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Since its inception in the early 1980s, "postfeminism" has become a common appellation for the attitudes and behaviors of young women in the contemporary United States. The article assesses how postfeminism is connected to the discursive deployment of sexuality in the late modern era by examining the socio-historical context out of which postfeminism emerges, reviewing various definitions of postfeminism, and offering a conceptualization of postfeminism as a neoliberal discursive formation. After briefly analyzing the existing scholarship on postfeminism, particularly the ways in which this body of literature privileges a white middle-class, heterosexual subject, the article proposes an intersectional approach to postfeminism in order to more fully understand how postfeminist discourses reproduce inequalities of race, gender, and sexuality, and offers some preliminary thoughts about pop star Nicki Minaj's potential to symbolically rupture postfeminism's discursive boundaries.
Keywords: femininity / Foucault / heterosexuality / intersectionality / Nicki Minaj / postfeminism / sex-positive feminism / symbolic boundaries / whiteness
"Our national love of porn and pole dancing is not the byproduct of a free and easy society with an earthy acceptance of sex. It is a desperate stab at free-wheeling eroticism in a time and place characterized by intense anxiety."
-Ariel Levy, Female Chauvinist Pigs
Nicki Minaj's musical career began quietly in 2007 with a mix-tape called Playtime Is Over. Five years later, in April 2012, her second studio album, Pink Friday: Roman Reloaded, debuted at number 1 on iTunes, making her one of the best-selling female solo artists of all time. Born in 1982 in Saint James, Trinidad, to parents of mixed Indian and Afro-Trinidadian ancestry, Minaj moved to Queens, New York, at the age of 5, where she cultivated the peculiar persona(s) for which she has become a global celebrity. On the cover of her first album, for example, Minaj appears as a dismembered Barbie doll, and she lovingly refers to her fans as "Barbz." In addition to "Harajuku Barbie," the star has adopted a slew of alter egos, ranging from the evil (and male) "Roman Zolanski" to the saintly "Nicki Teresa." Her rap style includes "a lot of wobbly, wacky voices, foreign accents, grunt-barks, horror-movie screams, and doll squeaks" that, as feminist blogger Edith Zimmerman (2010) notes, audiences either love or hate (2). In her...