Economies of visibility as a moderator of feminism: ‘Never mind Brexit. Who won Legs‐it!’

This article utilizes economies of visibility to interpret how two UK women political leaders’ bodies are constructed in the press, online and by audience responses across several media platforms via a multimodal analysis. We contribute politicizing economies of visibility, lying at the intersection of politics of visibility and economies of visibility, as a possible new modality of feminist politics. We suggest this offers a space where feminism can be progressed. Analysis illustrates how economies of visibility moderate feminism and tie women leaders in various ways to their bodies; commodities constantly scrutinized. The study surfaces how media insist upon femininity through appearance from women leaders, serving to moderate power and feminist potential. We consider complexities attached to public consumption of powerful women's constructions, set up in opposition, where sexism is visible and visceral. This simultaneously fortifies moderate feminism and provokes feminism. The insistence on femininity nevertheless disrupts, through an arousal of audible and commanding feminist voices, to reconnect with the political project of women's equality

Hakim Revisited: Preference, Choice and the Postfeminist Gender Regime

Abstract We revisit Hakim’s influential preference theory to demonstrate how it is both reflective of postfeminism and generative of its values and practices. We differentiate between two interpretations of postfeminism – first a surface level “successful but obsolete” version articulated by Hakim and a second, multi-layered account of postfeminism as a discursive formation connected to a set of discourses around gender, feminism and femininity. Drawing on this latter version we make visible the embeddedness of postfeminism in preference theory highlighting its connection to the creation of a new postfeminist subjectivity based on an agentic and ‘choosing’ femininity. We show how a consideration of preference theory in terms of the emergence and constitution of “the female chooser”, opens up aspects of Hakim’s thesis which to date have been overlooked. In addition, our postfeminist reading of preference theory draws out aspects of Hakim’s account which she herself understated. Specifically, within a contemporary context where equivalent priority is afforded to wage-work and care work, it is Hakim’s ‘adaptive’ woman who exemplifies the new postfeminist subject required to perform well simultaneously in both the work and domestic domains

Communicating (post)feminisms in discourse

10.1177/1750481309343856Discourse and Communication34339-34