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WATCHING RAPE: Film and Television in Postfeminist Culture Sarah Projansky New York: New York University Press, 2001; 311 pp.
Watching Rape: Film and Television in Postfeminist Culture provides a systematic examination of the ubiquity and versatility of rape narratives in American cinema and television, and articulates the intersections of such narratives with discourses of "postfeminism." Sarah Projansky contends that there is a "discursive effectivity" (p. 3) to rape narratives that contributes to a rape culture. Therefore, representations of rape must be a site for feminist activism. Most importantly, Projansky details intersections of race, class, sexuality, and gender. She argues that "rape narratives help organize, understand, and even arguably produce the social world; they help structure social understandings of complex phenomena such as gender, race, class, and nation" (p. 7). Projansky also maps how postfeminism structures the ways that rape is portrayed, and works to limit the possibilities for feminist mobilization against rape. Projansky's critical reading practice opens space for multiple interpretations as her analysis does not work towards closure on these issues; rather, her work points to important directions in feminist cultural studies.
In her chapter, "The Postfeminist Context," Projansky details feminism's co-constitutive relationship to postfeminism through the idea that postfeminism perpetuates discourse around feminism even as it declares feminism obsolete. Critically, Projansky challenges the type of feminism that postfeminism implies - an implicitly white, heterosexual, middle-class feminism. I found this critique to be particularly useful. What Projansky does is dehomogenize postfeminism, by identifying five categories of this discourse: linear, backlash, equality and choice, (hetero)sex-positive, and men-can-be-feminists-too. The effect...