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Feminist Media Studies in a Postfeminist Age
A massive billboard hovering over die street invites us to -gaze at 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 thehis- tory of feminist theorizing about media, that acknowledges tiieories of the male gaze while simultaneously pushing such concerns aside, assuring us that now that we all know about the sexual objectification of women we need not bother with old-school protests and can, instead, just "enjoy looking at women's bothes again."1 Angela McRobbie presents this analysis of contemporary postfeminist media culture in the first chapter of Interrogating Postfeniinism, 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," "partly [appropriating] the cultural power of feminism, while often emptying it of its radical critique."2 Postfeminist culture takes feminism for granted, assitming that the movement's successes have obviated the need for its continuation. In the process, discourses 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 writing 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 Feminist Media Studies begun in 200 1 ), although the subject has also been addressed increasingly in single-author monographs.* Tasker and Negra 's Interrogating Postfeminism and a new edition of Brunsdon and Spigel's Feminist Television Criticism take postfeminist culture as their organizing 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.