Postfeminism
dencies (for example, see Genz and Brabon
CAMILLE NURKA
Independent scholar
In its broadest sense, “postfeminism” means
“after” or “beyond” feminism. The term
simultaneously references feminism as a
historical legacy and creates distance from
that political identity. There are broadly
three (sometimes overlapping) approaches
to defining postfeminism in the scholarly
literature. The first is that postfeminism is
an anti-feminist backlash, as a politics which
actively pushes back, or aggressively resists,
feminism in periods where it has made
the greatest gains (for example, see Faludi
1991). The concept of “backlash” implies a
retrogressive movement backward, toward a
prefeminist time. The second is that feminism
is over or dead because it is assumed to have
been successful in its aims, having passed into
mainstream culture and politics, and is thus
no longer needed. As Angela McRobbie puts
it, “for feminism to be ‘taken into account’ it
has to be understood as having already passed
away” (2009, 12). This second approach is
complex and should be distinguished from
the simplified “backlash” position. This is
because it depicts postfeminist discourse as
accepting that female empowerment is of
value, but promoting female agency on the
condition that feminism “fades away.”
The third approach positions postfemi-
nism as signifying the evolution of feminism
through the process of productive self-
reflection – for instance, in its intersection
with postmodernism (for example, see
Brooks 1997). This approach also includes
perspectives that associate postfeminism
productively with third-wave feminism, to
The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Gender and Sexuality Studies, First Edition. Edited by Nancy A. Naples.
© 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2016 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
DOI: 10.1002/9781118663219.wbegss238
incorporate conservative and innovative ten-
2009). Although their emphasis is not strictly
comparable, in the latter two approaches
postfeminism is understood to be a contra-
dictory politics that assumes familiarity with
feminist concepts and refashions them in
response to the demands of a changing social
context where women are called upon to
“do” gender politics and identify as female in
strikingly new ways. The difference between
theorists on this point is the extent to which
this refashioning can be considered reac-
tionary (where the “new” is a reformulation
of the “old”) or pragmatic (in the surprising
alignments of competing discourses).
The prefix “post” also acts as a chronologi-
cal marker that situates the “going beyond” of
feminism in time. Susan Faludi suggests that
in the US context, postfeminism emerged
in response to the gains of first-wave fem-
inism and that a postfeminist attitude was
discernible in the reactionary responses to
suffrage of the 1920s press (1991, 70). The
term “postfeminism” is acknowledged to
have become widely popularized in the 1980s
(Faludi 1991, 14; Gamble 1998, 38; Brunsdon
and Spigel 2008, 176) and commonplace in
the 1990s (Tasker and Negra 2007, 8). The
source of this more recent usage is usually
attributed to a 1982 New York Times article
written by Susan Bolotin, entitled “Voices
from the Post-Feminist Generation” (Rosen-
felt and Stacey 1987; Walters 1991; Dow 1996;
Henry 2004; Genz and Brabon 2009), which
sought to identify the reasons why feminism
provoked a lack of interest and antipathy
among young women. In the Bolotin article,
postfeminism is represented as the historical
product of generational change. Younger
women display a tacit acknowledgment of
2 P OST FE MI N I SM
gender inequality, while rejecting feminism
as a political force for change; feminists are
characterized as bitter and unhappy, and fem-
inist politics is replaced with an individualist
ethos of advancement. This particular article
provides the context for more recent work
that examines the ways in which the historical
rise of postfeminism is imbricated in the rise
of individualist “neoliberalism” as a domi-
nant paradigm organizing social relations.
Neoliberalist ideology holds that individ-
uals are responsible for their conditions of
existence and can therefore change those
conditions through their own actions – there
is no recognition, in this perspective, of
shared experiences of oppression as a result
of structural inequality. Much of the recent
theoretical scholarship on postfeminism
examines its currency in popular culture
and highlights the way in which postfem-
inist narratives celebrate female autonomy
through the rejection of a collectivist feminist
identity in favor of an individualist mode of
self-actualization. Moreover, the consumer
culture embedded within late capitalist West-
ern society is integral to significant changes in
the way that gender is politicized and discur-
sively represented. Postfeminist discourses
can thus be situated as a feature of late capital-
ist society, where consumerism, rather than
collectivist political movements like femi-
nism, provides the primary means for identity
construction and gender identification. Post-
feminism, then, can be broadly defined in
relation to its capacity as a marker of political
identification in the current late capitalist era.
“Postfeminism” is a notoriously difficult
term to define, although it has benefited
greatly from feminist attempts at refinement
over the past decade. Part of the problem
of definition lies in disagreements over
the nature of its relationship to feminism,
with early feminist accounts of the term
divided over whether postfeminist resis-
tance to the feminist identity is radical or
reactionary. Ann Brooks (1997) argues that
while postfeminism in popular culture is
crude, reactionary, and hostile to feminism,
in the academy it signifies a shift in emphasis
from equality to difference, a product of its
engagement with the anti-foundationalist
aims of postmodernism, poststructuralism,
and postcolonialism. For Brooks, postfemi-
nism’s radical politics lies in its interrogation
of the integrity of the stable categories of fem-
inism (such as “oppression” and “woman”)
because they are implicated in maintaining
“hegemonic” feminism and its unacknowl-
edged hierarchies of class, race, and ethnicity
among women (1997, 4–8). On the other
hand, “difference” theory has been associ-
ated with postfeminism because it is seen
to delegitimate feminist activism by turning
away from feminist aims to achieve equal-
ity and erasing “woman” as the prioritized
material category of feminist analysis (Wal-
ters 1995, 136; Murray 1997, 37–38; Walby
2011, 18, 20). Other arguments posit that
postfeminism in the academy neutralizes
feminism’s political challenge to patriarchy
through the appropriation of feminism – as
well as femininity – by male-centered theory
in an attempt to mitigate the threat of female
empowerment (Modleski 1991; Jones 2003,
321–324).
Another problem of definition lies in
postfeminism’s relationship to third-wave
feminism. It is difficult to determine whether
postfeminism is synonymous with third-wave
feminism, whether it is an offshoot of third-
wave feminism, or whether it is a set of
political claims that do not bear any associa-
tion with the third wave at all. For instance,
Amanda Lotz (2001), as well as Brooks,
defines postfeminism as a progressive sub-
set of the third wave, which productively
diversifies and shifts central second-wave
formations of identity and activism. But a
counterview is that postfeminism is a con-
servative, oppositional politics that must be

distinguished from the “third wave” (Hey-
wood and Drake 1997, 1). For Heywood and
Drake, “‘postfeminist’ characterizes a group
of young, conservative feminists who explic-
itly define themselves against and criticize
feminists of the second wave,” while third-
wave feminism is “neither incompatible
[with] nor opposed” to the second wave
(1997, 1). In this view, the waves model
assumes continuity with, and identitarian
commitment to, the second wave while also
problematizing certain second-wave prin-
ciples. The third wave is, for Heywood and
Drake, a hybrid politics that draws on prior
feminist critique of the power structures
within which women are positioned, and
also makes ironic use of those very same
structures as a tool for female self-definition
(1997, 3). For example, it allows for the
seemingly contradictory pairing of “femi-
nine” and “feminist” (Hollows 2000, 193).
Similarly, Ednie Kaeh Garrison argues that
the third wave should be distinguished from
postfeminism because third-wave feminists
still identify with feminism (2000, 149).
However, Genz and Brabon argue that such
attempts to separate “third-wave feminism”
and “postfeminism” are faulty because they
don’t recognize the interrelatedness of the
two terms, and tend to (wrongly) oversim-
plify the complex workings of postfeminism
as anti-feminist backlash (2009, 156). Clearly,
any attempt to outline the various theoretical
approaches to postfeminism/third-wave fem-
inism involves negotiating troubled, difficult,
and contradictory terrain.
While some theorists position postfem-
inism as an expression of anti-feminist
backlash (Faludi 1991; Modleski 1991;
Walters 1995; Heywood and Drake 1997;
Garrison 2000; Whelehan 2000; Jones 2003),
other scholars prefer to define postfemi-
nism as a contradictory movement between
acknowledgment and disavowal (Rosenfelt
and Stacey 1987; Stacey 1987; Rapp 1988;
P O ST FEM I NI SM 3
Dow 1996; Brunsdon 1997; Nurka 2002; Gill
2007; Tasker and Negra 2007; McRobbie
2009; Taylor 2012). This is best summarized
by Judith Stacey as the “simultaneous incor-
poration, revision and depoliticization of
many of the central goals of second wave
feminism” (1987, 8) and is probably the defi-
nition that informs the key current definitions
of postfeminism. Rosalind Gill argues that
postfeminism is distinctive because it incor-
porates “feminist and anti-feminist ideas”
(2007, 269), while McRobbie defines post-
feminism as a “double entanglement,” which
refers to the way in which feminism becomes
“commonsense” or mainstreamed, “while
also fiercely repudiated, indeed almost hated”
(2009, 12). Postfeminism thus represents
both a presumption of feminist achievement
and a dissociation from feminist politics. As
Natasha Walter, author of the book The New
Feminism, wrote, feminism now “works from
the inside” (1998, 33), while Walter’s ideolog-
ical contemporary Rene Denfeld expressed,
“we are feminists – in action, if not in name”
(1995, 5).
According to McRobbie, a radical femi-
nism that questions or critiques the social
order, rather than one that can be aligned with
female progress, is rejected as a site of iden-
tification for women (2009, 14–15). Yvonne
Tasker and Diane Negra agree that postfemi-
nism requires that as women assume feminist
success in achieving equality, feminism is
othered, constructed as “extreme, difficult,
and unpleasurable” (2007, 4). According to
Monica Dux and Zora Simic, millennial post-
feminism “invites us to abandon feminism as
a failure that has actually made women’s lives
worse” (2008, 21). Postfeminist discourse
thus erects a “straw feminist” – usually the
ubiquitous figure of the “hairy-legged les-
bian” – who symbolizes “all that is wrong
with feminism” (Dux and Simic 2008, 34).
Second-wave feminism is charged with being
puritanical, punitive, and too invested in
4 P OST FE MI N I SM
female victimhood (Bulbeck 2010; Nurka
2002, 2003). Author of DIY Feminism Kathy
Bail writes: “The word ‘feminism’ suggests
a rigidity of style and behaviour and is still
generally associated with a culture of com-
plaint. Young women don’t want to identify
with something that sounds dowdy, asexual
or shows them to be at a disadvantage. They
don’t want to be seen as victims” (1996,
4–5). Naomi Wolf’s Fire With Fire (1993),
Katie Roiphe’s The Morning After (1993), and
Rene Denfeld’s The New Victorians (1995)
are three US texts that are paradigmatic of
the postfeminist critique of second-wave
“victim feminism” (Genz and Brabon 2009).
All three argue that contemporary women
must be liberated from the sexual and ide-
ological repression of second-wave values
that emphasize danger over pleasure and
disadvantage over empowerment.
A large part of the postfeminist resis-
tance to feminism is based on a particular
conception of a puritanical feminist view
of heterosexual intercourse as a manifesta-
tion of patriarchal violence, a theory most
notably espoused by US feminists Catharine
McKinnon and Andrea Dworkin. Because
postfeminist discourse can be identified via
its positioning against a particular image
of second-wave feminism (i.e., bra burn-
ing, man-hating lesbians), a central theme
by which this differentiation is enacted is
through an identification with a “pro-sex”
narrative (Projansky 2001, 83), also called
“do-me feminism” (Genz and Brabon 2009,
ch. 4). Hence, one of the primary splits
by which postfeminism can be identified
is between the sexually repressive femi-
nist mother and the sexually assertive and
empowered postfeminist daughter (Nurka
2003; Henry 2004). Postfeminism has been
articulated by Ariel Levy as “female chau-
vinism,” an effect of what she terms “raunch
culture,” in which women are now the new
male chauvinists making sex objects out of
themselves, as well as other women (2005,
4). This is taking place as part of what is
commonly dubbed “the sexualization of cul-
ture,” which refers to the normalization of
a pornographic aesthetic in “a hyper-culture
of commercial sexuality” (McRobbie 2009,
18), where young women obtain a sense
of sexual self-expression through mimicry
of the visual codes found in heterosexual
male-oriented pornography (Levy 2005; Gill
2007, 256–259).
In contemporary consumer culture, fem-
ininity is something to be improved upon
through buying power, with its attainment
a reflection of the value placed on the self.
Therefore, the way in which women are hailed
as sexual agents by advertisers is an impor-
tant aspect of postfeminist culture. Where
traditional sexist advertising says “buy this
product and you will be irresistible to men!”
postfeminist sexism says “this product gives
you the choice to perform your own style
of sexiness which is irresistible to men!”
Choice, freedom, and individuality are essen-
tial concepts in defining the constitution of
postfeminist sexual subjectivity. The concern
for some feminists is that as Western culture
becomes increasingly sexualized, there is less
room for traditional feminist critique of the
sexual objectification of women by men. For
instance, Gill (2007) and McRobbie (2009)
argue that “irony,” as the ludic manipulation
of culturally recognizable sexist imagery and
discourse, justifies the sexism it represents
through an implied historical separation
between present and past audiences. The
contemporary audience is invited to share an
illicit enjoyment in sexist imagery through
our distance to its content, which is presumed
to render it harmless. It is this pretense of sep-
aration that works to legitimate sexism in the
media because we “get the joke” (McRobbie
2009, 17).
In the postfeminist media context, femi-
nist objections to the sexualization of women

appear as a restriction of the pleasures of
looking and being looked at. Yet, as Gill
points out, young women are invited to
inhabit sexual subjectivity on the condition
that their bodies conform to a normative
image of sexual attractiveness. Raunch cul-
ture constructs sexual desire in very precise
ways: “only some women are constructed as
active, desiring sexual subjects: women who
desire sex with men (except when lesbian
women ‘perform’ for men) and only young,
slim and beautiful women” (Gill 2007, 259).
Older or fat women, by contrast, are denied
the pleasures of sexual subjecthood (Gill
2007, 259). The male gaze that second-wave
feminism criticized for its dehumanizing,
sexually objectifying effects on women is now
internalized by women themselves as a “self-
policing narcissistic gaze” through which an
agentic feminine subject is constructed (Gill
2007, 258). On this basis, women are invited
to express selfhood in the capacity for sexual
empowerment, which is achieved through
remaking the sexual body.
Attendant on these demands of sex-
ualization is the intensification of body
surveillance. As Gill argues, it is not a set
of “feminine” characteristics that serve to
define femininity today; rather, postfeminism
prioritizes the accomplishment of the “sexy
body” as the achievement of a feminine
identity (2007, 255). For McRobbie, now
that financially independent women are able
to make choices that are not solely deter-
mined by their orientation to the marriage
market, the Symbolic restores the balance
upset by feminism through relocating female
self-worth to the never-ending work of body
maintenance required by the fashion–beauty
complex. Hence, the feminist achievement of
women’s entrenchment in the workforce is
undone by the symbolic imperatives of the
fashion–beauty complex, which serves to
restabilize gender relations under threat by
female acquisition of independent economic
P O ST FEM I NI SM 5
capacity, or “female phallicism” (McRobbie
2009, 62–63). This restabilizing impulse
reasserts traditional boundaries of gender
and sexuality in that the freedoms gained by
“the phallic girl” are enjoyed on the condition
of a heterosexual gaze, thus reinforcing the
repudiation of lesbian sexuality (McRobbie
2009, 86).
The association of feminism with lesbian-
ism motivates the postfeminist assertion
that feminism is at odds with the desires of
an implicitly heterosexualized “feminine”
subject, for whom it seeks to reaffirm and
recuperate heterosexual romance. Anthea
Taylor suggests that in the sexual sphere,
feminism is blamed for robbing women of
the pleasures of romance (in its critique of
marriage, for example) and encapsulates a
reaction against a feminism that is consid-
ered to be both an “unhappy” politics and
the cause of contemporary women’s unhap-
piness (2012, 26). One of the unhappiest
heirs of feminism, according to postfeminist
accounts, is “the single girl” (Dux and Simic
2008, 73; Taylor 2012), whose professional
success is seen to come at the cost of personal
failure. The postfeminist vision of the single
woman is that she is a “lamentable product of
the pervasive feminist rhetoric that encour-
aged women to pursue independence and
autonomy at the cost of a husband and …
a nuclear family” (Taylor 2012, 6). The most
prominent fictional single women in recent
decades – Bridget Jones in Helen Fielding’s
book Bridget Jones’s Diary, Ally McBeal in
David E. Kelley’s TV series of the same name,
and the women in Sex and the City – are
characters who “endure as reference points
for talking about women who are purported
to be struggling to find a balance between
their careers and their biological clocks”
(Dux and Simic 2008, 75).
One of the defining characteristics of
postfeminism is that it situates itself between
public success and private failure (McRobbie
6 P OST FE MI N I SM
2009; Taylor 2012). According to Taylor,
we find that in postfeminist rhetoric the
deeply held “feminine” desire to be coupled
is the undercurrent that upsets the valoriza-
tion of single women as confident, financially
autonomous, and sexually agentic. For Taylor,
postfeminist narratives of feminism’s failure
to secure single women’s happiness “work
to manage the threat posed by the woman
without a man” (2012, 14). This tension is
typically expressed through the figure of the
lonely, childless, single white professional.
Figures such as Ally McBeal and Bridget
Jones also share the qualities characteristic of
the postfeminist assumption that feminism
has wrested from young women the right to
enjoy the “feminine” pleasures of romance
and marriage (Gill 2007, 228; McRobbie
2009, 21; Taylor 2012, 26). Heterosexual
romance is thus constructed as something
which must be reclaimed from a perceived
anti-male feminism. Postfeminism makes
desirable for women a traditional organiza-
tion of gender and sexuality (for example,
heterosexual romance, sexual dependence
on men, marriage, motherhood, family,
and the home), presenting these highly
structured gender relations as individual
lifestyle options. McRobbie describes this as a
“double entanglement,” in which neoconser-
vative (or new traditionalist) ideologies exist
in tension with the liberal rhetoric of choice,
in relation to gender, sexuality, and family
(2009, 12).
McRobbie’s companion concept of the
“postfeminist masquerade” – which derives,
via Butler, from Riviere’s psychoanalytic
account of the masquerade in which phallic
women don the mask of “womanliness” to
avert male retribution for their transgres-
sion – disavows feminism so that postfemi-
ninity, dressed in the garb of traditional desir-
able heterosexual femininity, can appear as
freedom (of choice) and empowerment (2009,
64–66). The concept of freedom of choice in a
postfeminist world no longer constrained by
gender inequality allows for a return to tradi-
tional gender values, or what Elspeth Probyn
(1990) calls the “new traditionalism.” Probyn
argues that postfeminist “new traditionalism”
draws upon a false choice “posed as the pos-
sibility of choosing between the home or the
career, the family or the successful job” (1990,
131) to reaffirm that the “natural” place for
women is in the home. As Bonnie J. Dow
notes, such a choice is constrained in more
ways than one. It is a distinctly middle-class
conundrum that is not available to women
who don’t have the option of returning home
(Dow 1996, 99). Probyn explains that the
ticking biological clock which is so present in
popular media texts and which inspires such a
sense of urgency among women is a powerful
postfeminist trope that naturalizes women’s
place in the home. What makes this fantasy
of a return to the home (and family) postfem-
inist is that it is articulated against feminism
as the submerged or unspoken Other – a
politics that is silenced because it has already
passed on.
Negra extends this position to suggest
that popular culture narratives which center
on the professional urban woman’s return
to her hometown are symbolic of a “female
retreatism,” which works to recuperate the
loss of the family represented by the dislo-
cated femininity of feminism. The hometown
fantasy is a response to “a set of social and
economic conditions” increasingly defined
by atomization, risk, and instability (Negra
2009, 15–16). The fantasy of home provided
by postfeminism is a gendered expression
of a nostalgic longing for stability as the
answer to a restructured, itinerant, precari-
ous, outsourced global marketplace in which
workplace protections are being steadily
chipped away. As traditional gender roles
become dis-embedded through the changing
requirements of global capital, postfeminism
instates their symbolic redefinition alongside

the “abandonment of critique of patriarchy”
(McRobbie 2009, 57).
Postfeminism has thus emerged in a his-
torical moment that marks a global shift to
the right, increasing privatization in opposi-
tion to state regulation leading to a decrease
in social welfare and an increase in eco-
nomic inequality, “free market” ideology,
and the rise of the individual alongside the
dissolution of models of political solidarity
(Tasker and Negra 2007, 6–7; McRobbie
2009, 18–19, 55; Gill and Scharff 2011, 5;
Walby 2011, 11; Taylor 2012, 15). The work of
Anthony Giddens (1991), Ulrich Beck (1992),
Zygmunt Bauman (2000, 2001), and Nikolas
Rose (1992) on individualization is influential
to the current theorization of postfeminist
neoliberalism as involving the construction
of the individual freed from the ties of col-
lective belonging, such as gender and class
(Ringrose and Walkerdine 2008; McRobbie
2009, 18–19; Scharff 2012, 10–11); however,
Beck and Giddens are criticized for failing
to recognize that “individualization” can
function as a regulatory force and does not
in actuality entail the falling away of the con-
straints of gender, class, race, and sexuality,
for example. It is, rather, “individualization”
as an ideology – or a dominant mode of
interpreting one’s place in the world – that
feminist theorists of postfeminism find most
useful. In this respect, individualization is
theorized as a mode of governmentality
that “exerts power through techniques that
autonomise and responsibilise subjects”
(Scharff 2012, 11) in ways that “quite literally
‘get inside us’ to materialize or constitute our
subjectivities” (Gill and Scharff 2011, 8).
Postindustrial capitalist consumer culture
provides the overarching socioeconomic
context for the articulation of postfeminist
values, where the incorporation of feminism
as a “lifestyle” is simultaneous to its commod-
ification through the figure of the empowered
female consumer (Tasker and Negra 2007, 2)
P O ST FEM I NI SM 7
free to take up sexual and economic oppor-
tunity, and free to choose between work and
the home. Of course, such choice is, in reality,
constrained by class and race: the housewife
is a profoundly middle-class subject position
available to privileged women who do not
need an income to support themselves or
their families, and the rewards of sexual sub-
jectivity are not accorded evenly to women
of color, who have historically been posi-
tioned by colonialism as the hypersexualized
other of white femininity. As Tasker and
Negra remind us, “postfeminism is white
and middle class by default, anchored in
consumption as a strategy (and leisure as a
site) for the production of the self” (2007, 2).
As neoliberal market ideology emphasizes
the achievement of fiscal success through
individual, rather than collective, means, so
too does postfeminist discourse presume that
middle-class women’s wage-earning capacity
be directed toward the improvement of the
self, chiefly through beauty culture, in what
McRobbie calls “the new sexual contract”
(2009, 72).
Postfeminism ushers in a new era of
intensified self-management for women, as
the “makeover paradigm” gains ascendancy
in popular media (Gill 2007, 262–264).
Across all aspects of modern living, the
makeover paradigm offers improvement as
entertainment and draws ever more sharply
distinctions of gender and class: for instance,
television shows like Extreme Makeover
present cosmetic surgery to women as a path
to autonomy and happiness, while Ladette to
Lady urges working-class women to conform
to middle-class taste for self-betterment.
Tasker and Negra suggest that one of the key
contradictions of postfeminism is that female
empowerment is dependent on the capacity
to consume (2007, 8), thus requiring the
exclusion of women who cannot meet these
demands. Or, as Jessica Ringrose and Valerie
Walkerdine put it, “this successful femininity
8 P OST FE MI N I SM
is bourgeois, yet coded universal, normal and
attainable for all” (2008, 228).
Women’s economic capacity is encour-
aged at the same time as the changing
global marketplace increasingly relies on the
exploitation of women in the “third world” as
women migrants take up poorly paid, unregu-
lated domestic work and Western businesses
secure cheap female labor offshore. The
inevitable subject of capacity that is produced
under these conditions is, therefore, white,
Western, and middle class. Christina Scharff
argues that in contemporary European soci-
eties, women’s condition of freedom offered
by postfeminism is in fact “intertwined with
the construction of their cultural other, the
‘oppressed Muslim woman,’ who is por-
trayed as being a passive victim of patriarchal
culture” (Scharff 2012, 1–2). Scharff found
that the interviewees from her empirical
research positioned themselves as liberated
Western subjects beyond the need for femi-
nism in contradistinction to Muslim women
who were believed to be “powerless and
subjugated” (Scharff 2012, 67).
In terms of television and film represen-
tation, African American women are still
presented as the enduring other to white
women’s changing modalities of selfhood
(Springer 2007, 249), which implies that they
do not have the same access to “the individu-
al” as a category of identity reserved for the
white female subject whose self-construction
depends upon a subordinated black female
other. Another consequence of the commer-
cializing thrust of postfeminist neoliberal
discourse is that political difference (such as
race) becomes commodified as a consumable
brand identity (Banet-Weiser 2007).
Although the term “postfeminism” invites
definitional ambiguity, in recent years schol-
ars on the subject have done much to clarify
its discursive constitution, particularly across
the popular media. While initial attempts
at definition saw fit to distinguish between
postfeminism in the academy and in popu-
lar culture, it is to the latter manifestations
that contemporary theorists are increasingly
turning their critical attention. Theories
postulating that postfeminist female disiden-
tification with feminism constituted an
anti-feminist “backlash” were crucial in
providing chronology and context for a
cultural moment in which feminism had
been proclaimed dead; this approach has
since been critically revised to account for
the contradictory nature of postfeminism
as a political position that simultaneously
assumes and refuses feminist values. With
the expansion of scholarship in this area,
we now have a rich, albeit still developing,
vocabulary with which to interrogate the
complexities of postfeminism as one of the
most fascinating cultural phenomena of the
new millennium.
SEE ALSO: Backlash; Feminisms, First,
Second, and Third Wave; Feminist Sex Wars;
Individualism and Collectivism, Critical
Feminist Perspectives on; Lesbian Stereotypes
in the United States; Pornography, Feminist
Legal and Political Debates on
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FURTHER READING
Gamble, Sarah. 2000. The Routledge Critical
Dictionary of Feminism and Postfeminism. New
York: Routledge.
Munford, Rebecca, and Melanie Waters, eds.
2013. Feminism and Popular Culture: Inves-
tigating the Postfeminist Mystique. London:
I. B. Tauris.
Phoca, Sophia, and Rebecca Wright. 1999. Intro-
ducing Postfeminism. New York: Totem Books.