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 BOOK REVIEWS: Feminist Film
and Media Studies

Feminist Media Studies

in a Postfeminist Age

by ELANA LEVINE
massive billboard hovering over the street invites us to gaze at

A a voluptuous woman admiring her own Wonderbra-enhanced

cleavage. The ad’s caption, “Or Are You Just Glad to See Me?”
offers up the punchline to Mae West’s infamous double entendre.
But the black-and-white image presents more than a sexualized tease;
it sells a mediated version of femininity that takes into account the his-
tory of feminist theorizing about media, that acknowledges theories of
the male gaze while simultaneously push-
ing such concerns aside, assuring us that
now that we all know about the sexual ob-
jectification of women we need not bother
with old-school protests and can, instead,
© 2009 by the University of Texas Press, P.O. Box 7819, Austin, TX 78713

just “enjoy looking at women’s bodies

again.”1 Angela McRobbie presents this
analysis of contemporary postfeminist
media culture in the first chapter of Inter-
rogating Postfeminism, one of several recent
volumes that trace the cultural formation
that has become the dominant framework
in western culture’s discourses of gender.
Across media and genres, postfeminism
offers up “the repudiation of a feminism
invoked only to be summarily dismissed,”

1 Angela McRobbie, “Postfeminism and Popular Culture: Bridget Jones and the New Gender
Regime,” in Yvonne Tasker and Diane Negra, eds., Interrogating Postfeminism: Gender and the
Politics of Popular Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 32–33.

www.cmstudies.org 48 | No. 4 | Summer 2009 137

Cinema Journal 48 | No. 4 | Summer 2009

“partly [appropriating] the cultural power of feminism, while often emptying it of its
radical critique.”2 Postfeminist culture takes feminism for granted, assuming that the
movement’s successes have obviated the need for its continuation. In the process, dis-
courses that seek to change or challenge a still-strong patriarchy get incorporated into
a new kind of patriarchal common sense, ultimately sustaining the very structures of
dominance they had set out to critique and destroy.
Feminist media scholars have been writ-
ing about postfeminist culture, and labeling it
as such, for at least the past twenty years, but
this scholarship has blossomed since the turn
of the twenty-first century.3 Much important
work has appeared in journals, especially Femi-
nist Media Studies (begun in 2001), although the
subject has also been addressed increasingly
in single-author monographs.4 Tasker and
Negra’s Interrogating Postfeminism and a new edi-
tion of Brunsdon and Spigel’s Feminist Television
Criticism take postfeminist culture as their orga-
nizing concept, as does Rosalind Gill’s Gender
and the Media, a single-authored volume with
a textbook-like structure.5 The appearance of
these volumes indicates not only the growth of
this arena of scholarship, but also the political urgency of feminist attention to this
insidious cultural formation.
An altered media culture is not the only development to which this flurry of new
publications attest. Inherent in the discourse of postfeminist culture is the indication
that something has changed about feminism itself. Presented most visibly in such sites
as the June 29, 1998, Time magazine cover “Is Feminism Dead?” as well as in widely
quoted moments such as Charlotte’s hyperbolic “I choose my choice!” rant in Sex and
the City, contemporary media culture has taken on feminism as a topic, even as an
organizing logic. The fact that feminist discourse of any kind pervades popular, com-
mercial culture demands a consideration of how feminism has evolved.
Of course, there are many ways in which feminism—both as a political movement
and as a scholarly perspective—has changed over time. Feminist media scholarship
was born of the second wave women’s movement and has matured within a world

2 Ibid., 34. Rosalind Gill, Gender and the Media (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2007), 74.
3 Earlier scholarship includes Elspeth Probyn, “New Traditionalism and Post-Feminism: TV Does the Home,” Screen
31, no. 2 (1990): 147–159; Tania Modleski, Feminism Without Women (New York: Routledge, 1991); Bonnie J.
Dow, Prime-Time Feminism: Television, Media Culture and the Women’s Movement Since 1970 (Philadelphia: Uni-
versity of Pennsylvania Press, 1996).
4 See, for example, Sarah Projansky, Watching Rape: Film and Television in Postfeminist Culture (New York: New
York University Press, 2001); Diane Negra, What a Girl Wants? Fantasizing the Reclamation of Self in Postfeminism
(London: Routledge, 2008).
5 Yvonne Tasker and Diane Negra, eds., Interrogating Postfeminism: Gender and the Politics of Popular Culture (Dur-
ham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007); Charlotte Brunsdon and Lynn Spigel, eds., Feminist Television Criticism,
2nd ed. (Berkshire, UK: Open University Press, 2007).

138
 Cinema Journal 48 | No. 4 | Summer 2009

altered by that movement. A primary development in this scholarship has been the
consideration of the multiplicity of differences that mark human identities. Matters
of class, race, national identity, and sexuality, along with those of gender, are founda-
tional to contemporary feminist research. At times, this recognition of the multiplicity
of differences is labeled third wave feminism.6 In Merri Lisa Johnson’s Third Wave
Feminism and Television, a third wave perspective becomes nearly synonymous with a
queer perspective; in Sarah Banet-Weiser’s contribution to the Brunsdon and Spigel
volume, third wave feminism is a kind of empowerment “increasingly found within
commercial culture.”7 However labeled, “it is attitudes towards and tastes for both TV
[or media more generally] and feminism that have changed” (emphases mine).8
Changes within media culture itself are the more pressing concerns in these vol-
umes. Interrogating Postfeminism and Gender and the Media unambiguously label these
changes as postfeminist and are largely critical of them for the manner in which they
co-opt, commodify, and even corrupt more explicitly feminist discourses. At the same
time, postfeminism is carefully distinguished from feminist backlash. While backlash
implies “achievements won and then subsequently lost,” postfeminist culture “works
in part to incorporate, assume, naturalize aspects of feminism,” taking for granted an
extent of feminist “success” that thereby enables “the displacement of feminism as a
political movement” and that in particular embraces those aspects of empowerment
that “can be articulated . . . to normative femininity.”9 As a result, postfeminist culture
is “white and middle-class by default, anchored in consumption as a strategy (and lei-
sure as a site) for the production of the self.”10 It both encompasses feminist backlash
and works itself more deeply and broadly into our cultural consciousness than do
overtly reactionary backlash discourses.
The scholarly output on postfeminism has debated how to best conceptualize the
term, but a consensus is beginning to emerge. The Tasker and Negra collection has
a unified, critical perspective but nonetheless acknowledges the pleasures and even
the potentially liberating elements within postfeminist culture. Hannah E. Sanders
argues that the empowered femininity of the 1990s series Charmed enables a “healthy
postfeminist discourse” that does not reject second wave feminist politics, and Suzanne
Leonard contends that certain contemporary texts, such as the independent feature
film, The Good Girl (Miguel Arteta, 2002), effectively voice the problematic dimensions
of gender and work in an age of post-industrial labor.11 Similarly, Gill acknowledges
some of the pleasures of postfeminist culture, but she refuses to excuse their ideological

6 See Stacy Gillis, Gillian Howie, and Rebecca Munford, Third Wave Feminism: Expanded, 2nd ed. (Hampshire, UK:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).
7 Merri Lisa Johnson, Third Wave Feminism and Television: Jane Puts It in a Box (New York: I. B. Taurus, 2007);
Sarah Banet-Weiser, “Girls Rule! Gender, Feminism and Nickelodeon,” in Brunsdon and Spigel, eds., 196.
8 Charlotte Brunsdon and Lynn Spigel, “Introduction to the Second Edition,” in Brunsdon and Spigel, eds., 12.
9 Tasker and Negra, “Introduction: Feminist Politics and Postfeminist Culture,” in Tasker and Negra, eds., 1, 2;
McRobbie, 31; Gill, 231.
10 Tasker and Negra, 2.
11 Hannah E. Sanders, “Living a Charmed Life: The Magic of Postfeminist Sisterhood,” in Tasker and Negra, eds., 74;
Suzanne Leonard, “‘I Hate My Job, I Hate Everybody Here’: Adultery, Boredom, and the ‘Working Girl’ in Twenty-
First-Century American Cinema,” in Tasker and Negra, eds., 100–131.

139
Cinema Journal 48 | No. 4 | Summer 2009

dimensions. Her work delivers a comprehensive and damning critique; however, she
weakens her case by neglecting to label some of the phenomena she covers as “post-
feminist.” Thus, while her analysis of contemporary advertising is structured around a
compelling list of postfeminist features, other chapters, those on news and talk shows
in particular, describe the individualist bent and backlash tendencies in such realms
without using the term. In light of the debate and uncertainty that have been attached
to the word, her perspective on the meaning of “postfeminism” would have been bet-
ter served by more consistent use of the label.
As an update to the first edition, Feminist Television Criticism also acknowledges the
significance of contemporary postfeminist discourse. However, the book offers a less
clear perspective on the phenomenon than either Tasker and Negra or Gill. The edi-
tors acknowledge that the meanings of both “television” and “feminism” are less sta-
ble than they were upon publication of the 1997 edition but reveal some ambivalence
about how to characterize these shifts. They write, “Apparently we now live, as many
of the chapters in this book suggest, in ‘post-feminist times.’” Here, “apparently” and
the scare quotes mark the concept of “post-feminist times” as inherently suspect.12
While feminists are rightly wary of embracing a term that seems to put feminism in the
past, the increasingly widespread usage of “postfeminist” to describe the hegemonic
gender politics of contemporary western culture suggests that it is time to accept the
use of this signifier to more effectively, and collectively, critique the cultural formation
to which it refers. Perhaps because Brunsdon and Spigel have compiled essays that
have been published previously, it is especially difficult for the volume to offer an argu-
ment about television and gender in the present. More recent publications develop
many of the ideas addressed in these chapters further, but the editors’ survey approach
does not lend itself to a distinctive through-line.
It is unclear what kind of through-line one might offer to characterize a field called
feminist television (or media) criticism. Does deciphering the postfeminist cultural for-
mation of the present require a new set of methods, a new approach? If so, how might
one reconcile such an approach with past scholarship? Brunsdon and Spigel include
some “classic” essays in feminist television studies amidst the newer entries, thereby
offering an historic trajectory of sorts. At the same time, they contend that there has
not been a major paradigm shift in feminist TV scholarship itself, and that “textual
analysis, ethnographic audience research, fan studies, institutional analysis, narrative
analysis and ideological analysis still form the major approaches to the object.”13 The
work they include, as well as the other recent research, bears this out.
Still, if not the methods then at least the theories, the ways of thinking about
gender and media culture in the contemporary context, might bear reworking. Gill
comes closest to articulating the need for some reconceptualization when she points
out that the usefulness of various concepts long central to feminist media scholarship
may be waning. She makes her strongest case around the concept of “objectifica-
tion” and the ways in which the contemporary sexualization of women’s bodies
might be better understood as sexual subjectification (a process equally if not more

12 Brunsdon and Spigel, “Introduction to the Second Edition,” in Brunsdon and Spigel, eds., 1.
13 Ibid., 12.

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 Cinema Journal 48 | No. 4 | Summer 2009

problematic than objectification, as the gaze here becomes self-policing). In this re-
spect, she points out that the sexualization of women’s bodies is defined differently in
postfeminist culture, especially given the interweaving of such discourses as irony or
feminism itself.14 Whereas previous work has addressed such cultural developments,
rarely have we seen the kind of effort to re-think the very terms of our analyses that
Gill encourages.
Perhaps the greatest challenge to feminist media scholarship that the postfeminist
context demands is the fact that, as Sarah Projansky argues, “postfeminism is by defi-
nition contradictory, simultaneously feminist and antifeminist, liberating and repres-
sive, productive and obstructive of progressive social change.”15 Because of this, it
does feminist critiques a disservice to classify particular instances as wholly disruptive
of dominant discourses or as all-out efforts of containment against such disruptions.
Merri Lisa Johnson identifies the critical position best suited to this context as that of
the “feminist fangirl,” a position that makes “skepticism and critique . . . the givens of
our approach” but that places such traditional feminist perspectives alongside a recog-
nition of the pleasures in television, a position Johnson labels as third wave.16 Projansky
describes this perspective as one that emphasizes the “both/and nature of postfeminist
representations.”17 Such exhortations welcomingly urge a new kind of feminist media
criticism.
Is such a shift in criticism part of a broader shift in feminism as an international
social and political movement? The growing recognition among western feminists that
questions of gender-based inequality operate at both global and local levels has had an
impact. Brunsdon and Spigel include chapters that consider East Asian, South Asian,
Latin American, British, United States, and Eastern European reception contexts, tak-
ing as a given the significance of geographic variations. Gill, writing from Britain,
attempts to address gender and the media transnationally, although the sweep of some
of her claims comes off as too broad in her efforts to be globally inclusive. This is es-
pecially marked in her discussion of news representations of women in politics and the
news coverage of rape; she over-generalizes even the differences between the United
States and Britain. Tasker and Negra label their contributors’ explorations as specifi-
cally centered on these two national contexts; their claims are thereby transnational,
yet specific in productive ways.
An additional concern of contemporary feminism is the intersection of class and
race with gender. A pronounced trait of postfeminist culture is its alliance with post-
racial/post–civil rights and even post–class conscious perspectives, in that “the ideo-
logical notion that contemporary American society is . . . one in which racial difference
and gender discrimination are no longer salient” pervades contemporary culture.18

14 Gill, 38–41, 89–90.

15 Sarah Projansky, “Mass Magazine Cover Girls: Some Reflections on Postfeminist Girls and Postfeminism’s Daugh-
ters,” in Tasker and Negra, eds., 68.
16 Merri Lisa Johnson, “Introduction: Ladies Love Your Box: The Rhetoric of Pleasure and Danger in Feminist Televi-
sion Studies,” in Johnson, ed., 10.
17 Projansky, “Mass Magazine Cover Girls,” 68.
18 Sarah Banet-Weiser, “What’s Your Flava? Race and Postfeminism in Media Culture,” in Tasker and Negra, eds.,
204.

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Cinema Journal 48 | No. 4 | Summer 2009

Similarly, the privileging of high-status professions in postfeminist representations of

working women makes such cultural sites “generally quite inattentive to the mate-
rial conditions and pressures of actual work.”19 Given the intersectionality of these
discourses, and their simultaneous drive to make the concerns of progressive activism
seem outdated and unnecessary, it is unfortunate that more feminist media scholarship
does not take on these disturbing convergences. The fact that Kimberly Springer’s
insightful essay, which explores post-feminist and post–civil rights stereotypes of black
women, appears in both Interrogating Postfeminism and Feminist Television Criticism indicates
a dearth of scholarship on such topics.20
Two additional interventions in contemporary feminism find a place as well—
attention to neoliberalist discourses, such as Laurie Ouellette’s analysis of Judge Judy,
and exploration of queer perspectives.21 Sexuality is a pervasive concern, but explicitly
queer readings appear mainly in Steven Cohan’s “Queer Eye for the Straight Guise”
and throughout Johnson’s Third Wave Feminism and Television.22 At least four of the seven
chapters Johnson includes offer queer (in one case trans) readings of television texts,
helping to cement the book’s equalization of third wave feminism with matters of sex-
ual radicalism. At times, this results in refreshing perspectives—as in Katherine Frank’s
effort to see the reality dating show, The Bachelor, as a space in which to “challenge ev-
eryday thinking about the practice of monogamy in heterosexual relationships.”23 Yet
the equation of third wave feminism and sexual radicalism throughout the chapters
unfairly limits the scope of the former. In addition, the range of programs deemed
eligible for these radical readings is frustratingly narrow. Other than The Bachelor, the
only television programs seen as holding the radical potential for feminist and queer
interpretation in Johnson’s collection are those of American premium cable channels,
an editorial choice that, intentionally or not, predicates feminist pleasure upon the
cultural and economic capital required to appreciate and access these shows.
The field of feminist media studies is clearly eager to grapple with the changes in
media and in feminism that have accelerated in recent years. Yet questions remain
about the future of feminist media scholarship and the objects of its analytic gaze. One
such question concerns the benefits and drawbacks of holding to distinctions between
media that have informed previous periods. Feminist Television Criticism and Third Wave
Feminism and Television keep TV at the forefront, but other work is more invested in
erasing the lines between media, concerning itself more with converging discourses of
gender. While there is surely value in attending to medium specificity—especially in

19 Leonard, 104.
20 Kimberly Springer, “Divas, Evil Black Bitches, and Bitter Black Women: African American Women in Postfeminist
and Post–Civil Rights Popular Culture,” in Tasker and Negra, eds., 249–276, and in Brunsdon and Spigel, eds.,
72–92.
21 Laurie Ouellette, “‘Take Responsibility for Yourself’: Judge Judy and the Neoliberal Citizen,” in Brunsdon and
Spigel, eds., 139–153.
22 Steven Cohan, “Queer Eye for the Straight Guise: Camp, Postfeminism, and the Fab Five’s Makeovers of Masculin-
ity,” in Tasker and Negra, eds., 176–200.
23 Katherine Frank, “Primetime Harem Fantasies: Marriage, Monogamy, and a Bit of Feminist Fanfiction on ABC’s The
Bachelor,” in Johnson, ed., 91–118.

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the case of a medium like TV, too long denigrated and ignored by scholars—present
and future production and reception contexts encourage the elimination of such
distinctions.
Also remaining is the question of the relationship of contemporary feminist work
to earlier generations of research. Brundson and Spigel’s volume makes clear the value
of the early work of such scholars as Tania Modleski, Annette Kuhn, and Ien Ang, but
the books under review also suggest that newer scholarship is abandoning the broader
theorizations offered in these feminists’ accounts. Earlier generations of feminist me-
dia studies addressed the issue of pleasure, a topic that appears less frequently in newer
work. Joanne Hollows’s analysis of Nigella Lawson, Gill’s recognition of the pleasures
in certain post-feminist texts, audience readings gathered in some of the Feminist Tele-
vision Criticism essays, and Johnson’s call for a recognition of feminist love for TV are
some of the few instances in which this new batch of scholarship applies itself to this
previously pressing matter.24 While the relatively new context of post-feminist culture
has demanded scholarly critique, another way feminists might combat the more re-
gressive tendencies of this culture would be to examine and highlight the actual and
potential pleasures women—and men—find in those representations and forms that
do and do not subscribe to the post-feminist message.
Expanding feminist media scholarship beyond representations of and concerns
about women is also a new direction and one that might accrue great benefit to femi-
nist media scholarship and activism. Karen Boyle argues for the importance of sub-
jecting masculinity to critique, although she problematically conflates postfeminist
culture and contemporary feminist media criticism in doing so.25 Johnson’s analysis of
masculinity in The Sopranos, Cohan’s take on the men of Queer Eye, and Gill’s examina-
tion of lad mags as a site for the “defensive assertion of masculinity, male power and
men’s rights against feminist challenges” more effectively illustrate that discourses of
masculinity and addresses to men are crucial to the hegemonic common sense of post-
feminist culture and thereby crucial objects for feminist analysis.26
Whatever the future directions of feminist media scholarship, the new cultural for-
mations offered in our postfeminist times have disturbing ramifications, particularly in
their dismissal of feminism as a no-longer-necessary relic. It is essential that we do not
let our outrage with these tendencies keep us from seeking to understand their power,
as such understanding is a first step toward change. In this new hegemonic and patri-
archal common sense lies a rich arena within which feminist scholars can continue to
engage with both the dangers and the pleasures of our changing media age. ✽

24 Joanne Hollows, “Feeling Like a Domestic Goddess: Postfeminism and Cooking,” in Brunsdon and Spigel, eds.,
154–173.
25 Karen Boyle, “Feminism Without Men: Feminist Media Studies in a Post-Feminist Age,” in Brunsdon and Spigel,
eds., 174–190.
26 Merri Lisa Johnson, “Gangster Feminism: The Feminist Cultural Work of HBO’s The Sopranos,” in Johnson, ed.,
28–55; Cohan; Gill, 211.

143