The Post-Feminist Mystique

The problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American popular culture critics. It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that cultural studies theorists suffered in the beginning of the twenty-first century in the United States. As she wrote the essays, attended the conferences, and shut off the television at night, she was afraid to ask even herself the silent question—"Is this all?"

When Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique was published in 1963, it documented a generalize malaise among white middle-class college educated women who found wife and motherhood in the suburbs to be less fulfilling than American culture had promised. To some, this book ignited the contemporary feminist movement (labeled the "second wave" after the suffragists and abolitionists—the "first wave" of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century). Her infamous opening (reworked in my epigraph), narrated in the voice of a stay-at-home "everywoman," lamented a life devoted to cooking, cleaning, and taking care of others. Some forty-plus years later, we find ourselves mired in Martha Stewart-esque "new domesticity" as writers such as Caitlin Flanagan blame feminism and mothers who dare to venture outside traditional stay-at-home gender roles for just about every societal ill (Catlin 2006). Sometimes popular culture might appear to tell a different story, however, one where women (still, largely white) are the protagonists of their own destinies, with or without men and babies. Perhaps in response to an American culture veering closer and closer to a 1950s-era level of paranoia and conservatism, critics tend to heartily endorse unconventional images of gender in contemporary popular culture. Work of such a kind appears in the anthologies Chick Lit: The New Woman's Fiction, Athena's Daughters: Television's New Woman Warriors, and Action Chicks: New Images of Women in Popular Culture. Whether we mine the novels of Jemima K. for traces of Edith Wharton or squeeze out racial critiques of "Otherness" in Buffy's vampires, we feminist pop culture critics are skilled at unearthing progressive potential in what might at first appear to be patently sexist or otherwise conservative depictions of women. Such a "Search and Describe" mission reflects a hunger for agency and the potential for cultural/social change. Thus Pamela Anderson in Barb Wire troubles gender binaries because she stabs with a stiletto instead of a sword, and a Buffy fan's rejection of gender politics becomes a "submerged call" for "'radical and de-centered attention to multiple differences, none of which merit theoretical privileging over others'" (DiStefano qtd. in Frances and Kennedy 2003, 82). Similarly, the conflation of sexual power and credit card debt in the Shopaholic novel series is seen by one author as more about individual postmodern ideology fatigue than as a depressingly accurate portrayal of the limited routes to socially-sanctioned agency open to (even) white middle class women in the late 1990s. In other words, at least to me, sometimes these endorsements seem overly-optimistic.

Yet as a pop culture critic who herself has been called on the women's studies carpet for finding feminism in artifacts such as TLC's A Wedding Story and Mona Lisa Smile, I am not unsympathetic the mining of the popular for feminist potential. In this respect, I believe all three books are valuable additions to the field, not only of gender and popular culture but of feminism in general. I also realize that critiques of our critiques are sometimes as effortless and simplistic as reading aloud a list of MLA paper titles. However, I am equally suspicious of representational "empowerment" discovered via female characters who can run in high heels, fire a...