Post-postfeminism? New feminist visibilities in postfeminist times

This article contributes to debates about the value and utility of the notion of postfeminism for a seemingly “new” moment marked by a resurgence of interest in feminism in the media and among young women. The paper reviews current understandings of postfeminism and criticisms of the term’s failure to speak to or connect with contemporary feminism. It offers a defence of the continued importance of a critical notion of postfeminism, used as an analytical category to capture a distinctive contradictory-but-patterned sensibility intimately connected to neoliberalism. The paper raises questions about the meaning of the apparent new visibility of feminism and highlights the multiplicity of different feminisms currently circulating in mainstream media culture – which exist in tension with each other. I argue for the importance of being able to “think together” the rise of popular feminism alongside and in tandem with intensified misogyny. I further show how a postfeminist sensibility informs even those media productions that ostensibly celebrate the new feminism. Ultimately, the paper argues that claims that we have moved “beyond” postfeminism are (sadly) premature, and the notion still has much to offer feminist cultural critics

The One with the Feminist Critique: Revisiting Millennial Postfeminism with Friends

In the aftermath of its initial broadcast run, iconic millennial sitcom Friends (NBC, 1994–2004) generated some quality scholarship interrogating its politics of gender. But as a site of analysis, it remains a curious, almost structuring absence from the central canon of the first wave of feminist criticism of postfeminist culture. This absence is curious not only considering the place of Friends at the forefront of millennial popular culture but also in light of its long-term syndication in countries across the world since that time. And it is structuring in the sense that Friends was the stage on which many of the familiar tropes of postfeminism interrogated across the body of work on it appear in retrospect to have been tried and tested. This article aims to contribute toward redressing this absence through interrogation and contextualization of the series’ negotiation of a range of structuring tropes of postfeminist media discourse, and it argues for Friends as an unacknowledged ur-text of millennial postfeminism

Gender Monstrosity

Deadgirl (2008) is based around a group of male teens discovering and claiming ownership of a bound female zombie, using her as a sex slave. This narrative premise raises numerous tensions that are particularly amplified by using a zombie as the film’s central victim. The Deadgirl is sexually passive yet monstrous, reifying the horrors associated with the female body in patriarchal discourses. She is objectified on the basis of her gender, and this has led many reviewers to dismiss the film as misogynistic Torture Porn. However, the conditions under which masculinity is formed here – where adolescent males become "men" by enacting sexual violence – are as problematic as the specter of the female zombie. Deadgirl is clearly horrific and provocative: in this article I seek to probe implications arising from the film’s gender conflicts

Queering the Bitch: Spike, Transgression and Erotic Empowerment

According to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, queer exists when the constituent elements of anyone’s gender or sexuality are not made (or cannot be made) to signify monolithically. By this definition Spike is the queerest character in the 'Buffyverse': both his gender and sexuality are fluid – neither is secure and both are based around excess. His gender switches from male to female and his sexuality from 'vanilla' to more varied and non-traditional forms of eroticism. The article argues that the character of Spike opens up opportunities for the resignification of what it means to be male or female, man or monster, dominant or submissive, 'vanilla' or an exponent of erotic variation – opportunities we need to seize if we are to challenge the all-pervasive binaries which govern our understanding of sex, gender and sexuality, and the interrelationship between these terms