Doing what your big sister does : sex, postfeminism and the YA chick lit series

Mass-marketed teen chick lit has become a publishing phenomenon and has begun to attract critical interest among children’s literature scholars. Much of this critical work, however, has shied away from robust critical assessment of the postfeminist conditions informing the production and reception of young adult series like Private, Gossip Girl and Choose Your Own Destiny. Existing analyses may nod to the origins of the genre in women’s chick lit, but do not investigate how the postfeminist construction of ‘empowered’ female (hetero) sexuality translates into chick lit for young adults. Paying particular attention to these issues, this paper draws on feminist critiques of postfeminism to interrogate the implications of the way these novels position readers to understand their sexuality. In doing so, it poses postfeminist criticism as an unconsidered yet significant framework to evaluate novels for teenage girls.

Baudrillard, postfeminism, and the image makeover

Jean Baudrillard’s claim that we inhabit a transaesthetic and integral reality raises significant questions for feminists seeking to analyze how women are represented in Western media through the neoliberal guises of empowerment and choice. These questions relate to the impossibility of differentiating between feminist and antifeminist themes amid the implosive forces of a virtualized significatory and political economy. To map what a feminist-Baudrillardian approach to postfeminist media images might look like, this essay engages with current feminist theorizing about the postfeminist condition via the example of the UK reality makeover program How to Look Good Naked. In my analysis of this series, Baudrillard’s radical approach to the world “as is” illuminates some of the challenges an economy of exclusive positivity raises for the task of critical feminist inquiry. 

Feminism and Anti-Feminism in Harmony? : A Critical Discourse Analysis of Postfeminism in Women's Magazines

This essay investigates postfeminist discourses in women’s magazines with the use of Fairclough’s (2014) critical discourse analysis (CDA). Additionally, it presents consumers’ perceptions of women’s magazines in order to explore how women’s magazines might influence readers’ constructions of identity. Postfeminism is mainly defined by Gill (2007, 2009) and McRobbie (2004) as an idea of feminism and antifeminism combined with the use of neoliberal views. Previous research conducted between 1990 and 2009 has stated that women’s magazines follow a postfeminist discourse and therefore give a contradictory message to their readers, emphasising the importance of individuality and empowerment as well as promoting a traditional feminine image. The magazines analysed in this essay were the January 2016 issue of Elle Magazine US and the February 2016 issue of Elle Magazine UK. The magazines follow a postfeminist discourse, and it is constructed with the use of wording and modality. To complement the CDA, an interview with a target group of women’s magazine readers was conducted. Findings indicate that the magazines both largely follow a postfeminist discourse, constructed through the use of rhetorical features such as wording and modality, and readers believe magazines affect their identity construction negatively. The article is concluded with a discussion on what the aim of a postfeminist discourse is.

The Illusions of Post-Feminism, Ghosts of Gender and the Discourses of Law

This article seeks to consider evidence of post-feminist and "post-equality" gender narratives contained in the discourses of law in the UK and European contexts. Analysis of perennial ghosts of gender in the areas of gender-neutrality in policy, legislative regulation of sexual crimes, and the adjudication of gendered issues by judges will be undertaken in order to renew and reinstate the focus of the legal feminist project and advocate for continued scrutiny in these three practical areas.

La recherche de « sexiness » chez les adeptes de pole-fitness : une étude de terrain montréalais

Cette étude explore la transformation des critères normatifs qui donnent accès au statut de femmes respectables à travers le concept de nouveau sujet féminin discuté par Radner (1999), Gill (2008; 2012) et McRobbie (1993; 2009) où l’idée de recherche active de « sexiness » chez les femmes à l’époque contemporaine est centrale. Le post-féminisme, une formation discursive qui émerge dans les années 1980, est identifié comme étant à l’origine de ces transformations. Cette position identitaire permettrait aux femmes de résister aux stigmates attachés à celles qui se posent comme sujet sexuel actif plutôt que comme objet sexuel passif et conduirait ainsi à l’« empowerment » sexuel. Or, cette vision du nouveau sujet féminin est contestée puisqu’elle ne représenterait qu’une seule possibilité d’émancipation à travers le corps et deviendrait par sa force normative un nouveau régime disciplinaire du genre féminin. L’interprétation valable à donner au nouveau sujet féminin représente un débat polarisé dans les milieux féministes et ce mémoire cherche à y apporter des éléments de discussion par l’étude des motivations des femmes à s’inscrire à des cours de pole-fitness et des significations qu’elles donnent à leur pratique. Ce mémoire apporte des éléments à la compréhension de l’impact de cette recherche de « sexiness » sur la subjectivité des femmes à travers les concepts de pratiques disciplinaires et stratégies de résistance.

Have You Met Miss Jones? : Identity Construction of a Chick Lit Heroine

Take a random woman in her mid-twenties, with a crazy mother, a lousy job and no sex life, add some insecurity and a lot of alcohol and wrap her up in pink, and congratulations, you have just created your own chick lit heroine.The question is whether a chick lit heroine is this simplistic, or if she carries an important message to the readers. The most important traits in a chick lit novel are the complicated mother-daughter relationship, the career and the love life.Thus, this essay will outline to what extent the postfeminist features are depicted in theidentity of Bridget Jones, as an epitome of later chick lit heroines.

Latina Super-heroines: Hot Tamales in Tights vs. Women Warriors, Wrestlers and Guerrilla Fighters of La Raza

The year 1977 saw the making of the first Latino superhero by a Latino artist. From the 1980s onwards it is also possible to find Latina super-heroines, whose number and complexity has kept increasing ever since. Yet, the representations of spandexed Latinas are still few. For that reason, the goal of this paper is, firstly, to gather a great number of Latina super-heroines and, secondly, to analyze the role that they have played in the history of American literature and art. More specifically, it aims at comparing the spandexed Latinas created by non-Latino/a artists and mainstream comic enterprises with the Latina super-heroines devised by Latino/a artists. The conclusion is that whereas the former tend to conceive heroines within the constraints of the logic of Girl Power, the latter choose to imbue their works with a more daring political content and to align their heroines with the ideologies of Feminism and Postcolonialism.

A bit of a dirty word: 'feminism' and female teachers identifying as feminist

Following the identification of a gap in the literature around reasons for contemporary women’s self-identification as ‘feminist’ (Swirsky & Angelone, 2015), this paper discusses an empirical study of an intergenerational group of contemporary Australian female teachers collaboratively designing English curriculum around girls’ media. The paper explores the group’s shared conversations around feminism, over a series of meetings, as we (teachers and researcher) plan curriculum and negotiate broader subject positions possible for girls and women. These contexts include the competing discourses of feminism and postfeminism and how these mediate texts chosen for study, our pedagogical approaches, and the ways we experience our own lives. In this study, we struggle to find a shared language, across generations, with which to work collaboratively in a community of practice committed to the critical study of media, but involving different individual orientations to ‘feminism’. This is a space in which impediments to the feminist study of girls’ media quickly emerge. The paper also serves as a reminder that feminist scholarship takes place in schools, as well as in the academy, and that the gender studies work teachers do in schools is potentially whole population work, worthy of keen attention in the gender studies academic mainstream.

Meet the phallic teacher: designing curriculum and identity in a neoliberal imaginary

This paper introduces the concept of the phallic teacher, a spectral figure negotiated in teachers’ everyday work and in school-based disciplinary communities of practice. Reporting the findings of a three year Australian doctoral study completed in 2014, the paper looks closely at how English teachers design both curriculum and identity in an environment where feminist and poststructuralist work of the late 20th century seems to have lost traction. These observations made here are based on empirical research in a Victorian school, combined with autoethnographic writing and other materials connecting teachers’ and researchers’ lives to the broader cultural postfeminist debate. The paper makes room for an absent subject, the teacher, marginalised in neoliberal discourses of curriculum and critiques the masculinist hegemony of outcomes and standards-based education. This provides us with new ways to challenge increasingly dominant current paradigms and to conceptualise a different future in which the standpoints of teachers are privileged in curriculum theory and curricular innovation.

Analyzing media representations of sportswomen- expanding the conceptual boundaries using a postfeminist sensibility

This article seeks to expand the conceptual boundaries of sport media research by investigating the utility of a postfeminist sensibility for analyzing depictions of women in sport. Rosalind Gill's (2007) notion of a postfeminist sensibility is situated within UK-led feminist critiques of gendered neoliberalism in popular culture and offers a conceptual lens through which sports scholars might interrogate the complex and contradictory media landscape that often simultaneously marginalizes and empowers sportswomen. In highlighting postfeminism as a sensibility, this article makes visible the ways in which depictions of sportswomen as sexy and strong reorients responsibility for the sexualization of female athletes away from media institutions and toward the female athlete themselves. It also explains how a postfeminist sensibility differs from third wave feminism-a related framework popular among sports feminists seeking to respond to ambivalent and complex renderings of contemporary sporting femininity.