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Rikke Schubart and Anne Gjelsvik , editors; Nordicom, Gothenburg, 2004, 233p,
ISBN 91-89471-25-3
, $25
Femmes Fatalities: Representations of Strong Women in the Media is an anthology of essays addressing and questioning the alleged rise of powerful women in the media fictions of the 1990s. This highly eclectic collection of twelve essays ranges geographically from Scandinavia to South America, and covers the wide range of genres and sites that comprise the contemporary field of media reception and analysis.
Obviously covering all bases (and contributions) is beyond the confines of a single review, but in general the very diversity of Femme Fatalities is part of its strength - but primarily its weakness. This is a very mixed bag divided into three somewhat arbitrary sections (New Media and Postfeminist Aesthetics, Genre Fictions and From the Margins). The collection is marred by a lack of theoretical focus or direction, in the absence of which the editors have latched onto the term 'postfeminism' as a catch-all umbrella term for the project.
As Rikke Schubart and Anne Gjelsvik write in their introduction: 'Taken together, the essays in this anthology are representative for [sic ] a postfeminist approach to culture in the sense that none of them provide simple answers to complex questions' (p. 10-11).
This apparently rests on the highly problematic assumption that feminist theory, as opposed to postfeminist theory, does not take account of complexity and diversity, also in the field of film and cultural studies. After nine lines galloping from mid-nineteenth...