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For White Girls Only? Postfeminism

and the Politics of Inclusion
Jess Butler

Since its inception in the early 1980s, “postfeminism” has become a common appel-
lation for the attitudes and behaviors of young women in the contemporary United
States. The article assesses how postfeminism is connected to the discursive deploy-
ment of sexuality in the late modern era by examining the socio-historical context
out of which postfeminism emerges, reviewing various definitions of postfeminism,
and offering a conceptualization of postfeminism as a neoliberal discursive formation.
After briefly analyzing the existing scholarship on postfeminism, particularly the ways
in which this body of literature privileges a white middle-class, heterosexual subject,
the article proposes an intersectional approach to postfeminism in order to more fully
understand how postfeminist discourses reproduce inequalities of race, gender, and
sexuality, and offers some preliminary thoughts about pop star Nicki Minaj’s potential
to symbolically rupture postfeminism’s discursive boundaries.

Keywords: femininity / Foucault / heterosexuality / intersectionality /

Nicki Minaj / postfeminism / sex-positive feminism / symbolic boundaries /
whiteness

“Our national love of porn and pole dancing is not the

byproduct of a free and easy society with an earthy acceptance
of sex. It is a desperate stab at free-wheeling eroticism in a
time and place characterized by intense anxiety.”

—Ariel Levy, Female Chauvinist Pigs

Nicki Minaj’s musical career began quietly in 2007 with a mix-tape called
Playtime Is Over. Five years later, in April 2012, her second studio album, Pink

©2013 Feminist Formations, Vol. 25 No. 1 (Spring) pp. 35–58

36 · Feminist Formations 25.1

Friday: Roman Reloaded, debuted at number 1 on iTunes, making her one of the
best-selling female solo artists of all time. Born in 1982 in Saint James, Trinidad,
to parents of mixed Indian and Afro-Trinidadian ancestry, Minaj moved to
Queens, New York, at the age of 5, where she cultivated the peculiar persona(s)
for which she has become a global celebrity. On the cover of her first album, for
example, Minaj appears as a dismembered Barbie doll, and she lovingly refers
to her fans as “Barbz.” In addition to “Harajuku Barbie,” the star has adopted
a slew of alter egos, ranging from the evil (and male) “Roman Zolanski” to the
saintly “Nicki Teresa.” Her rap style includes “a lot of wobbly, wacky voices,
foreign accents, grunt-barks, horror-movie screams, and doll squeaks” that, as
feminist blogger Edith Zimmerman (2010) notes, audiences either love or hate
(2). In her music videos also, Minaj embodies a range of characters: for instance,
in “Stupid Hoe,” the second single from Pink Friday: Roman Reloaded, the mul-
tiracial rapper appears as a pink-haired Barbie, a caged jungle cat, a blue-lipped
“native,” and a freckled “white girl”; in other videos, she has played a geisha
(“Your Love”), a cyborg (“Turn Me On”), and, perhaps most controversially, a
monster (“Monster”). When asked about her status as a role model for young
girls, Minaj has resisted the “feminist” label in favor of “girl power.” In a 2012
interview with Nightline’s Juju Chang, for instance, she explained: “[My music]
makes girls feel like they can do anything. I’m always tellin’ my Barbz, ‘Always
be successful outside of a man.’ ”
What are we to make of Minaj, a woman who has become famous, at least
in part, because of her unwillingness to conform to mainstream definitions of
gender, sexuality, and race? How might we understand her seemingly paradoxi-
cal relationship to feminism wherein she claims, “I’m not a feminist,” yet, in
the same breath, describes her music as empowering for her female fans? What
can we make of her appropriation of Barbie and love of Harajuku street style or
her two-tone wigs and cross-gender alter egos? How can we make sense of her
performance of self that is at once masculine and feminine, hypersexual and
doll-like, vulnerable and hard? And what makes a woman like Minaj, a “space
oddity” in the hip-hop world (Ganz 2010), so incredibly popular among young
adult men and tween girls alike?
In this article, I address these questions by situating them within the con-
text of postfeminism. Drawing on the work of Michel Foucault, I first assess
how postfeminism is connected to the discursive deployment of sexuality in
the late modern era. I then examine the socio-historical context out of which
postfeminism emerges, review various definitions of postfeminism, and offer my
own conceptualization of postfeminism as a neoliberal discursive formation.
After briefly analyzing the existing scholarship on postfeminism, particularly
the ways in which this body of literature privileges a white middle-class, hetero-
sexual subject, I propose an intersectional approach to postfeminism in order
to more fully understand how postfeminist discourses reproduce inequalities of
race, gender, and sexuality and offer some preliminary thoughts about Minaj’s
 Jess Butler · 37

potential to symbolically rupture postfeminism’s discursive boundaries. While

I am admittedly critical of much that has been written about postfeminism, my
aim here is not to take other scholars to task for somehow being “wrong,” but
rather to open and extend a new debate about the ways in which race, along
with gender and sexuality, shapes postfeminist culture in important, and as-of-
yet underexplored, ways.

The Deployment of Sexuality

In The History of Sexuality: Volume I (1978), Foucault proposes a conceptualiza-

tion of power in late modernity that is fundamentally linked to the ways in
which sex has historically been “put into discourse” (11). He contends that
there has been, from the eighteenth century onward, a “discursive explosion”
concerning sex and sexuality in Western societies (17). The proliferation of
discourses concerning sex and sexuality enacted a form of power that did not
avoid or forbid sexuality, but rather multiplied and extended its forms, pen-
etrating individual bodies through a surge of incitements, enticements, and
excitements. This transformation has, in Foucault’s view, served as the central
mechanism of power in late modern societies: it established a wide network of
methods for listening to, recording, tracking, and regulating the sexuality of
individuals and populations.
Foucault defines sexuality not as an uncontrolled urge that must be domi-
nated or as a hidden domain that must be illuminated, but rather as a socially
constructed instrument of power. In this view, “sex” is not the source from
which various sexualities emanate, but is instead “a complex idea that was
formed inside the deployment of sexuality” (152). The incitement to transform
sexuality into discourse created sex as an imaginary element and discursively
reversed the relationship between power and sexuality by “causing the latter to
appear, not in its essential and positive relation to power, but as being rooted in
a specific and irreducible urgency which power tries as best it can to dominate”
(155). By making power appear to function as prohibition, this redefinition of
sex effectively concealed the ways in which relations of power precede and
produce sex itself.1
In its construction of sex as a natural urge that power continually tries
to suppress, the deployment of sexuality “established one of its most essential
internal operating principles: the desire for sex—the desire to have it, to have
access to it, to discover it, to liberate it, to articulate it in discourse, to formulate
it in truth” (157). The “desire for sex” has had undeniable and profound effects
that continue to reverberate in contemporary life. The emergence of feminism
as a political movement in the United States during the nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries and its resurgence in the 1960s and ’70s, the “feminist
sex wars” of the 1980s and ’90s, and, more critically and directly, the growing
popularity of “postfeminism” beginning in the mid-1980s and continuing into
38 · Feminist Formations 25.1

the present are each byproducts of, among other things, this eighteenth- and
nineteenth-century construction of sex.

The “Death” of Feminism

In its 29 June 1998 issue Time magazine asked, “Is Feminism Dead?” The cover,
which featured the faces of Susan B. Anthony, Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem,
and “postfeminist” fictional television character Ally McBeal, suggested that the
answer was, of course, “yes.” This Time cover story was only one of many news
stories and magazine articles that began to emerge in the 1980s, all anxiously
speculating about the status of feminism in contemporary society.2
Such widespread curiosity about—and, more often than not, celebration
of—feminism’s death implies that there was a time in recent collective memory
when feminism was, for better or worse, alive and well. Most Americans have
at least a vague idea about a women’s movement that took place in the United
States during the 1960s and ’70s, led by women who called themselves feminists.
The conventional story goes something like this: women were tired of being
obedient housewives, so they decided to get jobs and stop shaving their armpits.
They thought that sex was really important, and they wanted to be able to do it
without getting married or having babies. This was a pretty far-out idea. Some
people were not too happy about it, but the feminists eventually got their way
and—voila!—the problem of gender inequality was solved. Of course, these days,
we are regularly reminded that such attempts to address equality have actually
produced more discontent for women (see Anne-Marie Slaughter’s 2012 Atlantic
piece for the latest example), and that men and women are really, in the end,
from different planets.
To be sure, the story is much more complex than this colloquial version
suggests. Aside from the fact that there has never been a unified, homogenous,
or singular feminism, we often suffer from collective amnesia about other
important aspects of the women’s movement as well. For one, although there is
a general consensus among feminists regarding the socially constructed nature
of sex and sexuality, there has been fierce disagreement about where and how
to incorporate sexuality into feminist theory, as well as how to politically tackle
the issue of sexuality in a systematic way. While these disputes continue into the
present day, particularly those regarding the sexualization of girls, I would like to
examine one iteration that I think is particularly important for understanding
postfeminism’s emergence: the feminist sex wars of the mid-1980s.3 Centered
on the issue of pornography, a division emerged during this time between those
feminists who emphasized the need to protect women from sexual objectification
and those who emphasized the importance of women’s sexual liberation.
In perhaps the most influential formulation of the “protection” argument,
feminist legal scholar Catharine MacKinnon (1987) contends that since women
are constructed as objects for male pleasure from the start, the call for women’s
 Jess Butler · 39

sexual freedom renders their objectification invisible and further naturalizes

their oppression. Moreover, since heterosexuality is a compulsory system, women
cannot choose to participate. Thus, women are doubly victimized through
their construction as sexual objects and the limited options for sexual behavior
that compulsory heterosexuality allows. For MacKinnon, sexual liberation is
an inadequate and dangerous solution to the problems of male supremacy and
enforced heterosexuality. In her view, as long as women are defined as sexual
objects, as long as they are equivalent to their violation, then the idea of sexual
freedom is a joke.
The sex-war debates came to a boiling point in 1984 when MacKinnon
and fellow radical feminist Andrea Dworkin drafted an ordinance to ban por-
nography in Minneapolis that was passed by the City Council, but later vetoed
by Mayor Donald Fraser. The same year, a revised version of the ordinance
was passed and signed into law in Indianapolis. As MacKinnon and Dworkin
garnered unintended support from right-wing moralists like Phyllis Schafly,
anti-censorship feminists in New York and Wisconsin formed the Feminist
Anti-Censorship Task Force (FACT) in opposition to the anti-porn legislation.
By 1986, the United States Supreme Court ruled the Indianapolis ordinance
unconstitutional. While the debates among second-wave feminists over pornog-
raphy became arguably more focused on the issue of censorship than that of sex
itself, their broader implications were not lost on younger feminists. In particular,
the claim that women need to be protected against sexual objectification ignited
one of the main critiques leveled by the third wave.4
In the early 1990s, popular writers like Camille Paglia (1990), Katie Roiphe
(1993), and Naomi Wolf (1991) began to argue that rather than rejecting sexu-
ality wholesale, feminists should attempt to complete the sexual revolution in
a way that would allow women, as well as men, to become sexually liberated.
Instead of seeing women’s objectification as simply a violation, these “sex-
positive” critics were concerned with the ways in which objectification works
to constrain women’s sexual agency, exploration, and adventure. As “pro-sex”
advocates, they wanted to move beyond the notion that women are primarily
victims of sexual objectification; they instead asked how the internalization of
victimization prevents women from being sexual creatures and keeps them in
their proper (read asexual) place. Rather than focusing on victimization and
oppression, which, in this view, only furthers the perception of women as sexual
objects, feminists should focus on rights and freedom.
From the vantage point of third-wave feminists, the sex wars are framed
in an easily recognizable symbolic framework of protection versus liberation;
anti-sex versus pro-sex; old versus new. Obviously, both sides of this debate
are problematic. Portraying women as victims does not promote a progressive
agenda, and denying the real pleasure that many women get from sex seems
to dismiss the importance of women’s sexual desires and passions. However,
the pro-sex tendency to treat women’s subordination in popular constructions
40 · Feminist Formations 25.1

of heterosexuality as a form of false consciousness ignores and obscures the

material consequences of compulsory heterosexuality. Yet, as often happens
on the political Left in the contemporary United States, the logic of liberalism
ultimately triumphs: sexuality and its expressions are increasingly understood
as human rights, and the celebration of sexual freedom trumps any discussion
of material inequalities.5
The sex wars are problematic not only in their dichotomization of sex as
either oppressive or liberating, but they also continue the ongoing tendency
among “mainstream” feminists to ignore the experiences of women of color—a
legacy that, as we will see, postfeminism carries on. Despite a notable shift in
feminist publishing in the early 1980s, during which three highly influential
texts—Angela Davis’s Women, Race, and Class (1981), bell hooks’s Ain’t I a
Woman: Black Women and Feminism (1981), and Cherríe Moraga and Gloria
Anzaldúa’s anthology This Bridge Called My Back (1983)—emerged as trenchant
critiques of mainstream (white) feminism, the sex wars continued to privilege
a white middle-class, heterosexual feminist subject.

Neoliberalism

The late 1970s and early ’80s also marked a shift to post-Fordist modes of produc-
tion and neoliberal forms of governance in many Western countries, including
the United States. Much of the writing about neoliberalism has defined it as
a global hegemonic doctrine that emphasizes “deregulation, privatization, and
withdrawal of the state from many areas of social provision” (Harvey 2005, 3).
For scholars like David Harvey, neoliberalism is primarily a political economic
philosophy or practice that “seeks to bring all human action into the domain of
the market” (3). Other scholars, most notably Nikolas Rose (1996, 1999), have
argued that neoliberalism cannot be explained solely in political-economic
terms (see also Barry, Osborne, and Rose 1996; Burchell, Gordon, and Miller
1991; Dubal 2010). Drawing from Foucault’s work on governmentality, Rose
and others have emphasized the ways in which neoliberal forms of governance
construct new kinds of citizen-subjects and ways of governing “at a distance.”
Because neoliberalism “assumes that social subjects are not and should not be
subject to direct forms of State control” (Hay 2000, 54), it therefore requires
individuals to be increasingly self-reliant and self-governing. In Rose’s (1996)
words: “It has become possible to actualize the notion of the actively respon-
sible individual because of the development of new apparatuses that integrate
subjects into a moral nexus of identifications and allegiances in the very pro-
cesses in which they appear to act out their most personal choices” (57–58).
Understanding neoliberalism as a form of governmentality illuminates how its
reach extends far beyond the market. For example, as Lisa Duggan (2003) has
pointed out, under neoliberal regimes the costs of social reproduction become
increasingly privatized and the responsibility of caring for dependents shifts from
 Jess Butler · 41

state agencies to individuals and families (14). Consumer citizenship is prioritized

at the expense of social welfare, bolstered by the seemingly neutral rhetoric of
personal responsibility and individual choice. And, as Foucault (1978) predicted,
sex and sexuality (among other things) are increasingly understood in terms
of individual rights: “[t]he ‘right’ to life, to one’s body, to health, to happiness,
to the satisfaction of needs, and beyond all the oppressions or ‘alienations,’ the
‘right’ to rediscover what one is and all that one can be” (145). In this context,
rights-based political movements multiply as disenfranchised individuals and
groups use the technologies, processes, and subjectivities of consumer culture
to achieve their goals (Grewal 2005, 9).
Some scholars (for example, Beck 1992; Giddens 1991) claim that the desta-
bilization of the old social order simply means more opportunities for individual
choice and agency. Others (for example, Duggan 2003; Gill and Scharff 2011;
McRobbie 2009) counter this assertion, arguing instead that increased individu-
alism and autonomy often reinstate hierarchies of gender, sexuality, race, and
class and breed new forms of power. For example, Duggan argues that neoliberal
sexual politics, such as those promoted by the International Gay Forum, do
little to disrupt heteronormative assumptions and instead uphold and sustain
them through the promise of a demobilized constituency and a privatized,
depoliticized culture anchored in domesticity and consumption (50). While
neoliberalism is neither universal nor homogeneous in outcome (see Dubal 2010;
Ong 2006), the shift to neoliberal forms of governance in the West nonethe-
less provides fertile ground for the development of discourses that emphasize
consumer citizenship, personal responsibility, and individual empowerment.
It is within this complex social, cultural, economic, and political environ-
ment that postfeminism emerges as a contemporary gender ideology. Propped
up by the (imagined) success of the women’s movement, a sex-positive (and
racially exclusive) feminist legacy, and the ever-expanding neoliberal celebra-
tions of autonomy, individualism, and consumer choice, postfeminism surfaces
as a more attractive alternative to previous forms of gender politics.

Defining Postfeminism

Since its inception in the early 1980s, “postfeminism” has become a common
appellation for the attitudes and behaviors of many young women in the con-
temporary United States.6 The boundaries of its definition are vague: terms like
“antifeminism,” “retrosexism,” “enlightened sexism,” “new traditionalism,” and
“third-wave feminism” are often used synonymously with postfeminism, blurring
the lines between it and other popular sensibilities (Douglas 2010; Hollows 2000;
Projansky 2001; Tasker and Negra 2007; Whelehan 2000). For the purposes of
this article, it is particularly important to distinguish between postfeminism,
which I define as a range of cultural discourses, and third-wave feminism, which
I define as a quasi-political movement (see Genz 2006).
42 · Feminist Formations 25.1

Beginning in the 1990s, an emerging group of feminist writers and activists

situated themselves within a linear feminist trajectory, presenting third-wave
feminism as a more progressive corrective to earlier feminist waves. Led by
women of color like Rebecca Walker (1992, 1995), the third wave was initially
constructed as a more inclusive and welcoming space, particularly with regard
to racial/ethnic and class diversity, than that inhabited by their first- and
second-wave foremothers. Publishing in feminist magazines like Bitch and Bust
and often employing a manifesto-like style, writers like Jennifer Baumgardner
and Amy Richards (2000, 2004) laid out the primary goals of the third wave:
to reinvigorate feminism by bringing young women back into the movement,
and to allow women to define feminism in their own terms.
Ultimately, the third wave is meant to provide women with a comfort-
able, inclusive—and, I argue, fundamentally neoliberal—space where they
can cultivate individual feminist identities without all the strident negativity
of “old-school” feminist activism. In “Feminism and Femininity: Or How We
Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Thong” (2004), self-proclaimed third-
wavers Baumgardner and Richards propose “girlie” feminism as a way for young
women to challenge traditional associations of femininity with weakness and
subordination—it is a can-do, sex-positive, all-access pass that allows women to
be independent, strong, smart, and sexy all at once (60). While, as Baumgardner
and Richards explain, third-wave feminists actively campaign for reproductive
rights, sexual freedom, and economic and political equality, they also believe
that there are ways to be political other than burning proverbial bras (62; see also
Baumgardner and Richards 2000). In fact, girlie feminists often reject overtly
political activism in favor of consumer-based “cultural” activism—for example,
taking pole-dancing exercise classes, listening to Katy Perry, or getting Brazilian
bikini waxes as markers of their newfound liberation.
There are important similarities between third-wave feminism and post-
feminism. Both terms can be used to signal an epistemological break that
challenges the dominance of Anglo-American feminism and to denote a time
“after” a particular moment in feminist history (Gill and Scharff 2011, 3; see
also Brooks [1997] and Hollows [2000]). Yet, while third-wave feminism actively
engages with feminist history, if only to deem it inadequate, postfeminism
displaces or replaces feminism altogether. Popular cultural depictions—for
instance, the 1998 Time magazine cover story—often define postfeminism as
linear or as a logical endpoint in a historical trajectory from “pre-feminism”
through “feminism” and into the current “postfeminist” moment. Others (for
example, Hewlett 1987; Kaminer 1990; Sommers 1994) present postfeminism
as a backlash against an older generation of feminists. The backlash thesis,
advanced and famously detailed by journalist Susan Faludi (1991), suggests
that postfeminism not only declares feminism over, but also accuses feminism
of spawning an entire generation of miserable, burned-out, confused women.
There are also those who, echoing Paglia (1990), Roiphe (1993), and Wolf (1991),
 Jess Butler · 43

define feminism as “anti-sex” and see postfeminism as a more up-to-date, sex-

positive alternative.
These three definitions—postfeminism as linear, backlash, or sex-posi-
tive—are particularly prevalent in public discourse; however, I argue that they
are ultimately insufficient conceptualizations. For one, feminism has never
been a linear, monolithic, agreed-upon movement, so it makes little sense to
understand postfeminism as such. Moreover, defining feminism as anti-sex
both misrepresents much of feminist thought and renders invisible the ongoing
debates among feminists about sex and sexuality. Finally, while the concept
of backlash is certainly important for understanding the emergence of post-
feminism, it does not adequately capture the complex, and often paradoxical,
character of this contemporary discursive formation, particularly the ways in
which postfeminist discourses offer up an “entanglement” of feminist and anti-
feminist ideas (McRobbie 2004, 255). Not simply a rejection of prudish, militant
mothers, postfeminism also draws on a vocabulary of individual choice and
empowerment, offering these to young women as substitutes for more radical
feminist political activity.
In her analysis of contemporary feminism in the United Kingdom, Angela
McRobbie (2009) successfully complicates definitions of postfeminism as simply
linear, backlash, and/or sex-positive by illuminating the ways in which feminism
has also been instrumentalized and deployed by media, pop culture, and the state
as a signal of women’s progress and freedom.7 She points out that contemporary
young women are, at least notionally, the beneficiaries of past feminist victories
to the extent that gender equality now seems to be common sense. Today, girls
can do anything boys can do—on the playground, in the classroom, at work,
and in the bedroom. Women attend college at a higher rate than men; they
are increasingly employed in male-dominated fields; and they enjoy heightened
visibility in politics and media. As other scholars note, postfeminism empha-
sizes these celebratory narratives, proclaiming feminism’s “success” in bringing
about gender equity in education, work, and the home (Projansky 2001, 67).
Feminism is still constructed as a thing of the past; however, previous feminist
victories—the pill, Roe v. Wade, Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign—are
not forgotten, but are instead actively invoked as proof that feminism is no
longer needed. In short, “postfeminism suggests that it is the very success of
feminism that produces its irrelevance for contemporary culture” (Tasker and
Negra 2007, 8).
However, while postfeminism is clearly a response to feminism, post-
feminist discourses rarely mention feminism per se. Instead, they evoke, both
implicitly and explicitly, a variety of concepts, histories, and phrases that, taken
together, construct an identifiable discursive framework. Rosalind Gill (2007)
argues that rather than being understood as an epistemological perspective, an
historical shift, or (simply) a backlash against feminism, postfeminism should
be conceived of as a sensibility that characterizes an ever-increasing number of
44 · Feminist Formations 25.1

popular cultural forms (148). Understanding postfeminism as a sensibility, in

Gill’s words, “emphasizes the contradictory nature of postfeminist discourses and
the entanglement of both feminist and anti-feminist themes within them” (149).
The notion of postfeminism as a sensibility also allows scholars to identify
a number of relatively stable features that constitute postfeminist culture. Fol-
lowing Gill, I identify a narrative, performance, and/or text as postfeminist if
it incorporates one or more of the following characteristics: that it
1. implies that gender equality has been achieved and feminist activism is
thus no longer necessary;
2. defines femininity as a bodily property and revives notions of natural
sexual difference;
3. marks a shift from sexual objectification to sexual subjectification;
4. encourages self-surveillance, self-discipline, and a makeover paradigm;
5. emphasizes individualism, choice, and empowerment as the primary
routes to women’s independence and freedom; and
6. promotes consumerism and the commodification of difference.
As these criteria suggest, postfeminism is, by definition, incredibly ambivalent:
it simultaneously rejects feminist activism in favor of feminine consumption
and celebrates the success of feminism while declaring its irrelevance. Such
“collective ambivalence,” as Sarah Projansky (2001) points out, “ensures that
postfeminism is wide-ranging, versatile, and influential” (87). Postfeminists may
be lawyers, doctors, and heads of state; they may also be strippers, shoppers,
and sorority girls. In short, it appears that the only thing postfeminism requires
is that women “be who they want to be”—just as long as it is not a feminist.
The most fruitful frameworks for understanding postfeminism are the ones
that emphasize gender equality and sexual difference, individual choice and
empowerment, femininity as a bodily property, the shift from sexual objecti-
fication to sexual subjectification, and the commodification of difference (in
addition to backlash and sex-positivity), such as those advanced by Gill and
McRobbie. These frameworks require recognition of the complex and often con-
tradictory interplay of feminism, neoliberalism, and the deployment of sexuality
in contemporary society. Postfeminism, as I understand it, is not (just) a resent-
ful retaliation against earlier generations of feminists, nor is it (just) an empty
celebration of feminine consumption. It is not that young women have suddenly
retreated into a space of “traditional” feminine domesticity, nor is it true that
they have somehow accepted gender inequality and women’s objectification as
inevitable. The “post” of postfeminism does not signify feminism’s death. Rather,
postfeminism becomes a kind of substitute for or displacement of feminism as a
radical political movement in which earlier feminist demands for equal rights,
collective activism, and the eradication of gender inequality are taken into
account and then displaced by the postfeminist ideals of individualism, choice,
and empowerment (McRobbie 2009, 1). Rather than defining postfeminism as
 Jess Butler · 45

simply linear, backlash, or sex-positive or as a quasi-politicized subjectivity akin

to third-wave feminism, a more productive impulse is to analyze it as a complex,
broad, and increasingly hegemonic ethos, sensibility, or discursive formation.
Discourses, or bodies of knowledge that define, limit, and produce what can
and cannot be said in a particular socio-historical moment, must be understood
as historically specific and contingent upon relations of power. Discourses do
not emerge willy-nilly; rather, power produces knowledge and knowledge repro-
duces power in an ongoing discursive dialectic (see Foucault 1978). Defining
postfeminism as an historically specific discursive formation is, I argue, the first
step in understanding its ubiquity and popularity in the contemporary United
States. As Projansky (2001) notes, thinking about postfeminism discursively
“helps illustrate how postfeminism is a cultural response to feminism, one that
seeks to rework—to steal rather than supersede—feminism” (88; emphases in
original). As a versatile and pervasive cultural discourse postfeminism can
travel through complex social terrains, deftly adapting to cultural, economic,
and political shifts while maintaining its core characteristics.
Thus, it appears that the emphatic and widespread declaration of feminism’s
death in public discourse may signify a reformulation and redeployment of femi-
ninity and sexuality in accordance with neoliberal relations of power. Rosaling
Gill and Christina Scharff (2011) contend that postfeminism and neoliberalism
overlap in at least three important ways: both are structured by a “current of
individualism” that undermines notions of the social or political; both demand
an autonomous, self-regulating, active subject; and, perhaps most importantly,
both call upon women—more so than men—to “work on and transform the
self, to regulate every aspect of their conduct, and to present all their actions
as freely chosen” (7). Indeed, Gill and Scharff suggest, and I fully agree, that
neoliberalism is “always already gendered, and that women are constructed as its
ideal subjects” (ibid.; emphasis in original) (see also Gill 2007).
McRobbie (2009) proposes that postfeminism’s reliance on “an overarching
framework of capacity, freedom, change, and gender equality” works to conceal
new modes of gender regulation (51). While previous gender regimes established
what women ought not do, McRobbie contends that the “new sexual contract”
operates through a “constant stream of incitements and enticements” that
encourage capability, success, attainment, enjoyment, entitlement, participa-
tion, and mobility (57). Requirements for the postfeminist “new deal” include
occupying positions of visibility, agency, and capacity through participation
in education, employment, and consumer culture; abandoning a critique of
patriarchy and relinquishing political identities; and engaging in a range of
practices that are “both progressive but also consummately and reassuringly
feminine” (ibid.).
Mirroring the logic of neoliberalism, postfeminism constructs women
as both subjects and consumers, elevating consumption as an individualistic
mechanism of empowerment and effectively commodifying feminist activism
46 · Feminist Formations 25.1

(Tasker and Negra 2007). As liberated consumers, contemporary young women

self-consciously participate in a highly stylized “postfeminist masquerade” as a
statement of personal choice (McRobbie 2009, 64). These women buy skinny
jeans as a marker of their “progressive” gender ideals; they get pedicures and
bikini waxes because they have the freedom to “choose” to engage in conven-
tional femininity. The consumer-based logic of postfeminism conflates feminism
and femininity, individualism and liberation, and consumption and activism to
the extent that “women apparently choose to be seen as sexual objects because it
suits their liberated interests” (Goldman, Heath, and Smith 1991, 338). Through
postfeminism, “feminism itself has been re-scripted (though not necessarily dis-
avowed) so as to allow its smooth incorporation into the world of commerce and
corporate culture” (Banet-Weiser 2007, 209). Unchained from political activ-
ism, postfeminism constructs gender as a consumer product that women can
try on—and take off—as they choose. Thus, the contemporary young woman,
self-reflexive and gender-aware, finds herself “confined to the topographies of an
unsustainable self-hood, deprived of the possibilities of feminist sociality, and
deeply invested in achieving an illusory identity defined according to a rigidly
enforced scale of feminine attributes” (McRobbie 2009, 120). And, as if that
were not enough, the “grammar of individualism” on which such notions of
consumer choice relies ensures that experiences of gender, sexual, and/or racial
inequality are framed in exclusively personal terms (Gill 2007, 153).
McRobbie (2009) argues—and Foucault would surely agree—that postfemi-
nism becoming so widespread at this socio-historical moment is not a coinci-
dence; rather, it is precisely because women are now required to participate in
the labor market and the public sphere that postfeminism emerges to re-secure
the gender (and racial) order (67). In other words, as women come forward in
education and employment and gender equality is allegedly achieved, and as
women of color become increasingly visible in the academy and the public
sphere, contemporary discourses must adapt in order to reinforce gender and
racial hierarchies and ensure that the systems of compulsory heterosexuality
and white privilege remain intact.

Analyzing Postfeminism

Various scholars of gender and popular culture have described the ways in
which postfeminism reinforces existing relations of power and reproduces
inequality. For example, Yvonne Tasker and Diane Negra (2007) contend that
“many postfeminist texts combine a deep uncertainty about existing options
for women with an idealized, essentialized femininity that symbolically evades
or transcends institutional and social problem spots” (10). Or, as Projansky
(2001) asserts: “when a pervasive set of discourses defines feminism in these (or
any other) limited ways, other options are closed down, other experiences are
unaccessed, other possibilities are denaturalized, and other forms of activism
 Jess Butler · 47

are discouraged” (232). These scholars believe that “postfeminism has become
so installed as an epistemological framework that in many ways our culture has
stopped asking the kinds of questions that it appears to ‘settle’ ” (Tasker and
Negra 2007, 6).
In an attempt to address these issues, scholars have described the ways in
which postfeminist discourses function as a mechanism of power and exclusion.
Focusing primarily on representations of postfeminism in television shows like
Sex and the City (Arthurs 2003; Hermes 2006) and Ally McBeal (Hermes 2006;
Moseley and Read 2002), in films like Bridget Jones’s Diary (McRobbie 2009), and
in the “Girls Gone Wild” video series (Mayer 2005; Pitcher 2006), these scholars
explore the relationship among feminism, femininity, and sexuality as it appears
in popular culture. Notably, most of the academic literature on postfeminism
examines cultural representations featuring women who are young, hetero-
sexual, middle-class, and white.8 Those scholars who have critically examined
the racialized character of these representations conclude, almost uniformly, that
postfeminism works to exclude women of color and reproduce racial inequality
by reinstituting (Western) whiteness as a dominant cultural norm.
For example, McRobbie (2009) contends that a cultural politics of “disar-
ticulation,” which she defines as a force that undermines potential inter-gener-
ational and cross-cultural solidarities between and among women, is a central
tenet of postfeminism (24). Disarticulation works to foreclose potential cross-
cultural ties and transmissions by imagining non-Western women as sexually
constrained and victimized, in (false) contrast to “sexually free” young women
in the West, thereby recreating and reinforcing notions of Western superiority
while weakening potential alliances based on a feminist post-colonialist critique
(27). As processes of disarticulation reinforce the boundaries of (white/Western)
femininity, the postfeminist masquerade works to “re-secure the terms of submis-
sion of white femininity to white masculine domination, while simultaneously
resurrecting racial divisions by undoing any promise of multiculturalism through
the exclusion of non-white femininities from this rigid repertoire of self-styling”
(70). In its assumption of a white subject and its suggestion that anti-racist
struggles are a thing of the past, postfeminism functions, in McRobbie’s view,
as a subtle mechanism of racial exclusion.

For White Girls Only?

The aforementioned analyses rest on an apparently obvious, but rarely exam-

ined, conclusion that women of color are largely excluded from postfeminist
discourses and representations; or, to put it another way, that the idealized
postfeminist subject is a white, Western, heterosexual woman. It is, of course,
possible to claim that the overwhelming focus on white women in scholarly
analyses of postfeminism simply reflects a paucity of postfeminist cultural forms
that feature women of color. Or, as McRobbie implies, perhaps the discursive
48 · Feminist Formations 25.1

space of postfeminism is effectively closed to nonwhite women. Yet, the argu-

ment that postfeminism excludes women of color—or 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; the video series “Girls Gone Wild: Doggy Style”
(a spinoff of the original series, hosted by rapper Snoop Dogg); and films like
Think Like a Man (2012) all showcase women of color. Add these to the highly
successful, and highly sexualized, musical careers of En Vogue, Salt-N-Pepa,
Lil’ Kim, TLC, Destiny’s Child, The Pussycat Dolls, Mariah Carey, Shakira,
Beyoncé, Rihanna, Nicki Minaj, and Jennifer Lopez (to name just a few), and
it becomes clear that the postfeminist “girls” who are going “wild” are not all
white and middle class. The women of color featured in the above representa-
tions clearly embody and enact postfeminism: they embrace femininity and the
consumption of feminine goods; they espouse a vocabulary of independence,
choice, empowerment, and sexual freedom; and they construct themselves (or
are constructed by others) as heterosexual subjects.
Like previous normative conceptions of gender, postfeminism promotes a
limited version of femininity; like previous normative conceptions of sexual-
ity, it shores up heterosexism; like previous normative conceptions of race, it
reinstates whiteness as the standard. However, while it may be true that “the
central figure of postfeminist discourses is a white, heterosexual, middle-class
woman” (Projansky 2001, 12), this does not necessarily mean that nonwhite,
nonmiddle-class, and nonheterosexual women are altogether excluded from,
or somehow unaffected by, postfeminist discourses. Foucault (1978) warns that
“[w]e must not imagine a world of discourse divided between accepted discourse
and excluded discourse, or between the dominant discourse and the dominated
one; but as a multiplicity of discursive elements that can come into play in vari-
ous strategies” (100). While discourse transmits and produces power—in this
case, white hetero-supremacy—it also “undermines and exposes it, renders it
fragile and makes it possible to thwart it” (101). Indeed, as I have suggested, there
is no shortage of women of color who appear to be appropriating the language
of postfeminism in unexpected, and thus potentially disruptive, ways.
Let me be clear: I do not think that Projansky (2001) is incorrect in her
assertion that postfeminist discourses assume a white, heterosexual female sub-
ject, nor do I think that McRobbie (2009) is mistaken when she contends that
the postfeminist masquerade reinforces racial divisions and reinstates whiteness
as the racial standard. I do, however, want to echo Kimberly Springer’s (2007)
astute observation that “studies of postfeminism have studiously noted that
many of its icons are white and cited the absence of women of color, but the
analysis seems to stop there” (249). The tendency to conceptualize postfeminism
 Jess Butler · 49

as primarily exclusionary obscures the ways in which this discursive formation

includes (albeit in specific and limited ways) nonwhite and nonheterosexual
subjects. It is this inclusion that, in my view, remains undertheorized.
In his examination of the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie, Foucault (1978)
discovered that the transformation of sexuality into discourse was “applied first,
and with the greatest intensity, in the economically privileged and politically
dominant classes” (120). However, this did not mean that the deployment of
sexuality established an exclusionary principle, available only to the privileged
few; it represented instead a self-affirming experiment with a new distribution of
pleasures, discourses, truths, and powers (123). Extending the work of McRobbie
(2009) and others, I argue that the formation of postfeminist discourses in the
contemporary United States takes a similar shape: rather than simply an exclu-
sion of racial and sexual others, postfeminism primarily represents an affirma-
tion of a white heterosexual subject. It is, in Projansky’s (2001) words, “a way to
redefine feminism in order to perpetuate heterosexual whiteness as universal”
(16). In other words, the argument that postfeminist discourses exclude women
of color or queer women is not wholly incorrect, but it is an inadequate rendering
of the relations of power that produce them. Instead of assuming, for instance,
that women of color are somehow unaffected by postfeminist discourses, it seems
that a more productive route is to rethink postfeminism in terms of “cultural
ownership,” or what kinds of claims and boundaries are constructed by different
social groups across a variety of social contexts. Such an approach allows us to
interrogate the ways in which postfeminism provides space for others within
its discursive boundaries and explore how nonwhite and/or nonheterosexual
women adopt, internalize, negotiate, and challenge hegemonic postfeminist
conceptions of race, gender, and sexuality.

Toward an Intersectional Approach to Postfeminism

Despite the increasing visibility of women of color in contemporary popular

culture, the processes by which they are incorporated into media representa-
tions may, in fact, reproduce hierarchies of difference and dominance. As
Herman Gray (1995) argues, the inclusion of people of color in popular televi-
sion programs often follows an assimilationist mode of incorporation in which
“the privileged subject is necessarily that of the white middle-class; whiteness
is the privileged yet unnamed place from which to see and make sense of the
world” (86). This is certainly true of postfeminism: as Projansky (2001) asserts,
when women of color are depicted in postfeminist representations, they appear
“as assimilated ‘equal’ beneficiaries of the same ‘rights’ that feminism has sup-
posedly provided to white women,” while “the specific intersection of gender
and race oppressions that women of color may face in the US is ignored” (87).
Similarly, Springer (2007) notes that black women may engage with postfeminist
media, but only insofar as they conform to normative conceptions of race, class,
50 · Feminist Formations 25.1

gender, and sexuality (266). She writes that “for African American women, the
postfeminist message is that black women need to know their place within the
racial and gender hierarchy even if they are permitted, in small numbers, to
assume places in the middle class” (272). Such containment does not just apply
to black women: as Isabel Molina-Guzmán (2010) shows, mainstream media
representations of Latina bodies as inherently exotic, foreign, and consumable
work to affirm traditional notions of the United States as a white, Anglo-Saxon
Protestant nation (7). Thus, while postfeminism can and does make space for
women of color within its boundaries, it strictly regulates and polices the forms
their participation may take.
Just as postfeminist discourses commodify feminism, they also construct
racial and ethnic differences as commodities within the global marketplace
(see, for example, Yúdice 2003). As Sarah Banet-Weiser (2007) demonstrates in
her research on children’s programming on Nickelodeon, brown-skinned girls
are regularly depicted in a neoliberal postfeminist context as “urban” and full
of ethnic “flava” that adds to, but rarely challenges, representations of white
femininity (202). Or, as Springer (2007) argues in her work on representations
of African American women in popular culture: “Racialized postfeminism does
not move very far from bell hooks’s assertion that particular forms of cultural
engagement merely amount to ‘eating the other’: a ‘commodification of other-
ness’ in which ethnicity becomes spice, seasoning that can liven up the dull
dish that is mainstream white culture” (252). As these scholars suggest, the
incorporation of women of color does not necessarily disrupt the central tenets
of postfeminism; rather, the increased visibility of nonwhite postfeminists often
serves as further justification that “old school” gender and racial politics are no
longer necessary (Banet-Weiser 2007, 205).
Clearly, the versatility of postfeminism functions as a double-edged sword
with regard to women of color: on the one hand, it allows nonwhite women to
participate in its deployment and enjoy its rewards, albeit in narrowly circum-
scribed ways; on the other, it works to conceal the underlying power relations
that reproduce hegemonic ideas about race, gender, sexuality, and class. And, just
as it does for white women, postfeminism requires its nonwhite participants to
reject political activism in favor of capitalist consumption and cultural visibility.
Yet, as I have suggested, it is possible that women of color may be in a
unique position to disrupt, at least symbolically, the whiteness of postfeminism.
Writing about the construction of Latina bodies in mainstream media, Molina-
Guzmán (2010) proposes the concept of “symbolic rupture” to describe the ways
in which audiences, through critical interpretation, may destabilize processes
of symbolic colonization that manufacture and deploy race and ethnicity as
exoticized commodities (9). “Because media culture is never entirely homog-
enous and at times may contradict the demands of global capitalism,” she argues,
“media discourses about Latinas may actually result in symbolic ruptures that
destabilize dominant definitions of nation, citizenship, and ethnic, racial, and
 Jess Butler · 51

gender identity” (16). In her analysis of Puerto Rican superstar Jennifer Lopez,
Molina-Guzmán writes that
Lopez’s media visibility creates an opening for cultural resistance because the
unclassifiable nature of her identity vexes established representations of US
ethnic and racial identity. Governmentality does not depend on violence for
its power but instead draws on its ability to normalize classification, and Lopez’s
conscious play with ethnic and racial classification potentially destabilized
gender/race power hierarchies in the United States. Flexible and ambigu-
ous bodies that rupture classifications—in this instance black/white racial
hierarchies of beauty—thereby expose binary logic and essentialist identity
categories, inevitably problematizing the norm. (62)

Of course, as Molina-Guzmán points out, moments of symbolic rupture,

such as those performed by Lopez in the late 1990s, rarely go unpunished; the
negative tabloid coverage of Lopez’s sexual relationships and diva-like behavior
in the early 2000s effectively “contained her within familiar narratives of Puerto
Rican and Latina racialized hypersexualization” and contributed to the sym-
bolic colonization of the star (70). Nonetheless, as other scholars argue, Lopez’s
unabashed celebration and display of her short, curvy body—and, especially,
her well-endowed posterior—in the late 1990s represented nothing short of “a
revolutionary act with respect to Anglo beauty ideals generally reflected and
perpetuated through media images” (Beltrán 2002, 73; see also Molina-Guzmán
and Valdivia [2004] and Negrón-Muntaner [2000]). While crossover stardom
can, and often does, involve elements of commodification (Dyer 1986; hooks
1992), media representations of nonwhite bodies “also always contain the poten-
tial to upset the primacy of whiteness inherent in the Hollywood star system
and thus of norms of beauty and the body, with these opposing tendencies in
constant tension” (Beltrán 2002, 80).
By way of conclusion, I take up Molina-Guzmán’s (2010) concept of
symbolic rupture in relation to another racially ambiguous postfeminist icon
whose biography began this article: pop star Nicki Minaj. Like Lopez, Minaj
“consciously negotiates the ways in which she is racialized by shaping how she
is coded in the media through transforming signifiers such as clothing, hair
color, hair style, skin color, body weight, music and, of course, her paramours”
(59). Also like JLo, she embodies multiple ethnic and racial identities; while
blackness is arguably Minaj’s racial “home base,” she is often coded as ambigu-
ously brown. Yet, her performance of race, as well as of gender and sexuality, is
arguably more explicit, more self-aware, more contradictory, and more ironic
than Lopez’s; indeed, a crucial element of Minaj’s appeal lies in her refusal to
stay in any one representational box for long. If Lopez had/has the potential
to disrupt the primacy of whiteness in Hollywood, Minaj has perhaps an even
greater potential to unsettle our assumptions about race, gender, and sexuality
in postfeminist popular culture.
52 · Feminist Formations 25.1

Writing about Minaj’s ongoing appropriation of Barbie, Jennifer Dawn

Whitney (2012) argues that the star “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 (154–55). In
Whitney’s view, Minaj’s performances trouble the assumed “naturalness” of
white femininity that, as we have seen, is so central to postfeminist discourses,
leaving room for “liberatory, pluralistic and feminist interpretations” (142).
Minaj’s version of femininity, as music critic Ann Powers (2012) recently pointed
out in a blog post for National Public Radio’s The Record, is “characteristic of
a pop-cultural moment full of women splitting themselves down the middle”
(2). Powers explains that
Minaj’s feminine side, when it emerges, is cartoonishly exaggerated, sweetness
on steroids. She can’t settle into either role. Roman Reloaded shows no attempt
to connect Minaj’s boldly intoned raps, full of fire and phallic references, to
the strawberry-scented dance tracks she sings in a kitten yelp. Though many
critics have accused Minaj of making these more ‘girly’ tracks for strictly com-
mercial reasons, they do make a statement about femininity: that it’s a form
of drag as potentially ridiculous as the strap-on machismo of Roman. (ibid.)

Minaj’s performance of what Powers dubs the “fractured femme” is by no

means accidental. Indeed, as Out Magazine blogger Caryn Ganz (2010) details
in “The Curious Case of Nicki Minaj,” the rapper consciously engages with the
politics of being a multiracial woman in today’s music industry:
“Everyone knows I can go out and pick a dude and date him,” [Minaj] says.
“But I want to do what people think I can’t do, which is have the number 1
album in the country and be the first female rapper to sell albums like dudes
in this day and age.” After taking some heat for identifying with one of the
best-selling, and most disproportioned, toys in history—she ends phone calls
with a screeched “It’s Barbie, bitch!”—she was accused of being plastic. “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,’ ” she says, getting a bit heated. “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.” (2)

This is the complex terrain of contemporary postfeminism. Minaj is defending

her right to identify as a Barbie and as a “bad bitch,” as well as her aspiration to
sell records “like dudes.” She simultaneously locates herself within the hip-hop
“community” and critiques the search for (imagined) racial authenticity that
has long been a point of contestation in hip-hop culture. She repeatedly marks
herself as female—“female rapper,” “female dog”—yet distances herself from
the heterosexual demands—“pick a dude and date him”—of contemporary
femininity. And, while her erotic lyrics and hypersexual performances are often
in line with mainstream assumptions about women of color, Minaj’s sexual
 Jess Butler · 53

identification remains ambiguous: “I only stop for pedestrians or a real, real bad
lesbian,” she raps on “Go Hard” (2009). Like her performances of gender and
race, Minaj’s performance of sexuality refuses easy classification.
It is in this fractured positionality that, in my view, Minaj’s subversive
promise resides. Her hyperbolic enactment of a Barbie doll–like femininity, her
adoption of racially and sexually diverse alter egos, and her celebration of cyborg
subjectivities provide a vivid illustration of Judith Butler’s (1999) influential
claim that all gendered (and racialized) bodies are an “imitation without an
origin” (175). If Britney Spears and Carrie Bradshaw are postfeminism’s icons,
Minaj represents—visually, aurally, and lyrically—a literal fracturing of that
ideal. In her videos, interviews, and stage performances, she critically engages
with normative constructions of race and ethnicity, as well as gender and
sexuality, in ways that have the potential to symbolically rupture the discursive
boundaries of postfeminism.
Of course, Minaj does not somehow escape the commodification of
sexuality, gender, and race that is part of any neoliberal/postfeminist celebrity
construction; some critics have insisted that all of her shape-shifting is merely
a ploy to sell records. There is also the question of whether or not the kinds of
disruption presented by a pop star like Minaj are a viable option for “real” girls
or for women of color in postfeminist media forms other than popular music.
And, like those of all celebrities, Minaj’s performances are not unilateral; we
need audience studies to tell us more about how fans (and critics) understand
her enactment of postfeminism. A cursory glance at YouTube comment threads
suggests that while some viewers see her as a sexy feminist role model, others
see her as just plain weird. Nevertheless, she is clearly doing something that
resonates with a diverse and global audience, something that suggests that the
symbolic boundaries of postfeminism may be more permeable than scholars
have previously imagined.
The dearth of thoughtful analyses of the relationship between race and
postfeminism in the contemporary United States is troubling, particularly
because it seems to indicate a continuing tendency among feminist scholars
to treat race as secondary to gender, despite repeated calls from feminists of
color to understand race and gender as mutually constitutive. Similarly, with
a few exceptions, scholars of postfeminism seem to have sidestepped questions
of sexuality, even as queer theorists continue to emphasize the central role of
heterosexism in the reproduction of inequality.9 Such vacancies indicate that
there is much work to be done.
I believe that as scholars of postfeminism, rather than continuing to focus
primarily on gender, we would do well to integrate the work of feminists of color
and queer theorists into our analyses from the start. It is not enough to claim
that postfeminism excludes various groups by privileging a white middle-class,
heterosexual subject; we need to dig much, much deeper and unpack how post-
feminism, racism, classism, heterosexism, nationalism, ageism, and ableism work
54 · Feminist Formations 25.1

together to reproduce social inequality and relations of power. The deployment

of postfeminist sexualities in the contemporary United States is a complex,
dynamic, and multilayered process; as such, it requires a complex, dynamic,
and multilayered analysis. Possibilities for future research abound: exploration
of the many postfeminist cultural forms that feature nonwhite, nonmiddle-class,
and nonheterosexual women; ethnographic or interview-based accounts of
the women who participate in these forms; and further critical examination of
the ways in which postfeminism shores up white supremacy, male dominance,
and heterosexism are but a few examples. If, as McRobbie (2009, 97) suggests,
engaging with postfeminism is a requirement for being “culturally intelligible”
as a modern girl, then it is incumbent upon us—as feminists and as scholars—
to interrogate the various ways in which postfeminism exercises power in its
deployment of sexuality.

Acknowledgments

A version of this article was presented at the annual meeting of the Ameri-
can Sociological Association in August 2012. Special thanks go to Sarah
Banet-Weiser, Macarena Gómez-Barris, Sharon Hays, Hyeyoung Kwon, Sean
McCarron, Michela Musto, and Rebecca Schwartz-Bishir, as well as to the three
anonymous Feminist Formations reviewers, for their encouragement, comments,
and suggestions at various stages of this project.

Jess Butler is a PhD candidate in sociology and gender studies at the University of
Southern California. Her dissertation combines historical, textual, ethnographic, and
interview methodologies to examine the relationship between college hook-up culture
and postfeminist culture, demonstrating how both are connected to the perpetuation
of gender and racial inequalities and the production of neoliberal subjects. She is also
exploring the intersections of race, gender, and sexualities in postfeminist popular
culture. She may be contacted at jlbutler@usc.edu.

Notes

1. There are, of course, scholars other than Foucault who have made compelling
arguments for and against such conceptualizations of the relationship between sex and
power, and I do not mean to suggest otherwise here. Nor am I claiming that Foucault
alone has somehow “figured out” this complex and ever-changing relationship. Rather, I
simply wish to invoke one of Foucault’s central arguments—that we must not think that
in saying “yes” to sex we are saying “no” to power—as an entry point for understanding
the growing popularity of postfeminist discourses in many Western societies.
2. See, for example, “Is the Left Sick of Feminism?” (Hochschild 1983); “The Awful
Truth about Women’s Lib” (Jong 1986); “When Feminism Failed” (Dolan 1988); and
“Why the Women Are Fading Away” (Collins 1998).
 Jess Butler · 55

3. For a comprehensive historical analysis of the feminist debate about pornography,

as well as other recent feminist debates, see Nan D. Hunter and Lisa Duggan’s Sex Wars:
Sexual Dissent and Political Culture (2006).
4. This is not to suggest that there were no “sex-positive” feminists in the 1970s.
Indeed, there was a critical position within feminism from the start that worried that
anti-pornography feminism would have the effect of reinforcing women’s already fragile
sexual empowerment. For more discussion of this, see Alice Echols (1989).
5. The recent emergence of conservative right-wing “feminists” like Sarah Palin
and Michelle Bachmann is a fascinating topic in its own right, but for the sake of time
and space I avoid discussing it here.
6. Suzanna Danuta Walters (1991) locates the first mainstream use of the term
“postfeminism” in a 1982 New York Times Magazine article by Susan Bolotin titled
“Voices from the Postfeminist Generation.”
7. Although she focuses primarily on the British context, McRobbie’s analysis
is applicable to the United States and elsewhere, especially those places that have
experienced similar cultural, economic, and political shifts.
8. Sarah Banet-Weiser (2007) and Kimberly Springer (2007) are two important
exceptions. Others have examined themes of self-production, sexualization, and com-
modification in relation to women of color, for instance Tricia Rose’s (2008) examina-
tion of black women’s participation in hip-hop subcultures and Isabel Molina-Guzmán’s
(2010) work on the construction of Latina media bodies (see also Aparicio [2003]; Beltrán
[2002]; Molina-Guzmán and Valdivia [2004]; Negrón-Muntaner [2000]); however, in
these studies, postfeminism is not named as an explicit context.
9. See Joke Hermes (2006) for an analysis of heterosexuality and queerness in
popular postfeminist television and Gill (2008) for a discussion of the proliferation of
lesbianism in contemporary advertising.

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