18

Feminism, Gender,
and, Popular Culture
Diane Grossman

Feminism has always had a complicated relationship with popular culture, ranging
from a near‐complete repudiation by radicals to demands for inclusivity from liber-
als to postmodern approaches that emphasize textual polysemy to third‐ and even
fourth‐wave feminist reclamations of “girl power.” Critics of popular culture have
tended to vilify it because “women are depicted as second‐class citizens in popular
films, television, advertising, and newspapers, which is supposed to have disastrous
consequences for their self‐image” (Hermes 1995, p. 56). Liberal and neoliberal fem-
inists have offered a more tempered critique, seeking not to reject popular culture in
toto but rather to advocate for the inclusion of more (and more positive) models of
women that transcend gender stereotypes. All of these critical perspectives share
both a focus on the production and content of popular culture and an assumption
that texts are univocal. In contrast, psychoanalytic theorists and cultural studies
­critics have shifted the focus to women’s reception of popular texts. In many cases,
they seek to understand the pleasure that so many women derive from their viewing
experiences; for some, it is vital to move beyond simplistic explanations like “false
consciousness” to understand and perhaps even respect women’s choices and desires.
Some theorists, especially lesbians and women of color, have emphasized marginal-
ized women’s agency and their ability to “read against the grain”;1 such perspectives
offer alternative readings of even the most maligned texts. Feminist post‐structuralist
thinkers, influenced by Freud and Lacan, venture beyond both reception and pro-
duction to theorize gender as a sign rather than as tied to specific female bodies. Such
theorists have linked the degraded popular to the feminine, not only because popular
culture genres tend to be filled with women as subjects, but also because the passivity
and “moral vacuousness” associated with mass‐market culture and consumers of
such culture have been “feminized” (Huyssen 1986); thus, to reclaim the popular
might be understood as reclaiming a woman’s domain.
Despite their differences, these theoretical vantage points all presuppose that pop-
ular cultural texts speak with one voice. They ignore the fissures and ambiguities in

Companion to Feminist Studies, First Edition. Edited by Nancy A. Naples.

© 2021 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2021 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
322 Diane Grossman
popular texts and assume a hegemonic reading. In contrast, late twentieth and early
twenty‐first century cultural critics (both in and out of feminist theory) have deployed
a number of theoretical lenses, including postmodern theory, to argue that debates
over the value of popular culture often mask the reality that popular culture is not
monolithic or static, and that the “texts” (whether written or visual) comprising
popular culture often produce contradictory effects; those contradictions might even
be a source of pleasure for viewers.
This chapter explores these competing perspectives on gender and popular cul-
ture, concluding with a brief look at how popular culture today constructs both the
feminine and the feminist.

What Is Popular Culture?

Cultural studies professor John Storey (2018) maintains that there are at least six
different definitions of popular culture, and, though this brief chapter cannot elabo-
rate on those competing definitions, one should note that there is no consensus on
what defines popular culture. The field itself is unquestionably eclectic, ranging
from studies of film noir to the Harlequin romance to Beatles music to reality televi-
sion to professional wrestling to dating sites to cooking shows and much more.
Further, the very boundaries of popular culture are often unclear, as is the case with
television, where advertising and programming may blur, where fan communities
tweet and blog in reaction to shows they are watching, or with crossover trends,
where popular stars become associated with product lines.2 Despite controversies
over what constitutes the field, Ray Browne’s (1988b) succinct definition probably
provides a useful and simple way into the study of the field. For Browne, founder of
US popular culture studies, popular culture is the “vernacular, everyday culture of
the people, as opposed to the narrow elitist culture which artificially constitutes
some ten percent of a national’s lifestyle” (1988b, p. i). Later he refers to it as “our
total life picture” (1988a, p. 1). In addition, much of popular culture is targeted at
small audiences,3 what sociologist Herbert Gans (1999) terms “taste cultures” that
share “common aesthetic values and standards of taste” (p. 6). Viewers of popular
culture know that the field is profit‐oriented, and, as a result, popular culture is
often characterized by self‐referentiality and an ironic tone. Further, given that most
popular culture production is complex and often involves the labor of many indi-
viduals, the resulting work may contain within it conflicts and fissures ripe for
analysis, including feminist analysis.
Most scholars agree that popular culture is a product of mid‐ to late‐twentieth
century technologies that allowed the easy proliferation and reproduction of a variety
of cultural products – film, television, radio, books, and music, for example. In the
late twentieth and early twenty‐ first centuries, new digital technologies have ren-
dered popular culture more diverse, more individualized, and more ephemeral; the
omnipresence of personalized blogs, individual and group Facebook accounts, tweets,
Instagram, and Pinterest means that popular culture is both personal and mass. New
technologies also mean that popular culture is now global, and as such can disrupt or/
and reinforce geographic and political divisions. Further, “entertainment is said to be
the USA’s biggest export” (During 2005, p. 14), so there is no question of the influence
 Feminism, Gender, and, Popular Culture 323
of global markets on popular culture. Given that academic study has tended to focus
on the enduring, the weighty, and the universal, theorizing popular culture – given its
diversity, its transitoriness, and its local nature – has seemed to require a defense. And,
perhaps precisely for the same reasons, studying popular culture is often lauded as
anti‐elitist and democratizing.
But the growing hegemony of popular culture was not initially embraced by cul-
tural theorists, and Frankfurt School theorists Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer
(1993) wrote scathing critiques of the then‐emerging genres of popular film and
music. Looking at the production of mainstream culture, from radio to television to
film to magazines to “women’s serials” (p. 13) (which they later denigrate as “idi-
otic” [p. 16]), they see no individual voice or manner of expression anywhere. In the
classic 1944 essay “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception,”
Adorno and Horkheimer bemoan the homogeneity of mass culture: “culture now
impresses the same stamp on everything” (p. 1). Personality is reduced to “shiny
white teeth and freedom from body odor and emotions” (p. 24). Thus, any “indi-
viduality” one imagines in these cultural artifacts is an illusion:

In the culture industry the individual is an illusion not merely because of the standardi-
zation of the means of production. He is tolerated only so long as his complete identifi-
cation with the generality is unquestioned. Pseudo individuality is rife: from the
standardized jazz improvisation to the exceptional film star whose hair curls over her
eye to demonstrate her originality. …The peculiarity of the self is a monopoly commod-
ity determined by society; it is falsely represented as natural. It is no more than the
mustache, the French accent, the deep voice of the woman of the world, the Lubitsch
touch: finger prints on identity cards which are otherwise exactly the same … (p. 18)

Films, they argue, are all predictable; “as soon as the film begins, it is quite clear
how it will end” (p. 3). As Marxists, they emphasize the centrality of mass or popular
culture to ideology (it tames “revolutionary and barbaric instincts” [p. 17]), and they
note the ways that popular culture blurs with commercial advertising, ultimately
bolstering capitalist ideology and exacerbating alienation.
Perhaps as a product of 1960s radical countercultural and second‐wave feminist
activism, an emerging body of scholarship from the 1960s to the 1980s defended
popular culture against these kinds of universalizing claims. In 1970, Russel Nye main-
tained that studying popular culture, if done “seriously and with proper purpose and
methodology,” can enable us to achieve a “broader and deeper understanding of our
society” (p. 80). In 1974, Gans argued for “cultural democracy” (p. xi), and defended
popular culture against critics who claimed it was a threat to democracy, exploitative
of the masses, and a vulgarization of high culture. For Gans, popular culture is not a
danger to democracy, and he simplistically maintains that “all taste cultures are of
equal worth” (p. xv), that the differences between high and popular culture have been
exaggerated by critics of popular culture, and that “everyone should get the culture
they want” (p. xvi). Further, for Gans, audiences are not passively imbibing whatever
they are fed in popular culture; “I cannot subscribe to the notion that popular culture
is simply imposed on the audience from above” (p. xi). Later, in the 1980s and 1990s,
critics like Stuart Hall and John Fiske, while not denying the profit‐motive behind
popular culture production, also maintained that a popular cultural text “can no
324 Diane Grossman
longer be seen as a self‐sufficient entity” (Fiske 1997, p. 130), and that popular culture
audiences can contest power relations with “semiotic resistance that not only refuses
the dominant meanings but constructs oppositional ones that serve the interests of the
subordinate” (Fiske 1989, p. 10). Popular culture, then, offers the potential for resist-
ance and critique, though early critiques were written largely by men and, for the most
part, ignored the role of gender in popular texts.
The field of popular culture is now more than 50 years old, and it is rare that
cultural critics today feel the need to justify their interest in the subjects that com-
prise the field. But, for some time, given the inherent elitism of “high” theory, aca-
demics and activists who sought to study popular culture had to defend their focus
on the “low.” Further, feminist critics sought to salvage so‐called “women’s texts,”
largely neglected in both mainstream and popular culture scholarship. Cultural crit-
ics like sociologist Andrea Walsh maintained that examining the texts of popular
culture can, unlike traditional historical research, not only provide a lens into a cul-
ture’s surface but also reveal hidden (and often contradictory) fantasies “through the
mediation of myth and symbol” (Walsh 1986, p. 4).

The analyst of popular culture must abandon the criteria of realism at the door of the
theater, the cover of the novel, the dial of the television or radio. It is not sufficient to
measure fiction against real life. Rather, to interpret popular culture, one must enter the
world of cultural mediation, of symbol and metaphor, of collective dream and fantasy.
The challenge of cultural analysis is to decode that symbolic structure, and analyze why
audiences and readers … prefer particular patterns of fantasy over others.
(Walsh 1986, p. 6)

Those fantasies, as critics like Simon During point out, “help to form identity”
(2005, p. 193), and can even provide the basis for obsession. “It’s the mirror in which
the culture recognises itself…. It draws national – and international – communities
together, dotting conversations and private and communal memories” (p. 193). And
writing in 1988, political scientist James Combs predicted a “popular culture revolu-
tion” of the twentieth and twenty‐first centuries such that popular culture would
alter consciousness. He argues presciently that soon fantasy will supersede reality,
and “entertainment [will] become the ‘ritual center’ of our lives,” providing the
meaningfulness that was once expected of religion.
Given that many feminists, post‐structuralists, and the vast majority of gender
theorists view “gender” itself as a social construction the study of popular culture is
particularly well‐suited to the analysis of gender; further, one can profitably use
“gender” as a lens through which to understand popular culture itself. However, it
was not until feminist theorists began to explore popular culture texts that analyses
of gender became central to the field. And the proliferation of work over the last
thirty of so years on “readings” of popular culture texts suggests how ripe the field
is for feminist interventions and methodologies. As a number of feminist theorists
have pointed out, we ignore or vilify popular culture at our own peril; Australian
writer Catherine Lumby (1997), for example, notes: “If feminism is to remain
engaged with and relevant to the everyday lives of women, then feminists desperately
need the tools to understand everyday culture … the prime means of communication
in our culture” (p. 174).
 Feminism, Gender, and, Popular Culture 325
Second‐Wave Feminism, Gender, and Popular Culture

In the 1960s, Anglo‐American feminism launched an attack on representation –

often media representation – of women; these critiques focused on the invisibility of
women in media, and on the ways that such works, when they did feature women,
reinscribed traditional gender stereotypes. Betty Friedan, in the classic 1963 second‐
wave work, The Feminine Mystique, has nothing but contempt for the “image by
which modern American women live” (p. 34), an image she believes has been “cre-
ated by the women’s magazines, by advertisements, television, movies, novels, col-
umns, and books by experts on marriage and the family” (p. 34). Clearly, Friedan’s
analysis begs the question whether there ever was one image of “American” women,
and her blindness to race and class privilege as well as the heterosexist nature of her
argument, limits the analysis’s usefulness. Nevertheless, her approach reflects the
dominant strain of second‐wave Anglo‐American feminism that popular cul-
ture – along with economic inequality like the wage gap – was a major source of
women’s oppression; further, it maintained that, unlike the wage gap, media repre-
sentation of women both produced and reinforced gender role socialization.
Likewise, Germaine Greer, arguably a more radical second‐wave feminist than
Friedan, was highly critical of mass media. In her classic work, The Female Eunuch
(1970, reissued 1991), she lambastes the “highly sophisticated accounts” (p. 128) of
Freud, Karen Horney, Erik Erikson, Plato, Aristotle, Herbert Marcuse, and others.
But, along with those attacks, she also condemns a wide variety of popular cultural
artifacts. She notes, for example, that “every women’s magazine” warns of the “hor-
rors of vaginal odour” (p. 44). She denounces popular songs (pp. 183–184) for their
messages about love; “pulp stories” (p. 189) and “romantic fiction” (p. 191) where
female protagonists give up independence and careers for the sake of a “husband’s
pressing love” (p. 189); and “trash weeklies”4 (p. 195) that cater to teenage girls and
sell millions of copies a week, and are preoccupied with clothes and populated by
women who “cherish the chains of their bondage” (p. 202). Not even Charles Shultz’s
Peanuts cartoon series is immune to her hostility, as Greer reads the character of
Lucy as an anti‐feminist, misogynist foil to the beleaguered Charlie Brown (p. 327).
In other second‐wave feminist analyses of popular culture, feminists went beyond
abstract theorizing to inventory the actual content of popular cultural texts in order
to draw attention to gender stereotyping. For example, in 1970, Jan Sinott reviewed
34 hours of Saturday morning cartoons for the journal Off Our Backs. She created
a scale of 1 through 5 for the “chauvinism” of the programming, where a “1” meant
a “liberated female character.” Sinott found no 1s and only one 2, and the majority
of the shows earned 4s or 5s (Blakemore 2015). Such second‐wave projects continue
in more popular tools like the “Bechdel Test,” which first appeared in Alison Bechdel’s
comic strip “Dykes to Watch Out For” (1986), as a personal policy of one of the
characters who boycotts any film that doesn’t have at least two female characters5
who talk to each other about something other than a man. This “body count”
approach suffers from a number of problems, not the least of which is that it con-
flates gender and sex, and seems to presume that the mere presence of strong female
characters is feminist.
Such analyses share at least three questionable approaches: first, they ignore or
discount viewers’ responses, in particular the pleasure that viewers may derive from
326 Diane Grossman
popular cultural texts. “False consciousness” seems far too facile an explanation for
such a complicated phenomenon. Second, these analyses conflate sex and gender.
That is, they tend to assume that by counting women’s bodies, we have also accounted
for gender and for gender messaging. Finally, these critical perspectives beg the ques-
tion whether there is consensus as to what counts as a feminist and/or emancipatory
text. Later popular cultural analyses would challenge all of these claims. Paving the
way for such a shift was John Berger’s groundbreaking 1972 work, Ways of Seeing,
which moved away from analyses of production or of content to explore reception,
to theorize how viewers see.
Using images from classical art as well as popular advertising and mass media,
Berger’s thesis is fairly simple: that “the way we see things is affected by what we
know or what we believe” (1972, p. 3). Seeing, for Berger, comes before speaking
or writing, and, once we realize that we see, we also realize that we can be seen.
Further, Berger argues that in an age when images can be mechanically repro-
duced,6 those images can be used for a variety of purposes and to convey a variety
of messages; thus, the “meaning” of an image is no longer fixed (if it ever was).
Images can be used to serve commercial purposes or political purposes or even to
caricature the original image. As a result, the “modern means of reproduction” has
destroyed the “authority of art” (p. 32).
Berger’s analysis provides a foundation for understanding not only gender dynam-
ics in the visual but also how that dynamic may be disruptable. The “presence” of
men in art is dramatically different from the presence of women in art; men’s pres-
ence promises power, whether it be moral, physical, spiritual or political; and that
power is exteriorized. By contrast, women’s presence reflects an interiorized power
which results from how she negotiates her space in a male‐dominated world. As
Berger writes,

To be born a woman has been to be born, within an allotted and confined space, into the
keeping of men. …She has to survey everything she is and everything she does because
how she appears to others, and ultimately how she appears to men, is of crucial impor-
tance for what is normally thought of as the success of her life. Her own sense of being
in herself is supplanted by a sense of being appreciated as herself by another. (p. 46)

Or, as he later puts it, “men act and women appear” (p. 47). Berger implicitly
rejects gender essentialism, even as he generalizes about how visual images portray
men and women:

Women are depicted in a quite different way from men – not because the feminine is
different from the masculine – but because the “ideal” spectator is always assumed to
be male and the image of the woman is designed to flatter him. (p. 64)

Here Berger anticipates feminists like Sandra Bartky who argue that women pos-
sess a kind of double consciousness or self‐estrangement where they see themselves
as men see them; in other words, they have internalized the male gaze.

What occurs is not just the splitting of a person into mind and body but the splitting of
the self into a number of personae, some who witness and some who are witnessed; and,
 Feminism, Gender, and, Popular Culture 327
if I am correct, some internal witnesses are in fact introjected representatives of agencies
hostile to the self. Women have lost control of the production of our own images, lost
control to those whose production of these images is neither innocent nor benevolent,
but obedient to imperatives which are both capitalist and phallocentric.
(Bartky 1982, p. 138)

Out of “obedience to patriarchy,” women police themselves, recognizing that “she

is under surveillance in ways that he is not” (Bartky 1988, p. 81). Like Berger and,
before him, Simone de Beauvoir (1952), Bartky maintains that gender is not
innate – we are not born masculine or feminine (1988, p. 64), but modern discipli-
nary techniques  –  effective because they are mostly invisible and lateral (“every-
where and nowhere” [1988, p. 74]) – work “in pursuit of a body the right size and
shape” (1988, p. 136): docile women’s bodies. Thus, “femininity” as gender expres-
sion is not only artificially constructed; it is also an achievement, constructed through
women’s own “voluntary” actions and attitudes. Though Barky does not explicitly
name popular culture as the enemy, she uses the phrase “fashion‐beauty complex”
(1982) to refer to the collective actions of mass‐circulation magazines (Vogue fre-
quently comes under fire) with their omnipresent articles on dieting, advertising, and
the fashion and make‐up industries. For Bartky, gender – femininity – is alienation.
Given that particular understanding of gender, it is not surprising that theorists of
popular culture would position the female viewer as passive and compliant. A num-
ber of feminist film critics in the 1970s used psychoanalytic theory, influenced by
post‐structuralism and the work of Jacques Lacan, to create what eventually became
known as “sexual difference theory.” That theory, associated with journals like
Screen and m/f posits the unconscious as central to sexual difference and to gender
itself, and led to an “acknowledgement of both the fragmented nature of subjectivity
and the difficulty of maintaining stable, unified identities” (Franklin et  al. 1997,
p. 259). In her widely cited work, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975),
Laura Mulvey uses psychoanalytic and semiotic theory to argue that narrative film
places women in the position of the object, of the to‐be‐looked‐at, while men are
always already spectators who have the privilege of the gaze. “In a world ordered by
sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and ­passive/
female” (p. 837). Likewise, feminist film critic Mary Ann Doane (1982) maintains
that the female spectator is limited to one of three strategies for viewing a film: she
can take on the masculine position (“transvestitism”); she can over‐identify with
the female character (“masochism”); or she can “masquerade.” For Mulvey, even the
so‐called “femme fatale” of film noir lacks agency, despite appearances to the con-
trary. Thus, in a patriarchal culture, gender difference is fixed as gender inequality.
Given the inevitability of this sexual arrangement, Mulvey and Doane, along with
other early feminist media critics, could only argue for the creation of new, avant‐garde
films, produced by women (or, rather, by feminist women) that would serve as a form
of “counter‐cinema.” By implication, such a view implicitly recommends that women
resist and boycott mainstream film and other misogynistic cultural productions. In
effect, this analysis either denies the pleasure women derive from mainstream film (and,
by extension, popular culture more generally), or identifies that pleasure as a dangerous
symptom of false consciousness. And, from a theoretical perspective, the theory itself is
unfalsifiable; how can we prove or disprove the idea that gender determines whether
328 Diane Grossman
one’s viewing is active or passive? Further, there seems to be no possibility for a more
nuanced or even ambiguous understanding of the role that gender plays in viewing the
popular, that is, for an analysis that allows both activity and passivity to be present in
the same viewing presence. Many critics also argued that this perspective naturalized
gender inequality. On the other hand, the work served to challenge the notion of a self
as a unified subject, and to shift the theoretical focus from simplistic readings of content
to analyses of fantasy, pleasure, and desire.

Critical Perspectives: The Third Wave

Feminists have “long relied on an eclectic combination of frameworks and methods,

often extracted from traditional disciplines and reworked to take account of gender”
(Franklin et al. 1997, p. 264), and that has perhaps never been truer than in the late
twentieth and early twenty‐first century feminist work in popular culture. Third‐
wave feminist analyses, often influenced by post‐structuralism, semiotic theory, crit-
ical race theory, and deconstruction as well as activist politics, began with the
premise that women could read texts through their own agency, not as passive and
mindless viewers or readers. Whereas much of second‐wave theory and activism
were structured around an assumed opposition between feminism and femininity,
third‐wave feminists have tended to embrace both. For traditional second‐wave the-
ory, including radical feminism, liberal feminism, and Marxist‐feminism, femininity
itself was deeply complicit with patriarchy and gender inequality. Further, the wom-
en’s movement of the 1960s and the 1970s “was conceived as a social movement
that was ‘outside’ of, and frequently oppositional to, the dominant culture” (Hollows
and Moseley 2006, p. 3). In addition, the period’s psychoanalytically oriented per-
spectives on gender and popular culture construct femininity as passivity and sub-
mission. However different these theoretical perspectives might be, they share three
key premises: first, that women can be treated as a homogeneous group with shared
interests and shared experiences under capitalism/patriarchy; second, that the male
gaze is universal, active, and monolithic; and, finally, that the gender ideology implicit
or explicit in popular culture is unequivocally and uncontroversially problematic.
But a large body of scholarship beginning in the 1980s and 1990s challenged
those premises; in particular, critics charged psychoanalytic theories of gender with
essentialism and overdetermination. Influenced by various types of reader‐response
theories, such scholarship paved the way for a shift from “objectivist” readings of
texts to a focus on the active reader. As such challenges emerged, feminists began to
question whether the gaze is inherently male and whether gender is as overdeter-
mined as many had argued. Teresa de Lauretis (1987), for example, challenged
­feminist analyses of gender as sexual difference. Doing so, she argues, not only posi-
tions men in opposition to women; it also undermines the “radical epistemological
potential of feminist thought” to posit a “subject … not unified but rather multiple,
and not so much divided as contradicted” (p. 2). Gender, then, becomes an effect
produced in bodies, but is not any sort of property of bodies. De Lauretis wants us
to think of gender “as the product of various social technologies, such as cinema,
and of institutionalized discourses, epistemologies, and critical practices, as well as
practices of daily life” (p. 2).
 Feminism, Gender, and, Popular Culture 329
How do we understand the pleasure (often termed “guilty pleasure”) women
experience in popular culture? Is there a female gaze with an agency of its own? Is
“femininity” necessarily a form of false consciousness, an inevitable passivity?
Popular culture theorists, including feminists, began to argue that popular cul-
ture – in its variety of manifestations – “cannot be simply categorized as the “top‐
down” imposition of fantasy material on an all‐receptive mass, the audience” (Walsh
1986, p. 3). Often, to do so, these theorists shifted the focus from abstract theoretical
discussions of popular media, to ethnographic studies that made women’s voices
central, which actually spoke to women. Some analyses found pleasure, others resist-
ance; but all suggested that female viewers were hardly passive dupes of media.
Andrea Press (1990), for example, interviewed middle‐class white women about
their reactions to the popular primetime soap opera Dynasty (1981–1989).7 Press
found that the middle‐class viewers in her study were critical of the show, viewing it
as “unrealistic.” Ien Ang (1985) studied Dutch viewers’ reactions to the hit prime-
time soap opera Dallas to understand the pleasure that the show provided for them;
according to Ang, even a Marxist analysis would have to untangle the mode of pro-
duction of a cultural object from how it is consumed, from its use‐value. Theorists
like Hermes argued that working‐class women “resist the soap opera” (Hermes
1995, p. 62), implicitly challenging the universality of women’s experiences.
As such theorists shifted their focus from texts to audiences, from the male gaze
to feminine narcissism and pleasure, they found empowerment in many of the genres
associated with conventional female roles. Tania Modleski (1982), Cora Kaplan
(1986), Carol Thurston (1987), and Janice Radway (1984), for example, studied the
readers of romantic fiction (including gothic novels, erotic novels, Harlequin
romances, and soap operas) in order to determine “how various groups appropriate
and use the mass‐produced art of our culture” (Radway 1984, p. 222), thereby pro-
ducing female subjectivity. They argue that these genres allow women (both literally
and figuratively) to effect a break from their own lived experiences.
Other critics, mostly feminists of color, questioned what bell hooks describes as
the “totalizing agenda” (1992, p. 124) of white feminism and particularly of feminist
film criticism. Theorists of color like hooks, Jacqueline Bobo (1988, 1995), and Jane
Gaines (1986), like de Lauretis, challenge the feminist cultural critic’s emphasis on
gender as sexual difference, but they also add that doing so confines feminist theory
to a single‐lensed focus that ultimately erases race. Gaines, for example, argues that
the focus on sexual difference has meant that such theory is “unequipped to deal
with a film which is about race difference and sexuality” (1986, p. 12). Such critical
approaches, including intersectional theory (Crenshaw 1989), maintain that gender
cannot be neatly teased apart from other aspects of identity, including race, sexuality,
and social class, and that women’s lived experiences cannot be analyzed from a gen-
dered perspective alone. Indeed, for such theorists, gender itself is transformed
through its imbrication with other aspects of identity. For theorists of color, women
of color have always been “oppositional” readers of popular culture; they have
rejected both the phallocentric gaze and the alleged passivity of the white female
spectator to offer readings “against the grain” (hooks, p. 126), or what Patrocinio
Schweickart (1986) refers to as the “resisting reader” (p. 42) who discovers elements
in the text that are “suppressed in the dominant models of reading” (p. 39). More
recently, Erin Meyers (2015) notes the ways that women of color viewers often form
330 Diane Grossman
fan communities that tweet or blog to fill in narrative gaps, thereby creating ways to
find pleasure in their readings as well as to bond with other women of color.
Jacqueline Bobo, using Lawrence Grossberg’s argument that every text offers alter-
native ways for audiences to decode it, maintains that viewers can read film – here
The Color Purple – subversively, against the grain. Women of color, she argues, often
possess “an oppositional posture [that] can lead to a subversive reading of a work”
(Bobo, 1988). In her extended 1995 work, Black Women as Cultural Readers, Bobo
uses textual analysis and interviews to describe the ways that black women, as mem-
bers of an “interpretive community,” make “productive use” out of even problematic
films (p. 4). Bobo hypothesizes that Black women have become adept readers of
media, and have learned how to navigate racist images. Analyses such as Bobo’s sug-
gest that viewers can negotiate meaning, and that “the female spectator thus learns to
look at new representations of femininity” in popular culture “in a critical manner,
but with political involvement and with pleasure” (Smelik 1995, p. 80).8
Centering race in popular culture analysis has transformative potential, and the con-
trast between two readings of the cultural icon Madonna can provide one such exam-
ple. Both hooks and mainstream white critic John Fiske offer readings of Madonna, a
figure obsessively studied in 1980s popular culture theory. For Fiske, Madonna is a “site
of semiotic struggle between the forces of patriarchal control and feminine resistance,
of capitalism and the subordinate, of the adult and the young” (1997, p. 132); in Fiske’s
view, the parodic aspects of Madonna’s performativity can even challenge patriarchy.
Where Fiske reads Madonna through her fan base, and argues that she inspires young
girls to “find in her image positive feminine‐centered representations of sexuality”
(1989, p. 104), hooks sees a far more ambiguous and potentially dangerous message in
her reading of Madonna. Where Fiske does not mention race (and we assume that the
fan base he studies is largely if not exclusively white girls), hooks’s focus is on the ways
that Madonna works both to “exploit and transgress traditional racial taboos” (p. 161).
Where Fiske notes Madonna’s “courage just to be herself” (1989, p. 99), hooks exam-
ines the ways that Madonna’s “self” results from an appropriation of black (and gay
male) culture. And whereas hooks does not doubt the seductiveness of Madonna’s per-
sona and performance, she also sees that seductiveness as linked problematically to
white female gender identity; for hooks, unlike Fiske, the power of seduction must not
be confused with the power of real transformation.
In 1992, Rebecca Walker, galvanized by the Clarence Thomas confirmation hear-
ing, described in Ms. Magazine a “third wave” that was more racially and sexually
inclusive (Walker 1992). Leslie Heywood and Jennifer Drake, editors of the collec-
tion Third Wave Agenda: Being Feminist, Doing Feminism (1997), do not repudiate
second‐wave feminism but make clear that a new vision of feminism decenters gen-
der; such a vision must “come to terms with the multiple, constantly shifting bases
of oppression” (p. 3). The “third wave,” they maintain,

contains elements of second wave critique of beauty culture, sexual abuse, and power
structures while it also acknowledges and makes use of the pleasure, danger, and defin-
ing power of those structures. (p. 3)

Younger feminists, often the beneficiaries of second‐wave feminism, articulated a

messier vision of feminism, one where pleasure and danger are not mutually exclusive.
 Feminism, Gender, and, Popular Culture 331
British cultural theorist Angela McRobbie (1984) observed that teenage girls were able
to negotiate an alternative to the hegemonic reading of the film Flashdance by finding
an affirming pleasure in their own bodies; in a later work (1991), she explores how
girls negotiate their own subcultures.
Whereas second‐wave feminism posits femininity as a linchpin in oppression,
younger and third‐wave feminists see femininity and feminism as compatible, and
popular culture as a site for empowerment (often through sexuality) and identity
formation (e.g. Heywood and Drake 1997). Younger feminists grew up with femi-
nism, ironically often through popular culture itself: television programs like
Charlie’s Angels (1976–1981), Wonder Woman (1976–1979), My So‐called Life
(1994–1995), and Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1996–2003); girls’ magazines like
Sassy, Seventeen, and Jackie; entertainers like Madonna, Beyoncé, and the Spice
Girls; and films like the “brat pack” series of the 1980s, Clueless (1995), Titanic
(1999),9 and Mean Girls (2004). The cultural moment of the 1990s in particular was
ripe for entertainment directed at young women, especially teenage girls; both the
popular press and scholarly work acknowledged the “rising power” of teenage girls
“as a demographic group to be reckoned with” (Karlyn 2011, p. 2). Karlyn’s work
looks at the “unruly girls” of film (like the canonical Now, Voyager and the more
recent Titanic) who rebel against their more traditional mothers, a trope that could
just as easily describe intergenerational feminist conflict.
Whereas earlier feminists were proudly “outsiders,” recent contestations – even
violent contestations  –  occur within the landscape of popular culture (Hinds and
Stacey 2001). Insisting on the oppositional nature of feminism means necessarily
that feminism can never become mainstream. Today, for better or for worse, femi-
nism has become part of popular culture. Television shows like 30 Rock (2006–
2013) actively engage with the tensions of gender, power, and feminism itself, making
clear the twenty‐first century’s ambivalence about women, especially women in posi-
tions of power. Comedy itself, as culture theorist Linda Mizejewski points out, “has
become a primary site in mainstream pop culture where feminism speaks, talks back,
and is contested” (2014, p. 6). Comedians like Tina Fey, Sarah Silverman, Wanda
Sykes, and Ellen DeGeneres challenge the gender stereotype that one can be “pretty”
or “funny” but not both.
There are clear implications for popular culture and popular culture analysis in
this characterization of the third wave. The feminist work of the 1980s and 1990s
made it impossible, both theoretically and politically, either to posit “woman” as a
unified category or to uncritically extol the notion of “sisterhood.” This new empha-
sis on difference led naturally to a shift in popular culture analysis, from an earlier
insistence on homogenous audiences and unidimensional textual interpretation to
an awareness of the ways that the meaning of gender can shift and audiences can
challenge a dominant reading. While earlier critics saw popular culture texts as man-
ifestations of top‐down, patriarchal hegemony, these theorists sought to reclaim del-
egitimized cultural texts and to describe and analyze the ways that female readers
negotiated with those texts. To adopt such a position was not to naively assume that
capitalism and patriarchy could be ignored; rather, influenced by post‐structuralism,
multicultural feminism, and queer theory, among others, the popular culture analy-
ses of the late twentieth century emphasized both the contradictory elements within
cultural texts and the viewer’s ability to negotiate with those texts.
332 Diane Grossman
In addition, the rejection of a hegemonic reading of a text allows feminist culture
theorists to play with and open up texts to explore competing meanings, even of
gender, within those texts. Lisa Coulthard, for example, explores the challenges
involved in “reading hybrid and contradictory postmodern texts such as [the film]
Kill Bill” (2007, p. 158) whose femininity is idealized as white, heterosexual and
eroticized, but where the female characters control the flow of the narrative. Full of
graphic violence, typically read as masculine rather than feminine, in Kill Bill the
fight scenes all “position gender… at the forefront” and they become opportunities
for the women to bond; further, the highly violent fight scenes “are defined by the
strong kinetic action of the heroine” (p. 160). Both Coulthard and Jacinda Read
(2000) analyze a genre they call “rape‐revenge films” that can easily be read as
“simultaneously feminist, antifeminist, classist, racist, and often even radically criti-
cal of dominant ideology” (Coulthard 2007, p. 162).10
Adopting a similar theoretical lens, Suzanne Leonard in her book‐length treat-
ment of Fatal Attraction (2009) places the film in the genre of “erotic thriller[s]”
(p. 3) like Play Misty for Me and Body Double, and examines the competing gen-
ders that populate it. Where many critics saw the 1987 film as an attack on femi-
nism, with its hostile portrayal of career woman Alex,11 Leonard argues that the
film suggests a more complicated reading. Fatal Attraction, Leonard argues, offers
a “battle of femininities” (p. 33) as wife and mistress face off for the control of the
hapless, unfaithful husband. Likewise, Melissa Click refuses neat conclusions about
the global success of erotic romances like the Twilight Series and Fifty Shades of
Grey; the latter has sold over 70 million copies worldwide. Linking herself to the
earlier work of Radway, Click notes that the enormous popularity of these works
among women is not the “dire sign” of “women’s submission to our sexualized
culture,” but perhaps an indication that “most women’s lives are framed in shades
of grey” (2015, p. 29).

Post‐feminism, Gender, and Popular Culture

Elana Levine has pointed out that the “cultural products targeted to and experienced
primarily by women have proliferated in the twenty‐first century” (2015, p. 1), and
that large popular spaces are now signified as feminine. The rise of digital media has
allowed for what Levine calls “horizontal relationships” (p. 8), where audiences are
fragmented, needs are highly individualized (through blogs and Facebook pages, for
example), sources of information are disparate (and often contradictory), and cul-
ture has become global. Many traditional forms of popular culture – the women’s
magazine, cookbooks, and soap operas, for example – have been displaced by blogs
and websites that come and go fairly frequently. Reality television shows like The
Bachelor have millions of viewers who then blog their support or opposition to a
particular contestant. Celebrities like the Kardashians have thousands if not millions
of followers as well as extensive product lines; through the internet, we are able to
witness what Barack and Michelle Obama give each other as anniversary gifts.
Viewers routinely debate each other, through tweets and blogs, about how to inter-
pret texts. Thus, we are witness to the collapse of the split between the public and the
private, and, with the election of reality television star Donald Trump President,
between the world of politics and the world of celebrity. The #MeToo movement
 Feminism, Gender, and, Popular Culture 333
likewise has made activists out of stars like Ashley Judd, Gwyneth Paltrow, and
Jennifer Lawrence; feminism has been a subtext if not an explicit topic in the conver-
sations that have resulted.12
Debates about the nature of post‐feminism go beyond the scope of this chapter.
But most feminist and cultural studies critics agree that “post‐feminism” emerged in
the 1990s and beyond largely as a result of the success of feminism. Bridget Jones’s
Diary was one of the “first genres to be labeled ‘post‐feminist’” (Click 2015, p. 20),
and television shows like Sex and the City and popular series like The Bachelor are
also held up as post‐feminist. Unlike third‐wave feminism, post‐feminism is often
actively hostile to feminism. Though that historical shift presupposes feminism (one
must note here: liberal feminism), including its gains, at the same time it trivializes or
dismisses feminism as old‐fashioned or unnecessary or both. In post‐feminist popu-
lar culture, we see working women and mothers, sexually active women and girls,
and even what some refer to as “lady porn” (Click 2015). Post‐feminist “sensibility”
is highly conscious of age and thereby positions feminism itself as old, passé, and
outdated. In post‐feminism, “girlhood is imagined… as being for everyone” (Tasker
and Negra 2007, p. 18).
Emphasizing the “tropes of freedom and choice” (McRobbie 2009, p. 3), post‐
feminist ideology is highly consumer oriented, and tends to be both race‐ and class‐
blind. Roberts notes that post‐feminist ideology tends to embrace “bourgeois gender
identities and the consumer culture that goes with them” (p. 244), and television
reality shows that focus on makeovers (e.g. What Not to Wear and The Swan, Nip
and Tuck, and others) emblematize post‐feminist values where every one of us has an
obligation to be as fit and as beautiful as we can be. Post‐feminism refuses any “exclu-
sionary” definition of feminism; the message is that one can choose one’s own brand
of feminism, that one can define it however one chooses. Highly individualistic and
apolitical, post‐feminism has both “naturalized popular feminism” and constructed
feminism as “extreme, difficult, and unpleasurable” (Tasker and Negra 2007, p. 4).
On the other hand, mass viewings of events like the Kavanaugh confirmation
­hearings may underline the continued need for feminist analysis and activism.

Conclusion

In June of 1998, the cover of Time magazine asked the question “Is Feminism Dead?”
The tie to popular culture was obvious: the last of the four images of women on the
cover was Calista Flockhart, the actress who played Allie McBeal on the eponymous
television series. And as recently as 2005, cultural critic Simon During wrote of the
“withering of feminism,” maintaining that “feminism is no longer cool.” As evidence,
he noted that “commercial culture and marketing is [sic] more plastered with images
of hot babes than it was before the feminist movement began” (p. 172). Interestingly,
During ties the “withering” of feminism to popular culture: feminism, he claims,
“was a victim of popular culture which routinely regarded it as an enemy, reducing
it to a bunch of stereotypes” (p. 172).
But today this characterization is far too simplistic, and that was probably also
the case in 2005. If one googles “actresses who say that they’re feminist,” the search
produces 2 380 000 hits. Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s TED talk
“We Should All Be Feminists” has been translated into 47 languages and has now
334 Diane Grossman
received more than 14 850 000 views. Singer Beyoncé has riffed on Adichie’s talk in
one of her songs, and even performed with the word ‘feminist’ in large bold letters as
the backdrop to her concert. Taylor Swift openly embraced the label “feminist” after
being widely criticized for rejecting the label. Emma Watson, one of the stars of the
Harry Potter movie series, spoke at the United Nations about women’s rights and
feminism, and helped to start the HeForShe movement. Comedian and actress
Amy  Poehler founded the Smart Girls organization, and actress Geena Davis’s
­foundations is, as their website notes

the first and only research‐based organization working within the media and entertain-
ment industry to engage, educate, and influence content creators, marketers and audi-
ences about the importance of eliminating unconscious bias, highlighting gender
balance, challenging stereotypes, creating role models and scripting a wide variety of
strong female characters in entertainment and media …

Scarlett Johnansson gave a speech at the January 2017 Women’s March, and
Kerry Washington (of Scandal fame) spoke at the 2015 GLAAD Media Awards cer-
emony. Celebrities who have “come out” as feminist include Claire Danes, Lena
Dunham, Ellen Page, Alicia Keys, Anna Kendrick, Charlize Theron, Miley Cyrus,
Tina Fey, and many others.
In addition, there is empirical research that rejects the notion that feminism has
become passé and unappealing to younger women. Hall and Rodriguez, for exam-
ple, looked at data from 1980 to 1999 and found no evidence that fewer women
self‐define as feminist. They write: “Our research shows that post‐feminism cur-
rently is a myth; women continue to support feminism and find it relevant in their
lives” (2003, p. 878). But they also note the power of perception, and the dangers
of relegating feminism to the past. As they put it, “the emphasis on post‐feminism
in the popular media may create a future reality in which collective struggle is
deemed unnecessary. This possibility is the ultimate danger of the postfeminist
argument” (p. 879).
It is not surprising, then, that we leave this topic facing ambiguity – it seems clear
that feminism is no longer invisible and certainly not the much‐maligned ideology
that conservatives love to vilify. But as feminism (and popular culture) become
increasingly personal, and increasingly “micro,” we cannot help but wonder what
remains of the liberatory potential that many have seen not only in feminism but
also in popular culture itself.

Notes

1 There is no consensus on the origin of this expression, but one early appearance can be
found in Bartholomae and Patrosky in 1987. Similarly, Judith Fettereley coined the term
“the resistant reader” (1978).
2 As of 2013, 42% of the starts of the Real Housewives series started their own product lines
(Lee and Kornowski 2013).
3 Even more so with countless cable television channels and internet technologies.
4 Though in the preface to the 1991 reissue of the book, Greer does admit that “women’s
magazines are now written for grown‐ups” (p. 9).
 Feminism, Gender, and, Popular Culture 335
  5 At times, the Test adds that the female characters must be named.
  6 Berger acknowledges his debt to Walter Benjamin for this analysis.
  7 A reboot has been made of this show, which premiered on October 12, 2017 internation-
ally on Netflix, with 22 episodes planned.
  8 Lesbian readers of popular culture have made similar critiques of mainstream feminist
analyses.
  9 60% of the viewers of Titanic were female, 63% of those viewers were under 25 years old,
and 45% of those were repeat viewers (Karlyn 2011).
10 Coulthard ultimately suggests that violent action heroines serve as “markers for the
ambivalent and problematic pleasures, regressions, and recidivisms of post‐feminist femi-
nist culture (2007, p. 173); as she points out, in most cases the violence is narrativized as
aberrant and exceptional, “purposefully aimed at the reestablishment of family unity”
(p. 170).
11 Dan Kehr of the Chicago Tribune in an early review thought that Fatal Attraction made
the career woman the “most feared figure in Hollywood films” (Heching 2017).
12 It is noteworthy that the #MeToo movement began with Tarana Burke, an African‐
American woman, but that the movement has been criticized by women of color for its
focus on white women (see Prois and Moreno 2018).

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