http://weblearn.ox.ac.uk/site/human/women/students/biblio/historiog/McRobbie%20-%20postfeminism.pdf
Bridget Jones Diary
Quotes :
- “well regulated liberty” can backfire (the source of comic effect), and this in turn gives rise
to demarcated pathologies (leaving it too late to have a baby, failing to find a good catch,
etc.) which carefully define the parameters of what constitutes liveable lives for young
women without the occasion of re-invented feminism.
- The backlash for Faludi was a concerted, conservative response to the achievements
of feminism. My argument is that post-feminism positively draws on and invokes
feminism as that which can be taken into account, to suggest that equality is achieved,
in order to install a whole repertoire of new meanings which emphasise that it is no
longer needed, it is a spent force. This was most vivid in The Independent (UK) newspaper
column Bridget Jones’s Diary, then in the enormously successful book and film which
followed.1 For my purposes here, post-feminism permits the close examination of a
number of intersecting but also conflicting currents. It allows us to examine shifts of
direction in the feminist academy, while also taking into account the seeming repudiation
of feminism within this very same academic context by those young women who are its
unruly (student) subjects.
- In this context it requires both imagination and hopefulness to argue that the
active, sustained, and repetitive repudiation or repression of feminism also marks its (still
fearful) presence or even longevity (as afterlife). What I mean by this is that there are
different kinds of repudiation and different investments in such a stance. The more gentle
denunciations of feminism (as in the film Bridget Jones’s Diary) co-exists however with the
shrill championing of young women as a “metaphor for social change” on the pages of
the right wing press in the UK, in particular the Daily Mail.
Bridget Jones Diary
Quotes :
- “well regulated liberty” can backfire (the source of comic effect), and this in turn gives rise
to demarcated pathologies (leaving it too late to have a baby, failing to find a good catch,
etc.) which carefully define the parameters of what constitutes liveable lives for young
women without the occasion of re-invented feminism.
- The backlash for Faludi was a concerted, conservative response to the achievements
of feminism. My argument is that post-feminism positively draws on and invokes
feminism as that which can be taken into account, to suggest that equality is achieved,
in order to install a whole repertoire of new meanings which emphasise that it is no
longer needed, it is a spent force. This was most vivid in The Independent (UK) newspaper
column Bridget Jones’s Diary, then in the enormously successful book and film which
followed.1 For my purposes here, post-feminism permits the close examination of a
number of intersecting but also conflicting currents. It allows us to examine shifts of
direction in the feminist academy, while also taking into account the seeming repudiation
of feminism within this very same academic context by those young women who are its
unruly (student) subjects.
- In this context it requires both imagination and hopefulness to argue that the
active, sustained, and repetitive repudiation or repression of feminism also marks its (still
fearful) presence or even longevity (as afterlife). What I mean by this is that there are
different kinds of repudiation and different investments in such a stance. The more gentle
denunciations of feminism (as in the film Bridget Jones’s Diary) co-exists however with the
shrill championing of young women as a “metaphor for social change” on the pages of
the right wing press in the UK, in particular the Daily Mail.
Sex and the city
Quotes:
- Thus feminism is invoked in order that it is relegated to the past. But this is not simply a return to the past, there are, of course, quite dramatic differences between the various female characters of current popular culture from Bridget Jones to the girls in Sex and the City and to Ally McBeal, and those found in girls’ and women’s magazines from a pre-feminist era.
- The new young women are confident enough to declare their anxieties about possible failure in regard to finding a husband, they avoid any aggressive or overtly traditional men, and they brazenly enjoy their sexuality, without fear of the sexual double standard.
Quotes:
- Thus feminism is invoked in order that it is relegated to the past. But this is not simply a return to the past, there are, of course, quite dramatic differences between the various female characters of current popular culture from Bridget Jones to the girls in Sex and the City and to Ally McBeal, and those found in girls’ and women’s magazines from a pre-feminist era.
- The new young women are confident enough to declare their anxieties about possible failure in regard to finding a husband, they avoid any aggressive or overtly traditional men, and they brazenly enjoy their sexuality, without fear of the sexual double standard.
- In addition, they are more than capable of earning their own living, and the degree of suffering or shame they anticipate in the absence of finding a husband is countered by sexual self-confidence. Being without a husband does not mean they will go without men.
L.A Law
Quotes:
- in the mid-1990s, and then to overtly unpopular feminism (new century), as though these charted a chronological “great moving right show” as Stuart Hall might put it (1989).
- Is this then the new deal for, in the UK, New Labour’s “modern” young women, female
individualisation and the new meritocracy at the expense of feminist politics?
Claudia Schiffer - Citeron xsara Advert (Sexist advert)
Quotes
- She seems to be doing it out of choice, and for her own enjoyment;
the advert works on the basis of its audience knowing Claudia to be one of the world’s
most famous and highly paid supermodels.
- This advert appears to suggest that yes, this is a self-consciously “sexist ad,” feminist critiques of it are deliberately evoked. Feminism is “taken into account,” but only to be shown to be no longer necessary. Why? Because there is no exploitation here, there is nothing remotely naıve
about this striptease
- in the mid-1990s, and then to overtly unpopular feminism (new century), as though these charted a chronological “great moving right show” as Stuart Hall might put it (1989).
- Is this then the new deal for, in the UK, New Labour’s “modern” young women, female
individualisation and the new meritocracy at the expense of feminist politics?
Claudia Schiffer - Citeron xsara Advert (Sexist advert)
Quotes
- She seems to be doing it out of choice, and for her own enjoyment;
the advert works on the basis of its audience knowing Claudia to be one of the world’s
most famous and highly paid supermodels.
- This advert appears to suggest that yes, this is a self-consciously “sexist ad,” feminist critiques of it are deliberately evoked. Feminism is “taken into account,” but only to be shown to be no longer necessary. Why? Because there is no exploitation here, there is nothing remotely naıve
about this striptease
lads magazines - female gaze
Quotes
- we are witness to a hyper-culture of commercial sexuality, one aspect of which is the repudiation of a feminism invoked only to be summarily dismissed (see also Rosalind Gill 2003).
- There is quietude and complicity in the manners of generationally specific notions of cool, and
more precisely an uncritical relation to dominant commercially produced sexual representations
which actively invoke hostility to assumed feminist positions from the past in order to endorse a new regime of sexual meanings based on female consent, equality, participation and pleasure, free of politics
- the ironic normalisation of pornography, where they indicate their approval of and desire to be pin up girls for the centrefolds of the soft porn “lad mags,”
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