Girl Power's Last Chance?:Tavi Gevinson, Feminism, and Popular Media Culture

This paper focuses on Tavi Gevinson, the teenage fashion blogger-turned-editor in chief of the online magazine Rookie, as a case study with which to interrogate the production and circulation of feminist politics within a ‘post-girl power’ era. Drawing on theories of performativity, I employ a discursive and ideological textual analysis of Gevinson’s self-produced media and media coverage to map how she uses the opportunities afforded by digital media to rearticulate narratives of ‘girl power’ and perform a feminist girlhood subjectivity that makes feminism accessible to her many readers. While I argue that Gevinson’s ability to do so is positive and demonstrates the porous nature of postfeminist media culture, I also suggest that we must be critical of the ways in which her feminism functions as part of her self brand that reproduces feminism as white, middle-class, and ‘hip’. Thus, I conclude by questioning a larger cultural trend towards the branding of feminism and advocating the need for an intersectional approach to understanding the resurgence of feminism within contemporary popular media culture

Don\u27t Just Change The Channel: Why Pop Culture Matters to Feminism, Activism, and Social Justice

Andi is the cofounder of Bitch Media. A longtime freelance writer and illustrator, Andi\u27s work has appeared in numerous periodicals and newspapers, including Ms., Mother Jones, Utne, BUST, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Women\u27s Review of Books, and Hues. She is a former pop-music columnist for the SF Weekly and the East Bay Express, and also contributed to the anthologies Young Wives\u27 Tales, Secrets and Confidences: The Complicated Truth About Women\u27s Friendships (both from Seal Press), and Howl: A Collection of the Best Contemporary Dog Wit(Crown). She is the coeditor of BitchFest: 10 Years of Cultural Criticism from the Pages of Bitch Magazine, and the author of Feminism and Pop Culture (Seal Press). Her new book on pop culture and the commercial co-optation of feminism, We Were Feminists Once, will be out in May 2016 from PublicAffairs. She speaks frequently on the subject of feminism and the media at various colleges and universities. Andi graduated from The Colorado College in 1994 with a B.A. in Fine Art that has proved to be more or less useless, though she did use it to secure a job designing rugs for Pottery Barn back in the day. She passes her non-Bitch hours watching television and embroidering portraits of dogs, often simultaneously. Her other interests include drawing, reading, hiking, and eating cheese. Bio From bitchmedia.or