchies and by universalist concepts of truth and ­knowledge – w ­ hat John Fekete (1987) calls the ‘Good-­God-­Gold standards’ (17). In this sense, our discussion of how the prefix ‘post’ affects and modifies feminism also necessarily involves a consideration of contemporary forms of agency and constructions of identity as well as a much wider examination of how we conduct critique, use definitional strategies and analytical structures to (re)present the self and/in society. Here we also point towards the problem of criticality more generally whereby being ‘critical’ might now supply the justification for new forms of inequality and exploitation (see Fraser 2017). As we will discuss in our examination of contemporary articulations of sexism, we might appear to be enlightened and liberal because we are self-­ critical and yet, at the same time, we might also actively reproduce sexist norms and conventions we set out to critique in the first place (see Chapter 6). This need not engender what McRobbie calls an ‘empty space of antagonism’ (2015: 17), but it means that critique needs to start from within and account for the changed terms and nature of operation. In this sense, postfeminism’s frame of reference and genealogy open out to include not ­just – a­ s the term ­suggests – a­ conceptual and semantic bond with feminism but also relations with other social, cultural, theoretical and political a­ reas – ­such as consumer brand culture, popular media and neoliberal ­rhetoric – ­that might be in conflict with feminism. Hence postfeminism is

Postfeminist Contexts 31 not the (­illegitimate) offspring ­of – ­or even a substitute ­for – ­feminism but its origins are much more varied and even incongruous, addressing the paradoxes of a late twentieth- and early twenty-­first-­century setting in which feminist concerns have entered the mainstream and are articulated in politically contradictory ways. In what follows, we seek to locate postfeminism contextually in order to circumscribe a postfeminist landscape made up of an array of relationships and connections within social, cultural, academic and political arenas. Within these contexts, postfeminism acquires diverse and sometimes contradictory ­meanings – f­or example, it is often assumed that postfeminism as a descriptive popular category is conceptually inferior to and more conservative than theoretical versions associated with a postmodern challenge to identity politics.3 While we examine the intricacies of these postfeminist sites, we also argue against the establishment of separate and detached postfeminist versions and locations (academia and media) that runs the risk of recreating the artificial partition between the academic ivory tower and popular culture. As Stéphanie Genz (2006) argues, ‘this distinction signals an unwillingness to engage with postfeminist plurality and is viable only as a disclaimer to ensure that postfeminism remains easily categorized and contained in well-­defined boxes’ (336). The fact that postfeminism cannot be delimited in this way and defined with a clear sense of finality and certainty points towards its interdiscursivity and intercontextuality that inevitably take the form of boundary-­crossing. Patricia Mann (1994) offers a useful description by identifying postfeminism as a ‘frontier discourse’ that ‘bring[s] us to the edge of what we know, and encourages us to go beyond’: ‘Postfeminism is a cultural frontier resulting from the breakdown of previous social organizing structures that continue to exist only in various states of disarray’ (208). For Mann, taking up a postfeminist position is a precarious, risky task that seeks to capture the changing quality of our social, cultural and political experiences in the context of the more general process of women’s social enfranchisement (114). Postfeminism comes to be seen as a ‘fertile site of risk’ that transcends the confines of a feminist audience and admits a ‘bricolage of competing and conflicting forms of agency’ and ‘multiple subject positions’ (207, 31, 171). In the following chapters, we will elaborate on and discuss this notion of postfeminist agency in popular, theoretical and political terms and we will describe various embodiments of the ‘unmoored’ postfeminist ­subject – ­from the hybrid form of the ‘postfeminist man’ who blends metrosexual appeal with sexist laddishness to the ‘gendered micro-­politics’ of the neoliberal entrepreneur (1). Our usage and understanding of postfeminism are less motivated by an attempt to determine and fix its meaning than by an effort to acknowledge its plurality and liminality. We believe that postfeminism is a more complex

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and productive concept than many of its common usages suggest. For us, the problem surrounding postfeminism is not so much to choose between its various appropriations and impose a ‘tick list’ that approves or invalidates certain postfeminist strands. Rather, we endeavour to provide a more expanded and nuanced analysis of the ‘post-­ing’ of feminism that allows for polysemy or multiple meanings. Postfeminism is not a ‘new feminism’ in the sense that it represents something radically revolutionary and ground-­ breaking – ­indeed, we will later discuss the notion of ‘new feminism’ that has been employed by a number of writers to describe the state of contemporary feminisms and is often dependent on a consumerist and individualist logic. Our intention here is not to argue the case of postfeminism as either a new utopia or the trap of nostalgia, but to discover a postfeminist liminality that ‘moves us from the exclusionary logic of either/or to the inclusionary logic of both/and’ (Rutland 1999: 74). Postfeminism is both retro- and neo- in its outlook and hence irrevocably post-. It is neither a simple rebirth of feminism nor a straightforward abortion (excuse the imagery) but a complex resignification that harbours within itself the threat of backlash as well as the potential for innovation.4 We have witnessed postfeminism’s adaptability and self-­reflexivity most recently in its shift from a boom model that emphasises ‘choice’ and the freedom to consume and self-­ fashion, to a recessionary ‘bust’ postfeminist stance that retains the commitment to consumption but in a pragmatic, pared-­down and downsized format that takes issue with the extravagant and ‘irresponsible’ spending of the Noughties’ ‘bubble culture’. This double movement and flexibility expose the difficulty of attributing a meaning to postfeminism and containing it within a definitional straitjacket; a futile endeavour in our view that ultimately serves only as a critical shortcut. It is important for us to avoid this definitional trap that might supply us with appealing conclusions and neat answers at the expense of more complex and thought-­provoking questions. At the same time, our acknowledgement of postfeminist multiplicity and liminality does not imply that we are unaware of or forgetful about postfeminism’s limitations and demarcations. Among critics, a thorny issue has been the obvious restrictions and exclusions of postfeminist subjectivity in identity terms of class, age, race and sexuality as well as in relation to political and economic positioning. Many postfeminist expressions that we address in this book undoubtedly arise in a late twentieth-­century Western context characterised by the proliferation of media images and communication technologies and a neoliberal, consumerist ideology that replaces collective, activist politics with more individualistic assertions of (consumer) choice and self-­rule. In today’s consumer culture, the notion of freedom is often directly tied to the ability to purchase, with people’s agency premised upon and enabled by the

Postfeminist Contexts 33 consumption of products and services. Here economic independence and entrepreneurial spirit are key to empowerment, and subjectivity is organised around consumption and individualism as chief indicators. Contemporary brand culture further extends this neoliberal, corporate ­logic – ­whereby the individual is at once ‘responsibilised and entrepreneurised’ (Chen 2013: 444) – into modes of self-­branding and self-­promotion that connect ­affect – w ­ hat Banet-­Weiser (2012) calls ‘the stuff of identity’ (49) – with market rationale and profit-­seeking. Moreover, postfeminism has also been criticised for its exclusions in terms of class, age, race and (to some extent) sexuality whereby the ideal postfeminist subject is seen to be a White, middle-­class, heterosexual girl.5 Quoting bell hooks’s precept that ‘feminism is for everybody’, Yvonne Tasker and Diane Negra (2007) suggest that ‘postfeminism is in many ways antithetical to the notion of an open society in which all members are valued in accordance with their distinct identities’ (2). By contrast, we do not ascribe to this idea of a ‘closed’ postfeminism and we purposefully introduce theories and case studies that transcend the limits of White, adolescent, heterosexual and middle-­class femininity. We are equally interested in the categories of the postfeminist man and cyborg, queer and ethnic variations of postfeminism, and politicised interpretations of it. Indeed, as we have already mentioned, recent investigations have focused on postfeminism’s transnational and intersectional dimensions that situate it in non-­Western cultural contexts in order to examine how it ‘interpellates not only women in the West but also others elsewhere’ (Dosekun 2015: 960). In addition, we now also need to consider ‘bust’ postfeminism’s revised take on entrepreneurial feminine i­dentity – w ­ hat Michelle Lazar (2009) labels ‘entitled femininity’ – which in a recessionary context complicates or even invalidates postfeminist subjects’ entitlement to amuse themselves through shopping, to ‘take care and pamper themselves, enjoy autonomous sensual pleasure, and have access to an exclusive public space’ (380). We do not presume that our examination of postfeminism is all-­ encompassing and we do not at any rate expect to deliver the final answer to the contemporary postfeminist conundrum. Importantly, this book does not provide a sociological investigation and here we point readers towards recent work that has examined how postfeminism functions across a range of markers of differentiation and diversity (see, for example, Jess Butler 2013; Dolan and Tincknell 2012; Kapur 2012; Salmenniemi and Adamson 2014). Let us assure you as well that our analysis is not intended as an attack on feminism and its important fight for women’s emancipation and social equality.6 In our eyes, postfeminism cannot be understood as an alternative to feminism and its social and political agenda. Postfeminism does not exist in this bounded and organised form as a political and social movement and its origins are more

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impure, emerging in and from a number of contexts (academia, media and consumer/brand culture, neoliberal politics) that have been influenced by feminist concerns and women’s enfranchisement. At this point, it is also worth remembering that, as Nancy Whittier (1995) reminds us, the ‘postfeminist generation is not a homogeneous, unified group’ (228). While ­postfeminism – ­in its current late twentieth- and twenty-­first-­century ­manifestation – ­might still be considered an emergent critical concept, it has had over thirty years to solidify into an analytical category and develop a critical history in its own right that spans the backlash years of the 1980s, the ‘Third Way’ 1990s and the uncertain, post-­9/11 and recessionary years of the new millennium. Some of the postfeminist texts and theories that we discuss can undeniably be considered conservative, retrogressive and even anti-­feminist while others hold the potential for innovation and progress. Moreover, the relative interests of postfeminism might be shifting in response to changed social, economic and political contexts, for example by taking on board recessionary anxieties and undergoing an affective change that problematises earlier, more celebratory versions. What makes the postfeminist phenomenon so conflict-­ridden but also compelling and resilient is precisely that it does not conform to our ­definitional frameworks and our preconceptions of where the ­boundaries of academia, politics and popular/consumer culture should lie. As Sarah Projansky (2007) has observed, ‘postfeminism is by definition contradictory, simultaneously feminist and antifeminist, liberating and repressive, productive and obstructive of progressive social change’ (68). Whether critics see feminism or anti-­feminism as more dominant, she continues, is in the end ‘a matter of interpretation and degree’. We want to go a step further by positioning postfeminism not just in relation to (and against) feminism but also by contextualising it in consumer/brand culture, academia and politics. In this way, we hope to trace a genealogy of postfeminism that explores its pluralistic constructions, locations and meanings, its overlapping understandings and paradoxical critical practice. The ‘post-­ing’ of feminism thus posits a challenge to cultural critics to investigate the inescapable levels of contradiction and diverse points of identification and agency we are confronted with in late modern Western societies. At the same time, the postfeminist phenomenon also demands that we interrogate and possibly reimagine how we carry out critique, apply analytical frameworks and draw conclusions in a contemporary context that defies the logic of non-­contradiction. Feminist Roots and Postfeminist Origins We begin by looking in more detail at the intersections of feminism and postfeminism and by situating the latter in relation to earlier/other forms of femi-

Postfeminist Contexts 35 nism. In order to unravel the interpretive openness and the multifaceted nature of postfeminism, the interconnections between ‘post’ and ‘feminism’, prefix and root, have to be examined. The relationships between feminist and postfeminist discourses are multiple and varied. Confusion rules as post­feminism is variously identified or associated with an anti-­feminist backlash, pro-­feminist third wave, Girl Power dismissive of feminist politics, trendy me-­first power feminism, self-­branded celebrity feminism; corporate/neoliberal feminism and academic postmodern feminism. There seems to be a simultaneous denial, use and misuse of feminism, an unscrupulous embrace of contradiction and ambiguity that negotiates areas of tension that, we maintain, can be used p­ roductively within critical practice and theory. In effect, as Meredith Nash and Ruby Grant (2015) have recently observed, ‘feminist engagement with post-­feminism is multiple and shifting and . . . the breadth of issues involved in feminist identification is much broader and complex in the current moment’ (988). Even though postfeminism became concretised as a cultural phenomenon and critical concept in the late twentieth century, we should note that its first reference appeared much earlier, at the beginning of the century, after the vote for women had been gained by the suffrage movement. As Nancy Cott writes in The Grounding of Modern Feminism (1987), Already in 1919 a group of female literary radicals in Greenwich Village . . . had founded a new journal on the thinking, ‘we’re interested in people ­now – n ­ ot in men and women’. They declared that moral, social, economic, and political standards ‘should not have anything to do with sex’, promised to be ‘pro-­woman without being anti-­man’, and called their stance ‘postfeminist’. (282) This initial mention of postfeminism relied on the supposed success and achievements of the ‘first wave’ of the feminist movement that culminated with women’s suffrage, whereby the ‘post’ is understood in evolutionary terms as a progression of feminist ideas.7 Yet, it is fair to say that this early twentieth-­ century manifestation of postfeminism did not materialise or develop in any specific and tangible ­ways – c­ ut short by important historical developments such as the outbreaks of both First and Second World W ­ ars – ­and it was not until the early 1980s that the next significant appearance of postfeminism occurred. This time, it was the popular press that brought back postfeminism into the cultural limelight where it was mostly discussed as exemplary of a reaction against second-­wave feminism and its collective, activist politics.8 ­Postfeminism – denoting in this case post-­second w ­ ave – ­came to signal a generational shift in feminist thinking and in understanding social relations between men and women, beyond traditional feminist politics and its supposed threat to heterosexual relationships.9

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Approached in this way, postfeminism could be interpreted as a cyclical process of feminist ­rejuvenation – e­merging after momentous and organised stages (or ‘waves’) of feminist activism and p­ olitics – a­ nd be discussed as ‘postrevolutionary’ in its shift away from collectivist mobilisation that characterised both first and second waves of feminism (Stacey 1986: 8). As Julie Ewington (1994) suggests, ‘it is not feminism that we are “post” but one historical phase of feminist politics’ (119). Postfeminism encourages feminism to develop an understanding of its own historicity, ‘an account of its own temporality that does not simply mimic the modernist grand narrative of progress’ (67). It attributes a historical specificity to second-­wave feminism, for, as Charlotte Brunsdon (1997) asks, ‘why should 1970s feminism have a copyright on feminism?’ (101). In this chronological sense, the term ‘postfeminism’ is employed to describe a critical position in relation to the feminism of women’s liberation, signifying both the achievements of and challenges for modern feminist politics. Postfeminism’s interrogative stance could thus be read as a healthy rewriting of feminism, a sign that the women’s movement is continuously in process, transforming and changing itself. This is what Ann Brooks (1997) implies in her rearticulation of postfeminism as ‘feminism’s “coming of age”, its maturity into a confident body of theory and politics, representing pluralism and difference’ (1).10 Feminism has undoubtedly gone through a range of significant changes since its second-­wave heyday in the 1960s and 1970s: conceptual transformations ‘from debates around equality to a focus on debates around difference’; a shift away from collective, activist politics; an increasing mainstreaming and corporatisation of feminism; and the appearance of a new generation of women who redefine the movement’s goals and identity (Brooks 1997: 4). These intergenerational relations are characterised by connection but also, necessarily, discontinuity and discrepancy as young women becoming conscious of feminism post-­1970s are embedded in an altered social, cultural and political context and climate. Nancy Whittier (1995) explains that ‘just as the links between political generations grow from structural and social relations . . . so, too, are the differences grounded in the changing social structures and cultural contexts that organize the lives of women at different times’ (235–6). Not surprisingly, Whittier adds, this ‘postfeminist generation’ has different experiences and outlooks than ‘longtime feminists’ who ‘acquired a sense of the world and themselves in a different era’ (226). Moreover, for a millennial generation, some early versions of postfeminism itself can now appear outdated and out of touch, and therefore in need of revision and rearticulation. Importantly, for a post-­1970s generation of women/feminists, feminism exists not o ­ nly – ­or, indeed, some might argue, l­ess – ­as a political and social movement but also as a distinct identity position or, worse, a stereotype,

Postfeminist Contexts 37 most vividly expressed in the iconic figure of the humourless and drab ‘bra-­ burner’. As we will discuss shortly, this negative representation of feminism can be attributed both to an unsympathetic mass ­media – ­which has propagated images of the bra-­burning, mannish and fanatic feminist for a long time11 – as well as radical feminism’s own rejection of femininity and beauty practices. Many women coming of age in a post-­second-­wave environment have reacted against the image of ‘the women’s libber’, which they perceive as inadequate and restrictive, and they have adopted ­postfeminism – ­in particular those postfeminist strands (like Girl Power) that embrace femininity/sexuality as an expression of female agency and self-­determination – ­as it ‘appears not only as more rewarding but also as a lot more fun’ (Budgeon 1994: 60). In these circumstances, postfeminism comes to be seen as ‘the new and improved mind of feminism’, a feminism fit for the new millennium, whereas 1970s second-­ wave feminism is described as ‘embarrassingly out of touch’, ‘no longer moving, no longer valid, no longer relevant’ (Cacoullos 2001: 80). Unsurprisingly, perhaps, such evaluations of postfeminism as the new ‘improved’ feminism free from the dictates of the second-­wave motherhood were short lived, as a range of critics started to undo the ‘illusions of postfeminism’ (Coppock et al. 1995). As Lynne Alice (1995) notes, the ‘inflammatory myth of new beginnings and revisionings’ disguises the fact that postfeminism can ‘operate like a chimera, or perhaps even a conceit’, misrepresenting and undermining feminist politics and reducing all ­feminisms – ­and their long and diverse ­histories – ­to a caricaturised version of 1970s feminism (26). In some critical investigations, the ‘post-­ing’ of feminism is denounced as an invasion of the feminist body and a vicious attempt to debilitate and sabotage the women’s movement. In particular, this is the case in examinations and critiques of 1980s backlash culture that turns feminism into a ‘dirty word’ associated with a number of female crises and predicaments, from work-­induced stress and loneliness to insanity and psychosis. In this book, we suggest that postfeminism’s appropriation of feminism is more complex and subtle than a simple rewriting or modernisation and it can harbour anti-­ feminism, misogyny and sexism (albeit in a liberal guise). In its various manifestations, postfeminism exhibits a number of relations to feminism ranging from complacency to hostility, admiration to repudiation. In its most denunciatory expressions, postfeminism clearly misreads and classifies feminism as a monolithic movement that is archaic, binaristic and unproductive for the experiences of contemporary women. In order to position themselves against a supposedly unified and old-­fashioned feminist entity, some postfeminist strands and texts end up distorting and reducing feminism’s diversity. Other postfeminist versions celebrate and reinforce their connections with earlier forms of feminism and open up ‘the possibilities of finding and understanding

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feminisms in places and in ways very different from . . . that earlier period’ (Braithwaite 2004: 27). From this perspective, postfeminism is indicative of a broadening of feminist issues and areas of ­interest – ­in Kavka’s (2002) words, postfeminism provides ‘a focal point for articulating the meaning . . . and constituencies of feminism today’ (29). In effect, we argue that the entanglements of feminism and postfeminism are multiple and diverse a­nd – ­as a debating ­couple – ­they should not be viewed reductively in opposition, nor in terms of a linear progression. In our understanding, feminist and postfeminist stances are allied and entwined, creating a dynamic and multifaceted context that is made up of various standpoints and theories.12 However, these interconnections have often been overlooked and passed over in many critical studies in an attempt to establish two different and easily categorised positions. Much pro- and contra-­postfeminist rhetoric relies on a reductive binary structure in order to conjure up a pole of negativity against which postfeminism can be defined and lay bare the faults of feminist orthodoxy; or, alternatively, reminisce nostalgically about a mythical feminist past characterised by a homogeneous and unified women’s movement. Jane Kalbfleisch’s (1997) discussion of the feminism–postfeminism coupling is instructive in this respect as she analyses a number of rhetorical positions that underlie different articulations of postfeminism and render ­abstract – ­and almost ­nonexistent – ­the potential for overlap, the ambiguity between the two groups and the possibility of conflict within each one. Kalbfleisch describes how the ‘rhetoric of opposition’ effects a polarisation of feminism and postfeminism that is based on the assumption that the two are fully distinguishable and distinct. In this sense, ‘postfeminist’ denotes a non-­ feminist stance that can be read as a term of negation. This rupture can be interpreted positively as liberation from old and constraining conditions and an affirmation of new developments; or, it can be read as a deplorable regression and a loss of traditional values and certainties. The rhetoric of opposition thus takes the form of both anti- and pro-­postfeminism, either rejecting the term as an opportunistic move on the part of patriarchy or embracing it and thereby denouncing earlier feminist movements. Prominent in the 1990s, the pro-­postfeminist faction encompasses a group of (then) young women who appear to speak from somewhere outside and above feminism. The term ‘postfeminism’ is used to suggest that the project of feminism has ended, either because it has been completed or because it has failed and is no longer valid. The most prominent advocates of this s­ tandpoint – ­Naomi Wolf, Katie Roiphe, Natasha Walter and Rene D ­ enfeld – ­support an individualistic and liberal agenda that relies on a mantra of choice and assumes that the political demands of first- and second-­wave feminism have now been met (enfranchisement, equal pay, sexual liberation, etc.).13 It is

Postfeminist Contexts 39 argued that ‘all ha[s] been achieved, in fact over-­achieved’ to the extent that ‘feminism has . . . become irrelevant to the lives of young women today’ (Coppock et al. 1995: 3; Sonnet 1999: 170). Accordingly, Rene Denfeld starts her book The New Victorians (1995) with the observation that ‘[f]or women of my generation, feminism is our birthright. . . . We know what it is to live without excessive confinement. We are the first generation to grow up expecting equal opportunity and equal education, as well as the freedom to express our sexuality’ (2). Denfeld defines feminism as the ‘New Victorianism’ that ‘has become as confining as what it pretends to combat’ and it is totalitarian and inflexible in its upholding of views that are reminiscent of those of an earlier age (2, 5). The implicit assumption is that feminism no longer needs to be enforced politically as it is now up to individual women and their personal choices to reinforce those fundamental societal changes. In this case, the meaning of ‘post-’ becomes equivalent to both ‘anti’ and ‘after’: ‘postfeminism is that which both comes after and rejects . . . earlier ­feminism – ­it is the successor “feminism” to a now surpassed, and now unnecessary, prior feminism’ (Braithwaite 2004: 24). While Denfeld’s account relies on a dualistic and hierarchical narrative structure that, as Deborah L. Siegel (1997b) notes, might be summarised as ‘Down with the “bad” feminism and up with the good!’ (67), o ­ ther – ­perhaps less a­ ntagonistic – ­descriptions highlight a generational divide between second-­ wave mothers and postfeminist daughters. As Rebecca W ­ alker – ­daughter of Alice, the author of The Color Purple – notes in her introduction to the anthology To Be Real: Telling the Truth and Changing the Face of Feminism (1995a): Young women coming of age today wrestle with the term [feminist] because we have a very different vantage point on the world than that of our foremothers. . . . For many of us it seems that to be a feminist in the way that we have seen and understood feminism is to conform to an identity and way of living that doesn’t allow for individuality, complexity, or less than perfect personal histories. We fear that the identity will dictate and regulate our lives, instantaneously pitting us against someone, forcing us to choose inflexible and unchanging sides, female against male, black against white, oppressed against oppressor, good against bad. (xxxiii) A critical as well as temporal distance is established between the ‘new feminists’ – who discard what they see as uptight, establishment feminism (or, in some cases, ‘victim feminism’) in favour of ambiguity and d­ ifference – ­and the ‘old’ second wavers who hold on to a dated, old-­guard and rigid feminism. As Imelda Whelehan (2005) explains this generational conflict: the daughters ‘want to point out to these feminist mothers that the world has changed quite

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considerably since they were young feminists. . . . [W]hen it comes to feminism . . . young women assuredly do not want the “rules” perceived to be handed down from the motherhood’ (168, 179–80). Here, the persona of the second wave feminist appears as a historical figure whose time has now passed, a ‘rather unpleasant gatekeeper to the secrets of political freedom’ (180) – or, as McRobbie (2003) puts it, ‘a psychic policewoman, disallowing girls from the pleasure of imaging the pleasures of pre-­feminist womanhood’ (135). This familial logic is common among both a range of ‘new feminists’ who want to reframe and reanimate feminism with twenty-­first-­century meaning, relevance and, above all, sex appeal and a ‘third wave’ of feminists who do not necessarily reject their second-­wave mothers but insist on accommodating contradictions and diversity.14 In ­response – a­ nd very much on the anti-­postfeminist side of the d­ ivide – ­the feminist ‘foremothers’ attacked their ‘daughters’ for their historical amnesia and misappropriations of the feminist/familial legacy. According to Lynne Segal (2003), this new breed of feminists ‘were able to launch themselves and court media via scathing attacks on other feminists’ – even worse, this kind of feminism has been ‘appropriated by a managerial elite’ that works in the service of neoliberal values and is ‘eager to roll back welfare for workfare’ (152). Segal declares that by the 1990s the radical spirit of feminist politics had waned and there was ‘a kind of cultural forgetting of the intellectual legacies of feminism’, even as ‘its more radical residue lingers for those who wish to find it’ (Adkins 2004: 428; Segal 2003: 152). These anti-­postfeminist critics define postfeminism as a sexist, politically conservative and media-­ inspired ploy that guts the underlying principles of the feminist movement and transforms its collective activist agenda into an individualistic matter of self-­interest. As we will discuss in our section on ‘postfeminism in politics’, these concerns resurface in connection with neoliberal feminism more generally, which is informed by market rationality and embraces a new type of ‘feminist’ subject who ‘provides for her own self-­care, which entails calculation, initiative and innovation’ (Rottenberg 2013: 427). In line with this viewpoint, the advent of postfeminism has engendered not the eradication of sexism and inequality but their transformation into a more indirect and insidious form. In effect, we are now confronted with the possibility of an ‘enlightened sexism’ that draws on ‘embedded feminism’ to resurrect sexist stereotypes (Douglas 2010: 9; see Chapter 6). Postfeminism is depicted as ‘a hegemonic negotiation of second-­ wave ideals’, ‘working with “patriarchal” theory’ and employing feminist notions of equality and agency for non-­feminist goals (Dow 1996: 88; Toro 1999: 16). In this vein, Susan Douglas (2010) summarily rejects postfeminism because the term ‘suggests that somehow feminism is at the root of this when it isn’­t – i­t’s good, old-­fashioned, grade-­A sexism that reinforces good,

Postfeminist Contexts 41 old-­fashioned, grade-­A patriarchy’ (10). In particular, the popular media is criticised for co-­opting feminism’s language of choice and empowerment and selling women an illusion of progress that ends up subjugating and oppressing them even further and on more unconscious levels. This stance was taken up early on by the American journalist Susan Faludi who portrays postfeminism as a devastating reaction against the ground gained by the second wave and implicates the work of younger feminists (Wolf, Roiphe, etc.) in a backlash against feminism. Quoting an article from The Guardian, Faludi (1992) is resolute that ‘post-­feminism is the backlash. Any movement or philosophy which defines itself as post whatever came before is bound to be reactive. In most cases it is also reactionary’ (15). Rather than being a full-­blown attack on feminism, ‘[t]he backlash is at once sophisticated and banal, deceptively “progressive” and proudly backward’ (12). It does not refuse women’s rights and equality outright but redefines them in terms of a liberal individualist politics that centres around lifestyle choices and personal consumer pleasures. In this instance, the prefix ‘post-’ occupies an uneasy position suggesting an invasion and appropriation, a ‘parasite riding on the back of the original movement which benefits from the ground it has won but uses this for its own means’ (Kastelein 1994: 5). As Ann Braithwaite (2004) describes this process, ‘feminism is “written in” precisely so it can be “written out”; it is included and excluded, acknowledged and paid tribute to, and accepted and refuted, all at the same time’ (25). In a similar manner, McRobbie (2004b) uses the phrase ‘taken into accountness’ to illustrate ‘the co-­existence of feminism as at some level transformed into a form of Gramscian common sense, while also fiercely repudiated, indeed almost hated’ (256). Ultimately, however, we are advised to be suspicious of this ‘undoing of feminism’ that precisely appears to participate in an inclusion of feminist ideologies only to commodify, invalidate and repudiate feminist critiques (see McRobbie 2004a). As Tania Modleski (1991) insists, ‘texts . . . in proclaiming . . . the advent of postfeminism, are actually engaged in negating the critiques and undermining the goals of feminism, in effect, delivering us back into a prefeminist world’ (3). In what follows, we will discuss in more detail these notions of appropriation, incorporation and commoditisation that underlie many articulations and assessments of mostly popular forms of postfeminism. Here, we will also need to examine feminism’s growing corporatisation more ­broadly – ­that aligns it closely with a neoliberal ­ethos – a­s well as account for its seeming ‘rehabilitation’ and ‘visibility’ particularly in a post-­recession context (see Gill 2016; McRobbie 2015). While the complicated entanglements and engagements of feminism(s) and postfeminism will be explored later on, what interests us at this stage is the rhetoric of opposition deployed by both pro- and

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anti‑postfeminist camps that presents their relationship as mutually exclusive and incompatible. This either/or formulation implies that only one term can subsist by obliterating the other: postfeminism can only exist to the exclusion of feminism, and feminism can only exist to the exclusion of postfeminism. Rather than situating feminism and postfeminism antithetically, the second rhetorical position that Kalbfleisch (1997) identifies, ‘the rhetoric of inclusion’, relies on a polarisation of a different kind to eradicate the overlap between feminism and postfeminism. In this case, postfeminism is pitted against some ‘Other’ (for example postmodernism and poststructuralism) in a move that allows for the presumed commonalities among feminists and postfeminists while effectively erasing their potential differences (258). The rhetoric of inclusion displaces the polarisations from within the (post)feminist coupling to the relationships of (post)feminism and other discursive frameworks. The critical tension between feminism and postfeminism is defused in this way as the two terms are conflated into one and incorporated into another discursive project. Academic circles in particular have adopted this theoretical approach, discussing postfeminism as ‘a pluralistic epistemology dedicated to disrupting universalising patterns of thought, and thus, capable of being aligned with postmodernism, poststructuralism and postcolonialism’ (Gamble 2001: 50). As Keith Green and Jill LeBihan (1996) note, postfeminism marks ‘the involvement of feminism with other “post” discourses’ and addresses ‘one of the most pressing current concerns for academic feminism’: ‘the question of what to do with “post” discourses’ (253–4). Within academia, postfeminism is defined as the outcome of feminism’s intersection with these anti-­foundationalist movements whereby the ‘post-­ing’ is seen to denote a shift in feminist thinking and, specifically, in the way in which ‘woman’ as the subject of feminism is conceptualised. Postfeminism is employed as a theoretical or philosophical term that relates to the problematic search for a unifying cause of and common solution to women’s subordination and a rejection of the assumption that feminism is based on a unified subjectivity, a universal sisterhood. There is no shortage of debate on these diverse ‘post’ derivatives and the interactions of feminism with postmodernism especially are fraught with difficulties, with the problem of subjectivity as the point of contention and division. Indeed, we will later discuss the intricacies of a postmodern feminism that attempts to combine anti-­foundationalist theories that emphasise ‘the death of the subject’ with a collective understanding of a feminist ‘we’. While we do not deny the importance of these ‘Other’ discourses for the development of the postfeminist venture, we are also mindful of the fact that a purely academic conception of postfeminism is insufficient and inadequate. The absorption of postfeminism into postmodernist cultural critique runs the risk of repressing its importance in other domains, specifically its place in

Postfeminist Contexts 43 the public debate on feminism and the modern woman, and its resurgence in neoliberal rhetoric that promotes the entrepreneurial consumer-­citizen.15 In our understanding, postfeminism exists as a descriptive popular category, an academic theoretical tendency as well as a political phenomenon and brand strategy prevalent in late modern, Western capitalist societies and, even within these situated contexts, it does not necessarily aim for coherence. We argue against a bifurcation of postfeminism that splits it into a number of distinct, disconnected and competing ­strands – ­almost as if the term was leading separate lives in popular/consumer culture, academia and politics.16 This not only leads to oversimplified postfeminist meanings but also denies the overlaps between these postfeminist contexts as well as the possibilities inherent in the (post)feminist coupling.17 Ultimately, postfeminism’s complexities cannot be explained by oppositional nor inclusive rhetorical stances. Adopting Kalbfleisch’s (1997) terminology, we seek to interpret postfeminism through the lens of a ‘rhetoric of anxiety’ that foregrounds ‘conflict, contradiction and ambiguity’ (259). We want to rearticulate the questions of ownership and definition that have ­dominated – a­nd at times ­hampered – ­examinations and critiques of postfeminism and adopt a contextual and genealogical approach that highlights postfeminism’s multiplicity and intersections. Rather than polarising specific sites/strands of postfeminism, we retain the idea of a multifaceted and shifting postfeminist landscape that crosses the boundaries between popular/consumer culture, academia and politics. Our objective is not so much to establish and fix the meaning of postfeminism than it is to explore the postfeminist ‘frontier’ and the ongoing struggle over its contents. In this sense, we agree with Ien Ang (1996) that ‘critical research’ cannot be built around a ‘fixed, universal yardstick’ and should not ‘allow itself to rest easily on pre-­existent epistemological foundations’ (37). In the following sections, we will situate postfeminism contextually in order to avoid the pitfalls of reductive strategies of definition and we will investigate the emergence of late twentieth-­century ­postfeminism – ­as well as its twenty-­first-­century recessionary ­manifestation – ­in a number of cultural, consumer, theoretical and political sites. Postfeminism in Popular Culture The existence of postfeminism as a cultural media phenomenon is undisputed; after all, it was the popular press that resurrected the term in the 1980s in order to indicate a shift ­from – ­and at times also enact a ritualistic denunciation ­of – ­second-­wave feminism. Since then, the term ‘postfeminism’ has been used widely in popular culture, in particular as a descriptive marker for a range of female characters, from the 1990s emblematic figures of Bridget Jones and the

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Spice ­Girls – w ­ ho now have been elevated to the status of postfeminist c­ anon – ­to self-­branded reality stars like Kim Kardashian. Yet, the resolutely popular character of postfeminism has often been criticised for somehow lessening its analytical potential and undermining more thorough and systematic social and academic movements. As Tasker and Negra (2007) note, postfeminism (as a popular idiom) has been ‘generated and primarily deployed outside the academy, [and therefore] lack[s] the rigor we expect of scholarly work’ (19). For them, postfeminism is by definition ‘middle of the road, middle-­class’ and it is particularly treacherous in its ‘pervasive insistence on the bleakness and redundancy of feminism’. In fact, ‘postfeminist culture works . . . to incorporate, assume, or naturalize aspects of feminism; crucially it also works to commodify feminism’ (2). The merits of such a popular postfeminist position are rather limited for – ‘as we might expect of a popular mode’ – postfeminism rejects ‘the supposed difficulty of feminism, its rigidity and propensity to take things “too far” ’ (19). Several points are noteworthy here: Tasker and Negra not only locate postfeminism within the popular realm but they also infer a value judgement that belies both the complexities of postfeminism and popular culture; they uphold a dualistic conception of feminism and academia on the one ­hand – a­ s more effective and ‘rigorous’ sites of c­ riticism – a­ nd postfeminism and popular culture on the other; from this perspective, the negotiation of feminism with the popular has to be considered with the utmost c­ aution – a­s Tasker and Negra write, ‘our responsibility as feminist critics is to approach the popular with a sceptical eye’ (21). This perception of postfeminism is common among a number of (mostly feminist) critics who view the exchanges of feminism and popular culture not only with scepticism but sometimes even with hostility. Consequently, the media-­friendly postfeminist stance is interpreted as an abatement and depoliticisation of the feminist movement whereby feminism’s entry into the popular is represented as a damaging attempt to manage and contain the revolutionary potential of the feminist enterprise. In this process of co-­option, feminism has supposedly been made safe while its more attractive elements and terminology of liberation and emancipation have been preserved and accommodated.18 As Joanne Hollows and Rachel Moseley (2006) comment, ‘[f]rom such a position, popular feminism is feminism tamed and divested of its radical meaning’ (10). In effect, postfeminism has often been discussed in these circumstances as emblematic of the debates surrounding the relationship between feminism and popular culture and the viability of the category of ‘popular feminism’. As many contemporary commentators have acknowledged, feminism is now part of the cultural field and its meanings are increasingly mediated. Hollows and Moseley (2006), for example, note that ‘most people become conscious of

Postfeminist Contexts 45 feminism through the way it is represented in popular culture’ and ‘for many women of our generation, formative understandings of, and identifications with, feminist ideas have been almost exclusively within popular culture’ (2). Similarly, in her attempt to settle the question ‘what is feminism?’ Rosalind Delmar (1986) proposes that ‘it is, in practice, impossible to discuss feminism without discussing the image of feminism and feminists’ (8). Delmar’s comment points to the practical impossibility of experiencing and identifying an authentic feminism, unadulterated by the often-­conservative forces of cultural representation. In this way, ‘feminism is never available in some pure or unmediated form’ and instead, our understanding of feminism is filtered through the media, forming and shaping our ideas of what it means to be a feminist (Moseley and Read 2002: 234). As a result, feminist discourses cannot be comprehended as simply being outside and independent critical voices as they are part of a global-­based media landscape. In other words, popular culture comes to be seen as a critical location for the constitution of the meanings of feminism, a site on, through and against which the contents and significations of feminism are produced and understood (Moseley and Read 2002; Brunsdon 1997). This engenders many different explanations and discussions about incorporation and recuperation while also prompting other questions about the nature of the media itself and the role of the feminist cultural critic. In her book Gender and the Media (2007), Rosalind Gill asks whether the media have been ‘transformed by feminism’ and ‘­become – ­in significant ­ways – f­eminist’ (41). She also debates the function and responsibilities of feminist critics who can either celebrate women’s choices, look for strands of resistance or formulate alternative representational strategies. As Gill rightly says, in an increasingly diverse media culture saturated by information and communication technologies, ‘the “obviousness” of what it means to do feminist intellectual work breaks down’ and we are left with a ‘messy contradictoriness’, a clear sign that gender relations and media ­representations – ­as well as the feminist frameworks used to understand and critique ­them – ­are constantly changing in contemporary Western societies (22, 2). However, even if, as Gill says, ‘most feminism in the West now happens in the media’, this does not imply that the idea of ‘feminism in popular culture’ – to borrow Hollows and Moseley’s title of their collection of ­essays – i­s clear and uncontested (40). Quite the contrary, what happens to feminism within the ­popular – a­ nd how popular culture reacts to the mainstreaming of ­feminism – ­has been a major concern of feminist critics ever since the second wave’s prime in the 1960s. While contemporary accounts of popular feminism have frequently oversimplified the interconnections between feminism and the media and the complex ways in which feminism and the feminist have been envisaged within popular culture, the early days

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of second-­wave f­eminism were characterised by a determinedly anti-­media attitude, fore­closing even the possibility of the category of ‘popular feminism’. The women’s m ­ ovement – a­long with other political groups at the t­ime – ­conceived of itself as ‘outside’ the dominant culture and offering an alternative to the predominantly stereotypical images perpetuated by/in the 1960s and 1970s media. In this period, feminism was more visible as a vibrant social and political movement engaged in struggles over a range of issues related to women’s unequal position in society. From this perspective, popular culture was criticised for its cultural representation and reproduction of gendered inequalities and, as such, it was rejected as ‘a sort of ideological machine which more or less effortlessly reproduces the dominant ideology’, ‘little more than a degraded landscape of commercial and ideological manipulation’ (Storey 1997: 12, 129). It was seen as an inherently compromised site that merely serves ‘the complementary systems of capitalism and patriarchy, peddling “false consciousness” to the duped masses’ (Gamman and Marshment 1988: 1). Consequently, one of the best-­known and most characteristically second-­ wave strategies, ‘consciousness-­raising’ (or, in shorthand, ‘CR’), was designed to get to the core of women’s subjugated state, in society as well as their own home and bodies.19 Female revolution in consciousness was deemed to be the crucial first step to a wider social revolution, facilitating an awakening of previously brainwashed women. Second-­wave feminist critics often employed what Ang (1996) calls ‘the crude hypodermic needle model of media effects’, which relies on the assumptions that ‘mass-­media imagery consists of transparent, unrealistic messages about women whose meanings are clearcut and straightforward’ and ‘girls and women passively and indiscriminately absorb these messages and meanings as (wrong) lessons about “real life” ’ (111). This became known as the ‘images of women’ debate: the idea that the media socialises women/girls into consuming and accepting ‘false’ images of femininity and traditional sex roles, which tell them to ‘direct their hearts towards hearth and home’ (Hollows and Moseley 2006: 4). Accordingly, it was the feminist critic’s responsibility to assume the social function of demystifier in an attempt to enlighten ‘ordinary’ women ­who – ­it was ­suggested – ­indiscriminately and passively absorb these images and therefore suffer from a ‘false consciousness’. As Whelehan (1995) advocates, the only way out of this media absorption is to separate fact from fiction: ‘the role of the feminist . . . is to prove herself equal to demythologising the powerful and ever-­changing myths about the female self and nature perpetuated in the mass media and other state apparatuses’ (229). In order to show ‘real’ images of women, second-­wave feminism thus had to intervene in popular culture and produce its own alternative, countercultural descriptions.20 In this way, much second-­wave feminist work presumed the authority

Postfeminist Contexts 47 to designate what were correct portrayals and ways of seeing for all women (Hollows and Moseley 2006). What underpinned these analyses was not only a hostility towards the popular but also an opposition between the ­feminist – ­whose ‘raised consciousness’ allows her to see through the mystifications of ­ omen – a­ lso referred to in some second-­ popular culture21 – and ‘ordinary’ w wave tracts as ‘token women’ and ‘parasites’ (Daly 1995; Beauvoir 1953) – who require a feminist makeover. It was this notion of an elitist feminist ‘club’ that can illuminate the obfuscated and silent majority of women and the idea of an unadulterated, media-­hostile feminism that were to be challenged by later (post)feminists who argue for a different conceptualisation of popular culture and put forward the possibility of a popular kind of feminism. Second-­wave feminists also raised other objections with regard to the media that related not only to the misrepresentation of women as a whole but specifically to the depictions of feminism and feminists in popular culture. The media was condemned for launching an assault on feminism and fostering ‘debilitating caricatures, allowing the culture at large to dismiss and discount it’ (Mascia-­Lees and Sharpe 2000: 191). In particular, the media were credited with the invention and circulation of ‘the mythical, and most persistent, icon of second-­wave feminism: the bra-­burner’ (Hinds and Stacey 2001: 156). The figure of the bra-­burning, mannish and fanatic feminist has dominated popular representations of feminism ‘so long as to have become one of the most familiar symbols in the contemporary political landscape and cultural imagination’ (153). This negative stereotype has been propagated as a metonym for the feminist movement with the result that ‘we all know what feminists are’ (Douglas 1995: 7). As Susan Douglas summarises, ‘they are shrill, overly aggressive, man-­hating, ball-­busting, selfish, hairy, extremist, deliberately unattractive women with absolutely no sense of humor who see sexism at every turn’ (7). Paradoxically, the image of the bra-­burner was also the inadvertent outcome of one of the earliest and most iconic events that brought second-­wave feminist activism to public awareness: the demonstration that feminists staged at the Miss America beauty pageant in Atlantic City in 1968.22 The protest symbolically enacted the rejection of oppressive ideals of womanhood and it was an attack on male-­defined femininity and on the notion that women were objects to be consumed. It was also a carefully planned publicity stunt and an attempt at collective consciousness-­raising: it was hoped that the media would act as a mouthpiece for the feminist movement and disseminate its messages of female emancipation to a wider audience. However, media reports of the event were less than favourable as much of the national press coverage depicted the demonstration in ways that made the emerging movement seem ludicrous.23 The media stereotype of the feminist bra-­burner soon took root in the popular i­magination – ­undermining to a

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large extent feminists’ efforts to target the public consciousness and implant their own ­ideas – ­and, even until today, such assumptions persist.24 This incident reveals the uneasy relationship with the media that was going to characterise much of second-­wave feminism. While feminists were sure of their own motives for the protest and were evidently frustrated by the media’s negative depictions, they were also reluctant to court the media in order to get their message across. As Whelehan (2005) writes, the second wave did not want to enter into ‘the spin game’: the media liked to deal with spokespeople (preferably someone attractive and eloquent) and feminists were opposed to the development of a ‘star system’ within their ranks and demanded a rota for media appearances (138, 46­–7).25 This did not fulfil the media’s desires, nor did it enable the feminist groups to present themselves (and their message) in the most favourable manner. Moreover, the figure of the unattractive bra-­burner also cemented into the public’s mind the perception of feminism as anti-­feminine. Press coverage of the early 1970s reflects this media tendency to depict ‘the women’s libber’ as an unfeminine, ugly woman.26 As Hinds and Stacey (2001) argue, ‘there is no doubt that the persistent media characterisation of the feminist, from the bra-­burner onwards, condenses a range of characteristics antithetical to conventional definitions of desirable femininity’ (161). Feminists are characterised as ‘enemies of the stiletto heel and the beauty p­ arlor – ­in a word, as enemies of glamour’, and feminism is depicted as the preserve of ‘only the unstable, mannish, unattractive woman who has a naturally difficult relationship to her own femininity’ (Bartky 1990: 41; Whelehan 2000: 18). This media argument against feminism insistently proclaims that women who (collectively) adopt a feminist outlook and engage in feminist politics will effectively be desexed, threatening the prospective feminist with an unwelcome masculinisation. While the view of feminism as a defeminising force can clearly be identified as a distorted media refraction and propaganda, it is important to note that the sense of incongruity between feminism and femininity was not only publicised by the contemporary media but was also present in many feminist writings of the time. In Feminism, Femininity and Popular Culture (2000), Joanne Hollows describes how the notion of a feminist movement and the assertion of a feminist identity are often predicated on a rejection of femininity: ‘feminist critiques . . . are often dependent on creating an opposition between “bad” feminine identities and “good” feminist identities’ (9). In feminist t­hinking – ­from Mary Wollstonecraft in the late eighteenth century to Naomi Wolf in the late ­twentieth – ­women’s quest for femininity and beauty is often constituted as a ‘problem’ and a major cause of women’s oppression.27 This anti-­feminine trend reached its peak during the 1960s and 1970s when second-­wave feminist texts concretised the dichotomy between

Postfeminist Contexts 49 feminism and femininity by establishing the figure of ‘the feminist heroine’ in opposition to ‘the feminine anti-­heroine’ (Hollows 2000: 17). For example, in her landmark book The Feminine Mystique (1963), Betty Friedan famously declared that women’s enslavement to femininity gives rise to ‘the problem that has no name, a vague, undefined wish for “something more” ’ beyond the ‘genteel prison’ of their suburban homes (54–5, 83). In the more radical Gyn/ Ecology (1978), Mary Daly rejects femininity as a ‘man-­made construct’ and ‘a male attribute’ that blinds women and lures them into forgetting its ‘falseness’ (68–9). In Daly’s eyes, patriarchy has colonised women’s heads to such an extent that it ‘prepossesses’ them and inspires them with ‘false selves’ (322). She condemns these ‘moronized’ women as ‘man-­made’, ‘painted birds’ who have been incorporated into the ‘Mystical Body of Maledom’ and succumbed to the patriarchal invitation ‘to become “living” dead women’ (5, 334, 67). After the politically charged and heady days of the 1960s and 1970s, these sometimes revolutionary and extremist perceptions were to be disputed by a number of women/feminists who could not reconcile the perceived feminist ‘rules’ with their experience of ‘growing up female and feminist’ in the 1980s and beyond (Hollows and Moseley 2006: 8). Indeed, young women and men today are more likely to draw on popular culture and experience feminism in a mediated form through celebrities like Beyoncé who has embraced feminism openly in interviews and stage performances and participated in several campaigns designed to bring awareness to women’s issues (e.g. Chime for Change and Ban Bossy) (see Chatman 2015). Second-­wave feminists themselves were going to be troubled by a range of questions posed by their anti-­media and anti-­feminine stances as well as their supposed enlightenment vis-­à-vis ‘ordinary’ women. As a number of critics have emphasised, Daly’s feminism, for example, seems to have given up on most women and instead concentrates on a ‘chosen few’ (Hollows 2000: 15). Her distinction between ‘real women’ and feminine dupes is bound to alienate those who conceive of their femininity (and feminism) in different, more diverse, terms and who do not agree with this polarity. In years to come, new (post)feminist voices would emerge to support a rearticulation of femininity and popular culture that takes into account their complex interactions with feminism. In effect, from the 1980s onwards, the relationship between feminism and the ­popular – ­and, associated with this, f­emininity – ­was reconceptualised and new terms like ‘popular feminism’, ‘postfeminism’ and ‘third-wave feminism’ started to appear to mark a changed social, cultural and political context. What characterises these post-­second-­wave positions is exactly the way they locate themselves within popular culture and inside the realm of cultural representation. While negative readings of the popular are still p­ rominent – ­for example, Susan Faludi’s description of postfeminism as backlash very much keeps alive the suggestion

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that representations of feminism within the popular are anti-­feminist – ­there have also been concerted efforts to reimagine popular culture as a potentially liberating and innovative site that puts forward the possibilities of active consumption and the popular consumer as a creative and productive agent. Various topics we discuss in the rest of this book challenge the view of women as passive victims of an inexorably sexist media and affirm the notions of consumer agency and popular resistance. Numerous examinations and articulations of p­ ostfeminism – f­rom Girl Power to micro-­politics and brand c­ulture – a­cknowledge their insider position within popular culture and highlight alternative modes of production/consumption that combine cultural confidence with feminist awareness. Empowerment and ­agency – ­goals that both second-­wave feminists and postfeminists c­laim – a­re envisaged differently, whereby second-­wave notions of collective, activist struggle are replaced with more individualistic assertions of (consumer) choice and self-­rule. As we will discuss in more detail in the next section, within this contemporary context, empowerment cannot be understood and theorised ‘as separate from market strategies but is rather a constitutive element in these strategies’ (Banet-­Weiser 2007: 216; emphasis in original). In effect, in many recent analyses, the opposition between feminism and popular c­ulture – ­fundamental in and constitutive of second-­wave ­critiques – i­s displaced on to the relationship between feminism and consumer culture. The debates centre around the commoditisation of feminism and the specific forms of consumption that come to the fore in contemporary culture and society. Banet-­Weiser (2007), for example, suggests that feminism has been ‘rescripted’ so as to ‘allow its smooth incorporation into the world of commerce and corporate culture’ (209). The end result, it is feared, is ‘commodity feminism’ – also referred to as ‘free market feminism’ (Whelehan 2005: 155) – that constructs women as both subjects and consumers through an individualist rhetoric. Tasker and Negra (2007) follow a similar line of argument by placing postfeminism within the context of the 1990s ‘New Economy’ and ‘the displacement of democratic imperatives by free market ones’ (6).28 In the course of this interaction with the market, feminism is supposedly in danger of losing its radicalism as its ideas of ‘liberation’, ‘freedom’ and ‘independence’ become detached from their feminist roots and ‘now postulate many media forms because they sell’ (Hollows 2000: 194). In this rapidly changing cultural and economic landscape, feminism’s role and situation have certainly changed and there have been many discussions as to whether it can still exist as a discrete politics once it has been incorporated into popular/consumer culture. The move towards individual, consumer-­oriented ­empowerment has propelled the consideration of several, complex questions regarding the compatibility of feminism’s popular and political dimensions.

Postfeminist Contexts 51 In the following chapters, we examine the intricate and complex intersections of feminism and popular/consumer culture and the emergence of a postfeminist politics of representation and (controversially) ‘emancipation’ and ‘empowerment’. Here, we do not interpret feminism’s entry into the popular as n ­ ecessarily a depoliticisation and ­dilution – ­although some popularised forms of feminism are undoubtedly conservative and ­retrogressive – n ­ or do we adhere to the notion of postfeminism as apolitical and ‘non-­democratic’. We maintain that popular/consumer culture should be reconceived as a site of struggle over the meanings of feminism and the reconceptualisation of a postfeminist political practice that, unlike second-­wave feminism, does not rely on separatism and ­collectivism – i­ndeed, postfeminism should not be considered along the same lines as the second wave as an activist social ­politics – a­nd instead highlights the multiple agency and subject positions of individuals in the new millennium. Many of the postfeminist stances that we examine are resolutely and unapologetically popular in the sense that they arise from and within popular culture. In this way, it is no longer possible for contemporary critics to adopt a binary framework that sets up a contrast between feminism and popular culture, ‘real’ feminism and ‘fictional’ feminism (Dow 1996). At the same time as emphasising the importance of the popular, we also want to steer clear of a kind of ­populism – ­most famously discussed by John Fiske (1989) – that celebrates popular culture as a paradise of free choice.29 Importantly, we do not pursue the themes of popular pleasure and empowerment to the point at which, as McRobbie (1994) writes, ‘anything which is consumed and is popular is also seen as oppositional’ (39). Popular culture is not ‘a playground for everyone’, a utopian site that fosters a cultural democracy of consumers (Hollows 2000: 129). In this book, we do not herald the sovereignty of the consumer or ‘the freedom to play with lifestyles’ and we are careful not to oversimplify the complexities of popular culture and the act of consumption (Hollows 2000: 133). We do not support populist arguments that understand popular culture as ‘a supermarket of meanings’ from which consumers can ‘cook up . . . their own culture’ (Fiske 1989: 132). The problem with this viewpoint is that it presumes an autonomous popular space of liberal pluralism that is formed ‘in reaction to [but] never as part of the forces of domination’ and ‘exist[s] in some relationship of opposition to power’ (43, 49).30 This can amount to an apologetic ‘ “yes, but . . .” discourse’ that does not situate the popular in relationship to a social and political context and downplays the structural oppressions in favour of the representation of ‘a rosy world “where there’s always a way to redemption” ’ (Ang 1996: 139). By contrast, we define the popular domain not as an autonomous space in which free choice and creativity prevail but a contradictory site that ­interlaces

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complicity and critique, subordination and creation. As David Gauntlett (2007) writes, [a]lthough we may occasionally find ourselves saying that ‘the mass media suggests’ a particular perspective or point of view, the truth is that not only is ‘the mass media’ wildly diverse, but that even quite specific parts of media culture put out a whole spectrum of messages which cannot be reconciled. (255) John Storey (1997) agrees, noting that ‘popular culture is a concept of ideological contestation and variability, to be filled and emptied, to be articulated and disarticulated, in a range of different and competing ways’ (202).31 This also implies a reconsideration of the concept of ‘choice’ as an ideological discourse in which, as Ang (1996) says, ‘the rhetoric of the liberatory benefits of personal autonomy and individual self-­determination has become hegemonic’ (13). This has important reverberations for popular feminism and/or postfeminism which rely on consumerist notions of choice in order to promote and propagate individualist ideas of empowerment and agency. In this sense, the postfeminist consumer is endowed with contradictory forms of subjectivity and agency that allow for ‘choice’, but not within the same terms of emancipatory politics that characterised the second ­wave – ­indeed, we will revisit these ideas in more theoretical examinations of postfeminism that are concerned with the dichotomy between the ‘constituted’ and ‘constituting’ self. We argue that the most challenging representations of postfeminist subjectivity depict the double bind of consumption and the struggle of a ‘free-­yet-­bounded’ self who is both subject and object, active and passive, complicit and defiant (Ang 1996: 170). These contradictions are an inevitable by-­product of contemporary Western media forms that have integrated feminist messages and mobilise a diverse range of representations that strive to remake social relations beyond the oppositional logic of female powerlessness and male power, feminist enlightenment and feminine victimisation, popular indoctrination and feminist emancipation. Postfeminism in Brand Culture The debates and critiques surrounding media/consumer c­ ulture – f­or instance in relation to the commodification of ­feminism – ­have been given new impetus in contemporary examinations of brand culture that take into account the affective qualities and connections that tie the consumer to capitalist structures. As Naomi Klein noted in her influential No Logo (2000), we now live in a ‘new branded world’ characterised by an unparalleled integration of brand and culture in the course of which the straightforward relationship

Postfeminist Contexts 53 between buyer and seller is transformed into something far more ‘invasive and profound’ (3, 335). This is part of a larger shift in Western society towards the experience economy where consumer products and services are imbued with social meaning, which people can use for self-­expression (see Hearn 2008: 200; Pine and Gilmore 1999). Here, we ought to consider the ‘affective relational ­quality – ­the ­experience – o ­ f brands’ to understand changing relations between seller and buyer, marketer and consumer (Banet-­Weiser 2012: 9). In this branded sphere, consumers’ participation in the marketplace is not simply indicated by purchases but rather by ‘brand loyalty and affiliation’ (Banet-­ Weiser and Lapsabsky 2008: 1248). Indeed, as Sarah Banet-­Weiser writes, it is through ‘these affective relationships that our very selves are created, expressed and validated’ (2012: 9). In this sense, we need to move away from the assumption that brands are purely economic constructs designed to identify products and make claims about their properties. Nowadays, brands draw on emotional and experiential signifiers (Holt 2002: 80) and come to be seen as ‘cultural spaces in which individuals feel safe, secure, relevant, and authentic’ (Banet-­Weiser 2009: 9). This type of brand ‘security’ is particularly potent in a recessionary climate when the neoliberal enterprise discourse turns inward on the individual and presents the need to ‘self-­brand’ as a strategy for coping with and potential solution to economic precarity. As Marwick (2010) explains, self-­branding encourages ‘people to take on the responsibility of economic uncertainty by constructing identities that fit current business trends’ (319). Self-­branding – ­a staple component of career counselling and self-­help/marketing literature exemplified by a raft of publications like Brand New You: Your Must Have Guide to Build a Profitable, Influential, Kickass Brand (2016) and You! God’s Brand New Idea: Made to Be Amazing (2007) – is represented as a means to improve and marketise personal skills and involves the strategic construction of identity to be promoted and sold to others. As Alison Hearn (2008) describes this process: ‘Work on the production of a branded “self” involves creating a detachable, saleable image or narrative, which effectively circulates cultural meanings. This branded self either consciously positions itself, or is positioned by its context and use, as a site for the extraction of value’ (164–5). Self-­branding extends brand management and marketing schemes to the very formation of subjectivity and in this sense can be recognised as part of what Foucault (1988) defines as the ‘technologies of the self’ – ‘matri[ces] of practical reason’ through which people constitute themselves within and through systems of power (17). Here, the individual is encouraged to think of him/ herself as a profitable and flexible commodity that does not just hold value for potential employers but also gains worth through self-­empowerment in such a way that it becomes a means to access one’s ‘true’ self and authenticity

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(see Banet-­Weiser 2012). In Banet-­Weiser’s words, ‘self-­branding is seen not as an imposition of a concept or product by corporate culture’ but rather as an ‘expression of a moral framework’ that allows individuals to take on the brand exercise themselves in order to become ‘more of who you are’ as well as who ‘you were meant to be’ (61, 59). Within the discourse of self-­branding, we are instructed to seek self-­realisation, personal fulfilment and economic success through self-­examination by uncovering ‘authentic’ talents, skills and passions that will be valuable to us as well as to employers and that create both wealth and happiness. The neoliberal ‘project of the self’ – whereby identity is understood as a construct to be worked on (see Giddens 2008 [1991]; Chapter 12) – is thus transposed on to the ‘project of the self-­brand’ that internalises advertising and marketing techniques to such an extent that we not only define ourselves through products but actively become brands ­ourselves – ­in fact, ‘we now take for granted that the self is (and should be) branded, managed and distributed’ (Banet-­Weiser 2012: 85). The cultural and affective process of (self-)branding also has an effect on feminism and its mode of political engagement that now must contend with ‘the need to personalise all activities, put a name on and a face to everything one does, to gain publicity or followers, likes or dislikes, in the full glare of the global media’ (McRobbie 2013: 132). This has given rise to a ‘branded and personalised’ feminism that needs to fulfil the ‘requirement to self-­promote’ and be instantly identifiable and perceptible in brand culture. Indeed, a number of critics have commented on the new feminist ‘visibility’ whereby ‘after a long period of castigation and disavowal, feminism somehow makes a comeback’ (Gill 2016: 5; McRobbie 2015: 4). As McRobbie writes, ‘feminism once again has a presence across the quality and popular media, and similarly in political culture and in civil society’ (4). This is reinforced by Gill’s (2016) suggestion that ‘feminism has a new luminosity’: ‘Where a few years ago it sometimes felt difficult to make any feminist arguments “stick” in the media . . . today it seems as if everything is a feminist issue’ (5). This seeming rehabilitation of feminism is not without problems as it appears to occur hand in hand with an ever-­increasing ‘neoliberalization of everything’ (Rottenberg 2013: 433), whereby market principles (discipline, efficiency, competition, etc.) infiltrate society to such an extent that they organise and regulate the lives of individuals (see Ong 2006). Feminist researchers in particular have been critical of neoliberal discourse and ideology, arguing that its advancement occurs largely at the expense of women. Sylvia Walby (2011), for example, maintains that the rise of ­neoliberalism – ­and its related issues of economic inequalities and de-­democratisation – ­represents the biggest challenge for the ‘future of feminism’, while Nancy Fraser (2013) suggests that ‘the movement of women’s liberation has become entangled in a dangerous

Postfeminist Contexts 55 liaison with neoliberal efforts to build a free-­market society’ (qtd in Negra 2014a: 277). This is part of a broader debate about the co-­optation of feminism and the emergence of a ‘new feminist subject’ who accepts responsibility for her own economic and personal well-­being and is being called upon to ‘provide for [her] own needs and service [her] own ambitions’ (Brown 2006: 694). This engenders what Negra (2014a: 277) calls a ‘new feminist leadership discourse’ exemplified, for instance, by high-­profile corporate figures such as the Facebook billionaire Sheryl Sandberg, whose best-­selling Lean In: Women, Work and the Will to Lead (2013) tells women workers to get ahead in the world of business by ‘internalizing the revolution’, ‘leaning in’ and closing the ‘leadership ambition gap’. This type of neoliberal feminism complies with corporate values and has been criticised as a ‘hollow[ing] out [of] the potential of mainstream liberal feminism’ and an entrenchment of ‘neoliberal rationality and an imperialist logic’ (Rottenberg 2013: 420). Individualistic to the extreme, corporatist feminism interpellates women as entrepreneurial actors and presupposes ‘an aspirational female subject who is exhorted to know herself and her desires but is under no obligation to have any particular social awareness’ (Negra 2014a: 278). Here, the question of social and collective ­justice – ­prominent in analysis of postfeminist/neoliberal i­ndividualism – b­ ecomes paramount and compels us to rethink the kind of (feminist) ‘visibility’ that emerges in brand culture. As Rottenberg (2013) asks, ‘why is there any need for a feminist variant when a female (as opposed to a feminist) neoliberal subject might do the job just as well or better?’ (431). In other words, why is feminism suddenly being promoted and branded here, seemingly at the expense of traditional activist politics? Is the ‘rehabilitation’ of feminism really another sign of its ‘seduction’ by neoliberalism that allows some women to climb the corporate ladder while pushing many others into temporary low-­ wage w ­ ork – ­so called McJobs (see Eisenstein 2009)? At this juncture, we also need to remind ourselves of the inherent restrictions of self-­branding, particularly apparent in a post-­boom context that no longer necessarily values the self-­work that individuals put into the construction of their self-­brand and where, despite their best efforts, they might struggle to convert authentic ‘capital’ in monetary terms. The discourse of self-­branding assumes that individuals are actively remaking themselves into a saleable commodity and allowing their intimate thoughts and emotions to be colonised by market rhetoric. Critics of self-­branding stress that the underlying self-­commodification is in effect a ‘false consciousness’ primarily useful for employers (see Hearn 2008). Importantly as well, not all branded selves are ‘visible’ and ‘valuable’ in the same way and capable of successful self-­ promotion. Gill (2016) makes the point in a different context that v­ isibility

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is fundamentally ‘uneven’ – in the sense that the conspicuous neoliberal feminism of Sandberg’s Lean In may have little or nothing in common with contemporary forms of feminist activism (3) – and ‘related to the ideological complexion of . . . politics’ (7). This ‘unevenness’ also affects the visibility of specific self-­brands that do not transcend markers of identity like age, class and gender but often reinforce existing social relations and hierarchies. As Banet-­ Weiser (2012) rightly says, ‘there are limits to what kind of self is brandable’ (85). Her examination of online self-­brands stresses that in the current ‘economy of visibility’, the hypersexualised body can be sold successfully and profitably, while those who do not have ‘the same kind of access to their own bodily property’ – women of colour, working-­class women and older ­women – ­might not experience their ‘hotness’ as empowering. Here, we are entering familiar postfeminist territory surrounding the issue of sexual subjecthood, a stance that was particularly prominent in expressions of ‘raunch culture’ and ‘do-­me’ feminism from the 1990s onwards (see Chapter 5). What also becomes apparent at this point is the gendered dimension of self-­branding labour that positions postfeminism at the heart of contemporary brand culture. As Genz (2015b) writes, postfeminism functions as ‘a gendered brand space’ that produces delimited and normalised formations of feminine identity in entrepreneurial, classed and sexualised terms (546). Moreover, ‘the brand promises and agency claims [that postfeminism] makes are maintained by a gendered and mediated form of authenticity that acts as an affective commodity in a crowded neoliberal market’ (547). In a similar manner, Banet-­Weiser (2012) discusses the ‘postfeminist self-­brand’ through which ‘girls and young women are ostensibly “empowered” through public bodily performances’ (64). For her, this type of branded postfeminism is predominant in the online era because ‘it is supported by the contexts in which consumers are both more in control of their own productions and also increasingly under surveillance by media industries’ (2011: 284). Later on in this book, we will also investigate celebrity culture as a key repository of gendered authenticity linked to neoliberal/postfeminist articulations of self-­ branding, entrepreneurship and feminine agency. As our case study on Kim Kardashian reveals, contemporary celebrity involves a performance of ‘realness’ and a­ uthenticity – ­through sharing personal ­information – t­hat creates affective relations with fans and the illusion of closeness and relatability. The celebrity thus becomes the epitome of the commodified self, paving the way for other potential self-­branded individuals and modelling what is saleable/ lucrative and what attracts and maintains the attention (and money) of fans. The link to celebrity ­ culture – ­ itself a highly regimented, exclusionary and disciplinary field (see Turner 2004) – also reinforces the ambivalence and conflicts within self-­branding to, on the one hand, strategically create and

Postfeminist Contexts 57 promote identity-­as-­product while, on the other hand, such self-­presentation might be hampered by structural and economic inequalities. As Banet-­Weiser (2012) notes, ‘self-­branding is fraught with tensions between empowering oneself as a producer and occupying this empowered position within the terms and definitions set up by broader brand and commercial culture’ (70). These tensions have become harder to ignore in a recessionary environment where the economic structures no longer reward the self-­branding efforts of many individuals and remunerate the immaterial labour that they invest in the construction of an ‘authentic’ self. Indeed, in these circumstances, a­ uthenticity – ­one of the key self-­marketing strategies that encourage emotional labour (see Marwick 2013) – might have lost some of its capital value, exemplified, for instance, by the entitled protagonists of Girls who constantly try to outdo one another in their search for a more ‘authentic’ experience/self and who fail to convince others to ‘buy into’ their self-­work. In short, ‘being yourself’ might no longer be an effective self-­branding technique if your self-­as-­brand is devalued in times of economic crisis and therefore stops ‘selling’. In this sense, the postfeminist self-­brand is in need of constant updating in order to remain legible and viable within the confines of a capitalist economy. The result, in Banet-­Weiser’s (2012) words, is ‘a fixed cycle’: ‘postfeminism offers a cultural context that celebrates the production of the self but is shaped by an economic context that relies on that self to be a brand’ (66). As we have discussed, it is the frictions and oppositions between these various ­sites – ­as well as the intercontextual relations that emerge in-­between – t­hat make postfeminism such a productive but problematic critical category. In the next section, we will investigate the positioning of postfeminism within academic and theoretical frameworks that give rise to range of different yet associated debates. Postfeminism in Academia As we have seen, articulations of postfeminism in popular and brand culture are often preoccupied with notions of co-­option and appropriation: feminism’s conjunction with media/brand culture has hardly ever been interpreted as a beneficial exchange of ideas, values and theories, and, instead, it has been conceptualised as a takeover or subsumption whereby feminism is seen to lose its autonomous s­tatus – i­n political and ideological terms as a collective form of ­activism – ­by becoming incorporated into the popular/branded mainstream. Similar concerns resurface in discussions of academic strands of postfeminism that locate it within a range of anti-­foundationalist movements, including postmodernism, poststructuralism and postcolonialism.32 In Postfeminisms (1997), for example, Ann Brooks discusses post­feminism as a theoretical movement associated with deconstructive challenges to ­identity

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politics: ‘Postfeminism expresses the intersection of feminism with postmodernism, poststructuralism and post-­colonialism, and as such represents a dynamic movement capable of challenging modernist, patriarchal and imperialist frameworks’ (4). For Brooks, postfeminism denotes the culmination of a number of debates within and outside feminism emerging from the juncture of feminism with elements of cultural t­heory – p­ articularly p­ ostmodernism – ­and theoretical/political issues arising around postcolonialism that gives voice to marginalised, colonised and indigenous women who question the possibility of a universal feminist ‘sisterhood’. She is adamant that postfeminism is not about a depoliticisation of feminism but a political move in feminism’s conceptual and theoretical agenda. As such, postfeminism represents feminism’s ‘maturity into a confident body of theory and politics, representing pluralism and difference and reflecting on its position in relation to other philosophical and political movements similarly demanding change’ (1). Postfeminism questions the notion of feminist consensus and effects a shift from within feminism from debates around ‘equality’ to a focus on ‘difference’ (4). Brooks clearly envisages postfeminism as post-­second wave whereby it occupies ‘a similar “critical” position in regard to earlier feminist frameworks at the same time as critically engaging with patriarchal and imperialist discourses’ (2). In her analysis, feminism becomes the subject of postfeminist critiques that cast doubt on a singular and uniform conception of the feminist movement, emphasising instead the multiple and varied ways of being ‘feminist’ and understanding ‘feminism’. In this sense, postfeminism can be considered as a movement of feminist pluralisation and diversification, making room in its ranks for a more diverse ‘we’. It engages with the postmodern notion of the dispersed, unstable subject and it opens up the feminist realm for the articulation of ‘other’ voices and identities. Postfeminism can thus be discussed in relation to deconstructive theories that undermine the concept of an essential female/feminist identity from two critical directions: postmodernism’s deconstruction of the subject category is reinforced by anti-­essentialist feminists for whom ‘woman’ as a monolithic term is unable to address the complexity of gender in relation to other aspects of identity, including race, ethnicity, class, sexuality and age. As Deborah Siegel (1997a) notes, there are ‘two very different modes of deconstructive feminist theorizing’, two different taxonomies that can be oversimplified as ‘multiculturalist’ and ‘postmodernist’ (60). While postmodernist critics destabilise the idea of a universal and unified subject (including feminist subjects), multiculturalist feminists concentrate on material exclusions and examine how gender is constructed across a range of identity markers, beyond the limits of Western, White, heterosexual and middle-­class female ­experience – ­indeed, we will later examine the intricacies of ‘postmodern feminism’, ‘postcolonial

Postfeminist Contexts 59 feminism’ and ‘queer feminism’ that complicate such terms as ‘oppression’, ‘patriarchy’ and ‘identity’ as used by second-­wave feminists. In place of an identity politics of feminist solidarity against male oppressors, the pluralistic postfeminist stance that comes to the fore in postmodern, postcolonial and (to some extent) queer analyses puts forward the idea of multiple oppressed subjectivities rather than privileging any one site of oppression. In effect, postfeminism denotes ‘a context in which the feminism of the 1970s is problematized, splintered, and considered suspect, one in which it is no longer easy, fun, empowering, or even possible, to take a feminist position’ (Mascia-­ Lees and Sharpe 2000: 3). It facilitates a broad-­based, pluralistic conception of feminism that rejects the ideas of a homogenous feminist monolith and an essential female self. This theoretical/academic positioning of postfeminism is appealing for it ‘insists that we listen to the voices of those who dispute the terms of representation and who say “this is not us” ’ (McRobbie 1994: 7). In many ways, postfeminism can be said to respond to the theoretical and political challenges facing feminists in a post-­second-­wave environment ‘of moving feminism, as a political movement without the fixity of a single feminist agenda in view, into the next millennium’ (Siegel 1997a: 56; emphasis added). Yet, the understanding of postfeminism as feminist pluralism also highlights the fact that, with the advent of the postmodern era, any illusions of feminist unity have to be interrogated and ultimately discarded.33 It is argued that feminism can no longer rely on the notion of an authentic and unanimous feminist realm or ‘outside’ and it has to renounce the idea of a detached and untainted feminist identity.34 This engenders a number of difficulties and problems for the conceptualisation of feminism as a social/political movement that is seemingly dependent on the notion of a feminist self on which to base its collective, activist politics. As Amelia Jones (1990) observes, ‘the most important question . . . is whether . . . feminism is co-­opted by being harnessed to other discourses which neutralize its radical potential’ (7). While multiculturalist feminists actively counter mainstream feminist investigations (including the umbrella term ‘sisterhood’ that, they argue, does not account for all women/feminists and fails to address the needs and demands of marginalised and colonised women), there is also concern in some feminist quarters that ‘the intersection of feminism and postmodernism might result in feminism . . . losing its distinctive character as a body of critical theory and practice’ (Brooks 1997: 36). Feminism is said to be co-­opted by ‘other’ discourses that undermine its radical politics and splinter its separate (if illusory) singular identity. As Frances Mascia-­Less and Patricia Sharpe (2000) deplore, this makes it ‘both difficult, and often, undesirable to distinguish it [feminism] from endeavors with close affinities: poststructuralism, cultural studies, critical theory, and postcolonial or subaltern studies’ (3).

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The central questions raised by feminist critics revolve around issues of agency and the specific nature of political action that feminists can pursue in the absence of a single feminist agenda and identity. By providing a conceptual repertoire centred on deconstruction and anti-­essentialism, postmodernism highlights feminism’s own foundational discourses bounded by the concept of ‘woman’ and its epistemological entailments. In its attempts to posit a unified identity as its underpinning, f­eminism – ­in particular in its second-­ wave ­manifestations – ­is often compelled to exclude fragmented or multiple identities from its ranks. Postmodernism calls on feminists to relinquish their foundational goals and focus on the differences between women. For feminist theorists, the attraction of postmodern critiques of subjectivity can be found in the promise of an increased freedom for women and ‘the “free play” of a plurality of differences unhampered by any predetermined gender identity’ as formulated by either patriarchy or feminism itself (Alcoff 1987–8: 418). Yet, some feminists are also concerned that they cannot afford the luxury of rejoicing in ‘the death of the subject’ for ‘if woman is a fiction . . . then the very issue of women’s oppression would appear to be obsolete and feminism itself would have no reason to exist’ (Lauretis 1993: 83). Feminism is said to be pulled in two opposing directions: in order to be effective as an emancipatory and political movement designed to increase women’s access to equality in male-­dominated cultures, it supposedly needs to rely on an essentialist definition of woman.35 At the same time, feminism cannot deny the importance of anti-­foundationalist theories that dismiss (or decentre) the concept of the autonomous subject. Thus, at the moment when ‘postmodernism is forging its identity through articulating the exhaustion of the existential belief in self-­ presence and self-­fulfilment and through the dispersal of the universal subject of liberalism’, feminism is ostensibly engaged in assembling its cultural identity in what appears to be the opposite way (Waugh 1989: 6). According to this logic, the postmodern notion of the ‘subject in process’ cannot be embraced whole-­heartedly by feminism as this implies the loss of political agency and action. As Linda Nicholson (1990) asks, ‘does not the adoption of postmodernism really entail the destruction of feminism, since does not feminism itself depend on a relatively unified notion of the social subject “woman”, a notion postmodernism would attack?’ (7).36 ­Postfeminism – i­nterpreted in this academic context as the intersection of postmodernism/multiculturalism and ­feminism – ­is the battlefield on which these debates are fought out as it attempts to negotiate between the destabilisation of the notion of a feminist self and the historic mobilisation of a politically engaged feminist we. There is a significant conceptual overlap between postmodern feminism and postfeminism and the latter clearly participates in the discourse of postmodernism as it discredits and eschews the ideas of discursive

Postfeminist Contexts 61 homogeneity and a unified subjectivity. It understands that postmodernism’s fracturing of the universal subject pertains to feminism’s own identity and it rejects the concept of the essential and coherent sovereign self in favour of a selfhood that is contradictory and disjunctive. Postfeminism thus embraces a complexity of vision and gives vent to the multivalent, inharmonious and conflicting voices of contemporary women, including the ‘other’ voices of feminists themselves. It insists that feminism has to be viewed pluralistically and, in this way, it ‘establish[es] a dynamic and vigorous area of intellectual debate, shaping the issues and intellectual climate that has characterized the move from modernity to postmodernity in the contemporary world’ (Brooks 1997: 210). The shift to the ‘post’ – for example in postfeminism and ­postmodernism – ­has been discussed in terms of a nascent ‘post-­theoretical’ movement that reconfigures the limits of theory, politics and (feminist) critique/practice. As Fernando de Toro observes in ‘Explorations on Post-­Theory’ (1999), Something has happened. In the last two decades, before the end of this century, we have witnessed the emergence of the Post. This is a symptom of a society and a culture unable to name what is taking place in the very crux of its activity. The Post, then, comes to replace that which we know is there, but which we do not quite manage to signal. (9; emphasis in original) According to Toro, ‘Western culture has entered a New Age, one which is still searching for its name’ and he defines these new times as ‘post-­theoretical’ in their introduction of a new strategy and awareness and in their ‘search for a “beyond”, a third theoretical space’ (9, 10). As he explains, ‘post-­theory’ implies ‘exploiting the in-­between spaces . . . a transitory space, a space other, a third space that is not here/there, but both’ (20). Post-­theory emerges from the ‘deconstruction of current hegemonic systems, as well as the new knowledge being generated from the margins, or rather, from different centres’ (16). This deconstructive move implies the disintegration of the tenets of dominant culture along with an attack on universalist and essentialist ­thinking – ­importantly, this also involves a critique of the foundationalist premises of patriarchy and feminism, as well as the deconstruction of their relevant subject categories, ‘man’, ‘woman’ and ‘feminist’. The destabilisation of totalising and homogenising systems can be interpreted positively as a democratisation of opinion as ‘the epistemological space has been pried open, dissected, dismembered’ and all privileged points of view have become obsolete, along with the dominant position which allowed the establishment of hierarchies of interpretation (12). As Toro notes, it is ‘precisely, the de-­centring of the West that has made it possible to integrate within one simultaneous space apparently

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diverging epistemologies’ (12). Thus, he continues, ‘ “post-­theory” entails a simultaneous convergence of theories emanating from diverse epistemological fields and disciplines with the goal to analyze given cultural objects from a plurality of perspectives’ (10). Advocates of post-­theory maintain that this ­stance – ­and the ensuing dissolution of disciplinary and discursive b­ oundaries – ­should be welcomed as ‘experimentation in the combinatory mode’, transcending the limits and rigidity of binary models and frameworks (Rutland 1999: 74). As Toro (1999) puts it, what becomes important within post-­ theory ‘is not so much what divergent theories say, but what we can do with them’ (12; emphasis in original). This examination of the ‘post’ as a point of conjuncture between a number of often competing interests and agendas is particularly pertinent in the case of postfeminism that exists and moves across a number of disciplines and contexts, including popular/brand culture, academia and politics. In this way, Christine di Stefano (1990) identifies ‘a postfeminist tendency’ as ‘an inclination fostered by a refusal to systematically document or privilege any particular form of difference or identity against the hegemonic mainstream’ (73). However, rather than rejoicing in the plurality of differences made possible by this post-­theoretical/postfeminist condition, di Stefano is uncertain about the benefits of deconstructive critique that has potential anti-­political and ­anti-­feminist implications.37 Craig Owens is equally doubtful, noting that ‘pluralism . . . reduces us to being an other among others; it is not a recognition but a reduction to difference to absolute indifference, equivalence, ­interchangeability’ (88). In effect, critics are concerned that an abstract ­celebration of difference might encourage cultural relativism and political passivity. It is argued that the elimination of all totalising and essentialist discourses and the ensuing post-­theoretical ­positions – ­such as ­postfeminism – ­cause a perplexing multitude of differences. As a result of this multiperspectival stance, the post-­theoretical subject is seen to be stranded in a decentred realm of detachment and apathy in which taking a position becomes an almost impossible task. Post-­theory is criticised for adopting the ‘fantasy of capturing . . . heterogeneity in [its] “readings” by continually seeking difference for its own sake’ (Bordo 1993: 39). This line of reasoning is prevalent in discussions of postmodernism as a theoretical invocation of diversity, far removed from practical contexts and pragmatic considerations of how this theoretical position can be transformed into an effectual critique and politics of change. Susan Bordo (1993), for example, maintains that the postmodern enactment of plurality and fragmentation is animated by the ‘dream of everywhere’ but, unfortunately, this ‘new, postmodern configuration of detachment’, this ‘new imagination of disembodiment’, slips into ‘a fantasy of escape from human locatedness’,

Postfeminist Contexts 63 a retreat from an embodied point of view (217, 226–7). The problem with these supposedly theoretically pure, postmodern readings is that ‘they often present themselves as having it any way they want’ as they ‘refuse to assume a shape for which they must take responsibility’ (228). In its abandonment of all universalist patterns of thought, postmodernism is seen to display a political naivety and inefficacy as it does not posit theoretical stopping points, nor does it reserve practical spaces for a generalised critique and for attention to nuance.38 Similar concerns reappear in examinations of postfeminism that is often taken to task for its supposed indifference towards (or, worse, opposition to) a collective, pragmatic and activist feminist politics as well as its irreverent ‘boundary-­crossing’ and bricolage of competing forms of agency. Critics have mulled over postfeminism’s contents, uses and meanings, which seem to arise in so many, seemingly irreconcilable contexts. Some have dismissed the postfeminist phenomenon outright for its embrace of contradiction and intercontextuality – suggesting, for example, that postfeminism is ‘hampered by the need to meet the dual demands of theoretical consistency within the terms of poststructuralism and the wider feminist project’ (Kastelein 1994: 27). In its various cultural, branded, theoretical and political guises, post­feminism has often been criticised for its individualistic/anti-­essentialist ­tendencies that harbour the threats of political disablement and depoliticisation for the ­feminist movement.39 In effect, postfeminism is seen to produce a ‘popular and p­ olitical discourse [that] is repeatedly framed along the lines of female individualisation’ (McRobbie 2011: 181), giving rise to ‘atomic, autonomous subjects of interest competing for the economic opportunities available’ (Oksala 2013: 39). Driven by an ethos of competitive individualism that favours self-­interest over solidarity, postfeminism is seemingly trapped in ‘the endless dance of non-­commitment’ and losing the potential to operate as a ‘theoretical enterprise motivated by critique’ (Brooks 1997: 155). It is argued that ‘just as post-­modernism depoliticises political activity, so post-­ feminism depoliticises feminism’ (Davies 1996: 6). In the following section, we will investigate the viability of a ‘postfeminist politics’ and examine the political leanings of postfeminism that have brought it into close alliance with ­conservative and neoliberal agendas. Problematising facile readings of postfeminist depolitisation, we propose that postfeminism can act in politically and theoretically challenging ways that do not result in the end of critical and political production. In its most constructive sense, postfeminism offers an altered conceptual model to understand political and critical practice that acknowledges how we might be both conditioned and constrained by the very forms and institutions we set out to criticise. This amounts not so much to a depoliticisation or trivialisation of feminism but an active reinterpretation of

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contemporary forms of critique and politics that take into account the diverse agency positions of individuals today and their supposed self-­criticality. As we will see, it has now become essential to rethink (political/feminist) agency in the context of recently destabilised identity categories and gender relationships as well as the mainstreaming, commoditisation and branding of feminism in late twentieth- and twenty-­first-­century culture and society. Postfeminism in Politics In some ways, the heading of this section might be considered controversial by some critics who define postfeminism in apolitical/non-­activist terms, being at best self-­absorbed narcissism (Douglas 1995) and at worst a retrogressive and reactionary backlash that undermines the gains of the feminist movement/politics and returns women (and men) to the limited gender roles of a bygone era (Faludi 1992). Tasker and Negra, for example, take the distinction between ‘feminist politics’ and ‘postfeminist culture’ as the starting point for their collection of essays Interrogating Postfeminism (2007) as well as the title of their introduction. As they argue, ‘the transition to a postfeminist culture involves an evident erasure of feminist politics from the popular, even as aspects of feminism seem to be incorporated within that culture’ (5). Here, postfeminism is conceived not only as intrinsically ‘middle of the road’ but it also works to ‘invalidate systematic critique’ by transforming the postfeminist subject into a ‘silent’ consumer (19, 3). Consequently, as they suggest, postfeminism should be differentiated from feminism, which fundamentally operates as a political and critical movement, emphasising ‘the operations of power, whether economic, social, ideological, or representational’ (16). In effect, Tasker and Negra define postfeminism as ‘a set of assumptions . . . having to do with the “pastness” of feminism’ as ‘it is precisely feminist concerns that are silenced within postfeminist culture’ (1, 3; emphasis in original). Underlying this division is not only a perception of incongruity, and potentially antagonism, between feminism and ­postfeminism – ­and, to some extent, politics and c­ ulture – b­ ut also a strong sense of hesitation and distrust vis-­à-vis the ­latter – a­ s Tasker and Negra write, their analysis can be situated within a body of work that ‘names’ postfeminism but ultimately ‘remains unsure about its material, limits and theoretical territory’ (11). By contrast, we have argued for a more productive and expanded interpretation of postfeminism as a critical concept that takes into account its generativity and its shifting and multiple engagements with feminist issues. In this section, we want to address postfeminism’s feasibility and usefulness as a political category and investigate its activist potential. In our mind, there is no doubt that postfeminism acts in political terms and that there is always politics

Postfeminist Contexts 65 within postfeminism. Initially dismissed as a simplistic conservative backlash in alliance with 1980s right-­wing politics, postfeminism has now been anchored firmly within neoliberal ideology and politics that assert the responsibility of the individual to adopt entrepreneurial strategies of self-­management that glorify market principles of efficiency and competition. Pomerantz (2013), for example, notes that postfeminism can be viewed as ‘part of the broader political and economic strategy of neoliberalism’ (187) that draws on the discourses of ‘equality’, ‘choice’, ‘freedom’ and ‘empowerment’ to instil market values in consumer-­citizens – e­ xemplified most vividly by the ‘can-­do’ girl of boom postfeminism that is depicted as an ‘autonomous, confident and desiring sexual subject who actively and knowingly make[s] choices’ (Chen 213: 441). As Wendy Brown (2005) has suggested, we have witnessed a global neoliberal turn over the last three or four decades, with neoliberal rationality fast becoming the dominant mode of governance in many Western political landscapes.40 Organised around the key threads of individualism and commodification (Hall 2011), this mode of governance is not limited to economic or state policy but rather it ‘produces subjects, forms of citizenship and behavior, and a new organization of the social’ (37). In effect, neoliberalism is ‘folded’ into the subject itself and gives rise to an individualised, affective discourse that regulates each person through self-­discipline and other, affective ­promises – ­such as the ‘good life’ (Berlant 2011), happiness (Ahmed 2010) and authenticity (Banet-­Weiser 2012) – while endowing him/her with an entrepreneurial type of ‘freedom’ that validates acquisitive and competitive modes of citizenship, and rendering those obsolete or disposable who struggle to fulfil their consumer/civic duties and accumulate (economic and human) capital. As Nikolas Rose and Peter Miller (1992) write, the neoliberal subject is ‘less a social citizen with powers and obligations deriving from membership of a collective body, than an individual whose citizenship is active’ so that the responsibility to be a ‘good’ (i.e. productive, efficient, competitive) citizen lies within him- or herself (201). In what follows, we will examine neoliberal politics, and its problematic relation with feminism, in more detail (see Chapter 12) – indeed, there is now a suggestion that neoliberalism has mutated into a vague catch-­all term ‘that can mean virtually anything as long as it refers to normatively negative phenomena associated with free markets’ (Boas and Gans-­Morse 2009: 152). Importantly for this discussion, we are interested in the affective dimensions of neoliberalism and how it ‘moves to and from the management of the state to the inner workings of the subject, normatively constructing and interpellating individuals as entrepreneurial actors’ (Rottenberg 2013: 420). In Jim McGuigan’s (2014) words, neoliberalism can be discussed as a ‘principle of civilisation’ that brings about a transformation in subjectivity and shapes the

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‘socio-­cultural makeup of people’: ‘as well as promoting “the market” not only in the economic but also in the political field (i.e. “liberal democracy”) of contemporary capitalism, neoliberalism is implicated in an ideological battle for hearts and minds over everything’ (224–5). It is this notion of neoliberalism as a kind of ‘common sense’ – a discourse of ­affect – ­that is useful for our investigation into the viability of postfeminist politics and the possibility of a postfeminist political subject. Here, we offer an interpretation of postfeminist politics that taps into the language of affect and turns to interiority and individualisation to account for the diverse, at times contradictory, agency and subject positions available in a late twentieth- and twenty-­first-­century context. We want to complicate the critical understanding of postfeminism as a depoliticised and anti-­feminist backlash and we endeavour to advance a more complex and diversified interpretation that allows for contemporary feminisms’ varied relationships with Western politics and media/brand cultures. We suggest that postfeminism responds to the changing qualities of subjective experiences and different ways of b­ eing – i­ndividual, civic, social, political, etc. – and inhabiting neoliberal society, where people are less willing to become ideologically identified with any political movement, even though at the same time they are still encountering adversity, uncertainty and struggle in their private and public lives. As Patricia Mann notes in Micro-Politics: Agency in a Postfeminist Era (1994), ‘[g]iven the chaotic state of individual motivations and responsibilities in this scenario, it may be wholely unrealistic to expect anyone to worry very much about establishing firm social identities’ (115). According to Zygmunt Bauman (2001), this exemplifies the contemporary state of ‘disembeddment’ which is ‘now an experience which is likely to be repeated an unknown number of times in the course of individual life, since few if any “beds” for “re-­embedding” look solid enough to sustain the stability of long occupation’ (125). This forces men and women to be ‘constantly on the run’, with no promise or ‘satisfaction of “arriving” ’: ‘There is no prospect of “final re-­embeddment” at the end road; being on the road has become the permanent way of life [for] disembedded (now chronically disembedded) individuals’. Instead, we are driven further down the route of neoliberal ­individualism – ­epitomised, for instance, by the ‘Selfie’ generation of the online era as well as the self-­branded entrepreneur more g­ enerally – ­which, some critics fear, might lead to an ‘end of politics’ defined by social and ethical considerations. In Henry Giroux’s (2013) bleak vision, this could bring about ‘the age of the disappearing intellectual’ and the rise of the ‘disimagination machine’ that undermines our ability to ‘think critically, imagine the unimaginable and engage in thoughtful and critical dialogue’ (263). In this reading, the ‘cheerful robot’ comes to be seen as a metaphor for the systemic construction

Postfeminist Contexts 67 of ‘a new mode of depoliticised and thoughtless form of agency’ that reduces civic bonds and obligations to banal acts of consumption (Giroux 2011a: 165). In this book, we do not want to reduce the various articulations of contemporary personal, civic and political action to the opprobrium of a ‘dumb downed’ political ­illiteracy – ­indeed, as we have mentioned previously, we are currently witnessing an increased, albeit ‘uneven’ visibility of feminism in a range of cultural and political sites as well as other activist forms that have materialised, for example, post-­recession to oppose capitalist systems more broadly. In this sense, we shy away from the dead end of the ‘intellectual vacuum’ and ‘moral coma’ that Giroux identifies, which surrenders politics to ignorance, critique to consumption, solidarity to ‘economic Darwinism’ (Giroux 2011a: 164–5). At the same time, we do not underestimate the challenges of this particular political moment that is characterised by self-­ responsibilisation rather than social responsibility and that seems to generate its one internal critique while simultaneously ‘inscrib[ing] and circumscrib[ing] the permissible parameters of that same critique’ (Rottenberg 2013: 418). Moreover, as we have already discussed, the neoliberal political realm now encompasses an affective dimension that speaks to, rather than at, people and comes to represent a kind of ‘common sense’. This generates new forms of subjectivity and a ‘new relationship between government and knowledge through which governing activities are recast as nonpolitical and nonideological problems that need technical solutions’ (Ong 2006: 3). Here, the crucial point is to engage with these new kinds of politics and political subjects that emerge in this context and rethink how we can act politically as well as how we are acted upon by political and economic institutions. This does not imply that we do away with other modes of political activism/agency but it means that we need to broaden our conceptions of politics and political action as well as of ourselves as political actors (see Oksala 2013). Crucially, in our examination of ‘postfeminist politics’, we do not understand postfeminism as an alternative to feminism and its political struggle, nor do we discuss it as a bounded philosophy and an organised political movement that gains its force through activist lobbying at grass-­roots l­evel – ­although by now postfeminism has certainly acquired an activist dimension, both on a micro- and macro- level, that needs to be acknowledged (see Chapter 12). Instead, we maintain that postfeminism pushes us, in Patricia Mann’s (1994) words, to ‘reach beyond the boundaries of a feminist audience’ and address the fact that feminist concerns have entered the mainstream and are articulated in politically contradictory ways (118). The approach that we put forward involves not only a reconsideration of postfeminism and its political dimensions but also a reconceptualisation of political and critical practices. As Mann rightly observes, it is now necessary ‘to expand the vocabulary of political

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actions in order to make sense of individual agency in moments of discursive uncertainty and political change’ (17), a point which undoubtedly has been reinforced in a twenty-­ first-­ century recessionary climate marked by ever greater contingency and precarity. Of course, this also has reverberations for our discussion and perception of feminist politics and critique that have historically been dependent on separatist, collective and activist practice. At the end of the twentieth century and into the new millennium, feminism has undoubtedly gone through a paradigm shift that problematises political action as conceived by second-­wave ­feminism – t­he Miss America demonstration that we mentioned before is a representative example of the kind of direct and collective campaigning that underlies much of second-­wave politics. As Michèle Barrett (1990) writes, feminism has undergone a ‘turn to culture’ whereby ‘there has been an increasing tendency in feminism to think about politics through the medium of cultural debate’ (22). This move towards the cultural arena ‘has come at a time when there is quite rightly much less confidence than there once was in the standing and methodology of the traditional critical disciplines’ (23). Barrett argues that feminism’s turn to culture has created a more critical and reflexive feminism whose initial ‘consensus and confidence around issues of “patriarchy”, distinctions along sex/gender lines, as well as issues of “subject” positioning and sexuality’ are cast into doubt by the emphasis on deconstruction and difference (Brooks 1997: 38). Other critics are less positive about this emergence of ‘cultural politics’ and they have focussed on feminism’s ‘crisis of activism’ and the ‘dissolution of feminism as theory and practice’ as a result of its intersection with cultural theory (Stuart 1990: 40; Walters 1991: 105). As Andrea Stuart (1990) asks, how do we now go about changing oppressive situations ‘without some sort of campaigning “movement” ’ (40). In effect, in these circumstances, the idea of a collective ‘sisterhood’ – a united feminist ‘we’ and, related to this, a collective politics of e­ ngagement – ­becomes not only dubious but almost impossible. Banet-­Weiser (2007) notes that the complexity of the current feminist landscape means that ‘the idea that “we” all share a feminist politics, that we all “want the same thing”, is highly problematic. Not only does this propagate the mistake made by many second-­wave feminists, who insisted on a universal feminist standpoint, but it also functions as a kind of refusal to identify what it is we all apparently want’ (210). In other words, Banet-­Weiser continues, ‘if “we” all want the same thing in feminism, what is it: a liberal version of equality, a more radically configured understanding of liberation from patriarchy, or simply a more frequent and “positive” media appearance?’ (210). This struggle over territory has often resulted in a kind of ‘turf war’ with different factions and, over longer periods of time, ‘waves’ of feminism debating the meanings, uses and

Postfeminist Contexts 69 goals of feminism. The politics of feminism have undeniably changed for a post-­second-­wave generation and both postfeminism and third-­wave feminism, for example, are produced in an altered cultural and political climate than were 1960s and 1970s strands of feminism. Moreover, as we have discussed, feminism now exists in a ‘branded’ format where it becomes a ‘heavily named or signatured activity, where in the past the “collective” sufficed’ (McRobbie 2013: 132). From this point of view, what makes the current historical moment and political field so ­challenging – ­and perhaps disconcerting for s­ ome – i­s that it has become seemingly impossible to amalgamate contemporary versions of feminisms into a singular ‘movement’.41 Instead, as Banet-­ Weiser (2007) suggests, ‘feminisms exist in the present context as a politics of contradiction and ambivalence’ (210). Shelley Budgeon (2001) characterises this shift as a move from modernity to postmodernity: Feminism is fundamentally an emancipatory discourse as it has its origins in modernity and a liberal humanist political philosophy which emphasizes universal rights to equality, but as movement is made towards postmodernity, increasing differentiation problematizes the notion of universality itself, resulting in fragmentation and the questioning of unity. There is still an emphasis on the right to self-­determination and the right to choose but it becomes increasingly difficult to prescribe in advance the answers to questions about how to live and how to navigate those choices. (21) As Budgeon writes, ‘the problem of difference within the category “woman” ’ has revealed that ‘there are as many ways of becoming a feminist as there are of becoming a woman’ (23). Added to this escalation of difference between women is the fact that many feminist ideas have become part of the mainstream and common sense of today’s neoliberal consumer/brand culture to the extent that, at times, those ideas are expressed in a form that does not ­necessarily correspond with ‘traditional’ feminist methods and critiques. The questions that arise for contemporary feminist critics then have to do with how we can formulate and articulate a politicised agency within the conditions of late modernity and how we can theorise the politics of contradiction that emerge in the neoliberal context of consumerism and ­ individualism – ­ indeed, at a later stage, we will engage with the notions of ‘micro-/­ macro-­politics’ that ­reconceptualise the political sphere in more flexible terms and as part of neoliberal consumer culture. Postfeminism appears at the centre of these discussions on the state of twenty-­first-­century feminisms and politics as it has been defined as an inherently individualist and consumer/market-­ oriented – h ­ ence ­neoliberal – ­stance that works to incorporate, c­ ommoditise

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and disperse f­eminism’s fight for female emancipation and equal opportunities. Postfeminism has been said to effect a de-­collectivisation of the feminist movement as it translates feminist social goals and political ideas into matters of individual choice or lifestyle. Some, mostly feminist, commentators take a unanimously negative view of postfeminism’s individualistic stance arguing that ‘the political is personal’ as ‘the distinction between feminist politics and feminist identity is in danger of completely disappearing’ (Dow 1996: 210, 209). This ironic reversal of the well-­known feminist adage illustrates postfeminism’s individualistic agenda that problematises notions of a collective feminist identity or sisterhood and atomises ‘the revolutionary agents’ by ‘transferring the site of activity from the public arena to each individual’s psyche’ (Rottenberg 2013: 426).42 As Rottenberg probes, ‘What does it mean, many longtime feminists are asking, that a movement once dedicated, however problematically, to women’s liberation is now being framed in extremely individualistic terms, consequently ceasing to raise the spectre of social or collective justice?’ (419). Critics insist that, with the emergence of postfeminism, ‘feminist politics become feminist identity’ (Dow 1996: 209) as feminism’s political theory and practice are transformed into a set of personal attitudes; change is regarded as an internal and affective matter (Rottenberg 2013); and any emphasis on organised intervention is seen as misguided. It is feared that postfeminism’s tendency to potentiate individuals as individuals might inhibit all forms of potent ­collectivity – ­with the implicit assumption that feminism in its collective, activist form has become anachronistic. The reasons for this dismissal are highly varied, ranging from a theoretical questioning of the concepts of unity and ­coherence – ­for example in examinations of ­postmodernism – ­to the argument voiced in some media quarters that equality has been achieved and, hence, women can relax in their organised struggle and concentrate on the real work ­ahead – ­individual goals. From the 1980s onwards, the popular press provided the most explicit portrayal of this postfeminist/neoliberal utopia in which women can do whatever they please, provided they have sufficient will and enthusiasm. According to this media-­fuelled formulation, women choose the life they want and they inhabit a world centred in, what Elspeth Probyn (1990) calls, choiceoisie, which envisions all major life decisions as individual options rather than culturally determined or directed necessities. This postfeminist version of the American Dream (with its celebration of individualism) is seen to be entirely available to those who work hard e­ nough – ­underlining in this way a neoliberal, meritocratic logic whereby, whatever their social position at birth, those with enough drive, talent, effort or skills will rise to the top.43 ‘Being empowered’ becomes synonymous with ‘making the most of oneself’ and ‘pleasing oneself’ and, in this way, the second wave’s challenging collective programme of equal

Postfeminist Contexts 71 opportunity is transformed into atomised acts and matters of personal choice and consumption. As Douglas (1995) writes, ‘women’s liberation metamorphosed into female narcissism unchained as political concepts and goals like liberation and equality were collapsed into distinctly personal, private desires’ (246). This ‘narcissism as liberation’ equates women’s emancipation with their ability to do whatever they want, whenever they want, no matter what the expense. This comforting message is, of course, tied to the entitlement of prosperity and entrepreneurship linked to ‘boom culture’ and it suggests that women’s collective victimisation has ended and/or is exaggerated by feminist orthodoxy. This idea resurfaces later in this book in our discussion of ‘power feminism’ that views feminism’s emphasis on women’s subordinated status as disempowering and even o ­ ppressive – a­ stance that is also taken up by corporate, neoliberal feminism that produces an individuated feminist agent who alone is accountable for her own success and failure (see Chapter 3). Instead, women are presented as having freedom of choice to actively pursue their ambitions and take up the opportunities that a postfeminist choiceoisie – or neoliberal enterprise ­culture – ­puts at their disposal.44 Critics are adamant that the notion of ‘narcissism as liberation is liberation repackaged, deferred and denied’ as the most basic and revolutionary principles of feminism are distorted and undermined (Douglas 1995: 265). As Nancy Cott (1987) notes, as much as feminism asserts the female individual, ‘pure individualism negates feminism because it removes the basis for women’s collective self-­understanding or action’ (6). For her, the threatening outcome of this emphasis on personal choice is an excessively individualist feminism that obliterates the political. In a similar manner, Rottenberg (2013) writes that women’s individual ‘revolutionary energy’ is not ‘being steered towards the toppling of any political order or even . . . [the] coming to an awareness of systemic male domination . . . but rather such energy is transmogrified into ambition and metamorphosized into the nurturing of each individual woman’s desire to reach the top of the power pyramid’ (426). In its bleakest form, this ‘obsessive investment with self-­interest’ could strip away any commitment to the collective good and civic life and result in a pseudo-­ Darwinian ‘survival-­of-­the-­fittest’ world, what Bauman calls a ‘pulverized, atomized society spattered with the debris of broken inter-­human bonds’ (qtd in Giroux 2011b: 595, 587). The danger lies not in postfeminism’s celebration of the personal struggles and triumphs of women but, rather, in mistaking these often quite satisfying images ‘for something more than the selective, partial images that they are’ (Dow 1996: 214). In favouring individual effort rather than group struggle, a token is held up ‘not as exception but as proof that egalitarianism (the fully functioning American Dream) was present all along’ (Helford 2000: 292).45

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The rhetoric of tokenism redefines oppression and structural disadvantage as personal suffering while reframing success as an individual accomplishment, faith and self-­determination. The implication is that choice has supposedly always been there, in reach for the right person who knows how to work within the system for personal improvement. This logic has become particularly difficult to uphold and pernicious in a recessionary context that denies increasing numbers of hard-­working people the opportunity of choice and ­prosperity – ­particularly those working in cyclically sensitive areas (housing; manufacturing) and the shrinking public sector (see Christensen 2014). Yet at the same time it is still present in the ‘dogged, irrational aspirationalism’ exhibited by a corporate neoliberal elite (Negra 2014a: 284) – exemplified for instance by Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg and her ‘Lean In’ circles, professional peer groups that teach women workers how to get to the top of the career ladder (www.leanincircles.org/) – as well as the professional frugality and bargain-­hunting of consumer/media experts who provide self-­branding or self-­help advice for recession-­weary individuals on how to cope with or become ‘thrifty’ in times of economic uncertainty. According to this viewpoint, postfeminism is seen to be driven by representational/consumerist/individualist concerns for a more attractive and easily brandable image. While focusing on the strong individual’s will, the tokenism inherent in postfeminism displaces the importance of the group nature of the adversity as it obscures the collective nature of oppression and the need for organised action to remedy social injustice. As we will discuss, this is particularly problematic as far as contemporary articulations of sexism is concerned that can appear to be ‘enlightened’ (Douglas 2010) and even ‘liberal’ (Genz 2015a) while simultaneously endorsing a visceral, aggressive violence and unapologetic sexual licentiousness that reflect the stark realities of a recessionary, post-­9/11 world (see Chapter 6). Moreover, postfeminism’s individualism points towards its exclusivity whereby it is only appealing to ‘young women professionals imbued with confidence, an ethic of self-­reliance and the headstart of a good education’ (Kaminer 1995: 23). The focus on postfeminist elitism has become a staple component of many critiques whereby the most ‘free’ and ‘empowered’ postfeminist subjects happen not only to be young, good-­looking and affluent but also White and middle class. As Chen (2013) notes, ‘those women that are not attractive, past their youth and racially and economically underprivileged are losers in the competition and simply do not appear . . . or else are hastily dismissed’ (449). This brand of (post)feminism does not ensure that all women should receive ample opportunities and choices and, in so doing, it guarantees that a power and privilege imbalance continues to exist among them. As Janet Lee suggests, postfeminism’s individualist discourse is ‘a luxury the majority of women can’t afford’ and the

Postfeminist Contexts 73 postfeminist woman, ‘if there is one, is rich’ and ‘she can afford to consume clichés’ (172). As we have mentioned previously, these concerns have been addressed to some extent in contemporary examinations of postfeminism that stress its intersectional and transnational dimensions (see, for example, Dosekun 2015; Jess Butler 2013). Yet, questions about postfeminist privilege and limitations still prevail and there is no doubt that, for anti-­postfeminist critics, ‘postfeminism takes the sting out of feminism’, ‘confusing lifestyle, attitudinal feminism with the hard political and intellectual work that feminists have done and continue to do’ (Macdonald 1995: 100; Dow 1996: 214). Abandoning the structural analysis of patriarchal power, postfeminism is seen to mask the larger forces that continue to oppress many women’s lives and reinscribes their marginality by undercutting the possible strategic weight of feminist collectivities for change. Assuming rather than questioning equal opportunity for women, postfeminist individualism is criticised for depoliticising feminism and undermining the collective nature of women’s liberation while directing them to personal goals. As Dow (1996) writes, the notion of postfeminist choiceoisie is ‘at base, a rhetorical fiction’ under whose guise the term ‘feminism’ – as well as the patriarchy it tries to c­ ombat – b­ ecomes anachronistic and, sometimes, is scorned as reductive (194). Critics are concerned that this scorn for a perceived anachronism may even enable the patriarchal order to operate all the more smoothly within postfeminist discourse. Adopting this outlook, Helford (2000) concludes that ‘postfeminism leaves patriarchy in place, denouncing the idea that women are oppressed as a group and that the “personal is political” in an attempt to avoid all forms of direct struggle against male domination’ (293). We do not wish to invalidate these critiques and we do not deny that patriarchal/neoliberal ideology is a component of postfeminism. Nonetheless, we want to complicate the critical suggestion that postfeminism is a ­fundamental part and creation of patriarchy/neoliberalism and therefore it is automatically anti-­feminist and guided by ‘a selfish form of individualism’ that ‘radiates with a new sociopathic lack of interest in others’ (Finlayson 2010: 26–7; Giroux 2014: 260). Certainly, postfeminist politics do not comply with (second-­ wave) feminist definitions of what constitutes ­activism – ­that is, engagement in ­collective ­action – ­although, as we will see, there is now a gendered form of postfeminist macro-­politics (exemplified, for instance, by the global ‘SlutWalk’ movement) that goes beyond and rallies micro-­political individual agents (see Chapter 12). In our eyes, the second wave’s interpretive framework and models of political action need to be expanded in order to include politically ‘impure’ and contradictory modes of agency/activism that appropriate and accommodate notions of ‘choice’ and ‘freedom’ – a­ dvocated by many liberal

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activist groups (feminism; gay and civil rights, etc.) – while ­circumscribing the very limits of these liberatory goals. In effect, as Genz (2016) puts it, neoliberal/postfeminist subjects are ‘legitimised as self-­ ­ governing citizens through discourses of choice and free will, with freedom itself being manufactured by their ability to compete in the “game of enterprises” ’ (317). Here, freedom is not a given but rather must be produced by individuals/citizens who are responsible for and supposedly in charge of their own destiny.46 This involves a reconsideration of the concept of the individual, not only as a self-­ absorbed narcissist or ‘token’ who is a secret agent of patriarchy/neoliberalism, but also as an engaged ­agent – ­or, in Mann’s (1994) words, a ‘conflicted actor’ who is ‘capable of individually integrating diverse desires and obligations on a daily basis through creatively reconfiguring [his/her] practices and relationships’ (32). In this context, individualisation is conceived as a compulsory ‘task’ (Bauman 2001) – rather than free ­choice – ­that turns the individual into a self-­responsible subject who is ‘obliged to be free’ (Rose 1999a: 17). In McGuigan’s (2014) apt description, Individualisation is a contradictory phenomenon . . . both exhilarating and terrifying. It really does feel like freedom . . . But, when things go wrong there is no excuse for anyone. That would be mauvais foi. The individual is penalised harshly not only for personal failure but also for sheer bad luck in a highly competitive and relentlessly harsh social environment. (234) In this sense, postfeminist politics makes visible the plurality and contradictions inherent in contemporary individual/political subjectivity and demands new terms of critique to account for the changed nature of operation. As Eva Chen (2013) writes, ‘what is at stake is not a matter of how to find authentic, uncoopted forms of ­resistance – ­as if a pure, uncommodified and unmediated form of feminism could replace neoliberal . . . culture from the outside’ (448). Instead, what we need is what Johnanna Oksala (2013) calls ‘a politics of ourselves’ (44) that acknowledges our affective and subjective relations and involvement with economic and ideological structures. This encompasses a broader vision of politics that is necessarily ‘messier’ and potentially doubly ­coded – b­ eing able to act in both conservative and subversive ways, while also repudiating ‘traditional’ activist strategies and communal demonstrations. As we will shortly discuss, some versions of ­postfeminism – ­in particular those related to 1980s backlash culture and new ­traditionalism – ­are undoubtedly retrograde and can be linked to the conservative politics of the Right. Throughout the 1990s postfeminism was also aligned with ‘Third Way’ politics, adopted by centre-­left governments in Europe and North America as a progressive alternative to the worn-­out dogmas of liberalism and conservatism

Postfeminist Contexts 75 (Giddens 1998). While postfeminism’s adoption of Third Way principles is ­controversial – ­some critics argue, for instance, that the Third Way’s emphasis on market-­based policies results in a ‘politics for women without feminism’ (McRobbie 2000: 99) – it has also been interpreted more productively as a renewal of feminist policies and a reconceptualisation of the political sphere (see Genz 2006). Most recently, as we have seen, postfeminism has been discussed in relation to post-­boom neoliberalism that embeds this entrepreneurial logic deeper as a kind of common sense and endows it with affective qualities, exemplified, for instance, by the ‘authentic’ practices of self-­branding. Postfeminism thus adopts a politically ‘impure’ stance that allows for a mode of self-/political criticality that is potentially complicit with the reproduction of (sexist; economic; ideological) norms and practices it sets out to criticise in the first place (see Ahmed 2013). Several cultural/political commentators have sought to discuss the contradictions of the contemporary political field: Budgeon (2001), for example, refers to a postfeminist ‘politics of becoming’ (22) while Geraldine Harris (1999) discusses ‘a politics of undecidability’ that ‘acknowledges the impossibility of theoretical purity or perfectly politically correct practices’ (186). The politics of undecidability does not depend on a priori laws, pre-­existing assumptions, universal truths or appeals to absolute authorities. Instead, it promotes a double movement of exploitation and contestation, use and abuse, rupture and continuity. This form of politics accepts the necessity of working within what already exists and forging a future from resources inevitably impure. As Harris (1999) notes, the politics of undecidability strives to discover a position between ‘wild hope and total pessimism’, in order to deal pragmatically with the fact that ‘we are always within that which we would criticize without falling into passivity or relativism’ (180). Similarly, Judith Butler (1997a) designates ‘a politics of discomfort’ as a ‘politics of both hope and anxiety’ whose key terms are not fully secured in advance and whose futural form cannot be fully anticipated (161). She forges the notion of ‘living the political in medias res’ in order to describe this ‘reconfiguration of our “place” and our “ground” ’ (1995: 131). These variously named politics acknowledge that a transformation of the political is taking place and its outcome cannot be fully explained or decided upon from within the present without limiting the possibilities of this transformation. This need not imply a politics of pure flux and ceaseless c­ hange – ­or, worse, a purely market-­driven politics that cultivates ignorance and promotes ‘organised irresponsibility’ (Giroux 2011: 166) – but it means that, ultimately, there are ‘no rules for subversion or resistance, no guarantees of efficacy, only a process of . . . making provisional decisions, which are always invested with power relations . . . always haunted by their own internal contradiction’ (Harris 1999: 187).47 We interpret postfeminism as part of this

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transformed political sphere and, in this sense, we do counter critiques that delimit it as an apolitical or politically one-­dimensional (and mostly conservative) stance. Throughout this book, we seek to trace the varied and often conflicting influences, texts and contexts that make up the postfeminist ­landscape – ­beyond the benchmarks and dualities of feminism and patriarchy, Right and Left ideology, popular/brand culture and academia, feminism and femininity. Postfeminism responds to the paradoxes of modern-­day politics and culture, seeking to reconcile feminist ideas of female emancipation and equality, consumerist and affective demands of capitalist brand cultures, media friendly depictions of feminine/masculine empowerment as well as recessionary concerns of economic exigency. For us, it makes more sense to examine how power functions in contradictory ways in postfeminist discourses and how engaged individuals rework notions of agency in the context of postfeminist culture and politics. While we do not engage in a celebration or defence of postfeminism, we do hope to provide a critical analysis that reveals its continued relevance and adaptability, its drawbacks and possibilities, its transgressive and retrogressive dimensions. Notes   1. As Rostislav Kocourek (1996) has discussed in his examination of the prefix ‘post’ in contemporary English terminology, ‘an expression “post” + X can either be X or non-­X, or both at the same time, which makes the derivative motivationally ambiguous’ (106). This programmatic indeterminacy and interpretative openness are inherent in all ‘post’ t­erms – m ­ ost notably, postmodernism and ­poststructuralism – ­to the extent that they become issues of debate about whether the prefix signifies an end of a particular type of influence or a recognition of the fundamental importance of the latter.   2. On 29 June 1998, Time magazine’s front cover featured a row of black-­and-­white photos of three famous white feminists (Susan B. Anthony, Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem) and a colour portrait of fictional television lawyer Ally McBeal (Calista Flockhart), along with the caption ‘Is feminism dead?’ In the accompanying article, journalist Ginia Bellafante (1998) bemoaned the state of contemporary feminism that is ‘wed to the culture of celebrity and self-­obsession’ (57). In fact, as The Independent’s columnist Joan Smith (2003) argues, obituaries for feminism appear so regularly in the press that they have come to constitute a specific genre: ‘False feminist death syndrome’, as it is known, has been around for a very long time, ever since the late Victorian press described campaigners for women’s rights as ‘a herd of hysterical and irrational she-­revolutionaries’. . . . We vividly recall Newsweek declaring ‘the failure of feminism’ in 1990; The New York Times assuring its readers that the ‘radical days of feminism are gone’ in 1980; and Harper’s magazine publishing a ‘requiem for the women’s movement’ as early as 1976.

Postfeminist Contexts 77   3. Another distinction that underlies a number of critiques is between ‘feminist politics’ and ‘postfeminist culture’ (see, for example, Tasker and Negra’s introduction in Interrogating Postfeminism [2007]).   4. The notion of resignifiability is important for our understanding of postfeminism as it opens up the process of meaning construction and allows for multiplicity without foreclosing any interpretations. Following the theorist Judith Butler (1990a), meaning can never be fully secured because ‘signification is not a founding act’ but a site of contest and revision that accommodates the possibility of resignification, a citational slippage or deviation that creates new and unanticipated meanings (145).  5. As Sarah Projansky (2007) has discussed, ‘postfeminism depends on girlness, is defined by it in fact’ (43). Postfeminism’s focus on girlness and youthful ­femininity – m ­ ost vividly expressed in 1990s versions of Girl P ­ ower – h ­ as been criticised by commentators as a historicising and generationalising strategy that disempowers feminism: ‘the new female subject is, despite her freedom, called upon to be silent, to withhold critique, [in order] to count as a modern sophisticated girl’ (McRobbie 2004b: 258, 260). Girl Power thus presents itself as youthful and energetic while installing an image of feminism as ‘old’. At the same time, in its celebration of young femininity and its application of the term ‘girl’ to adult women, Girl Power is seen to infantilise and belittle women of all ages by treating them as children or adolescents. As Tasker and Negra (2007) have argued, in these circumstances girlhood is imagined as ‘being for everyone; that is, girlhood offers a fantasy of transcendence and evasion, a respite from other areas of experience’ (18).   6. Crucially, we do not want to write out of feminism women’s struggles in non-­ Western parts of the world, say the global South or the former Soviet bloc states, which would find it difficult to relate to postfeminism’s consumerist, individualist notions of empowerment.   7. The ‘first wave’ of US and British women’s movements generally refers to the surge of feminist activism in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The issue of women’s suffrage was raised from the 1830s onwards but it was not until 1918 that the vote was won for women over thirty and 1928 that women were enfranchised on the same terms as men (1920 in the United States).   8. The ‘second wave’ – which we now mostly associate with f­ eminism – d­ enotes the resurgence of women’s activism and organising in the 1960s. The term ‘second wave’ was coined by Marsha Weinman Lear in a 1968 article in the New York Times Magazine (‘The Second Feminist Wave’) and refers to an increased feminist activity in North America and Europe from the 1960s onwards. Linda Nicholson (1997) points out that ‘something important occurred in the 1960s. . . . That occurrence was a new intensity in many societies in the degree of reflection given to gender relations’ (1). Nicholson goes on to say that, in the United States, the beginnings of these changes can be seen in two, originally separate, political movements: the first was the Women’s Rights Movement, which emerged in the early 1960s and was composed largely of professional women who put

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p­ ressure on government institutions to end discrimination against women as they entered the paid labour force; the second m ­ ovement – ­the Women’s Liberation ­Movement – ­grew out of the Civil Rights and New Left Movements in the late 1960s. While Women’s Rights has been the more politically widespread movement, ‘expressing an ideology more in accord with that of the population as a whole’, the Women’s Liberation Movement has produced most of the theoretical works of the second wave (1–2). In her discussion of the feminist bestseller, Imelda Whelehan (2005) puts an end date on the second wave of ‘around 1975’: ‘It wasn’t that Second Wave feminism died in 1975 . . . yet, nonetheless, the heady period of activism was on the wane and intra-­feminist groupings were becoming more clearly demarcated than they had been’ (42).   9. For an early 1980s account of postfeminism, see Susan Bolotin’s (1982) New York Times Magazine article that discusses young women’s attitudes to feminism. One of Bolotin’s interviewees is characteristic in her dismissal of feminism: ‘Look around and you’ll see some happy women, and then you’ll see these bitter, bitter women. The unhappy women are all feminists. You’ll find very few happy, enthusiastic, relaxed people who are ardent supporters of feminism. Feminists are really tortured people’ (31). 10. Similarly, Ann Braithwaite (2004) argues for an alternative understanding of postfeminism that takes into account that ‘the breadth of feminist issues is now much broader than ever before, across a range of political, social and cultural issues, and intersecting with a variety of theories about gender, race and ethnicity, sexuality, class, and even corporeality’ (27). 11. See, for example, Claudia Wallis’s Time cover story of 4 December 1989, which proclaims that ‘hairy legs haunt the feminist movement; as do images of being strident and lesbian’ (quoted in Jones 1994: 19). 12. Here it is worth remembering that, as Sarah Gamble (2001) points out, ‘there are different ways of seeing which are all feminist, allowing for diversity within disciplines and within the feminist movement itself’ (231). 13. Given the statistical evidence, it is clear that such claims cannot be sustained. Women continue to earn less than their male counterparts (17 per cent less an hour if they work full-­time; 36 per cent if they work part-­time). 96 per cent of executive directors of the UK’s top 100 companies are men while only 20 per cent of MPs are women. For more facts about gender inequality, visit http:// www.fawcettsociety.org.uk (accessed 15 February 2008). As Vicki Coppock et al. (1995) comment, ‘this is not to say that nothing has changed for women and some aspects of women’s daily experiences can be defined as “progressive”. . . . While things may be different for women, this does not guarantee, nor translate into equality or liberation’ (180). 14. In Joan Morgan’s words, the third wave needs to go beyond black-­and-­white binary thinking and be ‘brave enough to fuck with the grays’ (qtd in Siegel 2007: 142). 15. As Amelia Jones (1994) suggests, ‘the incorporation of one particular kind of feminism into a broadly conceived . . . project of postmodernist cultural critique

Postfeminist Contexts 79 tends to entail the suppression of other kinds of feminist practices and theories’ (22). 16. Some critics contend that there are separate and easily distinguishable postfeminist strands, most commonly defined in terms of a popular, mainstream backlash on the one h ­ and – w ­ hich incorporates postfeminism’s political dimensions as part of a conservative reaction against ­feminism – ­and academic ‘post’ discourses on the other. As Deborah Siegel and Ann Cacoullos note, ‘when invoked by the popular press, “postfeminism” smugly refers to an era in which feminist movement is no longer necessary’ whereas in academia, ‘it refers to the challenging ways poststructuralist, postmodernist and multiculturalist modes of analysis have informed feminist theory and practice’ (Siegel 1997a: 53; Cacoullos 2001: 80). Postfeminism is condensed and defined as either popular feminism or postmodern/poststructuralist feminism respectively, and it is suggested that these two postfeminist contexts should be kept apart and considered separately. Accordingly, Ann Brooks points out in her theoretical exploration Postfeminisms (1997) that ‘popular “post-­feminism’s” conceptual repertoire provides a useful point of distinction from the way postfeminism is framed within the feminist academic community’ and she centres her discussion on the ‘conceptual equivalence in postmodern feminism and postfeminism’ (4, 6). Jones (1994), conversely, focuses on the widespread popular conception of postfeminism as a result of the term’s appropriation by the media, noting that ‘the popular deployment of . . . postfeminism . . . involves invidiously redefining femininity, feminism and even masculinity’ (21). 17. As Genz (2006) notes in relation to the often-­cited distinction between popular and theoretical postfeminisms: ‘This dualistic conception relies on the assumption that postmodern postfeminism is non-­hegemonic and inclusive whereas popular media postfeminism depicts a hegemonic negotiation of second wave ideas’ (337). 18. Joanne Hollows and Rachel Moseley note that ‘this idea of co-­option is a central one in many debates about the relationship between feminism and popular culture, whereby it is frequently claimed that those elements of feminism that can be “sold” – for example, ideas of liberation, independence and ­freedom – ­are appropriated by consumer culture but, in the process, become detached from the feminist discourses that anchored their radical meaning’ (10). 19. Inspired by the Black Power movement, feminists adapted consciousness-raising strategies to encourage women to identify the social, psychological and political origins of their personal problems. One of the main second-­wave slogans (‘the personal is political’) illustrates this scheme: ‘the personal is political’ implied that everyday interactions between men and women (sex, family life, household chores) were no longer simply private matters but implicated in the exercise of institutionalised power. Women were meant to become aware of this power through consciousness-­raising sessions which involved sharing experiences with a small group of other women and simultaneously learning about their experiences. It was hoped (and envisaged) that these personal acts of liberation would

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lead to a collective politics and activism. The anonymous essay ‘Consciousness Raising’ published in the 1973 collection Radical Feminism provides some insights into the workings and aims of the process: the guidelines suggest that a period of three to six months should be spent articulating the members’ personal experiences, before they are analysed in ‘feminist’ terms. This was then followed up by activities and self-­help groups as well as organised protests (qtd in Whelehan 1995: 72). 20. An example of such feminist intervention is feminist documentary film-­making that is seen to offer an alternative to the ‘false’ images of women perpetuated by Hollywood. As Annette Kuhn (1982) writes, the aim is to represent women, and feminism, with more ‘accuracy’ and ‘honesty’, which often means telling ‘real women’s’ stories through an ‘autobiographical discourse’ (148). 21. In fact, Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963) – a landmark text of liberal feminism – ­ ­ examined the role the media played in socialising women into restrictive images of femininity, in particular the ‘happy housewife’ myth. The ideology of the ‘feminine mystique’ convinces women that they should ‘desire no greater destiny than to glory in their own femininity’ and it uses the media, growing ­consumerism – ­and its associated forms of advertising and ­shopping – ­and fashionable psychoanalysis to bring about ‘the sexual sell’ (13, 181). Friedan was resolute that women’s confinement in the ‘genteel prison’ of the feminine mystique has life-­threatening consequences and amounts to a ‘slow death in mind and spirit’ and a ‘progressive dehumanization’ (83, 245). She was adamant that women can break this cycle of ‘helpless conformity’ only through a realisation of ‘the emptiness of the housewife’s role’: a woman ‘must unequivocally say “no” to the housewife image’ (164, 212, 297). For a detailed analysis of Friedan’s text and liberal feminism, see Genz’s Postfemininities (2009). 22. For a detailed analysis of the Miss America protest, see Genz’s chapter on the bra-­ burner in Postfemininities (2009). 23. For example, TV stations added imaginary flames in their reports in an attempt to ridicule the demonstrators while The Times salaciously referred to the ‘bra-­ burnings’ (though, in reality, no bras had been burnt in accordance with Atlantic City police’s request not to endanger the wooden walkway). As Hinds and Stacey (2001) comment, ‘what is striking about the persistence of this icon is that bra-­ burning seems never to have happened’: bras were not burnt, but were just one of many ­items – ­including corsets, suspender belts, high heels and hair ­rollers – t­ o be cast into the ‘freedom trash can’ . . . [as] part of the women’s liberation protest against the sexism and racism of beauty contests staged the day before the Miss America pageant in Atlantic City in 1968. (157)

24. A 2003 study on men’s and women’s attitudes to equality in Britain (commissioned by the Equal Opportunities Commission [EOC]) found that feminism is regarded virtually unanimously in negative terms, from old-­fashioned to ‘ball breaking’. Other research also suggests that ‘the label “feminism” operates as a negative cognitive frame’ that might reduce women’s support for the feminist

Postfeminist Contexts 81 movement in the future (Hall and Rodriguez 2003: 898). See www.equalityhumanrights.com/Documents/EOC/PDF/Research/talking_equality_report.pdf. 25. Whelehan (2005) discusses second-­wave feminism’s refusal to play the media game whereby ‘the Movement went into defensive retreat’ and ‘feminists weren’t beyond expelling people summarily if they were felt to have betrayed the central principles of feminism’ (138). Rosalind Miles clearly expressed this anti-­media, anti-­consumerist attitude in The Fiction of Sex (1974): ‘there are always the commercially-­minded who are quite ready to climb up on their sisters’ backs to make their impact (and their fortunes)’ (qtd in Whelehan 2005: 138). 26. For example, a Times article from 1971 laments that ‘some women’s liberation girls decide against caring for their looks. The movement rejects the artificiality of bras, deodorants, depilatories and other wonders of twentieth-­century technology which they feel exploit women commercially and debase them into sex objects’ (qtd in Hinds and Stacey 2001: 161). 27. In the proto-­feminist classic A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), Mary Wollstonecraft writes that ‘taught from infancy that beauty is woman’s sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body and roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison’ (113). Similarly, in The Beauty Myth (1991), Naomi Wolf suggests that ‘we are in the midst of a violent backlash to feminism that uses images of female beauty as a political weapon against women’s advancement: the beauty myth’ (10). 28. Thomas Frank uses the term ‘market populism’ that upholds the concept of the market as proof of social egalitarianism: ‘Markets were serving all tastes. . . . they were extinguishing discrimination; they were making everyone rich’; in this way, market populism identifies ‘the will of the people with the deeds of the market’ (qtd in Tasker and Negra 2007: 6–7). 29. In Understanding Popular Culture (1989), John Fiske champions popular culture as a creative site where the popular consumer actively and producerly negotiates the potentially oppressive effects of power structures. Fiske rejects the notion of the cultural dupe as ‘the victim of the system’ and, instead, he stresses ‘how people cope with the system’ and how they employ their resourcefulness and creativity to ‘make do with what is available’ (162, 105, 5). He seeks to unpack the term ‘consumer’ and reveal the productivity involved in the act of consumption, advocating ‘an entirely different kind of production called “consumption” ’ that uses ‘the products of capitalism [as] the raw materials, the primary resources of popular culture’ (142). In effect, Fiske makes a case for ‘active consumption’ or the ‘semiotic activity’ of the consumer who acts as a ‘poacher, encroaching on the terrain of the cultural landowner . . . and stealing what he or she wants without being caught and subjected to the laws of the land’ (142, 143). In Fiske’s eyes, the consumer’s raids or guerrilla tactics point towards the progressive political potential of popular culture that finds its expression on the micro-­political level: ‘the politics of popular culture is micropolitics, for that is where it can play the greater part in the tactics of everyday life’ (56). The politics of popular culture takes as its object

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the individual’s resistances and evasions in the minutiae of everyday life through which s/he constructs meanings and creates a sense of identity. 30. In his exploration of popular culture, Fiske (1989) focuses on ‘those moments where hegemony fails, where ideology is weaker than resistance, where social control is met by indiscipline’ (177). 31. The concept of articulation refers to the process of ‘establishing a relation among elements such that their identity is modified as a result of the articulatory practice’ (Ang 1996: 122). Stuart Hall (1986) develops the theory of articulation in order to account for the double way in which texts work in popular culture: a text-­centred way and a reader-­centred way. Fiske (1989) summarises the argument: ‘to articulate has two m ­ eanings – ­one is to speak or utter (the text-­centered meaning) and the other is to form a flexible link with, to be hinged with (the reader-­centered meaning in which the text is flexibly linked with the reader’s social situation)’ (146). The theory of articulation maintains a balance between seeing the text as a producer of meaning and seeing it as a cultural resource, open to a range of creative uses. The notion of articulation discusses the ways in which ‘meaning is a social production, a practice’ that arises from ‘a struggle to articulate, disarticulate and rearticulate cultural texts and practices for particular ideologies, particular politics’ (Storey 1997: 128–9). In other words, no articulation is ever definitive or absolute but it is always unfinished and subject to continual rearticulation and reproduction. This dynamic process of fixing and fitting together is never final or total but always ‘inexorably contextual’ (Ang 1996: 122). 32. Following Steven Best and Douglas Kellner’s Postmodern Theory (1991), we interpret poststructuralism as a subset of a broader range of theoretical, cultural and social tendencies that constitute postmodern discourses. Poststructuralism forms part of the matrix of postmodern theory and it can be described as ‘a critique of modern theory and a production of new models of thought, writing, and subjectivity, some of which are taken up by postmodern theory’ (25). Indeed, ‘postmodern theory appropriates the poststructuralist critique of modern thought, radicalizes it, and extends it to new theoretical fields’ (25–6). 33. Patricia Waugh (1989) writes that the first phase of post-­1960s feminism was characterised by a desire to experience a ‘whole’, ‘unitary’ or ‘essential’ subjectivity. In fact, ‘if women have traditionally been positioned in terms of “otherness”, then the desire to become subjects . . . is likely to be stronger than the desire to deconstruct, decentre, or fragment subjectivity’ (12). Feminism passed through ‘a necessary stage’ of pursuing a unitary essential self in order that women ‘might fully understand the historical and social construction of gender and identity’: Certainly, for women in the 1960s and early 1970s, ‘unity’ rather than dispersal seemed to offer more hope for political change. To believe that there might be a ‘natural’ or ‘true’ self which may be discovered through lifting the misrepresentations of an oppressive social system is to provide nurturance and fuel for revolutionary hope and practice. (13)

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Feminist thinkers thus endeavoured throughout the 1960s and 1970s to produce expansive social theories that could explain the basis for male/female inequalities. In the process, they often reified female differences through essentialist (or universal) categories that excluded the determinants of race, class or sexual preference. 34. Fredric Jameson (1993) articulates this idea when he explains that ‘the luxury of the old-­fashioned ideological critique . . . becomes unavailable’ as ‘distance in general (including ‘critical distance’ in particular) has very precisely been abolished in the new space of postmodernism’ (85, 87). Accordingly, the position of ‘the cultural critic and moralist’ has to be interrogated as we come to realise that ‘we . . .. are all somehow secretly disarmed and reabsorbed by a system of which . . . [we] might well be considered a part, since . . . [we] can achieve no distance from it’ (85, 87). 35. As Toril Moi writes, ‘it still remains politically essential for feminists to defend women as women in order to counteract the patriarchal oppression that precisely despises women as women’ (qtd in Waugh 1989: 25). 36. Christine di Stefano (1990) expresses similar doubts concerning the supposedly destructive encounter of feminism and postmodernism, stating that ‘the postmodernist project, if seriously adopted by feminists, would make any semblance of a feminist politics impossible’ (qtd in Cacoullos 2001: 92–3). 37. According to Stefano (1990), the ‘postfeminist tendency’ is a problematic side-­ effect of feminist postrationalism or postmodernism. In her discussion of the debates on gender differences, she distinguishes three strategic forms for posing the relationship between contemporary Western feminism and the Enlightenment legacy of humanistic rationalism: (1) feminist rationalism, (2) feminine anti-­rationalism and (3) feminist postrationalism. (1) Feminist rationalism uses a minimalist notion of gender difference and enables a critique of sexism as an irrational and hence illegitimate set of beliefs and practices. (2) Feminine anti-­rationalism, committed to a stronger version of difference, levels its protest against the rational/masculine and irrational/feminine construct and attempts to revalorise, rather than to overcome, traditional feminine experience. Stefano criticises both rationalist and anti-­rationalist frameworks: With regard to rationalism, equality is constituted within a set of terms that disparage things female or feminine. ‘She’ dissolves into ‘he’ as gender differences are collapsed into the (masculine) figure of Everyman. Anti-­rationalism, on the other hand, attempts to revalorise the feminine but fails to criticise it, sliding into anti-­feminism. (3) Feminist postrationalism seems to provide the only way out as it rejects the terms and strategies of the previous two stances and argues that feminism must initiate a break with the rationalist paradigm. Eschewing a position either within or outside of the rationalist ­framework – f­or or against d­ ifference – ­postrationalism attempts to transcend the discourse of rationalism and to offer new, decentered narratives of opposition. Hence, difference is simultaneously upheld and deconstructed as a proliferation of differences is counterposed to the singular difference of gender. While this strategy is theoretically appealing, Stefano notes that it is also complex

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and unnerving, inhabiting a constantly shifting ground of emerging and dissolving differences. With postrationalism, ‘she’ dissolves into a perplexing plurality of differences, none of which can be theoretically or politically privileged over others. 38. In Susan Bordo’s (1993) words, ‘any attempt to do justice to heterogeneity . . . devours its own tail. For the appreciation of difference requires the acknowledgement of some point beyond which the dancer cannot go. If she were able to go everywhere, there would be no difference, nothing that eludes’ (228). 39. The notions of postfeminist individualism and anti-­ essentialism resurface in popular, academic as well as political investigations of postfeminism that highlight the plurality and contradictions inherent in contemporary Western societies. The ideas and beliefs conglomerated under the heading of postfeminism are characterised by an anti-­universalist stance that betrays an awareness of the limitations of identity politics. For example, third-­wave feminism heralds the ‘return to the personal’ whereas power feminism and Girl Power embrace a ‘theory of self-­ worth’ and a vision of self-­help (Siegel 1997a: 51; hooks 1996: 63). Similarly, academic versions of postfeminism reject the category of ‘woman’ altogether by challenging and deconstructing the humanist subject who is no longer conceptualised as a fixed entity, a manifestation of essence. Viewed as a whole, the different facets of postfeminism question the possibility of a singular and coherent identity, a common ground from which to construct a collective politics and criticism. Popular postfeminism’s return to the ‘I’ and academic postfeminism’s deconstruction of the universal subject thus undermine the assumption that there is a continuous field of experience shared by ­all – ­women, men and feminists alike. 40. As Jeremy Gilbert (2013) defines it: ‘Put simply, neoliberalism, from the moment of its inception, advocates a programme of deliberate intervention by government in order to encourage particular types of entrepreneurial, competitive and commercial behaviour in its citizens, ultimately arguing for the management of populations with the aim of cultivating . . . individualistic, competitive, acquisitive and entrepreneurial behaviour’ (9). 41. In The Feminist Bestseller (2005), Whelehan charts the transformations and developments that feminism has undergone since its second-­wave heyday whereby from the mid-­1970s onwards ‘there was a gradual shift away from radicalism and activism’ (159). As Whelehan notes, certainly by the 1980s, ‘there could no longer be any belief that feminism spoke for all women . . . that moment of radical utopianism had passed where the problems that united women coming out of a male-­dominated political framework seemed larger and more urgent than those which spoke to other aspects of a woman’s identity’ (160–1). 42. The second-­wave slogan ‘the personal is political’ describes women’s relation to patriarchy and it encapsulates the idea that women’s personal, individual problems can be traced to their political living in a male-­dominated and male-­defined society. ‘The personal is political’ implies that everyday interactions between men and women (sex, family life, household chores) are no longer simply private

Postfeminist Contexts 85 matters but implicated in the exercise of institutionalised power. The adage sums up the way in which second-­wave feminism did not just strive to extend the range of social opportunities open to women, but also, through intervention within the spheres of reproduction, sexuality and cultural representation, to change their domestic and private lives. 43. As Jo Littler (2013) has demonstrated, the meritocratic ideal is riddled with contradictions: ‘it is not . . . merely a coincidence that the common idea that we live, or should live, in a meritocratic age co-­exists with a pronounced lack of social mobility and the continuation of vested hereditary economic interests’ (53). 44. Tellingly, in the best-­selling Fire with Fire: The New Female Power and How It Will Change the 21st Century (1993), Naomi Wolf urges her reader ‘to claim her individual voice rather than merging her voice in a collective identity’, reminding her that ‘making social change does not contradict the principle that girls just want to have fun’ (136, 138). Wolf adopts a feminist terminology but discards the more radical aspects of the second wave centred in sexual politics and a profound awareness of power differences between the sexes at all levels and in all arenas. Feminist commentators deplore that this personalised stance results in a postfeminist movement that can ‘embrace everyone, since it has no overt political tenets’ (hooks 1994: 98). The resort to individualism produces outstanding models of personal accomplishment but it cannot engender a programme for change in the position of women as a group. As Susan Douglas (2010) notes, instead of group action, we got escapist solitude. Instead of solidarity, we got female competition over men. And, most important, instead of seeing personal disappointments, frustrations and failures as symptoms of an inequitable and patriarchal society, we saw these . . . as personal failures, for which we should blame ourselves. (265)

45. Dana Cloud (1996) explains that ‘a token is a cultural construction of a successful persona who metonymically represents a larger cultural grouping’: ‘in popular culture . . . a token can be defined as a persona who is constructed from the character and life of a member of a subordinated group, and then celebrated, authorized to speak as proof that the society at large does not discriminate against members of that group’ (122–3). 46. Foucault’s (2010) insights about liberalism as ‘a consumer of freedom’ are also instructive here: ‘The new governmental reason needs freedom therefore, the new art of government consumes freedom. It consumes freedom, which means that it must produce it . . . Liberalism formulates simply the following: I am going to produce what you need to be free. I am going to see to it that you are free to be free’ (63). 47. Geraldine Harris (1999) refers to Derrida in order to explain that the politics of undecidability ‘does not mean that decisions cannot or should not be made’ but it highlights ‘the process of negotiation by which they are and must be made’ (180; emphasis in original). As Derrida points out, undecidability is always a ‘determinate oscillation between possibilities, possibilities which themselves are

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Postfeminism highly determined in strictly defined situations’ (qtd in Harris 1999: 111). Thus, the politics of undecidability does not offer absolutism from the responsibility of making decisions but it accepts that these cannot be made by applying a pre-­ existing law.

2 Backlash, New Traditionalism and Austerity-Nostalgia

Overview In this chapter, we examine one of the key strands of postfeminism, a largely pessimistic position that equates postfeminism with an anti-­ feminist and media-­driven backlash characterised by a rejection of feminist goals and an attempt to turn the clock back to pre-­feminist times. Emerging at the close of Reaganite America and Thatcherite Britain, such approaches interpret postfeminism as primarily a polemical tool with limited critical and analytical value. Famously discussed by the American journalist Susan Faludi in her 1992 bestseller, the backlash is seen to be fuelled by an entirely hostile media that blames feminism for a series of female illnesses and troubles, from burnout and infertility to depression and mental health problems. Feminism is depicted as ‘women’s own worst enemy’ and they are admonished that they cannot ‘have it all’ and must choose between private and public life, home and career (2). While backlash fears are pervasive in many popular narratives and representations of w ­ omen – ­including Bridget Jones’s desperate search for ‘Mr Right’ narrated in her fictional ­diaries – t­he backlash scenario has been most vividly depicted in the 1987 film Fatal Attraction that stages the dichotomy between the unmarried businesswoman and her apparent opposite, the homemaking wife, and reaffirms the patriarchal family by eliminating the single woman. Related to the backlash is the notion of ‘new traditionalism’ that articulates a vision of the home as women’s sanctuary from the stresses of their working lives. The new traditionalist or ‘retreatist’ discourse centralises and idealises women’s apparently fully knowledgeable choice to abstain from paid work in favour of hearth and family. The domestic sphere is rebranded as a domain

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of female autonomy and independence, far removed from its previous connotations of toil and ­confinement – ­a view advanced by mostly second-­wave critiques of domesticity. In particular, the female homemaker is no longer portrayed as a political prisoner held captive in, what Betty Friedan called in her 1963 landmark text, The Feminine Mystique, the ‘comfortable concentration camp’ of the family. Instead, home becomes the site of ‘mystique chic’ – ‘an illusory refuge from the drudgery of the corporate workplace’ (Kingston 2004: 66). We will analyse late twentieth- and twenty-­first-­century versions of domesticity through case studies on the 1987 film Baby Boom and the television series Desperate Housewives (2004–12). The last section of this chapter will be devoted to an analysis of ‘austeritynostalgia’ that, not unlike backlash and new traditionalism, harks back to the past in an attempt to reflect on the present. Here, we will investigate the pervasiveness of ‘thrift’ as a political discourse and cultural project that represents austerity as an ‘object of desire’ and creates affective links with individuals/ citizens by tapping into nostalgic notions of self-­sufficiency and neoliberal tropes of responsible restraint. In this context, nostalgia takes the form of consoling, ‘comfort’ narratives that compensate for contemporary experiences of hardship and reproduce dominant models of gendered identities and labour structures. Nostalgia becomes a symptom of both crisis and recovery, allowing us to escape, cope, reinforce and (potentially) resist the realities of post-­boom economies and cultures. Feminism and the Backlash Throughout the twentieth century the feminist movement has been troubled by the fear of backlash. Indeed, some feminist critics argue that a period of female/feminist advancement is almost invariably accompanied by a following stage of ­backlash – ­a reverse movement that is a reaction to, or a counter-­assault on, feminism. This was certainly the case in the 1950s and early 1960s when, after the tumultuous years of the Second World War had opened millions of jobs to women to support the war effort, there was a post-­ war backlash that saw industry, government and media converge to force a female retreat from the public sphere. During the 1950s women (and men) were encouraged to adopt more conservative positions and roles as advertisers reversed their wartime message (that women could simultaneously work and enjoy a family life) and claimed that women must choose the home while men were meant to go out to work. Home was once again regarded as the proper haven for women and feminism was pushed further out of women’s lives. This mid-­twentieth-­century backlash acted as an impetus for the emergence of second-­wave feminism in the late 1960s and 1970s (the ‘first wave’

Backlash, New Traditionalism and Austerity-Nostalgia 89 of feminism having come to an end before the Second World War and culminated with women’s suffrage in the 1920s in the United States and the UK). Second-­wave feminism attacked the ‘cult of the housewife’, illustrated, for example, by popular television programmes such as the 1960s American sitcom I Dream of Jeannie in which a female genie (played by Barbara Eden) confined to living in a bottle becomes the servant (and later wife) of an American astronaut. Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963) was instrumental in the exposure of the ‘happy housewife’ myth (what she also termed ‘the problem that has no name’). Friedan described the housewife as the epitome of female non-­identity and passivity, and she was adamant that the very condition of being a housewife has a progressively dehumanising effect on women: ‘I am convinced’, Friedan writes, ‘there is something about the housewife state itself that is dangerous. In a sense that is not as far-­fetched as it sounds, the women who “adjust” as housewives . . . are in as much danger as the millions who walked to their own death in the concentration camps’ (264–5). Friedan, a journalist and founder of NOW (National Organization for Women), admitted that she herself had helped to create this image: ‘I have watched American women for fifteen years try to conform to it. But I can no longer deny my own knowledge of its terrible implications. It is not a harmless image . . . what happens when women try to live according to an image that makes them deny their minds?’ (qtd in Whelehan 2005: 33). Friedan’s book tackled many of the issues that were to characterise much of second-­wave politics in the latter part of the 1960s. The second wave encouraged women to develop an understanding of their subjugated status in a patriarchal society and embark on a ‘consciousness-­raising’ journey, through dedicated sessions in women-­only discussion groups, public acts and demonstrations, and other forms of collective campaigning. As a number of critics have suggested, the heady, politically charged days of the second wave came to an end by the late 1970s and certainly the 1980s when the media fostered an anti-­feminist backlash that worked to revoke the gains made by the feminist movement (see Whelehan 2005). The 1980s are generally seen as a difficult decade for feminism, both in terms of popular representations as well as inner divisions t­hat – a­lthough present from the beginning of the second w ­ ave – ­were causing rifts within the women’s movement and fracturing the communal ideal of sisterhood. Nancy Whittier (1995) describes ‘the Eighties’ as a ‘grim symbol of antifeminism’ and ‘a tough period of retrenchment’: ‘the 1980s contained massive opposition and setbacks for feminism that drove longtime activists out of social movement organizations and into more individual forms of agitation. “Feminism” became a dirty word in many circles’ (191, 194). In effect, feminism lost much of its core position and identity as it was pulled in two directions by internal and external forces:

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on the one hand, feminists were confronted with a wider range of issues, which meant that more attention had to be paid to diversity and differences among women, particularly in terms of racism, classism and heterosexism. As Whittier summarises, ‘in short, feminist collective identity, or how participants understood what it meant to be a feminist, changed in the 1980s’, with the result that ‘ “[f]eminist” came to mean something quite different by 1990 than it had meant in the 1970s’ (196, 191). On the other hand, feminism also became less tangible and distinct in the ways that it was perceived from without. Feminism lost much of its outsider status as many feminist activists entered more institutionalised professions in the 1980s and feminist ideas of emancipation and empowerment were appropriated and adopted by popular culture (204–11). This is not to say that the second wave’s demise and the 1980s backlash were caused solely by internal fractures and divisions. On the contrary, by the time Margaret Thatcher was voted into power in the UK in 1979, feminism was facing a very different political climate and profound changes in the social, economic and cultural environments of Britain and the United States. In her bestselling book Backlash: The Undeclared War against Women (1992), the American journalist Susan Faludi locates a backlash against feminism in 1980s politics and media. As she explains, the 1980s saw ‘a powerful counter-­assault on women’s rights, a backlash, an attempt to retract the handful of small and hard-­won victories that the feminist movement did manage to win for women’ (12). The thesis originated in the United States, with the ascendancy of the ‘New Right’ and a shift in a more conservative direction that was to typify the Reagan era. The backlash soon made its way into media discourses that, Faludi maintains, work hand in hand with a right-­wing political ideology to launch an attack on the core beliefs and politics of the women’s movement and to rearticulate conventional versions of femininity and domesticity. Faludi outlines the backlash tenets that were propagated by a range of media texts in the 1980s and early 1990s and that are based on the assumption that female identity is troubled and tormented: Professional women are suffering ‘burnout’ and succumbing to an ‘infertility epidemic’. Single women are grieving from a ‘man shortage’. . . . Childless women are ‘depressed and confused’ and their ranks are swelling. . . . Unwed women are ‘hysterical’ and crumbling under a ‘profound crisis of confidence’. . . . High powered career women are stricken with unprecedented outbreaks of ‘stress-­ induced disorders’. . . . Independent women’s loneliness represents ‘a major mental health problem today’. (1–2) As Faludi explains, these so-­called female crises have been laid at the door of the feminist movement that has supposedly ‘gone too far’, providing women

Backlash, New Traditionalism and Austerity-Nostalgia 91 with more independence and choice than they can handle and thereby wrecking their relationships with men (xiii). Feminism is said to be responsible for ‘the sad plight of millions of unhappy and unsatisfied women’ who, thinking they could combine career and family, have jeopardised an essential part of their femaleness (Walters 1995: 119). Suzanna Danuta Walters summarises the backlash argument whereby feminism ‘promised more than it put out’, ‘we thought we wanted equality, but realize instead that we cannot have it all’ (121). Attempting to live up to an ambitious ‘Superwoman’ image, working women have been positioned in a no-­win situation as they are either condemned to a ‘double-­day/second-­shift’ existence or they recognise that their professional success has come at the cost of relationships and marriage (122). Backlash propaganda aims to dichotomise women’s private and public, feminine and feminist aspirations, splitting their ‘lives into half-­lives’ (Faludi 1992: 491). Moreover, the backlash not only warns women that they cannot ‘have it all’ and must choose between home and career but it also makes the choice for them by promoting wedded life and domesticity as a full and fulfilled existence. In other words, women are told that ‘if they gave up the unnatural struggle for self-­determination, they could regain their natural femininity’ (490). Faludi directly links the conservative 1980s backlash to, in her opinion, an equally retrograde postfeminism that lures women into an apathetic silence and inaction: ‘Just when record numbers of younger women were supporting feminist goals in the mid-­1980s . . . and a majority of all women were calling themselves feminists, the media declared that “post-­feminism” was the new s­tory – c­ omplete with a younger generation who supposedly reviled the women’s movement’ (1992: 14). In her eyes, postfeminism does not refer to a changed social context in which ‘women have arrived at equal justice . . . but [it means] simply that they themselves are beyond even pretending to care. It is an indifference that may, finally, deal the most devastating blow to women’s rights’ (95). She is adamant that the backlash/postfeminism can be attributed to an entirely hostile media that acts as an anti-­feminist force to damage and undermine the women’s movement and slander it as ‘women’s own worst enemy’ (2). In particular, single professional women are targeted by the popular press and pilloried for their unmarried state and the error of their independent ways. Working single women are cautioned that, unless they hurry and change their overly liberated lives, they are going to end up loveless and manless as ‘single women are “more likely to be killed by a terrorist” than marry’ (124). In fact, ‘to be unwed and female’ comes to be seen as an ‘illness with only one known cure: marriage’ – tellingly, these backlash fears continue to circulate in popular culture well into the 1990s when thirty-­ something singleton Bridget Jones is told by her ‘Smug Married’ friends that

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she is an ‘old girl’ whose ‘time’s running out’ and biological clock is ticking away (Faludi 1992: 122; Fielding 1996: 40–1). Unattached career women are pathologised and defined as abject and deficient, selfish and emotionally stunted, and ultimately regretful about neglecting their essential roles as wives and mothers. As Faludi observes, single women are taught to see that ‘what they think is a problem with the man is really something inside them’, and therefore, it can only be dealt with through individual, rather than collective, responsibility (376). Backlash texts thus try to convince their readers/viewers of the impossibility and undesirability of being superwomen as, in the attempt to juggle job and family, they jeopardise their feminine appeal and sign up to an exhausting existence filled with pain and guilt. The stigmatisation of working womanhood is particularly deprecatory in the case of single women who dare to diverge from homely femininity in search of a career. In the most one-­dimensional backlash scenarios, the unattached and childless professional woman is portrayed as a figure of evil and a neurotic psychopath, designed to deter women from seeking public success and neglecting their feminine duties. Case Study: Fatal Attraction ( 1987 ) The 1980s ­backlash – ­and the fears associated with i­t – h ­ as been vividly portrayed in the now classic film Fatal Attraction that condemns the figure of the liberated and unmarried businesswoman. The film’s villain, Alex Forrest (Glenn Close), embodies all that counters the dominant patriarchal structure: she is an independent career woman and an autonomous free spirit, maintaining a large apartment in Manhattan’s meat-­packing district and living out her sexuality and her emotions aggressively and excessively. Alex knowingly enters into a weekend affair with married lawyer Dan Gallagher (Michael Douglas) but then refuses to obey ‘the rules’, overstepping her assigned patriarchal position as the temptress/mistress and attempting to ‘have it all’. Pregnant with Dan’s child, she is resolute that she will not be ‘ignored’ or treated ‘like some slut’. However, the film forcefully undercuts the single woman’s position and desires by depicting Alex as a madwoman and specifically a ‘bunny-­boiler’ who, having been spurned by her lover, is determined to have her revenge and will not stop at anything, not even boiling a p­ et – ­the gruesome image of Dan’s daughter’s favourite rabbit simmering in a pot upon the stove has proven so powerful and influential as to have become part of our cultural knowledge/language, deserving its own entry in the Oxford English Dictionary. Following her vicious murder of an innocent animal, Alex came to be seen by moviegoers and journalists as an embodiment of evil, with one tabloid even dubbing Glenn Close’s character the ‘MOST HATED WOMAN IN AMERICA’. The film works to trivialise Alex’s anger by

Backlash, New Traditionalism and Austerity-Nostalgia 93 focusing on her increasingly psychotic behaviour and obscuring Dan’s paternal duties by siding overwhelmingly with him and favouring his life inside the established family unit. In fact, Fatal Attraction enacts a well-­ established dichotomy between, what the screenwriter James Dearden calls, ‘the Dark Woman and the Light Woman’, or, in this case, the raving single woman and the dutiful wife, the sexualised temptress and the good mother (qtd in Faludi 1992: 149). Any overlap or similarity between Alex and Beth Gallagher (Anne Archer) is denied, and ultimately it is the wife’s responsibility to act as the final arbiter of familial justice and destroy her unmarried nemesis. Confirming Susan Bromley and Pamela Hewitt’s assertion that ‘in the 1980s the single career woman must be killed in order to preserve the sanctity of the family’, Beth defeats her arch-­enemy in a bloody finale and shoots the she-­monster Alex has become in her intrusive and violent quest to find an avenue into Dan’s life (1992: 23). The brutal killing that takes place in the film’s final scenes is depicted as a justified act of self-­defence and an overdue punishment for the mad seductress who unlawfully tries to enter the family entity. The backlash thus succeeds in firmly relegating women to their conventional gender roles as wives/mothers and instructing them that their desire for a place outside the home could lead to a variety of dire personal consequences and may even result in death. As Faludi (1992) concludes, in 1980s cinema ‘there’s only room for one woman at a time’ (158). New Traditionalism When Cosmopolitan magazine declared in its June 2000 issue that young twenty-­something women had become the new ‘housewife wannabes’, the relationship between domesticity and female/feminist emancipation seemed to have been reversed (Dutton 2000). While for the last century women had struggled to uncover and challenge the subjugation inherent in their domestic subject positions, now it appeared that they were keen to re-­embrace the title of housewife and re-­experience the joys of a ‘new femininity’. Domesticity suddenly became a buzzword, with housewives, fictional and real, emerging in all areas of society and popular culture: from Nigella Lawson whipping up tasty treats on TV (and simultaneously managing to look infinitely glamorous) to Brenda Barnes famously giving up her job as president of Pepsi-­Cola North America to spend more time with her three children, there was no denying that domesticity was re-­emerging as a distinct twenty-­first-­century site and topic for critical investigation. Feminist critics in particular have been weary of this return to domesticity/­ femininity and they have interpreted it as an inherent part of the b­ acklash

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against feminism. According to Faludi (1992), the ‘back-­ to-­ the-­ home ­movement’ has to be recognised as the malicious creation of the advertising industry and, in turn, ‘a recycled version of the Victorian fantasy that a new “cult of domesticity” was bringing droves of women home’ (77). The backlash tries to convince women of their need to scale back their professionalism and rekindle their interest in romance and marriage. In Elspeth Probyn’s (1990) words, this marks the agenda of ‘new traditionalism’ that articulates and naturalises a ‘vision of the home to which women have “freely” chosen to return’ as a site of fulfilment (149). In a similar vein, Diane Negra (2009) discusses ‘retreatism’ in women’s films and romantic ­comedies – s­uch as Practical Magic (1998), Hope Floats (1998) and Sweet Home Alabama (2002) – that revive (idealised, upper-­middle-­class) domesticity and present a postfeminist subject who ‘having lost herself . . . [is] then (re)achieving stability through romance, de-­aging, a makeover, by giving up paid work, or by “coming home” ’ (5). Prominent in the ‘boom’ years of the 1990s and early 2000s, this new traditionalist stance centralises a woman’s ‘choice’ to retreat from the public sphere and abstain from paid work in favour of family values. Severing its previous associations of drudgery and confinement, the domestic sphere is redefined and resignified as a domain of female autonomy and independence. This model of home-­based/made happiness and self-­fulfilment has become increasingly unsustainable in the contemporary context of economic downturn where ‘the chick flick is beginning to relinquish the most obvious manifestations of the commitment to idealised retreatist domestic bliss which has anchored it ideologically for 20 years’ (Negra and Tasker 2013: 352). The retreatist woman now needs to be repositioned in order to take into account that the recessionary home no longer functions as a sanctuary or escape from the workplace but is instead reconfigured as a space of entrepreneurial feminine labour. As Pamela Thoma (2014) has examined in relation to ‘foodie romances’ like Julie and Julia (2009), recessionary femininity embraces the domestic realm through ‘an emphasis on women’s self-­work and through the trope of writing as both a creative activity and a safe and lucrative form of employment’ (109). Where boom postfeminism encouraged female employees to ‘downshift’ in order to evade the stresses and struggles of the (masculine) office, recession-­inflected narratives hold up domestic self-­labour (cooking, writing, etc.) – and other ‘self-­branding’ practices such as blogging and frugal shopping more ­generally – ­as a means of weathering and coping with the financial crisis. This also includes ‘retro’ activities such as knitting, baking and crafting that have made a comeback in post-­boom societies, exemplifying the contemporary taste culture of ‘austerity chic’ and a nostalgic and romanticised ‘thrift’ mentality that prides itself on ‘making do and mending’. Other, more long-­standing critiques of new traditionalist rhetoric have

Backlash, New Traditionalism and Austerity-Nostalgia 95 highlighted that this return to the domestic realm conceals a political assault on women’s rights, their re-­imprisonment in the home and regression to a stance of feminine passivity. As Faludi (1992) explains, new traditionalism encourages women to withdraw into the domestic shell and adopt the ‘cultural myth of cocooning’ that ‘maps the road back from the feminist journey’: whereas feminism can be discussed in terms of ‘the attempt of women to grow up’, cocooning’s ‘infantile imagery’ promotes ‘a retreat from female adulthood’ and urges women to assume a ‘false feminine vision’ that circles around home and family (77–8). In The Meaning of Wife (2004), Anne Kingston also comments on the romanticisation of domesticity that lures late-­twentieth-­ century housewives into a ‘domestic nirvana’ and a dream of ‘mystique chic’: Increasingly, ­housework – ­an endeavour reviled for decades as drudgery, as the source of women’s psychiatric problems, as the very root of female ­oppression – w ­ as presented as both fashionable and, even more perversely, a surefire route to female satisfaction. Call it mystique chic. Call it the ultimate backlash to The Feminine Mystique. (65) Kingston explores how in a chiastic reversal of the home/work dichotomy, domesticity has been transformed into an idyllic space of personal satisfaction and freedom from the shackles of working l­ife – ­although as we have seen post-­recession this public/private, labour/leisure dichotomy is increasingly being blurred in favour of domestic self-­work that accommodates forms of gendered labour (writing, crafting, cooking, shopping, etc.), and recessionary anxieties about welfare cuts and mass unemployment (see Thoma 2014). According to the rhetoric of ‘mystique chic’, the workplace has switched places with the homefront as the source of female frustration and now the corporation is presented as the same prison for women that the 1960s suburban home had once been. Whereas work outside the home is now an unavoidable economic necessity for most women, ‘homework’ has become the preserve of a few privileged, financially secure ­housewives – ­paradoxically, as Kingston points out, the domestic dream is perpetuated by a number of ‘professional’ housewives, like ‘the voluptuous, cashmere-­encased’ British ‘domestic goddess’ Nigella Lawson and the ‘hard-­core careerist’ and ‘mass-­media entrepreneur’ Martha Stewart, who sell domesticity to women viewers/consumers. Kingston (2004) maintains that women’s re-­embrace of ­domesticity – ­and retreat from the ­workplace – ­is at best a nostalgic illusion and at worst a ruse to return women to ‘the same kind of idealized domesticity that, ironically, had given rise to the twentieth-­century feminist movement in the first place’ (102). More recently, critics not only have started to analyse the revival of domesticity in the late twentieth and twenty-­first century in relation to a

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c­ onservative and reactionary ­move – ­such as the notions of backlash and new traditionalism ­imply – b­ ut have also sought less prescriptive and more flexible ways to interpret postfeminist domesticity and the figure of the housewife. In Feminism, Domesticity and Popular Culture (2009), Stacy Gillis and Joanne Hollows describe, how in the past, the housewife has often operated as ‘the feminist’s “other” ’, based on the idea that ‘an investment in the domestic [is] antithetical to the ideals of feminism’ (1–2). Arguing against ‘a monolithic and homogeneous perspective on the relationships between feminism, domesticity and popular culture’, they want to open up discussions about ‘these contentious, thorny and occasionally pleasurable relationships’ in order to answer the question of ‘how feminism might conceptualise domesticity in different ways’ (3, 9). Elsewhere, Hollows (2006) has also examined how a ‘downshifting narrative’ functions in contemporary literature and cinema, promising ‘alternative versions of “the good life” in which a new hybrid form of domestic femininity might emerge between the feminist and the housewife’ – Sophie Kinsella’s bestselling The Undomestic Goddess (2005) and the 1987 film Baby Boom are representative examples of the kind of narratives in which a female protagonist gives up the joys and professional rewards of city living to retreat to the country in search of the ‘freedom’ of domesticity (109). In the downshifting narrative, urban femininities are abandoned in favour of rural ones and a ‘work-­life balance’ is seen to be available through geographic relocation (108). Hollows acknowledges the problems and limitations of this proposed lifestyle change that is not readily available to everyone, involving a ‘profoundly classed’ and ‘thoroughly commodified’ narrative that centres around ‘choices for those who inhabit specific middle-­class femininities’ (110–11). However, she also emphasises ­that – ­while ‘it would be very easy to read the key downshifting narrative as a classic backlash tale’, depicting what could be seen as women’s ‘failure of nerve’ to smash the glass ­ceiling – ­downshifting can also be interpreted as ‘an opportunity to interrogate the very notion of “having it all” ’ (107). In her work on ‘postfemininities’, Stéphanie Genz takes this idea further by discussing the paradoxes of contemporary postfeminist femininities that reference both traditional narratives of feminine passivity and more progressive scripts of feminine agency. As Genz (2009a) writes, ‘postfeminism offers a new mode of conceptualising the domestic as a contested space of female subjectivity where women/feminists actively grapple with opposing cultural constructions of the housewife’ (49–50). In particular, she continues, ‘a postfeminist lens allows us to transcend a critical impasse (trapped by a dualistic logic) and re-­interpret the homemaker as a polysemic character caught in a struggle between tradition and modernity, past and present’ (50). In effect, depictions of twenty-­first-­century ­housewives – ­such as in

Backlash, New Traditionalism and Austerity-Nostalgia 97 Allison Pearson’s novel I Don’t Know How She Does It (2002) or the television series Desperate Housewives (2004–12) – undermine static constructions of the housewife and, instead, highlight the contradictions inherent in modern-­day femininity/domesticity and its complicated interactions with feminism and postfeminism. In Genz’s words, domestic femininity comes to be seen as ‘a site of undecidability, of meaning in question’ whereby ‘the figure of the housewife is inscribed with multifarious significations, vacillating between patriarchal scripts of enforced domesticity and postfeminist re-­appropriations that acknowledge agency and self-­determination’ (50). Case Study: Baby Boom ( 1987 ) Baby Boom has often been cited as representative of ‘new traditionalism’ and the backlash idea that, as Susan Faludi (1992) points out, ‘babies and business don’t mix’ (159). The film’s main protagonist, high-­flying Manhattan career woman J.C. Wiatt (Diane Keaton), is converted to the joys of motherhood after she ‘inherits’ a toddler from a distant relative. Initially characterised by her business panache and single-­minded pursuit of her professional ­ambitions – ­tellingly, J.C. is also known among her colleagues as the ‘Tiger Lady’ – she tries to combine motherhood with a high-­powered job in the city but soon comes to realise that she must choose between ‘the corner office’ and ‘the cradle’ (Faludi 1992: 159). It appears that, as her boss (Sam Wanamaker) tells her, caring for a child has made J.C. ‘lose her concentration’ and ‘go soft’. In a ‘downshifting’ move, she quickly retreats to the country where, after an initial phase of boredom, she enters into a fulfilling relationship with the local vet and even founds a baby-­food empire. At the end of the film, when J.C. is presented with the possibility of reclaiming her identity as a savvy ­businesswoman – ­her former associates are bidding to buy her new company in a multimillion-­dollar ­deal – ­she turns down the offer and, with this, her previous way of life and objectives: ‘I’m not the Tiger Lady anymore. . . . I don’t want to make . . . sacrifices and the bottom line is nobody should have to.’ In her discussion of the film, Faludi criticises Baby Boom for its reductive, backlash-­inspired emphasis on women’s private matters and family relationships at the expense of public, professional achievements, culminating in ‘a dewy-­eyed reverie about the joys of rural living’ (161). Similarly Walters (1995) argues that Diane Keaton’s character in Baby Boom ‘lets us all know the deep dissatisfaction of women at work and lays bare the budding mama behind every gleaming corporate desk’ (125). More recent examinations, on the other hand, highlight the film’s attempt to find a compromise between domesticity and professionalism. As Hollows (2006) suggests, while Baby Boom

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has frequently been discussed as one of the ‘quintessential backlash texts’, ‘by now it is beginning to look like it captures an emergent structure of feeling’, considering ‘what emerges between the feminist and the housewife’ (105). Case Study: Desperate Housewives ( 2004–12 ) When Desperate Housewives first aired in 2004 in the United States and the UK, the show became an instant success and pop culture phenomenon on both sides of the Atlantic, with even then First Lady Laura Bush confessing to being a huge fan of the series. Blending a number of generic forms and c­ onventions – i­ncluding soap opera, murder mystery, family drama and romantic ­comedy – t­he series’ focus is on the suburban lives of five w ­ omen – ­Susan Mayer, a divorced single parent; domestic goddess Bree Van de Kamp; working mother Lynette Scavo; adulterous ex-­model Gabrielle Solis and serial divorcee Edie Britt. While its title seems to conjure up visions of the pre-­ feminist ­housewife – ­whose ‘desperate’ state encouraged second-­wave feminists like Betty Friedan to unmask the 1950s American home as a ‘comfortable concentration camp’ – Desperate Housewives has been credited with catching the twenty-­first-­century female Zeitgeist, with its characters and plots discussed in wider culture and the main actresses featured on the covers of glossy magazines and fronting high-­profile advertising campaigns. The premise of the series revolves around the suicide of a seemingly happy housewife, Mary Alice Young, who becomes the show’s omniscient narrator from beyond the grave, commenting on the trials and tribulations of her neighbours on Wisteria Lane. As the series’ creator Marc ­Cherry – ­who, as critics never fail to mention, is (seemingly paradoxically) both homosexual and a ­Republican – ­emphasises, the concept of Desperate Housewives was inspired by his own mother and reflects the desperation of women who have chosen to live in the suburbs but then realise that suburban life is not as they imagined. His reasoning on the show as a ‘post-­post-­feminist take’ captures the ambivalence of the postfeminist age: ‘The women’s movement said “Let’s get the gals out working”. Next the women realised you can’t have it all. Most of the time you have to make a choice. What I’m doing is having women make the choice to live in the suburbs, but that things aren’t going well at all’ (qtd in McCabe and Akass 2006: 9). The storylines are characteristically diverse, ranging from adultery and the troubles of combining motherhood with a high-­flying career to murder, teenage pregnancy and cancer in the later seasons. The series has been discussed as the antithesis of the tame 1960s suburbia portrayed in programmes such as Bewitched! (1964–72), exposing the discontent, lust and betrayal behind the picket fences of American suburban life. The show’s feminist credentials

Backlash, New Traditionalism and Austerity-Nostalgia 99 have also been the subject of considerable debate: Alessandra Stanley (2004), for example, is perturbed by what she interprets as a turning back of the clock to a ‘pre-­Betty Friedan America’ (E1) while Ashley Sayeau (2006) expresses a similar sense of disappointment with the show’s ‘faux feminism’, ‘that subtle, yet increasingly pervasive brand of conservative thought that casts itself as deeply concerned with the frustrations of modern women, but can ultimately offer no alternatives except those of a traditional stripe’ (44). By contrast, other critics have focussed on Desperate Housewives’ subversion of domesticity and sexual norms from within. As Samuel Chambers (2006a) suggests, the series raises a number of controversial questions concerning the politics of gender and sexuality, airing, for example, one of the very few kisses between two males on network ­TV – ­Andrew Van de Kamp (Bree’s son) and his friend ­Justin – o ­ r displaying Rex Van de Kamp’s taste for S/M role-­playing (73). Chambers argues that ‘challenging the norm from the centre has the potential to wield a much greater force than questioning the norm from the margins’, leading him to the ‘counter-­intuitive but nevertheless powerful conclusion that Desperate Housewives motivates a significant cultural politics, subversive of heteronormativity’ (72–3). Anna Marie Bautista (2006) also highlights the transgressive possibilities of the series that subverts notions of domestic bliss and undermines cultural myths of the ‘happy housewife’, highlighting instead the contemporary homemaker’s contradictory social and cultural position. Ultimately, as Janet McCabe and Kim Akass (2006) suggest, Desperate Housewives is ‘enthralling and puzzling, mesmerising and frustrating, in equal measure’, as this ‘prime-­time soap bubbling with devilishly dark humour’ has continued to divide its audience and critics (14). Austerity-­N ostalgia The 2008 recession had a profound effect not only on economic and political policy but on cultural spheres more broadly. In response to the economic crisis, many Western countries adopted a series of measures designed to aid recovery, reduce public spending and cut welfare b­ enefits – ­a fiscal programme that has come to be known under the blanket term ‘austerity’. In effect, as John Clarke and Janet Newman (2012) note, ‘austerity has become the dominant global wisdom for addressing the problem of public debt’ (300). While the financial crisis initially might have appeared to be a purely economic problem, it soon became the subject of an ideological reworking that emphasised its moral and social dimensions in terms of responsibility and interdependence. In other words, the ‘austerity’ discourse was transformed from an ‘economic necessity’ claim into one of ‘virtuous necessity’, thus fulfilling the objective of securing the consent of the populace to spending cuts (Clarke and Newman

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2012: 301, 303). These economic and moral/social elements were linked in political rhetoric through an imagery of collective painsharing, summoning up the vision of ‘a nation united in the face of adversity’ (303). As the then British Prime Minister David Cameron put it in his 2010 speech on how to tackle the deficit and debt crisis: We are all in this together, and we will get through this together . . . We are not doing this because we want to, driven by theory or ideology. We are doing this because we have to, driven by the urgent truth that unless we do, people will suffer and our national interest will suffer. . . . Freedom, fairness, responsibility: those are the values that drive this government, and they are the values that will drive our efforts to deal with our debts and turn this economy around. So yes, it will be tough. But we will get through this ­together – a­ nd Britain will come out stronger on the other side. Denouncing reckless, ‘spendaholic’ ­behaviour – ­epitomised by the ‘extravagant waste’ of the previous Labour a­ dministration – C ­ ameron (2009) called for ‘a whole new, never-­been-­done-­before approach to the way this country is run’, an ‘age of austerity’ that ‘demands responsible politics’. He drew on popular historical consciousness and memories of wartime solidarities to redefine contemporary austerity in terms of ‘efficiency’ and ‘thrift’. Thus, the banking crisis came to be re-­envisaged as a national battle that demands the moral effort and individual (self-)work of responsible ­citizens – ­in Cameron’s (2012) words, ‘this country is in the economic equivalent of war today, and we need the same spirit’. This exemplifies what Clarke and Newman (2012) designate the ‘moral economies of austerity’ that combine ‘an economic logic with a particular moral appeal (to shared sacrifice and suffering, to fairness and freedom, to a sense of collective obligation)’ (309). Here, the turn to austerity can be witnessed beyond economic circles and it acquires affective elements that take hold of us ‘psychically as well as socially’, giving rise to recessionary anxieties and fantasies and constructing our sense of individual and collective identity (see Jensen 2012). As Rebecca Bramall (2012) points out, ‘it seems vital, then, to recognize that austerity is both an economic policy and a complex ideological phenomenon, to explore austerity’s cultural politics as well as its financial politics’ (3). A number of critics have commented on the emotional incitements that circulate around austerity: according to Lauren Berlant (2011), the mood of our times can be summarised as a ‘cruel optimism’ whereby we cling to the promises of the ‘good life’ and the idea of a better future while attaching ourselves to (neoliberal) institutions and practices that impede and diminish us. In a similar vein, Jeremy Gilbert (2011) has described the affective state

Backlash, New Traditionalism and Austerity-Nostalgia 101 under neoliberalism more generally in terms of a ‘resigned compliance’ – ‘We know that we don’t like neoliberalism, didn’t vote for it, and object in principle to its exigencies: but we recognise also that unless we comply with it, primarily in our workplaces and in our labour-­market behaviour, then we will be punished’ (13). In Gilbert’s eyes, the main ‘punishment’ that is meted out in neoliberal economies is a denial of access to consumer goods. Here, our ability to engage and spend in consumer culture becomes a kind of consolation prize that keeps us going and tied to neoliberal, enterprising principles, with consumption being held up as a ‘reward’ for the individual’s (self-)labour. This type of consumerist incentive and compensation has become increasingly difficult to come by in times of economic downturn when the average citizen/consumer has less money in their pockets to enable them to ‘claim’ their recompense. As Clarke and Newman (2012) suggest, ‘austerity . . . produces an odd politics of affect in a society dominated by the promises of growth and ever-­expanding consumption’ (307). In effect, this amounts to a kind of recessionary consumer challenge that demands that we be creative and self-­sufficient in order to ‘shop our way out of the crisis’. Critics fear that under austerity measures we might actually end up with a more ‘intensified neoliberalism’ that perpetuates an ideology which ‘is organised primarily around the interpellation of subjects as consumers, while simultaneously legitimating a political programme which actively undermines the capacity of citizens to consume’ (Gilbert 2011: 21, 18). In order to combine the ‘promise of hardship’ with the ‘glittering culture of consumption’ (Clarke and Newman 2012: 307), austerity regimes have mobilised specific, nostalgic ideas of frugality and efficiency in order to produce a ‘new cultural politics of wanting’ that permits attachment to ‘thrift projects’ denoting ‘respectable, responsible restraint’ (Jensen 2012: 4). In Bramall’s (2012) words, this indicates a ‘hunger’ or ‘appetite’ for certain manifestations of ‘austerity’, turning it into an ‘object of desire’ that has a great deal of purchase in contemporary politics and popular culture. Indeed, ‘thrift’ has now become a familiar trope in political rhetoric as well as across a broad range of cultural and lifestyle sites, designating not only a shift from mindless and excessive consumption and wastefulness but also a desirable and pleasurable endeavour and a source of personal value and self-­esteem. As Minette Marrin extols the virtues of austerity in her 2010 article in the Sunday Times: We are all going to have to make painful cuts in our spending. After years of borrowed plenty, it’s difficult to face. . . . In some ways it might be rather positive. Embracing the new thrift might bring on a pleasant feeling of virtue. And there will certainly have to be a new spirit

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Postfeminism of sharing . . . At any rate, the terrible anxiety we’re now supposed to feel about our status, appearance and taste, and generally speaking the struggle of having it all, will give way to the calm of nobody having very much anyway, or hiding it if they do. We won’t have to try so hard. Less will be calmer; at least we won’t have to suffer from choice fatigue. The pursuit of status will seem u ­ nkind – u ­ npatriotic ­almost – ­as will the relentless pursuit of fashion and style: austerity is a great leveller.

The cultural politics of the recession have been exploited in both British and US media, albeit in culturally and historically distinct ways and formats. While American articulations of ‘thrift’ have appealed to a pervasive and enduring frontier ­discourse – ­exemplified, for instance, by the weblog/television series Pioneer Woman that records the everyday and highly lucrative experiences and cooking pleasures of ‘accidental country girl’ Ree Drummond (see thepioneerwoman.com) – British versions have harked back to a romanticised 1940s era of war effort and rationing. For example, makeover television programmes like Kirstie’s Homemade Home (2009) celebrate ‘austerity chic’ by embracing a vintage, nostalgia-­led aesthetic and a ‘make do and mend’ philosophy. Analogous to new traditionalist narratives, these texts prioritise the home as a space of comfort that allows recession-­weary individuals to retreat ‘inward’ to the ‘fortress’ of a secure home and escape economic/national/social insecurities and threats (see also Dejmanee 2016). In addition, the revival of domestic crafts also reinforces traditional gendered forms of female agency and labour and reconfirms women’s place in the private sphere that post-­boom needs to be rebranded as a site of entrepreneurialism and self-­actualisation by enterprising ‘homemakers’ responsible for securing their own welfare. As Thoma (2014) argues, these recessionary domestic practices are therefore ‘connected to the seemingly limitless demands for women’s flexible labor in the marketplace and at home’ (130). Thriftiness is thus structured along conservative gendered lines, cementing pre-­feminist views of the ‘happy housewife’ along with ‘bust’ postfeminist articulations of domesticity in terms of self-­fulfilment and self-­sufficiency. Thrift cultures are often underpinned by a consoling type of nostalgia that longs for safer, simpler times. The eulogy of frugal shopping and home comforts has been criticised as a sentimental caricature, ‘an amnesia-­inducing pastiche’ and a state-­endorsed, corporate-­sponsored ‘sugar-­coated escape’ (Potter and Westall 2013: 158), replete with kitsch, retro-­stylish commodities. In a UK context, this has involved for example the creation of a ‘parody Britain’ symbolised by a range of nostalgic markers like ‘bunting, cup-­cakes and street parties’ and the revival of the wartime slogan ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’ (Ali 2012). While such comforting tropes and images are not only histori-

Backlash, New Traditionalism and Austerity-Nostalgia 103 cally ­inaccurate – ­belying the ‘real’ desperation and hunger of the rationing era (see Kynaston 2007) – they also have been seen as ideologically compliant and ­retrogressive – ­what Owen Hatherley (2009) describes as ‘a sort of idiot version’ of the affective incitement to take inspiration from the past (qtd in Bramall 2013: 11). Jeremy Gilbert makes a similar point in his examination of ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’ memorabilia that in his eyes does not work to reclaim a ‘stiff upper lip’ but rather ‘to convey the painful, potentially paralysing, rupture that results from being caught between the impossibility of calmness in late capitalism’s disaster-­melee and the desire to maintain sanity in the face of all-­consuming chaos’ (Potter and Westall 2013: 159; Gilbert 2011). Here, the rise of austerity-nostalgia suggests a compliant and complicit public beguiled by the command to ‘carry on’ while their security networks are being dismantled by economic austerity measures. Of course, this type of critique can be situated as part of a larger debate about historicity in postmodernity, particularly Fredric Jameson’s Marxist analysis of the ‘insensible colonisation of the present by the nostalgia mode’ (1993: 76). For Jameson, nostalgia films and nostalgic modes (parody, pastiche) displace ‘real’ history with the history of aesthetic s­ tyles – c­ olonising the present, conveying ‘ “pastness” by the glossy qualities of the image’ and thereby condemning us to ‘seek History by way of our own pop images and simulacra’ (75, 79). In this reading, nostalgia generates only ‘depthless’, superficial recreations of past ­styles – ­that are ‘stored up in the imaginary museum of a now global culture’ (74) – at the expense of meaningful engagements with history, both past and present. Without doubt, there has been a nostalgia-­boom in recessionary times that has infiltrated various aspects of our lives: from vintage fashion to films like The Artist (2011) and Populaire (2012) and television series like Pan Am (2011–12) and Mad Men (2007–15) that explore the aesthetics and social life of past decades. While a number of critics have upheld Jameson’s condemnation of nostalgia, others have argued for a re-­evaluation and recuperation in order to uncover its ‘critical potential’ (see Sprengler 2009). As Katherina Niemeyer (2014) has recently suggested, ‘nostalgia is not only a fashion or a trend. Rather, it very often expresses or hints at something more profound . . . It is related to a way of living, imagining and sometimes exploiting or (re) inventing the past, present and future’ (2). For her, nostalgia is ‘a symptom of progress but also of crisis’ (2) and thus can be seen as an apt barometer of contemporary social, cultural and economic conditions. Bramall (2013) agrees, arguing that interpretations of ‘retro-­nostalgia’ need to go beyond readings of a ‘conservative “backlash” ’ and instead ought to examine how ‘meanings of austerity and uses of the past connect and compete in the current conjuncture’ (11, 13). For her, austerity needs to be approached critically as a ‘site of struggle’ characterised by ‘contradictions, antagonisms, alternatives and

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possibilities’ (14). Citing the example of the Fawcett Society’s 2011 ‘Don’t Turn Back Time on Women’s Equality’ c­ ampaign – f­or which participants were encouraged to dress up as 1950s ­housewives – ­Bramall (2012) points towards the ‘socially progressive and inclusive politics of austerity’ that allows for a ‘productive articulation between anti-­cuts protest and austerity chic’, and, related to this, feminist and postfeminist expressions of domesticity as drudgery/agency (116). Rather than disavowing nostalgia as ‘aesthetic colonization’ (Jameson 1993: 75), this instance signals a more (politically) progressive interpretation that highlights contemporary anxieties and controversies surrounding consumption and gendered forms of domestic labour. In this sense, as Lynn Spigel (2013) writes, nostalgia can be a complex mechanism that offers us a ‘usable past for everyday life today’ (278). This encourages us to look beyond what Macdonald calls ‘conspiracy-­theory’, backlash accounts and be prepared to find social change in ‘the wrong places, desired by the wrong people, and contaminated by all the banality . . . of the everyday consumer culture’ (Soper 2008: 576). Recommended Further Reading Bramall, Rebecca. The Cultural Politics of Austerity: Past and Present in Austere Times. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Clarke, John, and Janet Newman. ‘The Alchemy of Austerity’. Critical Social Policy 32.3 (2012): 299–319. Genz, Stéphanie. ‘ “I am not a Housewife, but . . .” Postfeminism and the Revival of Domesticity’. Feminism, Domesticity and Popular Culture. Ed. Stacy Gillis and Joanne Hollows. New York and London: Routledge, 2009. 49-­62. Probyn, Elspeth. ‘New Traditionalism and Post-­Feminism: TV Does the Home’. Screen 31.2 (1990): 147–59.

3 New Feminism: Victim vs. Power

Overview In this chapter, we examine the notion of ‘new feminism’ prominent in the 1990s that focuses on a younger generation of women who express their desire to refashion new styles of feminism. Marked by an interest in ‘power feminists’ – including a revisionist reading of Margaret Thatcher as a free-­market ­feminist – ­new feminism provides an optimistic and celebratory picture of a confident, assertive group of young women who are reporting high levels of achievement and success across private and public sectors. ‘New feminist’ t­ exts – ­such as Natasha Walter’s The New Feminism (1998) – address the relationship between women and power, arguing that new feminism must reclaim the early women’s movement’s focus on material issues of inequality. A key move of new feminism is a decoupling of the personal from the political, signalling a break with second-­wave feminism which, Walter maintains, was too preoccupied with sexual politics and reductive accounts of female victimhood. Other writers (like Naomi Wolf, Katie Roiphe and Rene Denfeld) also discuss the distinction between ‘victim feminism’ and ‘power feminism’, suggesting that women have the power for self-­definition and simply need to exploit it. The second wave’s reliance on women’s victim status as a unifying political factor is seen as disempowering and outdated and therefore should be replaced with ‘power feminism’ that is ‘unapologetically sexual’, ‘free-­thinking’, ‘pleasure-­ loving’ and ‘self-­assertive’ (Wolf 1994: 149, 180). Post-­recession, the notion of ‘power feminism’ has been given new impetus and visibility in corporate and (self-)branded forms of feminism that promote an individualised feminist subject who adopts a neoliberal mantra of self-­care and self-­responsibility

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and crafts a felicitous work–family balance. We will examine the dichotomy between victim feminism and power feminism through a case study on the television series Ally McBeal (1997–2002). New Feminism In her 2011 bestselling How to Be a Woman, Caitlin Moran starts her ‘comedic memoir’ with the observation that ‘feminism . . . has ground to a halt. . . . [W]hat had once been the one most exciting, incendiary and effective revolution of all time ha[s] somehow shrunk down into a couple of increasingly small arguments’ (12; see also Negra 2014a). In opposition to ‘traditional feminism’, Moran is concerned with ‘all those littler, stupider, more obvious day-­to-­day problems with being a woman’ (13), including tasting one’s own menstrual blood, getting a Brazilian wax and going to a lap-­dancing club. This populist, personalised a­ccount – w ­ hose feminist credentials appear to revolve around grandiose, swaggering claims that ‘the patriarchy can get OFF my face and tits’ (294) – is one of the latest in a series of female-­authored, high-­profile texts that have engaged with the possibility of a ‘new feminism’ in the last thirty years or so. If during the 1980s the prevailing mood surrounding the feminist movement was one of disillusionment and backlash, then the following decade came to represent a more upbeat and ‘popular’ – though by no means ­uncontested – ­version of feminism. It was during this time that postfeminism became more recognisable and concretised as a cultural phenomenon and journalistic buzz­ word as the 1990s saw a veritable explosion of ‘new’ kinds of feminism: ‘do-­ me’ feminism, power feminism, raunch feminism and, perhaps most famously, Girl ­Power – i­ndeed, we will discuss in more detail some of these categories that are part of a late twentieth-­century postfeminist discourse that blends mainstream and individualised forms of feminism with a range of sexual/ feminine markers. In an attempt at renovation and possibly renewal, feminism is r­econstructed – ­and its language ­refurbished – b­ y prefixing it with another (mostly ‘feminine’) classifier, sometimes resulting in oxymoronic formulations like ‘raunch feminism’, ‘bimbo feminism’ and ‘babe feminism’ that revolve around the simplistic idea that ‘Good Feminism = Great Sex’ (Siegel 2007: 10; Quindlen 1996: 4). While we acknowledge the prevalence of some of these ‘new feminist’ strands for the development of the postfeminist phenomenon, we have argued throughout for a more complex interpretation of the ‘post’ that goes beyond a straightforward narrative of progression. As we have proposed, postfeminism is not a ‘new feminism’ in the sense that it represents something radically revolutionary and pioneering that transcends the feminist past; instead, the ‘post-­ing’ of feminism involves a process of resignification that harbours the threat of backlash as well as the potential for innovation.

New Feminism: Victim vs. Power 107 Contrastingly, the term ‘new feminism’ indicates a more definitive rupture and distinction from an ‘old’ kind of feminism considered outdated, unfashionable and in most cases, obsolete. In fact, Natasha Walter starts her book The New Feminism (1998) with the question ‘Has feminism had its day?’ and immediately provides the answer: ‘It often seems as if a movement for women’s rights must be a thing of the past’ (1). Walter is characteristically optimistic in her belief that, as women, ‘we’ve never had it so good’: ‘Everywhere you look, you see individual women who are freer and more powerful than women have ever been before’ (197, 1). As the title of Walter’s text implies, the focus is on a younger generation of women who confidently ‘down pints in pubs’, ‘pay their own bills’ and ‘walk down streets with a swing in their strides’ (1). According to Walter, these are ‘new times’ characterised by modernisation and detraditionalism as well as an increasing dissonance of the political and cultural lives of a new generation of women with those of their (feminist) mothers. The ‘raw, uncharted newness’ of contemporary women’s experiences makes ‘the old certainties of feminism’ look outmoded as the new breed of women ‘are beginning to move somewhere without any markers or goalposts. Although they have heroines, they are making up their lives as they go along. No one before them has ever lived the lives they lead’ (2). However, this does not ­mean – ­Walter is careful to point ­out – ­that feminism has no role to play in modern-­day female existence. On the contrary, ‘feminism is still here, right at the centre of these new lives’ where it is needed to address a central paradox of this ‘brave new world’ (3). In effect, The New Feminism presents a contradictory picture of unprecedented female freedom and independence coupled with continuing blatant inequalities, manifestly portrayed by young women’s transition from being ‘top of the class’ at school to confronting the glass ceiling in the workplace. The average woman, ‘with all her new dreams and beliefs’, still faces a number of concrete, economic and social injustices, such as a drop in pay after having children and an increased chance of living in poverty (3). In response, Walter advocates that the new feminism should reclaim the early women’s movement’s focus on material inequalities. For her, second-­wave feminism lost its way by shifting to an exclusive concern with sexual politics and culture in the mid-­1970s. One of the key aspects of the second wave that she most emphatically discards is its politicising of the personal: ‘the slogan “the personal is the political” sprang up in the seventies in debates about abortion, sexual harassment, rape and the division of domestic labour, often to good, and even revolutionary effect. But identifying the personal and the political in too absolute and unyielding a way has led feminism to a dead end’ (4). Walter is adamant that the time has come to disentangle the personal from the political and move beyond the constraints

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and ‘spectre of political correctness’ which a post-­second-­wave generation of women no longer identifies with (4). By accentuating younger women’s desire to free themselves from the normative demands of a feminist ‘straitjacket’, The New Feminism resonates with other, late twentieth-­century descriptions of individual agency that encourage contemporary subjects to engage in what Anthony Giddens (2008) calls the ‘reflexive project of the self’ (9) and forge their identities beyond/outside established social categories: as Walter (1998) explains, the new feminists are ‘combining traditionally feminine and traditionally masculine work and clothes and attitudes. They are wearing a minidress one day and jeans and boots the next’ (2). In her account, ­feminism – ­or, rather, the second ­wave – ­is depicted as an elitist and dictatorial ‘club’ that forces its potential members to learn ‘a set of personal attitudes’ before being admitted (5). Even worse, the image that feminism has – ‘man-­hating’ and ‘intolerant’, ‘angry rather than optimistic’, ‘whingeing rather than buoyant’, ‘negative rather than positive’ – often alienates younger women who do not want to become a feminist ‘outsider’ (36). Walter maintains that the new feminism must not be trammelled by rigid ideology and find a vocabulary that combines social and political equality with personal freedom relevant for diverse constituencies of feminists, including men and women who ‘flirt’ (5). In her opinion, pragmatism, not purity, is the watchword of a flexible, contemporary kind of feminism that focuses on political, social and economic reforms and is not framed in ‘the reductive language of victim or oppressor’ (9). In this way, as Diane Richardson (2000) notes, new feminism wants to present itself as ‘more popularist, more inclusive, more willing to embrace power, more tolerant in crossing political boundaries, a feminism that belongs to men as well as women, conservatives as well as socialists’ (5). The main principle underlying this feminism’s ‘newness’ is one of innovation, renovation and resignification. As Deborah Siegel (2007) observes, ‘new feminists came up with new names for everything. They wanted to refurbish the language, the ideas, and the face. New names were ­necessary – s­trong and edgy names’ (116). However, critics remain divided over how successful and ‘new’ this resignificatory strategy is and how damaging the revamping of ‘the “F” word’ can be for the feminist movement: while some have championed new feminism as a pertinent example of recent shifts in gender lifestyles and women’s relation to ­power – ­Helen Wilkinson (1999), for example, declares that we are all power feminists now and she offers a revisionist reading of former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher who, through her single-­ minded vigour and efficient leadership, provides a pertinent model of female power and a ‘road map’ for women, ‘a route to follow, a vantage point from which to strike out in a new direction’ (31; see also Walter 1998: 172–6)

New Feminism: Victim vs. Power 109 – new feminism also received much criticism from feminist commentators for its misrepresentation of feminism and its lack of political analysis. Imelda Whelehan (2005) contends that new feminism is about ‘the individual consumer making choices to improve their own life’ but in such a way that ‘the cost to themselves is minimal’ (166). Even though The New Feminism asserts the need for continuing political, social and economic ­reforms – e­ xemplified by five concrete goals that conclude the text: the reorganisation of the workplace, childcare, male inclusion in domestic life, the opening of the poverty trap and support for female victims of ­violence – ­the book’s individualist and consumerist bias is encapsulated by the epilogue in which Walter celebrates the ‘ordinary freedoms’ of sitting in a London café, wearing a trouser suit and paying for her drink ‘with my own money, that I earn from my own work’ (256, 255). While Walter’s goals have a solid policy foundation, her dismissal of a collective women’s party or network and her embrace of individualism are seen to put into question the implementation of these objectives. As Lynne Segal (1999) writes: But quite how (new) feminism will manage to deliver, once it remedies its ways and adopts ‘a new, less embattled ideal’, remains mysterious. Walter’s analysis promotes no particular collective political formations or affiliations. We are simply told: ‘We must understand that feminism can give us these things now, if we really want them’. Fingers crossed! (228) For Segal, new feminism lacks the very thing it hopes to promote, political seriousness, a point which is reinforced by Richardson (2000) in her definition of new feminism as ‘feminism without the politics: feminism-­lite’ (7). Rather than a politically active individual, the new feminist is often dismissed as no more than, in Melissa Benn’s (1998) words, a ‘young-­ish and pleasant-­ ish, professional woman’ who ‘is interested in designer clothes’, ‘goes to the gym’, ‘likes sex’ and ‘gossips a lot with her girlfriends’ (224). Critics are also concerned that through its emphasis and celebration of female power, some versions of new feminism may in effect work to deny female victimisation and vulnerability. Power Feminism vs. Victim Feminism In Fire with Fire (1993), Naomi Wolf argues that a ‘genderquake’ has taken place in the late twentieth century and women have now reached ‘an open moment’ when they can begin to ‘balance the imbalance of power between the sexes’ (xvi). However, before they can grasp authority from men and embrace their own power, women have one important obstacle to overcome which is their belief in their own victimisation. According to Wolf, women

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who flaunt victim ­status – ­a realisation crucial for second-wave feminist politics and its emphasis on collective activism and ‘consciousness-­raising’ – have made themselves impervious to the power actually available to them. She distinguishes two traditions of feminism that she designates ‘victim feminism’ and ‘power feminism’: one tradition is ‘severe, morally superior and self-­denying’ while the other is ‘free-­thinking, pleasure-­loving and self-­assertive’ (180). As she explains, victim feminism is ‘when a woman seeks power through an identity of powerlessness. This feminism takes our reflexes of powerlessness and transposes them into a mirror-­image set of “feminist” conventions’ (147). Casting women as ‘sexually pure’ and ‘mystically nurturing’, victim feminism stresses ‘the evil done to these “good” women as a way to petition for their rights’ (xvii). While useful and necessary in the past, these victim feminist ‘assumptions about universal female goodness and powerlessness, and male evil, are unhelpful in the new moment’ for they exalt what Wolf calls ‘trousseau reflexes’ – ‘outdated attitudes women need least right now’ (xvii). In effect, it is feminism’s adherence to a victim-­focused stance that has made women turn away from the feminist movement, with feminism itself becoming ‘the F word’. In Wolf’s eyes, feminism is plagued by ‘some bad habits’ and ‘maladaptive attitudes’ that have led many women to view ‘the weapon of feminist politics’ with distaste (65, xvi). While feminism was triumphant in bringing about ‘the most successful and least bloody revolution in human history’, it now has lost touch with contemporary women who fear that it ‘embod[ies] a rigid code of required attitudes and types of behaviour’ (63, 66). In line with other late twentieth-­century individualist narratives, Wolf is keen to point out that her own feminism (as well as that of her friends) is ‘self-­ defined’ and does not fit the list of feminist ‘dos’ and ‘don’ts’: ‘Don’t tell the sisterhood’, we often joke, uncomfortably, when we are about to confide some romantic foolishness or unsanctioned sexual longing or ‘frivolous’ concern about clothes or vulnerability or men. We have all felt pressure to espouse a line that does not conform entirely with our true practices or desires. If you can no longer square your feminism with your real-­life experience, then something has gone seriously wrong. (68) In Wolf’s account, feminism has come to represent a strict and uncompromising orthodoxy and the refuge of a minority few who are ‘too proscriptive of other women’s pleasures and private arrangements’ (68). The definition of feminism has become ‘ideologically overloaded’ and, instead of offering ‘a mighty Yes to all women’s individual wishes to forge their own definition’, it has been disastrously redefined in the popular imagination as ‘a massive No to everything outside a narrow set of endorsements’. Wolf is unwavering in

New Feminism: Victim vs. Power 111 her belief that victim feminism is obsolete and even harmful to the feminist ­cause – ­in effect, ‘[t]his feminism has slowed women’s progress, impeded their self-­knowledge, and been responsible for most of the inconsistent, negative, even chauvinistic spots of regressive thinking that are alienating many women and men’ (147) – and therefore should be replaced with a different approach that she terms ‘power feminism’. Countering notions of female collective victimisation, power feminism sees ‘women as human ­beings – ­sexual, individual, no better or worse than their male ­counterparts – ­and lays claim to equality simply because women are entitled to it’ (xvii). Power feminism means identifying with other women through shared pleasures and strengths, rather than shared vulnerability and pain. As such, it is ‘unapologetically sexual’ and ‘understands that good pleasures make good politics’ (149). Wolf also addresses the second wave’s embattled relationship with the media, asserting that the latter are at the heart of the new power feminism and leading power feminists include both men and ­women – ­Wolf specifically mentions a number of celebrities and public figures such as Madonna and Spike Lee. One distinguishing feature of power feminism that clearly differentiates it from earlier second-­wave feminist strands is its acceptance, use and manipulation of its insider position within popular culture. Refuting Audre Lorde’s famous precept, Wolf claims that ‘the master’s tools can dismantle the master’s house’ – moreover, she is convinced that ‘the genderquake should show us that it is only the master’s tools’ that can deconstruct and undermine the patriarchal power base for ‘[the master] hardly bothers to notice anyone else’s’ (118, 59; emphasis in original). The power feminist thus has to show herself capable of rearranging these ­tools – ­among which Wolf counts the electoral process, the press and ­money – ­and ‘examine closely the forces arrayed against [her] so she can exert her power more effectively’ (149). In particular, some of the ‘more flexible actions’ Wolf advises that women should take include the ‘power as consumers’, as ‘readers and viewers’, ‘the power of technology’ and of controlling ‘their tuition payments’ (319–30). Critics have been sceptical of this insider tactic and they have censured power feminism for ‘working within the status quo rather than attempting to overturn current political realities’ (Whelehan 2005: 163). As Whelehan puts it, power feminism ‘seems nothing more than an empty endorsement of a social meritocracy’ (163). Sarah Gamble (2001) concurs, arguing that Wolf oversimplifies the power structures that work to constrain women and obstruct their aims of equality and economic empowerment: ‘Her entire argument rests on the assumption that power is there for the taking’, but, Gamble asks, ‘is it, can it ever be, as easy as that?’ (49). Given that power feminism centres on ‘alliances based on economic self-­interest and economic giving back’ – in place of a sentimental ‘fantasy of cosmic sisterhood’ – critiques such as Gamble’s that

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highlight Wolf’s status as a white, middle-­class, educated, solvent American may be justified (Wolf 1994: 58). Following a similar line of argument, bell hooks (1996) concludes that Wolf’s ‘new vision of female power works best for the middle class’ and its message seems to be that ‘women can be procapitalist, rich, and progressive at the same time’ (63). However, by rejecting feminism as a collective political movement that seeks to eradicate sexism and female exploitation, power feminism can be considered, in hooks’s eyes, as no more than ‘a theory of self-­worth’ that can conveniently ‘embrace everyone, since it has no overt political tenets’: ‘This “feminism” turns the movement away from politics back to a vision of individual self-­help.’ Individualism, rather than collectivism, was to be the focus of a number of new feminist writers in the 1990s who upheld a dichotomy between the victimising politics of ‘old feminism’ and the powerful ‘new feminism’ needed to overcome the feminist ‘cult of victimology’ (Siegel 2007: 103). In The Morning After (1993), Katie Roiphe focuses on the issues of rape and sexual ­harassment – ­central in second-­wave feminist analyses of female ­oppression – ­asserting that ‘feminists are closer to the backlash than they’d like to think’ (6). By overly investing in women’s discrimination, feminism is charged with presenting an image of ‘women as victims, offended by a professor’s dirty joke, verbally pressured into sex by peers’ (6). Roiphe suggests that second-­wave feminism was responsible for a particular form of victim feminism and a ‘date rape hysteria’ that, she claims, is overrunning American campuses. She argues that feminist anti-­rape initiatives (like ‘Take Back the Night’ marches) are self-­defeating as they underline women’s vulnerability and weakness instead of bolstering their strength. According to Roiphe, feminism’s preoccupation with women’s victimisation is fuelled by an outdated model of sexuality, ‘one in which men want sex and women don’t’ (Siegel 2007: 99). Rene Denfeld, in common with Katie Roiphe, distances herself from collective feminist politics of the 1960s and 1970s and she articulates a view of feminism as a totalitarian, old-­fashioned and fanatic doctrine. For Denfeld (1995), organised feminism ‘has become bogged down in an extremist moral and spiritual crusade that has little to do with women’s lives’ a­ nd – ­by drifting into the realm and language of academia that is ‘inaccessible to the uninitiated’ – it offers a ‘worldview that speaks to the very few, while alienating the many’ (5). While Roiphe describes feminism as having lapsed into a 1950s image of ­women – ­characterised by passivity and ‘wide-­eyed innocence’ (6) – Denfeld looks even further back in her description: In the name of feminism, these extremists have embarked on a moral and spiritual crusade that would take us back to a time worse than our mother’s ­day – ­back to the nineteenth-­century values of sexual moral-

New Feminism: Victim vs. Power 113 ity, spiritual purity, and political helplessness. Though a combination of influential voices and unquestioned causes, current feminism would create the very same morally pure yet helplessly martyred role that women suffered from a century ago. (10) She dubs second-­wave feminism the ‘new Victorianism’ that is bound to promote ‘repressive sexual morality’ by promulgating ‘the vision of an ideal woman’ as ‘sexually pure and helpless yet somehow morally superior to men’ (16). By insisting on pursuing an agenda based on female victimisation at the hands of an all-­powerful patriarchy, the feminist movement that began in the 1960s with a ‘fierce fight for economic, social, and political parity’ has degenerated into ‘a profoundly antisex, antifreedom, and ultimately anti-­women’s rights perspective’ (216, 237). As Denfeld stresses, the ‘feminist matriarchy’ is in danger of duplicating ‘Victorianism in all its repressive glory’ whereby ‘the woman [is] revered on the pedestal, charged with keeping society’s moral order yet politically p­ owerless – ­and perpetually martyred’ (155, 16–17). Both Denfeld and Roiphe acknowledge that they are beneficiaries of feminism’s struggle to expose and combat women’s oppression and ­victimisation –D ­ enfeld (1995), for example, writes that ‘we have it much better now than our mothers ever did’, describing feminism as her ‘birthright’ and herself as an ‘equality feminist’ – but they make a distinction between the women’s movement’s rightful fight in the past and its ‘stagnant’ present when it is heading towards ‘complete irrelevance’ (1, 2, 267). They want to reinvent the image of feminism and turn it from ‘a doctrine that dictates the most personal aspects of our lives’ to a ‘movement that, quite simply, represents the majority of women’ (16, 21). Not surprisingly, this ‘us’ and ‘them’ rhetoric has been criticised for its overly simplistic rendering of the second wave and attitude towards feminism. Deborah Siegel comments on the harm performed by such sweeping analyses: Dissenting feminist voices participate in a much-­needed intergenerational conversation . . . [but] these authors’ desires for mastery overwrite any attempt to keep a dialogue moving. In their incorporation of a rhetoric of repossession, in their masterful articulation of ‘good’ feminism, and their righteous condemnation of a monolithic ‘bad’ feminism, Wolf, Roiphe, and Denfeld make feminist history the story of a product rather than that of a process. (1997: 59) Siegel (2007) is adamant that ultimately such scripts can only result in paralysis and they are noteworthy ‘not so much for what [they] argue’ but because they sparked ‘a war ­between – a­ nd also a­ mong – g­ enerations of feminists’ (100). These disagreements were to continue in examinations of popular culture that

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debate the emergence of new female characters and their adoption of ‘new feminist’ strategies, such as a recourse to individualism, power through sex and working within the system to dismantle ‘the master’s house’. Corporate Feminism The notion of ‘power feminism’ has been reinvigorated in the post-­millennium in a more intensified individualised and/or corporate format that highlights the neoliberal ideals of autonomy, choice and meritocratic advancement while undermining the principles of collectivism. As a number of commentators have noted, twenty-­first-­century feminism has experienced a ‘rehabilitation’ or ‘resurgence’ that has resulted in a ‘new visibility’ or ‘luminosity’ of feminism (McRobbie 2015; Gill 2016). While this ‘hip’ and ‘fashionable’ feminism is inherently multiple and c­ontextualised – t­aking a range of diverse forms from activist protests to celebrity ­campaigning – t­he incitement to be ‘visible’ has also produced a more ‘branded’ and ‘personalised’ feminist stance whereby ‘[f]eminists speaking out become immediately identifiable’: ‘To be effective requires going public, being constantly available and highly visible and this in turn requires modes of self-­branding and self-­promotion . . . There is no option it seems but to launch oneself into this sphere of entertainment if one wants to take part in public debate’ (McRobbie 2013: 132). Diane Negra (2014a) refers to this as a ‘new feminist leadership discourse’ that seeks to transcend patriarchal/economic/cultural constraints ‘through self-­belief and perseverance, and affective compliance with the codes of postfeminism’ (276, 278). Underlying the necessity to self-­promote is a conceptual link with neoliberal enterprise culture that interpellates women as self-­responsible and self-­branded citizens in the global recession who can provide for themselves and sell their ‘human capital’ without relying on government/welfare support. Facebook executive Sheryl Sandberg has often been named the poster child of this woman-­centred neoliberal position that constructs a deeply individualistic type of feminism informed by market rationality. Her bestselling book Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead (2013) has been discussed in terms of corporate self-­help or career management for female employees teaching them how to succeed in business while crafting a work–family balance. While pre-­recession, such advice manuals for women tended to be oriented towards a more romantic ­quest – ­exemplified for instance by Ellen Fein and Sherrie Schneider’s The Rules (1995) which, as its subtitle promises, uncovers the ‘time-­tested secrets for capturing the heart of Mr. Right’ – Sandberg’s book is firmly located in the public sphere of paid work and in particular targets working mothers who are in danger of stepping out of the corporate game to look after their children. In order to maintain and increase their commercial

New Feminism: Victim vs. Power 115 value in the job market, Sandberg advises that women need to learn how to ‘lean in’, pursue their career goals aggressively while simultaneously managing home and family life. Sandberg’s guide conceives of itself explicitly in feminist terms as a ‘manifesto’ that is dedicated to close the ‘leadership ambition gap’ and further equality between men and women. Key to this goal is an affective transformation of the individual that allows her to ‘internalize the revolution’ and develop the assertiveness and drive to move up the professional ladder. As Sandberg writes, women ‘hold [themselves] back in ways both big and small, by lacking self-­confidence, by not raising [their] hands, and by pulling back when [they] should be leaning in’ (8). Sandberg’s corporatisation of feminism has spawned criticism on a number of fronts: for Angela McRobbie (2013), Sandberg’s address is exclusively to ‘a privileged, largely white, middle-­class sector of the population’ and eludes ‘the world of non-­elite labour’, the high cost of childcare and ‘the reliance of white, middle-­class, elite women on the low-­paid domestic labour of migrant women’ (133). In her eyes, this amounts to a depoliticised, ‘comfortable’ feminism that is defined in such terms as to ‘protect and enhance the already existing privileges of a relatively select sector of the female population’ – in effect, ‘its conservatism is most apparent in its shying away from argument and confrontation; it merely requests a place at the table’ (133). Here, women are being called upon to become aware of gendered inequalities in the name of equal opportunities and free choice while such liberal/feminist notions are brought into the world of business and transformed into individualised, affective quests for a corporate version of the ‘good life’ (see Berlant 2011). Diane Negra follows a similar line of argument in her criticism of ‘corporatist feminism’, arguing that ‘it is about conformism to the strictures of corporate culture and requires no qualitative shift in social relations. Instead, it requires that those experiencing the impact of inequality and discrimination do some psychological finetuning’ (2014a: 282). Therefore, the solution to social injustice can be found in the individual’s psyche, involving entrepreneurial as well as internal work on the self(-brand). As Catherine Rottenberg (2013) writes, this ‘turn inward’ is a key characteristic of neoliberal feminism more broadly that produces an ‘individuated feminist agent who, alone, is accountable for garnering her own “revolutionary” energy’ and channelling it towards boosting her resources (426). In this sense, ‘revolution . . . is transformed from mass mobilization into an interiorized and individual activity’ and ‘feminism is so individuated that it has been completely unmoored from any notion of social inequality’ (424–5). Ultimately, this ‘new’ corporate type of feminism further cements its links with neoliberal ideology, recasting feminist issues in personal, individualised terms.

Postfeminism

116 Case Study: Ally McBeal ( 1997–2002 )

Ally ­McBeal – ­a fictitious twenty-­something Boston lawyer who is famous for her unorthodox work methods as well as her yearning to find a ­husband – ­has come to be intimately connected with the state of late twentieth-­century feminisms ever since Time magazine featured the television c­haracter – ­or, rather, a colour portrait of actress Calista Flockhart whose demonstrably anorexic-­looking body has proven a topic for discussion in its own ­right – ­on its June 1998 cover, juxtaposed with a row of black-­and-­white photos of three renowned white feminists (Susan B. Anthony, Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem), along with the caption ‘Is feminism dead?’ The article took the success of the Fox series as a sign that feminism was no longer relevant to a 1990s generation of women who, as author Ginia Bellafante bemoaned, apparently only think about their bodies and themselves. Despite feminist objections to Ally McBeal as a dubious feminist role model, the television persona has also been embraced by a predominantly female audience who strongly identifies with Ally’s struggles to combine a successful work life with an equally fulfilling romantic relationship. The series has been discussed as simultaneously ‘pro-­woman’ and ‘anti-­ feminist’ as it takes for granted women’s right to education, career and wealth but repackages these feminist principles into feminine issues. As L. S. Kim (2001) notes, 1990s depictions of ‘the working girl (or single girl in the city) seem to proffer a feminist tone or objective but it ultimately seems to be a false feminism’ that sets up ‘pro-­woman’ values and expressions in opposition to feminist goals (323). Kim suggests that Ally McBeal illustrates this pro-­woman/ anti-­feminist stance as the programme offers female protagonists in roles that are categorically strong and empowering but then deflates and feminises their feminist potential. Ally and her colleagues are Harvard Law School graduates, working in an up-­and-­coming Boston law firm and enjoying financial independence and social equality. As Ally herself puts it, ‘I’ve got it great, really, good job, good friends, loving family, total freedom and long bubblebaths. What else could there be?’ In Kim’s framework, Ally’s position as a liberated woman is sabotaged by her constant search for the missing element in her life, a man and a heterosexual partnership. Ally admits that, even though she is ‘a strong working woman’, her existence ‘feels empty without a man’ and, unlike her 1970s precedent Mary Tyler Moore, she ‘doesn’t want to make it on her own’ (Kim 2001: 331; Chambers et al. 1998: 58). She clings to a fairy-­ tale notion of love and often retreats into her private fantasy world to reflect on her unmarried and childless ­state – ­the series features regular interludes that comically visualise Ally’s ‘turn inward’ and interior monologues, for example her hallucination of a dancing baby. Following Kim’s logic, Ally emerges as

New Feminism: Victim vs. Power 117 a ‘self-­objectifying, schizophrenic woman’ and a ‘falsely empowered image’, too self-­diminishing and indecisive to bear the feminist label (2001: 332, 323). The character remains trapped in ‘a state of pseudoliberation’ as her education and professional credentials have not gained her personal fulfilment or self-­understanding and her main strategy for success and happiness is ‘through sexuality’ (321, 332). Laurie Ouellette (2002) follows a similar line of argument in her discussion of the ‘postvictimization premise’ of Ally McBeal: in its construction of ‘idealized postfeminist subjectivities’, the programme presumes women’s ‘already-­achieved professional and sexual gains while simultaneously affirming their right to choose femininity’ (315, 332–3). In this context, Ouellette reads postfeminism in terms of a ‘flexible subject position for a new era’ that presupposes the success of the women’s movement but, at the same time, construes feminism as ‘ “other” and even threatening to contemporary femininity’ (316). She is adamant that the ‘postvictimization’ discourse amounts to a depoliticisation of feminism because, ‘although its proponents make compelling points, they tend to exaggerate feminism’s unity . . . and advocate individual agency over collective action’ (323). Rachel Moseley and Jacinda Read (2002) also interpret Ally McBeal as a postfeminist text but they go beyond a backlash reading, suggesting that Ally is ‘postfeminist . . . not because she represents the death of feminism, but because she represents a period that is post-­1970s feminism’ (237). While other critics establish a dualistic relationship between Ally’s feminine and feminist, private and public traits, Moseley and Read argue that the programme represents ‘a re-­evaluation of the opposition between feminism and femininity which informed much 1970s feminist thought’. Ally McBeal can be seen to deconstruct such oppositions by ‘attempting to hold together the apparently incompatible’ and ‘have it all’ – marriage, children and partnership in the law firm (239). Moreover, staging ‘the coming together of “traditional” feminist values with a historically and materially different experience’ of a younger generation, the series speaks to a number of women who identify with ‘being female, feminist, and feminine in the late twentieth and early twenty-­first centuries’ (240). In particular, the articulation of Ally’s interiority in the fantasy sequences is not signalled as ‘manifestly unreal, but instead as emotionally real’, making the heroine’s feelings and presence ‘concrete, immediate, and all pervasive’ (243–4; emphasis in original). As Moseley and Read conclude, Ally McBeal ‘encourages rejection of the monolithic definitions of femininity or feminism, allowing multiple opportunities for female identification in its dramatization of the tensions and contradictions experienced by many young working women’ (247). In this sense, Ally McBeal can be understood not so much as an imperfect feminist role model but as an embodiment of postfeminist in-­betweenness and heterogeneity.

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118 Recommended Further Reading

Moseley, Rachel, and Jacinda Read. ‘ “Having it Ally”: Popular Television (Post-) Feminism’. Feminist Media Studies. 2.2 (2002): 231–49. Negra, Diane (2014). ‘Claiming Feminism: Commentary, Autobiography and Advice Literature for Women in the Recession’. Journal of Gender Studies 23.3 (2014): 275–86. Siegel, Deborah. Sisterhood, Interrupted: From Radical Women to Grrls Gone Wild. Houndmills and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. 97–126. Whelehan, Imelda. The Feminist Bestseller: From Sex and the Single Girl to Sex and the City. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. 156–72.

4 Girl Power and Chick Lit

Overview This chapter explores a key strand of power feminism that is aimed at a young generation of women/girls and is particularly pervasive in media definitions of postfeminism: Girl Power. Propagated in the 1990s by the Spice Girls, Girl Power’s defining characteristic is a reappraisal of f­emininity – i­ncluding the stereotypical symbols of feminine enculturation such as Barbie dolls, make-­ up and fashion ­magazines – ­as a means of female empowerment and agency. Girl Power contains an implicit rejection of many tenets held by second-­ wave ­feminists – ­who stressed the disempowering and oppressive aspects of femininity in a male-­dominated ­society – ­and it is often considered in popular culture to be synonymous with ‘chick lit’, a female-­oriented fiction that celebrates the pleasures of feminine adornment and heterosexual romance. Girl Power has been dismissed by a number of critics as an objectifying and commoditising trap that makes women buy into patriarchal stereotypes of female appearance and neoliberal individualist principles. Yet, Girl culture also has the potential to uproot femininity and make it available for alternative ­readings/meanings. Recent critiques have discussed Girl Power as a complex, contradictory discourse that provides a new articulation of young femininity and represents ‘a feminist ideal of a new, robust, young woman with agency and a strong sense of self’ (Aapola et al. 2005: 39). We will analyse Girl Power and chick lit through case studies on the Spice Girls and the bestselling novel Bridget Jones’s Diary (1996) that has been credited with summoning the Zeitgeist, with Bridget being hailed as a ‘kind of “everywoman” of the 1990s’ (Whelehan 2002: 12).

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While Girl Power has often been linked to a ‘boom’ postfeminist stance that sells girliness as a form of independence, empowerment and the ‘right’ to consume feminine products, it has undergone a shift in times of economic downturn that problematises some of its key tenets, specifically in relation to ‘entitled femininity’ and a neoliberal ‘have it all’ attitude (see Lazar). Instead of the overachieving ‘can-­do’ girl who flaunts her emancipated status through consumption (see Harris), young women in a ‘bust’ economy cannot avoid the possibility of failure and the ‘risks’ of neoliberal entrepreneurship in terms of self-­responsibilisation and self-­reliance. The final section of this chapter will investigate the representation of recessionary Girl Power in the HBO series Girls (2012–). Girl Power Publicised by the British band the Spice Girls, Girl Power refers to a popular feminist stance (common among girls and young women during the mid-­ late 1990s and early 2000s) that combines female independence and individualism with a confident display of femininity/sexuality. The phrase ‘Girl Power’ came into popular usage in 1996 when the Spice Girls used the slogan in their interviews and on their merchandise to promote female assertiveness and autonomy in lifestyle and sexuality. Girl Power can be understood as a response to long-­standing feminist critiques of feminine gender roles that define femininity as a patriarchal marker of female powerlessness and ­oppression – ­in effect, second-­wave feminists were almost unanimous in their dismissal of femininity as an ‘artificial, man-­made’ product and called for, what radical feminist Mary Daly (1995) terms, an ‘undoing [of] our conditioning in femininity’ and an ‘unravelling [of] the hood of patriarchal woman-­hood [sic]’ (409) – as well as media representations of feminists, in particular the epithet of the ‘bra-­burner’ that has been propagated in the popular press since the 1970s and caricaturises feminists as mannish, aggressive and humourless (see Douglas 2010; Genz 2009b: chap. 2). As Hilary Hinds and Jackie Stacey (2001) note, Girlies perform a glamorous make-­over of the drab and unfashionable women’s liberationist of the past, effecting a ‘shift from the monstrous outsiders of the 1960s and 1970s to the incorporated Ms of the 1990s’ (155; emphasis in original). Reclaiming elements of femininity and girlishness in fashion and style, Girl Power discards the notions that feminism is necessarily anti-­feminine and anti-­ popular and that femininity is always sexist and oppressive. Instead, Girlies are convinced that feminist and feminine characteristics can be blended in a new, improved mix. As Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards (2000) proclaim in their Girlie manifesto:

Girl Power and Chick Lit 121 Girlie culture is a rebellion against the false impression that since women don’t want to be sexually exploited, they don’t want to be sexual; against the necessity of brass-­ buttoned, red-­ suited seriousness to infiltrate a man’s world; against the anachronistic belief that . . . girls and power don’t mix. (137) Girlies are adamant that they can compete successfully alongside their male counterparts and attain equality without sacrificing all forms of ‘pink-­packaged femininity’ (137). On the contrary, their empowerment and assertiveness are seen to be directly linked to their feminine identities and their ability to redefine the meanings of and objects related to femininity. Insisting that they are not trapped by their femininity, Girlies want to gain control by using their insider position within consumer culture. Girl Power thus combines cultural confidence with feminist awareness, emphasising that the traditional/­ patriarchal connotations of girlishness can be interrupted by alternative modes of production/consumption. As Baumgardner and Richards explain, the term ‘Girlie’ depicts the ‘intersection of culture and feminism’ and allows for a productive reappropriation of conventional instruments of femininity: Using makeup isn’t a sign of our sway to the marketplace and the male gaze; it can be sexy, campy, ironic, or simply decorating ourselves without the loaded issues . . .. What we loved as girls was good and, because of feminism, we know how to make girl stuff work for us. (136) The myths of femininity that have historically been imprinted on the female body as signs of passivity and subordination are revitalised in Girlie rhetoric that establishes a gap between image and identity and, in this new signifying aperture, rearticulates feminine modes and subjectivities. The central tenet of Girl Power is that femininity is powerful and empowering, providing women/girls with the agency to negotiate the possibilities of their gender role. In this sense, women are encouraged to use their femininity to complement and even further the qualities of independence and emancipation fostered by the feminist movement. Proponents of Girl Power maintain that it offers a way out of the one-­sided attention to the restrictions of feminine conventions that has obscured women’s engagement in the construction of femininity. They embrace Girl Power for creating more expansive forms of femininity and a ‘take-­charge dynamism’ that rewrites the scripts of feminine ‘passivity, voicelessness, vulnerability and sweet naturedness’ (Aapola et al. 2005: 19). The claim of a new meaning for old symbols opens up a space for the inventive and potentially subversive use of cultural signs and a refashioning of feminine identities. This encompasses a reconsideration of a multitude of practices and ­forms – ­including previously tabooed symbols of feminine enculturation

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(Barbie dolls, make-­up, fashion magazines) as well as body remodelling exercises such as cosmetic surgery. Taken to its logical conclusion, Girl Power makes a case for femininity politics or ‘femmenism’ that implies using the signs and accoutrements of femininity to challenge stable notions of gender formations. Jeannine Delombard (1995) describes this feminine politics by alluding to Audre Lorde’s famous precept, ‘femmenism is using the master’s tools to dismantle the master’s house’ – it involves ‘playing up your femininity’ not as a mark of oppression but in resistance to a context of prohibition (22). While this understanding of Girl Power as a deconstructive strategy to rework gender categories from within can clearly be related to postmodern theories that interpret gender as a cultural construction and ‘a doing’, there have also been substantial objections to the Girlie stance and politics (Butler 1990a: 25). Critics have argued that Girl Power’s assertion of dynamic self-­ fulfilment and feminine self-­ expression is not unanimously liberating but rather conceals a trap of conformity and disempowerment. As Susan Bordo writes, ‘employing the language of femininity to protest the conditions of the female world will always involve ambiguities’ (177). In effect, Girl Power functions within and is animated by the same cultural imagery that transfers onto women the labels of inferiority and powerlessness. Its detractors deplore that Girlies’ celebrated energies and powers are channelled towards, in their opinion, a confined and limited goal, that is, the adoption and creation of femininity. Although Girlies are resolute that they are free to construct their  own appearances and identities, critics are concerned that the range of their choices is suspiciously narrow as the Girlie look is similar to, if not synonymous with, patriarchal ideals of feminine beauty. As Shelley Budgeon (1994) points out, this form of agency is contingent upon ‘self-­objectification and dependence upon the approving gaze of others’ (66). In this model of social power, women are offered the promise of autonomy by voluntarily objectifying themselves and actively choosing to employ their capacities in the pursuit of a feminine appearance and a sexualised image. Rosalind Gill (2003a) laments that in this way, ‘sexual objectification can be presented not as something done to women by some men, but as the freely chosen wish of active . . . female subjects’ (104). The focus on femininity as an avenue to self-­determination is interpreted as a malicious cover-­up that masks a deeper exploitation than objectification and ‘a shift from an external, male judging gaze to a self-­policing narcissistic gaze’ (Gill 2007: 258). This, Gill argues, is representative of a neoliberal society that constructs individuals as autonomous, free and in charge of their prospects and destiny (‘New Femininities?’). Harris (2004) refers to this ideal postfeminist/neoliberal subject as the ‘can-­ do girl’ who is in control of her own life and views uncertainty as opportunity. Underlying this ‘can-­do’ attitude is a narrative of individualism and merito-

Girl Power and Chick Lit 123 cratic achievement that puts the will to succeed in the hands of each ‘girl’. The general suggestion is that young women can ‘ “have it all” if they put their minds to it’ (Lazar 2009: 372) – with the implicit message that any potential experiences of inequality are unjustified or misconstrued and reflect more on the individual’s inability to prosper than on structural inequities. In Angela McRobbie’s (2011) words, this encapsulates a ‘new sexual contract’ that urges women to ‘achieve in school, at university and in the world of work’ and is supported by ‘[g]overnment . . . [that] provide[s] support and incentives to achieve and to aim for the financial independence of the monthly salary’ (182). An important element of this state-­funded and corporately endorsed ‘contract’ is access to consumer culture and, related to this, sexual/feminine pleasures whereby women earn the ‘right’ to consume sexualised commodities as a means to express their agency. Consumption in this case can be understood as a source of individual gratification and ‘freedom’ and it is intimately connected with, what Lazar (2009) calls, ‘entitled femininity’ that incites women to flaunt their sexuality and ‘unapologetically embrace feminine practices and stereotypes’ (372; see also Chen 2013). Here, female consumers are not only ‘entitled’ to buy feminine products but they are also encouraged to use them in order to work on and update themselves and be the ‘best’ – most confident, assertive, successful, sexy etc. – that they can be. Girl Power’s emphasis on consumer culture and media visibility has been at the root of a raft of critiques that focus on its appeal as a marketing slogan aimed at a lucrative girl market. McRobbie (1996), for example, uses the term ‘commercial femininities’ to refer to feminine subjectivities that are produced by/in contemporary popular culture, particularly in women’s magazines. In Girlie rhetoric, the notions of emancipation and agency are often directly tied to consumer culture and the ability to purchase, with women’s agentive powers premised upon and enabled by the consumption of products and services, frequently associated with femininity/sexuality. In its most commercialised forms particularly apparent in the 1990s, Girl Power combines an emphasis on feminine fun and female friendship with a celebration of (mostly pink-­coloured) commodities and the creation of a market demographic of ‘Girlies’ and ‘chicks’. As Lazar (2009) notes, the colour pink has ‘become popularized as a marker . . . of postfeminist femininity in popular culture’ and indicates qualities such as ‘independence and confidence, while at the same time reaffirming unambiguously women’s gendered identity’ (382). The embrace of consumer culture represents a marked point of differentiation from second wave feminism that believed in the power of separatism over, what Imelda Whelehan (2005) terms, ‘the spin game’ (138). Whelehan is sceptical of this ‘free market feminism’ that ‘allows women to think that they can change their own lives even if they don’t have the mettle to change the world’

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(155). In turn, McRobbie underlines the individualism inherent in such commercial feminine forms, arguing that the ‘over-­emphasis on agency and the apparent capacity to choose in a more individualized society’ shift feminism’s ideas and ­values – ­along with its community-­based, activist ­politics – ­into the past (2004a: 10). In these critiques, Girl Power’s popularity is credited to its very lack of threat to the status quo and its individualising and commoditising effects that co-­opt and undermine feminist content/politics by presenting the production of femininity as entirely self-­willed and (commercially) available and thereby, refuting calls for social change. In a similar manner, a younger generation of feminist critics/activists take issue with Girl Power’s central position in the popular mainstream and they argue for a diversification of Girl culture that differentiates between the marketable ‘girl’ – epitomised by the Spice ­Girls – ­and the non-­conformist ‘grrrl’, who emerged in the 1990s from the US underground punk scene and the Riot Grrrl movement. Deborah Siegel (2007) explains the difference between the two: ‘Grrl’ [sic] was ‘girl’ with a healthy dose of youthful female rage, minus the sugar and spice. The word entered the lexicon sometime around 1991, along with the Riot Grrl m ­ ovement – ­a loosely connected network of all-­girl punk bands and their fans that started in Olympia, Washington, and Washington, DC . . . Not to be confused with . . . ‘Girl Power’ (a marketing ploy that deployed empowerment rhetoric to sell products), grrl was a grassroots popular expression engendered and disseminated by girls and young women themselves. (146) Described as ‘an infusion of punk and feminism’, the Riot Grrrls (exemplified by such bands as Bikini Kill and Bratmobile) staged a rebellion against dominant representations of girlhood and the patriarchal structures they encountered in the music scene (Feigenbaum 2007: 132). Addressing issues such as sexual abuse and eating disorders in song lyrics, weekly meetings and zines, the Riot Grrrls have been described as forging ‘a unique feminist space for young women’ that, it has been suggested, is not ‘that structurally dissimilar to that sustained by the second wave consciousness-­raising groups and support networks’ (Gillis and Munford 2004: 170). The structural similarities with the second wave highlight a desire to ensure a continuation of feminist principles and ­ideas – ­a desire that, as we will discuss in a later chapter, is also shared by ‘third-wave feminists’ who adopt the Riot Grrrl movement as exemplary of their activist work and critical engagement with popular culture. The distinction between ‘girl’ and ‘grrrl’ has been used to illustrate a common perception of a much wider division between postfeminism and third-wave feminism whereby the former is interpreted as middle-­of-­the-­road

Girl Power and Chick Lit 125 and depoliticised while the latter is more sub-­cultural and activist. According to Rebecca Munford (2004), in the transition from underground music scene to mainstream culture, various ‘dangers of colonisation and recirculation’ become apparent, illustrated by the lip-­glossed Spice Girls who fall prey to this ‘dangerous slippage between feminist agency and patriarchal recuperation’ (148, 149). As she observes, ‘Spice Girls-­style girl power’ is often no more than a ‘fashion statement’, ‘a ready site for postfeminist colonisation’ whereas the grrrl movement can be understood as part of a ‘politics of identification that is vital to both individual and collective empowerment’ (147–9; emphasis in original). Munford seeks to rescue ‘Girl Power’ from postfeminism’s trivialising grip by pointing out that the ­phrase – a­ lthough popularised by the Spice Girls in the mid-­1990s – ­was actually coined some years earlier by members of the Riot Grrrls. Hijacked by the popular media, the term was then hollowed out and ‘deprived of its radical and activist history’ (Gillis and Munford 2004: 170). Contrastingly, Stéphanie Genz (2006) has argued against a dichotomisation of postfeminism and the third ­wave – ­and with this, ‘girl’ and ‘grrrl’– ­suggesting that ‘it might be futile to erect a line of demarcation and differentiation between what constitutes postfeminist activity and third wave activism’ (346). Genz draws attention to ‘the different dimensions of agency that women participate in’, emphasising how ‘micro-­political forms of gendered agency . . . play to the expectations of the patriarchal gaze while hoping to rewrite [these] patriarchal codes’. In their analysis of diverse expressions of contemporary girlhood, Sinnika Aapola, Marnina Gonick and Anita Harris (2005) also adopt a view of Girl Power as an eclectic concept with ‘various meanings and uses’ that offers young women an image of femininity which is about ‘possibility, limitless potential and the promise of control over the future’ (39). They propose that Girl Power’s ‘mainstreaming effect’ does not necessarily imply ‘selling feminism’ – on the contrary, the resolutely popular stance brings feminist ideas ‘into the lives of young women’ – through music, film and television ­characters – ­and encourages a ‘dialogue about feminism’ that raises ‘important questions about the relationships between feminism, femininity, girls and new subjectivities’ (29–31, 20). Rather than espousing a singular meaning, Girl Power’s implications are multiple and varied, allowing for the possibility of an altered understanding and reformulation of femininity that takes into account its relation t­o – r­ather than disconnection ­from – f­eminism and discourses of female empowerment and assertiveness. As Gillis and Munford (2004) put it, ‘the “power” and the “girl” in girl power need to be interrogated rather than dismissed outright’ (173).

Postfeminism

126 Case Study: Spice Girls

The term Girl Power has often been directly linked with music culture, in particular since the arrival of the Spice Girls on the pop stage in 1996. Defining Girl Power as ‘a celebration of self-­belief, independence and female friendship’, David Gauntlett (2007), for example, writes that ‘the ­Spices – d­ riven by Geri ­Halliwell – ­really did push the “girl power” agenda for a while’ (217–18). Neatly packaged into five facets of 1990s British ­femaleness – ­Sporty, Scary, Posh, Ginger and ­Baby – ­the Spice Girls (with their ‘Girl Power’ battle cry) declared their intention to shake up the music scene (and society with it). The girls’ message that was to be repeated in innumerable interviews and song lyrics (such as, their debut single ‘Wannabe’) was about ‘fulfilling your dreams, going against expectations and creating your own opportunities for success’ – in tandem with the ‘freedom’ to flaunt their femininity/­sexuality through a display of hot pants, platform shoes and Wonderbras (218). As their self-­penned manifesto Girl Power! (1997) reveals, the Spice Girls position themselves as late-­twentieth-­century modernisers providing an updated version of feminist empowerment: ‘Feminism has become a dirty word. Girl Power is just a nineties way of saying it. We can give feminism a kick up the arse. Women can be so powerful when they show solidarity’ (48). The suggestion that feminism deserves a good shake-­up (a ‘kick up the arse’) has been condemned by a number of critics as illustrative of an anti-­ feminist backlash in popular culture that presents feminism as obsolete and outmoded. Imelda Whelehan (2000), for instance, suggests that the band’s ­comment – t­hough a seemingly genuine gesture of pro-­female ­camaraderie – ­shows ‘how girl power as a rhetorical device is all too prone to appropriation for essentially patriarchal ends. It inevitably promotes the widespread view that feminism is nothing but a tangle of infighting factions who never gave serious consideration to the idea of female solidarity’ (45). Whelehan argues that, at their height, the Spice Girls ‘offered a vision of success, youth and vitality to the young in a world where youthful, childless, sexually attractive women are the most visible fetishised image of femininity’ (46). This is at best a purely individualistic type of feminism that ‘bears no relation to the “bigger” issues’ as the Spice Girls ‘seem to have forgotten, or remain blissfully unaware of, the social and political critiques offered by second-­wave feminism’ (47). Another, associated, point of contention relates to the band’s commercial and mainstream appeal that is viewed by many as a symptom of the ‘selling out’ of feminist principles and their co-­option as a marketing device. As numerous feminists (and others) have hastened to point out, the Spice Girls are a ‘manufactured’ band, hand-­picked by the British pop mogul Simon Fuller and 19 Management and as such, their motivations and commitment to female

Girl Power and Chick Lit 127 emancipation have been ­questioned – ­whereby ‘empowerment’ is seen to be defined merely in terms of their own financial gain. An Australian Riot Grrrl zine concisely makes the point that ‘[the Spice Girls’] version of lame “girl power” is so far away from our original vision of “grrrl power”; co-­opted, watered down, marketable, ­profitable – ­all style and not . . . a lot of content’ (qtd in Aapola et al. 2005: 25). Contrastingly, Gauntlett (2007) maintains ­that – d­ espite being ‘a commercial tool’ – Girl Power undeniably has had a positive effect on young women and girls: ‘Whilst it was easy for cynics to criticise the “girl power” idea as a bunch of banal statements about “believing in yourself” and “doing whatever you want to do”, it was still an encouraging confidence boost to young women and should not be dismissed too readily’ (219–20). In her discussion of feminine adolescence, Catherine Driscoll (1999) argues that the Spice Girls might also have interesting reverberations for the circulation of the label ‘feminist’ and the dominant perceptions of what girls want (186). In her view, Girl Power’s relation to feminism should not be conceived in too definite ­terms – ­whereby ‘either it is or it isn’t feminism’. Pop icons like the Spice Girls may not produce revolutionary change but they create a shift in the dominant paradigms of cultural production directed at girls (Aapola et al. 2005: 31). In a similar manner, Kathy Acker (1997) – one notable exception to the generalised feeling (within the feminist movement) of distrust towards Girl P ­ ower – ­highlights the band’s appeal to women, beyond class and educational boundaries. In an interview she conducted with the Spice Girls for The Guardian, Acker describes the girls’ ability to represent ‘the voices, not really the voice, of young women and, just as important, of women not from the educated classes’ (19). In this sense, Girl Power underscores an intellectual elitism and anti-­sexual bias within feminism: ‘it isn’t only the lads sitting behind babe culture . . . who think that babes or beautiful lower and lower-­middle-­class girls are dumb. It’s also educated women who look down on girls like the Spice Girls, who think that because . . . [they] take their clothes off, there can’t be anything “up there” [in their brains]’. As Sheila Whiteley (2000) summarises the impact of the Spice Girls: ‘By telling their fans that feminism is necessary and fun . . . they sold the 1990s as a “girl’s world” and presented the “future as female” ’ (216–17). The Spice Girls prepared the stage for a number of girl bands like Destiny’s Child, Little Mix and Fifth Harmony that inherited the Girl Power m ­ antle – ­although not necessarily the slogan i­ tself – a­ nd continue the emphasis on women’s (financial) self-­determination and autonomy. The lyrics of ‘Independent Women Part 1’, for example, praise ‘all the honeys makin’ money’ and proudly proclaim, ‘I depend on me’ while Fifth Harmony’s ‘Me and My Girls’ reasserts the power of female friendship: ‘You’re all I need, there’s nowhere I’d rather be than to have you crazy freaks with me’. The Spice Girls themselves have gone through

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a series of split-­ups and r­ eunions – f­ ollowing Geri Halliwell’s departure in 1998 and their separation in 2­ 001 – ­and continue to perform sporadically, most notably in 2012 when the band appeared at the London Olympics Closing Ceremony. Now in their forties, they have found fame in other a­ renas – P ­ osh Spice, for example, is nowadays more famous for being a fashion designer and married to footballer David Beckham. Chick Lit If the 1990s music scene was influenced by the emergence of the Spice Girls and their popular Girl Power slogan, then the publishing industry saw a corresponding development with the arrival of ‘chick lit’ – a female-­oriented form of fiction and a highly successful and commercial literary phenomenon. Frequently characterised by ubiquitous pastel-­ coloured, fashion-­ conscious covers, chick lit has simultaneously attracted the adoration of fans as well as the disdain of some critics who have dismissed it as trashy fi ­ ction – ­feminist writer Germaine Greer and novelist Beryl Bainbridge, for example, weighed in against chick lit, famously describing it as ‘an updated version of the old Mills & Boon scenario’ and a literary ‘froth sort of thing’ that ‘just wastes time’ (qtd in Whelehan 2002: 59; qtd in Ferriss and Young 2006: 1). Chick lit has come to be recognised for its distinctive subject matter, character, audience and narrative style. Suzanne Ferris and Mallory Young (2006) provide a definition of the genre whereby ‘[s]imply put, chick lit features single women in their twenties and thirties navigating their generation’s challenges of balancing demanding careers with personal relationships’ (3). Scarlett Thomas offers a more colourful description of chick lit as ‘a “fun” pastel-­covered novel with a young, female, city-­based protagonist, who has a kooky best friend, an evil boss, romantic troubles and a desire to find the ­One – ­the apparently unavailable man who is good-­looking, can cook and is both passionate and considerate in bed’ (qtd in Whelehan 2005: 203). The origins of chick lit have been traced to Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary (1996), which is said to have inaugurated the genre, offering a model and formula that many other writers were to adopt. The book gave prominence to the figure of the ‘singleton’ – a thirty-­something woman who is employed, financially independent, sexually assertive and (unhappily) ­single – ­with Bridget Jones becoming a recognisable emblem and a point of identification for a mostly female readership. By the late 1990s and the early 2000s chick lit was well established as a genre, earning publishers more than $71 million in 2002 and occupying Publishers Weekly bestseller lists (see Ferris and Young 2006: 2). Chick lit has often been likened to the traditional romance genre that focuses on a love story and affords ‘an emotionally satisfying happy ending’

Girl Power and Chick Lit 129 (Gill and Herdieckerhoff 2006: 490). Critics suggest that novels like Bridget Jones’s Diary maintain a straightforward romance plot at its ­core – ­an argument given credence by the fact that Helen Fielding’s book is, as she has openly admitted, a rewriting of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813). The novel acknowledges its nineteenth-­century predecessor in a number of ironic allusions, exemplified by Bridget’s observation on her first meeting with her love interest Mark that ‘it struck me as pretty ridiculous to be called Mr. Darcy and stand on your own looking snooty at a party’ (13). Commentators have criticised chick lit’s romance element, noting that ‘as Bridget gets her Darcy at the end of the book, we are not only given a narrative with some structural similarities to Jane Austen’s work, but some of its dominant values as well’ (Whelehan 2000: 138). Chick lit is decried as ‘nothing more than the contemporary version of the “How to Get Married Novel” ’, a ‘retro form that details the search for and nabbing of a husband, any husband’ (Jacobson 2004: 3). The chick-­lit heroine is said to embrace a passive and disempowered image of womanhood that has simply been revamped for a postfeminist era. As Whelehan argues, ‘chick lit provides a post-­feminist narrative of heterosex and romance for those who feel that they’re too savvy to be duped by the most conventional romance narrative’ (2005: 186). While 1990s characters like the singleton are presented as independent working women enjoying financial and sexual f­reedom – a­ nd as such can be seen as more empowered and emancipated than their romantic ­forebears – ­they are also portrayed as neurotic and preoccupied with finding a man and scrutinising the size of their ­bodies – ­Bridget Jones’s incessant calorie counting and weight monitoring at the beginning of her diary entries are pertinent examples. As Rosalind Gill and Elena Herdieckerhoff (2006) note, in this way ‘the codes of traditional romance are reinstated “through the backdoor” ’ by pathologising singlehood and focusing women’s efforts on the creation of a feminine and sexy body and on the quest for a romantic hero who can rescue the chick-lit heroine from a life of spinsterhood (494). Contrastingly, supporters claim that, unlike convention-­bound romance, chick lit discards the heterosexual hero and ‘offer[s] a more realistic portrait of single life, dating, and the dissolution of romantic ideals’ (Ferriss and Young 2006: 3). Refuting the ‘narrow-­minded description of the genre’ as a reprisal of some well-­worn clichés, fans and authors of chick-lit insist that ‘these books don’t trivialize women’s problems’ and can be designated as ‘coming-­of-­age stories, finding out who you are, where you want to go’ (Jacobson 2004: 3). The genre’s drawing power is said to lie in its realism and authenticity, reflecting the ‘lives of everyday working young women’ in ‘all the messy detail’ (Ferriss and Young 2006: 3). Chick-­lit protagonists are touted for being ‘bold’, ‘ambitious’, ‘witty’ and ‘sexy’ while simultaneously being bemoaned as

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‘shallow’, ‘overly compulsive’, ‘neurotic’ and ‘insecure’ (Chick Lit USA 2004: 1). In effect, it is the singleton’s inherent contradictoriness that makes her appealing for a 1990s generation of women who are unwilling to renounce their joint aspirations for job and romance, their feminist and feminine values. As Bridget Jones proudly proclaims, ‘we are a pioneer generation daring to refuse to compromise in love and relying on our own economic power’ (Fielding 1996: 21). As a result of her sometimes incongruous desires and choices, the typical chick-­lit heroine is characteristically flawed and fallible, eliciting the readers’ compassion and identification and producing, what Gill and Herdieckerhoff (2006) call, a ‘that’s me’ moment of recognition. Such identification is augmented by the genre’s distinctive narrative style and its use of the confessional mode, either by drawing on the diary form (such as in Fielding’s novel) or by employing the format of letters/emails or simply first-­person narration to create the impression that the protagonist is speaking directly to r­eaders – f­or example, Jane Green’s Jemima J. (1998) and Allison Pearson’s I Don’t Know How She Does It (2002) make use of one or more of these narrative techniques. Chick lit’s confessional tone has been discussed as representative of a ‘return to the I’ in postfeminist discourse whereby, as Daniela Daniele (1997) notes, there is an ‘implosion of personal styles and narratives’ in the postfeminist ‘rhetoric of autobiography’ (83, 81, 89) – in effect, we have seen a corresponding ‘turn inward’ in ‘bust’ postfeminism that draws the individual into affective, interior spaces in order to escape/cope with economic uncertainty. Offering an intimate engagement with and promising a closer insight into the heroines’ personal life and psychological dilemmas, chick lit provides the fiction of an ‘authentic’ female voice bewildered by the contradictory demands and mixed messages of heterosexual romance and feminist ­emancipation – ­a similar reliance on ‘authenticity’ can also be witnessed more broadly in brand culture that draws consumers into cultural as well as economic spaces that make them feel safe, confident, important and authentic (see Banet-­Weiser 2012). This reliance upon the subjective voice has been interpreted as a postfeminist re-­enactment of the consciousness-­ raising experiences of second-­wave feminism. As Imelda Whelehan (2005) observes, ‘chick lit has clear links with the tradition of the consciousness-­ raising novel in seeming to tell it like it is and to raise individual awareness of shared personal concerns’ (186). The focus on the ordinary and the trivial in contemporary chick lit is ‘reminiscent of the substance of early feminist criticism’ and writing which asked for ‘authentic images of women to counter the perniciousness’ of patriarchal stereotypes of femininity (200). However, Whelehan also draws attention to the differences and shortcomings of chick lit, concluding that ‘[u]nfortunately, this revival of confessional writing . . . is not likely to prompt a heady renaissance of feminism along the lines of 1970s

Girl Power and Chick Lit 131 politics’ (188). Deborah Siegel concurs, maintaining that postfeminist chick lit’s ‘personal expression . . . differs from the personalizing of the political effected through consciousness raising’ (1997a: 51). While fruitfully exploring the complexities of twenty-­first-­century femaleness, femininity and feminism, chick lit is censured for failing to move out of the protagonists’ personal sphere and relate the process of confession to a wider context of female discrimination and social inequality. Critics are concerned that the return to the personal does not provide an access to feminist politics and thus risks sliding into ‘lifestyle politics’, confined to navel-­gazing introspection rather than life-­ changing analysis and interrogation (Dow 1996: 209). The case of chick lit has often been held as exemplary of the controversy regarding the distinction between feminism and postfeminism. As Ferris and Young (2006) point out: Reactions to chick lit are divided between those who expect literature by and about women to advance the political activism of feminism, to represent women’s struggles in patriarchal culture and offer inspiring images of strong, powerful women, and those who argue instead that it should portray the reality of young women grappling with modern life. (9) Some critics take issue with chick lit’s ‘unseriousness’ and supposed anti-­ feminism. Anna Weinberg for instance maintains that ‘many of these titles really are trash’ while writer Erica Jong laments that today’s young women ‘are looking for the opposite of what their mothers looked for. Their mothers sought freedom; they seek slavery’ (qtd in Ferriss and Young 2006: 9; qtd in Jacobson 2004: 3). Chick lit is taken to task for not advancing the cause of feminism in a straightforward and politically evident manner and for rehearsing the narratives of romance and femininity that second-­wave feminists rejected. Moreover, chick lit’s unashamed commercialism and concern with shopping and ­fashion – ­epitomised by Sophie Kinsella’s series of Shopaholic ­novels – ­have also marked it for feminist disapproval and fears that see women being turned into the unwitting dupes of consumerism. As Ferriss and Young (2006) ask, ‘[i]s chick lit “buying in” to a degrading and obsessive consumer culture’ that leads to a ‘focus on skin-­deep beauty’ and heralds retail therapy as a means of personal fulfilment (11)? Such charges have been answered by other, mostly younger critics as well as authors and fans of chick lit who contend that ambiguity lies at the genre’s core. Countering criticisms of her novel, Helen Fielding writes with characteristic aplomb that ‘[s]ometimes I have had people getting their knickers in a twist about Bridget Jones being a disgrace to feminism. But it is good to be able to represent women as they actually are in the age in which you

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are living’ (qtd in Ferriss and Young 2006: 9). She adds, ‘[i]f we can’t laugh at ourselves without having a panic attack over what it says about women, we haven’t got very far with our equality’. Examining chick lit varieties over the past ­decade – r­ecent permutations include for example ‘mumlit’, ‘hen-­lit’, ‘bride lit’ and black chick ­lit – ­Ferriss and Young are adamant that ‘the genre is rife with possibilities and potential’, raising ‘issues and questions about subjectivity, sexuality, race, class in women’s texts for another generation of women to ponder’ (12). Even commentators who were initially dismissive of chick lit are now willing to re-­examine its prospects: as Whelehan writes in her conclusion to The Feminist Bestseller (2005), she is ‘in two minds about chick lit’ and ‘this uncertainty’ can be discerned in her book when she ‘waver[s] on both sides of the argument’ (218). For her, chick lit is essentially an ‘anxious genre’ that ‘does not know what to do’ with the problems and paradoxes it unearths about contemporary women’s lives and experiences (218). Ultimately, it appears that chick lit’s continuing popularity and increasing variations will ensure the genre’s endurance and challenge critics to take its contradictoriness as a starting point for their analyses of twenty-­first-­century women’s ­fiction – ­the 2016 film Bridget Jones’s Baby, for example, confirming that chick lit/flick still speaks to a contemporary audience. As Gill and Herdieckerhoff (2006) put it, it is not enough to simply point to the coexistence of contradictory discourses in chick lit – ‘what is important is the work they are doing’ (500). Case Study: Bridget Jones’s Diary ( 1996 ) Starting life as a column in the British newspaper The Independent, Bridget Jones’s Diary has often been discussed as the urtext of chick lit. An international bestseller and successful feature ­film – ­the 2001 film adaptation (starring Renée Zellwegger and Hugh Grant) took $160 million ­worldwide – H ­ elen Fielding’s novel about a British thirty-­something single working woman has been credited with catching the mood of the period and summoning the Zeitgeist. In this Bildungsroman of the single girl, Bridget struggles to make sense of her chaotic life and ‘career[s] rudderless and boyfriendless through dysfunctional relationships and professional stagnation’ (Fielding 1996: 78). She rejects the pejorative label ‘spinster’ and its negative connotations of unattractiveness, loneliness and social ineptitude and she redefines her status by coining the term ‘Singleton’ – a new, rebel identity with its own language and attitudes – and forging an unconventional and self-­selected urban family of friends. While Bridget is trying to throw off the stigma attached to her single state and resignify it as a novel and rewarding subject position, she also remains ensnared and persecuted by her recurring fear and ‘existential angst’

Girl Power and Chick Lit 133 of ‘dying alone and being found three weeks later half-­eaten by an Alsatian’ (20). Fielding identifies her character’s disorientation as a symptom of a postmodern era of uncertainty, explaining that ‘Bridget is groping through the complexities of dealing with relationships in a morass of shifting roles, and a bombardment of idealized images of modern womanhood’ (qtd in Whelehan 2002: 17). In these complicated times, women seem to have lost their sense of direction as they are in the process of experimenting with a new set of identities, simultaneously revolving around feminist notions of empowerment and agency as well as patriarchal ideas of feminine beauty and heterosexual coupledom. Bridget neatly expresses the tensions between the lure of feminist politics that enables her to fulfil her public ambitions and a romantic fantasy that sees her swept off her feet by a mysterious and passionate Byronic hero. Trying to combine her progressive feminist beliefs with more conventional views about heterosexual relationships, she reveals that ‘confusion . . . is the price I must pay for becoming a modern woman’ (Fielding 1996: 119). Bridget’s paradoxical outlook is summed up by her New Year’s resolution to not ‘sulk about having no boyfriend, but develop inner poise and authority and sense of self as woman of substance, complete without boyfriend, as best way to obtain boyfriend’ (2; emphasis in original). Starting each diary entry with a calorie/alcohol/cigarette count for the day, Bridget clearly intends to manage and take charge of her life but she remains obsessed with the twin spectres of marriage and physical insecurity. Bridget’s diary sets out her goals in the form of a lengthy list of New Year’s resolutions but her persistent failure to carry out her plans marks the Singleton’s inconclusiveness about her position and her constant weighing of the costs and benefits of living in a postfeminist world. Bridget’s fallibility and haplessness generate a number of humorous incidents and, eventually, come to be seen as the character’s passport to fulfilment and happiness, securing her a partner, the appropriately named Mr Darcy. Critics have interpreted Bridget’s inherent tension between the confident paragon she aspires to be and her imperfect and striving ‘natural’ self as a feminist/feminine, public/personal dichotomy. Accordingly, the novel’s ‘key contradiction’ can be found in the gap between ‘the autonomous career women’ who populate Singleton narratives and ‘the rather pathetic romantic idiots’ they become in their relationships (Whelehan 2002: 42). As Whelehan argues, ‘while the success of professional women is trumpeted . . . intimate heterosexual relationships remain unreconstructed, and people have no means of transforming their personal life to match their professional life’ (42–3). The novel poses a number of problems for critics who emphasise second-­ wave feminism’s fight for women’s equality and access to ­professions – ­for example, Bridget takes her boss’s email about her short skirt not as sexual

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harassment but as a welcome opportunity for flirtation. Chick lit thus presents women as sexual agents who knowingly employ their f­emininity – f­requently as a statement of e­ mpowerment – a­ nd do not need to be sheltered from male advances. This accords women a ‘sexual subjecthood’ and constructs ‘an articulation or suture between feminism and femininity’ (Gill and Herdieckerhoff 2006: 499). As Gill and Herdieckerhoff explain, this is exemplary of a contradictory postfeminist discourse in which, in relation to sexual relationships, ‘a discourse of freedom, liberation, and pleasure-­seeking sits alongside the equally powerful suggestion that married heterosexual monogamy . . . c­ aptures women’s real desires’ (500). Bridget encapsulates this contradictoriness that comes to be seen as her saving grace, eventually winning Mark Darcy’s heart. She is wanted and desired, not despite but because of her imperfections and her persistent failure to remake herself in another image. In this way, Bridget Jones’s Diary discards the notion of a perfect feminine or feminist identity and embraces incoherence and contradiction as the space of fulfilment. Case Study: Recessionary Girls ( 2012 –) If Bridget Jones has been discussed as the poster child of boom postfeminist chick lit, then the recessionary years of the new millennium have seen the emergence of a different kind of girl who clings to a sense of postfeminist/ neoliberal entitlement while also facing economic uncertainty and lack of opportunity. In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, young people in particular are in danger of falling prey to neoliberalism’s ‘disposability machine’ and become relegated to the position of ‘the new precariat’ – a ‘zero generation’ that, in Zygmunt Bauman’s words, is ‘cast in a condition of liminal drift, with no way of knowing whether it is transitory or permanent’ (Giroux 2013: 261; Bauman 2004: 76). The HBO dramedy Girls is firmly set in this post-­boom context, following four twenty-­something women as they confront post-­ recession/post-­graduation joblessness and frustrated aspirations. These millennial girls clearly distance themselves from the caricatures of white prosperity and hyper-­stylised designer femininity popularised during the 1990s and early 2000s heydays of boom postfeminist culture and epitomised by the recession-­ triggering over-­spenders of Sex and the City (1998–2004). The series scrutinises and casts doubt on prevailing postfeminist/neoliberal tenets, particularly in relation to compulsory heterosexiness and acquisitive modes of subjectivity that promote the self-­responsible and autonomous consumer-­citizen. Yet, despite the series’ conscious criticality, the privileged protagonists of Girls also stubbornly adhere to a narcissistic and self-­important individualism that authorises entitlement and self-­absorption and insists on their right to be heard and r­ ewarded – m ­ ost notably in the shape of a memoir that narrativises the, at

Girl Power and Chick Lit 135 times purposefully objectifying and degrading, experiences of the main character, Hannah. Here, the neoliberal reflexive ‘project of the self’ reasserts itself (see Giddens), calling upon recession-­weary individuals to make sense of and profit from their own biography by updating and upgrading the self. In the case of Girls, this neoliberal logic takes on a specifically gendered, postfeminist form of self-­branding that promotes (sexual) authenticity as an affective commodity in a dwindling, recessionary market (see Genz 2015b). Set in the market-­driven metropolis of New York City, Girls highlights the uncertain situation of a young middle-­class generation setting out to succeed in a highly competitive, (post-)recession workplace where personal initiative and enterprising creativity are at a premium. As Giroux (2014) warns, young people today are often struggling to develop the selfish resourcefulness demanded of them to counteract the threat of downward mobility: ‘nothing has prepared this generation for the inhospitable and savage new world of commodification, privatization, joblessness, frustrated hopes, surveillance and stillborn projects’. Here, young people are viewed as at risk and potentially dispensable, holding on to the meritocratic promise that talent and ambition can be converted into economic capital while simultaneously confronting an insecure future of increasing debt and itinerant internshipping. The series’ main protagonists are all privileged university-­educated white girls who are struggling to get by in contemporary upscale Brooklyn, well aware that they are ‘all slaves to this place that doesn’t even . . . want us’ (‘The Return’). None of them has managed to secure a full-­time and viable job in the ‘real’ world and instead they depend on the financial support of their (grand)parents in order to fulfil their supposedly abundant potential. ‘I am so close to the life that I want, the life that you want for me’, Hannah tells her parents in the opening episode as she tries to convince them to keep subsidising her career as an aspiring, yet unpaid writer (‘Pilot’). In spite of their privileged upbringing, Hannah and her friends are far removed from being what Angela McRobbie (2009) calls ‘top girls’ characterised by ‘capacity, success, attainment, enjoyment, entitlement, social mobility and participation’ (57). As the series’ creator Lena Dunham has repeatedly stressed, despite the obvious narrative similarities, Girls is not an updated version of the postfeminist prototype Sex and the City, undermining the link between individual empowerment and gendered consumer practices, for example, through the display of a hypersexualised and commodified body and the performance of designer femininity. These ‘can’t-­do’ girls do not consume voraciously or engage in endless shopping sprees funded by their glamorous yet curiously undemanding jobs. At the same time, other central neoliberal strands reassert themselves as one cannot help reading the girls’ youthful restlessness refracted through the lens of a narcissistic kind of individualism that legitimises an obsessive ­investment

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with self-­interest. Instead of forging affective female bonds that were a key marker of boom postfeminist texts, these recessionary neoliberal girls are in it mainly for themselves, trying to outdo one another in their search for the most meaningful (i.e. valuable) identity. Hannah clearly exhibits what Jake Halpern (2007) calls a ‘Prima Donna mindset’ (197), constantly looking for the recognition and admiration she thinks she deserves. In this sense, the ‘zero jobs/zero future’ predicament of the new precariat (Giroux 2013: 261) morphs into the angst-­ridden selfishness of, what psychologist Jean Twenge (2006) describes as, ‘Gen Me’, the entitled generation of millennials whose high self-­esteem and self-­worship have been encouraged since childhood and who end up disengaged, anxious and self-­absorbed in adult life. Hannah and her friends stubbornly cling to a neoliberal/postfeminist rhetoric of entitlement that allows them to cultivate a lack of ambition and hedonistic laziness that are at odds with the undeniably harsh post-­2008 economic c­ limate – a­ s Jessa neatly summarises her self-­imposed unemployability: ‘The weirdest part of having a job is . . . you have to be there every day, even on the days you don’t feel like it’ (‘Hannah’s Diary’). As Katherine Bell (2013) observes, such youthful and directionless indecision is a ‘luxury afforded to those who have ­choices – ­who are socially mobile’ (364). Despite their much touted ‘potential’, these work-­shy and entitled girls lack the skills and determination needed in an unstable recessionary labour ­market – a­ s Hannah’s short-­term employers tell her, she doesn’t ‘know how to do anything’ (‘Hard Being Easy’) and is not ‘hungry enough [to] figure it out’ (‘Pilot’). The pitfalls of the neoliberal contract are clearly apparent here as Hannah and her friends hold on to a hyper-­individualistic conception of selfhood as the key to unlocking human capital, despite the economic fact that their respective self-­commodities might not be as marketable and saleable as they had been led to believe by a meritocratic, neoliberal logic. While Hannah might not be ‘meant for a job in the traditional sense’ (‘Hard Being Easy’), she is nonetheless engaged in a continuous process of self-­work, mining meaning (i.e. value) from her unproductive artist’s life and theatrically staging a series of (sexual) fantasies that can be exploited and narrativised for her memoir. Everything that happens to ­Hannah – o ­ r, is choreographed to happen to ­her – ­becomes material for her book. Yet, her sheltered life does not always yield enough excitement and is constantly on the verge of wilting into egocentric and dull introspection. Battling her own mediocrity, Hannah busies herself perfecting her own biography, immersing herself in a number of self-­directed and orchestrated experiences that she hopes can be capitalised on. In her search for a good story, Hannah is willing to act out exploitative scenarios and scripts of sexual surrender, including propositioning her employer for sex after he harasses her and enacting her boyfriend’s rape fantasies. As such,

Girl Power and Chick Lit 137 Hannah’s memoir can be seen as her main asset in the contemporary ‘experience economy’ as her insistent questioning of ‘who am I?’ becomes translated into ‘how do I sell myself’? Hannah’s brand chiefly revolves around the conscious construction and narrativisation of herself as a struggling artist and sexual libertine, offset by the creeping awareness that she might not live up to this fictional type. The main selling point of her self-­brand is its perceived authenticity and honesty as Hannah ‘put[s] [herself] out there’ (‘Weirdos Need Girlfriends Too’), ‘trying to take in all these experiences for everybody, letting anyone say anything to me’ (‘One Man’s Trash’). In Hannah’s case, the authentic capital is also materialised in corporeal form as she frequently flaunts her nonconforming and naked body, from taking baths with her female friends to engaging in non-­ stylised, explicit and degrading sexual encounters. Her body takes centre stage in her production of authenticity, exposing its non-­slender and non-­athletic flesh in a graphic, uninhibited and at times, comic fashion. While her physical authenticity is linked to sexual exposure, it is not eroticised in a pornographic way, nor does it exhibit a kind of compulsory heterosexiness that is a key marker of the postfeminist ‘sexual entrepreneur’ who is always ‘up for it’ (see Gill and Scharff 2014). In Girls, sex is not stylish and it is not always a source of physical pleasure and individual ­fulfilment – ­on the contrary, it is often ugly, awkward and discomforting, both for the characters themselves as well as the audience to watch. In this respect, the series’ staging of sexual and corporeal authenticity is clearly in line with the brand requirements of HBO dedicated to creating ‘quality television’ and pushing boundaries. In its pursuit of ‘authentic’ female experiences, Girls appears to be devoted to a kind of edgy controversy that appeals to the critical, media-­savvy consumer. The series adopts a stance of implicit criticality and self-­reflexivity, often anticipating viewers’ frustrations with the narcissistic individualism adopted by the main characters. Yet, we are also confronted with the limited scope and potency of that critique, as the girls’ bohemian posturing and authentic alienation might amount to no more than, what McGuigan (2009) calls, a ‘coolcapitalist’ stance that incorporates signs and symbols of disaffection to popular and extremely profitable effect. As Hannah repeatedly discovers, her neoliberal project of the self is fraught with tensions because it needs to be legible and marketable within the terms set up by a recessionary brand culture that no longer rewards the immaterial labour that the individual invests to create their ‘authentic self’. Hannah’s self-­ brand is thus in danger of remaining on the shelf as others refuse to buy into her ­authenticity – ­as Jessa puts it, ‘this book does not matter. It’s not going to matter to the people who read it or to you’ (‘The Return’). Ultimately, these recessionary girls might have no option but to share their responsibility for

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economic uplift, forgoing their selfish, unproductive individualism in favour of a critical compliance symptomatic of a more intensified neoliberalism. Recommended Further Reading Aapola, Sinikka, Marnina Gonick and Anita Harris. Young Femininity: Girlhood, Power and Social Change. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. 18–39. Ferriss, Suzanne, and Mallory Young (eds). Chick-Lit: The New Woman’s Fiction. New York and London: Routledge, 2006. Fuller, Sean, and Catherine Driscoll. ‘HBO’s Girls: Gender, Generation, and Quality Television’. Continuum 29.2 (2015): 253–62. Gill, Rosalind, and Elena Herdieckerhoff. ‘Rewriting the Romance: New Femininities in Chick Lit?’ Feminist Media Studies 6.4 (2006): 487–504.

5 Do-Me Feminism and Raunch Culture

Overview In this chapter we consider a highly sexualised version of power feminism, so-­called ‘do-­me feminism’, that sees sexual freedom as the key to female independence and emancipation. Female sexual objectification and pornography have long been the subjects of feminist debates from the 1970s onwards, with critics vigorously defending both anti- and pro-­pornography stances. Advocated by cultural theorists like Camille Paglia, pro-­sex feminism emerged as a response to the late-­1970s anti-­pornography ­movement – ­virtually synonymous with the work of Andrea Dworkin and Catherine ­Mackinnon – ­that put pornography at the centre of feminist explanations of women’s oppression. In many ways, pro-­sex feminism can be linked to late twentieth-­century expressions of do-­me ­feminism – a­ lso referred to as ‘bimbo feminism’ and ‘porno chic’ – that addresses women as knowing, active and heterosexually desiring subjects. An important element of do-­me feminism is its acceptance and use of irony as a space of playfulness and ambiguity. The increasing sexualisation of female representations in popular culture has been criticised by a number of commentators who are suspicious of the notion of sexual subjecthood. Dismissing the idea that this is a bold new face of feminism, Ariel Levy (2006) condemns the rise of ‘raunch culture’ and the emergence of (what she terms) ‘female chauvinist pigs’ who deliberately ‘make sex objects of other women’ and of themselves (4). Raunch culture and do-­me feminism blend the sometimes-­conflicting ideologies of women’s liberation and the sexual revolution by heralding sexually provocative appearance and behaviour (including exhibitionist stripping) as acts of female empowerment.

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We will investigate this sexualised feminist position through case studies on celebrity culture (Paris Hilton) and popular television (Sex and the City). Do-­M e Feminism As we examined in the previous chapter, the last decade of the twentieth century saw a reappraisal and new configurations of femininity in Girl culture and chick lit. The Girlie stance restyles the feminist message of female agency and independence by addressing an (often adolescent) female subject who is self-­assured and comfortable with her femininity. The more sexed-­up version of this position – ‘do-­me feminism’ – made its way into popular men’s magazines in the early 1990s and focuses on sexuality as a means to attain freedom and power. Exemplified in popular culture by a range of ‘brainy babes’ – including the television lawyer Ally McBeal and the successful singletons of the HBO series Sex and the City – the ‘do-­me feminist’ has been discussed as a ‘new breed of feminist heroine’ who is ‘untrammeled, assertive, exuberantly pro-­sex, yet determined to hold her own in a man’s world’ (Shalit 1998: 27). As Ruth Shalit describes, the do-­me feminist is plucky, confident, upwardly mobile, and extremely horny. She is alert to the wounds of race and class and gender, but she knows that feminism is safe for women who love men and bubble baths and kittenish outfits; that the right ideology and the best sex are not mutually exclusive. She knows that she is as smart and as ambitious as a guy, but she’s proud to be a girl and girlish. (28) The do-­me feminist consciously employs her physical appearance and sexuality in order to achieve personal and professional objectives and gain control over her life. She expresses her individual agency not by politicising her relationships with men and her status as a sexual object but primarily through the rearticulation of her feminine/sexual identity. As Angela Neustatter reveals, this sexy ‘new woman’ no longer requires ‘any of that nasty bra-­burning, butch, strident nonsense’ and she has learned to make it for herself ‘feminine-­ style’ (137). In this sense, the do-­me feminist can be said to have ‘a different relation to femininity than either the pre-­feminist or the feminist woman’ as ‘she is neither trapped in femininity (pre-­feminist), nor rejecting of it (feminist), she can use it’ (Brunsdon 1997: 85). This ‘new’ kind of woman is both feminine and feminist at the same time, merging notions of personal empowerment with the visual display of sexuality. Do-­me feminists (and their advocates) insist that the adoption of sexual/feminine agency is framed by ‘a cultural climate in which women can now be traditionally “feminine” and sexual in a manner utterly different in meaning from either pre-­feminist or

Do-Me Feminism and Raunch Culture 141 non-­feminist versions demanded by phallocentrically defined female heterosexuality’ (Sonnet 1999: 170). As Esther Sonnet explains, the current ‘return to feminine pleasures . . . is “different” ’ because, it is suggested, it takes place within ‘a social context fundamentally altered by the achievement of feminist goals’ (170). The do-­me feminist does not manipulate her appearance ‘to get a man on the old terms’ but she ‘has ideas about her life and being in control which clearly come from feminism’ (Brunsdon 1997: 86). Sexuality/­ femininity thus undergoes a process of resignification whereby it comes to be associated with feminist ideas of female emancipation and self-­determination rather than its previous connotations of patriarchal oppression and subjugation. Do-­me feminists want to distance themselves from feminist positions that have been deemed ‘anti-­sex’ by celebrating the pleasures of feminine adornment and sexuality. Do-­me feminism bears obvious resemblances to earlier ‘sex-­positive’ feminist stances that argue for sexual empowerment and subjecthood. Sex-­positive (or, pro-­sex) feminism stands in marked contrast to ‘sex-­ critical’ feminist analyses that focus on the degrading and exploitive aspects of (hetero)sexuality. Taking its cue from the US grassroots anti-­ violence movement, much second-­wave feminist activism was geared towards highlighting women’s encounters with sexualised ­violence – ­for example, through consciousness-­ raising sessions that were meant to politicise their individual experiences and private lives. Many second-­wave writers and activists were interested in how ideological constructions of gender and sexuality participate in natu­ralising and perpetuating acts of violence against women. Heterosexual practices were criticised for objectifying and subjugating women and, gradually, voices e­ merged – i­n particular in some radical feminist q­ uarters – ­that urged women/feminists to unseat normative heterosexuality, through, for instance, ‘political lesbianism’, celibacy and anti-­pornography legislation (Whelehan 2005: 132; see also Genz 2009b: chap. 2). These sex-­ critical viewpoints reached their most radical height in the late 1970s and early 1980s with the ‘pornography wars’ that saw two distinct oppositional factions develop: on one side, the anti-­pornography and pro-­censorship ­camp – ­influenced by the writings and political activism of Andrea Dworkin and feminist law professor Catherine ­Mackinnon – ­argued that sexually-­explicit, pornographic material was inherently defamatory to women, encoding misogyny in its most extreme form. As Dworkin writes, ‘[t]he oppression of women occurs through sexual subordination’ as ‘[i]n the subordination of women, inequality itself is sexualized: made into the experience of sexual pleasure, essential to sexual desire’ (2000: 30). Dworkin identified pornography as ‘the material means of sexualizing inequality’, revealing an ideology of male domination that posits men as superior to women. Postulating a causal link between pornography and ­violence – ­in accordance

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with Robin Morgan’s famous slogan ‘porn is the theory, rape is the practice’ – anti-­pornography activists protested against com­mercial sex and aimed at banning it. To this effect, Dworkin and Mackinnon drafted a series of anti-­ pornography ordinances in the mid-­1980s with the intention of making pornography a civil rights ­issue – r­ ather than a moral o ­ ne – ­and giving victims of pornography the right to legal redress. They sought to change the legal definition of pornography and succeeded in getting anti-­pornography ordinances passed in some American states to be later overturned by the US Supreme Court on the grounds that they were in opposition to the constitutional right to free speech. Many feminists shared this view and saw anti-­pornography legislation as an instance of censorship. Anti-­pornography perspectives were also denounced for not engaging with female and non-­heterosexual fascinations as other than expressions of pornog­raphy’s objectifying ideological function. In much anti-­ pornography rhetoric, porn is depicted as a fixation of straight men and t­his – ­pro-­pornography campaigners ­suggest – ­leaves out both lesbian and pro-­ pornography women. Arguing that the view of women as passive sufferers and dupes is insufficient, they are adamant that attention should be given to meanings attached to pornography by women who draw on and get pleasure from it. Following this line of argument, the use of pornography encompasses a number of perspectives on female sexuality: some women might see their consumption of pornography as a source of sexual pleasure and an affirmation of their sexual identities, as well as an exercise of freedom of choice. As Caitlin Moran puts it in her 2011 memoir How to be a Woman, ‘I wish I could see more sex . . . The idea that pornography is intrinsically exploitative and sexist is bizarre: pornography is just “some fucking”, after all. The act of having sex isn’t sexist so there’s no way pornography can be, in itself, inherently misogynist’ (31, 35). Instead of understanding women simply as victims, pro-­ pornography proponents assert that women are capable of placing their own meanings on pornographic ­material – ­in Moran’s words, this involves replacing the ‘single, unimaginative, billion-­duplicated fuck’ with ‘free-­range porn’ in which ‘everyone comes’ (33, 37). Anti-­pornography feminists are criticised for relying on one-­dimensional definitions and readings of p­ornography/ sexuality as operations of male power and female oppression while also simplifying questions of representation, desire and fantasy (see, for example, Rubin 1995). Reacting against the interpretation of sexually explicit material as inherently demeaning and disempowering, sex-­positive feminists want to dissociate themselves from what they perceive as puritanical and monolithic feminist thinking. Principally, sex-­positive feminism maintains that ‘women have the right to determine, for themselves, how they will use their bodies, whether

Do-Me Feminism and Raunch Culture 143 the issue is prostitution, abortion/reproductive rights, lesbian rights, or the right to be celibate and/or asexual’ (Alexander 1987: 17). Combining sexual empowerment with feminist emancipation, sex-­positive feminism emerged from two distinct but closely linked revolutionary movements of the late 1960s and 1970s: women’s liberation and the sexual revolution. As Ariel Levy (2006) has discussed, these two important twentieth-­century cultural movements initially ­overlapped – w ­ ith many of the same people involved in both ­causes – b­ ut ultimately a schism formed between them (53–4). Many second wave feminist writers originally understood sexual revolution as an integral component of feminism’s struggle for women’s equality and freedom. For example, Kate Millett’s feminist classic Sexual Politics (1970) called for a ‘fully realized sexual revolution . . . [to] end traditional sexual inhibitions and taboos . . . [as well as] the negative aura with which sexual activity has generally been surrounded’ (24, 62). She continues, ‘[t]he goal of revolution would be a permissive single standard of sexual freedom, and one uncorrupted by the crass and exploitative economic bases of traditional sexual alliances’ (62). On a more literary level, this sexualised feminist position is perhaps best represented by Erica Jong’s bestselling novel Fear of Flying (1973) that follows its heroine, Isadora Wing, on her search for the now infamous ‘zipless fuck’ – the ultimate ‘platonic ideal’ of passionate and commitment-­free sex (11). Yet, radical and mainstream feminists soon became critical and suspicious of the alliance between women’s liberation and the sexual revolution. In The Dialectic of Sex (2003), Shulamith Firestone expressed her scepticism already in the early 1970s, commenting that ‘women have been persuaded to shed their armour’ ‘under the guise of a “sexual revolution” ’ (127). Firestone argued that the sexual revolution ‘brought no improvements for women’ but proved to have ‘great value’ for men: by convincing women that ‘the usual female games and demands were despicable, unfair . . . and self-­destructive, a new reservoir of available females was created to expand the tight supply of goods available for traditional sexual exploitation’ (127–8). More contemporary commentators like Ariel Levy and Imelda Whelehan have reinforced the distinction between feminist emancipation and liberation as conceived by the sexual revolution. As Whelehan (2005) explains, the sexual revolution might have announced a sea change in social attitudes but it did not automatically alter ‘women’s sexual identity or their power relationships with men’ (109). Sexual revolution thus came to be seen as a ‘chimera where women were being sold the idea of sex as liberation but often it cast them in just as strong a thrall to men, with new pressures to perform sexually at every occasion’. By contrast, sex-­positive feminists remained faithful to a libertine notion of sexuality well into the 1980s and 1990s, celebrating sexual energy, power and strength. In Sexual Personae (1991), Camille Paglia contends that we need

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to recall the principles of the global consciousness of the 1960s and, in particular, the sexual revolution in order to enable a new mode of feminism that ‘is open to art and sex in all their dark, unconscious mysteries’ (vii). Speaking from a late-­twentieth-­century perspective, Paglia adds that ‘the feminist of the fin de siècle will be bawdy, streetwise, and on-­the-­spot confrontational, in the prankish sixties way’ (vii). Her model of a ‘true feminist’ is Madonna who, in Paglia’s eyes, has ‘taught young women to be fully female and sexual while still exercising control over their lives’ (1992: 4). Controversially, Paglia also argues against feminist involvement in policing sexual relationships, including the issue of sexual harassment and date rape. This aligns her with ‘new feminists’ like Katie Roiphe who criticise feminism’s prudery and focus on female victimisation through exaggerating the dangers of date rape. More recently, the possibility of a ‘feminist’ sexuality has been instrumental in the formation of a new feminist culture that brings together a younger group of ‘third-­wave’ feminist writers and activists who reject anti-­sex forms of feminism and embrace the notion of sexual power. In her anthology of personal essays Jane Sexes It Up (2002), Merri Lisa Johnson proposes that sexual bravado is part of a contemporary kind of f­eminism – ­part of what she terms ‘Jane’s generation’s’ revamping of feminism. In Johnson’s rhetoric, the phrase ‘Jane generation’ denotes a new type of woman who is ‘lodged between the idea of liberation and its incomplete execution’ and wants to reconnect with the feminist movement through exploring the pleasures and dangers of sexuality (1). Her attitudes towards sex and power are in marked contrast to earlier sex-­ critical feminist stances that now appear unappealing and rigid to a new generation of sexually assertive women. As Johnson provocatively puts it, women of the ‘Jane generation’ want to ‘force feminism’s legs apart like a rude lover, liberating her from the beige suit of political correctness’ (2). She is keen to emphasise that the group of sexual mavericks writing for her anthology engage in a series of playful sexual expressions that indicate bravery and progress: ‘Our writing is play, but it is play despite and in resistance to a context of danger and prohibition, not a result of imagining there is none’ (2; emphasis in original). Advocates of this twenty-­first-­century sexualised feminist culture call for a vision of the future that is a continuation of the freedoms of the sexual revolution coupled with an awareness of sexual oppression activated by the feminist movement. For example, young women’s magazines like BUST and Bitch that both debuted in the 1990s heralded the right to be sexual while also demanding a revolution in representation that allows new configurations of sexuality/ femininity to emerge. As the editors of BUST’s ‘Sex Issue’ assert, ‘[w]e want the freedom to be a top, a bottom, or a middle. The freedom to say “maybe” and mean it. The freedom to wear spike heels one day and Birkenstocks the next’ (Stoller and Karp 1992: 2). What characterises these magazines is not

Do-Me Feminism and Raunch Culture 145 only a sexy kind of feminism but also an implicit acceptance of the fact that this sexualised feminist stance is necessarily embedded in popular culture. As such, a founding principle and subject matter of Bitch magazine is a critical examination and celebration of popular representations of women and girls. As the magazine’s full title – Bitch: Feminist Response to Pop Culture – suggests, feminist ‘revolution’ is conceived mainly in the realm of representation and in the creative rearticulation of femininity and sexuality. These young women writers and activists thus articulate their desire for feminist continuity/conflict in the controversial gap between sexual objectification and liberation, giving rise to a ‘politics of ambiguity’ that goes beyond ‘the black-­and-­white binaristic thinking’ of previous feminist waves (Siegel 2007: 140, 142). Critics take issue with both the sexual and popular focus of this new feminist ­culture – w ­ hich, as we have seen in the previous chapter, appears in a similar guise in recessionary texts like Girls, which flaunts and brands the main character Hannah’s sexual ­libertinism – ­arguing that it leads to an embrace of populism as well as a simplistic equation of sex with power. They are concerned that what the media sells here is a fashionable form of f­eminism – a­ lso referred to as ‘bimbo feminism’ – that acts as an anachronistic throwback to an earlier time (Siegel 2007: 10). The notion of sexual/feminine empowerment is criticised as ‘a new arrangement of an old song’ that mobilises women’s sexuality and femininity in the service of a patriarchal agenda and status quo (Helford 2000: 297). The do-­me feminist draws a sense of power and liberation from her sexual difference and thus can be said to propagate the ‘old-­fashioned’ idea that ‘women get what they want by getting men through their feminine wiles’ (Kim 2001: 325). Moreover, by rejecting the concept of group oppression and subjugation, the do-­me feminist favours individual effort and, as such, she has been discussed as an individualistic figure who ‘tips her hat to past feminist gains but now considers them unnecessary and excessive’ (Helford 2000: 299). As Charlotte Brunsdon (1997) writes, the do-­me feminist can be ‘accommodated within familiar . . . western narratives of individual success’, supplanting the analysis of sexual politics with the notion of personal choice (86). In Janet Lee’s eyes, this newly empowered feminine/sexy woman is no more than a media persona constructed to be in unison with patriarchy: bored by feminism and its unglamorous connotations . . . the media . . . [has] decided that we’ve done feminism and it’s time to move on. We can call ourselves ‘girls’, wear sexy underwear and short skirts; because feminism taught us that we’re equal to men, we don’t need to prove it anymore. (168; emphasis in original) According to this glamorised, all-­achieving, stress- and problem-­free media invention, women’s economic progress and social position are dependent

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on personal initiative and do not require continued feminist action and solidarity. In this sense, the do-­me feminist has been dismissed by critics as a token opportunist whose progress and choices are no longer obstructed by structural oppressions but result from her own will and self-­determination. Critics are adamant that the do-­me feminist’s emphasis on sexual and individualist achievement undermines and denies feminism’s ongoing fight for greater change on a societal level. The ‘me’-based feminism of the twenty-­ first century is said to flatten the dynamics of the feminist movement into one-­dimensional characters that are nothing more than ­cartoons – ­or, in Ruth Shalit’s words, ‘Gilliganesque caricature[s]’ and ‘brilliant iteration[s] of Jessica Rabbit’ (1998: 32). Nowhere is the do-­me feminist stance more contentious than in mainstream popular culture where feminism has come to be associated with sexually aggressive behaviour, glamorous styling and provocative posturing. Case Study: Sex and the City ( 1998–2004 ) When in 2004 the final credits of HBO’s Sex and the City rolled, a media frenzy of tributes and commentaries on the show ensued, testifying to its importance to many viewers. Based on Candace Bushnell’s 1996 ­novel – ­which itself developed from a weekly newspaper column in the New York Observer between 1994 and ­1996 – ­the series chronicles the lives and loves of four Manhattan-­based single professional women in their thirties and forties. The narrative is structured around the musings of writer Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker) whose column for the fictional New York Star provides the thematic framework by setting a different question to be resolved in each episode. Questions in the first few seasons include: Are relationships the religion of the Nineties? Is secret sex the ultimate form of intimacy? Is it better to fake it than to be alone? In order to explore these issues, the series depicts the experiences of Carrie and her close female ­friends – ­public relations expert Samantha Jones (Kim Cattrall), art dealer Charlotte York (Kirsten Davies) and attorney Miranda Hobbes (Cynthia Nixon) – as they navigate their privileged urban lives defined by sexual freedom, professional independence, consumerism, romance and friendship. The show proved to be a worldwide success with over 11 million viewers in the United States alone and won an Emmy award for outstanding comedy series in 2001 (Gill 2007: 241). Sex and the City has often been lauded for its innovative representation of female friendship and sexuality. As Jane Gerhard (2005) explains, the series is structured by two major and overlapping themes, the homosocial bonds between the four main protagonists and the explicitness with which their multiple sexual encounters are portrayed and recounted (43). While the

Do-Me Feminism and Raunch Culture 147 individual characters spend much of their time in the pursuit of heterosexual enjoyment and satisfaction, their perspectives and experiences are always presented and debated within a female world of friendship. In effect, they come to resolutions about their problems or q­ uestions – m ­ ostly related to their single lives and dating ­habits – ­within the network and through the support of the other women. For example, Miranda’s decision to go through with her pregnancy is met by Charlotte’s joyful announcement to the others that ‘we’re having a baby!’ Rosalind Gill suggests that one of the pleasures offered by the show is its ‘feminine address’ and ‘potential for feminine identification’: ‘Sex and the City is about being “one of the girls”; it opens up a world of female bonding’ as ‘the primary relations the women have are those with each other’ (2007: 243–4). The friendship that unites the characters offers them an emotional alternative and family structure to the world of boyfriends and potential ­husbands – ­a bond so strong that sees them through not only their unavoidable break-­ups with characteristically marriage-­shy New York men but also, as the show progresses, cancer, divorce and religious conversion. As its title emphasises, another important thematic that characterises the show is its sexual e­ xplicitness – b­ oth in the way in which the characters are shown having sex with multiple partners throughout the series as well as in the frank language they use to describe their various sexual encounters. As Deborah Siegel (2007) notes, ‘The Sex and the City four have been hailed as prototypes for the new sexually empowered woman’ (154). Without doubt, Carrie and her friends are beneficiaries of the sexual revolution as they are able to fulfil their desires without censure. The character of Samantha has been particularly notable as a portrayal of a sexually assertive woman in her forties who is demonstrably uninhibited: she is not afraid to display her ­body – ­tellingly, she appears nude in most ­episodes – a­ nd articulate her sexuality outspokenly and confidently. Samantha’s libertine attitude towards sexuality governs her perception of herself and her life as a single woman in ­Manhattan – a­ s she tells her friends in an early episode, ‘You can bang your head against the wall and try and find a relationship or you can say screw it and go out and have sex like a man’ (qtd in Levy 2006: 170). In an interview, actress Kim Cattrall highlights the progressive and liberating aspects of her screen persona’s candid attitude towards sexuality: ‘I don’t think there’s ever been a woman who has expressed so much sexual joy [on television] without her being punished. I never tire of women coming up and saying, “You’ve affected my life” ’ (qtd in Gauntlett 2007: 61). Jane Gerhard proposes that the explicit sex talk that makes up many of the protagonists’ conversations is as intimate as the sexual acts themselves and has a number of significant effects: the talk works ‘in the same way that consciousness-­raising sessions did for second wave feminists’, providing an account of the ‘ “dissonance” the characters experience between ideas about

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heterosexual romance and their experience of straight sex’ (45). Equally, the talk also foregrounds the gratifications of heterosexual sex for women, the pleasures they take in sex and in narrating their encounters to each other. In Gerhard’s eyes, this should be seen as an important contribution that the show makes – ‘these women are the subjects of heterosexual sex, not its object’ (45). Other commentators have been less optimistic about Sex and the City’s promise of sexual freedom and egalitarianism. In Gender and the Media (2007), Rosalind Gill points out that, while the show is clearly informed by second-­ wave ­feminism – ­featuring independent and successful working ­women – ­it contains a number of backlash elements that reveal its ambivalent attitude towards feminism. For example, in Gill’s eyes, the bold and sophisticated voices of Carrie Bradshaw and her family of female friends only ‘mask their very ordinary, traditional feminine desires’ as the four women expend most of their energy looking for Mr R ­ ight – ­or, in Carrie’s case, the elusive and symbolically named Mr Big (242). Even tough-­talking Samantha proves to be vulnerable to these feminine urges: when she falls ill with the flu in one episode, she discovers that none of her lovers will come and nurse her, leaving her to doubt her single lifestyle. Feverish and miserable, Samantha tells Carrie who eventually comes to give her medicine, ‘I should have gotten married’ and ‘if you don’t have a guy who cares about you, it all means shit’ – these fears are intensified later in the series when Samantha is diagnosed with breast cancer (qtd in Negra 2004: 7). Samantha’s emotional collapse is dismissed at the end of the episode as a ‘delirium’ but it provides a glimpse of a less glamorous version of single female life that permeates the series. Moreover, critics have also taken issue with the show’s frank sexual banter that offers ‘a nod to equality’ but ends up supporting a heterosexual script (Gill 2007: 243). As Angela McRobbie and Ariel Levy have argued, in these circumstances the notions of choice and entitlement have to be interrogated as the characters use their ‘feminist’ freedom to choose to re-­embrace traditional femininity and engage in hedonistic acts of consumption that focus as much on ‘Manolo Blahniks and Birkin bags’ as on sexual liberation and emancipation (McRobbie 2004a; Levy 2006: 172). In effect, sexuality is presented ‘as part of a consumer l­ifestyle – ­sexual relationships, fashion, and entertainment are the primary drivers’ (Nash and Grant 2015: 982). The series’ celebration of consumer culture and stylish sexuality firmly situates it within a boom postfeminist context that embraces the ‘ “have-­it-­all” woman of sexual and financial agency’ (Chen 2013: 441). More recently, this kind of consumer ­postfeminism – ­which relies on the heroines’ (financial) capital to engage in endless shopping sprees and sip cosmopolitans in trendy ­bars – ­has been viewed with more scepticism and acquired the appearance of excessive over-­consumption and self-­indulgence ill-­affordable in times of economic downturn. Tellingly, the 2010 cinema

Do-Me Feminism and Raunch Culture 149 sequel Sex and the City 2 failed to connect with recessionary audiences as its depiction of the friends’ luxurious, all-­expenses-­paid trip to Abu Dhabi seemed blithely out of touch/date with current anxieties. Despite disagreements over the series’ meanings and its now seeming outdatedness, what goes uncontested is the fact that the show has been influential in its representation of women, inspiring a number of women-­centred narratives such as The L Word and Desperate Housewives. Raunch Culture More generally, the emergence of do-­me feminism can also be situated within the context of an increasing sexualisation of late twentieth-­century culture that finds its expression in the propagation of discourses about and representations of sex and sexuality across a range of media forms (Gill 2007). A 1999 article in the New York Times noted ‘the continuing push towards more explicit sexuality in advertisements, movies and on network television’, particularly ‘the appropriation of the conventions of pornography . . . by the mainstream entertainment industry, the fashion and fine arts worlds’ (qtd in McNair 2002: 61). Feona Attwood (2006) as well refers to the contemporary ‘preoccupation with sexual values, practices and identi­ties; the public shift to more permissive sexual attitudes; the proliferation of sexual texts’ and ‘the emergence of new forms of sexual experience’ (78). From the celebrity images of Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian to Madame Tussaud’s wax modelling of porn star Jenna Jameson, texts citing highly sexualised and pornographic styles and aesthetics have become common features of popular media culture in Western societies. A number of critics have sought to diagnose this phenomenon as, variously, ‘pornographication’ or the mainstreaming of pornography (McNair 1996), the ‘pornofication’ of desire (Paasonen et al. 2007), porno chic (McNair 2002) and the rise of raunch culture (Levy 2006). The expansion of what Brian McNair calls the ‘pornosphere’ has been interpreted by some as a release from stifling mores and principles and a democratisation of desire that includes diverse sexualities and sexual practices. As McNair suggests, the accelerating flows of sexual ­information – ­aided by new communication t­ echnologies – ­have led to a ‘less regulated, more commercialized, and more pluralistic sexual culture (in terms of the variety of sexualities which it can accommodate)’ (McNair 2002: 11). Other critics have pointed instead to uneven gender effects of this mainstreaming of pornography and to the re-­sexualisation and commoditisation of women’s bodies in the wake of feminist critiques that worked to neutralise representations of female sexual objectification (Gill 2007). These commentators have highlighted that women in particular have to be wary of the notion of ‘porno chic’ that involves depictions of pornog­raphy in non-­pornographic

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contexts and risks providing these sexualised images with a sense of respectability and, indeed, autonomy and freedom. A specific point of contention has been the use of irony in sexualised imagery coupled with the idea that contemporary women are active sexual subjects rather than passive sexual objects. Discussing ‘laddish’ men’s magazines like FHM and Loaded – well known for their racy front covers, regular features like ‘High Street Honeys’ (ordinary women posturing in their lingerie) and competitions like ‘100 Sexiest’ lists and ‘Britain’s Best Bum’ – David Gauntlett (2007) argues that these representations of women are motivated by ‘genuine’ irony rather than sexism (168). Gauntlett maintains that these magazines are fully aware that ‘women are as good as men, or better’ and that ‘the put-­downs of women . . . are knowingly ridiculous, based on the assumption that it’s silly to be sexist (and therefore is funny, in a silly way), and that men are usually just as rubbish as women’ (168). Irony provides a ‘protective layer’ between lifestyle information and the readers while the ‘humour’ of the articles implies that they can be read ‘for a laugh’ (168). While Gauntlett is convinced that contemporary uses of irony do not provide a ‘get-­out clause’ against criticism (168), other commentators have stressed that this is a ‘catch-­ all device’ that means ‘never having to say you are sorry’ (Gill 2007: 110). As Bethan Benwell (2007) argues, ‘irony is a versatile device which allows a speaker to articulate certain views whilst disclaiming responsibility for, or ownership of, them’ (540). Criticism can be forestalled in this way and critics are rendered speechless as ‘[a]ny objections we might feel are set up as contradictory because we are supposed to “know” that this is ironic and therefore not exploitative’ (Whelehan 2000: 147). The ironic pornographic discourses prevalent in contemporary cultural texts are particularly damaging and treacherous as they present women as knowingly and willingly engaging in their own sexualisation. Potentially sexist depictions of women can thus be made palatable and played down as an ironic ‘joke’ shared by women and men alike, and critics who object to these portrayals do not have to be taken seriously because they just ‘don’t get it’ and are not sophisticated enough to read through the irony (Gauntlett 2007: 168). For Benwell, this amounts to ‘sexism-­by-­subterfuge’ that relies on ‘consent and complicity’ and uses humour as a ‘defensive strategy’ that is seen as a ‘visible part of discourse rather than a hidden discourse which has to be unpacked’ (540, 547). Another important characteristic that defines the pornographication of mainstream culture and complicates the work of contemporary cultural/­feminist critics is the idea that women now adopt a sexualised stance as an expression of positive female autonomy rather than objectification. In her examination of gender representations in the media, Rosalind Gill (2007) argues that nowadays women have undergone a ‘shift from sexual objectification to sexual

Do-Me Feminism and Raunch Culture 151 subjectification’ whereby they are not ‘straightforwardly objectified but are presented as active, desiring sexual subjects who choose to present themselves in a seemingly objectified manner because it suits their liberated interests to do so’ (258). Gill notes that contemporary femininity is now predominantly seen as a bodily property (rather than a social structural or psychological one) whereby the possession of a ‘sexy body’ is presented as women’s key source of identity (255). This modernisation of femininity includes a ‘new “technology of sexiness” in which sexual knowledge and sexual practice are central’ (258). Gill is sceptical of the liberating potential of sexual subjecthood, warning that ‘subjectification’ might just be ‘how we “do” objectification today’ (111). She suggests that the shift from sexual object to desiring sexual subject represents a move to ‘a new “higher” form of exploitation’: ‘a shift from an external, male judging gaze to a self-­policing narcissistic gaze’ (90, 258). In this way, ‘sexual objectification can be presented not as something done to women by some men, but as the freely chosen wish of active . . . female subjects’ (Gill 2003a: 104). The focus on femininity/­sexuality as an avenue to agency is seen to be representative of a neoliberal society that constructs individuals as autonomous and free (Gill and Arthurs 2006). In Female Chauvinist Pigs (2006), Ariel Levy also rejects the notion of sexual subjecthood, insisting that what some are calling ‘the new feminism’ is really ‘the old objectification’, disguised in stilettos (81). She blames a phenomenon she dubs ‘raunch culture’ – the ‘glossy, overheated thumping of sexuality’ exemplified by programmes such as Girls Gone Wild and Sex and the City (31) – for co-­opting the ideals of sex radicalism and feminism by equating sexually provocative behaviour with freedom. As Levy writes, ‘[r]aunch culture isn’t about opening our minds to the possibilities and mysteries of sexuality. It’s about endlessly reiterating one ­particular – ­and particularly ­commercial – s­horthand for sexiness’ (30). The women who adopt this kind of raunchy ‘trash culture’ are dismissed unceremoniously as ‘FCPs’ – ‘Female Chauvinist Pigs’ or ‘women who make sex objects of other women and of themselves’ (44, 4). Levy draws a direct link between raunch culture and postfeminism by describing the Female Chauvinist Pig as a ‘post-­feminist’ who surrounds herself with ‘caricatures of female hotness’ and acts ‘like a cartoon woman’ who has ‘big cartoon breasts, wears little cartoon outfits, and can only express her sexuality by spinning around a pole’ (in so-­called ‘Cardio Striptease’ classes that are offered in many gyms and perpetuate the idea that ‘Stripping equals sex!’) (93, 198, 107, 20). For Levy, the archetypal FCP is Paris Hilton, the ‘breathing embodiment of our current, prurient, collective fi ­ xations – ­blondeness, hotness, richness, anti-­intellectualism’ (30).

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152 Case Study: Paris Hilton

Paris ­Hilton – h ­ eiress to the Hilton hotel c­hain – c­ame into the limelight when a home sex video featuring Hilton and former boyfriend Rick Salomon found its way into Internet distribution in 2003, weeks prior to her reality television debut in The Simple Life. The Hilton sex t­ape – ­widely circulated online under the title One Night in Paris – became a staple on Internet porn sites, leading to instant celebrity, complete with journalistic coverage and magazine photo shoots. Since her adventures in amateur pornography, Hilton has become one of the most recognisable and marketable female celebrities in the United States, warranting a range of endorsement deals: there is a Hilton jewellery line, perfumes, a modelling contract for Guess jeans, a bestselling book (Confessions of an Heiress) and CD. Hilton’s brand-­name product lines sell best in Japan, where Vanity Fair describes her ‘as big, if not bigger than, any movie star’ (Smith 2005: 280). As Levy (2006) has argued, Hilton’s case is noteworthy for it exemplifies the repurposing of pornography and the proliferation of porno chic across contemporary media. Compared with previous examples of famous figures managing the exposure of pornographic i­mages – L ­ evy cites Vanessa Williams who was stripped of her Miss America crown in 1983 after nude photos of her appeared in Penthouse and who years later re-­created herself as an actress and ­singer – ­Hilton has made good use of her exposure to turn herself into a profitable brand. As Levy comments, ‘then, being exposed in porn was something you needed to come back from. Now, being in porn is itself a comeback’ (27). In Levy’s account, Hilton is presented as ‘the perfect sexual celebrity for this moment’ as she arouses the public’s interest not in the existence of sexual pleasure itself but in ‘the appearance of sexiness’ (30). For example, in her television series The Simple Life – which follows Hilton and fellow socialite Nicole Richie as they struggle to do manual, low-­paid jobs such as cleaning and farm ­work – ­Hilton plays the role of the clued-­up teenager, telling girls and boys alike how they can look ‘hot’. In effect, as Levy points out, ‘hotness has become our cultural currency, and a lot of people spend a lot of time and a lot of regular, green currency trying to acquire it’ (31). Hotness in this case does not just refer to sexual attractiveness but it is also closely related to saleability and commercial appeal. As Naomi Wolf puts it, Hilton can be described as ‘an empty signifier’ that ‘you can project absolutely anything onto’ (qtd in Smith 2005: 280). Media experts and producers have lined up to reinvent her as an actress, a pop singer, a model and author, making the ‘Paris Hilton’ trademark highly profitable and earning Hilton herself a considerable fortune, her net worth supposedly surpassing $100 million in 2016. While Hilton herself maintains that she is a canny businesswoman who is proud of her i­ndependence – a­ s she emphasises

Do-Me Feminism and Raunch Culture 153 in a number of interviews, she ‘loves to work’ and ‘it feels good that I don’t have to depend on a man or my family for anything’ (Hattenstone 2006: 18) – critics have largely dismissed her as an example of mainstreamed porno chic that draws on conventionally heteronormative imageries. As Susanna Paasonen et al. (2007) maintain, ‘[t]here is indeed little to be considered transgressive in the public/pubic acts of . . . Paris Hilton’ (12). Nonetheless, Hilton’s ‘career’ ­path – ­from sex tape to modelling and reality ­television – ­has served as a prototype for a number of other celebrities, including the ‘pop culture phenomenon’ Kim Kardashian (Vogue Staff 2016). Sexual Subjectivation While it would be convenient to conclude that sexual subjecthood is a commercial media ploy that is exploited by a few cartoonish women, we also want to draw attention to the potential for resignification that is lodged within the rearticulations of sexuality. As Stéphanie Genz (2009b) has argued, it might be useful to adopt a ‘postfeminine’ framework to discuss contemporary expressions of sexuality and femininity (31). In an effort to produce a more nuanced reading of twenty-­first-­century sexual and feminine identities, Genz suggests that ‘we have to open ourselves up to new modes of critique, subjectivity and agency that might not fit our pre-­exiting models and frameworks’ (96). In order to explore the paradoxes of a postfeminist femininity/sexuality, she proposes that we adopt a non-­dualistic model of subject formation that breaks down well-­established dichotomies between feminist and feminine identities; subject and object; victim and perpetrator; complicity and critique. The ‘ “pink-­packaged” power of sexual subjecthood’ is described as entailing ‘a simultaneous objectification’ as ‘postfemininity is at its core a paradoxical construction that effects a double movement of empowerment and subordination’ (31). Drawing on the Foucauldian concept of assujetissement (or, ‘subjectivation’), Genz proposes that ‘[t]his doubled process may help us to comprehend and explore the paradoxes of a postfeminist femininity that can work in empowering and subordinating ways’. Critiques such as these highlight the complex identity positions that women take up in contemporary society, both as a conscious and unconscious ‘choice’. In Ien Ang’s (1996) words, many women of the new millennium can be said to reside in a strangely unsettled in-­between space where they are ‘free and yet bounded’, inhabiting a contradictory site that is simultaneously constraining and liberating, productive and oppressive (165). What makes this contemporary critical site so thought-­provoking and contentious is precisely the varying degrees of ‘freedom’ and ‘boundedness’, with critics vigorously debating as to where this precarious balance lies.

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154 Recommended Further Reading

Genz, Stéphanie. Postfemininities in Popular Culture. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. 1–34. Gerhard, Jane. ‘Sex and the City: Carrie Bradshaw’s Queer Postfeminism’. Feminist Media Studies 5.1 (2005): 37–49. Gill, Rosalind. ‘From Sexual Objectification to Sexual Subjectification: The Resexualisation of Women’s Bodies in the Media’. Feminist Media Studies 3.1 (2003): 100–106. Levy, Ariel. Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture. London: Pocket Books, 2006.

6 Liberal Sexism

Overview In this chapter, we pick up on the themes of sexualisation of culture and mainstreaming of pornography discussed in the previous section. The post-­ recession years are characterised by a reinvigoration of new types of sexism – ‘new sexism’ (Benwell 2007; Walter 1998); ‘enlightened sexism’ (Douglas 2010); ‘postfeminist sexism’ (Gill 2011); ‘critical sexism’ (Ahmed 2013) – that belie assumptions of gender equality and sexual freedom. In particular, we have witnessed a move towards sexual explicitness in popular culture that depicts the gender (a)politics that emerge alongside the unfolding economic crisis in a markedly visceral form. Contemporary historical/fantasy television series like Game of Thrones (2011–), The Borgias (2011–13) and The Tudors (2007–10) are all typified by sexual licentiousness and aggressive physicality that reflect the immediacy of a time stripped bare of social coherence and moral clarity. The sexual sensationalism on show speaks to the stark realities of a post-­2008 world in which survival is no longer guaranteed by the neoliberal mantra of a free-­market economy that is meant to provide everyone with the right and potential to make profits and amass personal wealth. Here, sexuality comes to be seen as a survival strategy in the game of self-­interest, a carnal tactic that allows women in particular to negotiate exploitation and rape. At the same time, popular television series such as these do not deny or refute s­ exism – b­ y rendering it ‘imperceptible’ as some second-­wave feminists in the 1970s argued (see Frye 1983) – in their unapologetic and humourless depiction of hetero-­sexist norms and sexual violence. This is emblematic of a seemingly ‘liberal’ type of sexism that complicates (and possibly invalidates)

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optimistic articulations of (female) entitlement and empowerment, favoured by both ‘boom’ postfeminist and neoliberal rhetoric. The liberal sexism on show also raises interesting questions about the nature of visibility itself and its relation to critique whereby making a political issue ‘visible’ or ‘speakable’ might not be enough as an act of emancipation and political awareness. The chapter will conclude with a case study on Game of Thrones. Liberal Sexism The links between postfeminism and sexism have been debated at length by a number of, mostly feminist, critics who have discussed the specific modalities of ‘postfeminist sexism’ and its numerous expressions, for example in a ‘pornified’ mainstream culture (see Gill 2011). Sexism has long been seen as postfeminism’s ‘dirty secret’, with boom postfeminist expressions in particular appearing to rely on a repudiation of sexist and gendered inequalities and foregrounding instead the individual’s aspirationalism, entrepreneurship and will to succeed. In effect, as we have discussed in previous sections, women were hailed by boom postfeminist/neoliberal rhetoric as emancipated free agents who, through sheer effort and (self-)work, could transcend social and economic barriers. As Pomerantz et al. (2013) note, ‘[b]y promoting the idea that sexism is passé, postfeminism promotes an image of independent girls who are compliant within the new global economy, will consume robustly and without a gendered critique of global capitalism’ (187). Here, the argument goes, postfeminism gives widespread permission to discount sexism and turn a blind eye to the structural inequities underlying gendered prejudices, thereby rendering sexism anachronistic and seemingly irrelevant. The cross-­ nurturing ideologies of postfeminism and neoliberalism are understood to be working hand in hand in this dismissal of sexism, interpellating women as autonomous entrepreneurs and savvy consumers who self-­brand/objectify as a means of getting ahead. This neoliberal fantasy has become increasingly suspect and untenable in a climate of economic downturn ruled by market principles of competition and self-­responsibility. As neoliberalism shifts focus ‘from rights to risks’ (Lorenz 2012: 602), the buzzwords surrounding entrepreneurial subjectivity (creativity, innovation, etc.) can no longer disguise the hazard of failure and the bleak realities of recessionary self-­reliance. In a similar manner, the sexism inherent in postfeminism has also acquired a new visibility that problematises and potentially undermines boom assumptions of (sexual) freedom and equality. The question of visibility has frequently been at the centre of investigations into sexism and the kind of activist politics required to undo its pernicious grip on social and economic relations as well as individuals’ sense of self

Liberal Sexism 157 and others. As Laura Bates (2014) succinctly puts it, ‘sexism is an invisible problem’ that has become ‘so ingrained that we no longer notice or object to it. Sexism is a socially acceptable prejudice and everybody is getting in on the act’ (23, 25). These hidden and embedded aspects allow sexism to occupy a ‘ludicrously acceptable position’ in public discourse and engender a ‘general willingness to laugh and ignore it’ as well as blame the victims of sexist abuse if they dare to speak up (29). For her, the solution lies in tackling sexism’s invisibility through ‘active, pragmatic contribution’ and ‘team effort’: ‘sexism is . . . an eminently solvable problem. . . . [I]f you will pick up just one stone, then together we will redirect the flow of the river’ (380–2) – evidenced most effectively by Bates’ online ‘The Everyday Sexism Project’ that collates women’s routine experiences of prejudice and harassment (everydaysexism. com). Bates’s project is one of the latest in a series of well-­established critiques that have studied sex and sexism together as exemplary of a patriarchal power dynamic that uses sex to make sexist statements and produce sexist imagery. ­Sexism – w ­ hich ‘in its core and perhaps most fundamental meaning . . . ­characterises anything whatever which creates, constitutes, promotes or exploits any irrelevant or impertinent marking of the distinction between the sexes’ (Frye 2011: 246) – has been a key site of examination of second-­ wave feminism in particular that sought to unmask systemic structures of sex-­marking in male-­dominated societies. Representative of the occasionally sweeping comments of contemporary feminist critics, Natasha Walter states that in the 1970s for example ‘[a]ll treatments of sexuality in culture were forced to reveal the imprint of sexism . . . [and] any hint of sexuality in culture was proof of sexism’ (112). Indeed, for many second-­wave feminist critics, the ­naming – a­ nd making ­visible – o ­ f sexism amounted to a feminist declaration and consciousness-­raising. Marilyn Frye (1983) begins her essay ‘Sexism’ with the observation that ‘like most women coming to a feminist perception of themselves and the world, I was seeing sexism everywhere and trying to make it perceptible to others’ (17). For these feminist writers, sexism had to be seen and named as a problem because, as Frye suggests, many ‘would not see that what I declared to be sexist was sexist’. Sexism, or rather its exposure, was irrevocably linked to a feminist consciousness and awakening from a state of victimisation and oppression to one of emancipation. Early second-­wave consciousness-­raising and activist efforts were often tied to the cataloguing of sexist incidents that were shown to be part of a hetero-­normative social structure. The role of feminism was to bring to light this fundamental subjugation of women and teach them (to use Frye’s words) to ‘look macroscopically’ at the ‘network of forces and barriers which are systematically related and which conspire to the immobilisation, reduction, and molding of women and the lives we live’ (8). Frye (1983) anticipated

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that this awareness of sexism might come at a cost as women are caught in a double bind and often ‘participate in [their] own erasure’ and signal their compliance with a ‘smile’ (2). In a similar vein, bell hooks (1989) has observed that sexism is the only form of oppression in which the oppressed are expected to love their oppressor. Psychologists have also distinguished between different forms of ‘hostile’ and ‘benevolent’ sexism whereby the latter is ‘the carrot aimed at enticing women to enact traditional roles’ while the former is ‘the stick used to punish them when they resist’ (Glick and Fiske 2011: 532). This feature of sexism masks and normalises gender inequality under a cloak of imperceptibility that enables it to flourish in society. If, as Gill (2011) notes, ‘the potency of sexism lies in its very unspeakability’, then the answer appears to be deceptively simple: ‘just using the word sexism, naming it, opening up a conversation about its novel forms would be an important political act’ (63). Yet, becoming aware and politicising sexism has become an increasingly tricky project in contemporary culture and politics as sexism itself is no longer clearly delineated by a particular set of actions and attitudes towards women. As Sara Mills (2003) has commented, ‘the nature of sexism has changed over the last 15 years because of feminist campaigns over equal opportunities, so that there now appears to be less overt sexism’ (90). Sexism and anti-­sexism have become entangled and confused with ideas around political correctness and ‘an excessive attention to the sensibilities of those who are seen as different from the norm’ (89). As Gill (2014) writes, ‘sexism is . . . becoming more flexible, agile, and mobile, is itself innovating, making it harder to recognise, to critique, and to resist’ (517). Critics have tried to pinpoint the ‘dark, sneaky serpent of sexism’ (Douglas 2010: 6) by coining different neologisms to explain the subtle new forms that it takes: ‘new sexism’ (Benwell 2007); ‘enlightened sexism’ (Douglas 2010); ‘hipster sexism’ (Quart 2012); ‘postfeminist sexism’ (Gill 2011); ‘critical sexism’ (Ahmed 2013). As evidenced by a flurry of articles, books and non-­academic websites, sexism is very much en vogue these days among commentators who have re-­embraced the term after years of academic/editorial abstinence. If, in 2003, Judith Williamson bemoaned that the concept of sexism had ‘fallen into disuse’ and could be ‘enjoyed as kitsch rather than as a contemporary problem to be addressed as unjust’, it is now firmly back on the agenda, both in feminist terms as well as more broadly in cultural and political sites. Undoubtedly, this is related to a more generalised resurgence or ‘comeback’ of feminism, and, problematically linked to this, its increasing ‘neoliberalization’ that forges a ‘new’ feminist subject who is not only individualised but also entrepreneurial (Rottenberg 2013: 420; see also Introduction and Chapter 3). As Angela McRobbie (2013) writes, ‘where in the early 2000s an invitation to female empowerment seemed to require a ritualistic denunciation of feminism as old-­fashioned and no longer needed

Liberal Sexism 159 . . . the current repertoire now feels able to make a claim, of sorts, to a feminism, of sorts’ (121). In this sense, we have to complicate the logic that feminism is in retreat and that sexism can be tackled through a straightforward recourse to a ‘politics of visibility’ that exposes and unmasks the embeddedness and ‘acceptability of the problem’ (Bates 2014: 30). While it might have been possible to frame sexism ‘in terms of a stock of relatively stable ideas and stereotypes and easily-­recognisable practices’, nowadays our critical vocabularies need to take into account the fact that ‘sexism [is] not as a single, unchanging “thing” ’ (Gill 2014: 517). Sexism takes many different forms and is often disguised by an ironic tone and postmodern reflexivity which, in Susan Douglas’s (2010) words, allows for an ‘enlightened’ sexist stance that wears ‘a knowing smirk’, is immune to criticism and ‘feminist in its outward appearance’ (14, 10). Douglas uses the example of MTV’s My Super Sweet Sixteen that employs irony ‘as a shield’: You can convince yourself that you are seeing a parody of girls as party-­ obsessed airheads only capable of thinking about popularity and conspicuous consumption while, of course, My Super Sweet Sixteen repeatedly shows girls as party-­obsessed airheads only capable of thinking about popularity and conspicuous consumption. This kind of irony allows for the representation of something s­exist – m ­ ost girls, and especially rich girls, are self-­centred ­bimbos – ­while being able to claim that that’s not really what you meant at all, it’s just for fun. (14–15) In this way, ‘we are getting images of imagined power that mask, and even erase, how much still remains to be done for girls and women, images that make sexism seem fine, even fun’ (6). This ‘enlightened sexism’ appears to support female equality and empowerment but ultimately is dedicated to the ‘undoing’ of feminism. There are clear echoes here of often rehearsed critiques of boom postfeminism that ‘takes the gains of the women’s movement as a given, and then uses them as permission to resurrect retrograde images of girls and women as sex objects’ (10). Unlike this ironic sexist attitude that is meant to ‘make patriarchy pleasurable for women’ (Douglas 2010: 12), the post-­boom climate has also given rise to a hyper-­visible, seemingly ‘liberal’ type of sexism that is blunt and uncompromising in its portrayal of physical violence, sexual abuse and torture. Prevalent in fantasy/historical popular culture texts like Game of Thrones (2011–), The Tudors (2007–10) and The Borgias (2011–13), this form of recessionary sexism speaks to the precariousness and bleakness of a socially and economically fraught environment, with citizens sharply divided by access to capital. At the same time, this ‘hard-­edged’, austere sexism also appears to

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draw on and reproduce a ‘liberal’ framework around criticality and visibility while invalidating the very potency of these tools. As Nancy Fraser (2013) writes, ‘our critique of sexism is now supplying the justification for new forms of inequality and exploitation’ (n.p.), complicating our understanding and modes of resistance to sexist oppression. This kind of liberal sexism exploits what Duschinksy (2013) calls the ‘liberal loophole’ whereby ‘systematic forms of oppression are reduced to the question of whether a citizen has or has not given meaningful consent’ (para. 2.1). Liberal ­discourses – ­united by the core commitment to the equal status and treatment of each ­person – ­thus allow for a dynamic of power whereby ‘either you are on the playing field of liberal competition, in which case you require no protection, or you prove into a category as a victim who is being kept off the field’ (Mahoney qtd in Duschinksky 2013: para. 2.1). In a similar manner, Stuart Hall (2011) refers to the ‘Janus-­faces of Liberalism’ that adopts a practice of ‘splitting’ and grants ‘liberty now for some [and] an unending apprenticeship to freedom for others’ (715, 710). In this way, focus can be shifted from the power disparities and structural inequalities that define and demarcate the (sexist) playing field to the individual competitors who choose to engage in a game that potentially oppresses and subjugates them. Playing the ‘field’ also sets limits of intelligibility and legitimacy for individual actors whose freedom is manufactured by their ability to compete in what Foucault (2010) calls the ‘game of enterprises’ (173). At the heart of this oppression is a distorted notion of freedom and individualism that surrenders compassion and social responsibility to a brute necessity of survival and competitive enterprise. Liberal sexism demands detailed interrogation as what is missing here specifically is an ironic tone and postmodern reflexivity that provide immunity from criticism. This is not what Benwell (2007) calls ‘sexism by subterfuge’ whereby sexist views can be articulated under the pretext of irony while disclaiming responsibility for, or ownership of, them. Nor does this resemble Attwood’s postmodern sexual discourse or Williamson’s ‘sexism with an alibi’ that can be enjoyed as ‘knowingly done, self-­aware, even kitsch’. Here, sexism does not rely on humour to make it palatable, nor is it hidden under the veil of postmodern nostalgia where style replaces substance (see Jameson 1993). Liberal sexism does not need elaborate demystification through layers of ironic representations, nor complex decoding of discursive ambiguity. On the contrary, this is sexism visible for all, unapologetic and humourless about its depiction of hetero-­sexist norms and gender politics.

Liberal Sexism 161 Case Study: Game of Thrones ( 2011 –) ‘I’m not going to fight them, I am going to fuck them,’ Petyr Baelish (aka ‘Littlefinger’) notes in the first season of the HBO drama Game of Thrones, exemplifying the series’ explicit use of sex as a means of power and survival employed by both male and female characters (‘Cripples, Bastards, and Broken Things’). Adapted from George R. R. Martin’s international bestselling epic fantasy novels, the television series’ pornographic fusion of violence and sexuality has struck a cultural nerve with audiences worldwide, with Game of Thrones officially becoming the most-­watched HBO series of all times in 2014. Here, sex is everywhere and everyone has sex, so much so that the series seems to revolve around a ‘gotta fuck’ mandate whereby sex is ubiquitous and compulsory. One explanation for the series’ success can undoubtedly be found in the spectacle of violence and sex that satisfies audiences’ need for heightened sensations and voyeuristic viewing pleasures that are unconstrained by a moral compass. More importantly, however, Martin’s fantasy also speaks to us because it is a poignant social commentary grounded in sexual/sexist, economic, cultural and political conditions. Despite the fantasy setting, Game of Thrones is overtly presentist in its engagement with social matters like gender and sexuality and economic fears of bankruptcy. The series is laden with socio-­ political themes including issues of power and gender politics and it works within a value system based on contemporary Western cultural, political, aesthetic and economic factors. In this context, we need to investigate ‘fucking’ as a carnal strategy that can be employed as a way of survival and doing politics. In some ways, Game of Thrones’ established formula of sex and violence can be seen as emblematic of a wider cultural shift that allows for a broadening of sexual narratives and more permissive attitudes to sex (see Chapter 5). This also aligns the HBO series with other contemporary historical/fantasy texts like Showtime’s The Tudors (2007–10) and The Borgias (2011–13) that are typified by sexual sensationalism and violent physicality. Game of Thrones in particular has been famed for its ‘sexposition’ sequences in which expository dialogue is accompanied by nudity, most notably in Season One, when King’s Council member (and bordello owner) Littlefinger instructs two prostitutes in their art of pleasure while comparing his own casuistry to theirs (‘You Win or You Die’). For some critics, such scenes have a narrative function: ‘For the viewer, the sex scenes guarantee that our eyes will not be glazing over with too much information; for the narrative, sexposition suggests the power that even sex workers may have over the most influential of men’ (Wells-­Lassagne 2013: 421). From this perspective, Game of Thrones manages to avoid sliding into pornography and circumnavigate charges of trivial sexism by using nudity and violence in a ‘non-­gratuitous’ manner.

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While Game of Thrones can clearly be located as part of an expanding ‘pornosphere’ (see McNair), it also parades a liberal, at times blasé, attitude towards sexism that begs to be acknowledged. In effect, the series exhibits a form of liberal sexism that is stark and unsentimental in its portrayal of sexual abuse and physical violence. If we adopt Marilyn Frye’s (1983) definition of sexism as ‘cultural and economic structures’ that ‘create and enforce the elaborate and rigid patterns of sex-­marking and sex-­announcing which divide the species, along lines of sex, into dominators and subordinates’ (19), then Game of Thrones is clearly sexist. Female characters especially are dehumanised as sexual objects, mutilated or physically h ­ urt – t­ he low-­born prostitute Ros who is tortured and murdered by mad boy-­king Joffrey in Season Three being the most obvious example here. The lives of most male and female characters are structured around a ‘gotta fuck’ directive that typically posits men as the subjects of the ‘fuck’ and women as its object. Here, sexism is overt and undisguised and sex is often depicted as painful, most commonly exercised by men upon women and, as such, symptomatic of male supremacy that trades in power and violence. Rape in particular is depicted with complacency and smug indifference as a common weapon and efficient instrument of power used in times of social unrest and war but also as a means to cement kinship relations between men and their families. Inequality is clearly sexualised in this context whereby male characters are often considered to have a right of sexual access to female characters while sexual violence and coercion are also eroticised, notably in the case of Cersei’s rape by her brother in Season Four. Following the death of their eldest son born out of their incestuous relationship, Jaime forces himself on his sister next to Joffrey’s dead body, her repeated pleadings (‘It’s not right’) nullified by his nonchalant answer ‘I don’t care’ (‘Breaker of Chains’). Not only is this scene disconcerting because of its morbid nature but it also invests rape with sexual qualities that makes violence appear ­sexy – r­esponding to viewer criticisms, director Alex Graves claimed that the assault became ‘consensual by the end’ (Sepinwall 2014: n.p.). Here, the viewer is invited to partake in a customary defensive sexual script whereby ‘no’ means ‘yes’ and women ‘are up for it’ in the end. In this scenario, men are sexually assertive and experienced while women are more reluctant and threatened by unwanted sexual attention. The fallacy of this sexist and apologist logic is most painfully exposed in Season Five by Sansa Stark’s ‘Black Wedding’ that sees her off-­camera rape by her sadistic husband, reluctantly witnessed by Ramsay’s servant Reek (aka Theon Greyjoy) (‘Unbowed, Unbent, Unbroken’). This bleak and uneroticised rendering of a classic voyeuristic scenario repudiates any permissive sexual liberalism and instead underlines the sexual/sexist abuse suffered by women, symptomatic of a cruel and pitiless social order where the necessity of survival demands a stoic and hardened endurance to pain and humiliation.

Liberal Sexism 163 In particular, unmarried adolescent girls are targeted for rape or other forms of sexual violence: while Sansa Stark epitomises these fears for most of the tele­vised seasons, the inevitability of women’s sexual submission is made explicit from the beginning in the case of Daenerys Targaryen whose privileged birth does not protect her from being sold to a warlord and used for sex (albeit sanctioned by matrimony). Daenerys’s example can also be read through a well-­rehearsed sex-­positive postfeminist script around sexual subjecthood that interprets femininity and sexuality as a potential source of female agency and power (see Genz 2009b). After enduring repeated sexual assaults at the hands of her warrior husband, she seeks advice from a handmaiden on how to pleasure him. ‘The Dothraki take slaves like a hound takes a bitch’, the girl counsels her, ‘Don’t make love like a slave. In this tent, he belongs to you’ (‘The King’s Road’). Similar sex advice is delivered by a number of characters, from pimp Petyr Bailish’s directive to his prostitutes to make male customers feel ‘better than other men’ (‘You Win or You Die’) to Cersei’s blunt tuition to a newly menstruating Sansa Stark that ‘tears aren’t a woman’s only weapon. The best one’s between your legs. Learn how to use it’ (‘Blackwater’). In this way, women are instructed to ‘fuck their way out of everything’ and use sex instrumentally as a source of power (‘Blackwater’). At times, this ‘gotta fuck’ agenda is defused and masked by being channelled through a hetero-­conservative script of romance, marriage and patriarchal kinship mandates that command women to be fertile and bear (male) ‘fruit’. The red sorceress Melissandre, for example, gains control over Stannis Baratheon and his army by promising him a son and heir and later advising his cooperative but ‘unproductive’ (i.e. unable to birth a male offspring) wife, ‘It’s only flesh. It needs what it needs’ (‘Mockingbird’). In Daenerys’s case, the initial suggestion of marital rape is superimposed by a more romantic idea of sexual love where men are happy for women to be ‘on top’. As rape is sanctioned by marriage, women might have no choice but to embrace their victimisation and find pleasure in objectification. Here, a case could be made for ‘positive’ objectification or sexual subjecthood but ultimately such hetero-­ conservative, postfeminist readings around female sexual agency and desire are suspended and cut short by Khal Drogo’s death, which leaves an inexperienced Daenerys struggling to become a ruler in her own right. In our haste to simplify these narrative developments and construe Game of Thrones’ treatment of sex as a continuation of well-­established sexual scripts and gender politics, we could interpret what we are seeing here as the same old story of sexual and sexist discourse: sex is a means of power employed by both men and women whereby men use rape as a threat and women seek to acquire a form of sexual power that allows them to transcend their object status. Yet, the knot of sex, power and victimisation secured by a

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­ etero-­normative grid is not as tightly fastened as it initially appears. What h might start out as a gendered conflict between female victims and male aggressors is increasingly complicated as the gender binary of strength and vulnerability becomes blurred. In Game of Thrones, both male and female characters endure suffering, sexual violation and d­ ismemberment – ­Theon Greyjoy’s castration and psychological abuse in Season Three being the most prominent example. Also, the series’ commitment to the visualisation of sex(ism) could be read as a nod to critical/political ­movements – ­like f­eminism – ­that endeavour to make visible the structures of sexist patriarchy and its effects on both men and women. If, as Sara Ahmed (2013) writes, ‘complicity is a starting point’, then Game of Thrones might be seen as part of a critical project to underscore our implications in the world that we critique. The series undeniably makes sexism visible by baring the various forms of oppression that it takes and exposing the underlying power hierarchies of gender and sexuality. In its humourless, non-­ironic and austere depiction of sexism, Game of Thrones does not follow the route of other retro-­stylish television series, like Pan Am (2011–12) and Mad Men (2007–), which allows the audience to frame sexism in period images and thereby lock it in the past (see Spigel 2013). On the contrary, the series does not appeal for a return to the ‘good old days’ – if there is any lesson to be learned about this fantasy past, it is that the ‘old days’ were not that good and are best left behind. At the same time, Game of Thrones also poses a range of questions in relation to the nature of visibility itself and its critical/political potential. The series’ hyperbolic visualisation of sex and violence appears daringly cutting-­edge, far from nostalgic and chilling in its portrayal of sexist abuse. In its relentless pursuit of visibility ­of – ­gendered, sexist, class and ­economic – ­power dynamics and hetero-­norms, Game of Thrones flatters and entertains our media-­ literate minds and challenges us to revise narrative expectations. Yet, what makes any denomination of critique problematic is the absence of an overt moral position or structure that sets up parameters between what is and is not permissible. While we cannot avoid seeing sexism at every turn, we are not encouraged to do anything about it and instead are invited to linger in a state of engaged but ultimately passive witnessing that is at odds with, for example, second-­wave activist tactics of consciousness-­raising. As viewers are drawn into explicit images of physical brutality and sexual sadism, they might become inured not to notice (or, criticise) what happens on screen and what might be replicated in society at large where rape and torture are often ignored to such an extent as to become invisible. In this sense, Game of Thrones’ practice of ‘making visible’ for visibility’s sake is not related to a larger politics of opposition and thus is in danger of wilting into self-­congratulatory introspection. This can amount to what Ahmed (2013) calls ‘critical sexism’

Liberal Sexism 165 whereby sexist structures and logic are reproduced by ‘critical subjects who do not see the reproduction [of sexism] because of their self-­assumed criticality’ (n.p.). Sexism and its inherent violence are not repudiated in this ­case – ­or made ‘imperceptible’ as second-­wave feminists like Frye a­rgued – a­nd yet they are manipulated to such an extent that ‘making it perceptible’ and visible might no longer suffice as an act of political awareness and critically engaged and socially responsible agency. Here sexism, while bared and paraded before our media-­savvy and critically astute eyes, is nonetheless dealt with and thus paradoxically comes to be seen as less of a problem. Recommended Further Reading Douglas, Susan. The Rise of Enlightened Feminism: How Pop Culture Took Us from Girl Power to Girls Gone Wild. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2010. Frye, Marilyn. The Politics of Reality: Essays in Feminist Theory. Trumansburg, NY: Crossing Press, 1983. Gill, Rosalind. ‘Sexism Reloaded, or, It’s Time to Get Angry Again!’ Feminist Media Studies, 11.1 (2011): 61–71. Schubart, Rikke and Anne Gjelsvik (eds). Women of Ice and Fire: Gender, Game of Thrones and Multiple Media Engagements. New York: Bloomsbury, 2015.

7 Postmodern (Post)Feminism

Overview This chapter addresses the contentions surrounding the problematic meeting of feminism and postmodernism and explores the theoretical and practical implications of a postmodern feminism. As will be demonstrated, such a conjunctive relationship is fraught with complexities as ‘it is clear to anyone engaged in these enterprises that neither feminism nor postmodernism operates as one big happy family’ (Singer 1992: 471). There is no unified postmodern theory, or even a coherent set of positions, just as there is no one feminist outlook or critical perspective. Instead, one is struck by the plurality of postmodern and feminist positions and the diverse theories lumped together under these headings. There is a variety of different links between feminist and postmodern theory, with the proposals of conjunction ranging from a strategic corporate merger, to the suggestion of various postmodern and feminist versions varying in strength, to the downright rejection of a postmodern feminism. These calls for (non-)alliance often draw upon a reductive conceptualisation and simplification of the two entities and they propose a facile distinction between feminism’s political engagement and postmodernism’s theoretical self-­absorption. In the following, we resist such dualistic responses that do not account for the wide range of relationships between feminism and postmodernism and we maintain that there is no shorthand way to characterise the differences and conjunctions between these two multifaceted discourses or movements. Prevalent in academic circles, theoretical strands of postfeminism are informed by both postmodern and feminist a­ nalyses – a­ s well as the complexities inherent in ‘postmodern feminism’. This understanding of postfeminism

Postmodern (Post)Feminism 167 highlights its pluralistic and anti-­foundationalist tendencies whereby it rejects the notion of a universal and singular conception of ‘Woman’ and instead foregrounds the individual differences between women. This emphasis on difference and individualism links postmodern postfeminism to its more popular as well as political manifestations. We will explore the debates surrounding postmodern feminism, centring on the problem of subjectivity as the point of contention and ­division – w ­ hat Susan Hekman (1991) calls the distinction between the constituted self of the humanist/modern tradition and its constituted postmodern counterpart. In so doing, we consider various manifestations of postmodern (post)feminism, including postcolonial and hip-­hop feminism. We will discuss the pop icon Madonna, the French performance artist Orlan and hip-­hop stars Lil’ Kim and Nicki Minaj as representatives of a postmodern (post)feminist stance. These female performers have been credited with reinventing their identities and reappropriating feminine/female iconography and fashion (most famously exemplified by Madonna’s conically breasted Gaultier corset). This self-­fashioning will be examined in relationship to Linda Hutcheon’s theory of complicitous critique (a paradoxical postmodern form of critique that is bound up with its own complicity with domination). The Postmodern Subject The notion of the ‘subject’ has been accorded a vital importance in postmodern theories that cast doubt on the idea of the autonomous and free ­agent – ­often identified as an integral component of m ­ odernity – ­and articulate a self that is always within power structures and subjected to multiple discursive formations. As a conceptual category, the postmodern subject is fluid rather than stable, constructed rather than fixed, contested rather than secure, multiple rather than uniform, deconstructed rather than whole. In effect, postmodern (or poststructuralist) thinking problematises the concept of the constituting subject of the Cartesian tradition, along with the notions of agency, creativity and resistance, and instead stresses the discursive construction and the constituted nature of the individual (see Hekman 1991). Following Fredric Jameson (1993), this deconstructive attack can be referred to as ‘the death of the subject’ or ‘the end of the autonomous bourgeois monad’ whereby the spontaneous and rational self developed by Enlightenment thinkers is radically decentred and dismissed (71–2). The postmodern dispersal of the subject has been reinforced by feminist scholars as this deconstructive move seems to further their attempts to open up the subject category to women. The contemporary feminist movement is informed by postmodernism’s questioning of the major tenets of the subject-­ centred epistemology of modernity that has the potential to advance a cultural

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politics of diversity. Feminists have rejected the philosophical notion of a transcendent subject, a self thematised as universal and free from any contingencies of difference. The feminist critique is based on a distrust of modern theory and politics that, it is argued, have devalued women’s subject positions and neglected their vital concerns. As Best and Kellner (1991) maintain, feminists ‘have quite rightly been suspicious of modernity . . . because the oppression of women has been sustained and legitimated through the philosophical underpinnings of modern theory and its essentialism, foundationalism and universalism’ (206). The principal thrust of the feminist argument is that the subject has been conceived as inherently masculine and thus, it has been a significant factor in maintaining the inferior status of women. In its gendered conceptualisation of the subject category, the humanist discourse of ‘Man’ covertly supports and justifies male domination of women as it constructs a binary opposition between the sexes, exemplified by two antithetical sets of characteristics that position ‘Man’ as the voice of reason and objectivity while enslaving ‘Woman’ in domestic activities and excluding her from public life. Accordingly, as Susan Hekman (1991) points out, ‘efforts to open up, reform, or reconstitute the masculine subject have been a central aspect of the feminist movement for several decades’ and she notes that, unless the subject is reconstructed, ‘the subjection of women that it fosters will necessarily continue’ (45). In this way, there are profound similarities and affinities between postmodern and feminist attacks on universalism, foundationalism and dichotomous thinking and, on this level, postmodern theory is ‘of use to feminism and other social movements, providing new philosophical support and ammunition for feminist critique and programmes’ (Best and Kellner 1991: 207). As Best and Kellner point out, ‘the postmodern emphasis on plurality, difference and heterogeneity has had immense appeal to those who have found themselves marginalized and excluded from the voice of Reason, Truth and Objectivity’ (207). As critiques of modernity, feminism and postmodernism are suspicious of the imperial claims of Enlightenment philosophy revolving around concepts of knowledge, subjectivity and forms of social domination. In fact, ‘feminism encourages postmodern theory to articulate the critique of the humanist universal “Man” as a discourse of male domination’, thereby producing a more differentiated analysis of the production of subjects in terms of gender identities (207). Post-­T heory As we mentioned in the first chapter, postfeminism has been discussed as an inherent part of a post-­theoretical tendency that articulates ‘the deconstruc-

Postmodern (Post)Feminism 169 tion of current hegemonic systems’ and entails a convergence of theories emanating from diverse fields and disciplines (Toro 1999: 16, 10). While post-­theory’s rejection of epistemological purity in favour of a pluralistic conception of theory can be welcomed, such a mixing of disciplines and evocation of difference cannot be adopted unquestioningly, as is evidenced in the case of postmodern feminism. According to advocates of post-­theory, the amalgamation of different epistemologies can be imagined as a mutually beneficial coalition, proceeding from a recognition of the diversity of the two entities to be combined and without the expectation and safeguard of some unifying principle. In this optimistic formulation, ‘the prospect of a merger . . . is undertaken as a way of intensifying and enhancing the value of each entity taken separately’ (Singer 1992: 472). Contrastingly, the intersection of feminism and postmodernism cannot be conceptualised as a romantic communion and uncomplicated blending of diverse epistemological fields, but it has been examined as an open and intense confrontation of two multifaceted and contradictory contexts. Feminism and postmodernism operate as forms for social production and exchange, and in both contexts there is little agreement among practitioners with regard to that which they may be said to have in common. These internal specificities further complicate the question of articulating a proposal of convergence that does justice to the diversity of feminist and postmodern viewpoints. In this sense, post-­theory’s seemingly unproblematic alliance of postmodernism and feminism threatens to elide both movements’ inherent complexities. Rather than embracing epistemological plurality for its own sake, one has to interrogate the nature of the linkage and analyse the conceptual use and strategic function of the post-­theoretical ‘and’. In this chapter, we will consider various theoretical and practical attempts to define a postmodern feminism and/or postfeminism and we argue that many of these calls for conjunction rely on a binary structure whereby postmodernism’s ontological uncertainty is opposed to a feminist politics and working model that depend on a Cartesian notion of subjectivity, agency and creativity. The critical juncture of feminism and postmodernism has been theorised employing a falsely dualistic formulation whereby feminism is based on the assumption of an autonomous and self-­reflexive female subject whereas postmodernism is defined as a theoretical/philosophical perspective, debilitating for feminist agency and politics. Following these conceptualisations, postmodern theory is seen to undermine women’s/feminists’ sense of selfhood and their capacity for criticism and resistance. Postmodernism is interpreted as a political threat for feminism as its primary motivation is philosophical while feminism’s primary motivation is political. We suggest that the intersections of feminism and postmodernism cannot be conceived as a harmonious union, nor can

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they be mapped on to a simplistic dualism that opposes feminist practice to postmodern theory. Instead, postmodernism and feminism are engaged in a multivalent and contradictory dialogue, forging a postmodern feminism and/ or postfeminism that exceeds binary logic. In fact, the rift between postmodernism and feminism is seen to be the result of two tendencies proceeding from opposite directions towards the same objective: to debunk traditional/patriarchal philosophy. Postmodernists and feminists both criticise Western concepts of Man, history and metaphysics, but their criticisms do not necessarily converge. In this way, feminism is described as ‘a call to action’ that ‘can never be simply a belief system’ as ‘without action, feminism is merely empty rhetoric which cancels itself out’ (Alice 1995: 12). Diametrically opposed to this activist stance, the postmodern discourse is characterised by an inherent relativism and declares itself concerned not with the question of establishing meanings, but with the challenge of any univalent structure and concept. As Nancy Hartsock deplores, ‘postmodernism . . . at best manages to criticize these theories [of enlightened modernity] without putting anything in their place’, concluding that ‘for those of us who want to understand the world systematically in order to change it, postmodern theories at their best give little guidance’ (159). According to these viewpoints, the effect of postmodernism has been a limitation of political and critical intervention as its introspective and deconstructive sensitivity turns into tongue-­tying anxiety and quietism. Within postmodernism, the category of intention is seen to be overdetermined to the extent that subjectivity is little more than a construct grounded in discourses, beyond individual control. Myra Macdonald (1995) reveals that women in particular are questioning whether ‘we have the right to offer criticism as “women”, when “women” may be an essentialist, patriarchal category that denies difference within it’ (38). Applied to feminism’s own identity as representing the interests of women, postmodernism’s fracturing of the subject poses a potential threat to feminist theory and politics as it forecloses the possibility of a sovereign feminist selfhood. Postmodernism represents a political liability for feminism, in so far as it challenges a unified conception of the feminist movement. The encounter of feminism and postmodernism is fraught with conceptual and practical dilemmas for, as Nancy Fraser and Linda Nicholson (1990) ask, ‘how can we combine a postmodernist incredulity toward metanarratives with the social-­critical power of feminism?’ (34). The central questions raised by feminist critics revolve around the issues of agency and subjectivity and they are concerned with the specific nature of the political action that feminists can design and pursue in the absence of a systematic, general and theoretical account of the condition of women. Feminist critics maintain that postmodern deconstructionism gives little sense of how

Postmodern (Post)Feminism 171 to justify generalisations about women and ultimately, it dissolves the foundations of the feminist movement. Consequently, fears mount up that the postmodern critique ‘may not only eliminate the specificity of feminist theory but place in question the very emancipatory ideals of the women’s movement’ (Benhabib 1994: 78). As Moi (1985) asserts, ‘the price for giving in to [this] powerful discourse is nothing less than the depoliticisation of feminism [as] it will be quite impossible to argue that women under patriarchy constitute an oppressed group, let alone develop a theory of their liberation’ (95). It is suggested that, for feminism, postmodernism’s invocation of difference and its dismissal of the constituting agent of modernity translate into a self-­destructive pluralism and abstract individualism. Diversified beyond the possibility of union, critics are concerned that the feminist movement will become fractured and fragmented to such an extent that it cannot be said to represent and politically advance the interests of women, as a structurally disadvantaged category relative to men. The outcome is a depoliticised and personalised feminism that makes individuation of its members a principal goal but cannot be employed as a politics of resistance or a programme for change. Thought through to its logical conclusion, postmodern theory may even result in a nihilistic stance that dismantles and dismisses the subject category altogether as a fiction or construct. As Patricia Waugh (1989) notes, postmodernism ‘may even situate itself at a point where there is no “subject” and no history in the old sense at all. . . . “Identity” is simply the illusion produced through the manipulation of irreconcilable and contradictory language games’ (7). This view is encapsulated by Jean Baudrillard’s pessimistic position that ‘the postmodern world is devoid of meaning; it is a universe of nihilism where theories float in a void, unanchored in any secure harbour’ (qtd in Best and Kellner 1991: 127). According to Baudrillard (1984), the postmodern is ‘characteristic of a universe where there are no more definitions possible. . . . It has all been done. The extreme limit of these possibilities has been reached. It has destroyed itself. It has deconstructed its entire universe’ (24). Postmodernists’ theoretical deconstructionism, critics fear, can turn into stagnation and quietism as they refuse to offer any declarations of faith or meaning. By deconstructing subjectivity, postmodernism is seen to abolish those ideals of autonomy and accountability that are necessary for the idea of historical change. Seyla Benhabib voices her concerns that a complete rejection of the concepts of selfhood and agency debilitates the possibility of critical theory. Benhabib (in Benhabib et al. 1995) notes that postmodern views of subjectivity are incompatible with feminist politics as they ‘undermine the very possibility of feminism as the theoretical articulation of the emancipatory aspirations of women’ (9). She is adamant that such utopian thinking is ‘a practical-­moral imperative’ as ‘without such a regulative principle of hope,

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not only morality but also radical transformation is unthinkable’ (20). As she notes, ‘social criticism without some form of philosophy is not possible, and without social criticism the project of a feminist theory which is at once committed to knowledge and to the emancipatory interests of women is inconceivable’ (Benhabib 1994: 90). Following postmodern theorists, feminist efforts must be directed towards dismantling all totalising and essentialist patterns of thought, including its own unifying myths and grounding assumptions. The category ‘Woman’ can no longer be embraced as a collective identity whereby women can bond and express their relative lack of power vis-­à-vis men in society. As a consequence, the feminist movement has to interrogate its own foundation, forged as an inclusive, women-­centred basis for social thought and political action. Some critics are anxious that this might result not only in the depoliticisation of feminism but also its eradication as a social movement: ‘Nominalism threatens to wipe out feminism itself’ for ‘if the concept of woman is a fiction, then the very concept of women’s oppression is obsolete and feminism’s raison d’être disappears’ (Alcoff 1987–8: 419; Brooks 1997: 23). The dilemma facing feminist theorists is that their very self-­definition is grounded in a concept that they must also de-­essentialise in all of its aspects, which ultimately leads to the ‘nagging question [of] whether the uncertain promise of a political linkage between feminism and postmodernism is worth the attendant potential risks’ (Stefano 1990: 77). In the most pessimistic formulations of the postmodern/feminist synthesis, feminism is absorbed by postmodern theory and its specificity and politics are negated. Paradoxically, while the decentred space of the postmodern is adorned with ciphers of heterogeneity and perspectival multiplicity, it can also be seen as a neutralising realm, subsuming differences into the metacategory of the ‘undifferentiated’ where all singularities become indistinguishable and interchangeable in a new economy of ‘sameness’. As Nancy Hartsock (1990) notes, despite postmodernists’ ‘desire to avoid universal claims and despite their stated opposition to these claims, some universalistic assumptions creep back into their work’ (159). Feminist theorists have been wary of this gesture of inclusion that arrogates feminism into postmodernism, suggesting that the postmodern condition should not be mistaken for a structural fait accompli, a one-­dimensional phenomenon that impacts upon everyone in the same way. As Ien Ang (1996) reveals, such totalising accounts assume that there is ‘a linear, universal and radical historical transformation of the world from “modernity” to “postmodernity” ’ (2). Ang asserts that one has to go beyond the many sweeping generalisations and platitudes enunciated about postmodernism and concentrate on its signification as a break with modernity, ‘the very dispersal of taken for

Postmodern (Post)Feminism 173 granted universalist and progressivist assumptions of the modern’ (2). The underlying thread of these remarks is that postmodernism must question its own globalising narratives and reject a description of itself as embodying a set of timeless ideals. As Nicholson (1990) points out, postmodernism ‘must insist on being recognized as a set of viewpoints of a time, justifiable only within its own time’ (11). Postmodern theorising and its invocation of difference must be historical, following from the demands of specific contexts and attuned to the cultural specificity of different societies and periods. As Waugh (1989) notes, women can only ‘begin to problematize and to deconstruct the socially constructed subject positions available to them’, once they have ‘experienced themselves as “subjects” ’ (25). Starting from the position of fragmented subjectivity, women’s ‘dreams of becoming “whole” ’ cannot be dismissed and rejected as ‘the reactionary move it might constitute in the writings of a representative of hegemony’, since they are ‘far less likely to mistake themselves for the universal “man” anyway’ (Koenen 1999: 134). Feminism has provided its own critique of essentialist and foundationalist assumptions that is not interchangeable or synonymous with the postmodern deconstructive position. Postmodernism is criticised for its gender-­blindness whereby it assumes or even rejects relationships that women have never experienced as subjects in their own right. Furthermore, even if women were to adopt postmodern deconstructionism, ‘the luxury of female anti-­ essentialism’ could still be accorded only to the privileged as ‘non-­white, non-­heterosexual, non-­bourgeois women are still finding political impetus in summoning up womanhood as identity and femininity as a construct which excludes and punishes them most painfully of all’ (Whelehan 1995: 211). The majority of women are not in a position to make choices and reject the politically enabling category of ‘Woman’, and thus they might not be willing to yield the ground on which to make a stand against their oppression. Consequently, suspicions arise in some feminist quarters that postmodernism is a ‘remasculinizing’ strategy and an antifeminist appropriative scheme whereby feminism is subsumed ‘into the postmodernist critique of “the tyranny of the signifier” ’ and it is reduced to ‘simply another of the “voices of the conquered” . . . that challenge the West’s desire for ever-­greater domination and control’ (Jones 1990: 9, 14). According to this view, feminism is negated and its political theory is appropriated and defused as merely one postmodernist strategy among many to criticise modernist ideologies. Postmodernism’s questioning of subjectivity and its scepticism regarding the possibilities of a general theory are interpreted as patriarchal ploys to silence the confrontational voices of feminism and to divert feminists from ‘tasks more pressing than deciding about the appropriateness of the label “feminist” ’ (Modleski 1991: 6). In this context, postmodernism and by extension postfeminism appear as a Trojan

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horse pretending to expand the feminist debate but, in effect, allowing male critics to enter and take over feminism. Tania Modleski is one of the key proponents of this pessimistic and defensive appraisal of the postmodern/feminist synthesis whereby ‘men ultimately deal with the threat of female power by incorporating it’ (7). She entitles her book Feminism Without Women (1991) and she employs this phrase to suggest either the triumph of a male feminist perspective that excludes women, or of a feminist anti-­essentialism so radical that every use of the term ‘Woman’, however provisional, is disallowed. Modleski is concerned that, in its extreme interpretations, anti-­essentialism has inaugurated a postfeminist stance that is not only without ‘Woman’ but also without the possibility of ‘women’. She concludes that the postmodern and postfeminist ‘play with gender in which differences are elided can easily lead us back into our “pregendered” past where there was only the universal ­subject – m ­ an’ (163). Accordingly, it is suggested that ‘if feminism can learn from postmodernism it has finally to resist the logic of its arguments’ and reject ‘its more extreme nihilistic’ implications (Waugh 1989: 189, 190). It is argued that feminism must posit some belief in ‘the notion of effective human agency, the necessity for historical continuity in formulating identity and a belief in historical progress’ (195). The underlying assumption is that feminism has to articulate a core belief in a self that, despite being produced through discursive and ideological formations, nevertheless has a material existence and history in human relationships. This view presupposes that, no matter how constituted by discourse, the subject retains a certain ability and agency as, without such a regulative ideal, the very project of female emancipation becomes unimaginable. Feminist critics are adamant that, in order to be effective as a politics of liberation, the feminist movement must maintain a distance and autonomy from postmodern theories that valorise free play of meaning, even as it sees the potential that these theoretical positions offer in disrupting hierarchies of power once taken for granted. In other words, feminist politics and action can be formulated only if they maintain the modern idea of a creative and autonomous self. Feminism has to take into account its own epistemological anchorage in the theories and ideas of enlightened modernity. The very discourse of emancipation is ‘a modern discourse’ as ‘modern categories such as human rights, equality, and democratic freedoms and power are used by feminists to criticise and fight against gender domination’ (Best and Kellner 1991: 208). Consequently, Waugh (1989) argues that ‘feminism cannot sustain itself as an emancipatory movement unless it acknowledges its foundations in the discourses of modernity’ (190). Moreover, feminist critics maintain that, even if feminism draws upon postmodern forms of disruption, it cannot repudiate entirely the framework

Postmodern (Post)Feminism 175 of enlightened modernity without perhaps fatally undermining itself as an emancipatory politics. Yet, as we have already discussed, feminists are also involved in a critical project designed to attack the totalising claims of modern philosophy, to expose its limitations and highlight their own exclusion from the humanist discourse of ‘Man’. In this sense, at least, feminism can be seen to be an intrinsically ‘postmodern’ discourse. We suggest that feminism has to be cognisant regarding its own ambiguous positioning between modernity and postmodernity as it tries to advance the idea of a self that eschews the sexism of the Cartesian subject while simultaneously retaining the notion of agency and autonomy. The feminist movement cannot unproblematically embrace an unreconstructed modern subject nor postmodernism’s decentred self as it is engaged in a struggle to reconcile context-­specific difference with universal political claims. Feminism has to negotiate its position in the problem space between essentialism and anti-­essentialism in which neither interminable deconstruction nor uncritical reification of the category ‘Woman’ is adequate to its demands. As a conceptual category, feminism has to recognise a central contradiction in its attempts to define an epistemological base as women seek equality and recognition of a gendered identity that has been constructed by cultural formations that feminism simultaneously seeks to challenge and dismantle. By conjuring up the category ‘Woman’ as their common, political denominator, feminists are in danger of reproducing the essential constructions of gender that they also set out to contest. In many ways, one could argue that feminism is suspended between its desire to posit an autonomous female/feminist self and the necessity of having to deconstruct the modern discourse of subjectivity. Post(modern) Feminism As we have already noted, the feminist debate over subjectivity is structured by the strained relation between the constituting self of the humanist/modern tradition and the constituted subject of postmodernity. According to Susan Hekman (1991), there is a sharp opposition between these two conceptions: the constituting subject is ‘transcendent, rational, and autonomous’ whereas ‘that which is constituted (which cannot be labelled a “subject” at all) is determined and ­unfree – a­ social dupe’ (47). Feminist theorists have sought to reformulate the postmodern dismissal and decentring of subjectivity and articulate a new approach to the subject. They have tried to alter the parameters of the controversy surrounding the concept of subjectivity and redefine the relationship between the constituted and constituting selves. Specifically, they have posed the questions of how agency can be defined and attributed to a non-­Cartesian subject and how resistance can be posited for this subject.

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Various critical attempts have been made to reconcile feminism’s modern and postmodern, essentialist and anti-­essentialist components as feminist theorists are engaged in the process of forging a postmodern feminism that integrates both contexts’ ‘respective strengths while eliminating their respective weaknesses’ (Fraser and Nicholson 1990: 20). This ‘postmodern, unbounded feminism’ unifies ‘coalitionally rather than foundationally’ in such a way that postmodernism and feminism operate like ‘those fictive entities known as corporations, under whose auspices a wide range of enterprises are organized and collected’ without assuming any essential relationship between them (Schwichtenberg 1993: 132; Singer 1992: 472). As Linda Singer suggests, the postmodern/feminist meeting should be interpreted as a ‘corporate merger’ that is not undertaken as ‘a romantic project of desire nor out of the need for some form of mystical communion’ but as a strategic union ‘born out of an interest in consolidating competition, diversifying one’s assets, or operating from a greater position of strength and viability’ (472). This model of conjunction assumes and proceeds from a recognition of the diversity and difference of the two entities to be combined without the expectation of unification or resolution. For example, Nancy Fraser and Linda Nicholson suggest that we can reconcile political (feminist) commitments with their theoretical (postmodern) sympathies by substituting pragmatism for the hyper-­ theoretical claims of postmodernism. In order to mediate between philosophical adequacy and political efficacy, feminism has to adopt a pragmatic approach that does not shift concerns about difference to theoretical questions but remains focused on practical considerations. Other feminist critics have followed similar lines of thought, arguing that ‘we need to be pragmatic, not theoretically pure’ if we want to preserve the possibility of ‘project[ing] utopian hopes, envision[ing] emancipatory alternatives, and infus[ing] all our work with a normative critique of domination and injustice’ (Bordo 1993: 242; Fraser 2013: 159). Seyla Benhabib (1994) provides an example of this pragmatic union of feminism and postmodernism in her conceptualisation of a postmodern scale that offers variously intense versions of postmodern theses that are distinguished in terms of their compatibility with feminism. Benhabib notes that the complex interaction of postmodernism and feminism around the notion of identity ‘cannot be captured by bombastic proclamations of the “Death of the Subject” ’ (83). She suggests a way out of the subject-­centred dilemma by advocating a ‘weak’ version of this theory that situates the subject in relation to social, cultural and discursive surroundings. Contrastingly, a ‘strong’ version of the same thesis undermines all concepts of intentionality, accountability, self-­reflexivity and autonomy. Benhabib maintains that only the ‘weak’ version is compatible with feminism as it stresses variability and diversity while

Postmodern (Post)Feminism 177 the strong/radical version is counterproductive for feminist theory, politics and practice, reducing the subject to an endless state of flux. Any attempt to link feminism with a ‘strong’ postmodernism can only engender incoherence and self-­contradictoriness, undermining all efforts at effective theorising and leading feminism to a passive stance from which it is reticent to formulate a feminist concept of autonomy for fear of lapsing into essentialism. Benhabib’s proposition relies on a rejection of an extreme postmodern theory that is one-­ sided, excessively prohibitive and politically disabling. Instead, she draws on a ‘weak’ postmodernism as a method of feminist pluralisation and a strategy of disruption that ‘can teach us the theoretical and political traps of why utopias and foundational thinking can go wrong’ (Benhabib et al. 1995: 30). In this mediating attempt, ‘pure’ postmodern theory is injected with a dose of feminism’s political concreteness while feminism is diversified in its exchange with postmodern anti-­essentialism. Benhabib (1994) endeavours to criticise ‘the metaphysical presuppositions of identity politics’ and challenge ‘the supremacy of heterosexist positions in the women’s movement’, without completely debunking the notions of selfhood and agency (81). This delineation of the postmodern/feminist junction retains the idea of a modern agent who drives towards autonomy in order to avoid a conception of the subject as wholly determined. Benhabib does not ascribe to a complete deconstruction of the Cartesian self, but rather, she seeks to incorporate some of its key elements. Her analysis rests on a modern definition of agency imported from the Cartesian subject and rooted in a dichotomised understanding of the constituting self of modernity and its constituted postmodern counterpart. Benhabib’s account of the postmodern/feminist meeting results in a predominantly modern feminism infused with a postmodern strain to create a more diverse politics for the contemporary age. Contrastingly, we maintain that feminism’s intersection with postmodern theory and the emergence of (theoretical) postfeminism cannot be comprehended by having recourse to a modern epistemology of subjectivity. The postmodern/feminist link needs to displace the opposition between the constituted and constituting selves and formulate concepts of agency from within the constructivist constraints. In this way, liberal fantasies of a rational agent have to be abandoned in favour of a subject who is firmly located within a network of power/discourse. This entails a contentious redefinition of agency and intentionality as the products of discourse, implicated in and conditioned by the very relations of power they seek to rival. In our understanding, political action and selfhood cannot be presented as emanating from an untainted inner space that is opposed to the outer world of external determination but, instead, they are part of an inherently multiple, dynamic and contradictory discursive field that depolarises and blurs the binary distinctions between the

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Cartesian self and the postmodern non-­self. We adopt a view of postmodernism as a politically ambivalent, but nonetheless political, discourse whose directionality is not fixed and provides a double movement of subversion and reinforcement. In this sense, we resist contemporary critiques that assume that postmodernism/postfeminism is disqualified from political involvement and postulate that the postmodern/postfeminist discourse offers a paradoxical critique that works within the very systems it attempts to undermine. For us, postmodern feminism represents a multivalent and pluralistic site of exchange that transcends monological classifications. Additionally, we suggest that the proliferation of difference – precipitated by postmodern theory – not only complicates the perception of (feminist) political agency but also becomes entangled with economic considerations of a late capitalist society that recognises the commercial appeal of signifiers of ‘diversity’. This holds true for political identities linked to both race and gender that have been appropriated in dominant culture through ‘the brand identity of the urban and postfeminism’ (Banet-Weiser 2007: 215). As Banet-Weiser notes, one has to acknowledge the mediated forms of both race and gender that ‘come to us in the contemporary context as a commodity’ (204). This adds another layer to the postmodern/feminist problematic and highlights the fact that ‘agency’ and ‘diversity’ are now consumer-driven marketing tools. Case Study: Madonna As Madonna turned fifty in 2008, her ability to keep redefining the parameters of her identity did not abate. Whether it is as a woman, mother, pop icon or almost sixty-­year-­old, the American singer challenges our preconceptions of who ‘Madonna’ is and, more broadly, what these identity categories mean within a postmodern context. Madonna can be said to represent the archetypal postmodern (post)feminist woman, constantly contesting and reworking her identity. In part, the key to her identity is that it cannot be fixed and, as she explains in an interview in her documentary Truth or Dare (1991) – or, as it was known in Europe, In Bed with Madonna – we can never have access to the ‘real’ Madonna: ‘I wanted to see that my life isn’t so easy, and one step further than that is the movie’s not completely me. You could watch it and say, I still don’t know Madonna, and good. Because you will never know the real me. Ever’ (qtd in Kaplan 1993: 149). Madonna’s postmodern characteristics pose a problem for some feminists who ‘view her multiple personae as a threat to women’s socialization, which entails the necessary integration of female identity’ (Schwichtenberg 1993: 130). As Schwichtenberg proposes, Madonna ‘uses simulation strategically in ways that challenge the stable notion of gender as the edifice of sexual

Postmodern (Post)Feminism 179 difference’ (130). In particular, the singer’s hyper-­feminine/sexualised performances in her music videos and films (such as the sexually provocative Body of Evidence [1993]) have been the subject of critical debates that interrogate Madonna’s use and manipulation of gender conventions and styles. In her flaunting of feminine characteristics and female body ­parts – ­most (in) famously exemplified by the cone-­shaped Gaultier bustier she wore for her 1990 ‘Blond Ambition’ ­tour – ­Madonna lays bare ‘the devices of femininity, thereby asserting that femininity is a device. Madonna takes simulation to its limit in a deconstructive manoeuvre that plays femininity off against ­itself – ­a metafemininity that reduces gender to the overplay of style’ (134). Madonna’s postfeminist reworking of her i­dentity – ­using femininity as a vehicle to empowerment in what could be described as a ‘feminine masquerade’ (135) – provides a commentary on the artifice of gender. For example, her performance in the music video of ‘Material Girl’ shows how the gaze can be realigned through the use of the hyper-­feminine. In ‘Material Girl’ Madonna replays the iconic femininity of Marilyn Monroe in order to deconstruct femininity through the act of appropriating Monroe’s feminine look. Madonna also challenges moral and sexual boundaries in the video of ‘Justify My Love’, with depictions of bisexuality, sadomasochism and group sex. In these videos, Madonna negotiates the postfeminist double b­ ind – o ­ r, in Linda Hutcheon’s words, a complicitous critique – that does not shy away from using femininity as a means to its undoing and resignification. As Hutcheon (1988) explains, ‘this is a strange kind of critique, one bound up . . . with its own complicity with power and domination, one that acknowledges that it cannot escape implication in that which it nevertheless still wants to analyze and maybe even undermine’ (4). While exposing femininity for what it ­is – ­a ­device – ­Madonna employs femininity as an excessive performance to parody gender in ‘a doubling back on femininity in a masculinity that is feminized’ (Schwichtenberg 1993: 135). In this way, Madonna encourages the viewer to ‘reread her body as the intersection of converging differences’ (135). Case Study: Orlan On 30 May 1987, the French performance artist Orlan began a series of surgical procedures to transform her body through a project entitled ‘The Reincarnation of Saint Orlan’. Her objective was to remodel her body using aesthetic ideals taken from Western art. From the lips of Gustave Moreau’s Europa to the nose of Jean-­Léon Gérôme’s Psyche, Orlan deployed cosmetic/ plastic surgery as ‘a path towards self-­determination’ (Davis 1997: 174). As Orlan explains: ‘I am the first artist to use surgery as a medium and to alter the purpose of cosmetic surgery: to look better, to look young. “I is an other”.

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I am at the forefront of confrontation’ (qtd in McCorquodale 1996: 91). Here Orlan explores not only a reworking of the body, but also a reimagining of the ­self – a­ n altercation with the Other that demands a complete change of identity. In fact, ‘she desires to “pass” as a new person with a new character and a new history’ (Gilman 1999: 323). According to Davis (1997), Orlan’s ‘project represents the postmodern celebration of identity as fragmented, multiple ­and – ­above ­all – ­fluctuating and her performances resonate with the radical social construction of Butler (1990, 1993) and her celebration of the transgressive potential of such performativity’ (174). Orlan exposes how femininity and ‘beauty’ are culturally constructed, historically specific and by extension, open to resignification. In so doing, she demonstrates how femininity itself can be mobilised as a tool against patriarchy and the male gaze as the feminine body becomes ‘a site for action and protest rather than as an object of discipline and normalization’ (177). Walking the tightrope of postfeminist identity, Orlan also demonstrates how ­technology – i­n this case cosmetic s­urgery – c­ an be used by women for feminist objectives. Orlan’s surgical performances provide an example of how women can work against the grain of femininity in a postfeminist move that attempts to wrestle back control of their bodies. As Orlan keenly asserts, she is ‘the creator not just the creation; the one who decides and not the passive object of another’s decision’ (175). Postcolonial (Post)Feminism Intimately linked to the notion of postmodern postfeminism is the idea that postfeminism emerges from the contribution of minority feminists who demand a diversification of the feminist movement and a non-­ethnocentric and non-­heterosexist feminism. This understanding of postfeminism aligns the postmodern concern for difference and feminist concepts of freedom and equality with postcolonial interests that see racial, class and ethnic oppressions at the bottom of women’s marginalisation. Here postfeminism has been interpreted as ‘a product of the interventions of women of color into the feminist debate’ (Koenen 1999: 132). Within this context, ‘postfeminism, diverging from earlier essentialist and monolithic concepts of “woman”, embraces the idea of gender as a performative rather than a biological category, the deconstruction of the unified subject, and the concepts of difference/­fragmentation’ (131–2). As a ‘post’ discourse, postfeminism is seen to deconstruct the homogenising effects of feminism’s conception of ‘Woman’ as a universal sign involved in a common struggle. At face value, postfeminism would seem to offer rich theoretical possibilities for women of colour to resignify white middle-­class Western feminism.

Postmodern (Post)Feminism 181 Yet here it is also important to acknowledge the undeniable tensions between postfeminist theories and their use by women of colour. As Koenen (1999) argues, ‘[w]hite postfeminism elevated the traditional center of “male, pale, and Yale” over the periphery of black and female, thus unwittingly duplicating a much-­criticized hegemonic strategy of studying and canonizing white male master texts’ (132). In fact, as we have noted already, boom postfeminism in particular has often been discussed as an inherently elitist and exclusionary sensibility, privileging a white, middle-­class, heterosexual ­subject – a­s Jess Butler (2013) writes, ‘the discursive space of postfeminism is effectively closed to nonwhite women’ (47–8). While the relationship between postfeminist and postcolonial discourses might be fraught with difficulties, recent investigations have adopted an intersectional and transnational approach to postfeminism in order to ‘rupture [its] discursive boundaries’ (37). In Butler’s words, the argument that postfeminism excludes women of c­ olor – o ­ r worse, that women of color do not appear in postfeminist popular ­culture – ­seems both overly simplistic and empirically unfounded. For one thing, we can see women of color enacting postfeminism simply by turning on the television. Popular reality shows like Basketball Wives, Bad Girls Club, Candy Girls, Love & Hip Hop, Flavor of Love, The Real Housewives of Atlanta, America’s Next Top Model, The Real World, and Keeping Up with the Kardashians . . . all showcase women of color. . . . [I]t becomes clear that the postfeminist ‘girls’ who are going ‘wild’ are not all white and middle class. (48) Simidele Dosekun (2015) agrees in her assessment of the transnational traits of postfeminism, noting that postfeminist ‘culture reaches and hails not only women in the West but also others elsewhere’: ‘post-­feminism is readily transnationalized via the media, commodity, and consumer connectivities that today crisscross more borders more densely and more rapidly than ever before’ (961, 965). In particular, the postfeminist rhetoric of ‘Girl Power’ is ‘broadcast and sold across borders, to put it quite simply, and in ways that are neither simply linear nor inevitably from North to South’ (961). Instead of defining postfeminism ‘as uniquely or authentically Western culture’, we need to take into account non-­Western postfeminist contexts and ‘theorize postfeminism with globalization’ in order to develop ‘an understanding of [it] as a culture put into transnational circulation’ which includes ‘the understanding that the culture does not travel or arrive in a unitary or prototypical Western form’ (964, 968). These new directions in postfeminist criticism allow us to interrogate the ways in which postfeminism might provide ‘space for others within its discursive boundaries’ and investigate ‘how nonwhite and/or

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­ onheterosexual women adopt, internalize, negotiate, and challenge hegemn onic postfeminist conceptions of race, gender, and sexuality’ – as Jess Butler (2013) puts it, ‘it is possible that women of color may be in a unique position to disrupt, at least symbolically, the whiteness of postfeminism’ (49, 50). In this sense, we can detect thematic similarities between these recent articulations of transnational/intersectional postfeminism and a more established postcolonial feminism that developed in the 1980s and sought to critique Western feminism’s failure to adequately acknowledge and represent the diversity of women. In fact, ‘[p]ostcolonial feminisms seek to disrupt the power to name, represent and theorize by challenging western arrogance and ethnocentrism, and incorporating the choices of marginalized peoples’ (McEwan 2001: 100). The question of power within feminism becomes increasingly crucial as feminism is challenged from the inside by previously unheard voices of marginalised, colonised and indigenous women who object to feminist theories that fail to address their needs. As a social and political movement that claims to embrace women’s interests beneath the umbrella term of ‘sisterhood’, feminism is criticised for developing a methodology that uses as its paradigm white, heterosexual and middle-­class female experience. Imelda Whelehan (1995) recognises a dominant feminist stream of ‘white, heterosexual and bourgeois thought’ that embodies the possible meanings and definitions ascribed to feminism, accompanied by a marked reluctance on the part of such ‘feminists to address the degrees of social acceptance and privilege that they’ enjoy ‘at the expense of others’ (107, 108). This ‘ “mainstream” feminist analysis of female oppression’ is denounced as ‘flawed and narrow in its focus’ as it does not take into account that ‘a patriarchal ideology also supports a racist and heterosexist one’ (110, 120). Black and lesbian feminists actively counter and reject these methodological boundaries of feminist discourse, refusing to be silenced by a ‘ “hegemonic” feminism with its roots clearly located in the Anglo-­American influences so powerful in the conceptualization of second wave feminism’ (Brooks 1997: 4). Their critique of the racist, ethnocentric and heterosexist assumptions of a largely white, middle-­ class and heterosexual feminism is seen to result in a breakdown of feminist consensus, a collapse from the inside, and its replacement by a pluralistic postfeminist stance. In this way, historically speaking, the postfeminist discourse could be interpreted as a product of the interventions of women of colour and lesbian theorists into the feminist debate as it takes into consideration the demands of marginalised and colonised cultures for a non-­ ethnocentric and non-­ heterosexist feminism. In this sense, postfeminism can be seen to address the notion of power within feminism, insisting that one has to ‘rethink the feminist project in ways that do not oversimplify either the nature of power in

Postmodern (Post)Feminism 183 general, or questions of power relations among women and among feminists’ (Elam 1997: 67, 58). Claims of victimisation are problematised as concepts such as ‘oppression’, ‘patriarchy’, ‘identity’ and ‘difference’ as used by white middle-­class feminists are challenged by black and lesbian feminists, fighting for visibility within mainstream feminism. Their demands for a diversification of the feminist movement are epitomised and illustrated by Michelene Wandor’s insistence that ‘the p­ olitical – ­and ­personal – ­struggle now needs a larger, more diverse “we”, who will combine in resistance to all the overlapping oppressions’ (qtd in Thornham 2001: 42). In fact, one cannot pose a clear distinction between the pressures from inside and outside feminism as postmodernism/poststructuralism are embraced by non-­mainstream feminists as adequate frames to theorise the multivalent, contradictory and conflicting voices and demands of contemporary women. These marginalised feminist voices reinforce the postmodern belief that no singular explanation for relations of power will suffice and no monolithic interpretation or alteration of praxis will in itself effect social change. As Linda Nicholson (1997) points out, postmodernism ‘provides a basis for avoiding the tendency to construct theory that generalizes from the experiences of Western, white, middle-­class women’ and ‘offers feminism some useful ideas about method, particularly a wariness toward generalizations which transcend the boundaries of culture and region’ (5). Case Study: Hip-­H op Feminism In recent years, the growing popular proliferation of hip-­hop has marked it out as part of the ongoing commoditisation of race, which has seen hip-­hop deployed widely in commercials for major brands like Coca-­Cola and Burger King. Hip-­hop has been transformed ‘from being the symbolic anathema of the dominant commercial apparatus to serving as one of its most strategically effective symbolic instruments’ (Smith qtd in Tasker and Negra 2007: 205). Hip-­hop’s adoption by marketing executives and the media in general as a powerful selling device has been matched by a diversification of its influence into the unlike area of feminist theory. With the publication in 1999 of Joan Morgan’s book When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost: My Life as a Hip-Hop Feminist, the concept of ‘hip-­hop feminism’ was born. For Morgan, ‘hip-­ hop feminism’ designates a contemporary feminist stance that engages with ambiguity and difference, or, as she puts it, it is a ‘feminism brave enough to fuck with the grays’ (qtd in Siegel 2007: 142). As Morgan implies, this is a controversial form of feminism that is happy to court c­ ontradiction – ­playing with the tools of women’s e­ xploitation – o ­ n the path to female empowerment. In effect, hip-­hop has long been criticised as a highly gendered music

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genre and culture that puts women on the periphery and ‘structures male and female participation through heterosexual metaphors of power’ (Gaunt 2006: 114) – the terms ‘bitch’ and ‘ho’ being used nominally for Black women who act within and outside of the ever-­shifting boundaries of acceptable behaviour within hip-­hop culture (Lane 2011: 776). As Lane asserts, Typical, commercial depictions of Black women’s bodies in rap music, offer a body with no agency. We see Black women whose rear ends are either the theme of the song or the star of the music video, but rarely do these women get to express anything outside of a sexuality that is already shaped by the desire of the male artist. (789) Morgan touches upon these inevitable incongruities of ‘hip-­hop feminism’, arguing that women are often complicit in their representation within rap and hip-­hop culture as ‘many of the ways in which men exploit our [women’s] image and sexuality in hip-­hop is done with our permission and cooperation’ (78). For many feminists, this is very dangerous ground, as it seems to support a patriarchal script that justifies the suppression and subordination of women on the basis that they are in part to blame. However, Morgan’s argument gives voice to the ongoing dilemma that many African-­American and Latino-­American women and girls confront in their enjoyment and consumption of hip-­hop culture and music without being offended and debased. In fact, Gwendolyn Pough (2004) argues that ‘having women’s voices represented via Hip-­Hop in the larger public sphere opens the door for a wealth of possibilities in terms of the validation of the Black female voice and Black women’s agency’ (85). In effect, the ‘sexually explicit lyrics . . . offer black women . . . a chance to be proud o ­ f – ­and indeed ­flaunt – t­heir sexuality’ (qtd in Neal 2007: 2). Although many female hip-­ hop artists would not associate themselves with f­eminism – ­as for many black women it is still a label restricted to white, middle-­class w ­ omen – ­Morgan’s category of ‘hip-­hop feminism’ demonstrates how feminism can be resignified for new and minority groups of women. Such a contentious form of feminism can be readily aligned with the notorious, Grammy Award–winning rapper Kimberly Denise ­Jones – ­otherwise known as Lil’ Kim. A native of Brooklyn, New York, Lil’ Kim combines hardcore rap with ­explicit – a­ nd at times ­pornographic – s­ exuality. With song titles like ‘Suck My D**k’, ‘Queen Bitch’ and ‘Don’t Mess with Me’, Lil’ Kim is not afraid to take up the sexist language of male rappers and hip-­hop artists, as a riposte to misogynistic ideas and practices. In her music, Lil’ Kim celebrates the ‘sex object’ role assigned to women by male rappers, transforming it into a position of power by using female sexuality and hardcore rap. She literally sings back the lyrics of oppression to male rappers, reminding

Postmodern (Post)Feminism 185 t­hem – ­as she does in ‘Don’t Mess with Me’ – that ‘I’m that Bitch!’ In this way, Lil’ Kim’s brand of ‘hip-­hop feminism’ takes what could be described as a postfeminist turn, as femininity and sexuality are used for self-­definition and self-­gain. Taking up a stance of h ­ ypersexuality – b­ oth in terms of lyrical content and ­appearance – ­Nicki Minaj appears to be following in the footsteps of predecessor Lil’ Kim, albeit in a more ‘edgy’ and ostensibly performative manner. Since the 2010 release of her Pink Friday album, Minaj has made a name for herself not only as the most-­charted female rapper in the history of the Billboard Hot 100 but also for her hyper-­stylised and theatrical performances, replete with ‘anime facial expressions’ (O’Connor 2010), neon-­coloured wigs and a series of racially and sexually diverse alter egos, including cartoonish ‘Harajuku Barbie’ and saintly ‘Nicki Teresa’. Adopting a self-­consciously performative stance, Minaj has embodied a range of characters, from pimp who likes ‘real big old ghetto booty’ (‘Lil’ Freak’) to cyborg (‘Turn Me On’) and monster (‘Monster’) – as she puts it in an interview: ‘I look at rap as an opportunity to act. My head is full of different ­characters – ­in each song I’m auditioning a character’ (Weiner 2010). As McMillan (2014) argues, Minaj practises what he terms ‘nickiaesthetics’, a form of ‘black performance art that employs an extravagant theatricality and a vivid, intensely hued style’ (79): Minaj’s adroit manipulation of fashion as well as her saucy irreverence are indicative of her determination to steer a different, and weirder, course in a genre known for its taut conformity. Indeed . . . her métier is her skill at character itself, her execution of a dazzling array of multiple personalities. Through these aggressive aesthetic acts, Minaj not only crashes hip-­hop’s proverbial boys club, but also refuses its constitutive ­element – ­a street-­savvy authenticity, or ‘realness’ – in favor of girly artifice. (80) In particular, her appropriation of Barbie has been read as a critical masquerade of white femininity, undermining its supposed naturalness in favour of (postmodern) construction. In Whitney’s (2012) words, Minaj ‘both imitates and parodies the iconic doll, going beyond straightforward identification’ in ways that call ‘the idea of an authentic and cohesive feminine identity’ into question (154–5). Minaj herself has defended her performative staging of white feminine norms: ‘It’s interesting that people have more negative things to say about me saying “I’m Barbie” than me saying “I’m a bad bitch” . . . So you can call yourself a female dog because that’s cool in our community. But if you call yourself a Barbie, that’s fake’ (qtd in Jess Butler 2013: 52). By inserting herself into a hetero-­normative subject position like Barbie, Minaj

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has also opened herself up to criticism, in particular the persistent claim that her shape-­shifting only serves her own financial gain and is in line with neoliberal/postfeminist constructions of celebrities who constantly have to reinvent themselves in order to maintain their commodity value. Undoubtedly, Minaj is now an established mainstream artist and lucrative self-­brand, sought after by media professionals and fashion designers. At the same time, as Shange (2014) writes, her assemblage of public personae functions as ‘a sort of “bait and switch” on the laws of normativity’, whereby she appears to perform a range of gendered, racial and sexualised identities (male/female; straight/ queer; white Barbie/‘bad bitch’) while, upon closer examination, she refuses to be pinned down and be legible within these normative parameters (29). Ultimately, it might be Minaj’s adherence to a postmodern fissured self and a postfeminist aesthetics of (white) femininity that lies at the heart of her transgressive ­potential – ­as Jess Butler (2013) summarises, ‘[i]t is in this fractured positionality that . . . Minaj’s subversive promise resides . . . If Britney Spears and Carrie Bradshaw are postfeminism’s icons, Minaj ­represents – ­visually, aurally, and l­yrically – ­a literal fracturing of that ideal’ (53). Recommended Further Reading Benhabib, Seyla et al. ‘Feminism and Postmodernism: An Uneasy Alliance’. Feminist Contentions: A Philosophical Exchange. New York and London: Routledge, 1995. 17–34. Hekman, Susan. ‘Reconstituting the Subject: Feminism, Modernism and Postmodernism’. Hypatia 6.2 (1991): 44–63. McMillan, Uri. ‘Nicki-­aesthetics: The Camp Performance of Nicki Minaj’. Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 24.1 (2014): 79–87. Schwichtenberg, Cathy. ‘Madonna’s Postmodern Feminism: Bringing the Margins to the Center’. The Madonna Connection: Representational Politics, Subcultural Identities, and Cultural Theory. Ed. Cathy Schwichtenberg. Oxford: Westview Press, 1993. 129–45.

8 Queer (Post)Feminism

Overview The relationship between feminism and queer theory is not a straightforward one. At face value, they seem a likely pairing as both at some level attempt to deconstruct identity categories and register difference. Yet queer theory has been challenged by some feminist critics because it seems to neglect political theories in favour of a focus on gender and sexual transgression. This said, there are many fruitful intersections between feminism and queer theory, perhaps most strikingly in the work of Judith ­Butler – w ­ hose theories we will explore in more detail later in this chapter. Developing out of the radical movements of the 1960s, queer theories have their roots outside academia. In particular, the Gay Liberation Movement of the late 1960s and 1­ 970s – ­which can be traced to the Stonewall Riot in New York in ­1969 – ­marks a seminal moment in the development of rhetoric and political doctrine to challenge the ‘heterosexism’ of mainstream society. The primary objective of queer politics during this period was to increase public visibility. As Geltmaker (1992) asserts: ‘Our refusal to live in a closet is one way of “just saying no” to a world, a nation, and a regional culture intent on closing borders to those who are “different” ’ (650). The objective here is the breaking down of barriers through an acknowledgement of diversity. By the 1990s queer theory marked a radical reconfiguration of the intersection of sexuality, representation and subjectivity. Foregrounding the politics of difference, queer theory disrupted binary configurations of the subject by advancing a destabilisation of identity. In this chapter, we address this destabilisation and ‘queering’ of the

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­ eterosexual and heterosexist norm as theorised by gay and lesbian critics. h Queer theory takes up the postmodern/poststructuralist concern with breaking down essentialist notions of gender and sexual identity and replacing them with contingent and multiple identities. As a deconstructive strategy, queer theory aims to ‘denaturalise heteronormative understandings of sex, gender, sexuality, sociality, and the relations between them’ (Sullivan 2003: 81). Popular culture as well has witnessed the increasing popularity and mainstreaming of gay and bisexual characters and narratives that do not centre on heterosexuality, from the successful television series Will & Grace (1998–2006) and The L Word (2004–9) to the critically acclaimed Boys Don’t Cry (1999). Yet the developing frequency of representations of gay and lesbians within the media is, as Rosalind Gill (2007) warns, part of a ‘queer chic’ aesthetic that signifies homosexuality ‘through highly specific and highly sexualized codes’ (103). ­Homosexuality – l­ike race and ethnicity (see Chapter 7) – has thus become a commodity. Within this context, we begin by examining Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity, in particular her discussion of drag performances of gender that disrupt the seemingly natural continuity of heterosexuality. From here, we analyse Judith Halberstam’s notion of ‘female masculinity’ (1998) and ‘transgender bodies’ (2005) – in relationship to the film Boys Don’t Cry – that argues for a more flexible taxonomy of masculinity. The chapter will conclude with a case study on Lady Gaga who commodifies subcultural queer marginality into a mainstream pop act. Gender Performativity Judith Butler has been instrumental in the formulation and theorisation of gender performativity whereby femininity and masculinity come into being when a body performs or ‘does gender’ in a stylised reiteration of conventions that eventually become naturalised and consolidated. As Judith Butler (1993b) notes, gender is ‘an identity tenuously constituted in time’ and ‘instituted through the stylisation of the body’ (402). The gendered body is performative in the sense that it has ‘no ontological status apart from the various acts which constitute its reality’ and, thus, gender ‘can be neither true nor false, neither real nor apparent, neither original nor derived’ (Butler 1990a: 136, 141). Instead, ‘gender is always a doing’, a ‘performance that relies on a certain practice of repetition’ that retroactively produces the effect of identity and the illusion that there is an inner gender core (Butler 1990a: 25; Butler 1990b: 2). Hence, ‘all gendering is a kind of impersonation and approximation’, an ‘imitation for which there is no original’ but rather the idea of an imaginary or fantasised origin (Butler 1993b: 313).

Queer (Post)Feminism 189 While the everyday performativity of gender resides in unacknowledged acts of citation that produce the female/male body as feminine/masculine, Butler’s particular interest lies in disrupting this appearance of natural continuity and making ‘gender trouble’. For Butler (1990a), drag in particular acts as a subversive practice that challenges gender identity because ‘in imitating gender, drag implicitly reveals the imitative structure of gender itself – as well as its contingency’ (137; emphasis in original). Drag marks a conflict between gender and performance, as ‘the so-­called sex of the performer is not the same as the gender being performed’ (Sullivan 2003: 86). By exposing gender as a reiterative mechanism and a performative achievement, Butler explores the potential of an unfaithful and critical repetition that might displace the very constructs by which it is mobilised. As she writes, if the ground of gender is the stylised repetition of acts through time, and not a seemingly seamless identity, then the possibilities of gender transformation are to be found in the arbitrary relation between such acts, in the possibility of a different sort of repeating, in the breaking or subversive repetition of that style. (Butler 1993b: 402) In other words, femininity and masculinity become available for a deconstructive practice and/or politics that use and resignify simulation in ways that challenge the stable notion of gender as the edifice of sexual difference. The gender template is opened up to integrate a more complex set of signposts that refashion the body and allow the subject to disengage from the roles of an apparently naturalised femininity/masculinity. Yet, at the same time as asserting that gender can ‘be rendered thoroughly and radically incredible’, Butler (1990a) is also aware that this form of parodic imitation cannot be confused with a voluntarist stance whereby subjects choose their various identities much as they would select their clothes (141). Butler (1995) insists that ‘gender performativity is not a question of instrumentally deploying a “masquerade” ’ for such a construal of performativity presupposes an intentional subject behind the deed (136). On the contrary, gender is an involuntary and imposed production within a culturally restricted space and it is always put on under constraint as a compulsory performance that is in line with heterosexual conventions. In this way, femininity/masculinity is ‘not the product of a choice, but the forcible citation of a norm, one whose complex historicity is indissociable from relations of discipline, regulation, punishment’ (Butler 1993a: 232). With this in mind, performativity can simultaneously be theorised in terms of subversion and normativity whereby it both empowers and constrains the subject. As Butler admits, ‘there is no guarantee that exposing the naturalized status of heterosexuality will lead to its subversion’ as the gender meanings taken up in these parodic styles remain ‘part of hegemonic, misogynist

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culture’ (Butler 1993a: 231; Butler 1990a: 138). Butler’s notion of gender parody is characterised by an undeterminable disruptive and revolutionary potential that cannot be summed up by a dualistic logic as either a powerful and self-­conscious protest or a disempowering and unconscious placation. In relation to postfeminism, the importance of the concept of gender parody lies in its transgressive doubleness whereby it both undermines and reinforces normative representations of gender, blurring the opposition between activity and passivity, subject and object. Case Study: Will & Grace ( 1998–2006 ) Will & Grace provided a seminal moment in TV sitcom history as the first network television series to showcase a gay man as the principal character. Telling the story of Will ­Truman – ­a gay New York ­lawyer – ­and his relationship with Grace ­Adler – a­ straight Jewish woman who runs her own interior design fi ­ rm – a­ long with their friendship with Jack ­McFarland – ­a struggling gay actor and sometime student n ­ urse – a­nd Karen W ­ alker – t­he alcoholic wife of wealthy businessman Stan Walker and Grace’s proudly incompetent ­assistant – ­the series charted new territory with its comic portrayal of the relationship trials and tribulations of Will and Grace. Garnering widespread popular acclaim and substantial viewing figures, with over 17 million viewers tuning in at the height of its popularity in the United States in 2­ 001 – ­making it the fourth highest-­rated programme in March of that ­year – ­the series marked what Gauntlett (2007) describes as ‘a growing acceptance of gay characters’ (85). In fact, by its third series Will & Grace was ‘one of 22 shows that portrayed gay or lesbian characters in lead, supporting or recurring roles’ (Battles and Hilton-­Morrow 2002: 87). However, the series’ popularity among the viewing public was not matched by critics’ appraisals, as they criticised it for stereotyping gay characters and reifying a heterosexual matrix. In addition, critics attacked the series’ representation of the gay community as narrow, singular and homogenous. More broadly, what we witness in Will & Grace is part of an ongoing commercialisation of gay and lesbian culture, where glamour is sexualised and deployed to sell ‘queer chic’ to the ‘hetero-­masses’. As Rosalind Gill (2007) argues, queer chic taps into the ‘pink economy’ – the expanding market for gay and lesbian ­identities – ­and ‘can seem to add “edge”, risk and sexiness to products that are often associated with straight men and traditional sexism’ (103). Although the characters of Will and Jack offer two very different and celebrated representations of the gay man ­and – ­within the context of the lack of leading and supporting gay characters on network TV in the late ­1990s – ­could be seen as progressive, they are still ‘positioned within a narrative space that relies on

Queer (Post)Feminism 191 familiar comedic conventions for addressing h ­ omosexuality – ­equating gayness with a lack of masculinity’ (Battles and Hilton-­Morrow 2002: 89). Jack’s camp performances fit directly into the historic association within the media of the gay man as ‘queen’. Jack’s excessive displays of his ‘gayness’ are represented as non-­threatening and c­ omedic – i­llustrated, for example, by Will’s response to Jack’s assertion that not many people know that he is gay when they meet him: ‘Jack, blind and deaf people know you’re gay. Dead people know you’re gay.’ This stereotypically camp secondary character acts as a foil that allows for a renormalisation and ‘heterosexualisation’ of the lead character Will who emerges as more conventionally masculine. As a well-­groomed gay man, Will closely approximates mainstream aesthetics and heteronormative conventions of masculinity to such an extent that this ‘version of gay masculinity is in no way different from the same image being sold to heterosexual men’ (90). As Shugart notes, gay men are shown to be ‘capable of “doing” heterosexuality’ and of ‘being wholly grafted onto established heterosexual communities and contexts’ (76). In Lisa Duggan’s (2004) words, these stereotypical gay characters come to be seen as a conduit for homonormativity – ‘a politics that does not contest dominant heteronormative assumptions and institutions, but upholds and sustains them, while promising the possibility of a demobilized gay constituency and a privatized, depoliticized gay culture anchored in domesticity and consumption’ (50). Devoid of gay social and political contexts, ‘queerness’ is defined through consumption, not sexual orientation, and gay culture is reduced to shopping (Cohan 2007: 179, 180). This conservative, consumerist frame seemingly contains any subversive possibilities that a series like Will & Grace poses to the American mainstream media, offering the wider viewing public a safe peek into a world that many would not be familiar with and at the same time providing gay audiences with ‘a space for identification and self-­construction’ (Battles and Hilton-­Morrow 2002: 102). Here, as with many postfeminist texts, the danger of ultimately reinforcing heterosexual and heteronormative s­tructures – w ­ hile in this case attempting to resignify gay characters to a mass ­audience – i­s a domain of risk that must be entered. What this example reveals is that the presence of ‘alternative’ ideas and characters does not necessarily imply a political threat as marginalised groups are assimilated into mainstream popular/consumer culture. This also poses wider questions about the uses of ‘visibility’ as a political or critical tool. As Helene Shugart (2003) writes, ‘when previously ignored groups or perspectives do gain visibility, the manner of their representation will reflect the biases and interests of those powerful people who define the public agenda’, with the result that ‘apparently emancipatory messages and representations may, in fact, function to reify dominant discourses’ (67–8).

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192 Case Study: The L Word ( 2004–9 )

First aired in January 2004, The L Word was the first primetime drama to explore lesbian and bisexual relationships and identities. Representing the ‘queer’ lifestyles of a group of well-­dressed lesbian and bisexual women from West Hollywood, the series has been both praised for breaking new ground and criticised for offering what has been described as ‘soft-­core girl-­on-­girl pornography aimed at heterosexual men or couples’ (Sedgwick 2006: xix). For Tasker and Negra (2007), this is indicative of a conservative postfeminism that ‘absolutely rejects lesbianism in all but its most guy-­friendly forms, that is, divested of potentially feminist associations’ (21). Marketed as a lesbian version of Sex and the City – dubbed by some ‘Sex and the Clittie’ – and as such censured for its white, femme bias, The L Word offers a ‘visible world in which lesbians exist, go on existing, exist in forms beyond the solitary and the couple, sustain and develop relations among themselves of difference and commonality’ (Sedgwick 2004: B10). Yet for some critics this visibility is still governed by a heterosexual frame, as ‘lesbian lives are simultaneously fetishized and celebrated, mediated through a curious heterosexual gaze that is marked as both male and female’ (Tasker and Negra 2007: 21). In many ways, this is where the conflict of representation resides in The L Word – in the tension between making lesbian identities visible and the demands of the mainstream (heteronormative) media. This tension is well expressed in episode nine (‘Late, Later, Latent’) of the second season when Mark’s financial backers for his film on lesbian life emphatically respond to his pitch by telling him that ‘red-­blooded men don’t give a fuck about this anthropological bullshit . . . They want hot lesbian sex and they want it now.’ Within this context, Samuel Chambers (2006b) argues that ‘The L Word is a heternormative show about homosexuals’ that deploys a narrative structure that ‘often serves to perpetuate, preserve and sustain the normativity of heterosexuality’ (82). For Chambers, the implicit message that lesbians are sexy, attractive objects of desire, even for straight men, crop up repeatedly, whether in the form of the straight man observing lesbian sex (‘Lawfully’, 1:6) or in the representation of lesbians in/as the pornographic model . . . (‘Losing It’, 1:3). These reminders . . . help to blunt any challenge that lesbian sex might pose to the preservation and exaltation of heteronormativity. (91) While at one level Chambers is correct in his appraisal of The L Word’s failure to undo the heteronormative matrix, the show does nevertheless engage with and at times trouble this frame of reference. In part, this troubling of heternormativity could be described as a postfeminist lesbian approach to sexuality that

Queer (Post)Feminism 193 reappropriates the symbols of heterosexual femininity for a homosexual identity. By walking the postfeminist tightrope, The L Word replaces the historic media stereotypes of lesbians as ugly, unfashionable bra-­burners, with chic, well-­dressed, sexy West Hollywood women and, in so doing, mobilises the markers of heterosexual femininity for lesbians and bisexuals. Although open to criticism as just ‘lipstick lesbianism’ – which often represents two conventional feminine, young women embracing and seems aimed at a heterosexual male audience and ­gaze – ­glamour, according to Jennifer Vanasco (2006), ‘equals power, and the more perceived power television lesbians have . . . the better chance we have to gain that power’ (183). In this sense, The L Word deploys glamour in a postfeminist turn that celebrates queer chic as a means to empower lesbian and bisexual women. Case Study: Boys Don’t Cry ( 1999 ) The independent film Boys Don’t Cry – starring Hilary Swank as Brandon Teena and Chloë Sevigny as Brandon’s girlfriend, Lana ­Tisdel – ­is based on the real-­life story of a female-­to-­male transsexual who was murdered on 31 December 1993. A week prior to her death, Brandon was kidnapped and raped by John Lotter and Marvin Thomas ­Nissen – t­wo ex-­convicts whom Brandon had ­befriended – ­who were later convicted of the murder. The film portrays the unconditional love between Brandon and Lana and the ultimate threat that Lotter and Nissen feel that Brandon poses to their masculinity. For filmmaker Kimberly Pierce, Boys Don’t Cry was not simply a matter of telling Brandon’s story, but an attempt to recuperate his identity in the face of the lurid glare of the press and media. According to Pierce, press coverage was ‘focused almost exclusively on the spectacle of a girl passing as a boy, without any understanding of why a girl would want to pass’ (qtd in Leigh 2000: 18). ‘Passing’ for many transsexuals involves being accepted as the gender you present yourself as, without ‘being denied a job, laughed at, beaten up, or even killed because one is “weird” ’ (Sullivan 2003: 106). According to Jacob Hale (1998), the crisis in identity that Brandon experienced was the central focus of media reports at the time: ‘a state of crisis over identity, sexual and otherwise, characterizes not only “Brandon’s” brief life but also the media attention devoted to this murdered youth. Much of this crisis finds its focal point in the necessity of being named’ (312). Brandon’s ­name – ­born as Teena Brandon, he later inverted the name to Brandon ­Teena – ­provided the semantic focus for this process of definition as Brandon was ‘named’ as ‘he’, ‘she’ and even ‘it’ by the press and authorities. The attempt to position Brandon within one gender identity category amounted to ‘a refusal to acknowledge that this person was a border zone dweller: someone whose embodied self existed

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in a netherworld constituted by the margins of multiple overlapping identity categories’ (Hale 1998: 318; emphasis in original). Brandon Teena’s story demonstrates the dilemmas surrounding the expression of a ‘trans’ identity within contemporary culture and the strictly policed borders of gender i­dentity – a­ position that has recently achieved mainstream media attention in the case of Olympic athlete Bruce/Caitlyn Jenner whose gender transition has been the focus of the reality television series I Am Cait (2015–). Although Boys Don’t Cry received widespread critical acclaim, with Hilary Swank picking up a Best Actress Academy Award, Brandon’s story reveals how difficult it is to undo/redo bodily identity and ‘rewrite the cultural fiction that divides a sex from a transex, a gender from a transgender’ (Halberstam 1994: 226). Within this context, queer theory can function to destabilise binary distinctions and dissolve divisions. For Judith Halberstam (1998), the existence of the distinct category of the masculine woman ‘urges us to reconsider our most basic assumptions about the functions, forms, and representations of masculinity and forces us to ask why the bond between men and masculinity has remained relatively secure despite the continuous assaults made by feminists, gays, lesbians, and gender-­queers on the naturalness of gender’ (45). In Female Masculinity (1998), Halberstam argues that ‘female masculinity is a specific gender with its own cultural history rather than simply a derivative of male masculinity’ (77). The case of Brandon Teena exemplifies that the bastion of masculinity that has historically been seen as a stronghold of male identity is not unassailable but it becomes available for an alternative construction that undermines static gender norms. As Halberstam suggests, ‘many bodies are gender strange to some degree or another, and it is time to complicate on the one hand the transsexual models . . . and on the other hand the heteronormative models’ (153–4). In this sense, Boys Don’t Cry serves as a challenge to our assumptions about where the distinctions between genders are drawn, queering the relationship between subject and object. Case Study: Lady Gaga On 13 September 2010 Lady Gaga grabbed the headlines at the MTV Video Music Awards, not only for her eight ‘Moon Man’ statuettes for ‘Bad Romance’ and ‘Telephone’, but also for the controversial Franc Fernandez– designed dress, hat and boots she wore, made entirely from cuts of raw meat. Always courting controversy, Lady Gaga, aka Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta, has bent rules of gender and genre, invoking postmodern ideas of the fractured/multiple self and commodifying subcultural or marginal identity for a mainstream pop audience. According to Victor Corona (2013),

Queer (Post)Feminism 195 [Gaga] attempt[s] to explicitly link herself to categories of individual Otherness. By celebrating the ‘monster’, the ‘freak’, or the ‘misfit’ in multiple ­expressions – ­not ‘fitting in’ at school or being ­gay – ­she is able to build a sense of subcultural membership among fans while the catch-­ all liveliness of her music works to sustain mass appeal. (726) Otherness is reconceived by Gaga not as something that is isolated, detached, threatening and/or misunderstood, but rather a common, shared experience that binds and solidifies her fans under the banner of Gaga’s so-­called ‘little monsters’. Here the monster (and Gaga’s much-­promoted misfit or outsider status) is a catalyst for her success: her exploitation of the ‘Other’ in her carnivalesque and theatrical performances attracts a loyal fan base that connects with her expressions of ‘difference’ and ‘queerness’. Simultaneously, it is the product of that success as fans are (represented as) ‘monsters’ themselves. Gaga has celebrated, what Stuart Hall (1997) calls, the ‘spectacle of the Other’ (225) in a range of forms, appropriating well-­known tropes of monstrosity like the vampire as well as her more abject ‘Mother Monster’ persona whose leaking and swollen body, heaving with the force and pain of birthing, is featured in the video for ‘Born This Way’. Other on- and off-­stage acts explicitly draw on performative ideas of gender, with Gaga enacting both male and female drag: while her ‘femme’ identity showcases elaborate wigs and exaggerated make-­up – s­uch as her 2010 Grammy Awards outfit that parodies ‘Barbie’ femininity with a glittery pink dress and fake yellow ­hair – ­her male alter ego Jo Calderone made his first public appearance in the September 2010 issue of Vogue Hommes Japan for which Gaga was both interviewed and photographed in this persona. Also featured in her video for the single ‘Yoü and I’, Calderone’s image is a compilation of stereotypical masculinity, being presented as a mechanic and criticising femme Gaga for her over-­the-­top femininity. As Gaga herself puts it in an interview, ‘reading Jo in any kind of way is a fair reading. The performance of Jo is meant to manipulate the visualization of gender in as many ways as I possibly could’ (qtd in Michelson 2011). Through her femme and drag king performances, Gaga exposes the theatricality and constructedness of gender, highlighting that there is no inner gender core (see Butler 1990a). The rapid turnover of her fashion styles and her multiple alter egos also mirror the instability that surrounds the illusion of a unified or fixed subject. In this sense, the construct that is ‘Gaga’ is inherently postmodern, embracing a perpetual state of ‘becoming’. Here, postmodernism becomes a fashion accessory quite literally as Gaga ‘tinker[s] with the aesthetic power of the core symbols of American culture’, such as her bricolage ‘Kermit the frog’ dress and her pastiche performances of both Madonna and David Bowie (Corona 2013: 731).

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Some critics have been entirely sceptical of Gaga’s performance of ­performativity – for Camille Paglia (2012), Gaga is nothing more but a ‘ruthless recycler of other people’s work . . . the diva of déjà-­vu’. Commentators have highlighted that there might be a potential conflict between Germanotta’s upbringing on the Upper West Side of New York and the conception of Lady Gaga as a gender-­bending, queer artist who speaks to ‘freaks’. Gaga’s much publicised Otherness seemingly runs contrary to Germanotta’s privileged background and her attendance at the exclusive Convent of the Sacred Heart on East 91st Street, an institution that has educated a number of America’s political and cultural elite, including Caroline Kennedy and Gloria Vanderbilt. Critics have focused on questions of ‘authenticity’, meaning and depth(lessness) of Gaga’s postmodern ­performances – ­as a Newsweek music journalist remarks, the ‘problem with Gaga is that she refuses to add any concrete value, while also wanting us to think she has something to say’ (Colter Walls 2011). This line of argument follows a well-­established critique of postmodernism as the ‘effacement . . . of the . . . frontier between high culture and mass or commercial culture’ in which ‘depth is replaced by surface, or by multiple surfaces’ (Jameson 1993: 63, 70). Gaga clearly exploits the currency of queer marginality, combining subcultural edge with commercial appeal, avant-­garde presentation with lyrical blandness. As Benjamin Brabon (2012) succinctly writes, here ‘the marginal becomes central and the centre is made to appear marginal’ (21). In this sense, Gaga’s stance of cultivated nonconformity could be interpreted as part of a ‘coolcapitalist’ brand strategy that incorporates signs of rebellion and disaffection and turns them into a profitable commodity (see McGuigan 2009). Alternatively, Gaga’s performative self-­work has also been read as entirely ‘authentic’, constantly crafting and ‘doing’ Gaga to such an extent that the fissure between persona and person closes up. As Brabazon and Redhead (2013) note, ‘this simulacrum is not fake or an illusion. It is the new real. Gaga confirmed her authentic, simulacrum realness: “This is truly who I am. Gaga is not a character. There’s the fashion, the music, the films, and the videos. Everything that you see is an extension of me. It is not a character that I play on television.” ’ Similarly, Gaga’s gendered performances have also been the subject of deliberation and dispute, in particular in relation to her public displays of sexuality and provocative styles of dress and dance. As Fogel and Quinlan (2011) note, ‘while arguments have been made that Lady Gaga could be seen as a gendered warrior allied with ongoing feminist struggles, it could also be argued that she represents the continued objectification and dehumanization of women’ (187). This clearly connects with familiar postfeminist debates around female/feminine agency and individualised ­empowerment – ­indeed, Gaga is quick to assert her status as a strong independent woman in what

Queer (Post)Feminism 197 could be characterised as a typical mantra of ‘Girl Power’: ‘I don’t need a man. I might sometimes want a man, but I don’t need one. I earn my money, I create art, I know where I am going’ (qtd in Phoenix 2010: 213). She invokes her financial independence and creative ­power – k­ ey markers of a neoliberal ‘enterprising’ ­subject – ­to define herself as a sovereign woman who does not require a man to delineate the parameters of her existence. This type of empowerment is clearly individualised and ties into the commodity form the subject takes within neoliberal capitalism that links self-­actualisation to contemporary modes of self-­branding and celebrity: ‘You have the ability to self-­ proclaim your own fame’, Gaga tell us, ‘[y]ou have the ability to experience and feel a certain amount of self-­worth that comes from a very vain place, by your choices [. . .] you can literally choose to have fame’ (qtd in Phoenix 2010: 52). The veneer of Gaga’s ‘empowering’ words is dangerously thin as it hangs upon the assumption that choice in itself will deliver the desired change through a volitional performance that will provide the self with value/capital in a world that celebrates the fleeting nature of celebrity and fame. Ultimately, Gaga’s greatest sales device might reside in the ‘undecidability’ that surrounds the ‘authentic’ and commodity self within brand culture (see Banet-­Weiser 2012; Harris 1999) – as she sings in one of her songs, you ‘can’t read my poker face’ (‘Poker Face’). Recommended Further Reading Berlant, Lauren, and Michael Warner. ‘What Does Queer Theory Teach Us about X?’ PMLA 110.3 (1995): 343–9. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, London and New York: Routledge, 1990. Chambers, Samuel A. ‘Heteronormativity and The L Word: From a Politics of Representation to a Politics of Norms’. Reading The L Word: Outing Contemporary Television. Ed. Kim Akass and Janet McCabe. London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2006. 81–98. Halberstam, Judith. Female Masculinity. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 1998.

9 Men and Postfeminism

Overview In this chapter, we examine the relationship between men and (post)feminism, discussing the emergence of the men’s movement as a result of women’s social enfranchisement and the cultural influence of feminist ideas and policies. The questioning of the term ‘Woman’ by feminism and the interest in gender relations produce a variety of responses by men who endeavour to redefine masculinity and understand their place within/alongside feminism. Initially, we chart what has been described as an ongoing crisis in masculinity which reached its pinnacle in the popular press in the United States and UK in 2000 (Beynon 2002). Considering the transforming political, social, economic and cultural landscape between the late 1960s and the present day, we identify important developments within these areas that have impacted upon our understanding and representation of masculinity and male i­dentity – s­uch as the economic shift from Fordism to Post-­Fordism; broadening inequalities within recessionary neoliberal capitalism; 9/11 and a global threat of terrorism as well as the ‘man-­cession’ engendered by the 2008 global financial crisis. In so doing, we pick up on recent developments within masculinity studies that have analysed men as a politically gendered category (bounded by specific masculine cultural forms) that can no longer be ascribed a normative location as transparent, neutral and disembodied. From here, we focus in detail on three versions of masculinity that have evolved since the 1­ 980s – t­he ‘new man’, the ‘metrosexual’ and the ‘new lad’ – in order to advance and define a fourth, new category of masculinity for the twenty-­first ­century – t­he ‘postfeminist man’, a compound and conflicted subject position that has developed

Men and Postfeminism 199 out of a series of competing social and economic hybrid scripts. Through the use of topical case studies on representative cultural icons (such as David Beckham as the epitome of the ‘metrosexual’), fiction and film (Fight Club [1996; 1999]; Failure to Launch [2006]), we show men’s responses to the shifting terrain of masculinity over the past twenty-­five years. Masculinity in Crisis Crisis is . . . a condition of masculinity itself. Masculine gender identity is never stable; its terms are continually being re-­defined and re-­ negotiated, the gender performance continually re-­ staged. Certain themes and tropes inevitably re-­appear with regularity, but each era experiences itself in different ways. (Mangan 1997: 4) Crisis, as Michael Mangan highlights, is not a new condition of masculinity, nor, it is argued by some critics, is it confined to the last decades of the twentieth and early twenty-­first century (Kimmel 1987; Ferrebe 2000; Beynon 2002). In fact, Kimmel argues that the last two hundred years have witnessed male concerns and anxieties over the intrusion of the ‘feminine’ into ‘masculine’ spheres of influence. Often these crises in masculinity are aligned by critics with w ­ ar – ­for example, Ferrebe identifies a crisis in masculinity in Britain post-­Second World War, as thousands of soldiers returned to civilian life. The country that these soldiers returned to had been transformed by the need to function without them. Their heroic displays of masculinity upon the battlefields of Europe and beyond were now seemingly redundant within the new social structures and economies of post-­war Britain. The traditional spheres of influence (women/home, men/workplace) had been redefined by the exodus of women from the home to the factory in support of the war effort. In fact, as Ferrebe argues, ‘the older generation felt itself to be disinherited from the public sphere, just as the country they had remembered seemed increasingly diminished in importance’ (11). It could be argued that this post-­war condition of masculinity provides us with a paradigm for understanding the complex relationship between masculinity and conflict in ­general – ­as redundancy often leads to backlash from within the newly conceived structures of economic, social and political power. More recently, for example, the transformative effects of conflict are seen in British and American fiction, film and television series post-­9/11. Jarhead (2003; 2006), Outlaw (2006), House M.D. (2005–) and Grey’s Anatomy (2006–) provide us with versions of masculinity that are coming to terms with being displaced and/or wounded (more often than not literally). This results in the ‘postfeminist man’ who frequently relies upon a prosthetic appendage to his

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­ asculinity (for example, House’s walking stick) in order to disguise the fact m that he is no longer whole and hegemonic. In these examples, phallic aggression and hegemonic masculinity become misdirected and undermined as new blended characteristics of masculinity (‘old man’, ‘new man’, ‘new lad’ and ‘metrosexual’) congeal from these failed or defunct masculinities into postfeminist subject positions. The notion of ‘failing’ masculinity has also been at the forefront of investigations into the gendered effects of the 2008 recession. As Heather Tirado Gilligan (2011) points out, ‘end-­of-­men crises’ tend to be ‘most acute whenever there is an economic slowdown, often resulting in a backlash against women in the workforce’. Critics were quick to infer that the financial crisis had impacted on men and women in different ways, with women seemingly able to cope and weather the bursting of ‘bubble culture’ with resilience and flexibility whereas m ­ en – ­in particular, working-­class m ­ en – ­were seen to be disenfranchised culturally as well as economically (Negra and Tasker 2014). These fears were vocalised most prominently in Hannah Rosin’s (2010) Atlantic magazine article ‘The End of Men’, which developed into her 2012 book, The End of Men and the Rise of Women. According to Rosin, ‘our vast and struggling middle class, where the disparities between men and women are the greatest, is slowly turning into a matriarchy, with men increasingly absent from the workforce and from home, and women making all the decisions’ (3). Rosin’s account has been criticised for a series of inaccuracies, most importantly the fact that post-­2008 recovery strategies and austerity ­measures – ­slashed benefits, job cuts and reduction in public s­pending – h ­ ave actually rendered women more vulnerable than men to the effects of the recession (see Christensen 2014; McKay et al. 2013). Yet, Rosin’s compelling slogan encapsulates broader cultural anxieties around male obsolescence and emasculation and was soon taken up by the wider media that promoted the idea of a ‘man-­cession’ or ‘he-­cession’. In line with previous descriptions of male crisis, the twenty-­first-­century economic downturn was represented in terms of a ‘feminization’ – as Drucilla Barker and Susan Feiner note, the recessionary era may well entail a conversion of all labour to ‘the conditions of female labor . . . where the global economy promises jobs that are more insecure, more flexible, and even more poorly paid’ (qtd in Thoma 2014: 125). Moreover, the narrative of failing men and resilient women also allowed for a reassertion of patriarchal gender hierarchies and capitalist social relations, albeit in a more ‘responsible’ guise in keeping with austerity politics. As Suzanne Leonard (2014) argues, the recession offered ‘a convenient opportunity to recirculate and revalidate misogynist tropes’ that ‘encourage hostility between the sexes’ and create ‘the mythology that in a new economic order, motivation and opportunity are both unequally apportioned in favour

Men and Postfeminism 201 of women’ (36, 54). While the financial crisis was seen to threaten men in general, the discourses surrounding the downturn set up different types of recessionary masculinities that range from melodramatic constructions of the unemployed white-­collar male worker (exemplified by The Company Men [2010]), comedic portrayals of self-­deprecating slackers who embrace a life of delayed adolescence (e.g. Knocked Up [2007]; You, Me and Dupree [2006]) to the widely reviled image of the ‘greedy banker’ showcased in The Big Short (2015), Too Big to Fail (2011) and Inside Job (2010). While Michael Douglas famously held up robber-­baron power in the 1980s corporate drama Wall Street (1987) – captured by the now classic axiom ‘greed is good’ – the bare materialistic and exploitative nature of capitalism now needed to be masked as a character flaw of a few avaricious ‘masters of capital’ who could be replaced by the aspirational yet socially responsible entrepreneur who emerges in a recessionary climate (e.g. Chef [2014]; Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps [2010]). Another way of approaching the relationship between masculinity and crisis is through the distinct shift in the ‘politics of looking’ that came about in the 1980s. As various commentators have suggested, the expanding commercialisation of masculinity in the 1950s, 60s and 70s, culminated in the ‘male on male’ gaze of the 1980s. Whereas previously the female body had been the exclusive site of sexualised and voyeuristic representations by the media, the 1980s witnessed ‘the commercial exploitation of men-­ as-­ sex-­ object’ (Beynon 2002: 103). This version of commercial masculinity transformed the male body into an ‘objectified commodity’ that saw the rise of retail clothing outlets for men, new visual representations of masculinity on television and in the media, and the growth of men’s lifestyle magazines. The results of this commercialisation of masculinity were witnessed at all levels of society. For instance, according to John Robb (1999), ‘[t]he football fan of the early Eighties was no longer a rattle-­waving, scarf-­wearing wally or a toothless skinhead grunt, but a mass of label-­wearing, style-­coded casual wear freaks’ (29). Yet it would be incorrect to assume that no man was left behind by these changes as the economic pressures exerted on masculinity to transform during this period excluded tens of thousands of working-­class men. In fact, the accompanying shift from the mass production of Fordism to the niche production of Post-­Fordism further sidelined the ‘old industrial man’, as downsizing and outsourcing led to unstable work patterns for the working classes. Many men were not able to adjust to the new shape of masculinity and ‘were experiencing their work changes, this so-­called feminization of labour . . . like a smack in the eye’ (Coward 1999: 51). Commercial masculinity demanded wealth and good looks if men were to engage fully with the ‘new man’ of the 1980s. As Tim Edwards (1997) argues, these developments in the 1980s set the course for masculinity as

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wealthy, good-­looking and well-­located young men [were] increasingly socially valorised over older, uglier or poorer men . . . Those with the looks, the income and the time on their side have never had it so good in terms of the opportunities which the expansion of men’s style and fashion have to offer them. . . . But those without the luck, the looks or the time have never had it so bad. (133–4) Within this context, masculinity is clearly bound by social, cultural and economic practices. The male body (particularly the young, ‘good-­looking’ male body) is reinscribed as the site of opportunity and power, not because of physical prowess and economic value linked to labour, but as a signifying surface for commercialised masculinity. Contemporary Masculinities Over the past thirty years or so, we have been bombarded by the popular media and academics alike with numerous varieties of male identity which have been aligned with different versions of masculinity. From the ‘soft lad’ to the ‘new boy’; the ‘modern romantic’ to the ‘new father’; the ‘new man’ to the ‘new lad’, via the ‘metrosexual’; male identity and masculinity have become unstable, readily contestable, increasingly transferable, open to (re) appropriation and constantly in motion (see Chapman 1988; Mort 1996; Edwards 2006; Simpson 2003). Masculinity or the more commonly discussed ‘hegemonic masculinity’ – which, as Raewyn Connell notes in her seminal text Masculinities (1995), ‘refers to the cultural dynamic by which a group claims and sustains a leading position in social life’ – has become a ‘historically mobile relation’ and is ‘no longer a position from which to judge others but a puzzling condition in its own right’ (Connell 1995: 77; Coward 1999: 94). Some critics argue that men are becoming redundant in a biological, social and economic way as the historic roles of ‘heroic masculinity’, ‘old industrial man’ or simply ‘old man’ have been phased out by ongoing technological, social and political change since the late 1960s. In fact, ‘women are asserting that they can conceive and rear children on their own. They don’t need men to father their children . . . women can do without them in the workplace’ (Clare 2000: 100). This rhetoric of redundancy encouraged men in some quarters to counter this perceived threat to their masculinity and position of power upon their patriarchal pedestals. Fearful that their response to the transforming gender roles of the 1970s and 80s which saw them adopt the guise of the ‘new man’ – pro-­feminist, nurturing and sexually ­ambivalent – ­had made them go ‘soft’, men’s concerns and interests soon conglomerated into a recognisable men’s movement. Loosely divided between pro-­feminist

Men and Postfeminism 203 and masculinist g­ roups – s­uch as Victor Seidler’s contributions in the UK to the magazine Spare Rib (supporting the women’s movement), the Canadian White Ribbon Campaign (working against male violence directed at women) and Robert Bly’s ‘Iron John’ movement (reawakening the ‘deep masculine’) – men reacted in a variety of ways to the questions posed and advances gained by second-­wave feminism. At the most notorious end of this spectrum of responses, Bly’s much-­ debated search for an authentic ‘masculine self’ in his text Iron John (1990) could be described as the legacy of the rapidly dissolving and vilified ‘old man’ as portrayed by, for example, Sylvester Stallone in the Rambo series of films. Described by Rowena Chapman as ‘bare-­chested and alone, wading through the Vietcong swamp with not even a tube of insect repellent for comfort’, these men were represented as seemly in touch with their ­masculinity – ­in this case, a throwback to an aggressive, phallic masculinity (227). As the tide of the popular imagination ebbed away from the macho body of these angry men towards the protective father figure in the early 1990s (Gauntlett 2007), Bly’s intervention called upon men to reclaim their true manhood. According to Bly, it was conceived not as a counterattack on the women’s movement but, instead, an attempt to get men back in touch with their ‘deep masculine’ selves. Seen by feminist critics as part of an anti-­feminist backlash, Bly’s ‘New Age masculinist community’ claimed the hearts, heads and dollars of many mainstream Americans (Faludi 1992; Brabon 2007). Beyond the backlash sentiments of Bly’s Iron John movement, it demonstrated the contested location of masculinity in the United States and UK in the late 1980s and 1990s as the pro-­feminist ‘new man’ was evolving into the retro-­sexism of the ‘new lad’. As we will explore later in this chapter, this transition was not smooth or seamless and it would be wrong to assume that the characteristics that defined the ‘new man’ simply evaporated in the 1990s. Although it can be argued that the 1980s was the decade of the ‘new man’ and the 1990s that of the ‘new lad’, what is significant in the 1990s is that we begin to see a process of seepage between the categories or types of men as they try to come to terms with the shifting social and economic environment and grapple with conflicting varieties of masculinity (Gill 2003b). In what could be described as an opening up of postfeminist possibilities and subject positions, we witness the uneasy and problematic ‘subjectivation’ – ‘both the becoming of a subject and the process of subjection’ (Judith Butler 1993c: 83) – of men as simultaneously and seemingly irreconcilably pro- and anti-­feminist in their (re)turn to ‘masculine’ pursuits. Contrary to Tim Edwards’s (1997) assertion that ‘the reconstruction of masculinity . . . demonstrate[s] very few signs of post-­feminist consciousness’ (51), we contend that the concept of p­ ostfeminism – ­in its various ‘boom’ and ‘bust’; pro-­feminist and backlash ­articulations – h ­ as much to offer for

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i­nvestigations into the changing dimensions and formulations of contemporary masculinities that coexist, overlap, revise and replace one another. Masculinity in the late twentieth and twenty-­first centuries has assumed a variety of shapes, forms and subject positions. Many of these new manifestations have been derived in part from the commercialisation of masculinity witnessed from the 1980s to the present day, as new masculinities have become part of selling lifestyle choices to men across the social spectrum. In fact, these new men are a ‘crystallisation of ­consequences – ­economic, marketing, political ideology, demography and, most widely, consumer society in the 1980s’ (Edwards 1997: 39–40). The product of this ‘crystallisation of consequences’ for men in the twenty-­first century is what Mort (1996) describes (within the context of the 1980s ‘new man’) as a ‘hybrid character’ (15). This amalgamated nature of contemporary masculinity has developed out of a series ­of – ­at times competing – ‘hybrid scripts’ that have become enmeshed to form conflicting and conflicted subject positions. As we will go on to discuss, the most recent manifestation of this hybridity is the ‘postfeminist man’ – the epitome of ‘bricolage masculinity’ that has developed as we ‘ “channel hop” across versions of the “masculine” ’ (Beynon 2002: 6). However, before analysing the ‘postfeminist man’, it is important to have a sense of three preceding versions of m ­ asculinity – t­he ‘new man’, the metrosexual’ and the ‘new lad’ – whose characteristics compete and congeal into the ‘hybrid’ form of the ‘postfeminist man’. New Man The ‘new man’ has been described conflictingly as pro-­feminist, narcissistic, anti-­sexist, self-­absorbed and sexually ambivalent. He is often seen within the context of a response to feminism, as ‘a potent symbol for men and women searching for new images and visions of masculinity in the wake of feminism and the men’s movement’ (Chapman 1988: 226). Originating in the early 1970s, the ‘new man’ was conceived as a ‘nurturing’ figure seemingly in tune with the demands of feminism and women in general. In this 1970s version, he is ‘attempting to put his “caring and sharing” beliefs into practice in his daily life’ (Beynon 2002: 164). Contrastingly, in the 1980s the ‘new man’ developed a more hedonistic and narcissistic edge, embracing consumer culture as advertising executives transformed the male body into a lifestyle billboard that was no longer just selling products but also a way of life. This potentially more sinister version has been attacked as ‘nothing less than the advertising industry’s dramatization of its own self-­image and driven primarily by commercial greed’ (Beynon 2002: 115). Here the ‘new man’ is criticised for being exclusively Western, white, middle-­class and ­elitist – ­a distant and

Men and Postfeminism 205 alien representation of masculinity, decidedly ‘other’ from the day-­to-­day lives of the majority of ‘real’ men. These changing meanings and characteristics of the image of the ‘new man’ from the 1970s to 1980s are witnessed in the evolving critical descriptions of the ‘newness’ of the ‘new man’. For example, in Male Order: Unwrapping Masculinity (1988), Chapman acknowledges that, while the ‘new man’ can be recognised as a response to feminism, the category is ambiguous, at times negative and ultimately (in its most positive manifestations) an impossibility: The ‘new man’ is many ­things – ­a humanist ideal, a triumph of style over content, a legitimation of consumption, a ruse to persuade those that called for change that it has already occurred . . . [W]hile the ‘new man’ may well have provided some useful role models for those redefining their masculinity . . . [he] is an ideal that even the most liberated man would never lay claim to. (226, 228, 247) Within this context, there is very little ‘new’ about the ‘new man’. In this formulation, he is the misleading and unobtainable by-­product of a consumer society obsessed with new lifestyle choices. While the now-­infamous 1980s images of men holding ­babies – s­upposedly displaying their sensitive ­side – ­marked a shift in the range of subject positions available to men, it would be incorrect to assume that the ‘new man’ signalled a clear break from older versions of masculinity and patriarchy. A more fruitful understanding of the ‘new man’ is provided by positioning him as a response to the transformative influences of postmodernity on the male subject. As Mort (1996) highlights, multiple subject positions lead to multiple (and conflicting) masculinities: I am not arguing that the 1980s ‘new man’ is totally new. But nor am I saying that nothing has changed . . . For we are not just talking images here: images are underscored by the economics and cultures of consumption . . . The 1980s [saw] an intensification of that process and proliferation of ­individualities – ­of the number of ‘you’s’ on offer. (207, 208) This plurality of identity provided a ‘new’ framework in which male identities and masculinities were reconceived. A variety of new subject positions were available to men as the category of ‘man’ and (hegemonic) ‘masculinity’ g­ rew – i­n the process redefining the location of those ‘bodies that matter’ (see Judith Butler 1993a). Thus, the ‘new man’ was not ‘new’, rather he was a reinvention or rebranding of m ­ asculinity – e­ xpanding the boundaries of hegemonic m ­ asculinity – t­hat spread out of the shift in the politics of looking and the pressures of consumer culture in the 1980s. At his worst, the ‘new man’ was ‘a patriarchal mutation, a redefinition of masculinity in men’s

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favour, a reinforcement of the gender order, representing an expansion of the concept of legitimate masculinity and thus an extension of its power over women and deviant men’ (Chapman 1988: 247). As such, the ‘new man’ paved the way for the ongoing commercialisation of masculinity that continued unabated into the 1990s, reaching its apotheosis in 1994 with the arrival of the ‘metrosexual’. Metrosexual The term ‘metrosexual’ was coined in 1994 by Mark Simpson to describe ‘a young man with money to spend, living in or within easy reach of the metropolis . . . He might be officially gay, straight or bisexual, but this is utterly immaterial because he has clearly taken himself as his own love object and pleasure as his sexual preference’ (qtd in Simpson 2003: 1). Epitomised by David Beckham, the ‘metrosexual’ extends the narcissistic and self-­absorbed characteristics of the ‘new man’, revelling in the consumerist heaven that is the modern-­day metropolis. Sexually ambivalent, the ‘metrosexual’ embraces gay culture but only as a product of late capitalism. The ‘metrosexual’ puts his body on display, parading what Simpson (1994) describes as the ‘essence of masculinity: the desired male body’ and adopting techniques that have ‘long been understood by advertisers in the gay press who have often employed photos of headless idealized male bodies’ (107). Here, the boundaries between the ‘metrosexual’ and the ‘new man’ become b­ lurred – ­as do those between homosexual and heterosexual ­masculinities – ­as narcissism and the commoditisation of masculinity become the organising features of both forms. In fact, ‘in discussing metrosexuality we are on remarkably similar territory to the New Man and . . . indeed the New Lad’ (Edwards 2006: 43). These similarities mark a growing trend in the shifting shape of masculinity throughout the twentieth century (and beyond) to adopt increasingly ‘hybrid’ and enmeshed subject positions. The ‘metrosexual’ sits uneasily in the middle of a sliding s­cale – ­as an excessive display of stylised heterosexual masculinity that is ultimately camp in its ­excess – ­that has the ‘new man’ and the ‘new lad’ on either side. More groomed than the ‘new man’ and not as sexist (or ironic) as the ‘new lad’, the ‘metrosexual’ is ‘less certain of his identity and much more interested in his image . . . because that’s the only way . . . you can be certain to exist’ (Simpson 2003: 2). The metrosexual’s projection of a seemingly assured male identity (as a caring narcissist and/or a family man who is brand-­conscious) masks a more general (and expanding) instability at the heart of contemporary m ­ asculinity – o ­ ne that has come to be embodied in the twenty-­first century by the ‘postfeminist man’. Over the last ten years or so, there have been a number of calls to mark the passing of the ‘metrosexual’. For example, Marian Salzman has argued that

Men and Postfeminism 207 he has been superseded by the ‘übersexual’ male ‘who mixes old-­fashioned honour with good conversation’ (qtd in Hoggard 2005: 1). The ‘übersexual’ is, according to Salzman, less narcissistic than the ‘metrosexual’ – ‘He thinks positively of women but he doesn’t go out of his way to seek their acceptance and approval. Because he’s not bitter or boxed in, he can cope with living in a world increasingly dominated by femininity’ (qtd in Hoggard 2005: 1). Although Salzman is perhaps overstating the importance of femininity within contemporary ­culture – e­specially outside of Western Europe and North ­America – ­it becomes apparent that ‘new’ masculinities are increasingly bound up in men’s lifestyle choices that find their expression within the neoliberal political and economic arenas of the West. At the same time, Salzman’s ‘übersexual’ male seems to resurrect ‘backlash’ scripts that are regressive and exclusive. The appeal and impact of ‘metrosexual’ figures like David Beckham may be trans-­social and trans-­global, but the associated lifestyle choices are limited and limiting, and often only accessible to a small number of affluent individuals who can buy into an identity whose foundations are commoditised masculinity. The ‘metrosexual’ of the mid-­1990s illustrates the precariousness of masculinity in the twentieth century, as ‘new’ and ‘old’, homosexual and heterosexual masculinities compound and evolve in increasingly ‘hybrid’ forms. In this way, the ‘metrosexual’ – who begins to make over ‘masculinity from a postfeminist perspective’ (Cohan 2007: 182) – moves masculinity one step closer to the ‘postfeminist man’. Case Study: David Beckham According to Mark Simpson (2003), David Beckham is the ‘ultimate manifestation’ of the metrosexual man (1). Aware of the marketability of his metrosexual identity and fully embracing commoditised masculinity, Beckham provides an excellent example of the ‘hybrid’ nature of masculinity in the twenty-­first century (Cashmore 2006). Yet ‘Beckham is not so much a new form of masculinity as a brand selling everything from Dolce & Gabbana to Gillette shaving products’ (Edwards 2006: 43). As Beckham’s official website makes clear, he has multiple i­dentities – f­ ootballer, style icon, ambassador, a­ ctor – t­ hat coalesce to form ‘David Beckham’ the self-­brand and, at the same time, open up numerous identity pathways and subject positions that have traditionally seemed incompatible. Beckham’s attraction is in part delineated by the ability of his identity to cross b­ oundaries – s­ocial, racial, economic, sexual, national. As Ellis Cashmore (2006) observes, ‘Beckham captivates a global audience that includes young females who have no obvious interest in sport, gay men for whom Beckham has acquired almost fetishist properties . . . working-­class kids who proclaim their nationalism through their champion’ (6).

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At once the epitome of heterosexual masculinity and a gay ­icon – ­not least because he is married to the former pop star and now fashion designer Victoria (or Posh Spice) – Beckham’s broad appeal is defined by the numerous identities that can be projected on to his body. After all, ‘[w]e, his public . . . make Beckham Beckham’ (Cashmore 2006: 3). In fact, as Cashmore suggests, we are all implicated in the construction of the brand narrative that is David Beckham. As a metrosexual man, his identity is malleable, transferable and, at times, uncertain. However, in contrast to the malleability of his identity, his image is instantly recognisable to millions of people across the globe and as such it is fixed. He can be an inspirational figure for the working-­class British man; reflect a way of life that connects with successful black American hip-­ hop artists; and at the same time seemingly undermine these strong assertions of traditional heterosexual masculinity through his use of nail varnish, sarongs and plucked eyebrows. Although Beckham has been heralded as a style guru for the homosexual man, the metrosexual ‘is of course not necessarily homosexual at all but rather homosocial, centred on men looking at other men, competing with other men’ (Edwards 2006: 43). As a representative example of the commoditisation of masculinity, Beckham’s ­image – ­and the products he ­endorses – ­presents new lifestyle choices, showing men what they can be. The metrosexual’s fluid identity and c­ ontradictory – ­even ­conflicting – ­associations find their zenith in popular and marketable representations of David Beckham. H ­ ere – i­n its most positive ­manifestations – ­metrosexual masculinity is broad and inclusive, defying ideological and sexual roles, and, as such, it provides the foundations for the postfeminist man. New Lad New Man and New Lad, apparently antagonistic phenomena, were in fact intimately r­elated – b­ oth were the offspring of glossy magazine culture. Both were also about a kind of commodified masculine self-­ consciousness that stemmed from insecurity and r­ootlessness – t­hough, ironically, New Lad was much more successful in selling men fashion and vanity products than New Man. (Simpson 2003: 3) The relationship between the ‘new man’ and the ‘new lad’ identified by Mark Simpson hides the ‘backlash’ scenarios underpinning the development of the ‘new lad’. If the ‘new man’ was a product of the 1980s, then the ‘new lad’ is most definitely a product of the 1990s and should be recognised as a reaction against both the ‘new man’ and (to a lesser degree) the ‘metrosexual’. Arriving in 1994 with the launch of Loaded magazine, the ‘new lad’ embraced ‘laddish’ ­behaviour – ­revelling in naked images of ‘girls’, games, ‘footie’ and booze. In

Men and Postfeminism 209 fact, according to Beynon (2002), the ‘ “new lad” is defensive about fashion, ambivalent in his attitude towards women (he has pornographic notions of them rather than relationships with them) and he believes life should be one huge alcohol and drug-­induced party’ (118). Whereas the ‘new man’ was pro-­feminist, the ‘new lad’ is pre-­feminist, displaying retro-­sexism in what can be described as ‘a nostalgic revival of old patriarchy; a direct challenge to feminism’s call for social transformation, by r­eaffirming – a­lbeit ­ironically – ­the unchanging nature of gender relations and sexual roles’ (Whelehan 2000: 5). Yet while revisiting the domain of the ‘old man’, the ‘new lad’ is eager to throw off the constraints of traditional, patriarchal representations of masculinity. According to Gill (2003b), ‘the “new lad” offers a refuge from the constraints and demands of marriage and nuclear family. He opened up a space of fun, consumption and sexual freedom for men, unfettered by traditional adult male responsibilities’ (27). In this sense, the new lad’s appeal was broader than that of the ‘new man’ as it spoke directly to working-­class masculinities that were excluded by the ‘upmarket’ and commoditised representation of the ‘new man’. As Edwards (2006) notes, ‘the New Lad has succeeded so well where previous invocations of consumerist masculinity failed precisely because it reconciled, at least artificially, the tension between the playboy and the narcissist or, to put it more simply, it reconstructed personal consumption and grooming as acceptable parts of working-­class masculinities’ (42). Recent statistics illustrate these marketing successes, with male grooming business experiencing a worldwide ­boom – ­Mrporter.com, for example, a high-­end menswear retailer, reporting a 300 per cent growth in men’s beauty and grooming products in 2015 (see Fury 2016). Although the roots of the ‘new lad’ may be bound up with those of the ‘new man’, the new lad’s characteristics are more closely aligned with those of the ‘old man’ – the main distinction being the embrace of postmodern irony to justify sexist behaviour (see Chapter 6). In particular, ‘new lad’ discourse mobilises irony as a defence mechanism against accusations of sexism and misogyny. According to Gill (2007), it is important to recognise that ‘[n]ew stereotypes have not necessarily displaced older ones but may coexist alongside these, or perhaps merely influence their style’ and that ‘[s]exy  “babes” are still selling cars’ (111, 112). In this way, the ‘new lad’ wants it both ways, jettisoning the responsibilities of patriarchy while maintaining its privileges. Towards the Postfeminist Man The new millennium has given rise to another transformation of masculinity that questions a number of social, cultural and economic expectations and

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norms that link the successful construction and performance of gender with the interlocking systems of capitalism and patriarchy. Emerging out of a series of competing social and economic hybrid scripts, the ‘postfeminist man’ tries to reconcile the tensions between heterosexual romance and homosocial bonding, alongside bacheloresque bravado and a failure to accumulate capital that has become more pressing in a post-­2008 recessionary climate. The postfeminist man is increasingly unable to fulfil his patriarchal duties due to the incapacitating social and economic topography of late capitalism and recessionary neoliberalism, inhabiting a world where job security across the social spectrum is uncertain and first-­time buyers find it impossible to step on to the property ladder and thereby relinquishing the male breadwinner position of power and independence. Here, we need to take into account the general affective state of precarity and insecurity in the early twenty-­first century in which economic survival is no longer guaranteed by a neoliberal, meritocratic mantra, terrorist acts have become shockingly commonplace and sexism has remerged in a non-­ironic, seemingly liberal guise. In this context, the cultural history of the postfeminist man marks a different trajectory and hinges upon a loss of economic and social power and a threat to homeland safety, where the questioning of hegemonic structures of ­authority – ­and men ­specifically – ­fosters new uncertainties that are represented as destructive/deconstructive. Developing out of the accumulative and enduring hybridisation of masculinity through ‘new man’, ‘metrosexual’ and, principally, the ‘new lad’, the postfeminist man is not a feature of re-­masculinisation of contemporary Anglo-­American ­culture – ­a forthright repudiation of second-­wave feminism that can effortlessly be recognised as part of the ­backlash – b­ ut, instead, an uneven and diffident subject position that is doubly coded. On the one hand, the postfeminist man accommodates backlash (see Chapter 2) ­scripts – ­drawing upon characteristics of the ‘new lad’ – while, on the other hand, he is more self-­aware, displaying anxiety and concern for his identity. He is as brand and style conscious as the metrosexual, while simultaneously navigating the legacy of his roots in the ‘deep masculine’. Moreover, he is evidently rancorous about the ‘wounded’ status of his masculinity that has not only been altered by second-­wave feminism, but also by his changing economic status in the new global economy. In effect, the postfeminist man is distinguished by his awkward rapport with hegemonic ­masculinity – t­hat exists in a latent, at times nostalgic, but always unattainable f­orm – a­ s he attempts to navigate the danger he presents to himself and the social and economic system he simultaneously sustains and is alienated by. In many ways, the postfeminist man could be described as the ‘new lad’ grown up or a less sensitive ‘new man’, displaying a compound identity that reveals that multiple masculinities may coexist in new hybrid forms. In short, the postfeminist man is defined by his problematic

Men and Postfeminism 211 relationship with the ghost of hegemonic masculinity as he tries to reconcile the threat he poses to himself and the social systems he tries to uphold. Case Study: Fight Club ( 1996; 1999 ) David Fincher’s 1999 film Fight Club – based on Chuck Palahniuk’s 1996 novel of the same ­name – ­provides a critique of masculinity and male subjectivity in the late twentieth century. Following the life of the nameless insomniac narrator – referred to in the script as ‘Jack’ (Edward Norton) – and his alter Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt), the film recounts the creation of ‘fight club’ – an underground male sparring club. As the bond between men develops through the act of unarmed combat, ‘fight club’ evolves into an anti-­ capitalist group that goes by the name ‘Project Mayhem’. Fight Club shows how, through the physical act of fighting and the collective action of ‘Project Mayhem’, men try to make connections with one other and give meaning to their lives in a seemingly empty postmodern world where only physical pain can confer a sense of purpose and identity. At the heart of this urban Gothic tale is the fear that men’s lives have become nothing more than ‘by-­products of a lifestyle obsession’. In effect, Fight Club negotiates the dilemmas facing the ‘postfeminist man’: Tyler ­Durden – J­ack’s violent other – d­ efines this trauma of contemporary masculinity in almost Baudrillardian terms, noting that ­‘everything’s a copy of a copy of a copy’. While Fight Club can be read as a backlash text – ‘what you see at fight club is a generation of men raised by women’ (Palahniuk 1997: 50) – a more productive path of analysis is provided by the issues of self-­image explored in the novel and the film as men confront the possibility that they are merely a product of ‘ornamental culture’ (Faludi 1999: 35). For example, Jack’s uncertainty about what a ‘real’ man looks l­ike – ­as he gestures towards a Calvin Klein underwear advertisement, asking Tyler, ‘Is that what men look like?’ – confirms that signifier and signified have become disconnected. Here masculinity is unstable and uncertain, its form contested and undermined. Fight Club must also be read within the context of the recession of the early 1990s, which, according to Susan Faludi (1999), had a significant impact on the shape of masculinity as men lost their sense of economic authority. Yet, as Faludi notes, economic recovery did not signal a straightforward recovery of male authority and power. Far from it, men could no longer rest assured that masculinity would provide the economic rewards historically associated with male identity. As Brabon (2007) suggests, the ‘bleak inefficacy of men in the postmodern era provides a backdrop to Jack’s troubled negotiation of his own masculinity through his encounters with his schizophrenic alter ego, Tyler Durden. Tyler offers Jack multiple personalities and subject positions,

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being, as Tyler says, “all the ways in which you could b­ e – t­hat’s me” ’ (64). While the excessive violence witnessed in Fight Club can be interpreted as a response to this inefficacy as men search for an identity, both the attempted reclamation and deconstruction of masculinity represented in the book and film are not straightforward reactions to second-­wave feminism or a backlash against women. On the contrary, as Brabon writes, ‘the men in Fight Club are defined by the absent father and the alienating images of male identity in contemporary culture’ (65). What Fight Club reveals is a masculinity which is aware of its ‘wounded’ status, self-­consciously struggling with the legacy of the ‘old man’, ‘new man’, ‘metrosexual’ and ‘new lad’. Case study: Failure to Launch ( 2006 ) Failure to Launch tells the story of Tripp (Matthew McConaughey), a 35-­year-­old man who shows no interest in leaving his comfortable life with his parents and needs the intervention of relationship expert Paula (Sarah Jessica Parker) to finally ‘launch’ into self-­sufficiency and leave the parental home. The film has been discussed as exemplary of a cinematic stereotype that film critic David Denby (2007) calls the ‘slacker-­striver’ dyad, made up of an infantilised man and a high-­achieving woman, that plays into recessionary narratives around a twenty-­first-­century ‘man-­cession’. As Suzanne Leonard (2014) notes, while ‘slacker-­striver’ fi ­ lms – ­like Knocked Up (2007), Wedding Crashers (2005) and The Break Up (2006) – might predate the economic crisis by a few years, they have provided ‘convenient vocabularies for recession-­era categorisations that slot men and women into opposing teams, thus buttressing popular perceptions that men are struggling financially and emotionally, while ambitious women are (impatiently) showing them up’ (43). Here, ‘lackadaisical’, laddish men must learn to take responsibility for themselves and be ‘disciplined into recognizing the implicit rewards of hard work and normative familial commitments’. In some ways, Failure to Launch clearly epitomises these fears about ‘failing’ white men while also evoking the predicament of today’s ‘Boomerang generation’ that, out of university or failing on the recessionary job market, return home to live with their parents or rely on them for financial support (see Davidson 2014). Yet, unlike other ‘laddish’ films, Tripp’s sense of masculinity is not threatened by a lack of self-­esteem or the potentially destructive state of arrested development that the notion of pubescent ‘laddishness’ inadvertently implies. Quite the opposite, central to the film’s narrative is the manipulation of the relationship between Tripp’s ‘laddish’ persona and his resistance to ‘fleeing the nest’ as the economic conditions of masculinity combine with a suppressed emotional trauma that becomes fundamental to understanding his

Men and Postfeminism 213 status as a ‘postfeminist man’. Contrary to the film’s title, for Tripp, being a single man is not the result of a ‘failure’ on his part to be socially ­acceptable – ­nor does it stem from low levels of self-­confidence – b­ ut it is a lifestyle choice that has specific advantages in a world where the economics of capitalism no longer favour hegemonic forms of masculinity in an uncontested manner. As Tripp reiterates throughout the film, he likes ‘to come home to a nice place’, a place that in an increasingly competitive American labour market is out of his price bracket. His parents’ house serves to accentuate the economic disjunction between generations as home ownership in the twenty-­first century is no longer the cornerstone of patriarchal endeavour but instead a weighty burden or a financial impossibility. Tripp’s father’s ‘forty years in a suit’ as a traditional figure of hegemonic masculinity and patriarchal achievement have reaped substantial rewards, but the suit no longer fits Tripp’s generation. Instead, Tripp is left with an understanding of the role that society historically has asked him to play as a white middle-­class heterosexual man, but without the financial means, willingness or drive to accomplish it. At the same time, he enjoys and benefits from the image that his parents’ home affords for his own sense of self and allows him to enact the fantasy of the (white, Western, privileged) ‘good life’ (see Berlant 2011). In keeping with the image-­conscious world of the early twenty-­first century, the home is a readily identifiable façade of success that Tripp is able to exploit to impress potential girlfriends, even t­hough – ­unlike his ­father – ­he has not put in the hard graft that is required to achieve and maintain this marker of financial and patriarchal accomplishment. The evolution of Tripp’s masculinity throughout the film underlines the hybrid and conflicted nature of the postfeminist man. For example, in the early scenes the legacy of the ‘yuppie’ is confirmed by Tripp’s Porsche 911, the archetypical accessory for this 1980s young urban professional. However, the perceived affluence and economic independence of this ‘yuppie’ connection are swiftly undermined by the revelation that he lives at home with his parents. Once again, the cultural and social resonance of an image is essential to the postfeminist man’s identity, to the point where the value of the image (and its underlying associations) as an external marker of wealth and success underpins the superficiality of the relationships Tripp has with women. While he uses the mask of the comfortable large family home as a signifier of middle-­class affluence to manipulate his girlfriends’ perception of him, the house also becomes the means for Tripp to rid himself of unwanted female proximity. As his mother explains, he only brings women home when he wants to break up with them, as their realisation of Tripp’s economic/masculine f­ailure – t­ his is not a home he has ‘made’ for himself but one that he shares with and is still owned by his ­parents – ­inevitably results in a loss of female interest. Thus, Tripp knowingly exploits the disjuncture

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between (economic) appearance and reality to maintain a lifestyle of ‘fun’ and homosocial friendship, not based on competition and financial a­ chievement – ­the traditional markers of successful ­masculinity – ­but on shared, ‘New Age’inspired experiences of yoga, surfing and rock climbing. Tripp and his friends thus embrace a life of leisure and consumption by adopting a performance of masculine accomplishment that is meant both to entice and deter. In effect, performance is at the heart of Tripp’s existence and gender relations in general in the film. Paula’s role as a professional interventionist who teaches ‘special needs kids’ – hired by Tripp’s parents to get him out of their ­house – s­ erves to accentuate the existing gender performativity within Tripp’s world by simulating a romantic relationship. Confirming Judith Butler’s (1993b) contention that ‘all gendering is a kind of impersonation and approximation’ (313), Tripp ‘performs’ a succession of masculine ‘types’ in his sexual encounters with women. For example, the yoga class that he attends with his friends resonates with the sensitive ‘new man’ while his daredevil love of ‘fun’ is characteristic of the ‘new lad’. Although he and his friends engage in ‘laddish’ pursuits such as video gaming and paintballing, and in ‘Bly-­esque’ male bonding activities firmly embedded in the great outdoors, they are not archetypal lads but conform more closely to the hybrid identity of the postfeminist man. In particular, Tripp is far from the sexist and pleasuring-­seeking lad, nor is he maladjusted and emotionally challenged. He is identified by Paula as ‘smart, sweet and funny’ and ‘a fascinating case. He doesn’t fit the usual profile. I actually don’t see why he still lives at home. He has got a good job; he has got normal social skills; he’s attractive; he’s really sweet.’ What his parents, and Western society in general, classify as dysfunctional, Tripp celebrates as a life-­management choice that allows him to seemingly keep control of his relationships and preserve a bachelor-­esque level of fun in his life. However, the psychology of Tripp’s use of his dysfunctional status is also underpinned by the traumatic and ‘real’ death of his former fiancée, Amy. Tripp is emotionally wounded by her death and, as a result, he relies upon the performance of masculine ‘types’ – and its distancing ­effect – t­o retain an exclusive grip on his sense of the ‘real’. His life-­mantra may invoke fun but there is a deeper emotional sensitivity h ­ ere – ­beyond fun-­loving ‘laddishness’ – that frames his relationships with women and is also confirmed by his ‘fatherly’ relationship with Jeffrey, Amy’s son. These disjunctions and ambiguities classify Tripp as a postfeminist man as he both extends and hybridises the subject positions of the bachelor, ‘new man’, ‘metrosexual’ and ‘new lad’. The multi-­directionality of his masculinity captures a postfeminist malleability that reflects the paradoxes of postmodern subjectivity. However, these contradictions do not make for simple and

Men and Postfeminism 215 straightforward renditions of masculinity as they fail to fall readily into the historic categories of what it means to be a man. In this sense, the postfeminist man is a conglomeration of a series of seemingly irreconcilable masculine gender scripts that can function simultaneously in debilitating and inspiring ways. He is evidently not only wounded by the impact of feminism and the emotional sufferings of past r­elationships – h ­ owever ­traumatic – b­ut also the significant financial burden of the legacy of the father/patriarch and the less favourable economic conditions of masculinity in the early twenty-­first century. At the same time, the postfeminist man reveals that being single is a neoliberal lifestyle option that does not necessarily have to signify in dysfunctional directions, but instead can liberate the individual from the restrictive expectations and constraints of hegemonic forms of gender identity. That this will not be a straightforward and all-­encompassing liberation from culturally and socially embedded gender norms is made apparent by the ‘compulsory individuality’ and exclusivity that underlie the postfeminist man’s way of life. Moreover, his assertion of non-­hegemonic masculinity is also disabled from wider social reform by his complacency and reliance on the taken-­ for-­granted privileges that hegemonic manhood affords white middle-­class men. Ultimately, then, the postfeminist man might not want to effect change because, frankly, he does not need to. Recommended Further Reading Beynon, John. Masculinities and Culture. Buckingham and Philadelphia: Open University Press, 2002. Brabon, Benjamin A. ‘The Spectral Phallus: Re-­Membering the Postfeminist Man’. Postfeminist Gothic: Critical Interventions in Contemporary Culture. Ed. Benjamin A. Brabon and Stéphanie Genz. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. 56–67. Connell, R. W. Masculinities. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995. Faludi, Susan. Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man. New York: William Morrow, 1999.

10 Cyber-Postfeminism

Overview In this chapter, we analyse the multiple intersections of technology and feminism that have been the focus of cyberfeminism. Beginning with a consideration of the relationship between the cyborg and feminism, we revisit Donna Haraway’s influential work on the cyborg. Teasing out the utopian feminist potential of her t­ hesis – a­ longside the work of Sadie Plant, Anne Balsamo and Rosi ­Braidotti – w ­ e argue that the paradoxical figuration of the cyborg (both as a site for liberation and conservative backlash scenarios) fruitfully intersects with the politics of postfeminism in the late twentieth and early twenty-­first century. From here, we explore how cyborg technologies are being used by women (and men) in a postfeminist era to rescript heteronormative categories through micro-­political actions. We introduce the category of the postfeminist cyborg as a figure that moves along the border between conformity and transgression, complicity and critique that women take up. In conclusion, we consider the relationship between the posthuman and feminism, as new post-­gender locations open up that attempt to take us beyond dualistic configurations of the subject. We examine diverse variations of the cyberfeminist project by referring to the cyberpunk classic Neuromancer (1984) as well as providing case studies on the series of Alien films (1979, 1986, 1992, 1997) and the computer game persona Lara Croft.

Cyber-Postfeminism 217 Feminism and Cyborgs Cyberspace provides a terrain of possibilities and challenges for (post)feminism. Loosely positioned along a spectrum of pro- and anti-­ cyberspace ­feminists – ­from the pro-­cyberspace, utopian feminism of Sadie Plant to the more techno-­wary criticism of Nicola Nixon – ‘cyberfeminisms can be differentiated by their political stances in relation to . . . technology and how its effects on gender and identity are understood’ (Chatterjee 2002: 200). Yet it is important to recognise that ‘there is a marked ambivalence in cyberfeminism as to how cyberspace can be understood in relation to the feminist political project’ (200). On the one hand, cyberspace is full of potential as critical issues centring on female embodiment seemingly dissolve in a virtual, post-­gender world. For its advocates and supporters, cyberspace offers a locus where gender and sexual identities can be questioned and problematised in a fluid exchange that does not (necessarily) privilege a patriarchal form of femininity and female subjectivity (Halberstam and Livingstone 1995). In its most positive manifestations it is ‘the matrix not as absence, void, the whole womb, but perhaps even the place of woman’s affirmation’ (Plant 1995: 60). Instrumental in this debate are Donna Haraway’s seminal texts ‘A Manifesto for Cyborgs’ (1985) and Simians, Cyborgs and Women (1991), which provide a productive critical account of the interface between technology, gender and sexuality. Central to Haraway’s work is the idea that technology is generating a new ­ontology – t­he very possibilities of new ways of being. As she points out, ‘the cyborg is a creature in a post-­gender world: it has no truck with bisexuality . . . or other seductions to organic wholeness through a final appropriation of all powers of the parts into a higher unity’ (1991: 150–51). This opens up the possibility for ‘gender bending’ and ‘postgenderism’ that, as George Dvorsky notes, is a diverse social, political and cultural movement whose adherents affirm the elimination of gender through the application of advanced biotechnology and reproductive technologies. Yet, on the other hand, some critics find this flexible and ‘plastic’ manifestation of the postmodern self disingenuous and misleading. In particular, the figure of the ­cyborg – ­as witnessed in a number of contemporary popular manifestations, such as Seven of Nine in the Star Trek: Voyager series (1995– 2001) and the humanoid robot Ava in Ex-Machina (2015) – is problematic, often reinstating a traditional, sexualised and hyper-­feminine female body. In Gillis’s eyes, ‘the transgressive promise of the cyborg and the posthuman has not always been evident’ as ‘the cyborg as metaphor is fraught with difficulties precisely because it is already such a ubiquitous image in popular culture, an image that, unfortunately, replicates traditional ways of thinking about gender’ (Gillis 2008: 216; Booth and Flanagan 2002: 15).

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A more productive pathway that moves beyond debates on the bodily limitations/possibilities of Haraway’s cyborg is offered by an expanding critical focus on the posthuman. In an attempt to transcend the Cartesian dualism of the subject, critics like Halberstam (1991) and Hayles (1999) have attempted to integrate and redefine our understanding of the relationship between the body and machine in a posthuman context. For Hayles, ‘there are no essential differences or absolute demarcations between bodily existence and computer simulation, cybernetic mechanism and biological organism, robot teleology and human goals’ (3). In other words, cyberspace becomes a location where the distinction between the subject and the object, the self and the other dissolve. Accordingly, ‘the posthuman contests old categories of identity formation that function to essentialise and exclude women and replaces them with a more complex range of subject positions’ (Toffoletti 2007: 115). Within this context, cyberspace offers a particularly liberating site for women as it has the potential to sever their links with the female body. The metaphor of the cyborg provides rich opportunities for (post)feminism. The cyborg does not simply mount a riposte to the Cartesian subject, eroding its inherent dualism, but it also challenges us to question how we define the (female) body and its relationship to technology. In other words, the cyborg raises fundamental questions about human identity. According to Balsamo (1996): Cyborgs are hybrid entities that are neither wholly technological nor completely organic, which means that the cyborg has the potential not only to disrupt persistent dualisms that set the natural body in opposition to the technologically recrafted body, but also to refashion our thinking about the theoretical construction of the body as both a material and a discursive process. (11) Within this context, the cyborg as a ‘feminist boundary rider’ has been particularly useful for the cyberfeminist critique of the female subject (Toffoletti 2007: 21). Addressing the historically and culturally constructed connections between men and ­technology – ­a relationship that more broadly excludes women from full ­subjecthood – c­ritics like Haraway, Wajcman and Plant have sought to redress these limiting and artificial links. As Judy Wajcman (1991) reminds us, the ‘very definition of technology . . . has a male bias. This emphasis on technologies dominated by men conspires in turn to diminish the significance of women’s technologies, such as horticulture, cooking and childcare, and so reproduces the stereotype of women as technologically ignorant and incapable’ (137). In effect, women have historically been ‘othered’ from technology and it is this history of technology’s gendered bias towards men that Donna

Cyber-Postfeminism 219 Haraway rethinks in her 1985 article ‘A Manifesto for Cyborgs’. The influence of Haraway’s work on cybertheory, postmodern and feminist theories is of such importance because, as Gillis (2008) suggests, ‘it provides a useful way of critiquing Enlightenment ideas, and offers an opportunity to think about the body without the boundaries of gender’ (208). Haraway (1991) calls for an attempt ‘to build an ironic political myth faithful to feminism, socialism and materialism’ (7). In so doing, she confronts the imposition of boundaries and definitions on the female body by patriarchy and asserts that there is ‘nothing about being “female” that naturally binds women. There is not even such a state as “being” female, itself a highly complex category constructed in contested sexual scientific discourses and other social practices’ (14). In accordance with other postmodern theories, Haraway dismantles the gendered category of ‘female’, illuminating its constructedness and the lack of ‘essential’ unity between feminists and women in general. Identifying the conflicting/conflicted power of patriarchy, colonialism and capitalism as the forces that have worked to fragment and divide women’s/ feminism’s political identity, she argues that ‘white women, including socialist feminists, [have] discovered . . . the non-­innocence of the category of “woman” ’ (16). Here ‘woman’ is a loaded termed, saturated with numerous ideologies that have served both to homogenise and fragment a collective sense of womanhood. In order to work against the disintegrating effects of a phallocentric s­ociety – w ­ here the categories of ‘female’ and ‘woman’ are tainted by patriarchal i­deologies – ­Haraway maintains that cyberfeminists ‘have to argue that “we” do not want any more natural matrix of unity and that no construction is whole’ (16). Within this context, the metaphor of the cyborg provides a valuable alternative model of subjectivity that it is not bound by Western/patriarchal scripts that define gender identities and the origins of civilisation (12). For Haraway, cyborg writing is concerned with ‘the power to survive, not on the basis of original innocence, but on the basis of seizing the tools to mark the world that marked them as other. . . . Feminist cyborg stories have the task of recoding communication and intelligence to subvert command and control’ (33). Cyborg writing is involved in the reappropriation of the symbols of oppression by rescripting gender identities and subverting the language of patriarchal domination. The power of the cyborg metaphor and its subversive ­potential – a­ s a form that counters the homogenising effects of the grand narratives of Western ­culture – ­are worked through at the level of the text, as ‘writing is pre-­eminently the technology of cyborgs, etched surfaces of the late twentieth century. Cyborg politics is the struggle for language and the struggle against perfect communication, against the one code that translates all meaning perfectly, the central dogma of phallogocentrism’ (34).

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Building upon Haraway’s provocative analysis, Judith Halberstam (1991) outlines the full impact of the cyborg as a device that not only liberates possible associations between femininity, femaleness and f­eminism – i­n what could be described as a thoroughly postfeminist articulation of the female/feminist/ feminine s­elf – b­ ut also covers up (by dissolving) any distinctions between gender and its various representations: The female cyborg becomes a terrifying cultural icon because it hints at the radical potential of a fusion of femininity and intelligence. . . . A female cyborg would be artificial in both mind and flesh, as much woman as machine, as close to science as to nature. . . . As a metaphor, she challenges the correspondences such as maternity and femininity or female and emotion. (454) However, we must tread with care as the metaphor of the cyborg is just ­that – ­a ­metaphor – ­and, as Stacy Gillis (2007) has argued, popular representations of the cyborg often fail to move beyond the patriarchal script of femininity/ female identity as they walk the tightrope of transgression and conformity. William Gibson’s cyberpunk classic Neuromancer (1984) – which introduced the concept of ­cyberspace – ­provides a good example of how postfeminist attempts to transcend patriarchal scripts are often problematic and, at times, seemingly regressive. As Gillis (2007) maintains, figures like Molly Millions in Gibson’s novel cannot move beyond the limitations of the hypersexualised female body. While Millions embraces the image of the ass-­kicking techno-­babe, she is still restricted by her sexualised femininity and ‘contained by the language of sexuality. Her nails may conceal a weapon but they are coloured burgundy and serve to lengthen her fingers’ (12). ‘Ultimately’, writes Gillis, ‘the cyborgic female body is modified only so as to accentuate or enact sexual promise’ (15). In this way, just as cyberspace is in many ways inherently conservative, the cyborg encompasses backlash scripts and retro-­sexism in its display of feminine excess. Yet there is no denying that increasingly, outside the fictional world, we are starting to live cyborg lives: ‘Cyborgs actually exist. About 10 percent of the current US population are estimated to be cyborgs in the technical sense, including people with electronic pacemakers, artificial joints, drug-­implant systems, implanted corneal lenses, and artificial skin’ (Hayles 1999: 115). Here the metaphor of the cyborg becomes ‘real’ as technology increasingly plays its part in modifying and ‘enhancing’ the human body. Postfeminist Cyborgs Whereas the cyborgic male is limited in its representations of the excesses of ­masculinity – a­ s the muscular body of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Terminator

Cyber-Postfeminism 221 from the Terminator trilogy of films (1984; 1991; 2003) ­highlights – ­the female cyborg’s identity is more malleable and dexterous. The cyborgic male’s identity can only revolve around displays of masculine aggression, attempts to become more human and/or a protecting father figure. Contrastingly, the female cyborg blends sexuality with assertiveness, hyper-­feminine characteristics with tough-­girl strength, allowing her to transcend the patriarchal limits of female identity/femininity. Taking into account the paradoxical and, at times, conflicting images of the cyborg, it seems to readily align itself with the postfeminist woman, who (in her most positive manifestations) conforms to and reworks patriarchal scripts from behind the mask of heteronormative, sexualised femininity. It would be incorrect to assume that such a pairing is straightforwardly predicated on Haraway’s conception of the cyborg, but the strands of her cyborg politics (albeit corrupted by a return to the corporeal and the normative) permeate contemporary culture through the new cyborgs of the twenty-­first century. One manifestation of this new cyborg identity is witnessed through the rapidly expanding extreme makeover phenomenon, which deploys the new technology of cosmetic surgery to reconstruct the body in order to shape a ‘better’ self. Becoming part of the everyday fabric of women’s lives, cosmetic surgery and the extreme makeover open up new possibilities for women to harness what could be described as cyborg technologies. As we watch numerous transformations of women in programmes such as Extreme Makeover (first aired on ABC in 2002), The Swan (aired on Fox in 2004) and, more recently, Bridalplasty (E! 2010–11) and Good Work (E! 2015–), we behold the arrival of the postfeminist cyborg woman who has turned to cosmetic surgery to enhance her heteronormative sense of self. More and more women (and men) in Western Europe and the United States in particular are choosing to embrace cosmetic surgery to augment their organic matter in what could be described as the metaphor of the cyborg made flesh. However, whereas Haraway’s configuration of the cyborg is emancipatory and transgressive, these postfeminist cyborg women seek normative ideals as they attempt to contain and improve their ‘transgressive’ bodies. Perhaps somewhat ironically, these women harness cyborg technologies (such as liposuction and breast ­augmentation – ­the two most popular procedures performed in the United States and UK in 2015) in order to conform to patriarchal scripts, but in so d­ oing – a­ s their exuberant responses to the ‘makeover reveal’ e­ xpose – t­ hey discover a revitalised self that has been unshackled from their bodily ‘inadequacies’ and imperfections. Here, one of the paradoxes of postfeminism reappears surrounding individuals’ relationships with power and their subject/object status. As Foucault reminds us in Discipline and Punish (1977), the process of subject formation involves a double bind as the ‘power of the norm’ ­functions in two

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ways: ‘In a sense’, he notes, ‘the power of normalization imposes homogeneity, but it [also] individualizes’ (184). In this way, the postfeminist cyborg woman is involved in working with and against the power structures inherent within subjectivity as she becomes object (of the heterosexual male gaze) and subject (to a ‘new’ self). As we have already mentioned, this dialectic is also implicit in Foucault’s discussion of subject formation that has been developed by Judith Butler among others. According to Butler (1997c), subjection is understood not only as subordination but also as ‘a securing and maintaining, a putting into place of a subject’ (90–91). For us, postfeminism and the postfeminist woman must be understood within this context of the double bind of subjectivity. This concept of normalisation can be employed to explain the paradoxes engendered by the postfeminist woman’s use of the technology of cosmetic surgery. Within this context, makeover series like Brand New You (aired in the UK on Channel 5 in 2005) offer an obvious example of the homogenising aspects of normalisation as the participants’ bodies are measured for their deviation from the norms of heterosexual desirability. As Heyes (2007) points out, ‘normalization is obscured . . . by avidly proffered alternative narratives that stress identity over beauty, and taking one’s life into one’s hands to become a better person’ (23). Kathryn Morgan (1991) voices concerns about this makeover process, noting that ‘while the technology of cosmetic surgery could clearly be used to create and celebrate idiosyncrasy, eccentricity, and uniqueness, it is obvious that this is not how it is presently being used’ (35). Indeed, ‘choice’ could be nothing more than ‘necessity’ whereby ‘elective cosmetic surgery . . . is becoming the norm’ and those ‘women who contemplate not using cosmetic surgery will increasingly be stigmatized and seen as deviant’ (26; emphasis in original). Here, we need to grapple with the contradictions surrounding this rhetoric of choice as what looks like individual empowerment, agency and self-­determination can also signal conformity and docility. Rosemary Gillespie (1996) refers to this as ‘the paradox of choice’: ‘The decision whether or not to undergo cosmetic surgery clearly involves individual choice, yet the concept of choice is itself enmeshed in social and cultural norms’ (79). The postfeminist cyborg must navigate the pitfalls of this ‘paradox of choice’, struggling with the patriarchal framework that dictates potentially sexist configurations of the female body as hypersexualised, in order to rescript the body for the world of cyberspace in such a way that femininity and feminism are not competing discourses (Genz 2009b).

Cyber-Postfeminism 223 Posthuman Feminisms The challenge that faces us in a posthuman world centres not only on dismantling the dualism of the Cartesian subject, but also on jettisoning our internalised sense of the ‘normal’ body. The posthuman possibilities that technology offers pose a new set of questions that, as Rosi Braidotti (1994) notes, demand that we scrutinise the very condition and meaning of ‘human’: ‘What counts as human in this posthuman world? How do we rethink the unity of the human subject, without reference to humanistic beliefs, without dualistic oppositions, linking instead body and mind in a new flux of self?’ (179). The questions Braidotti asks identify how the limits of the human are evolving within a posthuman context. As Toffoletti (2007) states, the posthuman ‘cannot simply be explained by the transcendence, extension or penetration of the human body via technologies. Rather, it is the bodily transformations and augmentations that come about through our engagements with technology that complicate the idea of a “human essence” ’ (13). Critics like Braidotti and Toffoletti argue that this complicating or troubling of the category of human by the intervention of technology creates a new politics of identity that, we suggest, can be positively deployed by (post)feminism. For Toffoletti, the posthuman opens up a range of subject positions beyond dichotomous relationships between men and women. Embracing what could be described as a postfeminist directionality or ‘line of flight’, the posthuman becomes ‘a figuration that exceeds signification; in Baudrillard’s terms it “disappears” in the process of transforming into something else beyond the effects of technology as affirmative or negative for women’ (Deleuze and Parnet 1987: 36; Toffoletti 2007: 26). Here the posthuman marks a point where boundaries dissolve and the relationship between the signifier and referent is brought into question in such a way that terms like ‘human’ and ‘woman’ are (potentially) no longer tainted by biological and ideological preconceptions. However, this does not mean that the ­posthuman – ­or, for that matter, p­ ostfeminism – i­s apolitical. On the contrary, as Braidotti (1994) notes, the ‘hyperreality of the posthuman predicament . . . does not wipe out politics or the need for political resistance’ (12). Posthuman (and postfeminist) politics turn on the ­individual – a­t the point where the individual is called into question, where the body is deconstructed and ‘reformed’. For postfeminism, it is often micro-politics that is the new framework of action and resistance, although, as we will discuss shortly, we have also seen the recent emergence of postfeminist macro-politics that address a range of gendered inequalities (see Chapter 12). As we have already noted, for an increasing number of people (particularly women), technology is involved in helping them to navigate the ‘paradox of choice’, moving them beyond the limits of

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the human in both normalising and liberating directions. Here, micro-­politics is a hybrid politics for a hybrid ­identity – ­a neoliberal ideology of the self that assimilates the objects of technologies into the redefined parameters of the individual, dissolving the ever-­thinning line between self and other. In this sense, both posthuman and postfeminism are impure discourses that blend and bind the forms that they ‘post’ – reifying and rewriting the categories of human, feminism, woman. Case Study: Alien Released in 1979, the first of the four Alien films (Alien [1979]; Aliens [1986]; Alien 3 [1992]; Alien Resurrection [1997]) introduces us to Sigourney Weaver’s feisty character, Lieutenant Ellen Ripley, and the perilous journey of the spaceship Nostromo as it investigates a distress signal. Over the course of the four films, we witness Ripley’s various and, ultimately, deadly alien encounters as she is killed and reborn as a clone. According to Judith Newton, Alien is ‘seemingly feminist’ (84) – as Ripley/Weaver takes centre stage, single-­ handedly repelling the a­lien – b­ut feminist theorists’ responses to Ripley display an unease over her status as an action heroine. Carol Clover (1992), for example, criticises reviews of Aliens that cast it as ‘a feminist development’ as ‘a particularly grotesque expression of wishful thinking’ (117). In part, criticism is directed at Ripley for adopting the role of the male hero while embodying ‘traditionally feminine qualities’ (Newton 1990: 87). Importantly, it would be incorrect to assume that because she adopts the traditional position of the male hero, that she is simply imitating men. Ripley ‘presents audiences with an image of a female character who is both victim and her own rescuer: a character which breaks down the hierarchical division of active-­male/passive-­ female’ (Hills 1999: 43). In this sense, Ripley’s femininity and in-­between status can be analysed productively within a postfeminist context. She is perhaps best described as a ‘post-Woman woman’ – blurring and collapsing the binary distinctions between the genders (Braidotti 1994: 169). Ripley displays the multiple subject positions of the postfeminist ­woman – ­a spectrum of identity that does not deny conflicting and seemingly irreconcilable ‘selves’. As the films develop from Alien to Alien Resurrection, Ripley’s ‘monstrous corporeality’ is reconceived through the technology of c­ loning – a­ s sleeping beauty or ‘Snow White’ (as one of the marines labels her in Aliens) evolves from worker to warrior, mother to champion, woman to alien–human hybrid (Hills 1999: 47). In fact, as Fred Botting (2007) has argued, ‘[t]he logic of a particular version of the “post” – post-­human and ­postfeminist – ­seems fully realized in Alien Resurrection: the categories of human and gender appear obsolete, along with all the ideological ­bases – ­nature, bodies, feelings, ­ideals – ­that

Cyber-Postfeminism 225 support them’ (181). Dissolving dualistic configurations of the subject and dismantling hierarchical structures, Ripley’s hybrid identity marks her out as a postfeminist figure who challenges our expectations of what it means to be a woman in a posthuman era. Case Study: Lara Croft Created in 1996 by Eidos Interactive for the Tomb Raider video game series, Lara Croft has divided and split feminist critics. Lauded as the greatest ‘cyber­ babe’ in the Guinness Book of World Records – with more than a thousand Internet fan sites and appearances on over two hundred magazine covers (including Time and Newsweek) – Lara Croft is a hybrid figure, an action heroine who displays hyper-­feminine bodily characteristics. Tapping into the 1990s ‘Girl Power’ phenomenon, Croft and Tomb Raider rework the male-­ dominated action-­adventure genre epitomised by Indiana Jones by putting centre stage a feminine, hotpant-­wearing fighting machine. The game goes to some lengths to give Lara a fictional biography, whereby she is portrayed as simultaneously an English aristocrat, daughter of Lord Henshingly and educated at Wimbledon High School for girls; a tomb-­raiding adventurer and martial arts expert; and sex symbol for the ­gamer – ­who, it must be acknowledged, has ultimate control over Lara’s movements and actions. In this way, Croft is a postfeminist boundary rider who provides women (and men) with a new female/feminine figure of identification, deploying physical prowess to battle with men and monsters. She has, as Helen Kennedy (2002) notes, a ‘bimodal’ appeal for young men and women as both an object of sexual desire and an emancipated, strong woman. However, the inherent threat to masculinity embodied by the action heroine’s empowered status is short-­circuited, for, as critics emphasise, Lara is ‘a girl, not a woman. From the tip of her schoolgirl plait to her army boots, she is a luscious tomboy’ (Stables 2001: 20). At the same time, through her heroic actions and physical prowess, Lara also manipulates and subverts gender roles, reinforcing and undermining how we are expected to read the hyper-­feminine script of her body. Her potential is defined by how identities (both male and female) can be projected on to her bodily surface in cyberspace: ‘She is an abstraction, an animated conglomeration of sexual and attitudinal signs (breasts, hotpants, shades, thigh holsters) whose very blankness encourages the (male and female) player’s psychological projection’ (Poole qtd in Stables 2001: 19). Lara Croft captures a number of postfeminist possibilities, opening up subject positions that ­seem – ­at the level of the female ­body – ­irreconcilable. Now a prototype for many contemporary female characters in video games like the hypersexualised ‘Bayonetta’, she can be seen as a postfeminist figure par e­ xcellence – c­ onventional in her stylised

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and accentuated femininity and innovative in her active heroine status (see Tasker 2004). Recommended Further Reading Balsamo, Anne. Technologies of the Gendered Body: Reading Cyborg Women. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 1996. Gillis, Stacy. ‘The (Post)Feminist Politics of Cyberpunk’. Gothic Studies 9.2 (2007): 7–19. Halberstam, Judith. ‘Automating Gender: Postmodern Feminism in the Age of the Intelligent Machine’. Feminist Review 17.3 (1991): 439–60. Haraway, Donna J. Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York and London: Routledge, 1991.

11 Third-Wave Feminism

Overview In this chapter, we examine the notion of ‘third-­wave feminism’ that emerged in the 1990s and has often been described by its advocates in antithesis to postfeminism. According to third-­wave feminists, postfeminism can be understood in terms of a conservative/patriarchal discourse that seeks to criticise and undermine second-­wave feminism. By contrast, third-­wave feminism defines itself as a budding political movement with strong affiliations to second-­wave feminist theory and ­activism – t­he conflict between third wavers and postfeminists often being exemplified by the supposed dichotomy between the politically informed Riot Grrrls and the mainstream, fashionable Spice Girls. Third-­wave feminism speaks to a generation of younger ­feminists – ­born in the 1960s and ­1970s – w ­ ho see their work founded on second-­wave principles, yet distinguished by a number of political and cultural differences. Third-­ wave feminists embrace contradiction and diversity as inherent components of late-­millennium women’s (and men’s) lives and they envision a new model of feminist thinking and practice that goes ‘beyond black or white’ and situates itself within popular culture in an effort to bridge the gap between consumption and critique (Siegel 2007: 142). We suggest that the adoption of a binary logic to conceptualise the relationship between third-­wave feminism and postfeminism is misleading in many cases as it does not account for the slippage between the two terms and often rests on an overly simplistic view of postfeminism as defeatism. We analyse the rifts and overlaps between the third wave and postfeminism through an examination of the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

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The mid-­1990s saw a number of, largely non-­academic, publications by a younger generation of women who were keen to debate the meanings and relevance of feminism for their late twentieth-­century lives. Anthologies and edited collections such as Listen Up: Voices from the Next Feminist Generation (1995), To Be Real: Telling the Truth and Changing the Face of Feminism (1995) and Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism, and the Future (2000) provide personal accounts of feminist awakenings and are meant as guides to feminism for a mainstream audience. These writings announced the advent and set the tone for a new, ‘third wave’ of feminism, marked by a desire to renew feminist commitment as well as distinguish itself from its second-­wave precursor. As Barbara Findlen (1995), a former editor of Ms. magazine, writes about the young feminist contributors to Listen Up, ‘[w]e’re here, and we have a lot to say about our ideas and hopes and struggles and our place within feminism. We haven’t had many opportunities to tell our stories, but more of us are finding our voices and the tools to make them heard’ (xvi). The term ‘third wave’ was popularised by Rebecca Walker in a 1995 article, ‘Becoming the Third Wave’, in which she encouraged young women to join their (second-­wave) mothers and embrace feminism (Walker 1995b) – previous usages include a 1987 essay in which Deborah Rosenfelt and Judith Stacey reflect on the ebbs and flows of feminism throughout the 1970s and 1980s, proposing that ‘what some are calling a third wave of feminism [is] already taking shape’ (359). An underlying concern of many of these studies outlining the third wave is to establish and demarcate its parameters as well as characterise its proponents. For Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards (2000), for example, the third wave consists of ‘women who were reared in the wake of the women’s liberation movement of the seventies’ (15) while, for Leslie Heywood and Jennifer Drake (1997), it is the generation ‘whose birth dates fall between 1963 and 1974’ (4). A less precise delineation is favoured by Rory Dicker and Alison Piepmeier (2003) who maintain that ‘we want to render problematic an easy understanding of what the third wave is’ (5). By adopting the ‘wave’ metaphor, the third wave clearly situates itself within what Deborah Siegel (1997) calls ‘the oceanography of feminist ­movement’ – a chronology that comprises the surge of feminist activism in the nineteenth and early twentieth ­centuries – c­ ommonly referred to as the ‘first wave’ of feminism that culminated around the campaign for women’s suffrage in the ­1920s – ­and the ‘second wave’ resurgence of feminist organising in the 1960s (52). As Gillis, Howie and Munford note in their introduction to Third Wave Feminism (2004), ‘[t]o speak about a “third wave” of feminism . . . is to name a moment in feminist theory and practice’ (1). The very invocation of ‘third

Third-Wave Feminism 229 wave feminism’ and the mobilisation of the adjective ‘third’ indicate a desire to establish a link with previous feminist waves and ensure a continuation of feminist principles and ideas. The self-­declared third wavers Leslie Heywood and Jennifer Drake (2004) emphasise that ‘to us the second and third waves of feminism are neither incompatible nor opposed’ (3). In Deborah Siegel’s (1997) eyes, one should think of the third wave as ‘overlapping both temporally and spatially with the waves that preceded it’ – ‘just as the same water reforms itself into ever new waves, so the second wave circulates in the third, reproducing itself through a cyclical movement’ (60­–1). Mimicking the nomenclature of its predecessors, third-­wave feminism acknowledges that it stands on the shoulders of other, earlier feminist movements and in this sense acts as a stance of resistance to popular pronouncements of a moratorium on feminism and feminists. While the third wave is inextricably linked to the second, it is also defined in large part by how it differs from it. Gillis and Munford (2003) state categorically that ‘we are no longer in a second wave of feminism’ and now need to delineate ‘a feminism which could no longer, in any way, be identified as “victim feminism” ’, a feminism that does not ‘hurt itself with . . . simplistic stereotyping and ideological policing’ (2, 4). The third wavers’ orientation to feminism is different because, among other reasons, they have grown up with it. Baumgardner and Richards (2000), for instance, propose that ‘for anyone born after the early 1960s, the presence of feminism in our lives is taken for granted. For our generation, feminism is like fluoride . . . it’s simply in the water’ (17). Third-­wave writers and activists insist that feminism cannot be based on ‘anachronistic insularity’ and separatism but has to adopt a ‘politics of ambiguity’ that embraces tolerance, diversity and difference (Gillis and Munford 2003: 2; Siegel 2007: 140). As Baumgardner and Richards (2000) explain, ‘most young women don’t get together to talk about “Feminism” with a capital F. We don’t use terms like “the politics of housework” or “the gender gap” as much as we simply describe our lives and our expectations’ (48). The third wave is keen to ‘make things “messier” ’ by using second-­ wave critique as a central definitional thread while emphasising ways that ‘desires and pleasures subject to critique can be used to rethink and enliven activist work’ (Heywood and Drake 2004: 7). According to the third wave’s agenda, ‘there is no one right way to be: no role, no model’ – instead ‘contradiction . . . marks the desires and strategies of third wave feminists’ who ‘have trouble formulating and perpetuating theories that compartmentalize and divide according to race and gender and all the other signifiers’ (Reed 1997: 124; Heywood and Drake 2004: 2; Walker 1995a: xxxiii). The third-­ wave subject is always in process and accommodating multiple positionalities, ‘including more than excluding, exploring more than defining, searching

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more than arriving’ (Walker 1995a: xxxiii). Third-­wave feminism thus seeks to make room for ‘the differences and conflicts between people as well as within them’ and ‘to figure out how to use [these] differences dynamically’ (Reed 1997: 124; emphasis in original). Third-­wave feminism is clearly informed by postmodern theorising as well as a multiculturalist sensibility, arguing for the political possibilities that the postmodern present makes available. The third wave functions as a ‘political ideology currently under construction’, welcoming pluralism and describing itself as a post-­identity movement that engages with the postmodern challenge to a unified subjectivity (Pender 2004: 165). As Rebecca Walker suggests in an interview entitled ‘Feminism Only Seems to Be Fading: It’s Changing’, ‘the next phase in feminism’s evolution will entail a politics of ambiguity, not identity’ (qtd in Siegel 1997b: 53-­4). Third-­wave feminism addresses the subject’s experience of having fragmented and conflicting selves that do not constitute a seamless and coherent whole. In this way, ‘with no utopic vision of the perfectly egalitarian society or the fully realized individual’, third-­wave feminists ‘work with the fragmentation of existing identities and institutions’, creating a new theoretical/political space that ‘complicates female identity rather than defining it’ (Reed 1997: 124). Simultaneously, the third wave is committed to political action, asserting that ‘breaking free of identity politics has not resulted in political apathy’ but rather has provided ‘an awareness of the complexity and ambiguity of the world we have inherited’ (Senna 1995: 20). In effect, third-­wave theory and practice consider anti-­essentialism and political engagement as indispensably allied. The movement sees itself as ‘a political stance and a critical practice’, thriving on the contradictions that ensue from postmodernism’s questioning of the identity category (Siegel 1997b: 54, 59). Further to being a theoretically informed movement, the third wave also locates itself within popular culture and understands a critical engagement with the latter as the key to political struggle. This is in marked contrast to second-­wave feminism that, for the most part, took a ‘hard line’, anti-­media approach, favouring separatism over the ‘spin game’ (Whelehan 2005: 138). As Heywood and Drake (2004) put it, ‘we’re pop-­culture babies; we want some pleasure with our critical analysis’ (51). They highlight that ‘it is this edge, where critique and participation meet, that third wave activists must work to further contentious public dialogue’ (52). The third wave thus contests a politics of purity that separates political activism from cultural production, ‘ask[ing] us . . . to re-­imagine the disparate spaces constructed as “inside” and “outside” the academy . . . as mutually informing and intersecting spheres of theory and practice’ (Siegel 1997b: 70). Many third wavers critically engage with popular cultural f­orms – ­television, music, computer games, film and ­fiction – a­ nd position these within a broader interrogation of what ‘feminism’

Third-Wave Feminism 231 means in a late twentieth- and twenty-­first-­century context. They concentrate on the proliferation of media images of strong female characters to interpret consumer culture as a place of empowerment and differentiate themselves from second-­wave feminists who had been critical of the misogyny of the popular realm. One of the most prominent and public icons of the third wave is Courtney Love, lead singer of the Riot Grrrl band Hole and wife of the late Kurt Cobain. For Heywood and Drake (2004), Love personifies the third wave and its politics of ambiguity: She combines the individualism, combativeness, and star power that are the legacy of second wave gains in opportunities for women . . . with second wave critiques of the cult of beauty and male dominance. . . . Glamorous and grunge, girl and boy, mothering and selfish, put together and taken apart, beautiful and ugly, strong and weak, responsible and rebellious, Love bridges the irreconcilability of individuality and femininity within dominant culture, combining the cultural critique of an earlier generation of feminists with the backlash against it by the next generation of women. (4–5) While the third wave’s bond with its second-­wave forerunner is marked by continuity and c­hange – i­llustrating the third wave’s ‘central drama’ of ‘wanting to belong but being inherently different’ (Siegel 2007: 140) – its relationship with postfeminism is far less ambiguous. Many third wavers understand their position as an act of strategic defiance and a response to the cultural dominance of postfeminism. From its initiation, the third wave has resolutely defined itself against postfeminism: in fact, third-­wave pioneers Rebecca Walker and Shannon Liss were keen to establish an ideological and political split between the two, pronouncing ‘[w]e are not postfeminist feminists. We are the third wave!’ (qtd in Siegel 2004: 128). Heywood and Drake also emphasise that, within the context of the third wave, ‘ “postfeminist” characterizes a group of young, conservative feminists who explicitly define themselves against and criticize feminists of the second wave’ – among these ‘young’ feminists are included Katie Roiphe and Rene Denfeld who reject notions of ‘victim feminism’ (1). The effect of these announcements is both to link third-­wave feminists to their second-­wave mothers as well as distinguish them from their alienated postfeminist sisters who supposedly discard older feminists’ strategies. Second and third waves of feminism are thus united in their condemnation of an exceedingly popular and retrograde postfeminism that is seen to be in line with the economic, political and cultural forces governing the market and mainstream media. A pertinent example of this rift is the often-­cited distinction between popular Girl Power discourse and the underground Riot Grrrl movement (see

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Chapter 4). Some critics insist that the Riot Grrrl’s ‘angry rebellion’ against the patriarchal structures of the music scene is in opposition to the media-­ friendly ‘absurdity’ of Girl Power that amounts to ‘a very persuasive and pervasive form of hegemonic patriarchal power’ (Gillis and Munford 2004: 174; Ashleigh Harris 2004: 94). While Girl Power (promoted by the Spice Girls) is at best no more than ‘a bit of promotional fun’, the Riot Grrrls can be placed within feminism’s radical and activist history, taking ‘cultural production and sexual politics as key sites of struggle’ (Coward 1999: 122; Heywood and Drake 1997a: 4). Ultimately, these critics claim, third-­wave feminism should be acknowledged as an emerging political ideology and ‘forms of feminist activism’ while postfeminism ‘shuts down ongoing efforts to work toward change on the level of both theory and practice’ (Heywood and Drake 2004: 7; Sanders 2004: 52). As we have suggested already in Chapter 4, this rhetoric of antagonism is sometimes misleading as it does not account for the overlap between the third wave and postfeminism, nor does it allow for a politicised reading of the latter. We have argued throughout for a more nuanced and productive interpretation of the prefix ‘post’ and its relations to feminism, whereby the compound ‘postfeminism’ is understood as a junction between a number of often competing discourses and interests. This expanded understanding goes beyond a limited interpretation of postfeminism as anti-­feminist backlash and encourages an active rethinking that captures the multiplicity and complexity of twenty-­first-­century feminisms. There are, of course, a number of important differences between postfeminism and the third wave, significantly at the level of foundation and political alignment; yet, there are also a range of similarities as the third wave and postfeminism both posit a challenge to second-­ wave feminism’s anti-­popular and anti-­feminine agenda. Sarah Banet-­Weiser (2007) maintains that postfeminism is ‘a different political dynamic than third wave feminism’, with the latter defining itself more overtly as a kind of feminist politics that extends the historical trajectory of previous feminist waves to assess contemporary consumer culture (206). Postfeminism, on the other hand, does not exist as a budding political movement and its origins are much more impure, emerging from within mainstream culture, rather than underground ­subculture – i­n Tasker’s and Negra’s eyes, postfeminism can be seen as a ‘popular idiom’ while third-­wave feminism is ‘a more scholarly category’ and ‘self-­identification’ (19). Moreover, unlike the third wave, postfeminism is not motivated by a desire for continuity and a need to prove its feminist ­credentials – w ­ hat Diane Elam (1997) terms the ‘Dutiful Daughter Complex’ or Baumgardner and Richards (2000) describe as a ‘scrambling to be better feminists and frantically letting these women [second-­wave feminists] know how much we look up to them’ (85).

Third-Wave Feminism 233 However, this unwillingness or rather indifference to position itself in the generational wave narrative need not imply that postfeminism is apolitical and anti-­feminist. On the contrary, in the following chapter, we will analyse the notions of a postfeminist politics and/or a political postfeminism t­hat – ­while not identical to other, particularly feminist, strategies of ­resistance – ­adopt a more flexible model of agency that is doubly coded in political terms and combines backlash and innovation, complicity and critique. We also need to remind ourselves that there is a potential overlap between third-­wave feminism and postfeminism that should not be interpreted, as some critics propose, as a ‘dangerous and deceptive slippage’ but rather an unavoidable consequence of contradiction-­prone contemporary Western societies and cultures (Munford 2004: 150). In effect, the third wave is the target of similar objections that have been raised in connection with postfeminism, mainly related to its resolutely popular and consumerist dimensions. Discussing Courtney Love’s ‘postmodern feminism’, Gillis and Munford (2004), for example, question whether the politics of girl culture can be reconciled with her ‘bad girl philosophy’ (173). While Love clearly confounds the dichotomisation of ‘Madonna and Whore’, her reliance on brand culture and her embrace of feminine ­paraphernalia – ­exemplified by Love’s provocative statement that ‘we like our dark Nars lipstick and La Perla panties, but we hate sexism, even if we do fuck your husbands/boyfriends’ – propel a debate as to ‘what extent . . . this commodification neutralise[s] feminist politics’ (173). The third wave and postfeminism thus occupy a common ground between consumption and critique, engaging with feminine/sexual and individual forms of agency. Both third-­wave feminism and postfeminism have drawn on popular culture to interrogate and explore twenty-­first-­century configurations of female empowerment and re-­examine the meanings of feminism in the present context as a politics of contradiction and ambivalence. While it could be argued that the first generation of third wavers is now approaching middle age, the term continues to be employed by twenty-­first-­century young activists to signal their ‘newness’. As Catherine Redfern and Kristin Aune confirm in Reclaiming the F Word (2010), ‘the very fact that the term “third wave” exists adds weight to the argument that there are a growing number of active feminists. We’ve watched this new feminism grow and have been involved with it over the last decade and know this is not a “flash in the pan” ’ (10). Case Study: Buffy the Vampire Slayer ( 1997–2003 ) In their introduction to the edited collection Fighting the Forces (2002), Rhonda Wilcox and David Lavery note that ‘good television’ – in opposition to ‘bad television’ that is simply ‘predictable, commercial, exploitative’ – is

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c­ haracterised by its ability to resist the pressures of social and artistic expectations and the conventions of the business, ‘even while it partakes in [these forces] as part of its nature’ (xvii). Buffy the Vampire Slayer is identified as such a case of ‘good television’, confounding not only the laws of the horror genre but also offering a new kind of female protagonist who disrupts any clear set of distinctions between ‘passivity, femininity and women on the one hand and activity, masculinity and men on the other’ (Tasker 1993: 77). Joss Whedon, the creator of the series, has often been quoted as saying that Buffy the Vampire Slayer was explicitly conceived as a reworking of horror films in which ‘bubbleheaded blondes wandered into dark alleys and got murdered by some creature’ (qtd in Fudge 1999: 1). As he notes, ‘the idea of Buffy was to . . . create someone who was a hero where she had always been a victim. That element of surprise, that element of genre busting is very much at the heart of . . . the series’ (qtd in Thompson 2004: 4). Whedon is determined to ‘take that character and expect more from her’, deconstructing the label of blonde (i.e. dumb) femininity and linking it with notions of power and strength (qtd in Lippert 1997: 25). Buffy the Vampire Slayer enacts in its title the foundational myth and the premise of the entire series, centring on an ex-­cheerleading, demon-­hunting heroine who tries to combine being a girl with her vampire-­ slaying mission. From its US premiere in 1997 to its primetime finale in 2003, the series followed the fortunes of Buffy Summers (Sarah Michelle Gellar) as she struggled through the ‘hell’ that is high school, a freshman year at U.C. Sunnydale, and the ongoing challenge of balancing the demands of family, friends and relationships, and her work as the ‘Slayer’ whose duty is to fight all evil (Pender 2004: 165). The ‘joke’ of the cheerleading demon hunter is not a ‘one-­line throwaway gag’ but encapsulates Buffy’s ongoing battle with her composite character as the ‘Chosen One’ – who, as the voiceover to the show’s opening credits relates, ‘alone will stand against the vampires, the demons and the forces of darkness’ – and as a sixteen-­year-­old teenager who wants to do ‘girlie stuff’ (Pender 2002: 42). Blending elements of action, drama, comedy, romance, horror and, occasionally, musical, the series has been lauded as a reinterpretation of established cinematic and generic concepts and identities. With her long blonde hair and thin, petite frame, Buffy is visibly coded by the conventional signifiers of attractive, helpless and (to some extent) unintelligent femininity. The show foils both viewers’ and characters’ expectations by portraying this cute cheerleader not as a victim but a ‘supremely confident kicker of evil butt’ (qtd in Krimmer and Raval 2002: 157). According to Whedon, Buffy is intended both to be a feminist role model and to subvert the non-­feminine image of the ‘ironclad hero – “I am woman, hear me constantly roar” ’ (qtd in Harts 88). Buffy has been celebrated as a ‘radical reimagining of what a girl (and

Third-Wave Feminism 235 a woman) can do and be’ and a ‘prototypical girly feminist activist’ (qtd in Pender 2004: 165). In particular, Buffy has been embraced as ‘the new poster girl for third wave feminist popular culture’, continuing the second wave’s fight against misogynist v­ iolence – v­ ariously represented as types of monsters and ­demons – ­and articulating new ‘modes of oppositional praxis, of resistant femininity and, in its final season, of collective feminist activism that are unparalleled in mainstream television’ (Pender 2004: 164). The climax of Season 7 is specifically noteworthy as it sees ­Buffy – ­with the help of the ‘Scooby gang’, her friends Willow (Alyson Hannigan) and Xander (Nicholas Brendon) – redistribute her Slayer power and ‘change[s] the rule’ that was made by ‘a bunch of men who died thousands of years ago’ and prescribes that ‘in every generation, one Slayer is born’ (‘Chosen’). Buffy’s Slayer strength is magically diffused and displaced on to ‘every girl who could have the power’, so that ‘from now on, every girl in the world who might be a Slayer, will be a Slayer’. In transferring power from the privileged, white Californian teenager to a heterogeneous group of women, Buffy the Vampire Slayer can be said to address the ‘issue of cultural diversity that has been at the forefront of third wave feminist theorising’ (Pender 2004: 170). Buffy’s final description of herself as unbaked ‘cookie dough’ has also been highlighted by critics as exemplifying the third wave’s politics of ambiguity, its deliberate indeterminacy and ‘inability to be categorized’ (‘Chosen’; Gilmore 2001: 218). Despite the end of the series in 2003, Buffy has had an active afterlife, giving rise to an online journal (Slayage), several conferences and anthologies devoted to the burgeoning field of ‘Buffy Studies’. Other commentators have been more sceptical about the series (and its conclusion) and Buffy’s suitability as a feminist role model. They draw attention to the show’s ‘mixed messages about feminism and femininity’, upholding a dualistic rationale that defines ‘Buffy’s form and Buffy’s content’ as ‘distinct and incompatible categories’ (Fudge 1999: 1; Pender 2002: 43). For example, Anne Millard Daughtery (2002) condemns the Slayer’s feminine exterior on the grounds that ‘for all the efforts taken to negate the traditional male gaze, Buffy’s physical attractiveness is, in itself, objectifying’ (151). Buffy’s ‘Girl Power’ is seen as ‘a diluted imitation of female empowerment’ that promotes ‘style over substance’ and ultimately lacks a political agenda (Fudge 1999: 3). She is censured for being a ‘hard candy-­coated feminist heroine for the girl-­power era’ whose ‘pastel veneer’ and ‘over-­the-­top girliness in the end compromise her feminist potential’. This polarised viewpoint defines action heroines by their adoption or refusal of femininity and is forced to conclude that ‘Buffy cannot be a feminist because she has a cleavage’ (Pender 2002: 43). Following this line of argument, Buffy the Vampire Slayer has been discussed as a contemporary version of the 1970s ‘pseudo-­tough’, ‘wanna be’ action

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heroines exemplified by Wonder Woman and Charlie’s Angels. As Sherrie Inness (1999) explains, femininity was used in this context as a way to allay the heroine’s toughness and tone down and compensate for her assertiveness and display of strength. Contrastingly, we have argued that such an attempt to create a dichotomy between feminism and f­emininity – a­ nd, in a similar manner, postfeminism and the third wave, girl and g­ rrrl – ­is disadvantageous for a number of reasons, leading not only to a reification of masculine power/ feminine weakness but also negating the transgressive potential of the action-­ adventure heroine who occupies an empowered and heroic position. We contend that Buffy’s feminine and feminist, girl and grrrl components should not be separated and we interpret her as a liminal contemporary character who transcends binary formulations and subverts gender frameworks that underlie the concepts of masculine activity and feminine passivity. It is in this gap between dualities that the postfeminist possibilities are revealed for more complex and diverse understandings of modern-­day womanhood, feminism and femininity. Recommended Further Reading Genz, Stéphanie. Postfemininities in Popular Culture. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. 152–69. Gillis, Stacy, and Rebecca Munford. ‘Genealogies and Generations: The Politics and Praxis of Third Wave Feminism’. Women’s History Review 13.2 (2004): 165–82. Heywood, Leslie, and Jennifer Drake, eds. Third Wave Agenda: Being Feminist Doing Feminism. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. Siegel, Deborah L. ‘The Legacy of the Personal: Generating Theory in Feminism’s Third Wave’. Hypatia 12.3 (1997): 46–75.

12 Micro/Macro-Politics and Enterprise Culture

Overview In this chapter, we advance the notion of a politicised postfeminism and/or a postfeminist politics, problematising in this way critical perceptions of postfeminism as a depoliticised and anti-­feminist backlash. This not only implies a reconsideration of postfeminism but also involves a rethinking of the political sphere and the concept of the individual. We suggest that postfeminism is doubly coded in political terms and is part of a neoliberal political economy that relies on the image of an ‘enterprising self’ characterised by initiative, ambition and personal responsibility (Rose 1992). The modern-­day ‘enterprise culture’ invites individuals to forge their identity as part of what Anthony Giddens (2008 [1991]) refers to as ‘the reflexive project of the self’ (9) – that is, in late modernity individuals increasingly reflect upon and negotiate a range of diverse lifestyle choices in constructing a self-­identity. Following Patricia Mann (1994), we argue that the vocabulary of political actions has to be expanded and we examine the notion of postfeminist ‘micro-­politics’ that takes into account the multiple agency positions of individuals today (160). Micro-­politics differs from previous models of oppositional politics (including second-­wave feminist politics) in the sense that it privileges the individual and the micro-­level of everyday practices. Postfeminist micro-­politics is situated between two political frameworks, incorporating both emancipatory themes and ones more explicitly concerned with individual choices (Budgeon 2001). We will discuss micro-­politics by referring to postfeminist sexual agents who use their body as a commodity to achieve autonomy and agency. This stance is illustrated by the American designer/writer/women’s rights activist

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Periel Aschenbrand whose provocative T-­shirt campaigns politicise fashion by exploiting sexuality to sell feminism to a new generation of women. In the final section of this chapter, we will debate whether in the current recessionary climate, this micro-­political postfeminist stance has evolved and expanded on a macro-­political level in the shape of, what we call, boob and bust politics. From FEMEN’s ‘topless Jihad’ against sex tourism and religious institutions in the Ukraine to the now worldwide ‘SlutWalk’ movement to challenge sexual violence, we examine how sexualised feminist politics have erupted in many different locations, reappropriating the topless female body as a means for macro-­political expression and activism. Individualisation and Enterprise Culture As we have indicated on a number of occasions, postfeminism has been conceived (and criticised) by many commentators as a purely individualistic phenomenon that is disqualified from political action. Postfeminism has been defined as a depoliticisation of feminism, inherently opposed to activist and collective feminist politics. The notions of a postfeminist politics and/or a political postfeminism have been seen as futile, if not oxymoronic. The postfeminist s­ubject – i­n particular, the fashionable and marketable ‘girl’ of Girl Power ­discourse – h ­ as been described in antithesis to second-­wave activists who publicly and collectively campaigned for feminist goals of female emancipation and equality. Critics have argued that postfeminism at best is simply apathetic and indifferent to politics while at worst it amounts to a ‘proudly backward’ counter-­assault on women’s rights (Faludi 1992: 12). Postfeminism is condemned not just for being apolitical but for producing, through its lack of an organised politics, a retrogressive and reactionary conservatism. In this chapter, we want to complicate the perception of postfeminism as a depoliticised and/or anti-­feminist backlash that acts as a ruse of patriarchy to spread false consciousness among women. We propose that a more productive interpretation of postfeminism situates it as part of a changing political and cultural climate that responds to, among other issues, the destabilisation of gender relationships, a diversification and mainstreaming of feminist ideas that has resulted in a ‘new’ visibility of a branded and personalised type of feminism and an increased emphasis on affective concepts like ‘choice’, ‘empowerment’ and ‘happiness’ as well as entrepreneurial values of ‘self-­improvement’ and ‘self-­responsibilisation’ prominent in (recessionary) neoliberal rhetoric. As Mann (1994) observes, in the current era in which fewer people are willing to connect ideologically with any political movement, feminism should be regarded as a ‘theoretical and psychological resource rather than an identifying political uniform’ (100). The existence of feminism as a kind of ‘common

Micro/Macro-Politics and Enterprise Culture 239 sense’ has been noted by various commentators who examine the shifting conditions of being feminist and doing feminist work in the twenty-­first century (Gill 2007; McRobbie 2003). Feminism’s increasingly mediated and non-­collective/activist status has a number of important consequences, both for the role of the feminist cultural ­critic – ­who engages with more diverse and contradictory fields of ­enquiry – ­as well as more generally for our conception of political power and agency. With the certainty of a stable and secure feminist perspective and politics slipping away, different understandings of political engagement and feminist ­activity – ­as well as of the relationship between feminism and its ­subject – ­have to be explored that take into account the emergence of an increasingly branded, decollectivised and ‘neoliberalised’ political sphere that taps into individualism, affect and entrepreneurship as conduits for political activism (see Banet-­Weiser 2012: 129). A key place to start this process of rethinking is the concept of the individual itself that has gained a lot of attention in discussions of postfeminism and contemporary politics. While the individual has always been at the heart of feminist activism and ­politics – e­ xemplified by the well-­known second-­wave slogan ‘the personal is political’ – it was largely envisaged as a catalyst and step towards collective action and organised protest. For example, second-­wave strategies like consciousness-­raising might have started in the private sphere where women shared personal experiences of sexual and material subjugation but these individual grievances were soon related to a broader context of social injustice affecting all women. Consciousness-­raising directly drew on women’s victimisation in their everyday lives to politicise their personal outlooks and pave the way for a wider politics of engagement. In this sense, there was a clearly defined and structured link between individual women and the feminist sisterhood, personal expression and political action, single awareness and collective consciousness. The individual was seen as a springboard to look beyond the private space traditionally designated for women into the public worlds of education, profession and social opportunity. Agency and emancipation were conceived along these lines with the explicit aims of liberating women (both as individuals and as a group) from patriarchal forms of constraint and empowering them to participate on an equal footing with men in areas of social activity. It is this connection between the individual and the feminist collective that has come to be the focus of contemporary examinations of postfeminism and its supposed apolitical agenda. Postfeminism is said to sever the link between individual women and the feminist movement by embracing a singular, self-­ centred form of agency that undermines the communal aspects of feminism and its distinct social and political goals. As we noted in Chapter 1, critics have taken issue with postfeminism’s individualistic credo which, they argue,

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is ‘driven by representational concerns and commodity logic’ and is based on an overly optimistic formulation of ‘choiceoisie’ that assumes that the second wave’s struggle for women’s rights and equality is now redundant (Dow 1996: 213; Probyn 1990). Underlining personal choice rather than structural necessity, postfeminism’s individualism is seen to effect a de-­collectivisation of the feminist movement that, critics are concerned, works to obliterate feminism’s political dimensions and collective self-­understanding. In these readings, the postfeminist subject is at best a token a­ chiever – w ­ ho affirms female oppression while neutralising that affirmation in an individualistic ­rhetoric – ­while at worst she is a traitor to the feminist cause, guiltily standing over ‘the corpse of feminism’ (Hawkesworth 2004: 969). In Angela McRobbie’s (2001) words, the ‘ruthless female individualism’ of postfeminist ­women – ­whom she labels ‘TV blondes’ – presents a fantasy of female omnipotence but ‘on the longer term it may prove fatal’ as it means ‘living without feminism’ (363, 370, 372). By contrast, we want to reconceptualise the postfeminist individual by reimagining the connections between public and private spheres and expanding the range of political actions to allow for more diverse and conflicting forms of agency that combine emancipatory objectives with individual choices. Following the social theorist Patricia Mann (1994), we contend that it is more politically compelling to conceive of the postfeminist subject in terms of the ‘multiple agency positions’ – ‘a confusingly varied set of motivations, obligations, and desires for recognition’ – that we occupy in contemporary society and that provide ‘the context for political struggle and social transformation’ (171, 160). During this time of ‘social confusion’ in which we operate in a ‘sometimes terrifying array of relationships and connections within both domestic and public arenas’, a successor form of i­ndividualism – ­which Mann calls ‘engaged individualism’ – has emerged as a result of the reorganisation of everyday life brought about by the social enfranchisement of women (4, 115, 121). The ‘engaged individuals’ that Mann refers t­ o – s­ he also uses the terms ‘conflicted actors’ and ‘micro-­political agents’ – respond to the contradictions of the postmodern age by experimenting with ‘multiple and changing forms of individual agency’ while struggling to preserve a ‘shifting and always contingent sense of . . . integrity’ (32). Mann’s notion of engaged individualism acknowledges that new modes of agency and identity are gradually developing and transforming forms of social and political behaviour, beyond but not necessarily in opposition to collective and activist strategies (favoured, for instance, by second-­wave feminism). As she writes, a contemporary feminist approach needs to adapt itself to an era in which communal forms of political action are on the wane and more complex notions of individual ­agency – which are capable of delineating the heightened level of personal choice and ­responsibility – ­begin to come into play

Micro/Macro-Politics and Enterprise Culture 241 (100). Analyses such as these provide alternative ways of comprehending the category of ‘the ­postfeminist’ – p­ ersonified, for example, by the ‘chick’, the ‘do-­me feminist’ and the ‘new feminist’ – not as a patriarchal token or a failed feminist but as a complex subject position of multiply-­engaged individuals. For us, it is important that we submit this postfeminist individual to an internal critical gaze in order to effect what Oksala calls ‘a politics of ourselves’ (44) that acknow­ledges our own affective and subjective participation in economic and ideological structures and accounts for the complex interior dynamics that make up contemporary forms of feminism. Postfeminism attributes a central position to the individual and, in this sense, it can also be read in conjunction with current sociological and political examinations of self-­identity. This line of thought is associated with the work of Anthony Giddens (2008 [1991]) who formulates a theory of the self as reflexively made by the individual. Giddens suggests that with the decline of ­traditions – ­what he designates ‘the post-­traditional order of modernity’ – identities in general have become more diverse and malleable and today more than ever, individuals can construct a narrative of the self (5). This is the reflexive ‘project of the self’ which takes place ‘in the context of multiple choice’ and allows individuals to negotiate a range of diverse lifestyle options in forming a self-­identity (5). In this account, self-­identity is not a set of traits or characteristics but it is a person’s own reflexive understanding of their bio­ graphy. The more society is modernised, the more subjects acquire the ability to reflect upon their social conditions and change them (Budgeon 2001; Beck 1992). Here, there is a shift from a socially prescribed life ­story – ­constraining in particular for women who historically have been disadvantaged by the fact that they are f­ emale – t­ o a biography that is self-­produced. This construction is not optional but it is an ongoing project that demands the active participation of the subject (Beck 1992: 135). As Shelley Budgeon (2001) points out, this is especially relevant for young women in contemporary society as ‘processes of individualization and detraditionalization mean that not only are a wide range of options available to them in terms of their self-­definition, but that an active negotiation of positions which are potentially intersecting and contradictory is necessary’ (10). Individualisation thus operates as a social process that, instead of severing the self from a collective, increases the capacity for agency while also accommodating a rethinking of the individual as an active agent. It is at this juncture that we can witness and interrogate the cross-­nurturing and cross-­fertilising ideologies of postfeminism and neoliberalism. As Rosalind Gill highlights in her examination of contemporary media and gender (2007), there is a ‘clear fit between neoliberalism and postfeminist media culture’: ‘At the heart of both is the notion of the “choice biography” and the contemporary injunction to render one’s life knowable and meaningful through

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a narrative of free choice and autonomy’ (260, 262). Gill is sceptical of this neoliberal/postfeminist focus on the individual as an ‘entirely free agent’ and she criticises the postfeminist subject for her return to femininity and her ‘reprivatization of issues that have only relatively recently become politicized’ (259–60). By emphasising notions of personal choice and self-­determination, the grammar of individualism ‘turns the idea of the personal as political on its head’ (259). In Gill’s eyes, the shift to neoliberal/postfeminist subjectivities illustrates a change in the way that power operates as ‘[w]e are invited to become a particular kind of self, and endowed with agency’ on condition ­that – ­in the case of the postfeminist feminine/sexual subject – ‘it is used to construct oneself as a subject closely resembling [a] heterosexual male fantasy’ (258). This, Gill is convinced, represents a ‘higher or deeper form of exploitation’ as it implicates women in their own subjugation and objectification, imposing (male) power not ‘from above or from the outside’ but from within ‘our very subjectivity’ (258). Likewise, Stéphanie Genz (2006) has investigated the links between postfeminism and ‘Third Way’ ­philosophy – ­adopted throughout the 1990s by centre-­left governments in Europe and the United States as a middle course between Right and Left i­deology – ­to analyse the notions of postfeminist entrepreneurship and subjectivity. As she notes, ‘[p]ostfeminism is part of a Third Way political economy, participating in the discourses of capitalism and neoliberalism that encourage women to concentrate on their private lives and consumer capacities as the sites for self-­expression and agency’ (337–8). She argues that female subjects in particular are addressed by neoliberal rhetoric and ‘become the “entrepreneurs” of their own image, buying into standardized femininities while also seeking to resignify their meanings’ (338). Genz admits that this is certainly ‘a politically “impure” practice’ that does not adhere to second-­wave conceptions of politics and social change but, in her view, it also allows for a different understanding and construction of political agency and identity. Grounded in the idea of the free, possessive individual, neoliberalism’s critical and political potential has similarly been discussed and questioned by a range of commentators (Hall 2011). Following Giddens, ‘boom’ expressions of neoliberalism have tended to herald the individual as ‘an entrepreneur’ or ‘an enterprise of the self’ who remains continuously engaged in a project to shape his or her life (Gay 1996: 156). The conception of the individual as an entrepreneur has been particularly influential in political quarters that stress the importance of personal choice and self-­determination. As Nikolas Rose (1999a) proposes, ‘enterprise culture’ accords ‘a vital political value to a certain image of the self’ who ‘aspire[s] to autonomy . . . strive[s] for personal fulfilment . . . [and] interpret[s] its reality and destiny as matters of individual

Micro/Macro-Politics and Enterprise Culture 243 responsibility’ (141–2; emphasis in original). The enterprising self is motivated by a desire to ‘maximise its own powers, its own happiness, its own quality of life’ through enhancing its autonomy and releasing its potential (150). The presupposition of the ‘autonomous, choosing, free self as the value, ideal and objective underpinning and legitimating political activity’ has imbued political mentalities of the West, in particular those informed by neoliberal rhetoric (142). Though neoliberalism is in the first instance a doctrine of political e­ conomy – ­founded on the principle that ‘human well-­being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterised by strong private property rights, free markets and free-­trade’ (Harvey 2011: 2) – it has also been extended to other areas, becoming, as McGuigan (2014) notes, a ‘principle of civilisation’ (224). In Rottenberg’s words, we have seen a ‘neoliberalization of everything’ (433) as neoliberal rationality has taken over as a hegemonic mode of governance that has colonised more and more domains and now frames the meaning of everyday reality for a multitude of people. This includes the construction of subjectivity itself and the formation of neoliberal modes of selfhood, exemplified by the individual as entrepreneur or self-­brand (see Oksala 2013). The neoliberal subject is self-­regulating, entrepreneurial and responsible, resembling what Foucault (2010) describes as the mythical homo economicus who makes rational choices based on economic knowledge and turns his/her life into ‘a sort of permanent and multiple enterprise’ (241). As Jodi Dean (2008) describes, this neoliberal subject is entirely imaginary: Neoliberalism offers its subjects imaginary injunctions to develop our creative potential and cultivate our individuality, injunctions supported by capitalism’s provision of the ever-­new experiences and accessories we use to perform this self-­fashioning – I must be fit; I must be stylish; I must realize my dreams. . . . If I don’t, not only am I a loser, but I am not a persona at all; I am not part of everyone. Neoliberal subjects are expected to, enjoined to have a good time, have it all, be happy, fit, and fulfilled. (62) This neoliberal injunction has been increasingly difficult to live up to in a twenty-­first-­century context of economic recession that puts distinct structural and financial pressures on neoliberal selves/workers who might not be able to adapt to the demands of changing markets. Now the ambitious and energetic neoliberal worker must prove him/herself to be flexible and resilient enough to weather economic turbulence and the threat of large-­scale unemployment by adopting a path of ‘individual self-­interest, economic efficiency, and unbridled competition’ (Steger and Roy 2010: x). In these circumstances, the neoliberal insistence on equality of opportunity needs to be problematised,

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as choice, economic success and social mobility are no longer guaranteed by a meritocratic, aspirational ­logic – ­whereby those with sufficient drive and talent will rise to the top irrespective of their position at birth (see Littler 2013) – but are now seen as a luxury regulated by a ‘survival of the fittest ethic’ that reaches into every aspect of society (see Giroux 2011a). In some ways, this has led to an intensification of neoliberal enterprise culture where citizens are called upon to share sacrifice, bear the burden of economic downturn and the responsibility for economic uplift and (self-)improvement. The general mood or affective regime is encapsulated by Clarke and Newman’s (2013) notion of ‘disaffected consent’ where consent is conditional and grudging rather than enthusiastic. In this climate of ‘disaffectedness’, critics are concerned that individualism further slides into a stance of disgruntled and disengaged non-­commitment that reduces the potential for social critique and undoes political solidarities. For Zygmunt Bauman (2008), for example, neoliberalism’s reliance on hyper-­ individualism inevitably results in an atomised society that has ceded the notion of collective citizenship and social responsibility: ‘individual men and women are now expected, pushed and pulled to seek and find individual solutions to socially created problems and implement those solutions individually . . . This ideology proclaims the futility . . . of solidarity: of joining forces and subordinating individual actions to a “common cause” ’ (88). In the same vein, Henry Giroux (2011) maintains that the regime of ‘economic Darwinism’ under neoliberalism relies on an ethos of anti-­intellectualism and ignorance to both ‘depoliticise the larger public while simultaneously producing the individual and collective subjects necessary and willing to participate in their own oppression’ (165). The end result is a ‘politics of disimagination’ that generates a politically inert mass of ‘uniformed customers, hapless clients, depoliticised subjects, and illiterate citizens’ who are unable to ‘think critically, imagine the unimaginable, and engage in thoughtful and critical dialogue’ (Giroux 2013: 263–4). The production of civic passivity and political illiteracy has only been amplified under the strain of the post-­2008 recession that mobilises ideas of self-­sufficiency and self-­responsibilisation in order to convince the individual consumer-­citizen of the economic necessity and moral obligation to bear the burden of the financial crisis (see Clarke and Newman 2012). While our current era might thus be described as ‘post-­political’ in some ­ways – ­characterised by self-­responsibilisation rather than social r­ esponsibility – ­it has nonetheless produced distinct forms of social and political action that re-­ engage with critical thinking and the language of reform and activism. In spite (or, maybe because) of increasing pressures on the neoliberal/­postfeminist individual, protests are ­ growing – ­ both on a micro- and macro-­ political ­scale – n ­ ot just pursuing an anti-­capitalist vein that highlights the self-­serving

Micro/Macro-Politics and Enterprise Culture 245 and avaricious practices of the ‘masters of capital’ but also generating a range of specifically gendered revolts that adopt a boob and bust politics that make explicit use of the female body to call attention to political and social issues specifically related to women (sexual violence and discrimination, prostitution, sex trafficking, etc.). The reasoning that underlies these gendered body protests can clearly be traced back to a postfeminist logic that argues for the subjectifying potential of the (post)feminine body (see Genz 2009b). Here, the notions of female individualisation and enterprise have been the focus of a number of critical investigations that debate women’s role in the reflexive project of the self and the possibility of expressing a politicised agency within the conditions of late modernity (McRobbie 2004b; Budgeon 2001). If, as Natasha Walter (1998) proposes, contemporary young w ­ omen – a­nd, we should add, m ­ en – n ­ ow have to ‘mak[e] up their lives’ without the security of ‘markers or goalposts’, then we need to further interrogate the nature of postfeminist politics that comes to the fore in a neoliberal consumer culture (2). Postfeminist Micro-­P olitics In her examination of agency in a postfeminist era, Patricia Mann (1994) formulates a theory of individual agency she designates ‘micro-­politics’ that takes into account the ‘multiple agency positions of individuals today’ (160). Mann recognises the fundamental transformations in late twentieth-­century Western societies that have occurred as a result of the enfranchisement of women and their unmooring from patriarchal relations. ‘Like it or not’, she writes, ‘ours is an era that will be remembered for dramatic changes in basic social relationships, within families, workplaces, schools, and other public spheres of interaction’ (1). As she explains, [w]e may be expected to change jobs, careers, marriages, and geographical venues with the same resignation or optimism as we switch channels. We may be described, without undue exaggeration, as operating within a tangle of motivations, responsibilities, rewards, and forms of recognition unmoored from traditional male and female, public and private identities. (115) Mann’s notion of ‘gendered micro-­politics’ is intended to provide insight into this complicated nexus of relationships and rethink agency in the context of these changes. The key to micro-­political agency is an ‘engaged individualism’ that allows individuals to combine ‘economic and interpersonal forms of agency’, and experiment with ‘various identities as well as diverse familial and community relationships’ (124). In these circumstances, the micro-­political agent is characterised as a ‘conflicted actor’ who is capable of individually

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i­ntegrating diverse desires and obligations through creatively reconfiguring his/her practices and relationships: ‘We are micro-­political agents insofar as we manage to operate within various institutional discourses without ever being fully inscribed within any of the . . . frames of reference that engage us’ (31). This postfeminist micro-­politics differs from previous political forms in its adoption of a more ‘dynamic and flexible model of political agency’ that arises from ‘a struggle that is not only without a unitary political subject but also without a unitary political opponent’ (159). What makes micro-­politics so contentious is that it is not put into practice by a political community engaged in activism but it results from individual and daily gender-­based struggles. As Mann admits, the playing fields of contemporary gendered conflicts are still ‘under construction’ and therefore, the rules of postfeminist micro-­politics are ‘not clearly defined’ (186). The practice of micro-­politics has also been investigated by other critics who focus more exclusively and directly on young female identities and their connection with the feminist project. Basing her study upon interviews with a number of young women, Shelley Budgeon (2001) is keen to point out that, while her interviewees are alienated by second-­wave feminism, their identities are informed by feminist ideas. She relates this contradiction to the tension between second-­wave feminism and postfeminism, arguing that the identities under construction allow contemporary young women to ‘engage in a resistant fashion with the choices they have available at the micro-­level of everyday life’ (7). Budgeon maintains that it is possible to create a politicised identity at the level of the individual self and foster social change from daily interactions and practices. In their understanding of female rights and inequality, young women nowadays use ‘an interpretative framework that owes much of its potency to feminism’ while also being derived from a brand of postfeminism that appropriates feminist ideals and grafts them onto consumable products (20, 18). For Budgeon, this intermingling of feminism, postfeminism, individualism and consumerism is not necessarily undesirable and detrimental: in effect, the ‘marketability of feminist discourse in this popularized form is what renders it so accessible and, therefore, readily available to young women within the context of their everyday lives’ (18). Drawing on the work of Anthony Giddens, Budgeon (2001) proposes a politicised interpretation of postfeminism by locating it between two political frameworks: ‘emancipatory’ and ‘life politics’ (21). Reflecting ‘the characteristic orientation of modernity’, emancipatory politics is organised by principles of justice, equality and participation with the explicit aim of liberating individuals and groups from conditions that limit their life chances (Giddens 2008 [1991]: 211). Life politics, in contrast, is a politics of lifestyle options that focuses on the means to self-­actualisation and on self-­identity as a reflexive

Micro/Macro-Politics and Enterprise Culture 247 achievement (214, 9). In Giddens’s analysis, the two forms of politics are not mutually exclusive and questions that arise within one type pertain to the other as well (228). Budgeon (2001) argues ­that – ­while second-­wave feminism is fundamentally an emancipatory ­discourse – ­postfeminism should be interpreted as a transitional moment that mingles two political strands: The first is the theme characteristic of a feminism with its roots in modernity and identification with the universal subject ‘woman’. The second is about differences emerging within that category under postmodern conditions and the resulting shift of emphasis onto individual choices as universals dissolve. (22) In this sense, postfeminism combines emancipatory themes of second-­wave feminism and a ‘life politics’ style of feminism that is more concerned with individual choices and self-­ actualisation. Budgeon suggests that postfeminism’s blend of emancipatory and life politics is apparent in the lives of the young women she interviewed and in the ways in which ‘gender inequality is defined as a collective problem but with an individual solution’ (21). For her, the ‘pitting of “old” feminism and “new” feminism’ that characterises many discussions of postfeminism and ‘the debates about which form of politics is a more accurate representation of young women’ do not seem particularly relevant in the context of young women’s negotiation of identities that are ‘inherently contradictory’ (24). Rather, it is more likely that postfeminist micro-­politics calls into play aspects of both emancipatory and life politics, highlighting in this way the conflicting forms of agency that women take up in contemporary society. The possibilities and contradictions of a postfeminist micro-­politics are especially intriguing in the case of sexualised practices and regimes of recognition that have typically been overlooked as dimensions of agency. Moreover, another particularly contentious and, to use Mann’s (1994) term, potentially ‘messy’ (88) area of investigation revolves around the question of how such individualised and commodity-­driven actions can be reinforced on a macro-­ political level. As Mann notes, ‘micro-­ politics requires macro-­political and symbolic forms of reinforcement’ (196). As we will discuss below, this macro-­political dimension has now been crystallised against the backdrop of global cut-­backs and austerity measures in the shape of boob and bust politics that use the female body as a political tool to rewrite patriarchal scripts for women as a collective. Case Study: Periel Aschenbrand and Sexual Micro-­P olitics In Gender and the Media (2007), Rosalind Gill writes that contemporary culture is characterised by an increasing and pervasive sexualisation that is

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evident in ‘the extraordinary proliferation of discourses about sex and sexuality across all media forms’ as well as the frequent ‘erotic presentation of girls’, women’s and (to a lesser extent) men’s bodies’ (256). These depictions are part of a modernisation of femininity (and masculinity) and a shift from ‘sexual objectification’ to ‘sexual subjectification’ (258). In Gill’s eyes, this process is particularly apparent in the sexualised portrayals of women who come to be seen not as victimised objects but as knowing sexual subjects: ‘Where once sexualized representations of women in the media presented them as passive, mute objects of an assumed male gaze, today sexualization works somewhat differently’ as ‘[w]omen are not straightforwardly objectified but are presented as active, desiring sexual subjects’ (258). She uses the now-­infamous example of the little tight T-­shirt bearing slogans such as ‘fcuk me’ – employed by the British high-­street fashion store French ­Connection – ­or ‘fit chick unbelievable knockers’ to illustrate this move to sexual subjecthood (Gill 2003a: 100). As she describes the ubiquity of French Connection’s generic T-­shirt: ‘It could be seen everywhere, emblazoned across the chests of girls and young women, and competing on the street, in the club, and on the tube with other similar T-­shirts declaring their wearer a “babe” or “porn star” or “up for it”, or giving instructions to “touch me” or “squeeze here” ’ (100). While these everyday fashion practices have been dismissed by critics as instances of patriarchal colonisation, they also contain the seeds of a sexual micro-­politics whereby women/girls use their bodies as political tools to gain empowerment within the parameters of a capitalist economy. The balancing act from high-­street activity to emerging political activism has been achieved in the early twenty-­first-­century by controversial American designer/writer/ women’s rights activist Periel Aschenbrand whose provocative T-­shirts campaigns exploited sexuality to sell feminism to a new generation. Founder of the company ‘body as billboard’ which retailed T-­shirts across the United States and Europe, Aschenbrand (2005) summarises her mission statement in the following way: we should reject renting our bodies as billboard space for odious companies and use them instead to our advantage, to advertise for shit that matters. We should be wearing politically minded clothing, clothes that say things people aren’t saying. We should use our tits to make people think about the things no one is making them think about. (66) As Aschenbrand reveals in an interview with the British newspaper The Observer, she was originally inspired by a group of female students she used to teach: ‘I couldn’t believe the apathy. They were not at all politicised. They’d come into class wearing idiotic T-­shirts advertising garbage. “Mrs Timberlake”, “Team Aniston”. It was absurd. I told them: I think we should

Micro/Macro-Politics and Enterprise Culture 249 put our tits to better use’ (qtd in France 2006: 3). With her range of printed T-­shirts, she set out to turn women’s breasts into ‘advertising space’ to take advantage of the fact that this particular female body part has always been ‘oversexualized’ (Aschenbrand 2005: 66). As Aschenbrand suggests, her company offers ‘a sweatshop-­free original-­artwork clothing line for women sick of companies’ appropriation of their bodies for advertising’ (109). Slogans include campaigns against the Bush administration, date rape, domestic violence and the erosion of American abortion legislation. Her clothing ­items – ­most (in)famously exemplified by a T-­shirt bearing the words ‘The Only Bush I Trust Is My Own’ (which also doubles up as the title of her autobiographical polemic [2005]) – have been worn by a number of celebrities and feminist writers including Gloria Steinem, Susan Sarandon and Eve Ensler, playwright of The Vagina Monologues. Other T-­shirt campaigns include ‘What Would You Give for a Great Pair of Tits?’ sold in aid of breast cancer research, ‘Knockout’ to raise money for victims of domestic abuse and ‘Drug Dealer’ for the Keep a Child Alive organisation. Aschenbrand’s motivations can be understood in terms of a sexual micro-­ politics that seeks to rework the systems of sexual and economic signification. As she succinctly puts it, ‘[i]f Michael Moore made being politically involved hip, I wanted to make it sexy’: ‘I am on a mission to change t­hings – ­one pair of tits at a time’ (67, 109; emphasis in original). Patricia Mann (1994) explains that ‘sexual micro-­politics seeks a redistribution of the dimensions of sexual agency such that women will have as much right to feel, express, and act upon their sexual desires as men have’ (27). She argues that women have the capacity to be ‘self-­conscious social actors now rather than traditional passive objects of the patriarchal gaze’ (87). In her view, ‘[w]omen have no choice but to attempt to rewrite patriarchal codes of recognition’ by engaging in signifying practices and interactions that have historically played to ‘the expectations of the patriarchal gaze’ (87). However, Mann admits that while ‘participation in such risky signifying enterprises is increasingly a part of everyday life for women’, this is inevitably a ‘messy process’: ‘The hoary old patriarchal gaze tends to be at once so ambient and so distant that the intense local discourses of feminism have difficulty connecting with it’ (87–8). Sexual micro-­politics is thus inherently contradictory, simultaneously playing to stereotypes of women while hoping to rewrite and resignify the patriarchal codes which deny women the subject status and quality of recognition they aspire to. Ultimately, Aschenbrand’s sexualised and fashionable political stance can be said to raise as many questions as she suggests she solves, creating new fields of enquiry and interpretive ambiguities for contemporary critics to interrogate and debate.

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The questions raised by individual activists like Periel Aschenbrand have been taken up more broadly in times of recession by boob and bust political movements. From FEMEN’s ‘topless Jihad’ against sex tourism and religious institutions in the Ukraine to the now worldwide ‘SlutWalk’ movement to challenge sexual violence, sexualised macro-­politics have erupted in many different locations, reappropriating the topless female body as a means for political expression and activism. These bare-­chested protests employ the body as gendered political capital to unmask distinctively female crises in the context of an increasingly imbalanced global society in which ‘the impact of austerity has brought us to a tipping point where, while we have got used to steady progress towards greater equality, we’re now seeing a risk of slipping backwards’ (Bird qtd in Davies 2014). Founded in 2008 in Kyiv, Ukraine, FEMEN heighten the theatrical and performative dimensions of sexual body politics through carefully managed and staged topless protests which they brand ‘sextremism’. Echoing Aschenbrand’s body as manifesto tactics and message, activists argue that they are reclaiming their naked bodies and ‘defend[ing] with their breasts sexual and social equality in the world’ (qtd in O’Keefe 2014: 8). Comprised mostly of university-­educated women, FEMEN has received copious international media coverage, with French Magazine Madame Figaro, for example, ranking founding member Inna Shevchenko on their 2012 Women of the Year list. While the initial focus of the group was on sex tourism and the sex industry in Ukraine, recent protests have expanded their ­reach – ­addressing a range of issues from the wearing of the hijab to women’s exclusion from economic decision-­making – ­and courted media visibility, notably in the case of organised publicity stunts, such as outside the home of former International Monetary Fund head Dominique Strauss Kahn where they posed as sexy chambermaids. As has been noted by commentators, FEMEN protests are sexually overt and activists bare their breasts to capture the attention of the mainstream media (see O’Keefe 2014). FEMEN’s sextremist methods recover the naked female body as an instrument of ­patriarchy – ­where it is ‘used by man’s hands in fashion industry, in sex industry and in advertisements’ – and engage in a resignification of sexual stereotypes whereby ‘we are making a sign that it’s back now to its rightful owner, to women’ (Larssen qtd in O’Keefe 2014: 10). In addition, FEMEN also positions itself explicitly as an updated, sexy and smart version of feminism: as the movement’s co-­founder Shevchenko has stated, ‘classic feminism no longer works. It is, if you excuse me, impotent’ (qtd in Glass 2015). Unsurprisingly, feminist critics have reacted with ire to such pronouncements, highlighting the pitfalls of sextremist logic that

Micro/Macro-Politics and Enterprise Culture 251 employs the nude body as a means of protest. As Theresa O’Keefe (2014) has argued, ‘FEMEN need the male gaze; they explicitly seek to capture it. They take the commodification and objectification of women’s bodies and use it to sell a message’ (10). In this sense, FEMEN’s topless protesting needs to be differentiated from other forms of nude feminist ­activism – s­uch as Nigerian women’s naked demonstrations to challenge colonialism (see Ekine 2001) – that make subversive use of the naked female body to disrupt social taboos. By contrast, in the case of FEMEN, the naked breast is not taboo but an integral component of women’s sexualisation in many Western countries. Related to this, another point of contention has been the obvious hetero-­normative appeal of FEMEN activists who are typically white, young and in possession of a slim and trim body. The movement’s public face undoubtedly consists of a group of conventionally attractive women who self-­exhibit and flaunt their bodies instrumentally to attract media attention and desire. While on their website FEMEN activists describe themselves as ‘fearless and free Amazons’ who are ‘physically and psychologically ready to implement the humanitarian tasks of any degree of complexity and level of provocation’, they also champion a striking ‘pop star look’ (Zychowicz 2011: 218) – wearing little beyond make-­up and a vinok, the traditional Ukrainian garland of fl ­ owers – ­that is easily commodifiable and digestible for mainstream tastes and imagination. This aligns these macro-­political protests with sexual micro-­politics where individual women exert their consumer agency to achieve empowerment ‘by using their bodies as political tools within the parameters of a capitalist economy’ (Genz 2006: 345). Clearly, sexualised macro-­ politics demand careful investigation on a number of fronts, specifically in relation to norms of hetero-­corporeality and the performance of the sexy female body (see O’Keefe 2014); the mix of feminist language and rejection of the feminist label; the reclamation of patriarchal signifiers of abuse (like ‘slut’) that might be beyond redemption (see Dines and Murphy 2011); a facile and decontextualised universalism that associates nudity with liberation and insists that all women will be liberated by going topless (see Kapur 2012); the failure to account for the structural and intersectional nature of women’s oppression; the inherent limitations and exclusivity of these movements, for example, in terms of their predominant whiteness (see Nguyen 2013) and the celebritisation and branding of the political realm that requires political actors to be media savvy and eye-­catching. While, on the one hand, boob and bust politics such as these can be discussed as emblematic of a liberal sexism that interpellates women as critical sexual agents who, in order to be visible, need to be visually appealing (see Chapter 6), they nonetheless allow us to think beyond the intellectual vacuum of neoliberal individualism that cultivates political inertia and illiteracy. As Giroux (2014)

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allows, ‘it is precisely through the indeterminate nature of history that resistance becomes possible and politics refuses any guarantees and remains open’. Yet, at the same time, in these circumstances it might no longer be enough to expose and make visible the practices of (patriarchal) subjugation and victimisation, as visibility as a tool of (political) critique becomes questioned/questionable and might end up supplying the justification for new forms of inequality and exploitation. In a culture shaped by the need for intense and perpetual excitement, the spectacle of sexy politics thus acts as an apt barometer of the changing conditions of sex and sexual politics. Postfeminist Politics As we have seen, the notion of postfeminist politics poses a series of challenges on a number of fronts as it seeks to reconcile the seemingly irreconcilable by combining feminist concerns with female equality, neoliberal individualism and entrepreneurship, media-­friendly depictions of feminine/sexual empowerment, and consumerist as well as affective dimensions of capitalist brand culture. Postfeminist political agents take up politically ambivalent positions by tapping into a variety of often competing discourses that highlight the multiple agency and critical positions of individuals today. Sexual micro/ macro-­politics in particular undoubtedly commoditise and objectify female bodies; yet, at the same time, these contemporary uses of standardised sexual imagery also have the potential to ‘uproot’ feminine commodities and make them available for alternative meanings. In this sense, postfeminism’s political stance is unavoidably compromised, with criticality itself being implicated in the reproduction of those sexist/capitalist/neoliberal/patriarchal norms we seek to criticise (see Ahmed 2014). As Wendy Brown (2001) asks, ‘when fundamental premises of an order begin to erode, or simply begin to be exposed as fundamental premises, what reactive political formations ­emerge – ­and what anxieties, tensions, or binds do they carry?’ (3). As we have argued, our investment and implication in neoliberal consumer culture does not disqualify us from political action and relegate us to a stance of individualised impotence. Indeed, we would argue that in these deeply unsettling and precarious times, we cannot afford to turn our backs on politics and the internal conflicts and dynamics that structure contemporary political agency. The implications for postfeminist politics are that backlash and innovation, complicity and criticality can never fully be separated but they are ambiguously entwined. As Shelley Budgeon (2001) proposes, ‘[t]o think productively about the capacity for postfeminism as conducive to social change is to think of it as a “politics of becoming” ’ (22). At the same time, we are unwavering in our belief that the existence of postfeminist politics does not eradicate the continuing

Micro/Macro-Politics and Enterprise Culture 253 importance of other political forms and practices, nor does it undercut the basis of and need for a feminist resistance. Rather, it points to the mixed messages and conflicting demands of a neoliberal consumer culture that holds out the promise of freedom and the ‘good life’ while simultaneously working to undermine and withhold such affective, political and critical goods and fantasies. Recommended Further Reading Budgeon, Shelley. ‘Emergent Feminist (?) Identities: Young Women and The Practice of Micropolitics’. The European Journal of Women’s Studies 8.1 (2001): 7–28. Genz, Stéphanie. ‘Third Way/ve: The Politics of Postfeminism’. Feminist Theory 7.3 (2006): 333–53. Mann, Patricia S. Micro-Politics: Agency in a Postfeminist Era. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1994. O’Keefe, Theresa. ‘ “My Body is My Manifesto!” SlutWalk, FEMEN and Femmenist Protest’, Feminist Review 107 (2014): 1–19.

13 Postfeminist Brand Culture and Celebrity Authenticity

Overview In this chapter, we delve deeper into the affective relations that tie c­ onsumers/ subjects to postfeminist principles and modes of being/seeing/living and allow them to express and validate their sense of self within the context of postfeminist/neoliberal brand culture. We examine how postfeminism taps into emotion and affect to make a number of agency claims and promises of the ‘good life’. In this branded format, postfeminism relies on a gendered and mediated form of authenticity that acts as an affective commodity in a competitive neoliberal market. Our discussion takes into account that, as Naomi Klein noted in No Logo (2000), we now live in a ‘new branded world’ characterised by an unparalleled amalgamation of brand and culture in the course of which the connection between buyer and seller becomes more ‘invasive and profound’. This interest into affective economies and the cultural process of branding has focused on a plethora of self-­presentation techniques, such as self-­branding, that incorporate branding and advertising practices into the construction of identity as a product to be consumed by others (see Hearn 2008; Banet-­Weiser 2012). Self-­branding can clearly be located within enterprise discourse that encourages individuals to engage in continuous self-­work and ‘immaterial’ emotional labour to maintain and upgrade their entrepreneurial capital. We will focus on the gendered dimensions of such labour that gives rise to distinctly r­egulated – ­entrepreneurial, classed/racialised and s­exualised – ­formations of feminine identity. The chapter will conclude with a case study on the reality television series Keeping Up with the Kardashians (2007–).

Postfeminist Brand Culture and Celebrity Authenticity 255 Self-­B randing and Authenticity Much scholarship on postfeminist subjectivity has focused on the breakdown of d­ichotomies – f­eminism/femininity; subject/object; complicity/ critique; false/enlightened consciousness, emancipation/­empowerment – ­to discuss the complex identity positions that become available in the context of neoliberal modes of governmentality that construct the self as both freely choosing and self-­regulating. Critics have struggled to reconcile the creative and entrepreneurial dimensions of postfeminist culture with its confining and disciplinary aspects, giving rise to a number of Foucaultian- and Butlerian-­ inspired concepts that seek to capture the postfeminist dialectic of agency and control, self-­actualisation and normalisation. Contemporary neologisms such as postfemininity and sexual subjectivation point towards a new subjective space that offers various degrees of freedom and boundedness to postfeminist, neoliberal agents (see Genz 2009b; Gill 2007). The question of how postfeminism engages subjects in the double binds of discipline and choice is now opening up new modes of enquiry that provide forays into what one might call the interior dimensions or ‘affective’ core of postfeminism that lodges it deep within the individual’s psyche. Here, we seek to understand how postfeminism speaks to us and might ‘actually exist’ affectively in the relationships of the individual to him/herself as well as others. In this sense, we want to attribute, what Anderson (2015) labels, an ‘affective life’ to postfeminism that impacts on the ‘ways in which things become significant and relations are lived’ (20). This focus on affect also allows us to better understand the internal tensions and contradictions within postfeminism as well as its generativity and mutability whereby different affects can coexist and blur, such as the promise of a ‘good life’ – defined by choice, empowerment, success, creativity, can-­do attitude and so ­on – ­alongside the disenchantment and fraying of such fantasies, particularly apparent in recessionary times. Broadly speaking, this line of reasoning is influenced by sociological and philosophical theories of affect that examine the cultural dimensions of capitalism and the intrusion of the private into the public sphere, what Lauren Berlant (1997) refers to as the ‘intimate public sphere’ (4). This is also linked to Sara Ahmed’s (2004) work on ‘affective economies’ that examines how ‘emotions involve subjects and objects’ in ‘social and material, as well as psychic’ ways (121): ‘rather than seeing emotions as psychological dispositions, we need to consider how they work . . . to mediate the relationship between the psychic and the social, and between the individual and the collective’ (119). Here, ‘emotions work as a form of capital’ and ‘circulate and are distributed across a social as well as psychic field’ (120). The notion of affect as economy is related more directly to the ascendency of emotional branding in

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contemporary media (see Jenkins 2006) and the ‘transformation of culture of everyday living into brand culture’ (Banet-­Weiser 2012: 5). As Naomi Klein examined in her influential No Logo (2000), there has been a shift in modern consumer culture that has altered the relations between producer and consumer, seller and buyer: What is changing was the idea of w ­ hat – i­ n both advertising and b­ randing –w ­ as being sold. The old paradigm had it that all marketing was selling a product. In the new model, however, the product always takes a back seat to the real product, the brand, and the selling of the brand acquired an extra component that can only be described as spiritual. . . . The products that will flourish in the future will be the ones presented not as ‘commodities’ but as concepts: the brand as experience, as lifestyle. (21) In effect, brands are ‘intimately entangled with our culture and our identities’, with the result that ‘we have never been as “branded” as we are today’ (335). Sarah Banet-­Weiser (2012) confirms that, in the contemporary era, ‘brands are about culture as much as they are about economics’ in the sense that a brand’s value extends ‘beyond a tangible product’ (4). Accordingly, we need to move away from defining branding in purely economic terms as a marketing strategy and take into account the ‘affective relational’ quality of brands that is maintained by ‘personal ­narratives – ­lifestyle, identity, empowerment’ (Banet-­Weiser and Lapsabsky 2008: 1249). In this context, branding involves the exchange of immaterial ­ goods – ­ feelings, affects, v­alues – a­nd often impacts on individuals’ sense of self and social belonging. In Banet-­Weiser’s (2012) words, ‘brands become the setting around which individuals weave their own stories, where individuals position themselves as the central character in the narrative of the brand’ (4). This process is interiorised in the form of self-­branding that crafts and sells identity as commodity and instructs people to define themselves not only through brands but as brands themselves. As Alice Marwick (2013) has discussed, self-­branding involves the creation and presentation of an ‘edited self’ which requires emotional, immaterial labour to successfully pursue. Derived from the Marxist concept of ‘living labour’, the notion of immaterial labour addresses individuals as primarily workers, not only in the sense that they work for someone else. As Cova and Dalli (2009) explain, [Individuals] work in the sense that they actually build the substance and meaning of their daily lives, regardless of their status as employees, self-­ employed persons, unemployed ones, etc. According to this perspective, the most intimate and essential dimension of human beings is that of their work, in the sense of producing some sort of value for themselves and society. (328)

Postfeminist Brand Culture and Celebrity Authenticity 257 Here, the chief capital of the individual resides within the self and needs to be unearthed through persistent self-­work and immaterial labour that encompasses ‘affective elements’ and produces ‘socioeconomic added value’ (329). In this sense, self-­branding can also be discussed as an extension of enterprise ­discourse – ­and thus a key requirement of neoliberal ­citizenship – ­that involves the creation of an updated/upgraded self, capable of optimising the individual’s quality of life and functionality in the marketplace. Self-­ branding has become increasingly indispensable and ubiquitous in times of recession where the need to present a self-­as-­capital is key to economic survival. This is also related to the increase and spread of social media technologies like blogs and Twitter that allow for the wide-­scale and affordable distribution of edited forms of self-­presentation that are crafted to boost popularity and gain status (see Marwick 2013). These online spaces allow individuals to create a narrative of the self using the logic and strategies of consumer culture. Of course, the promotional ethos of self-­branding is not an invention of social media genres but has appeared in corporate marketing literature (see Hearn 2008) and also been narrativised by reality television where the demotic turn (see Turner 2004) presents fame as available to ordinary persons. In these on- and offline sites, self-­branding is undertaken by both elite and ordinary people, with material/economic goals of self-­promotion, profit and visibility inextricably entangled with individual/affective aims of self-­ reflexivity/care, creativity and authenticity. Indeed, as Banet-­ Weiser (2012) reminds us, the ‘construction of the self-­brand necessarily acknowledges the individual’s role as the producer of her [sic] individual life narrative’ (60). One implication of this is that the ‘authentic’ and ‘commodity self’ are now progressively intertwined and that such blurring is ‘more expected and tolerated’ than ever before (13). Importantly, authenticity has to be reconceived in these circumstances as an integral component of brand culture. While classic arguments of Adorno and Horkheimer, for example, were invariably sceptical of the culture industry producing authentic products of any kind, interpretivist and pragmatic approaches have adopted a more multidimensional and performative stance that highlights the central role of authenticity seeking in everyday consumer practice (see Arnoult and Price 2000; Rose and Wood 2005; Beverland and Farrelly 2010). There is widespread agreement in these quarters that authenticity is a socially constructed phenomenon that shifts across time and space. While in marketing and consumption theories, authenticity has been recognised as a ‘new consumer sensibility’ (see Pine and Gilmore 1999) – endowing products with a kind of ‘commercial story telling’ that generates emotional content and desire (Lewis and Bridger 2000: 39) – recent studies also have demonstrated how consumers find authenticity in seemingly fake or contrived

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objects. Rose and Wood’s 2005 study into reality television, for example, reveals how viewers are able to locate authentic ­elements – ­what they consider to be ‘genuine’ or ‘true’ – in consumption experiences that others may consider inauthentic or false. Here, the consumer is identified as a skilled and creative producer of authenticity, adept at transforming the ontologically fake (objects, brands, events) into the phenomenologically real. Cultural critics as well now readily accept that authenticity can be branded and that authentic and commercial interests can be seen as potentially consistent. As Banet-­ Weiser notes in Authentic TM (2012), the cultural practices of self-­branding demand individual labour and create personal identity that is experienced as ‘authentic’ – in short, ‘to truly understand and experience the “authentic” self is to brand this self’ (61). In this context, authenticity is discussed in connection with entrepreneurial self-­concepts – ­encouraged, for example, in blogging ­communities – ­that set up a mutable set of affective relations between individuals, audiences and commodities. In other words, authenticity links individual selfhood to neoliberal capitalism and requires consistent labour to achieve and maintain its own authentic capital. This establishes a cyclical process whereby authenticity is used not only to sell the (self-)brand but also to verify and validate it. Within the discourse of self-­branding, each individual is seen to possess an ‘authentic’ set of talents, passions and skills that can be discovered through self-­work and valorised by exposing and publicising them to others (see Marwick 2013). In effect, ‘feedback is crucial to creating a self-­brand; in order to sell oneself in a particular way, there must be a conscious recognition of the fact that other users are “buying” ’ (Banet-­Weiser 2011: 18). This is especially evident on social media where the ‘authentic’ self-­brand needs to meet the demands of an online audience and is constantly monitored, assessed, judged and valued. This implies a fundamental shift from ‘historical liberal values’ where ‘being true to the self is solely an internal process’ to an ‘outer-­directed self-­presentation’ where in order to be ‘authentic to yourself, one must first be authentic to others’ (Banet-­Weiser 2012: 80). What this also means is that, in order to turn the ‘authentic’ self into ‘authentic’ capital, the process of self-­branding needs to be legible within the structures and confines of a neoliberal economy that values and normalises particular modes of selfhood. In this sense, immaterial, ‘authentic’ labour is deeply rooted in the materiality and visibility of brand culture where ‘authenticity is the benchmark against which all brands are now judged’ (qtd in Boyle 2004: 26). While some critics have been quick to dismiss this kind of authenticity in consumption as the ultimate marketing position that sells brands at the level of self-­image and i­dentity – o ­ r, as Potter (2013) puts it, a ‘hoax’ that will never deliver (13) – research into consumer agency and neoliberal subjectivity also indicates that this is not simply the

Postfeminist Brand Culture and Celebrity Authenticity 259 fabrication of consumption-­inducing authenticity by profit-­seekers (see Rose and Wood 2005; Beverland and Farrelly 2010). Rather, this mediated, commodified authenticity is built into the structure of neoliberal media economies that construct the subject as self-­enterprising, self-­authenticating and narrativising. Authenticity labour then can be discussed as an integral element of the neoliberal reflexive ‘project of the self’ whereby the processes of authenticating/branding the self are framed by the conceptual paradigms of enterprise culture (e.g. self-­production, self-­determination, self-­responsibilisation; empowerment, choice etc.). Our focus in this chapter is on the gendered dimensions of such labour that emerge in the context of postfeminist/neoliberal brand culture where this kind of authentic self-­work intersects with gender identity and celebrity media and gives rise to distinctly ­regulated – e­ntrepreneurial, classed/ racialised and ­sexualised – ­formations of feminine identity. Here, we want to investigate how postfeminism as a gendered brand space taps into emotion and affect as crucial elements in the construction, promotion and consumption of female subjectivity. If, as we have noted, brands can be seen as a ‘story’ told to consumers and the background against which individuals create their own narratives, then postfeminism can certainly be described as a branded environment weaving stories of female empowerment to neoliberal principles of entrepreneurship and self-­care. Trading in commodifiable as well as affective values – ‘choice’, ‘fun’, ‘independence’, ‘confidence’, ‘happiness’ and so ­on – ­postfeminism is, of course, ‘eminently saleable and brandable’ (Genz 2015b: 547). For example, postfeminism has been discussed as a particularly ‘rich context’ for girl entrepreneurs, giving rise to a ‘moral framework, where each of us has a duty to ourselves to cultivate a self-­brand’ (Banet-­Weiser 2012: 56). Below, we want to parse out the intricacies and entanglements of this postfeminist self-­brand in the context of celebrity culture that is a key repository of authentic capital. We suggest that the affective and commercial appeal of postfeminist celebrity culture depends on the commodification and gendering of authenticity whereby the currency of ‘realness’ is harnessed to neoliberal and postfeminist expressions of self-­branding, entrepreneurship and feminine agency. Here, authenticity is incorporated into both a postfeminist ethos of feminine agency and sexual subjecthood as well as a market ideology based around mediated identity and celebrity (extra)ordinariness. Of course, celebrity has long been recognised as a means of self-­validation in contemporary society and a key operational site in the production and management of authenticity (see Dyer 1979). In contemporary society, ‘star agency’, as Marshall (1997) puts it, is increasingly reduced to ‘privatized, psychologized representation of activity and transformation’ (244). The focus on the private/ personal realm is a key attribute of the discursive regime of celebrity and

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a central factor framing the process of celebrification. In the course of this crossing of the public and private worlds, Western media cultures have been reinterpreted in personal terms, as seen through the eyes of celebrities. Here, audiences are invited to share in celebrities’ personal experiences and feelings and access those parts of their lives normally labelled ‘private’. For this staging of intimacy to be carried out successfully, the public persona of the celebrity needs to project an aura of authenticity and perform a ‘balancing act’ convincing the audience that they are like them while also maintaining an air of being special (Cashmore 2006: 131). However, given the often differing demands of audiences and the diverse industrial interests of celebrity culture, celebrities’ attempts to portray their ‘real’ self are regularly in competition with other media outlets that promise to provide an even greater, more ‘truthful’ insight into a celebrity’s private ­life – ­with celebrity magazines and gossip blogs as key loci for such claims. These frequently unsanctioned intrusions into a celebrity’s ­privacy – ­fuelled by a steady supply of paparazzi ­pictures – ­not only jeopardise the celebrity’s construction of ‘realness’ but also raise interesting points about the construction and stratification of authenticity. The possibility of simultaneous and potentially incongruous claims of a­uthenticity – m ­ ade by celebrities, audiences as well as other media ­institutions – ­exposes a hierarchy of meaning and value in the production and branding of the authentic whereby different branders might be vying for their take on authenticity and encourage various, potentially clashing, affective connections between consumers and brand. Rather than unmasking the manipulation and marketing behind these performances of the ­self – ­or exposing, in Gamson’s (1994) words, ‘yesterday’s markers of sincerity and authenticity [as] today’s signs of hype and artifice’ (144) – we want to focus on the authenticating strategies that are used to validate consumptive practices and experiences in the context of neoliberal/ postfeminist brand culture. To this end, authenticity is conceived within the contours of the (celebrity) brand and incorporated into a general entrepreneurial attitude (adopted by neoliberal capitalism) and a postfeminist ethos of feminine achievement and sexual subjecthood. We propose that this kind of gendered commodified authenticity might have a pivotal role to play in the understanding of postfeminist agency and self(-branding), both in relationship to the subjects that postfeminist discourses create and the consumers of those discourses. This points towards a broader cultural dynamic that involves the normalisation of gendered (self-)branding techniques whereby women in particular (celebrity and otherwise) integrate market logic into reflexive and lucrative performances of the feminine self within the limiting script of a neoliberal consumer culture circumscribed by specific gender, race, class and sexual norms.

Postfeminist Brand Culture and Celebrity Authenticity 261 Case Study: Keeping up with the Kardashians ( 2007 –) First broadcast in 2007 on the E! Entertainment channel, Keeping Up with the Kardashians has aired over twelve seasons, chronicling the notoriously public domestic and love lives of the Kardashian clan. Spearheaded by daughter Kim Kardashian-­West and matriarch/‘momager’ Kris Jenner, the show has captured the viewership of young women predominantly (see Scheiner McCain 2014) and given rise to a multimillion, cross-­platform brand that harnesses the authentic capital of the self-­as-­commodity and utilises feminine labour to create and market a multilayered celebrity product that is simultaneously regulated and exclusionary in its construction of hypersexualised, heteronormative and racialised bodies as well as performed and consumed as ‘real’ and attainable for others to imitate. Initially known for its powerful ­patriarchs – ­O. J. Simpson defence lawyer Robert Kardashian and Olympic decathlete Bruce/Caitlyn ­Jenner – t­he Kardashian self-­brand is now female-­oriented/dominated and has become a ubiquitous media presence, most notably on social networking ­sites – F ­ acebook, Instagram, Twitter and, more recently, ­Snapchat – ­where the Kardashian sisters trade personal information and revealing ‘selfies’ to an ever-­increasing online audience, with Kim currently in the lead with almost 90 million Instagram and 50 million Twitter followers. As Kim herself comments on the power of social media to encourage celebrity-­fan interaction and build affective relations with consumers: ‘I really do believe I am a brand for my fans . . . Twitter is the most amazing focus group out there’ (qtd in Wilson 1). Jennifer Lueck (2005) explains how social media rewards audiences by providing a constant stream of information about celebrities and generating interactive posts that position the celebrity as an ‘imaginary friend, who doesn’t talk about brands to conduct advertising, but to comment on a luxurious lifestyle and to give advice on how to create this lifestyle with the use of brands’ (103). Here, endorsements are seamlessly integrated and embedded into the self-­brand via personal stories and affective appeals that foster ‘valuable’ connections between and among female consumers and celebrities that can be exploited financially as well as emotionally. On top of a raft of reality-­ television spin-­off series (e.g. Kourtney and Khloé Take Miami [2009, 2010]; Kourtney and Kim Take New York [2011, 2012]; Kourtney and Kim Take Miami [2009, 2010, 2013], Khloé & Lamar [2011, 2012]), the Kardashian empire now encompasses a whole range of, mostly beauty-­related, products: fashion boutiques, fitness videos, fragrances, skin care, self-­tanner, makeup lines and so on. It also includes endorsements of jewellery, shoes, candles, perfumes, Nivea skin creams and other products similarly catered to (female) body discipline and self-­improvement, most notably the Quicktrim line of diet pills as well as a ‘waist cincher’, a twenty-­first-­century version of the corset.

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In line with other celebrity brands, particularly those that have emerged from reality-­television genres, the Kardashian brand constructs a lifestyle for consumers and offers ways of ‘being’ beyond mere purchasing by constructing ‘whole environments of meaning’ (Banet-­Weiser and Lapsabsky 2008: 1249). In particular, the exchange between consumer and brand is framed by personal narratives and recourse to a discourse of authenticity that creates affective bonds between product, producer and purchaser. One of the main authenticating strategies that the Kardashian brand employs in the production of self-­disclosure draws on celebrity confessionalism and the now well-­ established genre of private exposé of a celebrity-­being-­ordinary (see Tolson 2001). The Kardashian clan skilfully feeds consumer desire for authenticity by exhibiting an overt willingness to grant audiences a supposedly unfiltered glimpse of deeply private moments, such as the on-­camera birth of Kardashian offspring Mason or Kim’s visit to a fertility doctor. As Tolson points out, for a celebrity, ‘performing-­as-­ordinary’ for the camera is not necessarily perceived as acting but as a new kind of authenticity that is part of a self-­conscious personal project (452). This type of authenticity can be interpreted in terms of a quest for an ‘authentic mediated identity’, a credible public persona that commercially exploits the ideology of ‘being yourself’ while fostering emotive bonds with consumers (456). As Paper Magazine journalist Amanda Fortini (2014) confirms in an interview with Kim Kardashian, ‘she’s not performing, that ­is – a­t least not visibly. She is being. And being is her act. Her appeal derives from her uncanny consistency as does that of her show.’ Brand-­savvy audiences are thus able to put aside their apprehensions about media fabrications and actively authenticate the Kardashian self-­brand as ‘genuine’, creating what Deery (2015) terms an ‘affective reality’. This is also related to a broader context of ‘confessional culture’ that ‘depends on the exposure of the self, and the normalization of this culture’ in contemporary neoliberal society (Banet-­Weiser 2012: 77). Here, everyday mundane ­practices – ­which in the case of celebrities include the personal experience of fame and coping with its ­pressures – ­are turned into items of consumption, underlining the importance of individual identity as a lucrative self-­project and entertainment for others. Female celebrities in particular have taken up the work of being a ‘private’ self which reinforces the idea that the production of closeness and the public display of once-­private feelings are intrinsically gendered activities, linking the personal to the conception of female celebrity (see Holmes 2006; Geraghty 2000). This gendered authenticity is firmly rooted in the ‘real’ bodies of the Kardashian women who are all famed for their curvaceous exterior that positions them as ‘authentic’ in opposition to other, unnaturally ‘skinny’ female celebrities. Kim Kardashian in particular has become renowned for flaunting

Postfeminist Brand Culture and Celebrity Authenticity 263 her curves, most notably in a naked mirror ‘selfie’ posted on Instagram with the caption ‘When you’re like I have nothing to wear LOL’. As Murray (2015) has discussed, the selfie has become ‘a powerful means for self-­expression, encouraging its makers to share the most intimate and private moments of their ­lives – a­ s well as engage in a form of creative self-­fashioning’ (490). Faced with a widespread media backlash that criticised Kardashian’s blatant use of female nudity to market her self-­brand, she insisted that her Instagram picture was an act of sexual ‘empowerment’ and bodily authenticity, baring her physical imperfections to her online audience: ‘I am empowered by feeling comfortable in my skin. I am empowered by showing the world my flaws and not being afraid of what anyone is going to say about me’ (see Roth 2016). This instance can clearly be read through a postfeminist lens of sexual subjectivation that celebrates the ‘sexy’ female body as a means of liberation and emancipation (see Chapter 5). At the same time, Kardashian’s voluptuous physique also becomes a marker of her ‘real’ ethnic identity whereby her Armenian heritage is used to authenticate her body. As Sastre (2014) notes, Kardashian’s ‘butt’ in particular has been the focus of media speculation and rumours surrounding the authenticity of her figure, specifically persistent claims that her shapely posterior is the result of implants. Kardashian has refuted these accusations by posting an X-­ray image of her rear on the social media platform Twitter, accompanied by the caption ‘nothing like a good old Armenian ass to get your day going!’. Here authenticity is verified not only by the transparent physicality exposed in the X-­ray but it is also positioned along racial lines that marks Kardashian’s body as exotic and ‘non-­white’. In effect, Kardashian can be placed in a ‘history of other marginalised bodies’ that allows her strategic access to an ‘ “authentic” sphere of blackness’ that locates a ‘big rear [as] . . . a space on to which to project . . . the hedonism a white female body is consistently protected from’ (Sastre 131, 125, 129). Despite their much-­touted ‘real’ curves, the Kardashians’ corporeality is also tightly regulated/disciplined and, as such, representative of a wider neoliberal/entrepreneurial attitude towards femininity that encourages enterprising women to exploit and market their ‘assets’ through self-­work. The sisters constantly monitor their appearance and encourage one other to maintain their shape by engaging in rigorous workout ­routines – ­which, as Kim revealed on social media, includes ‘running 4 miles, planks, push ups, 1000 jump ropes and abs’ – and costly beauty regimes that audiences are encouraged to ‘keep up with’ (reputedly $2000 daily skincare; cellulite treatment; laser ultrasound, etc.) (see Lankston 2016). As Kris Jenner comments on her daughter’s body in the first episode of the show, ‘[Kim] has a little junk in the trunk’ and therefore should do ‘a little cardio’. This focus on feminine labour has intensified since some of the Kardashian sisters have become mothers and

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they have adopted the media-­friendly, aspirational persona of the ‘yummy mummy’ – common in neoliberal postfeminist culture as a modern representation of motherhood (see Baker 2009) – to present the image of a well-­ groomed and high-­consuming mother (see McRobbie 2006). As McRobbie notes, this postfeminist trope is a seductive but misleading redefinition of motherhood because ‘maternity is . . . fully incorporated into the language of self-­perfectability’ (23) and thus integrated into neoliberal modes of self-­ governance that stress ceaseless self-­care and self-­improvement. In the case of the Kardashians, this feminine self-­ work also includes recourse to body modification and plastic surgery, resulting in a manufactured and manicured ‘caricature of femininity and the female ­form – ­lengthy hair extensions, hourglass figures exaggerated through tight, fashionable designer clothing, [and] sky-­high heels’ (Scheiner McCain 2014: 51). In effect, all of the Kardashian women have had ‘work’ d­ one – ­from Kourtney’s admission that she has had breast implants, mother Kris’s ‘necklift’ in order to avoid it looking ‘like leather’ (‘Kim’s Fairytale Wedding, Part 1’) to youngster Kylie’s lip injections that caused an online furore with fans desperately trying to imitate the new look and then subsequently generating another profitable Kardashian enterprise in the shape of makeup ‘lip kits’ that were sold out in minutes after being released (see D’Addario 2015). This brand of blatantly ‘fake’ femininity is flaunted and staged in an exhibitionistic fashion throughout the on- and offline Kardashian empire and, somewhat paradoxically, is portrayed as a legitimate and even ‘natural’ solution to bodily anxieties. For instance, after altering her appearance in an irrefutably ‘unnatural’ manner, Kylie is told by her older sisters that she has to own up to the surgical procedure and prove to her fans that she has nothing to hide: ‘Having older sisters with some of the same insecurities as me helps me a lot and makes me feel like it’s okay’ (‘Lip Service’). This not only normalises gendered forms of body-­ discipline but it also authenticates such technologies of femininity in terms of reflexive entrepreneurship and unreflective ordinariness that allows audiences to interpret this transparent fakery as ‘real’ and ‘genuine’. In this sense, the creation of a surgically enhanced feminine body can be presented as an ‘authentic’ expression of a branded self, consistent with a neoliberal focus on self-­actualisation. This celebrity femininity is inherently artificial and fabricated and yet, despite and because of this, it can be marketed as part of a discourse of commodified authenticity that female consumers can pursue and emulate through comparable self-­work. The performativity of feminine fakery is thus offered as a marker of affective resonance with the audience who can engage in similar self-­branding practices and gendered forms of labour. This creates what Frith et al. (2010) term a ‘synthetic sisterhood’, a ‘close-­knit, intimate community of women with shared interests and

Postfeminist Brand Culture and Celebrity Authenticity 265 concerns, and particular ways of interacting and being characterized by friendship and care’ (479). Of course, ‘sisterhood’ is at the heart of the Kardashian ­brand – ­as Khloé puts it, ‘we are sisters by blood, best friends by choice. I don’t know how I would live my life without my family. It’s the best support system in the world . . . we are a united force’ (‘Kardashians Return with Power’). As well as being presented in private family moments, the Kardashian sisterhood is also fundamentally entrepreneurial and the driving force behind their joint business ventures. Promoting a postfeminist discourse of ‘empowered beauty’ (see Lazar 2011), the Kardashians’ project of the self(-brand) adopts a stance of collective individualism and entrepreneurship whereby each sister exhibits ‘similar qualities and follow[s] the family directive: all must participate in various media, provocatively exposing themselves’ (Scheiner McClain 2014: 37). Here, the neoliberal individualised directive to self-­care/ brand is subsumed into a close-knit community of branded ­sisterhood – ­itself a fundamental aspect of second-­wave ­feminism – ­that sets up an affective, intimate bond with consumers who are encouraged to unite through a common goal to ‘embody beauty, style and fashion in a manner that is desirable’ (www. kardashianbeauty.eu). This points towards the deeply normative and limiting scripts of postfeminist brand culture that restrict ‘success’ and ‘authenticity’ to those who can display and perform gender/class/race in highly specific ways. While the mastery of feminine labour promises empowerment and creativity, the practice of this self-­branding exercise nonetheless amounts to a self-­disciplining regime that constructs a tightly ­regulated – ­hyper-­stylised, heteronormative, ­consumerist – ­feminine body. As Banet-­Weiser (2012) points out, there are clearly ‘limits to what kind of self is brandable’ and ‘hotness’ might not be ‘empowering for all young women, who might not have the same kind of access to their own bodily property’ (85). The spectacle of female self-­discipline that the Kardashians offer both works with and denies the entrepreneurial logic that frames their ­brand – ­as putting women in charge of their own feminine self-­ branding is likely to engender positive perceptions of proficiency and self-­care while at the same time recreating a thoroughly classed, sexed and commodified female norm. Reinforcing the fact that celebrity is restricted to those who can perform femininity in highly specific ways, the Kardashian self-­brand reinstalls gendered stereotypes of female beauty and sexuality while redefining these limiting images around a capitalist entitlement to consume and neoliberal imperatives to improve and transform the self. Targeting postfeminism’s archetypal ‘have it all’ woman, the Kardashian brand also points towards new modes of work linked to celebrity/commodity authenticity that have become increasingly valuable in a world where the mass production and consumption of objects causes consumers to question the

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plausibility of that value. The entrepreneurship, artifice and labour that underlie the Kardashians’ commodified feminine authenticity allow consumers to congregate around the brand and take on an active role in the production of consumption. Despite the distinctly individualist and exclusive nature of celebrity femininity, the sisters’ collective self-­brand provides consumers with a model of feminine identity that can be bought and imitated while being owned and experienced as ‘authentic’. In this instance, authenticity acquires a range of different meanings, being at once an indicator of individual agency, communal/sisterly solidarity and neoliberal/postfeminist entrepreneurship while also being linked to consumerist/heteronormative ideologies and postmodern visuality that privileges surface over interiority. Here, we need to be mindful of the tensions inherent in brand cultures between ‘empowering oneself as a producer’ and inhabiting this empowered position within the terms set up by broader commercial culture (see Banet-­Weiser 2012: 70). Moreover, we also need to take into account the affective resonances and ­bonds – ­which in Brenda Weber’s words (2014), can result in equal parts ‘disgust and delight’ (29) – which allow postfeminism to get ‘under the skin’ of contemporary subjects while tying them more closely to neoliberal values and normative gender, race and class ideals. Recommended Further Reading Banet-­Weiser, Sarah. Authentic TM: The Politics of Ambivalence in a Brand Culture. New York: New York University Press, 2012. Genz, Stéphanie. ‘My Job is Me: Postfeminist Celebrity Culture and the Gendering of Authenticity’. Feminist Media Studies 15:4 (2015): 545–61. Sastre, Alexandra. ‘Hottentot in the Age of Reality TV: Sexuality, Race, and Kim Kardashian’s Visible Body’. Celebrity Studies 5:1–2 (2014): 123–37. Scheiner McCain, Amanda. Keeping Up the Kardashian Brand: Celebrity, Materialism, and Sexuality. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2014.

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Index

activism, 3, 15, 36, 47, 56, 57, 67, 68, 73, 110, 125, 131, 141, 227, 228, 230, 232, 235, 238, 239, 244, 246, 248, 250, 251 affect, 8, 12, 16–20, 23, 28, 34, 52–7, 65–7, 70, 74–6, 88, 100–1, 103, 114–15, 130–1, 135–6, 210, 238–9, 241, 244, 252–66 agency, 7, 9, 14, 17, 20–3, 31–4, 37, 50–2, 56, 60, 66–9, 76, 96–7, 102, 104, 108, 117, 119, 121–5, 133, 140, 148, 151, 153, 163, 165, 167, 169–71, 174, 175, 177, 184, 196, 233, 237, 239–42, 245–9, 251–2, 254–5, 258–60, 266 Ahmed, Sara, 17–18, 22, 65, 75, 155, 158, 164, 255 Alien, 216, 224 Ally McBeal, 106, 116–17, 140 anti-feminism see feminism appropriation, 28, 37, 41, 57, 79, 97, 121, 126, 202 Aschenbrand, Periel, 238, 247–50 austerity, 2, 7–11, 88, 99–101, 103, 104, 200, 247, 250 austerity chic, 11, 94, 102, 104 austerity-nostalgia, 12, 15, 99–104 authenticity, 16–22, 53–4, 56–7, 65, 129, 130, 135, 137, 185, 196, 254, 257–66 Baby Boom, 88, 96–7 backlash, 5, 15, 23, 26, 28, 29, 32, 34–5, 37, 41, 49, 64–6, 74, 87–104, 106, 112, 117, 126, 148, 199, 200, 203, 207–8,

210–12, 216, 220, 231–3, 237–8, 252, 263 Banet-Weiser, Sarah, 11, 13, 19, 20, 21, 33, 50, 53–4, 56, 57, 68, 69, 232, 256, 257, 258, 265 Baudrillard, Jean, 171, 211, 223 Bauman, Zygmunt, 17, 66, 71, 134, 244 Beckham, David, 24, 128, 199, 206–8 Berlant, Lauren, 7–8, 65, 100, 255 Beyoncé, 4, 49 Bitch magazine, 144–5 blogging, 10, 18–19, 94, 257, 258, 260 Bly, Robert, 203, 214 boob and bust politics, 238, 245, 247, 250, 251 Boys Don’t Cry, 188, 193–4 bra-burner, 37, 47, 48, 120, 193 brand culture, 19–21, 23, 28, 30, 33, 34, 50, 52–7, 62, 66, 69, 76, 130, 137, 197, 233, 252, 254–66; see also self-branding Bridget Jones’s Diary, 7, 9, 23, 43, 87, 91–2, 119, 128–30, 132–4 Buffy the Vampire Slayer, 227, 233–6 BUST magazine, 144–5 Butler, Judith, 75, 179, 181, 187–90, 214, 222 can-do girl, 8, 14, 21, 65, 120, 122–3 celebrity, 3, 21, 35, 56, 114, 140, 149, 152, 197, 254, 259–66 chick lit, 29, 119, 128–34, 140 consciousness-raising, 46, 47, 79n18, 89, 110, 124, 130, 131, 141, 147, 157, 164, 239

296 consumer culture, 9–12, 23–5, 30, 32, 34, 43, 50–2, 69, 101, 104, 121, 123, 131, 148, 191, 204–5, 231–2, 245, 252–3, 256–7, 260 cosmetic surgery, 122, 179–80, 221–2 cyberfeminism see feminism cyborg, 33, 185, 216–22 Daly, Mary, 49, 120 Denfeld, Rene, 38–9, 105, 112–13 Desperate Housewives, 88, 97–9, 149 do-me feminism see feminism domesticity, 9, 12, 14, 88, 90, 91, 93–7, 99, 102, 104, 191 drag, 188–9, 195 Dworkin, Andrea, 139, 141–2 enterprise culture, 20, 71, 114, 237, 242–53, 259 Extreme Makeover, 221 Failure to Launch, 199, 212–15 Faludi, Susan, 41, 49, 87, 90–7, 211 Fatal Attraction, 87, 92–3 female masculinity, 188, 194 FEMEN, 15, 25, 238, 250 femininity, 3, 5, 9, 11, 12, 14–15, 20–1, 33, 37, 46, 47–9, 76, 90–7, 117, 119–26, 130–1, 134, 135, 140, 141, 144–5, 148, 151, 153, 163, 173, 179–80, 184–6, 188–9, 193, 195, 207, 217, 220–2, 224–6, 231, 234–6, 242, 248, 255, 263–4, 266 feminism, 2–4, 15–16, 21, 25–52, 54–61, 67–71, 76, 87–91, 94–7, 99, 105, 107–17, 120–7, 144–6, 158–9, 164, 198, 204–5, 209, 215, 220, 222, 224, 229, 232, 235, 238–9, 240, 246, 247, 250 anti-feminism, 28, 34, 37 branded feminism, 54–5 corporate feminism, 114–15 cyberfeminism, 216–19 do-me feminism, 21, 25, 56, 106, 139–46, 241 first-wave feminism, 35–6, 38, 77n7, 88, 228 hip-hop feminism, 167, 183–5, 208 neoliberal feminism, 15–16, 30, 35, 40, 54–5, 56, 65, 71, 114–17 new feminism, 32, 105–9, 112, 151, 233, 247 popular feminism, 30, 44–52 postcolonial feminism, 181 postmodern feminism, 35, 42, 57–64, 166–86, 233

Postfeminism power feminism, 35, 71, 104–6, 109–14, 119, 139 second-wave feminism, 26, 35–52, 59–60, 68–70, 73, 77n8, 88–90, 98, 105, 107–8, 110–13, 119, 120, 123–6, 130–1, 133, 141, 143, 147, 148, 155, 157, 164–5, 182, 203, 210, 212, 227–32, 235, 237–42, 246–7, 265 sex-positive feminism, 141–3, 163 third-wave feminism, 23, 35, 40, 69, 84n38, 124–5, 144, 227–36 victim feminism, 39, 105–6, 109–14, 229–31 waves, 35–43, 68, 88–9, 145, 229, 231–2 FHM, 150 Fielding, Helen, 7, 23, 128–33 Fight Club, 199, 211–12 Firestone, Shulamith, 143 first-wave feminism see feminism Fordism, 198, 201 Foucault, Michel, 53, 85n44, 160, 221, 222, 243, 255 Friedan, Betty, 49, 76n2, 80n20, 88–9, 98, 99, 116 Game of Thrones, 16, 155, 156, 159, 161–5 Giddens, Anthony, 108, 237, 241–2, 246–7 Gill, Rosalind, 3, 4, 5, 15, 24, 28, 45, 54, 55, 122, 129, 130, 132, 134, 147, 148, 150, 151, 158, 188, 190, 209, 241, 242, 247, 248 girl culture, 119, 124, 140, 233 Girl Power, 6, 23, 28–9, 35, 37, 50, 77n5, 84n38, 119–28, 181, 197, 225, 231–2, 238 Girls, 3, 5, 20, 57, 120, 134–8, 145 Giroux, Henry, 1, 9, 22, 66, 67, 135, 244, 251 Great British Bake Off, The, 12 Grey’s Anatomy, 199 Halberstam, Judith, 188, 194, 218, 220 Haraway, Donna, 216–21 heterosexuality, 141, 188, 189–92 Hilton, Paris, 140, 149, 151, 152–3 hip-hop feminism see feminism homosexuality, 98, 188, 191, 192, 193, 206, 207, 208 Hutcheon, Linda, 27, 167, 179 identity politics, 16, 31, 58–9, 84n38, 177 immaterial labour, 18, 57, 137, 256–7 individualism, 20, 22, 29, 30, 33, 55, 63, 65, 66, 69, 70–3, 84n38, 109, 112, 114, 120, 122,

Index 297 124, 134–8, 160, 167, 171, 231, 238–46, 251, 252, 265 ‘Iron John’ (Robert Bly), 203 irony, 139, 150, 159, 160, 209 Jong, Erica, 131, 143 Kardashian, Kim, 24, 44, 56, 149, 153, 261–6 Keeping up with the Kardashians, 21, 181, 254, 261–6 Kinsella, Sophie, 96, 131 L Word, The, 149, 188, 192–3 Lady Gaga, 188, 194–7 Lara Croft, 216, 225–6 lesbianism, 141, 142, 143, 182, 188, 190, 192–4 Levy, Ariel, 139, 143, 148, 151, 152 liberal sexism, 15–16, 22, 25, 156–65, 251; see also sexism life politics, 246–7 lifecasting, 19, 21 Lil’Kim, 167, 184–5 Loaded, 150, 208 Love, Courtney, 231, 233 MacKinnon, Catharine, 139, 141–2 McRobbie, Angela, 5, 8, 15, 27, 30, 40, 41, 51, 54, 115, 123, 124, 135, 148, 158, 240, 264 macro-politics, 5, 15, 16, 25, 67, 69, 73, 223, 238, 244, 247, 250–2 Madonna, 111, 144, 167, 178–9, 195 man-cession, 12–13, 198, 200, 202 Mann, Patricia, 31, 66, 67, 74, 237–8, 240, 245–9 masculinity, 4, 12–14, 179, 188, 189, 191, 193–5, 198–215, 220, 225, 234, 248 masquerade, 179, 185, 189 mass media, 37, 46, 52, 95 metrosexual, 31, 198–200, 202, 204, 206–10, 212, 214 micro-politics, 5, 15, 25, 31, 50, 66, 67, 69, 73, 81, 81n28, 125, 216, 223, 224, 237, 238, 240, 244, 245–9, 251–3 Millett, Kate, 143 Minaj, Nicki, 167, 185–6 Miss America protest, 47, 68, 80n21, 80n22 multiculturalism, 58, 59, 60, 230 Negra, Diane, 3, 10, 33, 44, 50, 55, 64, 94, 114, 115, 192, 232

neoliberal feminism see feminism neoliberalism, 20, 54, 55, 65–76, 84n39, 101, 134, 137, 138, 156, 210, 241–4 Neuromancer, 216, 220 new feminism see feminism new lad, 198, 200, 202–4, 206, 208–12, 214 new man, 198, 200–6, 208, 209, 210, 212, 214 new traditionalism, 12, 15, 25, 74, 87–8, 93–7 nostalgia, 10, 11, 14, 32, 88, 102, 103, 104, 160; see also austerity: austerity-nostalgia objectification, 122, 139, 145, 149–53, 163, 196, 242, 248, 251 Orlan, 167, 179–80 Paglia, Camille, 139, 143, 144, 196 Pearson, Allison, 97, 130 performativity, 179, 188, 189, 196, 214, 264 Pioneer Woman, The, 12, 102 politics, 4, 5, 11, 14, 16, 19, 24, 25, 27, 28, 30–7, 40–1, 43, 48, 51, 52, 55–6, 58, 59, 61–76, 89, 90, 99, 100, 101–12, 122, 124–5, 131, 133, 145, 155, 156, 158–64, 168–77, 187, 189, 191, 200–1, 205, 216, 219, 221, 223, 229, 230–5, 237, 238, 239, 241–2, 244, 245, 246, 247, 250, 252; see also boob and bust politics; macro-politics; micro-politics; neoliberalism popular culture, 2, 4, 7, 12, 15, 16, 18, 23, 24, 31, 43, 44, 45–52, 81n28, 90–1, 93, 96, 101, 111, 113, 119, 123, 124, 126, 139–40, 145, 146, 155, 159, 181, 188, 217, 227, 230, 233, 235 popular feminism see feminism porno chic, 139, 149, 152–3 pornography, 139, 141–2, 149, 152, 155, 161, 192 pornography wars, 141 ‘post’ prefix, 25–8, 30, 35, 41, 61–2, 77n1 postcolonial feminism see feminism postcolonialism, 23, 25, 30, 42, 57–8 postfemininity, 9, 153, 255 postfeminism academic postfeminism, 23, 31, 42, 57–64, 84n38 affective postfeminism, 16–21, 23–4, 255 boom postfeminism, 2, 3, 6–10, 15, 24, 28, 32–3, 65, 71, 75, 94, 120, 134, 136, 148, 156, 159, 181, 203–4 and brand culture, 20–1, 52–7

298 postfeminism (cont.) bust postfeminism. 2, 6–24, 28, 32–4, 94, 102, 120, 130, 134, 155, 203 and consumer culture, 2–3, 5, 9–12, 29, 30, 32–3, 50 definitions of, 23–5, 28 and feminism, 25–31, 33, 34–43 genealogical approach to, 5, 24, 26, 30, 34 and neoliberalism, 7, 8–9, 15–16, 22–3, 29, 30, 40, 55, 56, 70, 74, 122, 134, 136, 156, 186, 241, 242, 244, 254, 259, 260, 264, 266 origins of, 28, 31, 33–4 political postfeminism, 33, 64–76, 237–53 popular postfeminism, 23, 20, 43–52 and recession, 2, 3, 5–24, 28, 32–4, 43, 53, 68, 72, 76, 94–5, 99, 100–5, 114, 120, 134–7, 145, 149, 156, 159, 198, 200, 201, 210–12, 238, 243, 244, 250, 255, 257 and third-wave feminism, 23, 69, 84n38, 144, 227–35 transnational postfeminism, 4, 29, 33, 73, 181 postfeminist man, 31, 33, 198–200, 204–15 postfeminist subjectivity, 6–9, 17, 20–1, 31–3, 42, 52, 255; see also can-do girl posthuman, 216–18, 223–5 postmodern feminism see feminism postmodernism, 23, 25, 26, 30, 42, 57–63, 70, 166–86, 195–6, 230 post-theory, 61–2, 168–75 power feminism see feminism queer chic, 188–90, 193 queer theory, 187–97 Rambo, 203 raunch culture, 21, 56, 106, 139, 149–53 recession, 7–14, 24, 28, 33, 34, 41, 43, 53, 57, 67, 68, 72, 76, 94, 99–105, 114, 134–7, 145, 149, 155–6, 159, 198, 200–1, 210–12, 238, 243–4, 250, 255, 257 and gender, 2, 12–13, 200–1, 212, 250 Riot Grrrl, 24, 124–5, 127, 227, 231–2 Roiphe, Katie, 38, 105, 112–13, 144, 231 romance, 9, 12, 94, 119, 128–31, 146, 148, 163, 210, 234

Postfeminism Sandberg, Sheryl, 15, 55–6, 72, 114–15 second-wave feminism see feminism self-branding, 6, 19–21, 29, 33, 53–7, 72, 75, 94, 114, 135, 137, 197, 254–60, 264–5 self-work, 9, 18, 20, 55, 57, 94–5, 136, 196, 254, 257–9, 263–4 Sex and the City, 3, 6, 9, 134–5, 140, 146–9, 151, 192 sexism, 5, 15–16, 22, 30, 37, 40, 47, 72, 112, 150, 155–65, 175, 190, 203, 209, 210, 220, 233; see also liberal sexism sex-positive feminism see feminism sexual politics, 105, 107, 145, 232, 252 sexual revolution, 139, 143–5, 147 sexual subjecthood, 56, 134, 139, 150–1, 153, 163, 248, 259–60 sexuality, 3, 5, 15, 21, 27, 32, 33, 37, 39, 58, 68, 92, 99, 112, 117, 120, 123, 126, 132, 140–53, 155–7, 161, 163–4, 181, 183, 184, 187, 188, 192, 196, 217, 220–1, 238, 248, 265 sisterhood, 13, 42, 58–9, 68, 70, 89, 110–11, 182, 239, 264–5 SlutWalk, 15, 73, 238, 250 social media, 10, 18–19, 21, 257–8, 261, 263 Spice Girls, 23, 44, 119–20, 124–8, 227, 232 Tasker,Yvonne, 3, 10, 33, 44, 50, 64, 192, 232 Thatcher, Margaret, 26, 87, 90, 105, 108 Third Way, 34, 74–5, 242 third-wave feminism see feminism thrift culture, 8, 10–12, 22, 72, 88, 94, 100–2 transgender, 188, 194 victim feminism see feminism visibility, 3, 15–16, 41, 54–6, 67, 105, 114, 156–7, 159–60, 164, 182, 187, 191–2, 238, 252, 257 Walker, Rebecca, 39, 228, 230–1 Walter, Natasha, 38, 105, 107–9, 157, 245 Whelehan, Imelda, 2, 39, 46, 48, 78, 81n24, 84n40, 109, 111, 123, 126, 129, 130, 132, 133, 143, 182 Will and Grace, 190–1 Wolf, Naomi, 38, 48, 85n43, 105, 109–13, 152