Post-feminism

CMN3104
Women and the Media
October 15, 2015
 Feminisms
• Feminism
1st Wave
2nd Wave
3rd Wave ?

• Backlash/Anti-feminism

• Post-feminism
– Girlie feminism
– Gaga feminism
 Feminism
• Gender equality
1st Wave: the vote
(late 1800s – early 1900s)
In Canada – Famous Five and the “Persons” case
1929: Women recognized as “persons”
Emily Murphy, Irene Marryat Parlby, Nellie
Mooney McClung, Louise Crummy McKinney,
Henrietta Muir Edwards
 2 Wave
nd

• Reproductive rights and employment

“The personal is the political”
The sexual revolution, contraception, abortions,
household division of labor, marriage and
divorce, professional women, “the glass ceiling,”
wage equality, daycare, harassment, rape,
domestic violence…
Gloria Steinem, Betty Friedan
Pushback – burning bras, angry lesbians, etc.
 3 Wave?
rd

• 1980s – 1990s – some say today…

• Critical of 2nd wave – particularly the focus on
white middle-class women
Expanding focus beyond sexism to include racism,
classism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, fat
phobia, Orientalism, Islamaphobia, imperialism,
settler-colonialism, capitalism
“Intersectionality”
• Imperialist “white supremacist, capitalist,
patriarchy” (bell hooks)
 Backlash/Anti-feminism
• 1980s and 1990s
• Susan Faludi’s (1991) book Backlash
• Blames the 2nd wave women’s movement for
women’s continued struggles…
• Self-perpetuating cycle driven by the media –
reports on single, working women (often false)
perpetuate the sense that feminism failed…
equality wasn’t so great after all! Women long
to be back behind the stove.
 Post-feminism
• After the backlash to the backlash, a new
ideology emerged, late 1990s.
• Post-feminism is NOT anti-feminist, it
celebrates feminism as a SUCCESS
• Post-feminism: because women are now able
to vote/work/get divorced/have sex, they are
equal. Feminism was a success, and is now
old-fashioned to call yourself a feminist.
Post-feminism
 Cultural Studies
• Stuart Hall – encoding and decoding.
(There is more to meaning than simply what a
text says…)
Cultural studies theorists are interested in what
texts do – how they are understood, taken up
and circulated within very real social power
relations and ideologies:
“The text is seen not as a closed work, but as a
discourse, a play of signification, dynamism and
contradiction” – Camera Obscura Collective
 Angela McRobbie
• A student of Stuart Hall’s
• Used cultural studies tools to analyze popular
media aimed at women, including women’s and
girl’s magazines, literature (“chick lit”), movies
(“chick flicks”) and television shows.
• Texts as discourses
• Meaning is never fixed, it can oscillate, it is
dynamic and fluid
• Post-feminism is not a fixed ideology
 Ideology
Ideology – “a set of ideas, values, tastes and/or
beliefs expounded by a particular social group,
organization, religion or culture”
Hegemony - “a process of give and take power
struggle between ruling elites (i.e. governments) and
the masses, in which the rulers offer certain benefits
and concessions to their ‘subjects’ in order to win
their consent and maintain the political status quo”
(definition from Laughey, D. 2007 Key Themes in Media Theory, p. 201)
• There is always struggle
 Post-feminist ideology
• Emerges in popular culture texts in the mid to late 1990s
• Tries to “fix” feminism and feminist politics in the past –
no longer needed.
• Now that we no longer need feminism, women can go
back to doing all of the fun things they did before
feminism (in their spare time off from their high-level
corporate jobs):
- being feminine (hair, make-up, mani-pedis)
- shopping (fashion)
- looking for husbands
- making self-aware, sexist jokes
Ads of the 1990s
Ads of the 1990s
Ads of the 2000s
Ads of the 2000s
 Pro-Feminism
• Again, post-feminism is not anti-feminism, it
celebrates the accomplishments of feminism:
- sexual liberation
- professional mobility (the higher-powered
the career, the better)
- (the power that comes with) consumption
- choice (the ability to choose to be a stay-at-
home mom)
- equality (but whose equality?)
 Liberal feminism
• Who is left out of this (gender-focused) notion
of feminism?
• Poor, racialized, disabled, queer women…
• Those who are not “women” (i.e. those
outside of the gender binary)
• Differences are erased
• Certain women have made “progress” – if
progress is measured in patriarchal terms
Contact
Email: spatr045@uottawa.ca
Twitter: @Ess_jay_pee
 Liberalism/Neo-liberalism
• Liberal feminism focuses on the potential of the
individual (white, middle-class) woman
• The legal gains of the 70s have “evened out” the
playing field
• Focus on economics
• Now it’s up to each of us to make it on our own
• Failure and/or achievement is individualized
• Ignorance of remaining structural barriers
 Post-civil rights
• The notion that once people of color gained equal
legal rights, racism was over
• Sherene Razack (among others) points to the ways
in which racism still operates both overtly and
covertly – there is an embrace of racial diversity
while racism presented as individual [bad] opinon
• Post-feminist texts mask race as structural equality.
• White-washed worlds, racialized characters are not
articulated as such
• Or they are articulated in economic/neo-liberal
terms
 ANTM and the commoditizing of race
• Amy Adele Hasinoff (2008) Fashioning Race
for the Free Market on ‘America’s Next Top
Model’
“Top Model makes race hyper-visible as
a malleable commodity and confirms
the neoliberal fantasy of the structural
irrelevance of race and class in the US
by satisfying the demand for
recognizable tropes of racialized
feminine beauty that only reference
hardship or disadvantage as something
that can be overcome through hard
work” (324)
R.I.P.
 The Makeover
• Race is not the only axis of identity that can be
made over
• Class mobility can be gained by learning the
“proper” (i.e. upper/middle-class) ways to
present one’s self
• “Can-do” girls vs. “failed subjects”
 Past post-feminism?
• Have we moved past post-feminism in popular
culture? (Post-post-feminism)
 Exhibit A
• The F word is (almost) okay again…
 Exhibit B: Reality TV
• Rise of:
Celebrity Shows
Real Housewives
Specialty channels (and shows)
• Decline of:
ANTM
What Not To Wear
The Swan
 Exhibit C: Other Media
• Other media are producing complex,
interesting, diverse female characters
Exhibit D: “Gaga Feminism”
 “Gaga Feminism”
• Coined by Jack Halberstam
• Not limited to Lady Gaga
• Rejection of “normal” – Normal ≠ Natural
• Breaking down binaries, categories and logic
• Double-meaning of “Gaga” as excited but also
as fanatic (fan behaviour – love and adoration,
subject/object distinction vanishes)
• Embraces technology, artifice, body
modification
• Can the aesthetic be political?
 Further Reading
• Hasinoff, Amy Adele. 2008. “Fashioning Race
for the Free Market on America’s Next Top
Model.” Critical Studies in Media
Communication 25 (3): 324–43.

• McRobbie, Angela. 2004. “Post-Feminism and

Popular Culture.” Feminist Media Studies 4 (3):
255–64.