Feminist Media Studies in a Postfeminist Age

A massive billboard hovering over the 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 the history of feminist theorizing about media, that acknowledges theories 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 bodies again."¹ Angela McRobbie presents this analysis of contemporary postfeminist media culture in the first chapter of Interrogating Postfeminism, 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, assuming 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 2001), although the subject has also been addressed increasingly in single-author monographs.⁴ 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.

An altered media culture is not the only development to which this flurry of new publications attest. Inherent in the discourse of postfeminist culture is the indication that something has changed about feminism itself. Presented most visibly in such sites as the June 29, 1998, Time magazine cover "Is Feminism Dead?" as well as in widely quoted moments such as Charlotte's hyperbolic "I choose my choice!" rant in Sex and the City, contemporary media culture has taken on feminism as a topic, even as an organizing logic. The fact that feminist discourse of any kind pervades popular, commercial culture demands a consideration of how feminism has evolved.

Of course, there are many ways in which feminism—both as a political movement and as a scholarly perspective—has changed over time. Feminist media scholarship was born of the second wave women's movement and has matured within a world altered by that movement. A primary development in this scholarship has been the consideration of the multiplicity of differences that mark human identities. Matters of class, race, national identity, and sexuality, along with those of gender, are foundational to contemporary feminist research. At times, this recognition of the multiplicity of differences is labeled third wave feminism.⁶ In Merri Lisa Johnson's Third Wave Feminism and Television, a third wave perspective becomes nearly synonymous with a queer perspective; in Sarah Banet-Weiser's contribution to the Brunsdon and Spigel volume, third wave feminism is a kind of empowerment "increasingly found within commercial culture."⁷ However labeled, "it is attitudes towards and tastes for both TV [or media more generally] and feminism that have changed" (emphases...