Postfeminism in Context

Postfeminism in Context studies the representation of women in Australian

popular culture over the past three decades to locate postfeminism in a
specific time and place.
Margaret Henderson and Anthea Taylor argue that ‘postfeminism’, as a
critical term, has been too often deployed in ways that fail to account for
historical and cultural specificity. This book analyses Australian popular
culture – chick lit novels; ‘dramedy’ television shows; women’s magazines;
YouTube beauty vlogs; self-help manuals; and newspapers – to reveal the
tensions, contradictions and ambiguities that have always been constitutive
of postfeminism, including in Australia. Examining how these popular
forms intervene in dominant conversations about contemporary Australian
femininities, Postfeminism in Context maps the ways in which various
aspects of Australia’s history and national identity have shaped its post-
feminism. While Henderson and Taylor identify some of the limited post-
feminist tropes and patterns of representation evident in comparable locales,
they also find that Australian popular culture has responded to feminism in
a much more hopeful way.
Adding some much-needed cultural specificity to the ongoing debate
around this loaded term, Postfeminism in Context is essential reading for
those interested in Australian popular culture, feminism, and the gendered
politics of representation.

Margaret Henderson lectures in literary studies at the University of Queens-

land. She has published extensively on feminist culture and contemporary
women’s writing, including a book-length study of Australian feminist cul-
tural memory, Marking Feminist Times.

Anthea Taylor is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Gender and Cul-

tural Studies at the University of Sydney. She is author of three books in
feminist literary and cultural studies, including Celebrity and the Feminist
Blockbuster.
Feminism and Female Sexuality

Postfeminism in Context
Women, Australian Popular Culture, and the Unsettling of Postfeminism
Margaret Henderson and Anthea Taylor
Postfeminism in Context
Women, Australian Popular
Culture, and the Unsettling of
Postfeminism

Margaret Henderson and

Anthea Taylor
First published 2020
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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Henderson, Margaret A., author. | Taylor, Anthea, 1972- author.
Title: Postfeminism in context : women, Australian popular culture, and the
unsettling of postfeminism / Margaret Henderson and Anthea Taylor.
Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2019. | Includes
bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “Postfeminism in Context argues that
‘postfeminism’, as a critical term, has been too often deployed in ways which fail to
account for historical and cultural specificity. Through an analysis across Australian
popular culture across three decades – chick lit novels; ‘dramedy’ television shows;
women’s magazines; YouTube vlogs; self-help manuals; and newspapers – we find, not
the simple disavowal of feminism commonly seen to constitute postfeminist media
culture, but a much more complicated, and in many ways more hopeful, picture.
Rather than seeing popular culture’s attempts to make sense of feminism as inevitably
limited or politically reactionary, as is common, our analysis foregrounds the tensions,
contradictions and ambiguities that have always been constitutive of postfeminism.
Building upon recent scholarship which questions the critical efficacy of postfeminism,
we argue that in Australian media, rather than being seen as a thinly veiled form of
antifeminism, postfeminism is best conceptualised as a form of popular feminism –
marked by both constraints and possibilities. Inevitably, given its transnational nature,
we do find some of the core postfeminist tropes, themes, and narratives circulating in
Australian popular culture, but that is not all we find. Ultimately, we conclude that
Australian postfeminism represents a transitional stage between second wave
feminism and the full emergence of a new, as yet unnamed form of feminist politics,
which can operate within (and possibly resist) consumer capitalism and neoliberalism.
Providing a nuanced account of the varied ways in which feminism has been taken up
in Australian media, Postfeminism in Context is essential reading for those interested
gender, feminism, and the politics of representation” – Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019028222 (print) | LCCN 2019028223 (ebook) |
ISBN 9781138894655 (hardback) | ISBN 9781315179872 (ebook) |
ISBN 9781351717656 (adobe pdf) | ISBN 9781351717649 (epub) |
ISBN 9781351717632 (mobi)
Subjects: LCSH: Feminism and mass media–Australia. | Feminism–Australia. |
Popular culture–Australia.
Classification: LCC P96.F462 A844 2019 (print) | LCC P96.F462 (ebook) |
DDC 302.23082–dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019028222
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019028223

ISBN: 978-1-138-89465-5 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-315-17987-2 (ebk)
Typeset in Sabon
by Wearset Ltd, Boldon, Tyne and Wear
Contents

Acknowledgementsvi

Introduction: postfeminism in and out of context 1

1 Chick lit: novels of postfeminist independence

and aspiration 26

2 Television dramedies: refiguring gendered intimacy

and postfeminist kinship on the small screen 57

3 Women’s magazines: dreamscapes of postfeminist

abundance90

4 YouTube beauty vlogs: intimate publics and

postfeminist confidence and care 123

5 Self-help books: calculating magic as postfeminist

everyday philosophy 155

6 Political journalism: women leaders, constrained

power, and the rhetoric of post-gender 187

Conclusion: Australian postfeminism as

popular feminism 226

Index232
Acknowledgements

Many thanks to Alison Bartlett, Frances Bonner, Melissa Harper, Graeme

Turner, and Alix Winter for reading drafts of this book. Your insights
were crucial to making this project come to fruition. We are also grateful
to Joanna McIntyre and Alexa Appel who each read a chapter and pro-
vided valuable commentary.
Thanks also to Krystine Howes and her clients at Mahogany Hair
Design, Brisbane, for their generous insights regarding women’s magazines
and for supplying an excellent archive of glossies.
Margaret would like to acknowledge the support given by the University
of Queensland’s Institute for the Advanced Study in the Humanities Faculty
Fellowship scheme, and research support from the School of Communica-
tion and Arts. Anthea would like to recognise the supportive research
environment of the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies at the
University of Sydney.
We also wish to acknowledge the support of Alexandra McGregor,
Gender Studies Commissioning Editor at Routledge, who supported this
project from its initial stages, and Eleanor Catchpole-Simmons for seeing it
through to production.
Finally, Margaret and Anthea would like to thank each other for their
patience, generosity, commitment, and that most necessary of qualities for
co-authoring: humour.
Introduction
Postfeminism in and out of context

In the contemporary Western academy, studies of postfeminism seem to be

everywhere – from law and education to health, psychology, and organisa-
tional studies.1 Without doubt, though, it is within feminist media and cul-
tural studies that postfeminism appears to have gathered most traction.
However, thus far only brief attention has been given to postfeminism’s
historical and cultural specificity, that is, how it plays out differently in
particular contexts. In Postfeminism in Context: Women, Australian
Popular Culture, and the Unsettling of Postfeminism, and to help address
this elision, we focus on Australian popular cultural texts (fiction, tele-
vision series, women’s magazines, new media, self-help literature, and
newspapers) between 1996 and 2018 to delineate an Australian postfemi-
nism. As we demonstrate throughout this book, Australian postfeminist
culture is comprised of the representational spaces – what we term ‘semi-
oscapes’ (to which we return) – in which feminism, neoliberalism, and the
‘everyday’ woman bump into each other, sometimes morph, and
­sometimes fracture, in postfeminism’s attempt to represent and answer
existential and political questions for contemporary Australian women.
We argue that Australian postfeminism, as befitting the compound nature
of the term, does share some tropes with general postfeminist discourse,
however, it is characterised more by its divergence. In particular, rather
than articulating a feminist disavowal or an anti-feminism, or even a sense
of feminism’s ‘pastness’ – key qualities commonly attributed to
postfeminism – a far more positive relationship between feminism and
­
popular culture emerges. Indeed, we contend that Australian postfeminism
articulates a popular feminism that simultaneously marks the impact of
second wave feminism, and the beginnings of an as yet unnamed broad-
based feminist politics.2 Australian postfeminism is, therefore, a transitional
cultural formation that is cause for hope rather than despair.
Although postfeminism is a highly contested signifier, within feminist
media and cultural studies it has emerged as a key concept to understand
the discursive production of contemporary women’s subjectivity through
popular culture, especially in an Anglo-American context (Modleski 1991;
Lotz 2001; Whelehan 2005; Gill 2007a, 2007b; Tasker & Negra 2007;
2  Introduction
Genz 2009; Negra 2009; McRobbie 2009). In this context, postfeminism
is frequently used to refer to the way in which feminism, particularly since
the 1980s, appears to have been incorporated and simultaneously dis-
avowed in popular discourse as a method of dealing with the changed
status of women and managing broader social transformation (Rosenfelt &
Stacey 1990; Brunsdon 1997; McRobbie 2009). In popular discourse, the
term is often used to signal a presumption that gender equality has been
achieved, with feminism thus figured as a victim of its own success.
However, reminders of the ways in which Australian women are still
limited by fairly traditional assumptions about gender and sexuality
abound. In this context, the gains of feminism appear in a class- and race-
blind ‘girls can do anything’ rhetoric, while a gendered division of unpaid
labour remains, the gender pay gap is stubbornly persistent, and the
­Australian labour market remains relatively gender segregated by OECD
standards. Here we ask: how does this tension play out in late twentieth-
and early twenty-first-century Australian popular culture?
Postfeminism in Context offers a textual analysis of six major forms of
contemporary popular culture from 1996–2018: chick lit, television dram-
edies (a hybrid of comedy and drama), women’s magazines – for young
and older women, YouTube beauty ‘vlogs’ (video blogs), women’s self-
help books, and newspapers. These forms, with the exception of news-
papers, are limited to those targeting a largely female audience or
readership, so this is a postfeminism produced for women’s consumption
(as it is in other contexts). Remarkably, attention to Australian women
and/in popular culture from the 1990s onwards has been limited. Con-
sidering the amount, influence, and variety of feminist analyses of the
­Australian popular cultural field from the beginnings of second wave fem-
inism (Edgar & McPhee 1974; Grace & Stephen 1981; Blonski et al. 1987;
Dermody & Jacka 1987; Morris 1988), the virtual absence of extended
analyses in the more recent past is troubling. It seems as if the Australian
academy is rehearsing the stereotypical postfeminist gesture that feminism
is over; the question of gender in media and cultural studies has been
decided once and for all. Or perhaps the increasingly globalised academic
publishing industry has had little interest in specifically Australian popular
culture, let alone studies centred on women (our study, of course, suggests
a recent shift in this regard). Responding to this elision, Postfeminism in
Context also provides the most detailed account of Australian women’s
popular culture, and of the contemporary representation of Australian
women across media platforms and genres over three decades of major
social, political, and cultural change.
As a heuristic device, rather than starting with what others have identi-
fied as the constitutive elements of postfeminism and then finding texts
that adhere to this model – a predominant method with which to analyse
postfeminist culture – the starting point of this study is to use the term
‘postfeminism’ as a historical descriptor.3 As Charlotte Brunsdon (1997,
 Introduction  3
p. 85) notes, ‘It [postfeminism] is a useful term historically because it does
allow us to point to certain representational and discursive changes in the
period since the 1970s’. Postfeminism, therefore, describes the culture that
emerges after second wave feminism, thus opening up the term to resignifi-
cation and localisation, and giving second wave feminism its rightful place
as a major cultural force. The primary texts drive our argument and hence
do this resignifying work, allowing us to identify the differences between,
as well as the similarities with, dominant accounts of postfeminism.
Moving away from more pessimistic accounts of how feminism is
made-to-mean in and through popular culture, we follow queer theorist
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s (2002) recommendation for shifting from what
she describes as a ‘paranoid reading’ – which begins by assuming that the
text will be problematic – to a ‘reparative’ one, which is conversely open
to ‘surprises’. Similarly, building upon this work, Rita Felski takes issue
with the ‘protocols of professional pessimism’, wherein critics seeking to
locate the pernicious agenda of texts are unable to acknowledge any
alternative interpretive possibilities:

Like an upscale detox facility, critique promises to flush out the

noxious substances, and cultural toxins that hold us in their thrall. It
demonstrates, again and again, that what might look like hopeful
signs of social progress harbor more disturbing implications.
(2015, pp. 128–129)

What Paul Ricoeur (1970) has described as the ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’

is, along with the reductive feminist pessimism it produces, to be avoided if
we are to think through how feminism may have inflected the Australian
cultural imaginary over the decades with which we are preoccupied.
Rather than conceptualising postfeminism primarily as a way in which
feminism is merely ‘taken into account’ so that it can be disavowed, as in
Angela McRobbie’s (2009) formulation, we engage with our texts using
what Rachel Wood and Benjamin Litherland (2018, p. 906) describe as ‘a
paradigm of critical feminist hope’ that ‘allows feminist media scholars to
recognize moments of possibility that can arise from the encounter of
popular feminism and neoliberalism’. Any hope we offer, however, needs
to be tempered by the recognition of the ongoing relative erasure and mar-
ginalisation of Australia’s dispossessed Indigenous people, migrants, and
refugees, as well as queer women in our mainstream popular culture, and
our readings draw attention to these elisions as well as where they are
challenged (as in chick lit and in some women’s magazines).
We are certainly not the first to highlight the lack of cultural specificity,
or the limitations of conflating distinct national contexts, in analyses of
texts dubbed ‘postfeminist’, and our work takes up the call issued by
others in this regard. As Justine Ashby, underscoring the ways in which the
United States regularly comes to stand in for the West, notes:
4  Introduction
these debates are forged within the context of, and respond to, what
are principally American concerns and we should not assume that they
can simply be grafted onto the rather different contours of political
and popular culture; the diversity of postfeminism in all its ephemeral
forms means that there can be no ‘one-size-fits-all’ framework for
thinking through its cultural and political currency.
(2010, p. 158)

Following Ashby’s lead, feminist scholars examining contexts as diverse

as Spain (Loxham 2019), Nigeria (Dosekun 2015), and China (Guo
forthcoming), consider how the term may be useful for analysing media
forms in these specific sites, but challenge any simple transferability of
this historically Anglo-American concept. Rosalind Gill, too, welcomes
these more recent attempts to reassess the term, including by taking
account of its historical and cultural specificities, challenging its whiteness
and offering more intersectional approaches, highlighting its trans-
national nature, and further attending to class as well as ageing (2016,
p. 612, 619–620). Following such calls to produce more nuanced accounts
of postfeminism’s operations (Tasker & Negra 2007, pp. 13–14), this
book – the first on how it plays out in the Australian context –
­underscores the need for further attention to the local while recognising
the inevitable commonalities across cultural fields and national boundaries
in a globalised world.
To do so, we turn to the idea of the ‘semioscape’. Our use of this term
extends Arjun Appadurai’s (1996) and Crispin Thurlow and Giorgia Aiello’s
(2007) work on the various ’scapes characterising the cultural flows of glo-
balisation. Appadurai (1996, pp. 33–35) lists five types: ethnoscapes
(‘moving groups of people’), ideoscapes (political images relating to state
power), technoscapes (‘the global configuration … of technology’), finances-
capes (the channels of global capital), and mediascapes (‘image-centred,
narrative-based accounts of strips of reality’). Appadurai describes these
­
’scapes as ‘the building blocks of what … I would like to call imagined
worlds, that is, the multiple worlds that are constituted by the historically
situated imaginations of persons and groups that are spread around the
globe’ (1996, p. 33, original emphasis). Thurlow and Aiello supplement
Appadurai’s schema with the notion of the ‘semioscape’, which ‘might help
bring into focus the non-mediatized but globalizing circulation of symbols,
sign systems and meaning-making practices’ (2007, p. 308). We modify
semioscapes so that it refers to the historically situated sign-systems found in
each form – whether literary or media – that produce a gendered, imagined
cultural ‘landscape’ specific to that form, that is, the worldmaking in which
each form engages. Chick lit, for instance, through the combination of its
key thematics of the working woman, hedonism, and the fashion–beauty–
media complex – an extension of McRobbie’s fashion–beauty complex
(2009) – is characterised by a semioscape of aspiration and independence.
 Introduction  5
The notion of semioscape enables us to methodologically and conceptu-
ally unify a diverse cultural field without ignoring differences amongst
forms, as well as identifying similarities relating to the Australian context.
Semioscapes is cognisant, and can recognise the contemporary global
mobility, of signs, and specifically the transnational quality of postfemi-
nism (Dosekun 2015), as well as their adaptability to local conditions.
Simidele Dosekun argues that:

to think transnationally about post-feminism is to consider how, as an

entanglement of meanings, representations, sensibilities, practices, and
commodities, post-feminism may discursively and materially cross
borders … It also entails thinking about what does or can not neces-
sarily travel, or perhaps need not.
(2015, p. 965)

Hers is an argument, with which we concur, that further problematises a

universal and unitary postfeminism. Moreover, semioscape as a concept
enables both visual and verbal codes to be addressed, a methodological
flexibility required by the nature and diversity of cultural forms being ana-
lysed here. These semioscapes as imagined worlds matter in terms of how
women might consider themselves and their place in the transformed space
that is contemporary Australia – they are a set of answers (and questions
addressed) to this context.
Another context we address is the academic discourse of postfeminism
(to which we devote the later part of this introduction). We agree with
other scholars about the slipperiness of postfeminism as a critical and/or
popular term: ‘There is no original or authentic postfeminism that holds
the key to its definition. Nor is there a secure and unified origin from
which this genuine postfeminism could be fashioned’ (Genz & Brabon
2009, p. 5). Although it is a ‘versatile cultural concept’ (Projansky 2001,
p. 68), in academic work a hegemonic version of postfeminism undoubt-
edly has emerged, which has in turn set and limited the parameters of the
field, limitations that our account unsettles. Many studies identify how the
specific tropes and themes of postfeminism identified by key theorists,
most notably McRobbie and Gill (whose important work in this area we
also draw upon throughout), operate in various forms of media and loca-
tions. So McRobbie’s core arguments of a ‘faux feminism’ offered to
young women that brings about feminism’s undoing (2009, p. 7), and
postfeminism’s ‘double-entanglement’ structure, in which neoconservative
and socially liberal ideas mix, and feminism is ‘transformed into a form of
Gramscian common sense, while also fiercely repudiated, indeed almost
hated’ (2009, p. 12), become the overarching interpretive framework of
so-called postfeminist times and texts.
In many other studies, Gill’s ‘elements of a [postfeminist] sensibility’
(2007a, p. 149) – including femininity as a ‘bodily property’; an ‘emphasis
6  Introduction
upon self-surveillance, monitoring and discipline’; a pronounced ‘focus
upon individualism, choice and empowerment;’ and a popular cultural
environment in which feminist and anti-feminist ideas are entangled – are
unreflexively sought out in whatever texts or cultural practices the feminist
critic has chosen.4 Along these lines, Australian scholars who have engaged
with postfeminism, predominantly through empirical work, have usually
sought to identify how the constitutive elements of postfeminism analysed
in American or British studies can be seen to operate identically in
­Australia (see Robinson 2011; Burkett & Hamilton 2012; Charles 2013;
Nash 2013). As Raewyn Connell argues, such uncritical appropriation of
theoretical frameworks developed elsewhere recurs in Australian scholar-
ship: ‘We have repeatedly imported theoretical frameworks from the
global North without thinking about their origins and specificity’ (2014,
p. 224). Susan Sheridan’s description of how Australian feminism engages
with international contexts is a more accurate and useful model for think-
ing through Australian postfeminism:

Australian feminism, having always provided fertile ground for the

transplantation of “international” (US and UK, and latterly French)
feminisms, has certain Indigenous features, notable amongst them
being its capacity to graft those others on to its own growth and at
times to produce new species.
(1988, p. 1)

So far, in the case of postfeminism, there is little or no attention paid to

how the Australian context and its specific feminist history may complicate
(or perhaps extend) these dominant understandings of postfeminism. In
effect, and regardless of Gill’s or McRobbie’s intentions and the undeniable
value of their scholarship in this area, postfeminism is largely constructed
as a generalised phenomenon or sensibility (Gill 2007a), marking an undif-
ferentiated Western, largely Anglo-American, culture (Dosekun 2015).
In her recent reassessment of the term ‘postfeminism’ and the critical
work it has recently been made to do, Gill suggests that rather than being a
distinct sensibility in media culture (as she had originally theorised it), post-
feminism is now the ‘new normal’, a ‘taken-for-granted commonsense that
operates as a kind of gendered neoliberalism’, which is ‘virtually hege-
monic’ (2017, p. 609). Here, we are concerned with thinking through the
extent to which such assertions of hegemony (that are now hegemonic) are
relevant to the Australian context. Nevertheless, given the cultural flows of
globalisation (Appadurai 1996) – particularly the ‘cross-cultural traffic’ in
popular culture, and the high degree of ‘discursive harmony’ (Tasker &
Negra 2007, pp. 13–14) between the United States and the United Kingdom
(and indeed Australia, with its troubled history as a British colony); some
shared dynamics of second wave feminism (Lotz 2001, p. 112); and the
spread of neoliberalism globally (Harvey 2005) – in Australian popular
 Introduction  7
culture we inevitably found some of the familiar tropes commonly seen to
be constitutive of postfeminism. However, we also found a much more
complicated and productive relationship to feminism than the repudiation
with which postfeminism has critically come to be synonymous.

An Australian postfeminism?
In historical terms, we argue that postfeminism becomes a recognisable
phenomenon in Australia in the mid- to late-1990s, and reaches its zenith
in the first two decades of the twenty-first century; as a consequence, we
will cover texts produced in the period from 1996 to 2018. As the first
generation of women to have benefited from the reforms of the second
wave women’s movement in Australia reached their 20’s and 30’s, and in a
time when the second wave had largely dissipated and/or been reduced to
pop culture stereotypes, the 1990s marked a period where the tensions and
contradictions of living after the second wave of feminism became appar-
ent. We chose 1996 as a starting date for our study because of the com-
plementary symbolism of two events that occurred in Australia that year:
the publication of Kathy Bail’s essay collection, DIY Feminism, a response
to the media event precipitated by the publication of Helen Garner’s The
First Stone (1995), and the election of the socially conservative but eco-
nomically neoliberal Liberal-National Party coalition government led by
John Howard (Sharpe & Boucher 2007, pp. 24–25).5 Bail’s collection
heralds a new and controversial form of (white, middle-class) Australian
feminism, a putative version of third wave feminism – individualistic,
­lifestyle- and youth-oriented, and non-threatening. We contend, however,
that DIY Feminism, in the sense of self-identifying as being after the second
wave (1996, p. 4; Kaplan 1996, p. 35, dates this as the 1980s), also consti-
tutes one of the earliest and most detailed versions of Australian postfemi-
nism (Henderson 2006; Taylor 2008).
We are well aware of the problems with the waves model of feminism –
with its sense of linear progress and generationalism, neat temporal and
ideological distinctions, and maternal tropes and metaphors (Roof 1997;
Henry 2004; Taylor 2009; Nicholson 2010; Eichhorn 2013). However, we
concur with Linda Nicholson (2010) who posits that:

there is one use that the wave metaphor is suited for – to identify those
moments in history when issues of gender mobilize large numbers of
people in very public, noisy, and challenging ways, that is, when such
issues are able to generate large scale social or political movements.
We are not in that kind of period, which makes the description of fem-
inist activism today as a ‘third wave’ even more questionable.

As a consequence, we argue that there is a distinct historical form of

women’s movement operative during the 1970s and into the early-mid-1980s –
8  Introduction
commonly termed second wave feminism, or the modern women’s move-
ment. Furthermore, although some critics use postfeminism and third wave
feminism interchangeably, and while there are temporal and conceptual over-
laps between them (Genz 2006; Rivers 2017) – as in our example of Bail’s
collection – we distinguish between the two. Although also suffering from
definitional instability, for our purposes third wave feminism6 is a political
(and theoretical) movement dating from the early 1990s – a putative succes-
sor to second wave feminism (Heywood & Drake 1997, pp. 2–3; Budgeon
2013, p. 4).7 Third wave feminism is a type of feminist politics – often
vaguely defined, but representing a generational shift and a response to
weaknesses in the second wave. In contrast, postfeminism is a cultural and
historical phenomenon defined as being temporally located after second wave
feminism. Our focus is on the ways in which Australian popular culture
integrates, as legacy, as aftermath, the modern women’s movement – the
‘post’ in postfeminism is definitive here. As such, third wave feminism is
outside our analytical scope. Rather, what we are identifying is a popular
feminism informed by the modern women’s movement.
Paralleling DIY Feminism, the election of the conservative Howard
Government symbolises the resurgence of social conservatism that partly
masks the government’s extension of the neoliberal agenda (Swarts 2000,
p. 103), and which has played out in particularly troublesome ways
around Indigenous Australians and asylum seekers. We use David Harvey’s
definition of neoliberalism:

Neoliberalism is in the first instance a theory of political economic

practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced
by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an
institutional framework characterized by strong private property
rights, free markets, and free trade. The role of the state is to create
and preserve an institutional framework appropriate to such practices.
(2005, p. 2)

Harvey dates the emergence of neoliberalism in the West from the early
1970s as a response to the crisis in capital accumulation. Michael Pusey
(2003) argues that Australia’s neoliberal turn becomes pronounced in the
1980s, although the ALP (Australian Labor Party) government moderated
its impact. The Howard Government (1996–2007), however, implemented
a much more ambitious neoliberal agenda. Mark Western et al. extends
Harvey’s definition by emphasising the centrality and permeation of the
market to neoliberalism. That is, neoliberalism is ‘concerned with providing
the institutional conditions for markets to operate even in arenas where they
did not do so previously’, which they insightfully argue is actually a form of
‘state-sponsored nation building’ (Western et al. 2007, p. 404), transform-
ing health, education, work, trade, welfare, the financial sector, the state’s
role as agent of social justice, environmental protection, and so on.8
 Introduction  9
As Michel Feher observes, however, neoliberalism also has a subjective
dimension, requiring a person to conceive of the self as human capital, so
that every existential project or form of conduct is governed by the quest
to appreciate (or at least, avoid depreciating) this capital (2009, p. 21). In
neoliberalism, the social and the subjective domains coalesce. It is there-
fore a discursive and political climate in which feminist demands are con-
strained and/or no longer seen as necessary, thereby absolving the state of
responsibility for addressing women’s inequality (Summers 2003).
Instead, women, with a nod to feminism’s desire for their independence,
are expected to be ‘the autonomous, choosing free self’ – indeed, ‘the indi-
vidual as entrepreneur of the self’ that Nikolas Rose identifies as required
by neoliberalism’s ‘enterprise culture’ (1996, pp. 150–151, 158), and is
what we see played out in our beauty vlogs and self-help books, for
instance. Yet, as Jemima Repo warns, given its distancing from any state-
based response to gendered inequalities and emphasis on self-responsibi-
lisation, ‘No regulatory context is perhaps more pertinent – or
threatening – for feminist struggles today than that of neoliberalism’ (in
Varney 2016, p. 28).
Historically, however, Australia has been seen as an innovator in terms
of ‘women’s policy machinery’, with leftist Prime Minister Gough Whitlam
appointing a women’s adviser (the first in the world), Elizabeth Reid, in
1973 to help ensure all policy and legislative submissions adequately
accounted for their gender implications (Rimmer & Sawer 2016, p. 745).
Such ‘femocrats’ – or ‘inside agitators’, as they have been dubbed
(­Eisenstein 1996) – are said to have played a pivotal role in the advance-
ment of women in Australia, and also speak to, and of, a specific national
variety of feminism (Watson 1990). As Hester Eisenstein notes, ‘Australian
feminists appear to me to operate on the basis of a socialist-feminist praxis
linked to the politics of the welfare state’, leading to an overwhelming
focus on women’s economic rights (1996, p. 88). From the 1990s, though,
in terms of these active feminist interventions into the state, progress is
said to have stalled and women’s policy sidelined (Rimmer & Sawer 2016,
p. 745).
Under the Howard Government, the rhetoric shifted and the idea that
gender no longer needed to be factored into any legislative or policy initi-
atives came to be publicly articulated, including by the Prime Minister. In
1997, the Office of the Status of Women was downgraded, and its head,
Pru Goward, remarked: ‘we are finally seeing the left-wing domination of
the women’s movement weakened … People are sick of the thought-police’
(in Dux & Simic 2008, p. 18). In such an environment, as Monica Dux
and Zora Simic argue, the femocrat ‘had all but died’ (2008, p. 18) –
although at a state level, her fortunes varied, depending on the government
of the time. The reason for this retreat from what Marilyn Lake (1999,
p. 253) calls ‘a state feminism’ was explained by Prime Minister John
Howard: Australia had ‘entered the postfeminist phase of the debate’ (‘The
10  Introduction
Mother’s Club’, 2002). We take this up further in our final chapter, though
we argue that it was more a case that we had entered the neoliberal phase
of the state’s dealing with women’s inequality.
Postfeminism is commonly seen as an orchestrated attempt to manage,
or indeed mitigate, the wider social and political transformations that fem-
inism seeks to effect; that is, as a way to tame feminism, to accept aspects
of it that accord with patriarchal capitalism (women as workers, women
as conspicuous consumers, women as sexual subjects, and so on), while
denying any need for structural reform or collective action. The Do-It-
Yourself impetus found in Bail’s collection (1996) as well as in much
1990s advertising – what Anna Cronin (2003) calls its ‘compulsory indi-
vidualism’ – represents one point where postfeminism and neoliberalism
come to most obviously intersect. Postfeminism, as Gill argues, can reso-
nate powerfully with neoliberalism: ‘the autonomous, calculating, self-­
regulating subject of neoliberalism bears a strong resemblance to the
active, free-choosing, self-inventing subject of post-feminism’ (2007a,
p. 164). Postfeminism, therefore, is neoliberalism gendered in feminine
terms (Taylor 2012, p. 15), enabling the latter to be articulated via feminist-
inspired discourses of autonomy, freedom, and choice for women, and in
the appealing ‘soft power’ that is popular culture.
Furthermore, as a number of accounts argue (Harris 2004; Scharff
2012; Budgeon 2013; Fraser 2013), women (and girls) form some of the
most contested and hence valuable terrain for the neoliberal project: to
remake women is to make a core part of neoliberalism happen. Neo-
liberalism, therefore, is the second temporal marker of our study because,
if second wave feminism predates postfeminism, neoliberalism is contem-
poraneous with it. Accordingly, in this study we will extend recent feminist
work on postfeminism and neoliberalism (Gill 2007a, 2007b, 2017;
Taylor 2012; McRobbie 2015) to explore their mutually constitutive as
well as antagonistic nature, and we therefore place our analysis within the
larger historical framework of neoliberalism in Australia. Given that both
postfeminism and neoliberalism are transnational phenomena, whose
articulation depends on general elements meshing with local conditions,
how does postfeminism coexist with neoliberalism, Australian-style? In
effect, we therefore wish to position postfeminism (and its cultural narrat-
ives) as part of mainstream Australian political culture rather than ‘some-
thing for the girls’.
Unfortunately, the many studies of Australian neoliberalism rarely con-
sider gender or gender relations as a specific vector of analysis, and
there are no substantial readings of neoliberalism’s figuration in Australian
media and popular culture. But when gender analysis does occur the full
and surprising effects of neoliberalism are revealed, as in Barbara Pocock’s
(2003, 2006) identification of the care deficit afflicting many Australian
families related to time pressures on working women and hence the out-
sourcing of care work (also done by women); Elisabeth Wynhausen’s
 Introduction  11
j­ournalistic account of supposedly unskilled women workers in Dirt
Cheap: Life at the Wrong End of the Job Market (2005); or the ways in
which men’s work is becoming more like women’s work – casualised, part-
time, and in the service industries (Broomhill & Sharp 2006). Australian
neoliberalism, as an imported programme rolled out from the early 1980s
onwards,9 has fundamentally transformed Australia. Pusey (2003, p. 6)
describes it as ‘a seismic shift in the distribution of income, power and
resources’ leading to a hollowing out of Middle Australia. For Connell
(2002, p. 5), it is an undoing of the post-Second World War Keynesian set-
tlement between government, business, and labour; Western et al. charac-
terise it as ‘the most profound transformation of Australian public policy
since World War II and one that fundamentally reworked a framework in
place since Federation’, with far-reaching consequence for how we live our
lives (2007, pp. 402, 404).
As Damien Cahill (2008) and Pusey (2003), amongst others, have
found, however, neoliberalism’s hegemony is incomplete: it has not won
over civil society. The Australian people, as Pusey identifies, are deeply
concerned by rising inequality and expect the State to continue its role as
agent of redistributive justice (2003, pp. 150, 156), a thematic also identi-
fied by Rebecca Huntley’s (2019) recent Quarterly Essay, ‘Australia Fair:
Listening to the Nation’. Although we are having to live under the political
and economic hegemony of neoliberalism, we remain attached to the Aus-
tralian mythology of egalitarianism and fairness identified by Russel Ward
(1958), or what Geoffrey Bolton calls ‘a strongly developed tradition of
equity’ (1996, p. 290). Australian postfeminism, particularly its associ-
ation with a more recent and specifically gendered form of egalitarianism
that is second wave feminism, is the ideal space in which to observe the
gendered and popular cultural playing out of imagined everyday neo-
liberalism, as well as its ambivalences and resistances. It is also an ironic
space, given that the Australian mythology of egalitarianism and the ‘fair
go’ for so long excluded, and in many ways continues to exclude, women.

Unsettling postfeminism
As we have thus far made clear, there has been a ‘scholarly over-reliance’
on a particular understanding of postfeminism (Keller & Ryan 2018, p. 6),
which inevitably forecloses other (feminist) ways of reading popular cul-
tural texts. In addition to arguing for greater cultural and historical speci-
ficity, Postfeminism in Context therefore intervenes in ongoing critical
discussions about the efficacy of ‘postfeminism’ itself as an analytical term
(Radner 2010; Whelehan 2010; Lumby 2011; Horbury 2014; Keller &
Ryan 2018), and suggests potential critical uses of the concept. What kind
of work does/can this concept do, and indeed what might it be made to do
if we problematise it, rather than take it as a critical given? Is it as genera-
tive as it once may have been for feminist media and cultural studies? And
12  Introduction
how might further engagement with historical and cultural specificity unset-
tle dominant accounts of its logics?
One of the earliest pieces to question the usefulness, critical relevance,
and limitations of postfeminism for an analysis of popular culture is
Imelda Whelehan’s 2010 article, ‘Remaking Feminism: Or Why Is Post-
feminism So Boring?’ In it, Whelehan argues that:

Because of the ubiquity of the postfeminist message in cultural produc-

tions, tackling postfeminism from a critical perspective can be nothing
short of disheartening and sometimes frankly boring, as it becomes
difficult not to level what seem to be the same kind of ‘old’ feminist
criticisms at any number of cultural products.
(2010, pp. 158–159)

How useful, then, is it to simply mine popular culture, including its

­Australian versions, for signs of postfeminism’s ubiquity, and as further
evidence of the ‘dangers’ of popular culture’s appropriation of feminism?
Others – including in the Australian academy – have begun to turn a
more critical gaze on the term, given that its invocation forecloses a con-
sideration of how feminism continues to manifest in contradictory ways in
popular culture. In this vein, Alison Horbury, in an instructive essay titled
‘Postfeminist Impasses in Popular Heroine Television’ (2014; see also
Keller & Ryan 2018; McDermott 2018), convincingly argues that there is
a ‘deadlock’ in feminist media scholarship. Dominant approaches to post-
feminism tend to presume that the necessarily reactionary politics of its
texts need to be demystified by the feminist critic, to allow for the viewer’s
or reader’s liberation (Horbury 2014) – this, of course, is nothing new in
media criticism, which has been rightly taken to task for its tendency to
position women consumers as passive ‘dupes’ (Brunsdon 1997; Hollows
2000). In such accounts, postfeminism comes to be seen as ‘patriarchy in
disguise, seducing young women into a “false” belief in feminism’s success
(and thus redundancy)’ (Horbury 2014, p. 220). Sean Fuller and Catherine
Driscoll, too, note that, indicative of its limitations, ‘postfeminism is still a
term used to label both texts and opinions as complicit with what fem-
inism should critique’ (2015, p. 254). That is, postfeminism, either overtly
or more obliquely, invariably signals an opposition, rather than a temporal
or causal relationship, to feminism. As Driscoll further (2018) argues, in
its dominant critical usages, postfeminism underestimates the radical
changes in (some) girls’ and women’s lives in the wake of modern fem-
inism (something she suggests McRobbie especially downplays).
As we will demonstrate, the ways in which feminism is articulated in
the various forms upon which we focus is more variegated than much
previous scholarship on postfeminism allows. We need to attend further to
the different political operations of this highly loaded term, and not auto-
matically dismiss it as a form of ‘unfeminism’ (Driscoll 2018, p. 2) or ‘an
 Introduction  13
unfaithful reproduction of feminism’ (Genz & Brabon 2009, p. 6). While
Gill (2007a) sagely argued that postfeminism is constituted by aspects of
both feminism and anti-feminism, it seems, in the critical context at least,
that the latter has eclipsed the former and popular texts have been prim-
arily mined for signs of their opposition to feminism. That is, in many
studies over the past two decades, there has been a move away from a con-
sideration of the ‘potentially fruitful inconsistencies of postfeminist
culture’ in earlier accounts (Rosenfelt & Stacey 1990, p. 564; see also Dow
1996; Projanksy 2001). The texts that we analyse, along with our indi-
vidual previous work (Henderson 2006, 2013, 2016; Taylor 2008, 2012,
2016), clearly demonstrate not that the relationship between feminism and
popular culture has just recently become more complicated, as others
argue (Gill 2016; Banet-Weiser 2018; Keller & Ryan 2018), but that it has
always been so. Furthermore, we argue that postfeminism as an analytical
frame has obscured this complexity – in Australia as elsewhere. As Genz
and Brabon (2009, p. 6) point out, contemporary critical accounts of post-
feminism often tend to suture over the tensions and contradictions that
earlier analyses saw as integral to it. Here, however, we are open to leaving
these tensions stand, and to recognising them as part and parcel of the
complicated ideological and discursive work of bringing feminism into
mainstream cultural forms.
In our analysis of texts produced across three decades, we also problem-
atise the inevitability of feminism’s ‘undoing’ in and through popular
culture. In this respect, we concur with Jonathan Dean who argues that
McRobbie ‘attribute[s] a level of success to practices of feminist undoing
that is surely unwarranted’. He continues: ‘McRobbie does herself a disser-
vice by refusing to provide much – if any – space, for failure, ambiguity, or
unevenness in these practices of feminist undoing’ (2010; see also Genz &
Brabon 2009; Driscoll 2018). These spaces surely exist, and if our reading
of Australian popular culture is anything to go by, they demand that we
develop new interpretive frameworks, or at the very least those that permit
more nuance, for thinking through the complexities of the feminism–
popular culture (and neoliberal) nexus.
What needs to be rethought, we argue, is the relationship between an
apparently postfeminist representational environment and the ‘feminism’
from which it is variously seen to derive, disrupt, or, most commonly,
disavow; that is, feminism needs to be ‘recentred’ in these debates about
postfeminism (Keller & Ryan 2018, p. 5; see also Kanai 2019). But what
makes critics designate a text ‘postfeminist’ rather than ‘feminist’, and
what work does such attribution do in critical terms? Commonly, as
already noted, it is the disavowal of feminism that provides the answer to
this question, but rather than start from such a point, we want to turn our
attention more to the question of the term’s very indebtedness to feminism.
Postmodernism, a popular and academic discourse afflicted by similar defi-
nitional problems, is instructive here (see Brooks 1998). As the term itself
14  Introduction
suggests, we wish to position postfeminism as temporally after but concep-
tually (and politically) dependent on second wave feminism: feminism is not
past or finished but rather is an internal, integral, element of postfeminism
(Genz 2006, 2009; Genz & Brabon 2009). We contend that postfeminism
is a transitional moment between second wave feminism and some emerg-
ing, though as yet indistinct, form of early twenty-first-century Australian
feminism, a bridge between two epochs operating in, and hence shaped by,
the difficult times labelled as neoliberal.
As Genz notes, ‘feminist concerns have entered the mainstream and they
are articulated in politically contradictory ways’ (2006, p. 337, emphasis
added), hence Rebecca Munford and Melanie Waters’ (2014) description
of feminism as a spectral presence in postfeminism – a core element that
we observe in Australian postfeminism. Beginning from the point of its
very presence, or at least being open (as a reparative reading is) to the
possibilities of finding something other than feminism’s repudiation, and
to see such spectrality in positive terms, necessarily affects the kinds of
readings/interpretations that are possible. We agree that, as Fuller and
Driscoll argue, although ‘ “postfeminism” is widely used to explain the
inadequacy of popular culture for representing feminism’ (2015, p. 254), it
is more fruitfully seen in a much longer ‘popular feminist history’ as ‘just
the current name for feminism’s long struggle to remain visibly relevant to
changing conditions’ (261; see also Driscoll 2018). It is just such a struggle
that we seek to map here.
Although much of our study pre-dates feminism’s recently renewed visi-
bility, it is clear we need to ‘better account for’ how seemingly ‘new’, or
‘emergent’, forms of popular feminism relate to postfeminism (Keller &
Ryan 2018, p. 4). Recently, scholars have addressed how feminism’s
apparent cultural currency (largely again in Anglo-American contexts) –
especially in relation to celebrity and to hashtag activism (such as the
#metoo movement) – may work to complicate the viability of postfemi-
nism in a critical sense. For example, Gill revisits the concept in her 2016
article, and challenges the idea that ‘postfeminism lacks analytic purchase
for engaging with a moment characterized by a resurgence of interest in
feminism’ (621). Scholars such as Gill (2016), Nicola Rivers (2017), and
Sarah Banet-Weiser (2018) argue that the term should not be jettisoned in
such a climate (something with which we ultimately agree, with some
caveats) and that postfeminism ‘is not displaced by popular feminism but
rather bolstered by it’ (Banet-Weiser 2018, p. 20; see also Gill 2016,
p. 612). Others such as Akane Kanai (2019) argue that postfeminism has
adapted to these changing cultural conditions, wherein feminism is no
longer disavowed or repudiated but instrumentalised in ways that nonethe-
less similarly result in the evacuation of its oppositional potential (see also
Gill & Orgad 2015). For these critics, current forms of popular feminism
are conceptualised as merely postfeminism in another guise.10 Further-
more, as both Gill (2016) and Banet-Weiser (2018) point out, this renewed
 Introduction  15
feminist visibility has itself been accompanied by ‘revitalized forms of anti-
feminism and popular misogyny’ (Gill 2016, p. 612), making it difficult to
uncritically celebrate these so-called new forms of mediated feminism.
While we certainly do not underestimate the power of anti-feminist
forces – as in the various misogynistic actions of the Trump regime in the
United States – postfeminism is, we suggest (in the Australian context at
least), in many ways a continuation of the feminist project, specifically in a
popular cultural form. Moreover, this increased feminist activism and visi-
bility seems further evidence for our claim that Australian postfeminism is
a transitional stage where a new form of feminism is beginning to take
shape, though neither along the lines of the fourth wave discussed by
Rivers that, with its emphasis on choice, agency, empowerment, and
digital media, sounds a lot like the third wave, nor Catherine Rottenberg’s
(2018) pessimistic and distinctly American neoliberal feminism, embodied
by certain high profile female winners of American advanced capitalism.
Finally, it is important to note that we are not interested in whether spe-
cific texts can be constituted ‘postfeminist’, or otherwise, but in how what
have been identified as postfeminist norms and tropes have come to circu-
late in and through a variety of Australian textual sites, including at the
level of postfeminist affect (McDermott 2018, p. 53), in culturally specific
ways, as well as how they are being disrupted. Attending to what Gill calls
‘the psychic life of postfeminism’ (2017; see also Elias et al. 2017; Gill &
Orgad 2017; Kanai 2019) helps to come to terms with its ongoing affec-
tive pull, something we take up especially in our beauty vlogs and self-help
chapters. Much of this previous scholarship on affect emphasises that post-
feminism has turned to interiority as a disciplinary mechanism, exhorting
women to merely think and act ‘positively’, perform self-care, and trans-
form how they feel about the troublesome socio-political contexts in which
they operate, rather than seek structural transformation or offer viable
forms of feminist critique. However, our analyses somewhat complicate
this position – particularly in outlining some of the generative capacities of
self-help and beauty vlogging and women’s affective investments in them
(as producers, consumers, and as both at once). Nevertheless, here we hope
to respond, at least partially, to Gill’s call for further work that attends to
the cultural forms in which postfeminism does its work as well as their
complex affective dimensions (2017, p. 620).

Locating the semioscapes

Through the various semioscapes identified, our six case studies combine
to produce a wide-ranging account of postfeminist culture, one which
attends to the social, personal, political, psychic, affective, and economic
dimensions of postfeminism. Each chapter begins with an overview of the
form under discussion, such as its particular generic characteristics and/or
historical location. We then undertake a close analysis of representative
16  Introduction
texts to demonstrate the narratives and tropes that construct a particular
semioscape for each form that, taken collectively, comprise Australian
postfeminist culture. Strategically, our case studies move from the most
overtly fictional forms through to those making claims to the real; not sur-
prisingly, we find that the former result in the most productive yoking of
popular culture and modern feminism, while the latter are constituted
more by ambivalence. As we underscore, the degree to which the texts
analysed take a specifically Australian form considerably varies.
We begin with one of the most paradigmatic genres of postfeminist
culture, chick lit, but rather than feminist disavowal or a reactionary pol-
itics, in its semioscape of aspiration and independence we find a deep
integration of feminist politics. Australian chick lit narrates the extension
of freedom – economic, psychic, and sexual – and hedonism to women.
It details what economic and socio-political changes have meant in fic-
tional terms to Australian women, and particularly young adult women,
what their aspirations are, and how women are central to economic and
social transformation in Australia. Chick lit thus fictionalises (and fanta-
sises) how second wave feminism could be lived in consumer capitalism –
particularly through the workplace, and in terms of a hedonistic
femininity. Chick lit, however, is not uncritical of these shifts, hence its
satire of middle-class aspiration and its soft feminist parodic reflexivity.
As such, and in alignment with other studies of postfeminist culture,
chick lit shows the intransigent power of the fashion–beauty–media complex
to making and disciplining contemporary femininities. There is also more
racial diversity in and through this form than we find in any other, and thus
more sense of a distinctly Australian adaptation of this popular literary
genre.
The analysis in Chapter 2 of Australian commercial television dramed-
ies, Offspring and Winners and Losers, and their semioscape of postfemi-
nist kinship, also suggests dramatic shifts in women’s lives since second
wave feminism, specifically in terms of the affective bonds of family and
friends. In this chapter, we explore the ways in which heterosexuality and
maternal intimacies are de-centred as women’s most privileged forms of
relationality. Moreover, the series under discussion refuse the typical post-
feminist dilemma occasioned by ‘having it all’: the career, relationships,
motherhood. This chapter argues that intimacy and gendered modes of
sociality have been rewritten in response to feminist critiques of the tradi-
tional family. In these Australian iterations of postfeminist ‘heroine tele-
vision’ (Horbury 2014), a successful career is neither antithetical to romantic
fulfilment, nor to extended networks of care. These television dramedies
therefore represent a restructuring of the family and intimacy that accom-
modates women’s liberation, but also – consistent with the kind of popular
feminist critique found in most of our chapters – reveal what has not
changed in terms of women’s emotional labour and the familial bonds it
maintains.
 Introduction  17
As in the case of chick lit, women’s glossy magazines, another of the
paradigmatic postfeminist genres, are deeply permeated by second wave
feminist values as they address consumer capitalism in specifically feminine
and white terms. The four titles that we analyse in Chapter 3, Cosmopol-
itan, Cleo, Marie Claire, and The Australian Women’s Weekly, are sim-
ilarly aspirational, by way of a semioscape of beautiful abundance ostensibly
for all women in the contradictory context of nearly three decades of eco-
nomic growth and increasing social and economic equality. Accordingly, the
semioscape takes specific form as a dreamscape, a type of wish fulfilment
that delineates aspirational lifestyles for particular stages in a woman’s life
and in a context of national affluence. Therefore, titles for young women
produce dreamscapes of abundant pleasure, the more upmarket Marie
Claire inscribes the middle-class woman as a cosmopolitan and ethical
subject, while The Australian Women’s Weekly constructs a scenario of
domestic plenitude. These dreamscapes also reveal what has not changed
for (white) Australian women: physical beauty and ageing remain major,
possibly increased anxieties, thus paralleling the findings of numerous
accounts of postfeminism.
The recent demise of two of our titles, Cleo and Cosmopolitan, can be
partly explained by the rise of alternative media platforms, typically web-
based. The subject matter of Chapter 4 – the archetypal DIY postfeminist
phenomenon of the YouTube beauty vlog – therefore can be seen as a
twenty-first-century successor to young women’s glossy magazines. Drawing
out the semioscape of confidence and care, in this chapter we consider the
role that beauty vloggers increasingly play in providing advice and support
to girls and young women, bringing into being young women’s ‘digital
intimate publics’ that represent important spaces of community and
belonging – despite also taking part in the production of normative femi-
ninities. Given that vlogs, though of course produced in specific cultural
and geographic contexts, are readily consumable across national bound-
aries, it makes sense that this form is the one with the least specifically Aus-
tralian contextual anchors. Although beauty vlogs are aimed at a younger
demographic, this chapter articulates the concerns found in a number of
our case studies. It continues to negotiate the tensions between the female
self and commerce we observe in the self-help chapter; reiterates the anxi-
eties surrounding physical appearance discussed in the magazines chapter;
and documents the business of post-industrial femininities parodied in
chick lit and the affective structures identified in the dramedy chapter.
While beauty vloggers do appear to play out some of the more problematic
aspects of postfeminist young women’s identities, feminism is neither dis-
avowed nor forgotten as these micro-celebrities perform a contemporary
version of sisterhood and care.
Women’s self-help books are where the negotiation and impact of neo-
liberalism becomes highly explicit – not surprisingly as these can be read as
guides to coping with consumer capitalism – and therefore the typical
18  Introduction
­individualistic and entrepreneurial subject of postfeminism becomes appar-
ent in self-help’s semioscape of ‘calculating magic’. What we term as
‘calculating magic’ is a postfeminist philosophy of the everyday, a mode of
ratiocination: the frameworks of thinking, feeling, and acting in the world
proffered to contemporary Australian women and found across the various
sub-genres of self-help, whether career or health advice, mothering or self-
actualisation guides. Even in this more reactionary frame in which neo-
liberalism is given a specifically feminine form, this chapter argues there is a
borrowing from, and transforming of, feminism, rather than a repudiation.
Chapter 5 thereby reads self-help as encapsulating a shift from the
second wave feminist practice of consciousness-raising to the calculating
magic of self-help books. Self-help therefore addresses the unfinished
business of second wave feminism – work, mothering, self-realisation,
and embodiment – but in the very different context of neoliberal con-
sumer capitalism.
Finally, our study of the media representation and self-presentation of
three Australian women political leaders occurs at the end of our book to
serve as a point of difference from the preceding chapters. What we find in
this chapter is a salutary reminder of the past (and present) blockages faced
by women operating in realms where the addressee is not primarily female,
the representational codes have to circulate in the ‘real’ world, the power
on offer is political, and the protagonists are women who lived through (or
at the very least benefited from) the second wave. The semioscape of con-
strained political power delineated through the figures of Pauline Hanson,
Julia Gillard, and Julie Bishop, is the only example where a more reaction-
ary form of postfeminism is articulated, specifically in terms of a pro-
nounced ambivalence towards feminism. This ambivalence suggests that
politics remains a masculine domain and that patriarchal national mytholo-
gies continue to shape political institutions and the conventions of reporting
politics, and hence women are particularly constrained here. Significantly,
the celebrity female politician who is the most typically postfeminist – in
terms of style and glamour – Julie Bishop, was the most acceptable to the
existing political system. She was the one Australian leader who correctly
(or acceptably) embodied political power. Ironically, therefore, what should
be a sign of women’s emancipation (i.e. participation in parliamentary pol-
itics) is actually a marker of the limited terms in which women can access
political power.
We conclude by outlining the contours of an Australian postfeminism,
and offer some suggestions as to why our local postfeminism takes its par-
ticular shape. As we will suggest, national mythologies, economic factors,
and recent feminist history are all factors in shaping how postfeminism has
been translated in this context. Neither celebratory nor condemnatory, our
analysis thus tells three related stories about: Australian women in/and
contemporary popular culture; Australian women and neoliberalism; and
the story of Australian feminism via its cultural residue and reformation
 Introduction  19
into a contemporary popular feminism. Our six semioscapes simultan-
eously register great changes in Australian women’s lives, but also a reluct-
ance by parts of Australian popular culture to make space for Indigenous
women’s and migrant women’s narratives. As a result, a far more compli-
cated, but in some respects more hopeful form of postfeminism emerges, as
we see most powerfully delineated in our first chapter on chick lit. Chick
lit – that most typically postfeminist of genres – makes evident the feminist
potential of this popular, contemporary literary form.

Notes
 1 Scholars in organisational studies (Lewis et al. 2017), health and psychology
(Riley et al. 2018), and law (Gozdecka & Macduff 2018) have recently taken
up this concept.
  2 Our use of the term ‘popular feminism’ relates more to earlier work by Megan
Le Masurier about the longer history of feminist ideas being translated for
wider audiences (2007), as well as to our own studies (Henderson 2006, 2013;
Taylor 2008, 2016), rather than recent work by Sarah Banet-Weiser (2018),
which sees it as a more recent commodified, individualised feminism merely
serving to bolster postfeminism (and neoliberalism).
  3 Amongst others, Gill (2007a) has argued against such a conceptualisation, but
we suggest it is a valuable way of moving beyond the dominant approaches.
  4 Genz and Brabon also refuse this approach of merely ‘ticking off’ key elements
of postfeminism in texts (2009, p. 8).
  5 For a detailed analysis of this media event, see Taylor’s Mediating Australian
Feminism (2008).
  6 Heywood and Drake (1997, pp. 2–3) define third wave feminism ‘as a movement
that contains elements of second wave critique of beauty culture, sexual abuse,
and power structures while it also acknowledges and makes use of the pleasure,
danger, and defining power of those structures’. For Budgeon (2013, p. 4),
Third wave feminism is defined, first and foremost, by a deconstructive
impulse that seeks to challenge the construction of these categories and to
insist on starting from the perspective of multiple differences rather than
from a position that advocates equivalence.
See also Lotz 2007 for an exploration of the relationship between the third
wave and postfeminism.
  7 Rebecca Walker’s 1992 essay, ‘Becoming the third wave’, in Ms. Magazine is
commonly given as a symbolic starting point for the third wave.
 8 Although economic rationalism is a ‘peculiarly Australian’ version of neo-
liberalism (Wright 2003, p. vii), the two terms have much in common and are
often used interchangeably. John Wright argues that
[a]n economic rationalist and a neo-liberal will very often agree on what
governments ought to do; in particular, they will agree that governments
ought to reduce their own activities and leave as much as possible up to the
free market. But when they come to explain why they think governments
ought to do this, economic rationalists and neo-liberals might give rather
different answers … The economic rationalist will emphasise efficiency, the
neo-liberal, freedom. We should also note that this difference is also likely
to only be one of emphasis.
(2003, p. 18, original emphasis)
20  Introduction
We use neoliberalism throughout to emphasise the doctrine’s ‘imported’ nature –
that is, its Anglo-American origins (Pusey 2003, p. 9) – as well as to distance
ourselves from two problematic assumptions inherent in the term ‘economic
rationalism’, namely, its rationality and its supposed confinement to the eco-
nomic realm.
  9 Pusey, however, dates the first neoliberal initiatives from 1975 (2003, pp. 8–9).
He provides an excellent timeline of Australian neoliberal reforms in appendix
A of The Experience of Middle Australia: The Dark Side of Economic Reform.
10 For example, Banet-Weiser suggests:
While postfeminism and popular feminism are oppositional on the surface,
they are actually mutually sustaining. Indeed, the feminist visions that
come into dominant view in the current moment are shaped by the same
affective politics that shape postfeminism: entrepreneurial spirit, resilience,
gumption.
(2018, p. 20)

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1 Chick lit
Novels of postfeminist
independence and aspiration

Our first semioscape of Australian postfeminism is that offered by chick lit

for, as Sarah Gamble (2006) amongst others argues, chick lit is the post-
feminist genre, ‘establishing the salient characteristics of postfeminism in
the popular consciousness’ (p. 63). As such, chick lit has been central to
influential theorists of postfeminism, such as Angela McRobbie (2007,
2009), Imelda Whelehan (2000, 2005), Rosalind Gill (2007a, 2007b), and
Stéphanie Genz and Benjamin Brabon (2009). McRobbie, for instance,
positions Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary (1996) as a foundational
text of postfeminism. Moreover, chick lit has attracted much criticism
from within and outside the academy, most notably for its consumerism
(Ferriss & Young 2006, p. 11), whiteness (Mißler 2017; Hurt 2019), and
reactionary gender politics (Whelehan 2000; Gill & Herdieckerhoff 2006;
McRobbie 2007, 2009).1 Whelehan (2005, p. 186), for example, contends
that ‘Chick lit provides a post-feminist narrative of heterosex and romance
for those who feel they’re too savvy to be duped by the most conventional
romance narrative’.
Australian chick lit, however, does chick lit differently, and thereby
articulates some key elements of a distinctive Australian postfeminism. In a
dynamic we see repeated in most of our cultural forms, chick lit seduc-
tively but not uncritically integrates the legacy and aftermath of second
wave feminism into a contemporary neoliberal context. With its blend of
young liberated heroines and material affluence, we argue that the semi-
oscape of Australian chick lit constructs a fantasy scenario of how fem-
inism could be lived in neoliberal times, and specifically in a post-Fordist
economy – an emergent mode of production based on niche production
and consumption, the service industries, and the importance of aesthetic
production (Harvey 1989; Lash & Urry 1994) – that attempts to negotiate
women’s increased independence and contemporary aspirations. It is
neither the ‘passing away’, nor the ‘pushing away’ of feminism that
McRobbie (2009) observes in Bridget Jones’s Diary, and thus in postfemi-
nism more broadly, but rather a continuation and updating of feminism in
altered historical circumstances.
 Chick lit  27
Regardless of chick lit’s neglect by Australian literary and cultural criti-
cism more generally2 – a neglect arguably related to the genre’s seemingly
‘lightweight’ and feminine subject matter and female readership – its
humorous narratives of female ‘cultural intermediaries’ (Bourdieu 2007;
Featherstone 2007) negotiating employment and romance does serious
ideological and cultural work.3 Chick lit perfectly captures Australia’s
insertion into circuits of post-Fordist capitalism, and the special role occu-
pied by women in these circuits. That is, while Australian chick lit per-
forms the typical chick lit function of satirising postfeminist manners
(Harzewski 2011, p. 4), its parody is directed more broadly than at chick
lit’s usual target of feminine advice genres, such as women’s magazines
(Smith 2008). Instead, Australian chick lit focuses on specifically feminine
notions and narratives of contemporary Australian middle-class aspira-
tions, supposed expressions of ‘the winners of contemporary [neoliberal]
Australia’ (Scalmer 2008, p. 6).
Given the importance of the post-Fordist economy to Australian chick
lit, we begin with a brief discussion of Scott Lash and John Urry’s (1994)
economy of signs and space, and outline the contours of local chick lit –
when it emerges, who writes it and for whom, and introduce our selected
novels on which our analysis is based. We then discuss each of the key ele-
ments structuring Australian chick lit’s semioscape of aspiration and inde-
pendence: the freedom and inauthenticity of work; an ambivalence
regarding middle classness; the conspicuous consumption and fetishism of
chick lit’s female hedonism; and the industry required by and underpin-
ning post-industrial femininities.
Australian chick lit, in its consistent choice of heroines who work as
sign producers in the culture industries, is one of the leading cultural
genres that engages with the changing structure of the Australian economy
and the associated production of post-industrial femininity (both in its nar-
ratives and its functioning as a cultural form). These increasingly
important and/or new culture industries – women’s magazines, public rela-
tions, television, advertising, event management, interior design, fashion,
and beauty – are all components of the fashion–beauty–media complex
(our extension of McRobbie’s fashion–beauty complex [2009]) and con-
sequently are core to postfeminist culture and theory. In effect, chick lit
provides a fictionalised, gendered, and contextually specific supplement to
Lash and Urry’s account of post-Fordism, which they term as ‘the
economy of signs and space’. According to Lash and Urry, the nature of
objects changes: ‘What is increasingly produced are not material objects,
but signs’ – either informational or aesthetic (1994, p. 4). They further
contend that this economy works through the accelerated and geograph-
ically increased flows of ‘money, productive capital, … commodities’, and
human subjects (1994, p. 2), and, we would add, cultural forms such as
chick lit. The production of immaterial, including symbolic, goods in
Australia – whether these be signs or services – by a largely female
­
28  Chick lit
­ orkforce challenges traditional and masculine sectors of the economy
w
and marks Australia’s position in global, semi-borderless circuits of eco-
nomic and cultural exchange.4 Crucially, Lash and Urry also reject the
usual left-pessimism regarding post-Fordist capitalism, instead arguing:

There is evidence that the same individuals, the same human beings
who are increasingly subject to, and the subjects of, such space eco-
nomies are simultaneously becoming increasingly reflexive with respect
to them … taking on an increasingly critical and reflexive distance with
reference to these institutions of the new information society.
(1994, p. 4)

Indeed, this is what we find with our heroines of Australian chick lit: socially
mobile while ensconced in a specifically feminine space of contemporary
capitalism (i.e. the fashion–beauty–media complex), but they use humour
and parody to voice the critical reflexivity identified by Lash and Urry.
In addition, Australian chick lit expresses this location in its local take
on an initially Anglo-American (though now globalising) literary form.
Like the global women’s magazines it satirises, such as Cosmopolitan or
Vogue – with their multiple international editions synecdochical of the
larger transnational dynamic of post-Fordist capitalism – Australian chick
lit takes on generic features of chick lit but transposes them onto local con-
ditions.5 As we demonstrate, Australian chick lit is distinguished from
chick lit in other contexts by a cultural diversity of writers and heroines, a
decentring of romance in favour of work and hedonism, and a feminist-
inspired parodic critique of middle-class aspirations and postindustrial
femininities, even as it rehearses their allure. In combination, these charac-
teristics produce a more nuanced and politically progressive genre than is
usually acknowledged, even by the defenders of chick lit.
Through its Bildung (or process of self-formation) centred on female
aspiration rather than romance, Australian chick lit symbolises two forms
of aspiration that have characterised Australia, and specifically young
women, from the 1980s onwards: second wave feminist narratives and ide-
ologemes of aspirations for freedom and independence (whether economic,
sexual, political, or subjective), and neoliberal narratives of material and
financial aspiration and social mobility. These blended types of aspiration
form the core of the heroine’s Bildung, and produce the double-voicedness,
or a feminist parodic reflexivity, that characterises the genre. Australian
chick lit’s engagement with the seemingly superficial reveals a critical con-
sciousness of and in postfeminist culture.

The making of Australian chick lit

Ironically, considering that expatriate writer Kathy Lette is one of the
formative chick lit authors with her 1991 novel, The Llama Parlour, (and
 Chick lit  29
paralleling Lette’s delayed identification with chick lit), Australian chick lit
makes a belated appearance on the local publishing scene, dating from the
early 2000s (Maggie Alderson’s Pants on Fire [2000] and Rebecca
Sparrow’s The Girl Most Likely [2002] are two of the earliest examples),
and becoming significant in the second decade of the twenty-first century.
This belatedness, we suggest, contributes to Australian chick lit’s parodic
take on the genre – it is well aware of the genre’s parameters and hence its
limitations. The eight authors we discuss, for instance, publish 14 works
from 2010–2015 (Lette’s expatriate status excludes her from the discus-
sion). Being an implicitly commercial form, chick lit’s ongoing interest to
publishers demonstrates a viable readership, while the range of authors –
including a number of high-profile Australian women (actor Sophie Lee,
media personality Wendy Harmer, PR guru Roxy Jacenko, and the
­ex-editor of Vogue Australia, Kirstie Clements) – suggests the genre’s
attractiveness. This popularity, as well as chick lit’s fictional engagement
with the lives of contemporary Australian women (even if at the level of
fantasy and hyperbole), means that the category of Australian women’s
writing needs to be redefined to include chick lit as an object of serious
consideration. In addition, chick lit should be regarded as a distinctive part
of the history of the Australian novel, rather than sidelined as just another
version of the women’s novel – as Cecilia Konchar Farr (2009) argues
occurs with American literature and chick lit.
Australian chick lit, like Australian women’s self-help (discussed in
Chapter 5), is a broad and expanding field. We base our discussion on a
small subset of chick lit novels written by Australian-based authors and
published between 1996 and 2016 – eight authors and their 22 works,
listed in Table 1.1 below. We selected these works from a much larger
group of Australian chick lit novels published over this time, attempting to
find both the atypical chick lit novel, but also representative examples of
Australian chick lit. First, to explore the feminist potential of the genre, we
chose works that confound the typical charges laid against what we term
the first wave of Anglo-American chick lit mentioned above: its whiteness,
apolitical nature, middle-class world view, and anti-feminist politics.6 To
give a more complete sense of style, and as evidence of an author’s popu-
larity and hence representativeness, we then prioritised authors of multiple
titles, where possible. In addition, we selected examples that typify
­Australian chick lit’s favoured terrain of the culture industries. With the
exception of Anita Heiss, we have limited our novels to ones set mainly in
Australia (we exempt Heiss from this requirement because of the signifi-
cance of an Indigenous writer using non-Australian settings).7
We had no problem finding examples that troubled the above-mentioned
criticisms of Anglo-American chick lit, and of the whiteness of postfeminist
culture (Gill 2007b; McRobbie 2009; Butler 2013; Marston 2018). That
Australian chick lit contains a noticeable number of confounding examples
is one defining feature of the Antipodean version of the genre. Although
30  Chick lit
Table 1.1  Novels analysed

Author Title

Randa Abdel-Fattah No Sex in the City (2012)

Amal Awad Courting Samira (2012)
Maggie Alderson Pants on Fire (2000)
Mad About the Boy (2002)
Zoe Foster Air Kisses (2008)
Playing the Field (2010)
The Younger Man (2012)
The Wrong Girl (2014)
Anita Heiss Not Meeting Mr Right (2007)
Avoiding Mr Right (2008)
Manhattan Dreaming (2010)
Paris Dreaming (2011)
Tiddas (2014)
Roxy Jacenko Strictly Confidential: A Jazzy Lou Novel (2012)
The Rumour Mill: A Jazzy Lou Novel (2013)
The Spotlight: A Jazzy Lou Novel (2014)
Cate Kendall Gucci Mamas (2007)
Versace Sisters (2009)
Chanel Sweethearts (2010)
Armani Angels (2011)
Jessica Rudd Campaign Ruby (2010)
Ruby Blues (2011)

Australian chick lit is overwhelmingly written by and about white women,

it does feature the significant presence of an Aboriginal author, Heiss, with
five chick lit novels (Not meeting Mr Right (2007), Avoiding Mr Right
(2008), Manhattan dreaming (2010), Paris dreaming (2011), and Tiddas
(2014), and two Muslim authors, the Turkish-Australian Randa Abdel-Fattah
and the Palestinian-Australian Amal Awad. In all three, the tensions between
postfeminist culture and ethnicity are central to the heroine’s Bildung. In
addition, Roxy Jacenko’s heroine of her three novels, Jazzy Lou, is Jewish
and claims a working-class background. These seem evidence of the mobile
subjects and culture of post-Fordism, a related recognition of Australia as a
multicultural nation – or at least, one where ethnicity matters to subject-
ivity, as well as a nation with an Indigenous population who are part of
urban Australia.
Given that the predominant setting for chick lit, including in Australia,
is the culture industries, we discuss Zoe Foster’s four novels, Air Kisses,
Playing the Field, The Younger Man, and The Wrong Girl; Cate Kendall’s
Gucci Mamas, Versace Sisters, Chanel Sweethearts, and Armani Angels;
and Maggie Alderson’s Pants on Fire and Mad About the Boy – all located
in this space.8 Another distinctive feature of Australian chick lit is that it
ventures into parliamentary and electoral politics, as in the two novels by
Jessica Rudd (daughter of ex-Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, and therefore
 Chick lit  31
one of chick lit’s higher profile authors): Campaign Ruby and Ruby Blues.9
We chose these two quite different domains – one typifying chick lit and
posited as linked to consumption and the reproduction of conventional
and oppressive notions of femininity; the other being an idiosyncratic
setting for chick lit, with party politics being a masculine realm (as
Chapter 6 explores) but also an important space of feminist and progres-
sive politics – to see how the chick lit scenarios play out in specifically
­Australian versions of these two sites. Because of the primary importance
of work to the Australian version of chick lit, and hence to its making of a
different version of postfeminism, our delineation of the semioscape begins
with the signs and space of chick lit’s workers.

The novel of postfeminist working women

Stephanie Harzewski is correct to characterise chick lit as an updating of
the working-girl novel (2011, pp. 124, 126). Australian chick lit captures
the freedom and mobility (economic, subjective, and physical) made pos-
sible by paid employment – enabling our heroines access to fetish objects
such as luxury shoes – but their work as cultural intermediaries in the
fashion–beauty–media complex also voices a critique of the inauthenticity
of feminine occupations in post-Fordist capitalism, and, by extension,
post-industrial femininity (to which we return). Indeed, contrary to Juliette
Wells’ claim that chick lit is predominantly about romance rather than
work – ‘the world of work in chick lit is thus essentially window dressing’,
she observes (2006, p. 55) – we argue that work (as in our dramedies) is
central to these novels and hence to women’s aspirations, even if at times
disguised or temporarily diverted by the romance plot. Just as social realist
writers like K.S. Prichard and Jean Devanny focused on the working lives
of Australian women in the early part of the twentieth century and aimed
to appeal to a broad readership, so too does chick lit.
The shift in the class position and types of employment in chick lit,
however, are signs of major historical change for the Australian working
woman, marking a victory of second wave feminism but also women’s
more ambiguous position within the economy of signs and space.
­Australian chick lit thereby covers, in fictional terms, similar terrain to
McRobbie’s (2016) account of British female creative workers in post-
Fordism, though far less pessimistically. McRobbie finds precarious mid-
dle-class work as the destination for socially mobile young women (2016,
p. 10), a thematic that Suzanne Ferriss (2015, p. 183) argues is played out
in Anglo-American chick lit. In contrast, and as befitting a fantasy of how
second wave feminism could/should have played out in this country with
its less deregulated labour market, the legacy of second wave feminism’s
use of the state to address women’s inequality (Kaplan 1996; Lake 1999),
and almost three decades of uninterrupted economic growth, Australian
chick lit offers freedom and affluence.
32  Chick lit
Many of the novels begin with a relationship break-up and conclude
with the heroine finding the right man; however, romance’s purpose is
largely structural: a plot with which to organise the novel’s real concerns
of work and consumerist pleasure, bearing out Harzewski’s contention
that chick lit ‘offers a sexual theory of late capitalism’ (2011, p. 11). Chick
lit updates the romance plot to include and foreground work so as to
better reflect the changed realities of young women’s lives. In this sense, it
is clearly post-second wave, and echoes McRobbie’s finding that now, for
both working-class and middle-class young women, ‘the idea of
“romance” has been deflected away from the sphere of love and intimacy
and instead projected into the idea of a fulfilling career … They want to find
work about which they can feel passionate’ (2018, p. 91). Jane Arthurs’
(2003, p. 85) reading of romance in the television version of Sex and the
City is equally applicable to our novels: ‘The traditional romance narrative
is there but as a residual sensibility’.
Frequently being employed by the fashion–beauty–media complex, the
types of work our heroines perform are of a particular kind – the glam,
ideal jobs to which young women should aspire as signs of postfeminist
social mobility and success (McRobbie 2016, pp. 89–90). Jacenko’s Jazzy
Lou is a public relations consultant, Abdel-Fattah’s Esma works in human
resources, Alderson’s heroine of Pants on Fire, Georgia, and Awad’s Samira
are women’s magazine journalists, while Antonia, heroine of Mad About
the Boy, is an interior designer/antiques seller. Foster’s Air Kisses features
Hannah, a women’s magazine beauty editor, The Wrong Girl has Lily, a
TV producer, and The Younger Man’s Abby runs a Promotional Girl
agency. Rudd’s Ruby is employed as a PR-media advisor to a politician,
and Heiss’s novels feature Aboriginal women working in television and as
arts bureaucrats. These are socially mobile, middle-class, often tertiary
educated, white-collar worker-heroines and, specifically, they are sign pro-
ducers, makers of images and taste directed at female audiences, offering
inside knowledge of the fashion–beauty–media complex, and its method of
producing aspirational post-industrial femininity. Heiss’s and Rudd’s hero-
ines, although working in the arts bureaucracies (a feminised branch of the
bureaucracy) and the political machine, respectively, reveal the similarities
with the fashion–beauty–media complex – they are both about the
manipulation of popular taste. The production of signs, typically of femi-
ninity, is women’s work in chick lit, and bears out McRobbie’s contention
that women’s increasing prevalence in the culture industries makes ‘the
gender of post-Fordism … female’ (2016, p. 88).
Rather than uncritical fictionalisations of their respective workplaces,
virtually every novel, in keeping with their working-girl novel heritage,
functions as a feminist exposé of their industries, even while the glamour
of work is foregrounded. These exposés typically revolve not around poor
working conditions or worker exploitation – problems from another era
and political paradigm – but rather the banality, even inauthenticity, of the
 Chick lit  33
industry, which is a major contributor to an ambivalence characterising
chick lit. Similar to McRobbie’s findings, chick lit’s critique reveals the
meanings attached to work for postfeminist women: it is about self-­
realisation, first and foremost, or what McRobbie terms ‘passionate work’
(2016). Foster’s Air Kisses begins each chapter with a beauty tip as an epi-
graph, the recontextualisation revealing the absurdity of the intertext:
‘Multi-task: use a pearly lip gloss not only on lips, but on brow and cheek-
bones as a highlighter. Use hair serum on your collarbone and shins to get
a sheen. And use bronzer on your décolletage, eyelids and cheeks’, the
magazine advises (2008, p. 209). Complementing this is a narrative that
details the absurdity of being a magazine beauty editor, a result of the
unrealistic promises made by the beauty industry and women’s magazines.
A working day for Hannah is as follows:

I was used to, say, a natural skincare launch at 8.30 am … followed

by a 12.30 lunch with a PR to talk about their tanning range, then a
2.30 two-hour board room meeting with Karen and Marly, and, to
finish, a 6 p.m cocktail function in a hotel lobby with every hairdresser
in the metropolitan district.
(2008, p. 112)

Here, and throughout the novel, Foster stresses the inextricable links
between beauty, magazines, and commerce that amplify the absurdity of
work in the fashion–beauty–media complex.
Similarly, across all of Jacenko’s novels, the PR queen, Jazzy Lou, pro-
vides a ruthless dissection of public relations, celebrity, fashion, and media,
offering the reader detailed case studies of just how products are really
launched, reputations made and remade, and how the circuits of fame fuel
the industry of popular taste. Rudd’s heroine, Ruby, in the different realm
of political parties (though never named, the party resembles the progres-
sive, centre left Australian Labor Party), is increasingly cynical about the
machinations of the party machine and electoral success, until closing the
second novel with a mild affirmation of faith in the political system. Like-
wise, Kendall’s international flight attendant in Versace Sisters, Bella,
seems set to reject her job’s apparently glamorous lifestyle: on her last
flight she does not purchase any discount Versace in Los Angeles. And
Samira, in Courting Samira, leaves Bridal Bazaar magazine – a title that
unsettles Western stereotypes of Muslim arranged marriages – to take up a
photography cadetship. While successful, these aspirational women are
Lash and Urry’s reflexive subjects rather than cultural dupes.
Heiss’s and Abdel-Fattah’s novels offer a significant contrast to the inau-
thentic jobs of our Anglo-Celt heroines, with characters engaged in
­politically committed work – in the cultural sector for Heiss, or in com-
munity work for Abdel-Fattah – another feature that confounds Western
stereotypes. Lauren O’Mahony (2018, p. 54) describes Heiss’s project as
34  Chick lit
c­ onsciousness-raising for white readers; similarly, Imogen Mathew argues
that ‘Heiss’s chick lit functions as an instructional text, exposing readers to
new perspectives on contemporary Aboriginal culture and identity’ (2016,
p. 335). In effect, Heiss writes a counter-advice manual for her white
readers. As part of this pedagogical project, her heroines, like the author
herself (Mathew 2016, p. 342), are literally curators of contemporary Abori-
ginal culture, and hence are makers of a different set of signs of Aboriginal
identity to those pathologised representations produced by the white Aus-
tralian media. Thus, the detailed descriptions of their working lives –
arranging exhibitions, writing arts policy, organising artist visits, lobbying
white bureaucrats, meeting with overseas Indigenous artists – make explicit,
normalise, and mainstream the networks of Aboriginal cultural production.
Similarly, No Sex in the City’s Esma – with her Master’s degree, and her
group of friends including Ruby, a Greek Orthodox lawyer, Nirvana, an
Indian-Australian midwife, and Lily, a Jewish radical lawyer – confounds
another set of pathologised representations reserved for non-Anglo women
as passive victims of oppressive religious traditions (a position we see the
xenophobic politician Pauline Hanson articulating in our final chapter).
Instead, both authors represent work as meaningful and vital; their hero-
ines’ critical consciousness is reserved for white co-workers’ ignorance.
Regardless of the fashion–beauty–media complex’s apparent superficial-
ity, being a worker or career woman is not the problem, and although the
girl usually ends up with the guy, like the television series we examine
next, Australian chick lit shows little interest in narratives of maternal or
married retreatism so familiar to postfeminist media culture (Negra 2009).
While a heroine may want to slow down the pace of work – Jazzy Lou, for
example, tries to sell her agency in The Rumour Mill (Jacenko 2013), or
find a husband (Abdel-Fattah 2012 and Awad 2012) – the space of work is
the space of self-realisation and freedom. This is evident in the amount of
textual space devoted to the workplace compared to the domestic and the
romantic, the dominant work-based temporality of the novels and, most
importantly, the heroine’s sense of aliveness at work, as the following
passage from The Wrong Girl makes clear:

As Lily sat down in her chair, she looked at the spreadsheet on her
screen, and a shiver of excitement whizzed through her body. Some-
times, with so much stress and so many morons taking precedence
much of the time, she forgot how much she loved her job. Jesus, she
was getting her jollies from Excel; she really needed some action. But
as Lily read over what she’d created, she couldn’t help the small hum
of delight from creeping back in.
(Foster 2014, p. 128)

Similarly, Esma’s volunteering at the Refugee Centre makes her reflect that
‘I drive home exhilarated, humbled and overwhelmed by a sense that it’s
 Chick lit  35
here, at the centre, that I am really starting to find my own identity and
place in the world’ (Abdel-Fattah 2012, p. 57). So, although the novels are
punctuated by the romantic rituals of flirting and dating, these occur
within, and are secondary to in most novels, a detailed evocation of the
heroines’ working lives. At times one feels as if reading someone’s diary of,
or how-to guide for, the contemporary workplace – pragmatic career
advice compared to the calculating magic that characterises Australian
women’s self-help books (see Chapter 5). For instance, Heiss’s novels,
although in many ways the most conventional in terms of the romance
plot, continually revolve around the strategies the heroines use to further
Aboriginal culture through their work as bureaucrats. Female agency is lit-
eralised by this detailed evocation of working life.
The fantasy of how second wave feminism could have played out con-
tinues in the nature of the workplace. These are typically highly feminised
spaces: women are often in senior positions; men are peripheral, and when
they do occur novels tend to feature alternative masculinities such as
artists and gay men. Work represents competency, connection, independ-
ence, and a sense of possibility – a form that we suspect can only be ima-
gined in a largely female workplace. Unlike the bitchy boss we see in, for
example, The Devil Wears Prada (Weisberger 2003), the female boss is
someone powerful and worthy of emulation; if the heroine becomes a boss
she is at pains to point out how she treats her employees decently, as does
Abby in Foster’s The Younger Man:

Every so often she had a girl (beautiful women attracted fuckwits like
silk shirts soaked up olive oil) who was clearly in love with an abusive,
be it physical or emotional, boyfriend, and Abby always felt compelled
to make sure her girls were okay, and to offer some help.
(2012, p. 25)

Furthermore, the workplace is a site of community for characters – found

also in the television dramedy, Offspring, discussed in the following chapter.
At the first meeting of the Parliamentary ‘Girls’ Club’, in Rudd’s Ruby
Blues, the Prime Minister’s female Chief of Staff declares:

we’re all victims of the same stretching machine. We’re being torn,
whether we’re MPs or Senators, party leaders or backbenchers, car-
toonists or press secs. We mightn’t agree with each other’s politics but
we need to help each other out because we’re the only ones who
understand what that’s like.
(2011, p. 32)

Most importantly, these working women act on and in the world; their
working lives are about making things happen. In Campaign Ruby, the
heroine has to rapidly organise a strategy to make an overly glamorous
36  Chick lit
candidate more electable: ‘My gut took over. “She needs an image over-
haul, she needs the local party to unite behind her and she needs to give
newspapers here something good to say about her” ’ (Rudd 2010, p. 237).
She executes the strategy perfectly. Laura, the curator of Aboriginal art,
organises an exhibition in New York almost single-handedly. No Sex in
the City’s Esma volunteers at the Sydney Refugee Centre. These evocations
of the agency associated with work differ so radically from the entrepre-
neurial, positive-thinking ‘self’ found in our self-help books. Harzewski
astutely observes that chick lit blends elements of the adventure story and
the romance (2011, p. 25); in nearly all examples we examine, the adven-
ture story is firmly located in the spaces and narratives of work.
Correspondingly, these heroines (with a couple of exceptions) are neither
the anxious incompetents like Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones, nor top girl
perfectionists identified by McRobbie (2007); rather, they take work ser-
iously, and either know or learn the importance of faking it at work.
Hannah, the inexperienced beauty editor of Gloss magazine, manages to
give a perfect presentation to potential advertisers:

I allowed myself a moment to loll about in my victory, small and

insignificant as it was in the scheme of my job, beauty and even maga-
zines in general. It felt good to know that, for once, I was not only
competent but impressive.
(Foster 2008, p. 204)

Similarly, Samira receives a promotion at the magazine and a photography

cadetship: ‘I’d won it, fair and square’ she reflects (Awad 2012, p. 340).
Rather than chick lit’s celebration of incompetency, as both Whelehan
(2005, p. 208) and Gill and Herdieckerhoff (2006, p. 496) contend,
­Australian chick lit shows women as adapted to and successful in the con-
temporary workplace – at least in their largely feminised occupations.
More importantly, chick lit offers a complex critique of work for women
in the fashion–beauty–media complex, and beyond – a realm of inauthen-
ticity but also agency and self-realisation, and, as we soon see, a means to
alternative sources of pleasure.

Chick lit class

Australian chick lit shares its antecedent Jane Austen’s focus on the nexus
of money, gender, and class, however, chick lit’s rendition signals the
radically different historical context of Australian postfeminism. Rather
than the female vulnerability of Austen’s heroines, feminism’s legacy of
emphasising paid work and career for young women decentres the
­problematic of negotiating the marriage market but inaugurates another
problematic – of mobility and affluence. Similar to the other elements of
the chick lit semioscape, the signification of class in our novels points to
 Chick lit  37
women’s contradictory position in the post-Fordist economy, namely, their
seemingly pleasurable and attainable role and aspirations.
Local chick lit continues and modifies the weirdness of Australia’s version
of class in which egalitarianism, one of our national mythologies (Ward
1958; Turner 1993; Elder 2007), is actually detached from a class-based
identity and analysis. As Catriona Elder explains, ‘Positing egalitarianism as
a central characteristic of Australian-ness obscures class inequality, while
paradoxically making class central to stories of being Australian’ (2007,
p. 46). Unlike Anglo-American chick lit novels (or at least, critical readings
of them), in which the middle classness of the heroine and culture is
assumed, noted, or elided with consumerism as a largely unproblematic
signifier of postfeminist or neoliberal culture (Whelehan 2005; Mabry 2006;
Scanlon 2013), for Australian chick lit, the symbolic meanings attached to
the middle and working classes suggest the conflicts facing an aspirational
female subject who has a residual attachment to myths of Australian egalit-
arianism. A number of the novels offer the fantasy destination not only as a
stylish bourgeois consumer, but also a satire of the middle classes, and posit
that working-class values are superior and can survive. This is Australian
postfeminist women attempting to negotiate an increasingly unequal class
system, by trying to have it both ways. Chick lit acknowledges social stratifi-
cation by its attempts to mask the loss of egalitarianism in the very terms
that articulate that loss (i.e. luxury goods).
A number of critics observe chick lit’s focus on the expensive nature of
postfeminist femininity and the easy availability of credit, with heroines
being constantly in debt (Harzewski 2011, p. 122; Wilson 2012, p. 217).
For example, in her reading of Sophie Kinsella’s Shopaholic series, Jessica
Lyn Van Slooten notes that: ‘Becky’s recurring patterns of Moneyfolly and
compulsive shopping speak to a larger problem; despite her ability to
emerge from immense debt, Becky inevitably falls into the abyss again and
again’ (2006, p. 236). Our heroines, however, appear less financially
strapped and more financially competent, and thereby contribute to a
broader national economic narrative of unimpeded and unproblematic eco-
nomic growth, and the acceptability of consumer and household debt as
part of this.
Rather than Ferriss’s (2015) chick lit precariat, Australian chick lit is
marked by an ease regarding money that keeps invisible the role consumer
credit plays in funding a postfeminist lifestyle, and thereby makes the aspi-
rational narrative more attractive. When Jazzy Lou buys a new Range
Rover she explains that:

When I put down my order I paid the deposit in cash. This is my tradi-
tion when buying a car. In a weird way it adds to the buzz, handing
over an envelope as thick as a brick, stuffed with notes. I earned it,
why not get a power kick from spending it.
(Jacenko 2014, p. 59)
38  Chick lit
As a consequence, Australian chick lit avoids what Diane Negra and Yvonne
Tasker term the recessionary culture of post-Global Financial Crisis popular
culture: ‘Recessionary culture maintains these [postfeminist] celebratory
discourses of course but, we argue, they are underwritten or more precisely
contextualised by a perception that equality is a luxury that can no longer
be afforded’ (2014, p. 4). This difference, we contend, arises from the Aus-
tralian context of over 25 years of economic growth, including the mining
boom, and the federal Labor government’s approach (during Kevin Rudd’s
leadership) to managing the Global Financial Crisis via the stimulus
package rather than austerity measures, for example (Taylor & Uren
2010). Australian chick lit is a novel for times when equality and luxury
can both be afforded or imagined to be so.
Jacenko’s Jazzy Lou series, Kendall’s designer label novels, and Maggie
Alderson’s Pants on Fire and Mad About the Boy are the most explicit
regarding class and money, and hence indicate the ways in which chick lit
maintains the contradictory and specifically Australian fantasies of aspira-
tion and egalitarianism through the moral coding of the middle and
working classes. Indeed, they do evince a form of nostalgia that Heike
Mißler observes as specific to chick lit, and which acts as a criticism of the
present (2017, pp. 174, 178). The overarching narrative in the Jazzy Lou
novels is that of a working-class girl who overcomes being sacked from her
first PR job, sets up her own PR agency, and ends up a wealthy and
powerful PR mogul: a classic narrative of post-Fordist capitalist and post-
feminist aspiration. Jacenko, however, provides a weird and hence signi-
ficant moment regarding class. Jazzy Lou is at pains to dis-identify with
Sydney’s eastern suburbs rich girls who dominate the PR and media indus-
tries, instead basing her success on her working-class Jewish origins: ‘I trod
like a lemming the well-worn track laid down by my parents. The path,
that is, of plain old hard work’ (2012, pp. 6–7). We contend that Jazzy
Lou identifies with a working-class identity because of its moral superi-
ority compared to the superficiality of her hard-won middle-class milieu.10
This moral coding and hierarchy feature in a number of the other novels,
as in Heiss’s Tiddas when the heroines return to their working-class child-
hood home of Mudgee, and through the depiction of Zoe Foster’s shop
assistant heroine in Playing the Field, and the rural working people of
Kendall’s Chanel Sweethearts. In contrast to the triumph of middle-class
values that Jennifer Scanlon (2013) observes in American post-GFC chick
lit, Australian chick lit signals the losses incurred by individual aspiration
and seemingly unfettered social mobility and consumerism, and a continuing
attachment to egalitarianism. Although, as our chapter on female political
leaders reveals, Australian egalitarianism can have retrograde implications for
women as well.
In the case of Jazzy Lou, because of her imagined working-class origins,
money and its transformation into markers of bourgeois taste and visible
success dominate her life. She continually refers to how much it costs for
 Chick lit  39
her lifestyle (see, for example, the third novel, The Spotlight, when she
moves into a five star hotel while the house is being renovated for the
second time in a year), how much the business is earning, how much its
earnings have grown, what the particular budgets are for various projects,
and what staff cost and expend:

I’ve been accused in the past of being a cut-throat boss with zero com-
passion (well, that’s how one ex-employee described me in a recent
lawsuit). Yet Anya, my longest-serving Bee, is proof that if you keep
your nose to the grindstone, working for me does pay off. Anya has
just bought a $1 million house in Double Bay, where she stores her
convertible Mercedes in the undercover car park. Her wardrobe is
even bigger and brassier than mine (remember, I also have a toddler
with expensive taste in clothes).
(Jacenko 2014, p. 20)

Jazzy, as a working-class creator of illusions, is one of the few characters

in chick lit to acknowledge the financial cost of producing them. She
emphasises the role of freebies in the industry (like the ‘haul’ videos by
beauty vloggers), and criticises the celebrities who do not want to pay the
cost of the image: keeping borrowed designer clothes and jewellery, hoard-
ing complimentary luxury products, and other acts of borderline theft.
Thus, Jazzy Lou is the accountant of contemporary capitalism: her method
blends working-class thrift with consumer capitalist excess. ‘I feel like
Santa freaking Claus sometimes, fulfilling the wish lists of journalists
struggling to live upper-class lifestyles on working-class salaries’, as she
doles out the luxury freebies (Jacenko 2014, p. 19). Regardless of her
increasing wealth, Jazzy’s moral accounting system remains consistent in
expressing her imagined working-class origins, though in lifestyle terms
she would never willingly return to them. She is the conflicted aspirational
postfeminist subject – unconsciously or consciously counting the costs of
social mobility.
Kendall’s four novels should be seen as an extended politico-moral
commentary on women and class in early twenty-first-century Australia.
Like Jacenko’s, each novel revolves around a character who has moved
from a working-class childhood to be an apparently successful bourgeois
woman: single, married, some with children, all enthusiastic participants in
post-Fordist capitalism. They face some sort of personal crisis, however:
relationship breakdown, family drama, or career blockage, and the solution
is linked to a coming to terms with their working-class past and the institu-
tion of a new set of more authentic (read socially conscious) values. Indeed,
political activism, or at least social justice activism, haunts Kendall’s works
– environmental politics in Chanel Sweethearts, the plight of the homeless
in Armani Angels, and existential authenticity versus consumerism in
Versace Sisters and Gucci Mamas. Throughout the novels contemporary
40  Chick lit
bourgeois culture is continually satirised: it is excessive, competitive,
shallow, and absurd; it creates morally vacuous women and men. In one par-
ticularly incisive passage in Gucci Mamas, two of the chicks are at Crown
Casino for a Child Victims of Landmines Lunch:

Mim and Tiffany needed a chance to check their reflections and swap
crowd observations. It was clear that this was the year of the boot –
and everyone who was anyone was boasting a pair under the ubi-
quitous wrap dress. High boots, low boots or ankle boots – boot-mania
had obviously struck.
(Kendall 2007, p. 119)

The neoliberal makeover and attempted takeover of social justice move-

ments and NGOs into charities (Weiss 2001; Middleton 2006) is perfectly
captured by Kendall’s grotesque irony.
Kendall, like Jacenko, reflects upon the rituals and the value system of the
newly affluent middle-class women in Australia, and they are found wanting.
Its representatives in her novels – all workers in the image industries – are
analogously hollowed out into signifiers of style and taste. We read the nar-
rative closure of each novel, in which there is a coming to terms with the
working-class past and/or the institution of an anti-bourgeois value system,
as a symbolic recognition of the losses incurred by the dominance of mid-
dle-class aspiration, and a related marginalisation and/or fantasy of the
working class in the post-Fordist capitalist imaginary. Kendall’s heroines
attempt a form of restitution for a reconfigured and less egalitarian Aus-
tralia, Jacenko records the debits, and, as we next discuss, Alderson attempts
to resolve class conflict. Significantly, in the case of all three authors, and as
McRobbie (2016), amongst others, observes, women are the major bene-
ficiaries of this social mobility, and therefore have the conflicted position
of being a symptom of the system’s emptiness as well as its moral
conscience.
In this role as moral conscience, Alderson’s Pants on Fire and Mad
About the Boy use the perspective of an English heroine and queer sexual-
ity to delineate and resolve the class-based geographies of Sydney in a
vision of post-Fordist social harmony. Both novels are set in the affluent
inner eastern suburbs of Sydney, centred on Paddington with its mix of
bohemian and bourgeois culture workers. In Pants on Fire the heroine
works for a women’s magazine; in Mad about the Boy she is an interior
designer turned antique shop proprietor. In their work and social circles,
they are observers of the various class fractions or ‘tribes’, as Alderson
puts it, which inhabit inner city Sydney. Alderson’s pluralistic vision of
class in Australia offers a more optimistic vision of aspiration than either
Jacenko’s or Kendall’s. In one of the final scenes in Pants on Fire, the
heroine ends up in bed with straight men and women, and gay men. It is
not quite an orgy, but it does represent how Alderson perceives Sydney to
 Chick lit  41
be – mixed and porous in terms of class and sexuality – an alternative to
class-stratified and repressed England. This tableau is slightly revised in
Mad About the Boy. In this novel, the heroine falls in love with a younger
working-class man who works at her local gym, after her aristocrat
husband leaves her for a man. If the husband can leave his sexual identity
behind (this occurs in Australia rather than England), she too can shift her
class-based identity. Similar to Jacenko and Kendall, the boyfriend is
represented as authentic and unaffected, unlike the duplicitous types in the
heroine’s middle-class world.
Although Alderson emphasises class-based misunderstandings and dif-
ficulties between the lovers, the novel has a scene towards the end where all
the tribes come together at a party and mix happily. This is Alderson’s
cosmopolitan desire for Sydney and its early twenty-first-century reconfigu-
rations of class and sexuality: a plural, fluid, tolerant terrain, where differ-
ences can be accepted (but most people are white), and where working-class
characters find space and represent moral solidity in chick lit’s semioscape.
Thus, in Alderson’s novels and throughout Australian chick lit, while reso-
lutely and comfortingly aspirational in class and financial terms, its parodic
reflexivity gestures to the costs for the heroines as they become middle-class
subjects in the economy of signs and space. The heroines appear economic-
ally free and self-choosing but must be its moral conscience; they look to
the working class for alternative values even as it disappears into post-
industrial aspirations and precarity. As the next section demonstrates,
however, the benefits of this mobility outweigh the costs.

The novel of female hedonism

A continuing concern of women’s writing and feminist literary studies has
been the need to better represent women’s pleasures and desires, an issue
linked to the broader one of women’s right to self-define their sexuality.
Women’s pleasures, therefore, have often been defined in terms of the
sexual and bodily and, as such, liberatory potentials of literary erotica or
porn for women writers and readers have been advocated (as in Angela
Carter and Pat Califia). We argue, however, that something quite different
occurs in the semioscape of Australian chick lit. Just as the pleasures of
work limit the romance plot, the pleasures of consumerism overshadow, if
not replace, sexual pleasures, as reflected in the chick lit totems of shoes,
make-up, and handbags. Australian chick lit’s response to the need to
better represent women’s desires, therefore, is a highly significant shift.
Forget erotica or porn for women, chick lit’s parodic consumerist
­hedonism makes it the contemporary novel of women’s desires. Rather
than signifying chick lit’s vacuousness or its (and, by extension, postfemi-
nism’s) incorporation by consumer capitalism – its ‘revelry in consumerism’
(Harzewski 2011, p. 51; see also Wells 2006) – Australian chick lit’s exces-
sively desiring heroine is indicative of women’s new found (economic)
42  Chick lit
power and its limitations, and signals Australia’s integration into the
global economy of luxury.
Stéphanie Genz observes that postfeminist feminine subjectivities are the
most recent iteration of ‘the New Woman’ identity that has recurred
throughout the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries and are ‘a particu-
larly ambivalent and contradictory embodiment’ (2010, p. 98). In contrast
to the critics who have argued that the ‘singleton’ – as first articulated in
Bridget Jones’s Diary – typifies the postfeminist new woman (as in
­Harzewski 2011 and Taylor 2012), we argue that the new woman found
in Australian chick lit is a hedonist: a pleasure-seeking female, who, in her
parodic excessiveness, is a humorous and self-reflexive fetishist. We refer
here to fetishism in a cultural or social sense more so than Freud’s patho-
logical understanding – in the sense of using a substitute semi-magical
object for pleasure that masks and acknowledges a form of loss. In the
pages of chick lit, whenever there is a need for pleasure or trouble, the
heroine reaches for or refers to this object. When Ruby loses her job in
Campaign Ruby, for example, she puts on her brand new pair of Loubou-
tin shoes (2010, p. 7). When Hannah, heroine of Air Kisses, sees her
­ex-boyfriend with his new girlfriend she reaches for her ‘new season Bobbi
Brown palette and touched up my under-eye concealer, my blush, slicked
on some gloss and applied some liner around my eyes’ (Foster 2008,
p. 57). The continual referencing of this particular object (in narratives
cluttered with objects), its specific nature, and the secondary importance
of heterosexual romance suggest that it functions as a fetish (a quality
Whelehan also observes [2005, p. 209]), making Australian chick lit the
terrain of the supposedly uncommon but historically significant phenom-
enon of the female fetishist – another articulation of chick lit’s parodic
reflexivity.11
In Heiss’s work the fetish is the handsome male body, for Kendall it is
designer clothes, for Foster it is make-up, for Alderson it is the gay male
friend, for Abdel-Fattah and Awad it is a virgin husband, for Jacenko it is
the Hermès Birkin bag, and for Rudd it is designer shoes. We argue that the
trauma that produces fetishism in the Freudian schema (Freud 1927) – the
sight of the castrated mother – can be interpreted in less literal terms as
the recognition and disavowal of the limits of women’s power in the con-
temporary social domain, and of the second wave feminist project. At
some level, our heroines are comically playing out these limitations: the
fetish allows her to acknowledge and forget the ‘mother’s’ and her own
castration. The fetish thus signifies, and is compensation for, the limits of
liberation – more typically voiced as ‘empowerment’ in consumer capit-
alism. Therefore, it is unsurprising that the fetish object is either a luxury
item (equating with wealth, taste, and conventional competitive feminin-
ity) and/or a phallic object (a substitute for, and a material reminder of,
where the real power still resides). The fetish object both hides and reveals
the limits of women’s political and social power.
 Chick lit  43
In novels where the fetish is a phallic rather than a luxury object (those
by Heiss, Alderson, Abdel-Fattah, Awad – significantly, nearly all non-
Western women), it must jostle for space amongst the narratives and set-
tings of luxury consumption, pointing to the way in which ethnicity, as
well as gender, can inflect the chick lit Bildung (Butler & Desai 2008;
Abdullah & Awan 2017).12 Indeed, in these phallic-oriented texts, the par-
ticular nature of the fetish – the gay male friend, the hunky hetero male
body, and the virginal husband – suggests the reduced importance of the
romance plot to Australian chick lit, and of the hero as a typical device for
satisfying the heroine’s desires. Hegemonic masculinity is troubled by these
substitute phallic objects that are hollowed out signs of masculinity. More-
over, the hetero male hero is but one other pleasure that the heroine may
or may not choose in a world of feminine delights. Teresa Ebert argues
that in chick lit, ‘Money is still the “thing,” but it is no longer securely
attached to the male’ (2009, p. 113), as our discussion of work hinted. We
extend her point to contend that pleasure, too, is no longer so firmly asso-
ciated with him. Therefore, although heterosexual desire does feature,
compared to the novels’ conspicuous consumption, it comes second. In
these narratives of consumerist excess, the real action is in the workplace,
restaurants, bars, and shops.
As the non-phallic fetish objects suggest, the pleasures constructing the
world of Australian chick lit are of a specific type and typify the broader
genre and postfeminist culture, being usually linked to luxury objects and
conspicuous consumption rather than a more general consumerism. Thor-
stein Veblen defines conspicuous consumption as ‘expenditure in excess of
what is required for physical comfort’ (2002, p. 57), hence our contention
that Australian chick lit continues the genre’s gendered theory of early
twenty-first-century conspicuous consumption (Van Slooten 2006). Veblen’s
interest was in the practices of the late nineteenth-century bourgeoisie,
which he traced back to Feudal Europe and the nobility’s need to demon-
strate ‘pecuniary strength’ in consumption and leisure, including the ability
to keep wives. Status is signified by living or spending wastefully on expen-
sive goods. This process continues in industrial society, whereby the wife is
key to signifying the male’s status, as she performs vicarious consumption
for her husband through fashion, beauty, and idleness (Veblen 2002,
p. 47). Chick lit, however, captures a historically novel situation: in the
economy of signs and space, women are not only signs of men’s status.
Being in paid employment and relatively independent, women instead
become agents of conspicuous consumption (Van Slooten 2006; Lazar
2009; Ommundsen 2011), as in chick lit’s ‘exaggerated shopping behavi-
ours’ (Smith 2008, p. 44), full participants in pecuniary emulation and the
honorific value that Veblen attaches to luxury goods. Their leisure prac-
tices, as we show, partake of a similar, wasteful dynamic. Veblen, to an
extent, helps explain the chick lit heroine’s rather easy ascension to hedon-
ist: this is an extension of her previous position. Women are now formally
44  Chick lit
emancipated, however, the underlying dynamic of conspicuous consump-
tion has only intensified during post-Fordism and its reliance on the
manipulation of signs and ‘aesthetic reflexivity’ (Lash & Urry 1994, p. 57).
As the latest iteration of the new woman, it is through her pay cheque,
rather than idleness, that she must now wastefully accumulate her own signs
and spaces of status.
Conspicuous consumption, in chick lit and in postfeminism, is part of
an individual’s (Gill 2007b, 2008), and, we argue, Australia’s imagined
class makeover – marking their shared integration into a global economy
of luxury goods and signs of luxury that heralds a new identity. Consider:
what other genre of novel could feature brand names in each of its
author’s titles, and then have the brand function successfully as a key
trope, as Kendall manages to do (i.e. Gucci Mamas, Versace Sisters,
Chanel Sweethearts, and Armani Angels)? Consequently, the real story in
Australian chick lit is not only the pleasures of consuming, but the open-
ness and aspiration to luxury consumption that we will see in later chap-
ters, as in the pages of Marie Claire and in the politician Julie Bishop’s
self-fashioning. Chick lit takes the historically new subject – the inde-
pendent middle-class female in full-time employment – and as seductive
agit-prop, enables her to consume as well as produce the luxury dream-
scapes symbolising and structuring contemporary capitalism. So Foxy, a
fashion blogger, requests the following as payment from Jazzy Lou in The
Spotlight: ‘As expected, when Foxy sent over her wish list, it would have
made Kim Kardashian’s gift registry look modest: a Smeg fridge in pepper-
mint green, a limited-edition Shepard Fairey print, and a $6000 gold and
marble Versace coffee table’ (Jacenko 2014, p. 70). Observe Jacenko’s
careful noting of the status signifiers of brands, prices, and materials.
Pleasures here are intrinsically excessive.
The repetitive rhythms of pleasurable spaces and consumption reiterate
the fetishistic quality of consumption. The narrative of learning to find the
right guy is overlaid, interrupted, and decentred by the repeated trips to
the clothes boutique, the bar and café, the night club, the day spa, the hair-
dresser, and so on – the aspirational Bildung of the chick lit woman. Every
novel covers the same rituals and this same urban-based geography of
pleasure; every novel, regardless of protagonist or ethnicity, speaks the
same brand-based language of international luxury. Ellie, going out for
coffee in Gucci Mamas is wearing ‘Seven jeans … the white Guess T-shirt
… Gucci frameless sunglasses’ (Kendall 2007, p. 186), while No Sex in the
City’s Esma comments, ‘I got the boots in Italy and I love them like they’re
a part of my family’. Chick lit, as we noted in the case of work, is not so
much about change enabled by the romantic quest, but about reproducing
a particular lifestyle: the female hedonist who repeatedly constructs the self
through an ensemble of high end goods, services, and signifiers (Van
Slooten 2006, pp. 228–229). Fetishistic indulgence here is a marker of
women’s liberation and a reward for it, and simultaneously compensation
 Chick lit  45
for a limited form of women’s liberation: for the heroines’ and the read-
er’s participation in workplaces that are not sisterly, do not feature an
ethical boss, contribute to the gender pay gap, and/or feature the non-
glamorous jobs of the services sector. Our heroines, likeable, seemingly
‘ordinary’ young Australian women – similar to our beauty vloggers in
Chapter 4, with nothing noticeably exceptional about them – manage to
participate in these circuits of luxury consumption, thus demonstrating
the spread of Veblen’s pecuniary emulation and the Australian narrative
of material aspiration and affluence, which appealingly sutures feminism
with neoliberalism.
We interpret these qualities of the heroine as functioning similarly to
chick lit’s satire of the middle classes, being analogous to Australia’s
attempt to maintain (via women) the residual myth of egalitarianism that
is still so central to the nation’s psyche, despite neoliberalism’s deleterious
impact (and egalitarianism’s chequered history with Australian women).
This is an instance of the fetishist’s disavowal: ‘I know it’s (egalitarianism)
gone but it’s not’. In her guise as the relatively novel subject type of the
Australian female hedonist, the chick lit heroine amalgamates the neolib-
eral present and future with a living connection to this imagined more eco-
nomically egalitarian and feminist past.
Moreover, the heroine’s energetic luxe consumerism makes her an ideal
symbol of an aspirational Australian future, in which old class and gender
loyalties, pleasures, and values are disconnected and restructured in the
global circuits of luxury, as spectacularly demonstrated in Jacenko’s first
novel, Strictly Confidential. Jazzy Lou is about to have sex with a client but
decides to take a phone call from work instead: ‘Even though the Converse
account would surely walk out the door, even though my fling with Ben was
over before it had begun, I’d do the same all over again. Because dismissing
someone’s profit margin just ain’t funny’ (2012, p. 156). Jazzy Lou’s rea-
soning perfectly encapsulates the two alternative centres of being for young
women we find in chick lit: work and consumerist pleasure. In our final
element of the chick lit semioscape, we demonstrate how the industry of,
and required by, postindustrial femininities, is founded upon both.

The postfeminist industry of postindustrial femininities

One of the major criticisms made of chick lit is its reproduction of conven-
tional stereotypes of femininity: its heroines are white, heterosexual,
middle class, able-bodied, slender, and conventionally attractive (Butler &
Desai 2008, p. 2; Mißler 2017, p. 153), even if, as in the case of Bridget
Jones’s Diary, they show the Sisyphean nature of achieving the ideal.
Regardless of a degree of ethnic and class diversity in terms of heroines,
as well as female characters from a range of backgrounds, Australian
chick lit produces a surprisingly coherent version of young adult feminini-
ties that aligns with the dominant version found in chick lit and in
46  Chick lit
­ ostfeminism – physically attractive, heterosexual, and middle class. This
p
coherence suggests that while Australian chick lit has fundamentally
updated romance narratives with work and alternative sources of pleasure,
and consciously addresses social mores and change, it also foregrounds
just what has not changed in ideas and ideals of femininity, even if the
methods of attaining it in post-Fordist capitalism have.
The chick lit totems of the handbag, the shoes, and make-up suggest the
key qualities of chick lit femininity: it is a femininity that is constructed
through signifiers and commodities. Contra Gill’s observation of ‘the
resurgence of ideas of natural sexual difference as part of the postfeminist
sensibility’ (2007b, p. 158), it is an explicitly prosthetic rather than an
essentialist femininity. And its definition revolves around beauty and cor-
poreality that can be purchased, hence the magical power attributed to the
objects – masking and making an ideal femininity that has never been.
Second, the ambivalence we observed regarding work and middle classness
is repeated in the emotional structure of chick lit’s femininity, and arises
from a similar source, namely, the fashion–beauty–media complex and the
work it elicits from women. This ambivalence is similarly expressed by
parody: ‘We know it’s fake, but then again …’.
This emphasis on the industries that produce and sell femininity, and
the industry required to be young and feminine, is shown through the
seamless integration of the codes of femininity into the lives and pleasures
of the heroines. These women are, suitably enough, makers as well as
consumers of these signs, and hence producers of ‘canons of taste’ – to
use Veblen’s term (2002, p. 65). At a make-up product launch, Hannah
reflects:

But me, I was fresh off the beauty boat, and I was light years away
from cynical. The moment I walked into a boardroom/café/elaborately
decorated garden tent, I unwittingly fell to my knees before the reli-
gion of face wash. Or eyeliner or teeth whitener, depending on what
was being offered in between mini fruit-salads and scrambled egg con-
coctions fit only for people who think capers count as actual food.
(Foster 2008, p. 81)

As this example shows, the heroine’s work reiterates that femininity is

staged in the specific terms of an industrial-strength and industry-backed
production (Elias et al. 2017). The reproduction of femininity is then
repeated at the heroine’s personal level, where the grooming required
before work or socialising is presented ritualistically. Gucci Mamas
devotes over a page to the grooming ritual of Mercedes: this includes a
couple of dress and shoe changes, before sorting out her hair and makeup:
‘After twenty minutes with the [hair] straightener her overall look was
now far less Donatella Versace and much more Gwyneth Paltrow’
(Kendall 2007, p. 65). Interestingly, the same rituals and values feature
 Chick lit  47
throughout our sample, whether in Heiss’s Indigenous chick lit, Awad’s
Palestinian-Australian version, Rudd’s English heroine visiting Australia,
or Jacenko’s Jewish-Sydney cast. All our heroines are interpellated by it; all
attempt to conform to its practices and standards, thereby suggesting the
cross-cultural nature and globalising reach of the fashion–beauty–media
complex (see also Tate 2017; Yang 2017).
Physical beauty, and therefore corporeality, is intrinsic to chick lit femi-
ninity, in Australia as elsewhere. As is reiterated in our chapter on beauty
vloggers, to be a woman is to desire to be physically beautiful, and thus
the self that is relentlessly worked on and disciplined is corporeal and liter-
ally superficial (though our vloggers’ branching out into other forms of
self-care contains an implicit critique of this focus). Unlike Bridget Jones
who, in addition to endless dieting, also works on her personality and
intellect, chick lit heroines – with the exception of Heiss’s novels – appear
to have little interest in high culture – how Australian!13 Luxury consump-
tion is the culture work they engage in, which also links to the body and
appearances. In effect, regardless of decades of feminist work critiquing
the stereotypes and deleterious effects of conventional femininity, a beauti-
ful appearance remains central to the chick lit imaginary, even as it occa-
sionally acknowledges anorexic models and photoshop. Alderson’s
magazine editor in Pants on Fire vents angrily: ‘I said STOP!’ Maxine
thumped her fist on the desk. ‘Zoe. How many times have I told you? I will
not have anorexics on the cover of my magazine. This girl is sick – and so
are you’ (2000, p. 156). And as a consequence of the geographical and
cross-cultural spread of the Western fashion–beauty–media complex, as
seen in non-Western chick lit (Ommundsen 2011; Ponzanesi 2014), this
image-based and consumerist femininity has increased its reach and appeal,
adding the industries and ideologies of conventional femininities as com-
ponents of Lash and Urry’s economy of signs and space.
Despite this focus on normative gender performances, a consistent
ambivalence about conventional femininity in these novels is expressed in
their parodic tone and approach. Parody articulates the excessive quality
of contemporary femininity and highlights its prosthetic nature. What
other literary genre could voice the ridiculousness of feminine rituals such
as when Ruby attempts to wax her armpits and ends up gluing her arm to
her chest (Rudd 2011, pp. 199–202), or when Sera realises she has worn
the wrong style of shoe to a party: ‘How could she have misread the foot-
wear zeitgeist so badly? How was it possible that both Mallory and
Chantrea had picked up on the espadrille trend while she … was so obvi-
ously out-of-step with the look of the moment?’ (Kendall 2009, p. 39).
Similar to their work in the inauthentic culture industries, the heroines
know what they are doing is frequently absurd – a costly and exhausting
manipulation of signs and products, yet they have to continue in this
regime, like their fetishistic consumerism. We surmise this compulsion
exists for the following reasons. First, a seamless integration of femininity
48  Chick lit
into pleasure and luxury goods – designer clothes with their honorific
value – makes postindustrial femininity feel good and valuable. Second,
there is no alternative present. In the pages of chick lit any way of being
outside that of the fashion–beauty–media complex is largely invisible and
thereby unthinkable: it is, as McRobbie puts it, ‘a feminine totality’ (2009,
p. 66). And our heroines, at some level, realise that even though they are
producers as well as consumers in the economy of signs, their agency is
limited.
Whelehan observes that chick lit’s contradictory drives regarding female
independence and heterosexual romance make it ‘an anxious genre’ (2005,
p. 188); we argue that another source of this anxiety is the ever-increasing
demands required to attain conventional feminine attractiveness. The infla-
tionary economy of luxury consumption mirrors (as well as feeds into) this
dynamic. The underlying drive to consume as wastefully as possible identi-
fied by Veblen, and an intensified importance of images to the economy of
signs, lead to an excessive femininity. And it is no accident that many of
the fetish objects (make-up, high heels) were targets of second wave fem-
inist critique. The postfeminist woman’s parodic veneration of the object
signals postfeminism’s conflicted relationship with second wave feminism
and post-Fordist capitalism, as well as its veiled acknowledgement of femi-
ninity’s essential fakeness. For Awad’s and Abdel-Fattah’s heroines, the
conflict between ethnicity and Western femininities is an additional tension.
McRobbie terms this new excessive femininity a ‘post-feminist masquerade’
that ‘openly acknowledges and celebrates the fictive status of femininity
while at the same time establishing new ways of enforcing sexual differ-
ence’ (2009, p. 64), which are as equally constraining as essentialist notions
of gender.
The emotional structure of Australian chick lit femininities similarly has
a bifurcated quality, oscillating between a knowingness and a humorous
playfulness, and is where much of the feminist critique of post-industrial
femininity is located. This bifurcation is core to the chick lit sensibility as it
represents the chick’s temporal and ideological location. Our heroines
display a knowingness regarding heterosexual mores, ideologies of femi-
ninity, and sexual politics. They are clearly influenced by second wave
feminism. Abby, the boss of the promotional girls’ agency, for instance,
‘never sent them on shitty jobs. Furthermore, she was vigilant about their
safety and intensely protective’ (Foster 2012, p. 15, original emphasis).
This knowingness is one of the key markers of their postfeminist historical
location as it encapsulates the lessons these women have learned from
second wave feminism. As a consequence, their relation to the world is
fundamentally altered, and an arguably new, if conflicted, female subject-
ivity occurs in the novel form.
Part of this new subjectivity, as we see across Australian and postfemi-
nist media culture in general (Winch 2013; Kanai 2017), and another
lesson seemingly learned from second wave feminism, is the value of
 Chick lit  49
women’s friendships. Just as work reduces the importance of the romance
plot, so too does the emphasis placed on friends. Accordingly, chick lit
could be read as the novel of postfeminist sisterhood, for, as A. Rochelle
Mabry notes, friends, or what she terms, ‘the urban family’, function in
chick lit as an alternative to the nuclear family. And, ‘More importantly,
the bonds of the urban family are often as strong, if not stronger, than
those of the romantic relationship’ (Mabry 2006, p. 202). Like the TV
dramedies in the next chapter, every novel examined either centres on one
heroine and her best female friend or friends, or takes an ensemble
approach, focusing on a group of female friends (such as Heiss’s Tiddas or
Abdel-Fattah’s No Sex in the City). They are fellow hedonists negotiating
the travails of postfemininity: sharing fashion disasters, beauty tips, advice
on men, workplace troubles, and the pleasures of excessive eating and
drinking. Postfeminist sisterly support typically uses a laconic form of
humour to satirise these dramas, and hence to satirise contemporary femi-
ninities, which also occurs with our vloggers. While humour is a character-
istic of all chick lit, distinguishing it from other types of women’s popular
fiction (Mißler 2017, p. 116), the laconic quality gives it a specifically
­Australian aspect. Moreover, combined with a strong emphasis on exces-
sive drinking and the mishaps and hangovers that inevitably result, the
heroine of Australian chick lit at times seems to be another version of the
female larrikin (see Bellanta 2012) we observe in the young women’s
magazines discussed in Chapter 3. The emotional rather than political
framing of sisterhood and the lighthearted approach to the various crises
and support offered are two other markers of femininities after feminism.
The emotional structures of chick lit femininities therefore suggest the
impact of feminist ideology as well as the limitations of the contemporary
neoliberal context. The heroines’ knowingness points to their self-reflexive
and critical performance of femininity: they do it to advance in the system,
they do it for seemingly pleasurable reasons, and they take as much agency
as possible – like our vloggers, they are not unconscious victims of femi-
ninity. The recurring sense in which aspiring to be conventionally feminine
cannot be taken entirely seriously perfectly matches the heroines’ employ-
ment in the culture industries: they are manipulating the signs and symbols
of contemporary femininities, keeping their selves on the surface level.
While this ‘superficial’ representation of postfeminist mentalities accords
with the constraints of chick lit as popular fiction, it equally reveals femi-
ninity as a potentially malleable but also a surprisingly static commodity-
based masquerade. The hedonistic female fetishist is thus novel (attesting
to major social change), but also partly stuck.

Conclusion
If one wishes to see a fantasmatic rendering of how feminism could have
played out for young women in contemporary Australia, chick lit’s
50  Chick lit
s­emioscape of independence and aspiration is ideal, and its use by non-
Anglo-Celt women to represent their historically and geographically
located fictions of self indicates the potential of the form to write back at
constraining tropes of non-Western femininities (Newns 2018, pp. 296–
297), and the deep attractions of freedom and mobility. Indeed, of the
various forms we examine, chick lit is the one that most closely articu-
lates an Australian context, even as it draws upon the transnational
chick lit tropes of work, pleasure, consumerism, and beauty. Its aspira-
tional Bildung perfectly narrativises a specifically feminine economy of
signs and space characterising affluent neoliberal Australia, the continuing
impact and dissemination of second wave feminism here, as well as the
pleasures of, and ambivalence regarding, women’s location in this space.
As such, Australian chick lit tells a different story about postfeminism to
the hegemonic version, one that is cause for some optimism rather than
despair or dismissal.
On the level of individual texts, the signifiers attached to the core ele-
ments of work, class, hedonism, and femininities coalesce into a young
woman’s narrative of partial but appealing economic and personal auto-
nomy – an updating of the romance novel that ironically decentres
romance. Chick lit, rather than being a dupe to consumerism, instead
exhibits a feminist parodic reflexivity – a satirical and parodic awareness
of the fashion–beauty–media complex and its role as base, superstructure,
and metonym of women’s location in the economy of signs and space. The
figure of the hedonistic female fetishist is a marker of women’s social power,
and of the power of contemporary capitalism – the fetish as seductive com-
pensation for the limits to her (and feminism’s) power. In a distinctive rever-
sal of the characteristic trope of postfeminism, Australian chick lit has had a
feminist makeover to acknowledge both the freedoms and constraints of
women’s lives, while the 1970s novel of women’s experiences has had a
chick lit makeover to acknowledge aspirations and pleasures attached to the
economy of signs and space.
Australian chick lit, like most of the magazines and some of the beauty
vloggers we examine in later chapters, in its address to young women from
all ethnicities to be guilt-free luxury consumers, also captures a broader
aspirational narrative connected to Australia’s part in globalising and
deregulated post-Fordist capitalism, and this narrative’s role in an
attempted remaking of the Australian middle class and working class. The
deregulation of the Australian economy that occurred from the 1980s on
was also accompanied by a cultural and social narrative of material and
financial aspiration that Sean Scalmer (2008), amongst others, argues takes
shape in the 1990s.14 Reward culture, the priority of the consumer rather
than protestant restraint, and a mélange of old and new cultural (read
class) loyalties (Gabriel 2003; Dyrenfurth 2007; Burgmann 2008) are
major parts of this aspirational narrative, and thus luxury goods conspicu-
ously consumed become legitimate – a sign of an active and successful
 Chick lit  51
participant in a post-industrialising and globalising Australia. And young
women, as signs of feminist energy, freedom, hope, and a new form of
national egalitarianism – this time, in a gendered form – are ideal to fic-
tionally embody simultaneously these two powerful national narratives of
the last few decades. In the next chapter, which focuses on television
dramedy’s semioscape of postfeminist kinship, a similarly atypical set of
postfeminist narratives emerges.

Notes
 1 See John Ezard (2001) for coverage of novelists such as Beryl Bainbridge’s
attack on the genre, and Heike Mißler (2017) for an account of the controver-
sies surrounding chick lit.
  2 Margaret Rowntree and Imogen Mathew are exceptions.
 3 Pierre Bourdieu describes cultural intermediaries as ‘the vendors of symbolic
goods and services, the directors and executives of firms in tourism and journ-
alism, publishing and the cinema, fashion and advertising, decoration and
property development’ (2007, pp. 310–311). Expanding upon Bourdieu, Mike
Featherstone defines ‘cultural intermediaries’ as those workers located between
academia and the media who ‘are engaged in providing symbolic goods and
services’ (2007, p. 44), and who are therefore symptomatic of post-Fordist
capitalism.
 4 The Australian Industry Report 2016 notes that the Services sectors are the
largest employers and contributors to the Australian economy, ‘representing
just over 60 per cent of GDP’ (Cully 2016, p. 35). See also the Australian
Bureau of Statistics (2017) where the last decade’s decline in manufacturing
and mining, and the rise in the services sectors are identified. The Workplace
Gender Equality Agency reports the high proportion of women in the services
sectors (and hence the continuing gender segregation of the Australian labour
market) (2016, p. 5).
  5 Eva Chen (2012) also notes this dynamic in her analysis of Chinese, Hungarian,
and Indian chick lit.
  6 Suzanne Ferriss and Mallory Young note that the genre is diversifying beyond
these confines in the US (2006, pp. 5–7), while critics such as Wenche Ommund-
sen and Sandra Ponzanesi analyse non-Western versions of chick lit, and Fem-
inist Theory has recently published a special issue, ‘Chick-lit in a time of African
cosmopolitanism’ (Frenkel & Gupta 2019).
  7 A significant number of Australian chick lit novels feature a heroine working in
the United States or Europe as part of the global fashion–beauty–media
complex, such as Sophie Lee’s Alice in La La Land (2008) and Maggie
­Alderson’s Handbags and Gladrags (2004), as did Lette’s The Llama Parlour.
These international settings are further evidence of the genre’s mobility – its
transnational nature.
 8 Cate Kendall is the nom de plume of Michelle Hamer, journalist, and Lisa
Blundell, advertising copywriter. Their background as cultural intermediaries is
common for chick lit authors, including ones in this chapter.
 9 Two Austrian chick lit novels, Die Wahl (Pluhar 2003) and Jessica, 30
(Streeruwitz 2004) engage with Austrian politics, with Die Wahl featuring a
female political politician as its heroine. See Fiddler’s (2011) analysis.
10 Jacenko’s penchant for blurring real life with her fiction is ironically demon-
strated by the jailing of her stockbroker husband, Oliver Curtis, for insider
trading.
52  Chick lit
11 Freud’s fetishists were all male, and it was inconceivable within the Freudian
paradigm that women or girls would have castration anxiety linked to the loss
of the maternal penis. Early accounts that explored female fetishism are Sarah
Kofman (1980), Naomi Schor (1985), Emily Apter (1991), and Elizabeth Grosz
(1993).
12 This difference bears out Ommundsen’s insight that non-Western chick lit
negotiates the interaction between the heroines’ ‘alternative modernities’ and
Western consumer culture (2011, p. 108). For these non-Western women,
desiring the virgin husband or the handsome male body is more of an issue
than for white middle-class postfeminist women.
13 One of Bridget’s New Year’s resolutions is ‘Not go out every night but stay in
and read books and listen to classical music’ (Fielding 1996, p. 3).
14 We contend that this rhetoric emerged earlier, in the 1980s as the ALP govern-
ment deregulated the economy. Evidence for this is in Treasurer Paul Keating’s
socio-economic rhetoric of dynamism that accompanied these policies (Morris
1992).

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2 Television dramedies
Refiguring gendered intimacy
and postfeminist kinship on the
small screen

In this chapter we turn to another contemporary cultural form that, like

chick lit, has featured heavily in much recent scholarship seeking to
identify some of the core thematics and tropes of postfeminism: ‘popular
heroine television’ (Horbury 2014). Perhaps this is no surprise, for in the
1990s American television in particular was characterised by the emer-
gence of seemingly new, agentic, sexually and financially empowered
women, epitomised by the foursome from the wildly successful HBO series
Sex and the City and the famously mini-skirted lawyer and eponymous
heroine of Ally McBeal. Alongside British literary and film heroine Bridget
Jones, these women are routinely invoked in critical studies of postfemi-
nism, their attempts to negotiate the tensions between professional success
and a seemingly deep-seated desire for (hetero)sexual intimacy seen to
mark a distinctive televisual postfeminism (Kim 2001; Arthurs 2003; Lotz
2006; Genz 2009; McRobbie 2009; Negra 2009; Taylor 2012; Winch
2013). As Rosalind Gill (2016, p. 619) remarks, the repeated invocation of
these texts in the early to mid-2000s by feminist media scholars suggested
that ‘a “postfeminist canon” seemed to be emerging’. Such heroines and
the series in which they feature, although celebrating female homosociality
and refigured forms of sisterhood and solidarity, are often dismissed as
embodying a limited type of feminism, more aligned with individualist
rhetoric of choice and agency – commonly exercised via consumption.1
Given that, in a micro-political sense, the field of intimate and affective
relations is where normative assumptions around gender are played out,
reinforced, and at times contested, television ‘dramedies’ (part drama, part
comedy) provide an especially rich site for feminist analysis. As throughout
Postfeminism in Context, what we find here is less the explicit disavowal
of feminism seen to constitute other postfeminist television series than its
careful integration into these depictions of familial and non-familial inti-
macies, as well as a critique of persistent gendered assumptions that may
delimit the kinds of femininities Australian women are able to embody
(one element of what we have called the unfinished business of second
wave feminism). In contrast to arguments (mentioned above) that
presume it is inevitably compromised, feminism – especially in terms of the
58  Television dramedies
­Australian women’s liberation movement’s critique of marriage, domestic-
ity, family, and the celebration of women’s autonomy (see Lake 1999) –
has found its way onto the Australian small screen, and the semioscape we
identify as integral to the dramedy genre relates to what we are describing
as postfeminist kinship (something further explored in Chapter 4). The
core aspects of this semioscape of postfeminist kinship include a reconfigu-
ration of family; a challenge to couple culture and to a privileging of
motherhood; a critique of gendered emotional labour; new spaces of
intimacy; a refusal of the key postfeminist trope, ‘having it all’; and a
celebration of a broader range of women’s intimate bonds. Although Anita
Brady et al. (2016) argue that it is primarily through new forms of tele-
vision delivery (such as series streamed via Netflix) that the normative
organisation of familial life and kinship structures are being troubled, our
analysis here reveals that such claims about the possibilities for reimagin-
ing intimacy, at least in the Australian context, are also applicable to free-
to-air television narratives.
One of the key generic manifestations of postfeminist or ‘chick lit tele-
vision’ (Hunting 2012) has been the dramedy. Accordingly, we analyse in
detail two of the most successful, long-running Australian network tele-
vision programmes of this ilk, aired around the same time – Offspring
(Network 10, 2010–2017) and Winners and Losers (Network 7, 2011–
2016) – because, despite their longevity and popularity with local audi-
ences, neither of them has been subject to critical attention, and together
they elucidate much about (post)feminism, gendered subjectivities, and
intimacy on the Australian small screen.2 Though they depict con-
temporary Australian womanhood in a variety of ways, in each section we
use one heroine to focus our analysis: Offspring’s Nina Proudman (who is
its homodiegetic narrator) and Winners and Losers’ Jenny Gross (whose
‘retraditionalised’ obsessive focus on romance mythologies the series
problematises).
In particular, here we demonstrate that, although ‘The ideological force
of couple culture is such that its privileged status is rarely recognized or
questioned’ (Budgeon 2008, p. 302; see also Kean 2015), and coupledom
is seen to be re-embraced within postfeminist media culture (McRobbie
2009; Negra 2009; Taylor 2012), other forms of intimate relations are
seen to be as, if not more, important than heterosexual bonds (even if het-
erosexuality itself still appears, at least for major characters, largely uncon-
tested). Similarly, while others have argued that motherhood has been
valorised, as well as having become more highly regulated, in postfeminist
media culture – part of the ‘new momism’ (Douglas & Michaels 2005) or
the ‘new mediated maternalism’ (McRobbie 2013) – these texts also decen-
tre its positioning as women’s key affective bond. Both Offspring and
Winners and Losers, therefore, seek to disrupt the privileging of romantic
and maternal connections over all others: the former through a promotion
of familial intimacy, albeit in an extended form, the latter through
 Television dramedies  59
­ ositioning female friendship as the most important form of relationality
p
in women’s lives and rendering a traditional suburban ‘Aussie’ nuclear
family anachronistic. While sexual and romantic intimacies, along with
children, are narratively important, both programmes seek to critique the
wider culture of mono-normativity (Kean 2015) and maternalism constitu-
tive of postfeminist imaginaries in other contexts, including through
respectively (re)coding family as friends and friends as family. Moreover,
in opposition to the individualism of both postfeminism and neoliberalism,
these two popular series underscore the criticality of community and
belonging. First, it is important to place this analysis in the context of
debates around the ‘transformation of intimacy’.

Intimacy transformed? Detraditionalisation,

individualisation, and self-reflexivity
According to critical narratives about detraditionalisation and the ‘trans-
formation of intimacy’ thesis (Giddens 1991), traditional certainties relat-
ing to the organisation of social and intimate life (such as the nuclear
family) in the West are purportedly under strain, including in terms of
gender (Beck & Beck-Gernsheim 1995, 2002). This writing, as Angela
McRobbie tells us, ‘appears to speak directly to the post-feminist genera-
tion’ (2009, p. 18). Integral to this supposed transformation is an
increased flexibility in how people (especially young women) organise their
intimate arrangements, where ‘standardized models’ (Gross 2005, p. 290)
are said to no longer hold sway and biological kinship is becoming decen-
tred in favour of the idea of friends as ‘chosen’ families (Allan 2008).
Moreover, the idea that tradition and familial expectations no longer
provide a useful or viable handbook for how life should be lived has been
accompanied by the suggestion that highly agentic citizens all manufacture
their own biographies, with individuals reflexively crafting themselves,
‘becoming the author of his or her own life’ (Beck & Beck-Gernsheim
2002, p. 23). This intense focus on the individual as unfettered-agent, of
course, is aligned with the interwoven discourses of neoliberalism and
postfeminism mapped throughout this volume.
While sociologists Anthony Giddens and Ulrich Beck have been
appropriately criticised for their limited engagement with gender, others
have viewed these ‘post traditional’ ideas as integral to, and in some
respects responsible for, postfeminism itself (Genz & Brabon 2009, p. 1).
Perhaps unsurprisingly, feminist critics have significantly complicated these
assumptions about both intimacy and gender having been radically trans-
formed, underscoring that claims regarding unimpeded agency in par-
ticular have been significantly overstated (Jamieson 1999; Adkins 2002;
Budgeon 2006; McRobbie 2009). As Sasha Roseneil (2009, p. 85) argues,
feminists are ‘highly sceptical about the extent to which individualisation
has been accomplished, intimacy transformed’ and draw attention to
60  Television dramedies
‘ongoing gender inequalities in practices of care and love, and to the con-
tinuities of mutual interdependence within families, even as they break up
and re-form’. Lisa Adkins (2002), too, has emphasised that while gender
may, to some extent and for some subjects, have been unmoored from its
traditional anchors, this has been accompanied by the concomitant process
of ‘retraditionalisation’, where women’s independence and desire for auto-
nomy come to uneasily coexist with traditional assumptions around
‘ “proper” femininity’ (Budgeon 2011, p. 61) – assumptions which prob-
lematically work to flatten difference and homogenise diverse groups of
women. Nevertheless, there have been clear shifts in how family is now
constituted, with arrangements commonly exceeding ‘traditional, norm-
ative heterorelational practice’, including in Australia (Roseneil & Budgeon
2004, p. 142). Such shifts, themselves informed by feminism and queer
reconceptualisations of intimate life (Berlant & Warner 1998), are evident
in the kinds of intimacies and female subjectivities being depicted on Aus-
tralian television screens, especially via the dramedy.

Feminism, postfeminism, and the dramedy

Television is and always has been ‘bound up with the very serious cultural
politics of our time’ (Wood & Taylor 2008, p. 149), and this includes the
ways in which intimate life may (and indeed may not) have shifted as a
result of the broader societal transformations precipitated by Australian
second wave feminism (themselves differentially experienced across
various modalities such as race, class, gender, and sexuality). As noted, the
relationship between television, feminism, and postfeminism has long been
a preoccupation in feminist media studies. In this regard, Susan Douglas
argues that television plays ‘a central, crucial role in the weekly and
monthly engineering of consent around an acceptance of postfeminism as
the only possible subjective stand and political position for women to
inhabit in the early twenty-first century’ (in Springer 2007, p. 250, empha-
sis added). For Douglas, women are only representable via postfeminism
and its constitutive tropes, and audience ‘consent’ to such understandings
is seemingly guaranteed. Here, Douglas overstates the homogeneity, and
indeed the hegemony, of postfeminist ways of framing feminine subject-
ivity. Conversely, we see Australian television as staging a dialogue –
about intimacy especially – that is clearly informed by feminist
re-imaginings of the social as well as broader structural and political trans-
formations in Australia. In this respect, our findings are more similar to
those of Bonnie Dow in her 1996 landmark study, Prime Time Television,
where she argues that there is evidence of programmes that ‘resist postfem-
inism quite vigorously in some ways’ (p. 101) – including through their
representation of non-normative affective bonds.
As a hybridised televisual form, the dramedy is said to have originated
in the mid-1990s. Dramedy, Julia Havas and Maria Sulimma (2018, p. 3)
 Television dramedies  61
note, ‘blends generic modes of soap opera, drama, and comedy to engage
with individualized or “micro” identity politics around gender, sexuality,
and community’. Given it is ‘rarely interested in “capital Politics” ’ and
‘instead trades on the politics of the “everyday” ’ (Havas & Sulimma 2018,
p. 5), dramedy seems an appropriate genre in and through which to reflect
upon shifts in intimate life informed by feminism (as well as to problema-
tise the way these everyday politics often remain marred by a recalcitrant
gender binary). As Rebecca Feasey (2012, p. 73) argues in her work on
motherhood and television, dramedies ‘exploit the contemporary family
unit for both dramatic and comedic effect. Indeed, many of these shows
seem committed to the presentation of alternative, non-nuclear and non-
patriarchal family units, be it stepfamilies, single parents, surrogate parent-
ing or homosexual partnerships’.
As a genre, its constitutive comic aspects are key to rendering altern-
ative ways of structuring intimate life visible, ‘addressing them in such a
way that they seem less threatening, more acceptable’ (Mintz 1999, p. 237).
Furthermore, as Feasey (2012, p. 72) notes, the contemporary dramedy
appears significantly indebted to earlier forms of television which valorise
sisterhood and female bonding: what Andrea Press (1991, p. 46) called
‘postfeminist, “postfamily” television’. However, what we find in these
dramedies, is not that the traditional family has been entirely replaced by
friendships, but – following Deborah Chambers (2012) – that a kind of
‘hybridised familialism’ is now operative. On Australian television family
is refigured, and indeed augmented with other forms of affective bonds,
in a way that acknowledges feminist-inspired shifts in gendered subjec-
tivities (Chambers 2012). Therefore, for the remainder of this chapter we
demonstrate how two extremely popular Australian dramedies – Off-
spring and Winners and Losers – exemplify the semioscape of postfemi-
nist kinship.

Family as friends: Offspring (2010–2017)

Offspring premiered on 15 August 2010 on Network 10, one of
­Australia’s commercial television networks. In 2016 its sixth season pre-
miered after a two-year hiatus, and its seventh began screening in June
2017. Each season consists of between ten and 13 episodes, and over this
period Australian audiences became deeply invested in its characters and
plotlines. Created and written by Debra Oswald, its success and resonance
with audiences has been attributed to its ‘incredibly strong female per-
spective’ (Perfect 2014). Its key protagonist, Nina Proudman (played by
Asher Keddie), is its narrator, and throughout the series depicts her rich
fantasy life, where she reimagines aspects of her hectic life to be other-
wise.3 Like the earlier drama, The Secret Life of Us (2001–2006), it fea-
tures an ensemble cast but instead of the ‘urban family’ trope, so often
constitutive of ‘chick TV’ narratives (Hunting 2012), it revolves around an
62  Television dramedies
actual family: the Proudmans (albeit much more widely conceived than the
patriarchal nuclear variety). The ‘offspring’ invoked in its title relates both
to Nina and the rest of the Proudman children, and to Nina’s professional
role as an obstetrician. Offspring, especially via its key protagonist’s career
in obstetrics, centralises the reproductive body, while also underscoring
that it is not the sole locus of intimacy or family. Given Nina’s occupation,
there are plenty of moments via which biological motherhood comes to be
celebrated, though it is the affective labour of familial intimacy in a much
wider sense that drives the series. Offspring simultaneously challenges the
idea that blood or biological ties have less affective pull than in previous
eras and argues that ‘family’ necessarily and positively exceeds such bonds.
The Australian spaces of postfeminist kinship are significant in both our
series; Offspring’s characters occupy the ‘borderlands between the city and
the suburb – the inner city’ (Brooks 1998, p. 88), while Winners and
Losers moves between cityscapes and suburban homes. In Offspring, bohe-
mian matriarch Geraldine owns the family home in Fitzroy (three kilo-
metres from Melbourne’s CBD), which is – along with the hospital at
which Nina works, St Vincent’s – the locus of much action.4 Importantly,
though one of the family’s adopted members, Cherie, midwife and later
mother to Nina’s half-brother, is an Indigenous woman, Offspring’s
diegetic world is largely governed by an unmarked whiteness and middle
classness (something we also saw in the dreamscapes marking our women’s
magazines), and in this respect is consistent with other limited forms of
Anglo-American postfeminist representation (Butler 2013). Before engag-
ing further with these familial dynamics and spaces, we consider Nina’s
ongoing role as homodiegetic narrator, a position that is central to the
series’ commentary on gender, intimacy, and postfeminist kinship.

Nina Proudman: fantasy and homodiegetic narration

Throughout its seven seasons the narrative is refracted through the psyche
of Nina, who acts as its homodiegetic narrator, and in whom fans have
been shown to deeply invest (Middlemost 2019). As Ashli Dykes (2011,
p. 50) observes of Sex and the City’s Carrie Bradshaw, ‘the use of voiceover
makes public what we often keep private, particularly in regard to female
sexuality and desire’. In Offspring, the voiceover is commonly used by
Nina to articulate the familial pressures that mark her everyday life, as well
as uncertainties around how to perform heterosexuality and normative
femininity appropriately within both personal and professional contexts.
Offspring can also be seen to bear an intertextual debt to Ally McBeal,
both technically and thematically (though it retains the focus on Nina’s
psychic life while this aspect only featured in the latter’s earliest seasons).
Like the 1990s US legal dramedy, Offspring offers a combination of ‘first
person narration, characters’ conversations with themselves and imaginary
people, and fantasy sequences to create rich character d ­ evelopment that
 Television dramedies  63
exposes perspectives and information unavailable through conventional
narrative structures’ (Lotz 2006, p. 90). But Nina is not, as we will demon-
strate, simply a glocalised version of either Bradshaw or McBeal, especially
given these anxieties relate largely to familial rather than heterosexual
intimacies.
In many respects, Nina represents a very different kind of (postfeminist)
heroine, and certainly a different kind of worker, single woman, single
mother, and finally coupled mother to those depicted on Anglo-American
film and television screens produced over the same timeframe. Crucially,
the focus on family in Offspring displaces mononormative couple culture.
While romance and sexual intimacies are important, as they are to all
dramedies, Nina’s singleness, in between bouts of workplace romance, is
not figured as problematic and it is managing her immediate family (as
opposed to romantic interests) alongside her work that is the source of so
much tension and existential angst. This is remarkable given the intensified
regulation and pathologisation of single women in other sites of postfemi-
nist popular culture, including on Australian reality television shows such
as The Bachelor (Taylor 2012) and, more recently, Married at First Sight.
As Laura Brodnik (2017) argues, rather than the male partners she has at
different points, the series represents Nina’s ‘true loves’ in equal measure:
‘One has been her family (this includes all the hospital staff who became
her family by default) and the other is her career’. Although Nina’s love
life is important (with fans affectively investing in potential partners, Chris
or Patrick), it is subsumed by the often interconnected familial and work-
place dramas in which she becomes heavily implicated. Much like the
chick lit novels in the previous chapter, romance is significant but, themati-
cally, is displaced by affective connections in a much wider sense.
From its pilot episode, thirty-something Nina is depicted negotiating the
tensions of modern feminine subjectivity – especially a pervasive sense of
insecurity and anxiety said to beset all postfeminist heroines (McRobbie
2009). In this vein, the pilot commences with Nina doing laps in a local
swimming pool; as she hits the wall when attempting to perform a tumble
turn, she internally chastises herself: ‘Oh god you’re an embarrassment’
(1: 01).5 The next scene, however, shifts to her professional life, as she
confidently delivers a baby, something, as she notes, she ‘is good at’. In
these opening few minutes, and through such a juxtaposition, the series
sets up the dynamic that has governed it ever since. Professionally, when
not babbling incoherently to a potential love interest in the hospital (as is
common), her extreme competence dominates, something that can certainly
not be said of Bridget Jones, whose professional disasters provide the
books – and their filmic adaptations – with much comic relief (Fielding
1996; Maguire 2001). As Nina says in a voiceover in the Season One
finale, fantasising herself at work, wearing a halo: ‘My personal life may
be a train wreck but at work I’m useful and confident’ (1: 13). But, in
many ways, although she frequently laments her own anxieties and lack of
64  Television dramedies
emotional competency (‘I’m very bad at this’ as she professes her love to
Patrick, 2: 13), it is not Nina who is incompetent in her personal life but
all those around her – particularly her immediate family.
Nina’s fantasy life involves both catastrophic and utopian visions of
professional, personal, and sexual fulfilment. Many of her fantasies, com-
monly depicted as dream sequences, are of an intimate life free from
tension, especially where family is concerned. Indicative of the multiple
layers of the text, she variously fantasises being in a romantic comedy
­­(3: 04) about ‘having it all’ (a highly gendered trope which the series ulti-
mately rejects); imagines herself giving a TED talk about successfully man-
aging competing domains of life (5: 13); and in season five she envisions
herself in a sitcom, ‘The Proudmans’ – announcing ‘good morning,
extended functional family’ – where, in stark contrast to the reality, all her
family and friends are happy and content (5: 10). While she will only
reluctantly tell her family that she feels overwhelmed by their demands, in
her narration and fantasy life it is common for her to visualise, and
imagine a space beyond, this sense of burden. In this respect, it is via her
position as homodiegetic narrator that the series’ critique of gendered
affective labour is performed. Accordingly, as with Carrie Bradshaw, ren-
dering visible women’s innermost thoughts, fears, and dreams ‘becomes a
feminist act’ (Dykes 2011, p. 56).
From the series’ beginnings, the family’s often unreasonable demands
upon Nina provide much of the narrative tension and (melo)drama. While
detraditionalisation and the individualisation thesis presumes that ‘family
is spiralling into disintegration’ (Chambers 2012, p. 39), Offspring upends
this narrative to underscore the importance of familial networks. Parents
Geraldine and Darcy, though divorced, maintain an unconventional
intimacy, including at times being on the verge of reuniting. Daughter
Billie, though the eldest, exhibits many insecurities around being the least
successful Proudman daughter, a divorce, and an inability to have chil-
dren, while son Jimmy is a man-child who (living in Geraldine’s inner-city
home) becomes the full-time carer of his two children when his partner,
Zara (also a nurse on Nina’s ward), returns to medical school.6 There are
also many smaller, non-normative, units that make up the larger extended
Proudman clan and the family is consistently expanding.7 In some respect,
families in Offspring are not a choice; as Billie remarks to Nina: ‘Every kid
in our family under 10 was conceived accidentally’ (7: 06).8 However,
characters also reflect upon the performative nature of family-building,
and the ways in which the family accepts, and actively recruits, new
members: ‘This family’s like a bath plug, they suck you in …’ (Kim, 5: 10),
a point reiterated by Nina (7: 01).9
As the series makes clear, Nina is not anxious because she is liberated
or because she is single, or too independent, as others have argued of
postfeminist television heroines (Chambers 2006; McRobbie 2009), but
because she is – despite the supposed unmooring of the self from
 Television dramedies  65
t­raditional familial bonds – unliberated from her immediate family.
Season Two’s first episode begins with Nina on a fellowship in Balti-
more, celebrating personal and professional life without the Proudmans:
‘number of panic attacks during that time: 0’ (2: 01), after which she is
called back to Australia because of her father’s heart attack. As this sug-
gests, each season begins with Nina feeling happy and content, until a
family bombshell, usually involving one or more family members, dis-
rupts it. This key plot device is central to both the humour and the melo-
drama that characterises the series. As she notes in a voiceover at the
start of the third season, ‘You’re tempting fate, it’s an unfair amount of
happiness for one person’ (3: 01), and she imagines a bomb dropping on
her in bed. Such a metaphorical bomb is later literalised in the form of
the revelation, immediately after her apartment catches fire, that she is
not Darcy’s biological child. This revelation, unsurprisingly, leads – in
addition to much emotional turmoil for Nina – to a clear narrative argu-
ment that biology is not what makes family, and her biological father,
socially awkward GP Philip Noonan, becomes part of their extended
familial network.
As Carol Smart points out, families can offer a form of ‘ontological
security’ or be suffocating (2007, p. 45); in Offspring, especially for Nina,
they appear to be both at once. Family is certainly not romanticised and is
instead represented as the product of much (gendered) labour. In this
respect, conceptualising such ties as ‘family practices’ (Morgan 2011) pro-
vides a valuable way to account for this ongoing affective work in which
Nina is involved. Like gender itself, family is something one does, not
something one is (Chambers 2001). Such performative practices, however,
are shaped by material and cultural factors. As Graham Allan (2008,
p. 10) notes, ‘families construct their practices within the material con-
straints they face (income levels, housing standards, occupational demands,
and such like) but also in the context of their cultural understandings of
appropriate family and kinship behavior’. While Allan does not engage
with gender, clearly these practices are also inextricable from assumptions
about normative ways of doing femininity and masculinity. As Smart (2007,
p. 28) notes, rather than over-stating the individual’s autonomy, intimacy
and personal life need to be recognised as ‘always already part of the social’,
including in terms of gender.
Furthermore, while hospitals and those employed there are involved in
care work, Offspring exaggerates this through having key familial intima-
cies conducted and sustained therein.10 In this sense, it appears consistent
with the kind of ‘new woman’ postfeminist narratives explored by
Amanda Lotz (2006), and which are marked by a collapsing of the bound-
aries between the public/private spheres. In the case of Nina, her profes-
sional and personal lives are largely inseparable, not simply as family
members call her at, or drop in to, the hospital where she works with
their various crises, but because over the course of seven seasons, Nina’s
66  Television dramedies
sexual and romantic life predominantly features men with whom she
works.11 While Melissa Gregg (2011, p. 2) is concerned with the ways in
which technologies permeate workers’ home lives, what she calls ‘pres-
ence bleed’, Offspring maps the opposite flow – of intimacy into the
space of employment. At work, Nina’s mobile phone rings persistently,
invariably heralding some new form of familial dilemma.12 Perhaps in a
recognition that workplaces too are affective realms, and that intimacy is
always already public (Berlant 1998), in Offspring it is performed across
formerly demarcated public/private spheres. As Cherie remarks to regis-
trar Eloise, ‘We don’t do work/family separation, none of us’ (4: 03).
However, there seems to be an extreme, if implausible, flexibility in
Nina’s work life; only with such flexibility can Nina carry out her famil-
ial, and clearly gendered, care-giver role – something which the series gently
critiques.

Gendered affective labour and the maintenance of familial bonds

Nina throughout performs much affective labour, both in professional and
personal contexts. As Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2009, p. 134)
argue, despite women’s ‘massive entry into the wage labor force … affec-
tive labor is required of women disproportionately on and off the job’.
While she tells her father ‘I’m not responsible for solving this family’s
many and varied problems’ (2: 09), this is precisely her role within the
diegesis. Although the middle child, she is the one responsible for ensuring
the Proudman family remains stable – a difficult, arduous, and relentless
task; she undertakes significant gendered labour which itself is entirely
normalised and taken for granted, though remarked upon by those outside
the Proudman family bubble, such as medical resident and short-term love
interest Fraser: ‘Nina, I know that you spend most of your life looking
after things for everyone else …’ (2: 05) and partner Patrick: ‘She cares for
this family in a way that is pretty extraordinary’ (4: 11). The labour she
invests to sustain the family is not domestic but affective; families still rely
upon women for their maintenance and stability but in this different sense.
The other family members do not rely upon friends instead of relatives – as
is commonly posited in scholarship on the transformation of intimacy
(Roseneil & Budgeon 2004) – but rather turn to Nina, to resolve tensions,
mediate disputes, bring the clan together, and to unquestioningly subordi-
nate her own emotional needs to those of the group. That said, despite her
role as chaos mediator, Nina’s intimate bonds with her family are crucial
to her, a source of great comfort and strength, and she cares deeply for
all those around her. And in times of crisis, such as when Patrick dies
unexpectedly towards the end of Nina’s pregnancy, the family does
rally around her, providing vital affective and material support. (It is
not insignificant, however, that this corresponds with her entrance into
motherhood.)
 Television dramedies  67
The show reflects, often critically, upon the ways in which otherwise inde-
pendent women remain bound, despite scholarly narratives about declining
familial bonds and responsibilities, to traditional gendered assumptions
around care. In a challenge to the idea of detraditionalisation, persistent
‘feminine discourses of nurturing’ ensure that ‘the responsibility placed on
women to cement domestic ties among kin and the wider community’ is
maintained (Chambers 2006, p. 73). Offspring makes explicit the extensive
emotional labour (Hochschild 1984) that women – whether as daughters,
sisters, or mothers – are still largely expected to selflessly perform. In comi-
cally rendering visible Nina’s ongoing role in caring for members of her
immediate family, and the relentless chaos that it brings to her own life, the
series effectively critiques the ongoing normalisation of this labour as inher-
ently feminine.13 It adds to this critique through the characterisation of
Nina’s mother, Geraldine, who adopts a non-traditional maternal role, and
brother, Jimmy, who is primary carer for his two small children. (Her
mother is an unconventional libertarian, a clear product of the Australian
feminist second wave, especially in terms of sexual agency and ageing.)
While the series does critique this labour, it also underscores its benefits.
Nina’s family are her friends; she seems not to have a friendship network
outside the extended kinship group, and, more pertinently for this female-
centred style of television series, she does not have a stable core of female
friends upon which she can rely: her extended family fulfils this role. Liz
Spencer and Ray Pahl (2006) deploy the term ‘suffusion’ to signal the ways
in which certain familial relationships can be seen to have the characteris-
tics of friendships and, relatedly, that friendships can be seen to have qual-
ities of kinship (see also Allan 2008). Undoubtedly, Nina’s closest friends
are her siblings – especially older sister Billie; as Nina tells her, ‘I love you
like no one else’ (6: 05). The tropes and discourses around romantic love
are persistently deployed to make sense of their, at times fraught, sisterly
bond: ‘No one can break my heart the way you can’ (6: 09, Billie to Nina).
While partners change, and despite periods of tension, jealousy, competi-
tion, and even temporary estrangement, Billie is positioned as Nina’s con-
stant (in the same way the ‘girls’ are in Winners and Losers). That their
connection is seen to approximate the kind of relationality usually associ-
ated with romantic intimacy represents another way in which the series
troubles the privileging of heteronormative bonds over all others. One
episode, wherein Patrick and Nina have clashed over these intense familial
demands, ends with a fantasy scene of them all in bed with them: ‘Even
when my family aren’t here, they’re sort of in my head. They’re my best
friends’ (4: 10). As Chambers notes, in a move from the idea that family
ties are simply based on obligation or duty, ‘The term “friend” is being
used increasingly to convey family relationships in which the association is
seen as positive and cherished’ (2012, p. 183). Such comments are apposite
to the familial intimacies depicted throughout the series, including when
Nina herself becomes a mother.
68  Television dramedies
Decentring matrimony and maternity
As in Winners and Losers, and unlike many texts characterised as postfem-
inist, romantic relationships are by no means uncritically celebrated in Off-
spring; most are tumultuous, the source of much melodrama throughout,
and are found wanting. Many characters are divorced or divorce during the
series (Geraldine and Darcy, Nina and Andrew, Billie and Mick) or sepa-
rate and reconnect (Zara and Jimmie, Cherie and Clegg, Nina and Patrick).
Perhaps unlike other postfeminist heroines, for whom a matrimonial sub-
jectivity is crucial (Negra 2009), co-habitation without marriage is
endorsed as a viable life choice for Nina. When partner Patrick suggests
marriage, she remarks, ‘I don’t want to get married, my life is bound to
yours in the most profound way already [by having a child]. I want you to
know that I choose you. I choose you’ (4: 09).14 Making such a ‘choice’,
performing an intimacy that is not sanctioned by the state, remains a non-
normative one: marriage is still overwhelmingly seen as one of the ‘central
choices that all citizens will make, and indeed that makes all citizens’
(Taylor 2012, p. 20, original emphasis). This mutually agreed upon deci-
sion not to marry mounts an important challenge to the heteronormative
assumption that committed relationships do and should inevitably lead,
teleologically, towards marriage.
Relatedly, despite supposed anxieties around pregnancy, childbirth, and
childrearing said to beset contemporary women, Nina does not exhibit any
disappointment about not having children, and not having had them by 35
is not positioned as abnormal. In contrast to numerous televisual depic-
tions of the postfeminist woman, there is no trope of the biological clock,
or any articulation of a fear of childlessness (Negra 2009; Leonard 2010;
Taylor 2012). Nevertheless, by depicting Billie’s disappointment over not
being able to fall pregnant, including the trauma of miscarriages and
unsuccessful IVF attempts, the series does address this fear.15 Nina does,
however, become unexpectedly pregnant in Season Three, and following
Patrick’s unexpected death shortly before the birth of their daughter, Zoe,
becomes a single mother. While single mothers have commonly been associ-
ated with ‘deviance’ (Sidel 2006), Nina – like Frances James from Winners
and Losers – illustrates a complexification of the single-mother-as-social-
problem narrative.
Nina and Frances, obstetrician and lawyer respectively, have the finan-
cial capital to support themselves and their daughters, acting as the ideal
neoliberal citizens who take responsibility for their circumstances.16 They
each have privatised childcare, one in the form of a paid nanny, the other
through a mother and brother who are expected, in many senses, to subor-
dinate their needs to collectivist childcare. In terms of the ‘hierarchy of
single motherhood’ (Brady et al. 2016, p. 88), women like Nina (and
Frances) are patently at its peak. Nina escapes the regulating, judgemental
gazes that frame other kinds of, implicitly welfare-dependent, mothers
 Television dramedies  69
without (male) partners (Tyler 2008). Her single mother status, too, is
coded as ‘acceptable’ because it was (like Frances’s, whose partner suffered
a debilitating stroke) beyond her control (Valdivia 1998, p. 283). Compar-
atively, the ‘bad’ single mother is located as responsible for her lamentable
predicament and accordingly found morally wanting (Valdivia 1998). In
such a framework, ‘good’ single mothers are those who are not a drain on
the increasingly stretched welfare state; those who take responsibility for
themselves and their offspring; and those who are white and, preferably,
heterosexual, and, of course, middle class.
Significantly, Nina’s motherhood does not see the postfeminist retreatist
trope activated; even in her fantasy life this is not an option she pursues.
That is, Offspring does not seek to reposition Nina in ‘adjustment narrat-
ives in which working women must downsize the importance of work in
their lives’ (Negra 2009, p. 86). Importantly, there is no sense that she
remains a worker for financial reasons, or that she only does so because
she is bereft of her child’s father. That Nina, whose career affords her
much fulfilment and pleasure, will return to work after six months is
unquestioned (while Frances lasts barely a few weeks as a stay at home
mother, a choice which is also diegetically normalised). Indeed, apart from
the first episode of Season Five, barely any maternal domesticity or mother
work is actually depicted (and certainly none of the maternal guilt
common to the postfeminist small screen). Although the ‘good mother’ of
television is said to ‘adhere to the ideology of intensive mothering whereby
she takes sole care and responsibility for her children’s emotional develop-
ment and intellectual growth’ (Feasey 2012, p. 2; see also McRobbie
2013), Zoe’s childrearing depends on a much wider network than such an
idealised representation would allow – especially during the first six
months, in which Billie, in another reconfiguration of familial arrange-
ments, functions effectively as a co-parent.
Contra many postfeminist familial narratives, biological motherhood,
as an identity and mode of being and care-giving, is not valorised over all
other aspects of women’s subjectivity. Both Offspring and Winners and
Losers, like American shows such as Grey’s Anatomy, and more recently
Big Little Lies, reveal ‘the cracks and fissures in the dominant social beliefs
about motherhood as uniquely nurturing, satisfying, and all-consuming’
(Hunter 2012, p. 327; see also Wallworth 2018). In a challenge to the post-
feminist phenomenon dubbed the ‘mommy wars’ (Douglas & Michaels
2005), and the opposition between working and stay at home mothers
upon which it is predicated, Offspring largely refrains from judgement. But
it does presume that work and child-rearing is dependent upon an
extended familial network rather than any state-supported initiatives or
policies (the lack of which continue to be the source of debate in Australia
as elsewhere), with Geraldine’s inner-city house functioning essentially as a
free crèche. That said, this labour is rendered visible by Geraldine: ‘I quit –
I am no longer running this childcare service, I am just sick and tired of
70  Television dramedies
being this family’s childcare stop gap. It’s elder abuse’ (6: 03). Though this
scene is overplayed for comic effect, it does underscore the ways in which
the neoliberal privatisation of childcare requires greater family support for
those who have children and work, and draws attention to the failings of
the Australian state in that regard.
In the final season, Nina’s hyperactive fantasy world becomes preoccu-
pied with mothering as she takes on the role of acting Head of Obstetrics.
The series begins with her dreaming about being in a television series on
‘exceptional women’; in stark contrast, she wakes at her desk, with a
post-it note stuck to her forehead, stressed and frazzled: ‘I’ve got too many
balls in the air’ (7: 03), she confesses. Although there are moments when
Nina clearly struggles in this season, and explicitly comes to consider
whether her professional life can be prioritised while a mother, it is the
way the series ultimately responds to these tensions that is most remark-
able, and disruptive of dominant postfeminist logics. As the season pro-
gressed and Nina became more certain of her ambitions, and her capacity
to actualise them, the series simply refused to situate motherhood and
ambition as antithetical, or to invoke the ‘new traditionalism’ said to char-
acterise earlier forms of postfeminist television (Probyn 1990). After Nina
makes excuses as to why she will not be applying for the position in which
she has been acting, Cherie asks: ‘Are you putting a glass ceiling above
your own head?’ (7: 06), an explicitly feminist phrase also uttered earlier
in the episode by Billie. Here, there is seen to be no impediment to Nina’s
future career success except Nina herself; the presumption is that she is
failing to, in Sheryl Sandberg’s (2013) term, ‘lean in’ (which itself is indic-
ative of the global circulation of these dominant postfeminist ways of
making sense of tensions experienced by women in the contemporary
workplace).
While ‘leaning in’ has appropriately been seen as an inherently conser-
vative response to ongoing inequalities in the workplace (Taylor 2016;
Rottenberg 2018), Nina’s self-actualisation, prioritising herself and her
own needs – a marked departure from earlier seasons – is important in
feminist terms. Moreover, the introduction of Nina’s second pregnancy,
precisely at her apparent ‘click’ moment around her desire for deeper
professional fulfilment, represents a further narrative device through which
to complicate, or even refuse to acknowledge, the difficulties of reconciling
maternal intimacies with intense professional ambition and its fulfilment.
There is no ‘having it all’ dilemma that needs to be resolved via a retreat
into domesticity as motherhood is not seen to compromise Nina profes-
sionally. At the end of the finale, Nina is offered a position at rival hospital
The Ainsworth, where, after declaring her ambition, a senior research role
has been created for her – itself, of course, a postfeminist fantasy only
available to the most privileged of women.17
Although the series perhaps obscures the obstacles that could impede
such a ‘choice’ to embrace professional ambition, and while some would
 Television dramedies  71
dismiss it as postfeminist on such grounds, Offspring’s refusal to have
motherhood hamper Nina’s career progression performs an important
intervention, in terms of the kinds of femininities that are intelligible in
Australian public discourse. The way in which this character navigates this
terrain suggests a glitch in the hegemony of postfeminist ways of framing
competing demands upon women (Vavrus 2007; Genz 2009; Negra 2009;
Taylor 2012; Winch 2013). This finale, consistent with its diegetic world,
refuses to prioritise mothering over other forms of being and caring, and
instead positions it as one amongst many modes of intimacy; this is an
integral part of the refigured postfeminist kinship semioscape we identify
here. Overall, Offspring reaffirms the value of familial networks, though
vastly expanded, and lays bare the extensive gendered labour underpin-
ning them, while also decentralising the role of marriage and maternity as
the most privileged of bonds. In this respect, it bears its indebtedness to
feminism, and rather than performing its disavowal, intervenes in contin-
uing Australian debates around women’s ongoing affective labour, and
demands upon women as carers and workers. For the remainder of this
chapter, we shift the focus from family as friends to friends as family, and
also further engage with how the traditional, patriarchal nuclear family, as
in Offspring, is seen as anachronistic in the semioscape of postfeminist
kinship.

Friends as family: Winners and Losers (2011–2016)

Launched in March 2011 on the Seven network (another Australian free to
air commercial television station), Winners and Losers centres on four
female friends who were each considered ‘losers’ in high school and
depicts their lives as they become ‘winners’ – quite literally, as in the pilot
episode they win the AU$8 million lottery. A kind of ‘revenge’ narrative,
as those who had occupied subordinate positions in their high school com-
munity turn the tables on those who had bullied them, Winners and Losers
has been described by its creator Bevan Lee as a ‘charmedy’, constituted by
a mixture of drama, comedy, and charm (in Jackson 2011). Pre-publicity
sought to brand the series as a glocalised version of Sex and the City:
‘Whereas [Packed to the] Rafters highlights the power of family, Winners &
Losers – like US hit Sex and the City – celebrates the power of friendship’
(Devlyn & Vickery 2010; see also ‘Winners & Losers, Tuesday April 12’
[2011]). Others, however, criticised its use of stereotypes and stock female
characters; as the series progressed, Bridget McManus (2011) remarked in
the Sydney Morning Herald: ‘it is unfortunately starting to resemble a
poor girl’s Sex and the City’. Winners and Losers ran for five seasons,
each consisting of between 22 and 26 episodes – except for its final series
which, due to falling ratings, only featured 13 episodes. Like Offspring,
the series is somewhat technically innovative, routinely deploying repre-
sentational devices such as split screens, temporal shifting (beginning an
72  Television dramedies
episode, then rewinding 24 hours, or representing a day but in segments as
different characters experience the same events), and sporadic fantasy
sequences (as in the pilot when Frances imagines physically attacking the
school’s ‘mean girl’). However, it does not deploy intradiegetic narration
to aid in either characterisation or plot development in the way Offspring
does.
Winners and Losers exemplifies a trend in Western popular television
from the mid-1990s onwards, with ‘home life now often being defined as a
chosen kinship network made up of friends (and sometimes co-workers)
rather than biological family’ (Sandell 1998, p. 144; see also Heath 2004).
Like the earlier Australian programme The Secret Life of Us, and Friends
in the United States, it ‘thus captures and romanticizes the formation of
alternative kinship networks made up of friends and neighbors’ (Sandell
1998, p. 144). While Nina seemingly transforms family into a network of
friends, it is the opposite dynamic that is mapped in Winners and Losers.
That said, in contrast to the inner-city dwelling, bohemian, dysfunctional
Proudmans and their extended clan, the series also depicts a traditional,
working-class Australian nuclear family, the Grosses, and we will shortly
discuss the diegetic role of this family.
Throughout, the series has a strong ethos of sisterhood, especially given
that the central characters’ affective bonds were forged in the misery of an
adolescence spent in an all girls’ secondary school. They are seen to experi-
ence varying degrees of personal and professional success, and much like
in Sex and the City, the four characters enable multiple variants of the
postfeminist woman to be depicted. As Lotz (2006, p. 74) notes, this is a
‘textual strategy that allows a diverse female audience various points of
identification’. However, with its ensemble cast, Winners and Losers
(like Offspring) offers little ethnic or racial diversity, as only one of the
foursome, Sophie Wong, is Chinese Australian while the rest of the char-
acters inhabit an unmarked whiteness (Moreton-Robinson 2000; Arrow
et al. 2017), again underscoring the limits of the Australian postfeminist
imaginary.18
Through its four central characters, in their late twenties at its com-
mencement though the programme concludes when they are in their mid-
thirties, the series maps various relationships, including (in some cases)
marriage and motherhood. However, it also renders visible the desire to
remain childfree, different forms of maternal care, marital ambivalence,
and singleness.19 That is, biological ties, as in Offspring, coexist alongside
chosen bonds, neither privileged over the other, though familial ties (apart
from the Grosses’) are exposed as seriously flawed. As in Offspring, fam-
ilies are both inherited and created, and there are various non-normative
forms of intimate bonds depicted. For example, the series represents surro-
gacy, step-parenting, same-sex marriage, and fostering and adoption, as
Sam (Jenny’s half-sister) becomes the primary carer for orphan Cory, while
Frances’s half-sister, Jasmine, is left in her care by their mother. As
 Television dramedies  73
­ hambers (2012) notes, indicative of the ‘hybridised familialism’ we see as
C
integral to postfeminist kinship, alternative familial models have long been
a key feature of Australian soap operas, such as Neighbours and Home
and Away, for the past few decades, and both these series are consistent
with that representational trend. Before engaging further with the series, it
is necessary to introduce its four central protagonists.

From losers to winners

The pilot episode begins with the four women individually contemplating
whether to attend their ten-year high school reunion, for which they have
received a Facebook invite from resident ‘mean girl’, Tiffany Turner. We
learn that the four spent much of their high school years – a traumatic
experience of liminality that is later seen as the source of their enduring
bond – ‘hiding in the toilets’ (1.01). The fictional Renwood High, a subur-
ban Melbourne girls’ public high school, is seen to have been a concen-
trated site of gender policing, particularly around the adolescent body. The
series depicts, and critiques, the long-lasting effects of the ‘normative cruel-
ties’ inflicted upon them by other girls seeking to establish their own sense
of belonging and sociality at the expense of others, who are subject to
intense forms of judgement and especially bodily surveillance (Winch
2013). To combat this gendered bullying, to contest the ‘meanness’ seen to
be inherent in ‘doing girl’ (Ringrose & Renold 2010, p. 585), and to offer
a much less toxic form of female sociality, the girls take refuge in each
other throughout these difficult years, however, all but Bec and Jenny
(who both continue to live in their childhood suburb) have lost touch.
In the few first moments of the pilot, each character is introduced in the
present, going about their daily lives, scenes which reveal much about
them and the kinds of post-school gender identities they inhabit. First, Bec
Gilbert is shown cooking breakfast for her fiancée Matt, and working at
her own beauty salon. Bec initially appears the most conventional, until a
one-night stand during a brief separation from Matt sees her fall pregnant
to Sophie’s boyfriend Doug, opening a space for the exploration of an
alternative familial arrangement in which her son, Harrison, is seen to
have four parents (something with which Sophie struggles). Sophie Wong
is depicted partying and having a series of one-night stands, as well as in a
professional setting: as a personal trainer, a position she took up after
dropping out of her medical residency (to which she returns after the
lottery win). Sophie was Dux of her school but was also considered over-
weight, making her the subject of many cruel jibes from her high school
cohort. However, indicative of the postfeminist makeover paradigm (Gill
2007), Sophie has dramatically transformed since high school, and is now
conventionally attractive and thin. In other ways Sophie is positioned as a
failure; in the series’ mobilisation of a racial stereotype, she does not live
up to her Chinese father’s high expectations, especially when charged with
74  Television dramedies
cocaine possession (1: 02). She also explicitly rejects marriage (she breaks
off two engagements) and children (she has an abortion, which is dealt
with sympathetically), and in the series’ finale remains the only contentedly
single character.
Conversely, Jenny Gross (a name that not so subtly invokes the kinds of
insults levelled at her at school), whom we first see being brought a cup of
tea in bed by her mother as she sleeps with a cuddly toy, has altered little
in the ten years since high school ended. Dubbed ‘Gross Out’ throughout
her school years – both due to her name and a body that is implicitly seen
as excessive – at 27, Jenny initially works at a call centre and continues to
struggle with insecurities. As we will demonstrate, and indicative of post-
feminist ‘girling’ (Negra 2009), she is throughout infantilised, and is
deeply invested in hetero-patriarchal romance mythologies, in which she
locates all hopes for personal fulfilment and happiness. Material gains
mean little to her, and, contra detraditionalisation, her Catholic views con-
tinue to shape her life choices; for example, she donates the majority of her
lottery win to a hospital ward after suggesting she would do so while
praying for her mother’s recovery from breast cancer, and is a virgin when
the series commences. Finally, Frances James is initially depicted as a dish-
evelled lawyer, waking up at her desk after an all-night session working on
a brief. This characterisation clearly positions her as the workaholic of the
group, who implicitly invests too much time in her professional life to the
detriment of her personal one – a familiar trope in postfeminist ‘chick tele-
vision’. Educationally and professionally, Frances is the ideal post-second
wave feminist subject: she is a Harvard law graduate, partner in a law
firm, who (like Sophie) has relocated from her childhood home to her own
inner-city apartment. She is clearly characterised as the series’ overt fem-
inist (perhaps reminiscent of Miranda in Sex and the City), including
through the invocation of a key second wave feminist phrase: ‘Do I need to
give you the “a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle” speech?’
(Frances to Sophie, 4: 21).20
After they ultimately decide to attend, the school reunion finds them
retreating to the familiar space of the toilet, with Frances lamenting that –
despite the intervening ten years – they are still the losers they were in high
school. Leaving the reunion to spend the night partying together instead,
they stumble past a newsagent the next morning and purchase a winning
lottery ticket. They are figured as not merely winners in monetary terms –
though, despite the popular fantasy of winning the lottery, the series sug-
gests that money does not buy happiness – but through their accumulation
of other forms of capital, including their enduring friendships (Lambert
2013). The lottery win is used to underscore the importance of women’s
friendship over any material gains, as well as to normalise the importance
of meaningful work, in terms of identity, to the contemporary postfeminist
subject.21 What the girls have ‘won’, the series makes clear, is this rejuve-
nated sisterly bond.
 Television dramedies  75
Screening sisterhood: girlfriendship and intimacy
As Chambers observes, ‘conventional intimate dyads are gradually being
supplanted by a new set of social dynamics characterised by group friend-
ships’ (2006, p. 71, original emphasis) – which is certainly the case for
women in various forms of postfeminist media culture (Winch 2013).
Given its narrative focus on these women friends, with each representing
a different embodiment of femininity, comparisons with HBO’s Sex and
the City, as in those press accounts above, may seem inevitable; the series
even gives an intertextual nod to the Manhattan foursome: ‘I feel like I’ve
just walked into an episode of Sex and the City’, says Jenny’s partner
Gabe (4: 20). However, the focus on a female friendship foursome is
arguably where the comparisons end. In contrast to other postfeminist
television dramedies (Negra 2004; Mabry 2006; Taylor 2012), their lives
are not glamorised, and apart from a few shopping sprees immediately
following the lottery win and celebrations once the money is deposited in
their accounts, their friendships are not tied to practices of conspicuous
consumption. In defiance of neoliberal logics, affective success – as in fos-
tering and maintaining strong affective connections – is more highly
valued than success in economic terms. Moreover, as in our chick lit nar-
ratives, these women’s friendships are not simply the backdrop to their
efforts to become ‘unsingle’ but crucial modes of intimacy in and of
themselves.
Despite their not insignificant differences, once reunited at the scene of
adolescent trauma, the ‘girls’ (as they, consistent with the infantilism of
single women in other sites of postfeminist media culture, refer to their
group) are more or less inseparable. Much of the action involves them
eating out and/or drinking, or attending Gross family events, and provid-
ing each other with moral and emotional support, engaging in what
Alison Winch (2013) calls ‘girlfriend reflexivity’ (including after trau-
matic experiences of gendered violence, stalking, illness, separation, and
sexual harassment), and such talk is essential to their sociality. While
Winch sees the communal monitoring and revision of women’s life nar-
ratives as integral to bringing them into being as ‘successful postfeminist
subjects’ (2013, p. 66), the Winners and Loser’s girlfriends do not appear
to judge and regulate each other’s femininities as per what she dubs the
‘girlfriend gaze’. And in a challenge to the atomised individual of neo-
liberalism, the collectivity offered in many women-centred series, includ-
ing in Australia, makes clear their indebtedness to feminist ways of
reframing intimacy. As Dow (2017) has argued, ‘Feminism is about
women together, not alone’. It is the representation of solidarity, ‘strong
female communities’, and a thematic emphasis on the importance of
women in each other’s lives, she suggests, that make series such as Sex
and the City and Girls so ‘compelling’ (see also Gerhard 2005; Lotz
2006). Although romance is a key generic element in the dramedy, the
76  Television dramedies
overarching narrative premise – consistent with the postfeminist kinship
semioscape – is that, despite the fluctuations of relationships and transi-
ence of partners lost through death, infidelity, or incompatibility, the
girls’ friendship is sustained.
Through the relationship between the four women, the series – as Off-
spring does through family – decentralises conjugal coupledom and the het-
eronormative imaginary (Roseneil & Budgeon 2004; Roseneil 2006;
Budgeon 2006, 2008). For example, key rituals and rites of passage fore-
ground their intimate bonds over others. Even when Bec gives birth at
home, there is no masculine presence (Doug and Matt are both fishing, a
recreational activity coded masculine); instead, only the ‘girls’ are there to
share in this gendered milestone. Their homosocial relationship is repeat-
edly seen as the one constant in their turbulent lives: ‘One thing will never
change, how grateful we are to have each other’ (Bec to the girls, 3: 26)
and ‘No matter what else changes, our friendships won’t’ (Frances to the
girls, 4: 12). Towards the end of Season Four Frances and Sophie fall out:
‘Sophie and I are over … nothing lasts forever’ (4: 23); consistent with the
figuration of women’s intimacy via tropes of romance – what Winch calls
‘womance’ (2013) – the language used approximates that of a breakup
(similar to Billie and Nina’s estrangement). Here, friendships are shown to
be – albeit temporarily – precarious, but they reunite a few episodes later
and reaffirm their deep commitment to one another (4: 25). In the series’
finale, when asked by a journalist to reflect upon her life prior to the
lottery win, Frances says: ‘I was not good at emotions, very focused on
work, anything to avoid human interaction’ (5: 13) – all traditionally mas-
culine stereotypes. She credits, not her child or husband, but reconnecting
with ‘the girls’ with ‘changing everything’. Although romantic and sexual
relationships may, as per Giddens (1991), be figured as contingent, these
friendships are attributed a form of consistency and certainty (Pahl 2000),
and the successful feminine self is seen as one who foregrounds these homo-
social intimacies.

Intimacy in the city and in the suburbs

The spaces in which this intimacy is maintained are also significant in fem-
inist terms, and suggest much about how Australian women’s subjectivities
have shifted in the wake of second wave feminism. In terms of domestic
spaces, half of the foursome (Bec and Jenny) remain, for the most part, in
suburban Renwood (though they are by no means relegated to such spaces –
they, too, move in and through the city like their urban counterparts). They
are, perhaps unsurprisingly, the two women who are the more conservative
of the group. Bec is engaged, later married (and subsequently widowed),
and lives in a suburban two-bedroom cottage, while Jenny lives at home
and is cared for by her parents (or more aptly, her mother) – even after the
lottery win. Though the relationship ultimately fails, she and her fiancé,
 Television dramedies  77
Cal, even purchase the house next door to her parents in Renwood. Con-
versely, Frances lives in a sparse, immaculate inner-city high-rise apartment;
and Sophie’s is a loft-style apartment also in the inner city (we frequently
see cityscapes immediately prior to any scenes in their homes, while in the
suburbs only the house is featured). Whether their domestic spaces are sub-
urban or inner city, these women are no longer confined to the gendered
space of the (suburban) home in the way their Australian mothers, or
perhaps grandmothers, may have been.
Many scholars have analysed the recurrent motif of women’s escape
from suburbia in Australian literature, however a ‘narrative of female flight
is a relatively recent phenomenon, influenced by the second wave feminism
of the 1970s and 1980s’ (Burns 2011; see also Henderson 1998). Following
Betty Friedan (1963) and Australia’s own Germaine Greer (1970), domes-
ticity and suburbia were coded as a form of imprisonment from which
women needed to escape in order to achieve self-fulfilment – a history of
which these characters seem aware. As Frances tells the girls, ‘Do you
know what I liked most about living in the suburbs? The leaving’ (5: 13).
Conversely for Jenny the suburban home (and the nuclear family residing
therein) represents a site of certainty and stability unavailable elsewhere,
hence she remains there until the penultimate series. Like Frances,
however, Sophie mobilises the escapist narrative familiar to invocations of
a city/suburb hierarchy, which identifies the latter with stasis and indeed
regression – especially for women: ‘I can’t move to Renwood, I won’t go
backwards … Just because the baby [Bec and Doug’s] is coming doesn’t
mean I’m ready for instant suburbia. I spent my entire childhood trying to
get out of Renwood. It’s like my life started when I left there’ (2: 02). The
televisual Australian postfeminist woman, in this series and in Offspring,
refuses to be domesticated.
For Sophie, who is also overtly anti-marriage, in a familiar feminist tra-
jectory ‘the outer-suburbs are residual spaces of patriarchal ideology’ (Hen-
derson 1998, p. 73), and a number of plotlines serve to complicate ideas
around ‘retreatism’; what Diane Negra (2009, p. 5) calls ‘one of postfemi-
nism’s master narratives’. A patent example of this anti-retreatist position is
depicted in Season Four, as Jenny’s sister Bridget begins to feel discontented
with her life in the suburbs. As she tells her boss, Frances, ‘Coming into
the city every day, seeing the cases you work on … I’m changing – before,
all I wanted was a family in the suburbs and now it’s like it’s not enough
… It’s like there’s a light that came on in me and I don’t want to turn it
off’ (4: 14). Bridget’s ‘light bulb’ moment, reminiscent of second wave
feminist consciousness-raising and its critique of the domestic sphere as the
source of women’s malaise and discontentment, occurred when she left the
suburban family home and entered the public sphere as a worker. As we
argue below, the stay-at-home mother embodied by Jenny’s mother, Trish, is
not seen as a viable, long-term subjectivity for any of the series’ younger
Australian protagonists.
78  Television dramedies
The pre-feminist Aussie family in a postfeminist context
Jenny’s suburban family features heavily and is central to her (re)tradi-
tional views; as in its sister series, Packed to the Rafters (by the same
creator and screened on the same network), it represents a very traditional
nuclear family, complete with stay at home mother (for the majority of the
series at least) who cares – materially and affectively – for her grown-up
children and their partners. Compared with the bohemian, inner city,
middle-class Proudmans, the suburban, white, working-class Grosses
appear to be from a pre-feminist time, with their nuclear family relatively
untouched by the feminist reconfiguration of gendered subjectivities. The
Grosses’ unrenovated weatherboard home offers a version of 1960s kitsch
(complete with a wooden spoon board in the shape of Australia on which
Trish’s collection of spoons hangs), and Jenny’s bedroom appears as it did
when she was a girl, suspended in time. In some respects, the suburb is
implicitly seen as responsible for Jenny’s arrested development, which can
be seen as a familiar feminist critique of it as stifling women and their
ambitions/emancipation.
While the relationship between the four women is at the core of the
series, this family seems to anchor it and they feature in every episode,
with much of the action (and intimacy) taking place in their suburban
family home. Comically rendered in many respects, like the Kerrigans of
the popular 1997 Australian film, The Castle, the Gross family – especially
the parents (who celebrate their 35th anniversary in Season One) – are
characterised by what Henderson (2013, p. 254) describes in another
context as an ‘unaffected Australian ordinariness’. With pronounced
­Australian accents, and later, in Season Three, disparagingly described by
one character, Coco, as ‘bogans’ – a classed term similar to the United
Kingdom’s ‘chav’ or the United States’ ‘red neck’22 – the Grosses are John
Howard’s ‘battlers’, a trope used to signal Australia’s working class and
their economic struggles. Jenny pays off their mortgage with her lottery
win, but their financial difficulties are still the source of narrative focus
(for instance, Mr Gross is made redundant by Frances’s management con-
sultancy, 2: 04).
The idealised depiction of Trish Gross is juxtaposed with a series of
neglectful or domineering mothers: Lily, Frances’s mother; Cory’s mother,
Hayley; and Bec’s mother, Carolyn. Rather than the disillusioned house-
wife struggling in isolation with a problem that has no name (Friedan
1963), and in stark contrast to Offspring’s matriarch, Geraldine, Trish
contentedly acts as care-giver, emotionally and in terms of domestic
labour (though her breast cancer diagnosis ultimately underscores, and
makes impossible, this extensive labour), finding echoes in The Australian
Women’s Weekly’s dreamscape of domestic plenitude discussed in the next
chapter. While this family, and especially the parents’ marriage, is perhaps
idealised, Season Three’s introduction of a daughter, Sam, of whom father
 Television dramedies  79
Brian was unaware, works to trouble the idyllic suburban life represented
earlier in the series. Ultimately, the Grosses represent a form of Australian
suburban family that in many ways is positioned as anachronistic, includ-
ing via the representation of Jenny’s myriad failed attempts to approxi-
mate it. Moreover, Jenny’s retraditionalised perspective is seen to contrast
markedly to that of the other women, and she embodies a nostalgically
informed world view which itself is problematised throughout the series.
Marriage is explicitly critiqued a number of times (through both explicit
disavowal by characters and marital discontentment, affairs, or divorce),
but it is through Jenny’s over-investment in it that marriage most clearly
comes under strain.

Jenny Gross and the critique of retraditionalisation

Perhaps quite unsubtly, the character who is seen to embody the most tra-
ditional view of (gendered) intimacy, and especially marriage, is Jenny
Gross, whose ‘retro’ views are written on her body; she is commonly
clothed in 1950s pin-up style (tight-fitting bodices with full skirts, bright
red hair also styled according to this aesthetic, and her horn-rimmed glasses
further invoke it). For Jenny, though her friendships and work as a teacher
are important to her, it is romantic love that offers the promise of belong-
ing and acceptance that eluded her in adolescence. Of all characters, in
either show, it is Jenny who most exemplifies the anxious postfeminist
subject described by McRobbie (2009) in her analysis of Fielding’s Bridget
Jones. Unlike the series’ other uncoupled women, Jenny is deeply dissatis-
fied with her singleness, and expresses a fear that, in terms of a romantic
relationship, she’ll be ‘the last one standing’ (2: 19); this is the fear that
McRobbie (2009) argues plagues postfeminist young women, and her series
of failed relationships, including engagements, are perhaps indicative of the
contingency mapped by sociologists like Beck and Giddens. The (postfemi-
nist) fear that that she will end up man-less is made explicit: ‘Who else is
going to love me like that?’ (3: 12), Jenny asks. Jenny and Callum, who had
earlier broken up after she cheated on him, become (re)engaged (2: 22),
simply because she is so affectively invested in the ‘marital economy’
(Geller 2001) and can imagine no other viable mode of being.
Juxtaposed with her more cynical – or perhaps just more realistic – girl-
friends, especially Sophie and Frances (though the latter eventually chooses
to marry), Jenny is the series’ resident defender of romantic mythologies,
and consistently invokes the trope of ‘the One’ or the soulmate, and
repeatedly consults fortune teller ‘Mystic Marg’ about the fatedness of her
romances. As she tells Frances, ‘The One is out there somewhere’ (3: 22).
Jenny’s singleness is not pathologised, as is common in postfeminist media
texts (Leonard 2010; Taylor 2012; Lahad 2017); instead, it is her invest-
ment, and seemingly unrelenting faith, in the heterosexual imaginary that
is seen as excessive. As Arthurs (2003, p. 85) remarks of Sex and the City’s
80  Television dramedies
Charlotte York, and as we can see in both the Australian chick lit narrat-
ives and women’s magazines examined here, ‘The traditional romance nar-
rative is still there but as a residual sensibility, a slightly old-fashioned
version of femininity that doesn’t work in practice’.
For Jenny, romance and its ultimate public affirmation – the wedding –
represents a form of salvation, certainly not a unique trope in postfeminist
popular culture, a way in which she can finally experience a sense of
acceptance and belonging (which she does not feel despite her upbringing in
a supportive nuclear family). She believes in the ‘utopian promise of love,
joy, happiness, well-being, belonging, and community’ (Ingraham 1999,
p. 132) that is integral to the heterosexual imaginary. The series under-
scores the limitations of so heavily investing in bridal fantasies, and offers
a number of moments where there is a disconnect between this mythology
and how intimacies are practically staged and maintained. Jenny’s deep
affective investment in this fantasy is so intense that she almost goes
through with her wedding to Cal, despite feeling that something is amiss
(especially after he gambles their wedding funds). As she later confesses,
she wanted the bridal identity so much that she almost ‘let the wedding
bells drown out the alarms’ (3: 13).23
While materially unnecessary for her, she continues to invest in mar-
riage as a symbolic anchor (McRobbie 2009). Such ‘neo-traditionalism’
has been seen as integral to postfeminist femininity, especially on the small
screen (Hamad 2018, p. 4), but in Winners and Losers it is not uncritically
celebrated. That is, while postfeminism is said to enable women to
embrace traditional aspects of heterosexuality, such as romance and white
weddings (McRobbie 2009; Negra 2009), the series renders Jenny’s view
anachronistic and naïve, with the overt ambivalence of Sophie and Frances
towards marriage, and marital discontentment experienced by other char-
acters, also functioning to call into question this nostalgic world view.24 In
the final series, after her wedding to Gabe, Jenny struggles as marriage
does not provide the succour she had long imagined, and she wrestles espe-
cially with her husband’s career success which far outstrips her own.25
Instead, perhaps in a feminisation of the mateship so central to Australian
national mythologies, throughout the series it is the women’s friendships
that offer the affective scaffolding vital to negotiating the tensions of post-
feminist subjecthood.

Conclusion
While Winners and Losers appears, in some respects, to trouble the hier-
archy of intimacy that privileges sexual and familial ties over other forms
of connection, Offspring relocates family to the heart of sociality even if
the way in which family is ‘done’, as well as what actually constitutes
family, may have altered. The labour involved in maintaining a stable unit
remains, however, deeply gendered, but we have argued that the series
 Television dramedies  81
c­ ritiques such positioning. The semioscape of postfeminist kinship we see
in these programmes aligns with the following comment about intimacy in
the twenty-first century: ‘it makes little sense to claim that people now-
adays have abandoned traditional “families of fate” for “families of choice”
based on friends, since the truth, perhaps unsurprisingly, is more complex’
(Spencer & Pahl 2006, p. 154). As we have argued, both series reveal what
Chambers has termed ‘hybridised familialism’ (2012), offering affective
bonds and networks of sociability that are still very much reliant upon dis-
courses of family (albeit widely conceived) to give them meaning. As their
narrative arcs, various plots, and characters suggest, despite the DIY ethos
co-constitutive of postfeminism and neoliberalism, contemporary Austral-
ian women can’t do it themselves, and without state support (especially in
terms of child-rearing), ‘family’ in the widest sense of the term has become
more not less crucial to women’s being in the world. As with Australian
chick lit, women’s magazines, and self-help manuals, these series, though
perhaps gently and often with humour, point to some of the unfinished
business of second wave feminism, including the gendering of care, rather
than revelling in its ‘pastness’ (Tasker & Negra 2007). They also under-
score how naturalised the Australian women’s movement’s critique of
marriage and nuclear families, and – in the discourse of egalitarianism –
women’s right to a ‘fair go’, in the workplace and in the home, has become
(although our final chapter, as well as the class privilege of the characters
in our dramedies, complicate this somewhat).
Our analysis has shown, like Jorie Lagerwey et al. (2016) in their recent
study of American and British television series such as Homeland and The
Fall, that ‘some established protocols of postfeminist representation are
subsiding’. As they continue, rather than reinscribing familiar retreatist
tropes,

New female-centered TV may be just as obsessed with ‘work-life

balance’ as earlier series, but it tends to inflect this dynamic in new
and noteworthy ways. Female characters’ home lives in the newer
series are constantly being drawn into their work lives and vice versa.

This dynamic can be seen to mark Offspring in particular, though the hos-
pital in Winners and Losers (where Sophie, Sam, Carla and Doug work) as
well as Frances’s law firm are also indicative of the collapse of public/
private boundaries and the material refiguration of the very ‘architectures
of intimacy’ (Filmer 2018).
We have also argued that while coupledom is certainly narratively
important and drives a number of plots, in the semioscape of postfeminist
kinship, relationships between women (i.e. sisterhood, whether literal or
symbolic) are (re)valued and prioritised over romantic intimacies, suggest-
ing interpretive frameworks for women’s rich affective lives that trouble
the valorisation of couple culture. As in Australian chick lit novels, this
82  Television dramedies
represents a significant contrast to American quintessentially postfeminist
dramedies, such as Ally McBeal, in which all forms of relationality come
to be subsumed by the romance narrative and its attendant mononorma-
tivity. While ‘patriarchal pessimists’ lament the supposed loss of a lack of
stability and diversified forms of community, we agree with much feminist
work which suggests that a focus on forms of intimacy beyond ‘conjugal
couples and families’, and especially on friendships, will help to further
destabilise the heterosexual imaginary (Roseneil 2006, p. 338). That said,
although LGBT characters do feature in each series, and as in our other
genres, it is heterosexuality that continues to be normalised.
As we have argued, Offspring and Winners and Losers, through depict-
ing many different forms of intimacy, as well as critiquing re-traditionalised
perspectives, reflect upon a political and representational environment
clearly informed by feminism. Therefore, rather than performing femi-
nism’s disavowal, as is commonly argued of twenty-first-century televisual
texts, especially those dubbed ‘postfeminist’, both these series persistently
‘bring up [questions] about how to function in a world that has only par-
tially achieved feminist goals’ (Hunting 2012, p. 195). In this sense, they
productively intervene in ongoing debates around gender, feminism, and
intimacy in twenty-first-century Australia. In the next chapter, focusing on
Australian women’s magazines, we also find that, although largely
addressed to white, heterosexual, middle-class women, a form of popular
feminism is operative, and works to shape the ‘dreamscapes’ of these texts
in important ways.

Notes
  1 More recently, feminist television scholars have expended much energy on how
postfeminism has been updated for millennial subjects, especially via Lena
Dunham’s Girls, populated by heroines simultaneously characterised by a sense
of entitlement and precarity (Nash & Whelehan 2017).
  2 As Sue Turnbull argues, apart from policy- and industry-focused studies, ‘the
number of academic books published on Australian television in general, and
specific shows or genres in particular, is minimal’ (2010, p. 116). Remarkably,
there have been no monographs on Australian televisual femininities (or indeed
masculinities), and certainly none on the relationship between feminism, or
even women, and television.
 3 For an analysis of how Keddie as celebrity was persistently conflated with
Nina, and how this impacted magazine coverage of its star, see Middlemost
(forthcoming).
  4 As the Channel Ten website notes in a section devoted to the series’ interiors:
Geraldine’s house is the heart of the show; it’s the family home, where the
Proudmans grew up. The Offspring team has used this location for seven
seasons; the richly layered and textured home is the perfect backdrop for
the Proudman family.
(‘Offspring’s Interiors: Geraldine’s House’, 13 July 2017, viewed
30 April 2019, https://tenplay.com.au/channel-ten/offspring/
offspring-interiors/offspring-interiors-geraldines-house):
 Television dramedies  83
  5 Seasons and episodes in these two series are represented in this form: Season
no.: Episode no. (1: 01).
  6 Billie is Nina’s elder, less professionally successful, sister; she struggles in her
career and in her relationships. As she notes: ‘Growing up I had this younger
sister who was exceptional, at everything, anything I did, Nina could do better’
(Billie to Jimmy, 3: 02). She herself says to Nina, ‘being around you always
makes me feel like a failure’ (4: 12). Nevertheless, they remain deeply involved
in each other’s lives.
 7 Nina learns she is the product of an extra-marital affair; Darcy fathers a
child to her workmate, Cherie; Zara, one of the other nurses she works with,
becomes unexpectedly pregnant (twice) to Nina’s brother, Jimmy; a half-
brother, Will, emerges in Season Six; Billie becomes a kind of surrogate
mother for Brodie, who herself later has a child, for which Billie helps care;
Martin Clegg is the sperm donor for Kim and her partner Renee, a role
which Will comes to take on in Season Seven, for she and Jess; and several
children are born, all delivered by Nina, throughout the seven seasons (Ray,
Cherie and Darcy’s; Stella, Kim and Clegg’s child; Alfie and Paddy, Zara and
Jimmy’s).
 8 Extratextually, this aspect of the dramedy was also the subject of meta-­
commentary, as Eddie Perfect (who plays Mick, Billie’s husband), noted in an
article he wrote for the Guardian (2014): ‘Offspring really pushed the idea
that we create our own families, that we’re accountable in shaping our own
communities.’
 9 Although the Proudmans are certainly not idealised, other families that are
represented are much more troublesome and found comparatively wanting
(Mick’s mum is spiteful and non-supportive; Cherie’s father is a homophobic
religious zealot; Patrick’s father is detached, dismissive, and patronising; Harry’s
father is domineering, moody, and bullying). The representation of all of these
inadequate families serves to underscore the desirability of the Proudman family
connection, dysfunctional though it may often seem.
10 The interwoven nature of work and intimacy (especially familial forms) is also
underscored through Billie’s job; for the first few seasons, she is a real estate
agent at her father’s agency.
11 For example, Season Three maps many awkward post-break-up moments at
the hospital between Nina and Patrick (3: 07), prompting Patrick to move to
the Ainsworth.
12 As ‘a technology of propinquity’, the mobile phone – enacting ‘new erosions
between public and private, work and leisure’ – ensures that intimacy ‘is no
longer a “private” activity but a pivotal component of public sphere performa-
tivity’ (Hjorth & Lim 2012, p. 477).
13 There are other points in the series where the gendering of emotions as fem-
inine is invoked. As Nina tells their couples’ counsellor, reinscribing a tradi-
tional gendered dynamic: ‘I have to talk, he has to shutdown’ (4. 10), and until
his death Patrick is coded as moody and brooding, like a Byronic hero.
14 Significantly, it is the men, not the women, who broach the subject of marriage
and the women who do not feel the need to have state validation of their
romantic relationships. For example, Zara rejects Jimmy’s proposal, though
they eventually do get married – in the hospital – as Zara gives birth to their
second son, Paddy (5: 05). That said, they later separate after unsuccessfully
attempting to negotiate a polyamorous relationship.
15 However, Billie does adopt maternal roles, including helping runaway teen
single mother Brodie with her son and functioning as a substitute mother for
Brodie herself, again detaching maternal care from the biological.
84  Television dramedies
16 Similarly, in Winners and Losers, Season Four, the resolutely child-free Frances
is unexpectedly pregnant but decides to keep the baby. Once George is born,
Frances finds herself bored at home and she returns very shortly after the birth,
a choice that it is entirely normalised (and which, indicative of her class privi-
lege, is also dependent upon her ability to hire a full-time nanny). As she
remarks when she returns to work, ‘Mama’s home … it’s so good to be more
than just a feeder … I may never leave this place [her office] again’ (4: 16) and
after her nanny resigns, ‘If I don’t find someone, I’ll have to stay at home, and I
can’t do that’ (4: 17). Like Nina, Frances, of course, is the most permissible
kind of single mother imaginable.
17 It should also be noted, though, that this scenario would have been un-­
representable if not for the presence of her uber supportive partner, Harry (not
insignificantly a professional ‘crisis manager’), who clearly embodies a type of
recoded Australian masculinity (also evidenced by Jimmy): ‘You know, just
because you’re doing one doesn’t mean you can’t do the other … We’d be
doing it together’ (7: 06).
18 Klocker’s 2014 study of ‘inter-ethnic intimacy’ on Australian television offered
‘strong evidence that Australian media representations do not yet reflect the
changing ethnic composition of Australian households and families’ (p. 48).
Her concluding comments are relevant to the series we analyse:
Australian television screens are, for all intents and purposes, still plagued
by whiteness – but not because of a lack of ethnically diverse bodies on-
screen. Rather, their whiteness rests upon the ongoing centring of white
characters and storylines, and the discounting of other possibilities – even
amongst visible inter-ethnic pairs.
(2014, p. 49)
19 Winners and Losers engages with a range of social, political, and health issues
such as mental illness, miscarriage, domestic violence, stalking, alcoholism and
drug addiction, infidelity and divorce, bullying, euthanasia and suicide, abor-
tion, trolling, homophobic violence, gambling addiction, revenge porn, and
grief (though, despite one of the core characters being Asian-Australian, there
is no engagement with racism). Violence against women is a recurrent thematic
preoccupation, perhaps indicative of the raised awareness of it through
­Australia’s White Ribbon initiative (JB and Shannon are both stalkers, of Sophie
and Frances respectively; Sam has broken off her engagement to Brett after he hit
her; Sophie is stabbed while in Kenya; and Tiffany is also a victim of domestic
violence).
20 Indicative of her explicit critique of marriage and its privileging throughout,
Frances notes of those attending the reunion: ‘It doesn’t matter how many
letters I have after my name, it’s the Mrs in front of it that counts’ (1: 01).
21 Despite their lottery win, there seems to be no question of them exiting the
labour market – except for Jenny who leaves her call centre position to con-
template wants she wants to do with her life. Employment is figured as an
integral part of women’s identities, arguably marking its indebtedness to
second wave feminism. Frances sells half the management consultancy to
partner Zac, after feeling disillusioned with the politics and ethics of advising
companies to ‘downsize’. She discovers her life’s purpose after representing
Jonathan (Frances’s assistant) and Will (Jenny’s first boyfriend who eventually
comes out) after an incident of homophobic violence, and becomes a criminal
lawyer. Of practising law, ‘fighting for people, helping make a difference,
nothing like it’ (Frances, 5: 06), taking on many pro-bono cases that ‘help the
underdog’ (5: 07). Sophie returns to her medical training, while Jenny returns
to university to retrain as a primary school teacher as a direct response to the
 Television dramedies  85
bullying she received (and indeed she returns to Renwood High for her teacher
training and deals with a case of bullying reminiscent of her own, 2: 13). Perhaps
with the exception of small business owner/beautician Bec, also the only one who
did not pursue higher education, each sees their (middle-class) career – as doctor,
lawyer, teacher – as integral to a meaningful life.
22 See Rossiter (2013) for an analysis of the cultural specificities and the affective
differences of the ‘bogan’ from these other forms.
23 She even has a wedding book, kept since childhood, in which she has placed
images and texts relating to her fantasy wedding day.
24 It is also significant that it is Jenny, who – after the failure of one of her
engagements – becomes a victim of revenge porn, prompting the series’ engage-
ment with debates around sexualisation: ‘I thought I was being sexy and
empowered. Turns out I’m just another slut on the internet’ (3: 20). As punish-
ment for this transgression, she loses her teaching job after the pictures come to
circulate amongst students, suggesting that neither the 1950s housewife nor the
postfeminist sexualised subject work for Jenny.
25 Nevertheless, after a brief separation, in the final episode we see a future vision
(in the form of a photograph) of Jenny and Gabe, blissful in San Francisco with
twin daughters. Frances appears with her husband and daughter, in judges’ robes
in front of a court, and Sophie appears by herself at her medical clinic in Kenya.

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­Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke.
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3 Women’s magazines
Dreamscapes of postfeminist
abundance

For some of the major feminist theorists of postfeminism, such as Angela

McRobbie (1999, 2009), Imelda Whelehan (2000), Rosalind Gill (2009),
and Diane Negra (2009), women’s magazines have a similar status to
chick lit, being exemplars of postfeminist culture, purveyors of the typical
elements such as luxury consumerism, sexualisation as empowerment, and
an ambivalence towards feminism. Anna Gough-Yates explains that the
new glossies of the 1980s and 1990s such as Marie-Claire and Elle address
the actual postfeminist woman who, as we saw in the case of chick lit, is
the contemporary version of the early twentieth-century’s New Woman:
‘mainly white, young and middle-class – [for whom] opportunities did
arise for an improved quality of life … Pitching themselves to a “New
Woman” who could please herself, be self-sufficient and autonomous’, she
contends, ‘the glossies were constituent in the fabrication of a “post-femi-
nist” emancipation’ (Gough-Yates 2003, p. 38). Despite a continuing
decline in readership for Australian women’s magazines (Bonner 2014b,
p. 499), and the recent closures of iconic titles Dolly (2014 – now only an
online version), Cleo (March 2016), and Cosmopolitan (December 2018),
the critical importance of the form to making postfeminist culture necessi-
tates that we examine them.1 In addition, magazines have an ability to
address diverse age groups of women, and to articulate specifically
­Australian femininities. Their replacement – websites and social media (at
least for younger women) – is the subject of the following chapter.
Regardless of the form’s importance to postfeminist culture, the rela-
tionship between Australian women’s magazines and postfeminism has
received little critical attention.2 This chapter addresses this lack and
argues that the prevalent semioscape of Australian women’s magazines –
specifically, women’s generalist lifestyle magazines – is one of material and
emotional abundance, taking specific shape as dreamscapes. And although
Australian women’s magazines contain some of the common narratives
and tropes that trouble influential theorists of postfeminism, such as
celebrification, sexualisation, and an obsession with physical beauty, we
contend that the form is not fatally compromised. While we would not
argue that these are vanguard feminist texts, the Australian magazines’ use
 Women’s magazines  91
of typical postfeminist tropes does not coalesce into a reactionary politics;
instead, they voice a popular feminism that is testimony to second wave
feminism’s success. The publications’ sense of plenty parallels a generosity
regarding contemporary women’s lives: work is taken for granted, not
having children is uncontroversial, the domestic is not a space of conser-
vative retreatism, and a strong presence of a feminist voice and issues in
these publications is cause for optimism. Moreover, their fantasy scenarios
of pleasurable abundance should be taken seriously as signs of historical
progress for women, as well as a restaging of, and offering potential solu-
tions to, pressures and contradictions facing contemporary, albeit prim-
arily white, Australian women.
Before detailing our three specific dreamscapes, we briefly discuss some
of the key critiques of postfeminist women’s magazines, outline our meth-
odology, and elaborate on the key element of the semioscape – the dream-
scape. We then discuss the dreamscape of young women’s endless, but
circumscribed hedonism characterising Cosmopolitan and Cleo, the ethical
luxury cosmopolitanism of Marie Claire’s dreamscape, and the domestic
plenitude constructed by The Australian Women’s Weekly (hereafter referred
to as The Weekly).
As suggested in our brief opening summary, accounts of postfeminism
and women’s magazines are generally either critical or see the form as a
mediation of broader structural shifts in the economy, politics, culture, or
the social (Winship 1991). The recurrent theme is that the seemingly
emancipated pleasures and freedoms on offer are actually quite limited,
being: highly commercial – woman as willing and compulsory consumer;
heterosexual – woman as free to fuck … men; racially exclusive – for white
women only; or individualistic – it’s all about you. Women’s magazines
therefore negotiate and transform feminist ideas and sensibilities to express
or address underlying pressures – whether those of women’s changing
social roles, or of the magazine industry itself. For instance, Gill argues
that the sex advice given by the UK magazine Glamour ‘is an attempt to
make an articulation … or a suture … between feminist and anti-feminist
ideas, in a manner that is distinctly postfeminist’ (2009, p. 362). She refers
here to feminist-sounding ideas such as ‘choice’ and ‘empowerment’ being
used to privilege men’s sexual needs over women’s, leading her to conclude
that ‘It is as if what were formerly presented as men’s desires have been
internalised and must now be understood as authentically women’s own’
(Gill 2009, p. 363). We, too, observe this technique, but show there is
more than just this colonisation of women’s desires occurring.
The increasingly explicit sexuality found in women’s magazines is a
major factor in critical accounts, being seen as indicative of postfeminism’s
reliance on codes and practices of hyper-heterosexuality (Whelehan 2000),
or in discussions of ‘new sexualities’ which refers to the contemporary
representation of ‘girls as crudely lustful young women’ (McRobbie 1999,
p. 50). In marked contrast to her pioneering work on young women’s
92  Women’s magazines
magazines (1991), McRobbie is critical of attempts to see the highly sexual-
ised and commercialised elements of postfeminist women’s and girls’ maga-
zines as feminist (2009, p. 5). ‘There can be no comfortable reconciliation’,
she concludes, ‘between feminism as a political discourse and the cultures
of commercial femininity which define the terrain of the magazine form’
(1999, p. 60). Thus, after nearly five decades of feminist analysis and two
decades of postfeminist culture, women’s magazines continue to be, for
many feminist critics, highly problematic. We contend, however, that there
is more of a ‘comfortable reconciliation’ between feminism and magazine
femininities in an Australian context than the above comments suggest.
Although the women’s magazine market is increasingly fragmented into
niche publications (Bonner 2014a, p. 205), we perform a textual analysis
of the category of women’s generalist, lifestyle magazines published in
Australia to examine a broad set of narratives and images of Australian
women from various age groups. As Frances Bonner (2014a, p. 202)
observes, ‘at each stage in the progress from a child to a mature woman an
appropriate title is available to give advice, principally on matters of con-
sumption’.3 Using this category enables comparisons to be made across a
number of titles and with the dominant accounts of postfeminism that
discuss this sub-genre. Our focus also redresses a lack of analysis of older
women in postfeminist culture, even as their presence increases (Jermyn
2016). Although many contemporary Australian titles are franchises of
global editions (Vogue Australia, Harper’s Bazaar, amongst others), they
do contain significant local inflections. In addition, Australia has its own
homegrown, popular, and long-running women’s magazines: most notably
The Weekly and, until recently, Cleo, publications that can be seen to
contain a specifically Australian voice or character (Sheridan et al. 2002,
p. 4; see also Le Masurier 2007).4
To cover a range of implied mainstream readerships across the putative
life cycle of Australian women, and to enable a historical survey, we have
chosen four Australian monthly titles published from January 1996 to
December 2016. We selected Cleo and Cosmopolitan because they are
magazines targeted at the typical postfeminist subjects – ‘conventional’
young women (from 18 to early 30s) – as well as to determine whether
Cleo’s Australian origins produce any differences.5 We chose our next
magazine, Marie Claire, because it is addressed to women aged 25 to 39,
takes an explicitly feminist stance, and is a ‘glocalised’ rendering of a
popular international brand. Finally, we included The Weekly for its more
domestically oriented and older readership (25 to 54 years claims the
industry body, Magazine Networks, however, the age brackets cited for all
our titles are far more elastic). The Weekly also features because of its
iconic status in the field of Australian women’s magazines and because,
unlike its obvious competitors, New Idea and Woman’s Day, it rejects
becoming a celebrity gossip magazine (Bonner 2014b, p. 500).6 We exam-
ined a random sample of six issues of each title per year to track changes
 Women’s magazines  93
within each title and the field more broadly. Because of their reliance on
seasonal fashion collections and the rituals of summer holidays, women’s
magazines are similarly organised along seasonal lines and routinised,
hence our choice of a randomised sample of months to gain a broader
sense of what is being covered by the magazines outside of these periods.
Our analysis accepts the commercial element of magazines as a determi-
nant frame that all messages, tropes, and registers must be read within;
that is, the commercial element is the limit of the magazine’s world. Its
role is to sell commodities by offering pleasure; anything that exceeds this
is a bonus, a condition that may be neglected in some accounts of women’s
magazines and which contributes to an enduring critical pessimism.
Despite this resolutely commercial purpose, and as our analysis shows, we
see the genre as holding potential for a popular feminism – a quality iden-
tified by Megan Le Masurier (2007, 2009); indeed, that feminist discourse
can find space in such a semioscape is cause for hope. We note that maga-
zines contain a range of modes of readerly address and, like any text,
contain the potential for multiple readings. For Joke Hermes, ‘The attrac-
tion of the genre … lies in its addressing of any of a wide range of
“selves” ’ (1995, p. 65), with individual readers bringing multiple interpre-
tive repertoires to their reading practice (1995, p. 146). In addition, Myra
Macdonald (and our own work) observes a contradictory set of messages
on offer in women’s magazines (1995), thus negating the possibility of one
ideal reading. Most importantly, we want to be guided by Hermes’s con-
tention that women’s magazines and their readers deserve respect from
feminist scholars: ‘everyday media use is a highly complex phenomenon,
made up of routines and constraints, of wishes and fantasies’ (1995,
p. 152). The same goes for the production and the producers of these
magazines, we would add.

Semioscape as dreamscape
We argue that the textual form of women’s magazines, what we term a
‘dreamscape’, is central to its semioscape of abundance. Indeed, a con-
sideration of the specific form of magazine textuality seems missing or
downplayed in scholarly accounts of women’s magazines, and hence is
another factor that produces critical pessimism. We use dreamscape in
both a Freudian and more informal sense. Women’s magazines are prim-
arily spaces of feminine pleasure, as suggested by readers’ comments that
magazine reading is a reward or guilty pleasure (Ytre-Arne 2011, p. 219).
These pleasures are manifested in a discrete textual tableaux constructed
by its three elements of text, visuals, and advertising, where fantasies (and
accordingly anxieties) are freely played out, and where the anxieties of the
external or real world are disguised or veiled. As Janice Winship (1991,
p. 148) notes, drawing on Dick Hebdige’s work, ‘As a mix of the prosaic
and the utopian and as small treats women buy themselves, are they not a
94  Women’s magazines
screen on to which so much inchoate yearning and desire are projected?’ In
this sense, magazines are the assumed dreams of women readers and, as
Sigmund Freud noted of dreams (1999, p. 97), are a space of wish fulfil-
ment. We say assumed because, regardless of the increasing sophistication
and impact of audience lifestyle research techniques used by women’s
magazines from the 1980s onwards, the fact that certain titles fail to
attract readership and close down (Grazie, Cleo, HQ, amongst others)
suggests that the psychographics now used are not failsafe.7 Our reading of
magazines as dreamscapes extends and complicates Roland Barthes’
(1985) reading of the fashion system constructed in magazines, in which
objects are translated into the language of magazines. Our titles are textual
wish fulfilment, articulating dreams via the language of the glossies. As
dreams, these are open to interpretation.
As a dreamscape the magazine is also an assemblage: a particular and
characteristic way of arranging contents and reading practices. The dream-
scape adequately captures the peculiar logic or grammar of women’s maga-
zines, and goes some way to explaining their contradictory, indeed,
schizoid nature that cannot be explained only by the attempt to address
multiple readerships (Moeran 2006, pp. 727–728): how an intelligent
article on domestic violence, for instance, is placed on the opposite page to
an advertisement for perfume in which the woman’s face appears badly
bruised (‘Women of the World Fight Back!’ and an advertisement for Gucci
eau de parfum, in Marie Claire December 2012, pp. 66–67). The magazine
as dreamscape uses the same processes Freud identified in the dream-work:
condensation, displacement, considerations of representability – the trans-
formation of thoughts into images, and secondary revision (Laplanche &
Pontalis 1973, p. 125). The dreamscape enables the magazine to maintain
coherence in the face of juxtaposition, excess, or dissonance – indeed, it
uses these elements to express and/or enable the assumed latent wish(es) of
readers (and producers and advertisers).
A particular reading practice is elicited and privileged by this dream-
scape form: women’s magazines attempt to construct a reader who sus-
pends disbelief so that the sometimes excessive or incongruous images and
articles can be processed – its codes of largely visual excess announce to
the reader a particular textual space. Similarly, Brian Moeran (2017, p. 3)
argues that fashion magazines attempt to enchant the reader into desiring
the commodities on display. Likewise, the dreamscape solicits a reader
who can easily move in and out of this space – as enacted in the practice of
flicking through magazines or reading one article while waiting in the doc-
tor’s surgery (what Winship [1991, p. 142] refers to as the ‘dip in and dip
out’ style of magazine consumption). And, like our dreams when we sleep,
how much of a magazine is ever remembered, at least consciously? Rather,
as Brita Ytre-Arne notes, reading the magazine can be a brief break from
everyday responsibilities (2011, p. 219) – a type of daydream. Moreover,
Freud’s distinction between the manifest and latent content of dreams also
 Women’s magazines  95
suggests the possibility of a critical interpretive practice – one that we
adopt.
We argue that the material and emotional abundance that characterises
every title’s dreamscape is a class and racial fantasy. As we show, each
dreamscape is a condensation and displacement of the pressures primarily
confronting contemporary white Australian women, for, as we discuss
below, the world of these magazines is unrelentingly, unself-consciously,
and hence invisibly, white (Moreton-Robinson 2000). The multitude of
things on offer and the aspirations they represent articulate changes in
women’s lives – the ability to work and be educated, to choose not to
marry and not to be a mother – but also the uneven benefits of second
wave feminism and of the deregulated Australian economy (see Yeatman
1990; Lake 1999; Pusey 2003), providing a fantasy of women’s equal
access to national wealth. As we saw in Australian chick lit, this abun-
dance of things and beauty is the appealing window dressing for that same
system, and simultaneously figures the terms for women’s participation in
the public and private spheres. The whiteness of the dreamscape promises
a consumption-based social integration in an increasingly multicultural
Australia for non-Anglo-European women, while the almost complete
absence of Indigenous women is an unconscious articulation of their con-
tinuing material and symbolic dispossession.8 Thus, and as we saw in chick
lit, postfeminist culture materialises the myth of white Australian egalit-
arianism into an abundance of things for women. We first examine two
archetypal postfeminist magazines, Cleo and Cosmopolitan, to see how
this abundance is figured for mainstream young women, the paradigmatic
postfeminist subjects in many accounts.

Cleo and Cosmopolitan: endless possibilities,

endless pleasure
Of the four titles analysed here, Cleo and Cosmopolitan display some of
the most notable changes across 20 years, suggesting the competitive pres-
sures they face from online platforms and celebrity magazines, as well as
the crucial significance, economically and ideologically, of young women
to postfeminist culture.9 Being the direct inheritors and beneficiaries of the
second wave legacy, young women are often positioned as the ideal sub-
jects of postfeminist culture, as in Sarah Projansky’s analysis of the girl in
popular culture (2014), or as the source of the characteristically postfemi-
nist denunciation of feminism, as in McRobbie’s later work (2009, p. 16).
We argue that the hedonistic dreamscape characterising Cleo and Cosmo-
politan continues the limited range of freedoms and pleasures traditionally
addressed to young women in these types of publication – namely, shop-
ping, beauty, and heterosexual desire. The quality of abundance, however,
suggests a greater degree of freedom – most notably, economic and sexual
– for young women. Moreover, these typical postfeminist texts are at ease
96  Women’s magazines
with feminism, indeed proclaim it, and so popular feminism finds space
amidst the tableaux of pleasures.
As Le Masurier has comprehensively demonstrated (2007, 2009, 2011),
Cleo occupies an important place in Australian popular culture and Aus-
tralian feminism, especially given its role in translating women’s and
sexual liberation for a wide audience. It commenced publication in 1972
under the editorship of Ita Buttrose, at the start of the Whitlam govern-
ment’s brief era of social liberalisation, and at the height of the women’s
movement and Australian cultural nationalism.10 Cleo aimed to compete
against the US women’s magazine, Cosmopolitan, a title targeting young
liberated women, to attempt to be the voice of the new young Australian
woman, a woman imagined as sexually as well as politically liberated – or
at least potentially so (Le Masurier 2007, p. 191). As part of bringing such
a woman into being, Cleo was an important source of enlightened informa-
tion about sexuality and other feminist issues such as rape, birth control,
and workplace discrimination. Le Masurier (2011, p. 216) observes that
from its beginnings Cleo was a major example of Australian popular fem-
inism, and indeed, its final editorial in March 2016 proclaimed that
‘Over her forty-four years of publication, Cleo continued to champion
the huge ideals of feminism and equality right up to this, her very last
issue’ (p. 9).
Cosmopolitan, while originating earlier (1965) and in the United States
(before becoming a global franchise), shares with Cleo a similar historical
moment of emergence and intention. With Helen Gurley Brown (author of
the 1962 feminist blockbuster Sex and the Single Girl) at its helm, herself
situated as the ultimate, empowered ‘cosmo girl’, Cosmopolitan wanted to
be the voice of the newly liberated young woman and, in doing so, exem-
plify a new, and hence non-domestic, type of women’s magazine to that
exemplified by The Weekly. Cosmopolitan represented a, then novel, life-
style for young women, one that was sophisticated, independent, and with
(hetero)sexuality at its core, thereby making it another important form of
popular feminism (Scanlon 2009; Hunt 2012; Taylor 2016).
At the start of our survey period (1996) there do seem to be minor
differences between the two titles. Cosmopolitan appears to be less brash
in tone than Cleo, more sophisticated in the femininities on offer as evid-
enced by the tailored fashions in stories and advertising, and the lengthier
feature articles, thus perhaps addressing a slightly older readership, and
not as closely attuned to local femininities as its Australian competitor. In
contrast, Cleo, via its Australian ‘cheekiness’, offers a very mild form of
female larrikinism (see Bellanta 2012). By the late 1990s, however, Cleo
and Cosmopolitan are nearly indistinguishable – whether in terms of
content, layout, advertising, or editorial approach – suggesting a consoli-
dation of the ideal of young Western womanhood and the importance of
her associated readerships to advertisers. Thus, in the remainder of this
section we will refer to them as Cosmo-Cleo, our now conjoined twin
 Women’s magazines  97
sisters for conventional young Australian women: the hybridised name
reflecting the increasingly global lifestyle represented in their pages, though
with a local inflection in the vernacular, photographic settings, and social
rituals of femininity they emphasise.
The dreamscape offered by Cosmo-Cleo is consistent across the two
decades, being one of abundant pleasures and endless possibilities for
young women – attesting to sociocultural change. Young women do have
more options, but are also subject to a certain conservatism regarding the
parameters of postfeminist femininities. When one ‘reads’ Cosmo-Cleo,
one enters a world defined by glamorous socialising, boyfriends, celeb-
rities, shopping, clothes, make-up, and, not surprisingly, obsessive atten-
tion to personal grooming. Issue after issue, whether in the regular
columns, feature articles or the staging of fashion shoots, not only repeti-
tively returns to these thematics but intermingles them. The table of con-
tents for Cleo November 2004 exemplifies and helps clarify these
magazines’ contents: five of the 13 cover stories provide sex or relationship
advice; a minimum of three articles address personal grooming; at least
eight articles are fashion advice.
Moreover, the thematic parameters of Cosmo-Cleo frequently merge,
exemplified in this 2004 issue: fashion meshes with boyfriend advice in
‘Swimwear so hot you’ll melt his drumstick’ (p. 10); fashion merges with
celebrity: ‘Like this? You’ll love these: The Young Starlet [Look]’ (p. 10);
and shopping blends with personal grooming: ‘Babe on a budget’ (p. 10).
Such a technique creates an integrated world, where the elements of the
Cosmo-Cleo lifestyle are interchangeable, overlap, and hence are difficult
to differentiate. Thus, the core elements of consumption, sex, and eventu-
ally celebrity bleed into every element of the magazine and the Cosmo-
Cleo life, as our excerpt from Cleo’s November 2004 Table of Contents
illustrates (see Table 3.1 over page).
To really understand the dreamscape, however, we also require a sense
of the visual contents. Unfortunately, we were unable to obtain permission
to reproduce the page layouts in any of our titles, so verbal description will
have to suffice. In each title we discuss (with the sole exception of The
Weekly) the elements of the dream are transformed into images rather
than into spoken or written speech (Freud 1999, pp. 254, 258). Such a
technique is a major contributor to women’s magazines’, and particularly
Cosmo-Cleo’s, quality of unreadability, which in turn also contributes to
the merging of thematics. The layout of Cosmo-Cleo is therefore crucial to
the dreamscape constructed.
First, the image dominates and overwhelms the verbal. While there is
plenty of text per page, the text is refigured into an image so that reading
the words is made more difficult. This occurs by the boxing of text, the use
of shading, mixed typefaces, and the fragmented layout of sections of text.
Second, each page frequently features multiple images arranged as a
­pastiche or collage. Furthermore, many of the images feature numerous
98  Women’s magazines
Table 3.1  From table of contents, Cleo November 2004

Section: every month

Cleo Boredom Breakers

Cleo Cool right now
Shopping guide; competitions info; privacy notice
C-mail
Cleo ‘Scope
Section: Celeb Reporter
It Girl of the month: Ashlee Simpson
Latest celeb obsession: floral dresses
We’re addicted to: The Simple Life
Home looks we love: Sorbet
Home Lust-haves: Egyptian
Chic or shriek! The wedge

Section: features

Flirt buddy or f%#* buddy?

Can a rebound relationship ever work?
‘I escaped Sudan and became a model’
When your mum has a mental illness
The dark side of Hollywood
The Insider’s guide
Hypnotise him sexy
When your guy goes to war
‘I lost a breast at age 27’
Diary of a swimsuit shoot

c­ommodities, so the photographs accompanying a story on the latest

fashion accessories features 10 or 20 handbags, 30 pairs of shoes, or
8 different types of sunglasses. The titles’ dreamscape is thereby intensely
visual but equally one of abundance. One enters a world of visual rivers of
beautiful things, and, given the techniques just noted, one is likely to
respond on an emotional or sensuous rather than cognitive level. One can
flick through, drop in and drop out of, the array of goods.
A visual abundance of beautiful things is reinforced by a visual abun-
dance of beautiful young, white bodies as part of the staging or backdrops
to feature articles and advertisements. While featuring primarily female
bodies, pages also include young men’s bodies, with both titles being
marked by their overt objectification of men, whether in Cleo’s pioneering
male centrefold, Cosmopolitan’s Bachelor of the Year competition, photo
spreads of semi-naked sportsmen, or in advertisements for women’s cloth-
ing. This prevalence of male flesh signals one aspect of the type of fem-
inism on offer: one that centres on sexual freedom, an inversion of the
gaze based on a simple understanding of equality (‘men do it to us, so we’ll
do it to men’). It also signals the hyperbolic heteronormativity that is
masked as young women’s sexual desires, a phenomenon noted by both
 Women’s magazines  99
McRobbie (1999) and Gill (2009). Just in case the young woman missed
the point of the sex advice columns, the visuals make clear that the male
body is the correct object of desire. We guess this is necessary given the
plethora of gorgeous commodities available to a reader as yet unencum-
bered by the responsibilities of heterosexual marriage and motherhood.
While the Cosmo-Cleo dreamscape offers an abundance of beautiful things
and bodies, a corresponding abundance of definitions of pleasure and
beauty is absent.
In their version of Australian egalitarianism, which elides racial and
class inequalities, Cosmo-Cleo are guides to how anyone can become the
Cosmo-Cleo girl – these are training manuals in magazine form. As essen-
tially pedagogical texts, such magazines seek to instruct young women
how to ‘do’ femininity correctly (Butler 1990). Judith Williamson argues
that, ‘Whatever the drive that keeps thousands of women – including
myself – buying women’s magazines like Cosmopolitan every month, it has
more to do with instruction than entertainment’ (cited in Gill 2007a,
p. 199). As the table of contents illustrates, and as constitutive of this
genre, the majority of content concerns technologies and techniques of
ideal femininity, whether referring to fashion, health, relationships, friend-
ships, or work (Winship 1987; Macdonald 1995; Gill 2007a). The visuals
outline the successful outcome of this quest: abundant beauty, things, and
pleasure. And yet it is a curtailed dreamscape, for a constrained and rather
traditional version of femininity underpins this plenty: straight, white, mid-
dle-class, and conventionally attractive. So although the magazines consist-
ently feature articles regarding lesbianism, the L-word is never spoken, a
feature also noted by Gill (2009), Kolehmainen (2010), and Kate Farhall
(2018). Instead, lesbianism is displaced into porno terms such as ‘bicuri-
ous’ or ‘girl on girl action’, which Farhall (2018, p. 213) describes as
‘lesbian desire becom[ing] co-opted by heterosexuality’.11 Such a circum-
scribed, idealised femininity is not unique to the Australian context,
however; Marisol del-Teso-Craviotto (2006) McRobbie (2009), and Jess
Butler (2013) observe a similar circumscription in their studies of postfemi-
nism. The success of locally produced Frankie (see note 5) as an alternative
young women’s lifestyle magazine – outselling Cosmopolitan at the time of
its demise – suggests that perhaps this model of femininity is increasingly
unappealing.
Freud’s observation that dreams arise from the contradictions and con-
flicts in our waking lives is borne out in the circumscribed hedonism of
Cosmo-Cleo. First, a schizoid approach to femininity suggests their deeply
conflicted nature. For example, Cosmopolitan’s January 1999 edition fea-
tures Alix Johnson’s article ‘Look like a babe (when you feel like a blob)’
(pp. 128–131), followed by Georgia Cassimatis’s ‘14+, pregnant, post-ano-
rexic: how three women beat their weight obsession’ (p. 132).12 Cleo’s
special ‘marriage equality’ issue of August 2015 features an article that is
pro-marriage equality (pp. 42–44), then a few pages later there is an article
100  Women’s magazines
on ‘same-sex sexual harassment’ (pp. 51–53). In the June 2002 issue of
Cosmopolitan there is a lengthy sealed section on lesbian sex tips, ‘Girl +
Girl Sex Confessions’ (pp. 99–113), followed by pages of photographs of
bare-chested men. Both magazines announce the introduction of policies
regarding the photoshopping of images and using a diverse range of
models, yet the magazines appear largely unchanged.
Moreover, in their consistent featuring of feminist articles regarding
sexual harassment at work, paid maternity leave, and domestic violence, as
well as less useful articles concerning career advice, we see another side of
the endless possibilities of the Cosmo-Cleo girl.13 A soft feminist politics is
a consistent presence in this world, and hence a popular feminism is simply
part of the magazines’ commonsense. These articles – brief outbreaks of
the real – are informative rather than sensationalised or cheekily humor-
ous. The contradictions and tensions identified above are perhaps unsur-
prising in this set of texts; women’s magazines are, after all, ‘ideological
juggling acts’ (Winship 1987), attempting to address women’s relative
freedom but within commercial and hence unthreatening terms. Abundant
pleasures, however, do not negate or make invisible popular feminism;
rather, they coexist.
We conclude by noting the one distinctive change characterising both
titles as they move into the twenty-first century. The hedonistic dream-
scape remains intact, however the ideal subject of Cosmo-Cleo becomes
rendered in increasingly excessive terms, taking on the shape of the
‘blokette’. By blokette we mean a specifically Australian version of what
McRobbie terms as ‘new sexualities’ in girls’ and women’s magazines:
‘those images and texts which break decisively with the conventions of
feminine behaviour’ (1999, p. 50; Dobson 2015). Evidence for this is the
increasing interest in porn – whether in terms of articles on sex toys and
the porn industry itself, or in the graphic and coarse depiction of sex and
body parts (such as ‘King Dong: My Life with a Massive Penis’ [Knoll
2010] and ‘Ball-Sports: The Ultimate Guide to Man-Handling’ [2012]).14
A complementary blokey discourse emerges, as in referring to friends as
‘mates’ and using vulgarisms. For instance, Cosmopolitan’s Table of Con-
tents for January 1999 features article titles that could have stepped
straight off the pages of FHM or Zoo lad mags: ‘The Big Bang! How to Be
a Show-Off in Bed’ and ‘His Penis Was the Size of a Prawn: And Other
Horny Horror Stories’. The Cosmo-Cleo pornographic imagination and
blokette discourse bring together the two ‘central post-feminist paradigms
of young womanhood’ identified by Amy Shields Dobson – the ultra-sexy
and the transgressively masculinised (2012, p. 254).
While we agree with McRobbie’s description of new sexualities as being
an ironic and decidedly non-romantic form of femininity (1999, p. 53), we
also interpret the intensified excess of Cosmo-Cleo in the following terms.
First, it suggests the competition faced by young women’s magazines from
online content and celebrity gossip magazines; excess is a point of difference
 Women’s magazines  101
but also corresponds with the register of the more celebrity-focused texts.
Second, it signals and continues the spectacularisation of the liberated
young woman – in postfeminism the young woman is brought into hyper-
visibility by the media, amongst others, for commercial and ideological
reasons (Projansky 2014). Like the vloggers in the next chapter, she
embodies the assumed success of second wave feminism – economically
independent with no enforced domesticity, making her an ideal worker and
consumer, and hence she confirms our belief in historical progress. And her
spectacularisation works as a form of discipline, specifically, in its hetero-
sexy porno codes.
Less optimistically, however, this excessiveness – a young woman’s last
gasp of freedom – can be read as a hystericised form of the postfeminist
melancholia as per McRobbie’s analysis (2009). McRobbie attributes this
affect to the continuing constraints of normative femininity and to the fate
of the conventional young woman once she leaves the Cosmo-Cleo dream-
scape: marriage, motherhood, the serious career (with its potential con-
flicts surrounding motherhood, domestic responsibilities, and career
advancement). The blokette is both rebellious and conformist, at once in
denial and cognisant of her potential fate as a mature woman. Moreover,
the blokette suggests that masculine traits and values are taken as the
model for emancipation and for a pleasure-based consumption, pointing to
the difficulty of finding a non-commercial feminine language of pleasure
and liberation. And finally, given these titles’ historical association with
mildly transgressive models of femininity, it is unsurprising that they are
attracted to contemporary codes of transgression such as coarseness. These
transgressions are far easier to articulate in a women’s magazine than a
rejection of heterosexuality or hyper-consumption.

Marie Claire: the real cosmopolitan woman

Like Cosmopolitan, Marie Claire is now a global magazine brand, originat-
ing in France in 1937, before expanding into the publication of international
editions in the latter part of the twentieth century: an exemplary case of
transnational media flows that characterise our various genres of Australian
postfeminist culture. Marie Claire’s Australian edition began in 1995 under
Jackie Frank’s editorship.15 In the Australian twentieth anniversary edition
(September 2015), Frank recalls that Marie Claire meant to her ‘returning
home to edit a magazine that brought the world to Australian women …
[W]e have been striving to inspire, entertain, move and provoke women for
the past twenty years’ (p. 28, emphasis added). From its inaugural edition,
Marie Claire aligned itself with a progressive and feminist politics: its group
website asserts a commitment to ‘humanistic values’, and ‘The Group
defends the cause of women, militates for their emancipation, supports their
struggles, and denounces the crimes committed against them’.16 This vocab-
ulary and explicit political intention are enough to distinguish Marie Claire
102  Women’s magazines
from most women’s magazines. By the time it is launched in Australia, its
blend of ‘style with substance [its humanist feminism]’ – as the masthead
proclaims – makes it the magazine for progressive middle-class Australian
women. In the anniversary edition (September 2015), Frank declares that ‘It
has been an absolute privilege to be able to steer the voice that has cham-
pioned women for two decades’ (p. 28).
We argue that Marie Claire represents one destination after the phase of
hedonistic (young) womanhood constructed by Cleo and Cosmopolitan,
being a textualisation of the ‘mature’ postfeminist Australian woman in
the space of post-Fordist capitalism, therefore representing a slightly older
version of our chick lit heroines. The dreamscape and its ideal femininity
are made possible by the legacies of second wave feminism, a connection
acknowledged rather than denied by Marie Claire (to which we return).
And as befitting a magazine whose origins are modern Imperial France,
Marie Claire’s dreamscape centres on feminine, ethical cosmopolitanism –
a contemporary capitalist form of exoticism. One enters a space defined by
the cosmopolitan pillars of mobility and geographical diversity
(­Szerszynski & Urry 2002, p. 467; Kendall et al. 2009, pp. 110–111), and
an abundance of luxury and style, in which the now relatively privileged
other engages with ethnic otherness in aesthetic and ethical terms. And the
reader, as a cosmopolitan woman, is comfortable – at home – in this space
(Kendall et al. 2009, pp. 111–112).
That the implied addressee is going ‘somewhere else’ is announced in
the eight or so pages of full colour glossy advertisements for various
­European luxury commodities that open the magazine – the nature of the
commodities are not as important as the proper names: Gucci, Prada,
Guerlain, Lancôme, Longchamps. As we saw in chick lit, this is the lan-
guage, indeed shorthand, of style and taste, and therefore is a specifically
feminine form of Bourdieu’s cultural capital (2007, p. 12). This language
of high-end taste, largely absent from advertisements in our other maga-
zines, is an interpellator and classifier of the implied reader (Bourdieu
2007, p. 6). If you can recognise these signifiers, then proceed to the Table
of Contents. And here one encounters something more than just the Euro-
exotica of the opening pages. As Table 3.2 indicates, there are stories on
equal pay, serial killers, female porn directors, an Indian matrilineal
society, the latest Australian fashion designers, refugees, luxury holidays,
and Christmas recipes. In this array we see the elements of a cosmopolitan
femininity: travel, career, luxury consumption, a global social conscience,
an international perspective, and style, with most of these containing ele-
ments of European or non-Western exoticism.
Another opening marker of distinction for Marie Claire is its method of
figuring the dreamscape. In contrast to the overwhelming visuality of
Cosmo-Cleo that results in its ‘unreadability’, Marie Claire relies more on
written text to construct the dreamscape. Feature articles are a significant
part of each issue’s content (around 40 to 50 per cent). In addition, layout
 Women’s magazines  103
Table 3.2  Table of contents, Marie Claire, December 2015

Cover stories

Party Perfect: Your summer wardrobe sorted for every occasion

Investigation: We look at how the spread of the internet has led to a shocking
rise in cyber abuse directed at women
Celebrity exclusive: Angelina Jolie Pitt opens up on her marriage with Brad
Sex report: Thanks to more female directors, the adult film industry is
undergoing a feminist revolution
Interview: With her fight for equal pay, Jennifer Lawrence is a woman on a mission
Your ultimate Xmas gift guide: From budget buys to blow-out opulence
The new make-up rules
5 Party Styles: The hottest hair looks for the festive season

Features

Reportage: From legalizing same-sex marriage to the tragedy of the Syrian war,
we look at the events that shaped 2015
Fashion report: How the Australians behind Ralph & Russo went from a single
sewing machine to couture behemoth
US Report: Is paying a stranger for a hug the new therapy craze or just a bit crazy?
World report: How one couple put their fortune on the line to save thousands of
refugees from drowning at sea
Frankly Speaking with Rachel Zoe: The American stylist to the stars shares her
views on fashion, feuding and family
Crime report: ‘The day I found out my father was a serial killer’
World Wrap: The heroine teacher of the Sandy Hook massacre relives the horror,
and the Indian village where women rule the roost
@Play: Music, movies and more …
Life stories: She sold half a billion books and bedded Marlon Brando, but Jackie
Collins’s life was also marred by adversity
Remaining Sections: Fashion, Beauty, Wellness, @Work, Promotions, Lifestyle:
Treasure Island: The owners of a tiny patch of paradise off the Tasmanian coast
are sharing their luxury getaway; Eat, Drink, and Be Merry: Set a simple scene
this festive season and celebrate good food in relaxed Australian style

increases the impact and readability of the verbal: features are grouped
together and are set out in an uncluttered style, without being interrupted
by graphics. As a result, one can ‘read’ the magazine, if desired, or
immerse oneself in the pages of beautiful clothes and other commodities.
Such a layout suggests a relative degree of intellectualism – there is sub-
stance here, even if we choose just to look at the pictures.
Style, and a specifically restrained type at that, is the dominant element
in the dreamscape and its overarching world view: as those opening adver-
tisements announce, this is an abundantly beautiful world. Our cosmopol-
itan femininity is founded on a style for living, where everyday activities of
femininity – often seen as drudgery – are transformed into an aesthetic
practice and space to announce an understated good taste. So, rather than
104  Women’s magazines
the postfeminist trope of the struggling woman, attempting, with difficulty,
to ‘have it all’ (Genz 2010, p. 120), we have the postfeminist woman of
style, and hence accomplishment. Thus, Marie Claire’s recipe pages, most
famously overseen by Donna Hay (the best-selling Australian cookbook
author), are upmarket but simple recipes with carefully staged accompanying
photographs: the meal as art. Home decorating becomes intellectualised and
aestheticised into interior design, with the homes of the famous and taste-
ful used as our guide, a process Negra terms ‘domestic aggrandizement’
(2009, p. 118). What to wear is equated with designer labels of clothes
and accessories; make-up and shampoo are also high-end brands, fre-
quently bearing exotic and/or European names (‘MonoDerma’, ‘Klorane’,
‘Clinique’). And note the dearth of articles on sex or relationship advice:
Marie Claire assumes this has been sorted.
As a consequence, and consistent with postfeminism as it manifests else-
where, Marie Claire’s style requires high-end consumption, or at least, this
desire – the second element in her dreamscape. This is a world based not
so much on the scale of consumption found in Cosmo-Cleo, but on the
type of consumption: luxury meaning exoticism. The modifier ‘luxury’
makes this consumption both more desirable and more acceptable. The
litany of European and American luxury brands (Tommy Hilfiger, Coach,
Bally) that fill Marie Claire’s pages seems to obscure and hence transcend
the commodity to which they are attached, and their exclusivity and exoti-
cism makes them more akin to an art work. They take the consumer ‘else-
where’ – geographically and socially. To purchase these (or to desire to
purchase them) is a mark of aesthetic and hence social distinction
(Bourdieu 2007, p. 280).
Although Cleo and Cosmopolitan made holidays part of the Cosmo-
Cleo girl’s world – often at the Australian beachside – Marie Claire has
moved on, and, as a consequence, international travel is the realm for
leisure: a key marker of her cosmopolitan, and high disposable income,
perspective. International and luxury travel is taken for granted (the shop-
ping trip to Dubai, or ski-ing in Vail, for example), and is another form of
encountering the exotic, adding to her cultural capital.17 Rather than signi-
fying aspirationalism, it is more accurate to see the Marie Claire dream-
scape as textualising the various types of mobility required for feminine
cosmopolitanism: physical, cultural, intellectual, and psychic (Skrbis &
Woodward 2013, p. 15). This dreamscape is about going and being else-
where, as physical travel replicates, expresses, and reinforces the social and
cultural mobility underpinning post-Fordism. In addition, a desire for
exotic landscapes forms an important source of Marie Claire’s various
realms of style, consumption, and especially fashion. That one little detail
imported from elsewhere found in its various photo spreads – the piece of
jewellery that completes the outfit, the type of hemp used in the outdoor
chair – is another marker of distinction, functioning as a signifier of
authentic cultural knowledge.
 Women’s magazines  105
Marie Claire, however, is not all about abundant consumption, and
indeed confounds Gough-Yates’s assertion that women’s magazines should
never mention the world of work (2003, p. 96). While not a major part of
its contents, work does feature regularly and is represented as career;
indeed, it publishes a special ‘Women at Work’ issue in February 2013 and
organises a ‘Success at Work’ summit in late 2014 (reported in the January
2015 issue). Marie Claire treats the world of work seriously and women as
workers seriously: work is a source of discrimination and harassment for
women (see Marinos 1999). Regardless, women are represented as leaders
in their fields and as deserving to lead (see advice on women and leader-
ship in the January 2015 issue). Given the importance of women and work
to the Australian women’s movement, we should not be surprised to see
such a commitment expressed in Marie Claire’s pages.
Furthermore, there is an implicit sense that work makes feminine cos-
mopolitanism possible, a causality suggested in the regular articles on
designer workwear. Unlike the glamorous fashion or media industry
careers idealised by Cosmo-Cleo and that characterise chick lit, Marie
Claire includes a broader and more realistic range of women’s occupations
in the ‘Exceptional woman’ type story. Thus the special ‘Women at Work’
issue (February 2013) features ten middle-class career women, including
Peta Credlin (then Prime Minister Abbott’s Chief of Staff), lawyers, finan-
cial planners, food exporters, and a philanthropy fund administrator.
Most significantly, and as we observed in the previous chapter, work is
seen as simply part of being a woman. Equally significant is that mother-
hood, families, and intimate relationships are of only very minor interest,
and the readers are rarely addressed in such terms. Marie Claire’s cosmo-
politan woman is autonomous.
One of Marie Claire’s most distinctive and crucial features is its consist-
ent interest in an internationalist version of feminist politics: an articu-
lation of its ethical cosmopolitanism that reinscribes the whiteness of its
ideal subject. Every issue contains at least one feature article on the treat-
ment of women (and often children) in developed or developing nations,
thus Marie Claire’s feminism blends a global social justice perspective with
its founding feminist humanism and cosmopolitan world view. The feature
articles in the January 1998 issue indicate the contours of Marie Claire’s
cosmopolitan feminism, with articles on Islam’s female army, a rape victim
being jailed in Pakistan, women ‘ecowarriors’, and a biography of Marilyn
Monroe. December 2007 includes a story on female Kurdish guerrillas and
one on Australian foreign aid guidelines that prohibit birth control. The
magazine also combines this internationalism with a local perspective; the
October 2008 issue contains articles on women being overly critical of
each other, a Columbian female political activist, the local ‘Fitted for
Work’ campaign, the international designers with an environmental con-
science, and a biography of Coco Chanel. There has also been a consistent
interest in women’s reproductive freedoms locally and internationally
106  Women’s magazines
(Corbett 2001; Haworth 2002; Dabscheck 2005), and domestic violence
(Goodwin 2000; Renkert 2001; Bobrow & Hawkins 2002; Robinson &
Dabscheck 2005).
While genuine and well-intentioned, Marie Claire’s cosmopolitan fem-
inism has attracted criticism, specifically for its representational politics
(Vrana 2007–2008). Gill argues, for instance, that

the writing, photography and mise-en-scène [sic] of the reportage

pieces constitute, in my view, what we might call a National Geo-
graphic-style racism – in which the women under discussion are
treated as exotic, uncomplicated, close to nature, inherently pure and
moral, and so on.
(2007a, p. 201)

In the numerous examples we analysed, we observed similar representa-

tional practices, though we contend that the problematic nature of Marie
Claire’s global feminism is also related to the adjacency of this material to
the glamorous contents, as well as to the Marie Claire stylised and stylish
world view: its contents, whether fashion, lifestyle, or politics are framed
in a consistent way. Women’s oppression around the world, therefore,
becomes almost a white woman’s traveller’s tale – the substance to the
magazine’s style. Marie Claire’s ethical cosmopolitanism thereby problem-
atically relies on an aestheticisation and hence exoticisation of the non-
Western other, and a Eurocentric feminist universalism.
This exoticism and aestheticism partly explains how these articles,
serious, uncompromising, and often disturbing, manage to be a central
part of a dreamscape. They align with Marie Claire’s aesthetic and ethical
impulses so that European style and luxury commodities are joined by
fragments of the literal dark side of the empire – a reparative gesture by
white postcolonials whose efficacy remains an open question. With paral-
lels to chick lit’s parodic critique of the fashion–beauty–media complex,
the articles appear to answer back to the lifestyle and commodities repres-
ented, to add some moral dimension to the beautiful view afforded to
white women, but still in beautiful terms – for there are very few articles
on ethical consumption or the exploitation of women garment workers.
Another explanation for the integral role of social conscience to the maga-
zine is to return to the function of the dreamscape, namely, wish fulfil-
ment. Marie Claire addresses the politico-ethical drive in white
middle-class Australian women, women who grew up with and benefited
from feminism, and who therefore have a strong sense of a distinct and
collective female identity, the injustices resulting from being female, and
some degree of political analysis of gender and inequality. The magazine
articulates privilege, but also a typically feminist sense of acknowledging
privilege and those who miss out (and who make this privilege possible).
It thus articulates a form of glamour and luxury that supposedly is not
 Women’s magazines  107
frivolous or incompatible with more politically engaged or intellectual
content, or with a feminine form of Australian egalitarianism. Marie
Claire’s cosmopolitan woman can seemingly be an ethical citizen of the
world: she is constantly reminded by these feature articles of the dispos-
sessed women of advanced capitalism, although an explicit link between
her exotic consumption, assumed affluence, and their dispossession is left
unremarked.
As with Cosmo-Cleo, the restrained surfaces of the dreamscape are,
however, troubled by some deep anxieties. First, the ongoing coverage of
violence against women and workplace discrimination and harassment
potentially disrupts any cosmopolitan triumphalism. Rather, these articles
and those stories of women in developing countries serve as reminders of
the privileged nature of, and potential reaction to, white women’s emanci-
pation. More importantly, the dreamscape’s valorisation of beauty brings
into being its deeper anxiety: ageing, and in this respect, it is consistent
with postfeminism as it manifests in other contexts (Negra 2009; Jermyn &
Holmes 2015; Whelehan & Gwynne 2015; Jermyn 2016). As Sadie Wearing
remarks in her study of a Hollywood film and a British makeover tele-
vision programme (2007, p. 284), ‘The older female body is expressly
figured in both as a problem, which, in generically characteristic ways,
these texts explore, investigate, and subject to the processes of renewal.’
The anxiety surrounding the ageing female body found in our magazines,
with the exception of Cosmo-Cleo, is manifested in the special issues
devoted to anti-ageing (one per year); the frequent beauty, fashion, and
wellness articles to address ageing’s effects; and the abundance of anti-
ageing products.18 Biological as well as social pressures make the dream-
scape fragile, and the cosmopolitan woman’s status is still reliant on
conventional definitions of femininity. Ironically, the valorisation of
beauty ensnares her, and more high-end consumption is offered as the
solution.
Although a franchise, indeed outpost, of a global chain – a ‘glocalised’
version of this well-known brand – Marie Claire is not a rootless cosmo-
politan and acknowledges the Australian context in a number of ways. It
directly and indirectly references Australia’s history of Indigenous dispos-
session and contemporary multi-cultural nature. This is acknowledged
directly in articles on Australian racial prejudice, and in displaced terms
via the exoticism of the magazine’s contents.19 Marie Claire champions
Australian fashion designers, artists and writers, and has a strong interest
in Australian politics and activism. Furthermore, arguably its concern for
social justice, sense of egalitarianism even with its elitist consumption, and
collectivist identification with the category of women are derived from
Australian social democratic and feminist traditions as well as from a
French humanism. As in chick lit’s semioscape of aspiration and indul-
gence, Marie Claire’s universal beautiful commodity-based dream is seem-
ingly available to all.
108  Women’s magazines
The Australian Women’s Weekly: domestic plenitude
So far there has been an assumed teleology in the ordering of our dream-
scapes: a narrative moving from youthful unrespectable excess to mature
sophisticated restraint, from popular culture to high culture, and from
ordinary middle-class to upper-class femininity. The Weekly’s broad and
older readership, its identity as a cultural institution, and its ability to
destabilise these preceding narratives make it the ideal last title for discus-
sion. From its inception in 1933, The Weekly desired to be an innovative
publication in a proto-feminist way.20 Deborah Thomas, one of The Week-
ly’s influential editors, reminds us that ‘When Frank Packer started The
Australian Women’s Weekly he set out to create a magazine that presented
everyday issues for women as “news” ’ (Thomas & Clements 2014, p. vi).
The inclusion of such content in a women’s magazine was revolutionary
for the time. ‘On the front page of the first issue’, for example, ‘it carried a
report, under the heading “EQUAL SOCIAL RIGHTS FOR SEXES” ’ on
the Women Voters’ Federation conference (O’Brien 1982, p. 21). In addi-
tion, Susan Sheridan et al. argue that

The Weekly gave itself a role as a national cultural institution … and,

more significantly, it gave [white] Australian women a redefinition of
Australianness that included them in it, unlike the very masculine
Australian legend that was revived in the 1950s.
(2002, p. 4)

Although The Weekly has attracted much scholarly attention throughout its
history, how it engages with a postfeminist context remains unaddressed.
Unlike our previous magazines’ relatively minor emphasis on the domestic
in favour of the autonomous working female consumer, The Weekly con-
tinues its historical focus on a pragmatic domestic femininity, and in its
contemporary manifestation thereby offers readers a dreamscape of
domestic plenitude – an Australian version of the postfeminist re-embrace
of domesticity (Hollows 2006; Genz 2009). That said, we argue The
Weekly confounds this narrative as well. This plenitude involves two
senses: first, in the overarching role that the domestic plays in the maga-
zine’s textual spaces; and second, in that the domestic space offers so
much: wishes can be met, problems ameliorated, and the self can be ful-
filled. Domestic plenitude, therefore, promises contentment arising from
many women’s reality, where, because of the conservatism of Australian
gender roles, the domestic is still primarily a space for women’s unpaid
labour and making of the self, but also for working women who do not
have time to be domestic enough.21
This dreamscape does not, however, simply reflect a social conservatism
regarding women’s ‘proper’ place. Rather, domestic plenitude in The
Weekly’s terms marks historical change in Australian women’s lives rather
 Women’s magazines  109
than stagnation. Specifically, domestic plenitude reveals the historical and
political pressures on ordinary (i.e. white working-class and lower-middle-
class) women’s domesticity whether they are in paid employment or not –
including time and income pressures, the pressures of aspirational style,
and female-headed households. The postfeminist Weekly is an attempt to
both integrate social (primarily feminist) change, and to conserve elements
of traditional white Australian femininity and national identity: specifi-
cally, egalitarianism – now extended to women – and a valorisation of ‘the
ordinary’.
Ironically, given that housewife/homemaker magazines have often been
considered bastions of conservative notions of femininity, the postfeminist
iteration of The Weekly constructs a particularly Australian domesticity
that avoids the excesses of the two key motifs that structure postfeminist
accounts of domesticity: domestic goddess mythologies and the narrative
of ‘retreatism’, in which ‘the professional, urban woman … returns to her
[idealized] hometown’ (Negra 2009, p. 15). (In The Weekly, this would be
a retreat towards the ‘old’ – read Anglo-Celt, pre-women’s movement –
Australia.) In The Weekly’s terms, the domestic is gently modernised into a
form of domestic feminism, rather than being retro-ised, hyperbolised, or
ossified. Thus, it provides an alternative to the consumerist and trans-
national aspirational dreamscapes offered by Cosmo-Cleo and Marie-
Claire. The Weekly is also evidence of a strongly Australian version of ‘the
new domestic femininities’ that Joanne Hollows (2006, p. 105) argues
emerge in the postfeminist historical space, in which the old binaries of the
feminist and the housewife, the career woman and the homemaker, and
the public and the private spheres, are no longer stable (Genz 2009,
pp. 53–54). The core elements of domestic plenitude are the traditional
content of The Weekly throughout its history (Sheridan et al. 2002, p. 1):
marriage, motherhood, family, and the home; however, these become
more liberally defined, though still focused on heterosexual white women.
As in our dramedies, de facto relationships are now legitimate, as are
women who work, or women without children. These core elements
inform the narrative and interpretive frames used by The Weekly: most
stories are constructed within their parameters, and they are the recipe for
plenitude.
The Weekly, like the other titles discussed here, regularly features the
‘exceptional woman’ type story or the celebrity story.22 Its difference is
that the exceptional woman’s identity as a wife or mother is given promi-
nence (the journalist, Jana Wendt is one such example, see Sheather 2005),
or the celebrity’s family background is foregrounded (as in the actor,
Rebecca Gibney’s childhood with an alcoholic father; see ‘Shadows of the
Past’ [2003]), or the retired champion athlete’s serious romance is now the
focal point for The Weekly’s interest (the champion Olympic swimmer,
Susie O’Neil’s courtship story, [see George 1998]). High achieving and/or
unconventional women are simultaneously recognised for their achievement
110  Women’s magazines
and reframed, that is, ­literally domesticated. In this process, their ‘special-
ness’ and unattainable lifestyle are translated into ‘ordinary’ women’s
reality and are therefore made accessible and comprehensible to them. This
extraordinary/ordinary dialectic (Dyer 1979; Turner 2004) is, of course,
constitutive of celebrity, but has especial valence in the Australian context
with its egalitarian and masculinist mythologies. Women celebrities, in par-
ticular, face intensified scrutiny in the postfeminist era, playing a ‘role in
testing dominant social norms’ and re-establishing conventional definitions
of gender (Holmes & Negra 2011, p. 3). In The Weekly’s contemporary
blend of relatively traditional models of female subjectivity, feminine egal-
itarianism, and a slightly increased celebrity focus, these women are re-
feminised, made just like ordinary white women, and equally importantly,
reinforce domesticity as a site of contentment, of plenitude.
What we term the ‘white Australian celebrity comeback story’ reveals
the critical importance of marriage, motherhood, and the home in con-
structing a normative model of a woman’s life course whose goal, or at
least touchstone, is domestic contentment, regardless of what career or life
path one chooses. Given its explicitly Australian focus, The Weekly’s pre-
ferred model of celebrity is the Australian ex-celebrity, as in the soapie star
from the 1980s (say, Rowena Wallace) or the Young Talent Time singer
(think Tina Arena). The Weekly loves to cover their post-fame lives, as they
either accede to conventional womanhood (having a baby or marriage) or
battle and overcome personal crises (divorce, stillbirth, illness, career col-
lapse, weight gain). Sometimes their destination is a tentative career come-
back. Regardless of its outcome, at its core the celebrity comeback story
celebrates the white female Aussie battler – no matter how famous – and
the domestic milestones in a conventional woman’s life (even if these go
wrong, at least the celebrity had a go at being ‘normal’). So for Dannii
Minogue: ‘Nobody imagined that Dannii would be so revolutionised by
pregnancy and motherhood’ (Iley 2011). For ex-soapie star Peta Toppano:

In the past, her photo shoots would have been done on film sets or in
one of the luxurious mansions she shared with her then husband. This
time, it’s held in her red-brick, two-bedroom flat, not far from the
house where her parents lived for more than 20 years. The block itself
is modest, but Peta has turned her flat into a colourful, cosy home,
decorating the walls with old playbills, photographs and a portrait of
herself painted for the Archibald Prize.
(Baker 2011)

For our celebrities and readers, the domestic functions as reward or

comfort, or as just being enough after the adventures of contemporary
white Australian womanhood.
The Weekly’s continuing role of offering domestic advice contributes to
a quality of sisterliness, a quality we also see in our beauty vloggers. While
 Women’s magazines  111
all our magazines can be read as particular forms of ‘how to’ guides, The
Weekly is distinctive in that it is explicit about its pedagogic role, and its
scope is formidable: virtually every aspect of the domestic is covered, from
cleaning and cooking to craft, budgeting, child rearing, and wardrobe
advice.23 The Weekly is a voice of help and support, as articulated in one
editor’s claim that ‘One of the mantras of The Weekly is to provide inspi-
ration and hope to our readers’ (Foyster 2009, p. 10). Unlike the sheer
impracticality or otherworldliness of Cosmo-Cleo’s and Marie Claire’s
dreamscapes, The Weekly’s aspirations are of an entirely different order.
Domestic plenitude relies on a relentless practicality: one acts rather than
simply consumes in this dreamscape! This emphasis works to ensure that
the domestic as a project can succeed, that a capable homemaker will
produce and hence receive plenitude. Its advice suggests that ends can be
met, children can be raised successfully, male partners understood, meals
will work, weight can be lost, and hence contentment can be found.
‘Transform your hair’, ‘map your face’, and ‘How to answer your chil-
dren’s trickiest questions’ encourages The Weekly in just one month’s issue
(December 2006). In keeping with its egalitarianism, it does not position
domestic skills as retro-cool art forms, subjects of mastery, or sensual
expressions of the self – all components of the domestic goddess phenom-
enon (Negra 2009, pp. 118, 130; see also Genz 2008). Rather, The Weekly
takes a pragmatic approach. Its pedagogy proffers accessible and valuable
skills that are part of contemporary ordinary life. The Weekly’s encyclo-
paedic scope validates an ‘ordinary’ domesticity (ordinary in terms of its
class identity), and that the little things – often target of middle-class ridi-
cule – matter. The dreamscape thus also validates a way of life increasingly
under threat by technology, labour market-induced time pressures, and
bourgeois aspirational consumption as exemplified in chick lit.
The class-specific practicality of The Weekly’s dreamscape is reflected in
its figuration. The magazine’s visual register is comparatively text heavy
and uncluttered in layout, which increases its readability – it is, after all, a
manual. The photographs are less highly stylised than Marie-Claire’s or
Cosmo-Cleo’s, and the pages as a whole do not attempt to resemble an art
gallery, making it a welcoming space. The commodities on offer – whether
in the advertisements and product reviews – are incredibly diverse and
numerous, contributing to the sense of plenitude. However, these com-
modities are unstylish, unstylised, and inexpensive: sauce mixes, anti-itch
preparations for children, Target lingerie, women’s vitamin supplements,
and mid-range cosmetics, for instance.
The dreamscape also testifies to changes in white Australian domestic
femininity, and hence class identity. The Weekly’s increasingly stylish pre-
sentation parallels the increasing importance of style and the personal
makeover to its dreamscape. Indicative of these changes, from about 2000
onwards (under Deborah Thomas’s editorship) The Weekly itself experi-
ences a makeover. Its layout moves closer to the upmarket glossies, while
112  Women’s magazines
the coverage of celebrity gossip and scandal reduces, the domestic advice
goes slightly upmarket, feature articles improve in quality, and the visuals
are also more sophisticated. What is occurring is that the working-class
and lower-middle-class form of domesticity traditionally represented by
The Weekly is remodelled into a more contemporary middle-class, and
aspirational, lifestyle: a stylish as well as practical domesticity, and hence a
modernised domestic femininity.
At the same time that homemakers are being addressed in more sophist-
icated terms, however, they are also subjected to the imperatives of post-
feminist makeover culture, which Gill (2007b, p. 156) explains thus:

This requires people (predominantly women) to believe, first, that they

or their life is lacking or flawed in some way; second, that it is amend-
able to reinvention or transformation by following the advice of rela-
tionship, design or lifestyle experts and practicing appropriately
modified consumption habits.

We want to emphasise not so much that this paradigm ‘reinvigorates class

antagonisms’ as in Gill’s account (2007b, p. 157). Rather, as we saw in
chick lit, it is an assertion of an upper-middle-class hegemony via aspira-
tions towards particular ways of being – even as, if not because of, the
achievement of solid middle-class economic wealth is increasingly difficult
(what Michael Pusey [2003] identifies as the hollowing out of the Australian
middle class). And such a makeover paradigm is credible and seductive in a
nation like Australia that prides itself on a relatively high degree of social
mobility. Domestic plenitude now includes numerous options for the self to
be remade, although along relatively modest and pragmatic lines.24
Regardless of the transnational makeover imperative, The Weekly con-
tinues its tradition of being a publication for and about Australian women –
its current masthead on the spine is ‘The Voice of Australian Women’. The
Weekly’s direct acknowledgement, indeed celebration, of Australian
culture and history in its articles, photography, and columns reveals its
nationalism: it supports Australian popular and high culture25 and cham-
pion women athletes,26 publishes quality Australian women writers (such
as Marele Day, Gabrielle Lord, and Maggie Alderson), has plenty of time
for Germaine Greer,27 and occasionally celebrates Indigenous women.28
The Weekly’s characteristic blend of the traditional and modern is clear
when it continues to love the British Royal Family (Seward 1998), but also
publishes articles highly critical of the mandatory detention of asylum
seekers (Leser 2002; Weaver 2016) and the treatment of women workers
(Buttrose 2000).29 Its progressive stance on contemporary social issues
thereby demonstrates the traditional Australian sense of care for the
underprivileged and the underdog.
Moreover, The Weekly still retains a focus on ‘ordinary’ women – this
is The Weekly’s version of Australian egalitarianism, although women are
 Women’s magazines  113
now hailed as worthy of being made over into a more glamorous self on a
fairly sensible budget, the limit of the dreamscape’s version of ‘luxury’
consumption. Thus, the look of the magazine may alter but the contents
remain the same: in October 2005 the new look is announced, though
craft, recipes, health, money, gardening, renovations, family, and mother-
ing stories continue. However, as Sheridan et al. make clear, historically
The Weekly offered a ‘culturally specific construction of the housewife as
consumer. By presenting itself as an ideal universally applicable to all
women, it obscured the differences between them’ (2002, p. 6). Regardless
of the occasional story on Indigenous or non-Anglo-Celt women, such eli-
sions have arguably continued for these groups who were and are alien-
ated from the specifically white Australian ‘ideals of femininity and
domestic life promoted in The Weekly’ (Sheridan et al. 2002, p. 6). So,
while the category of Australian woman may now include women who
work, who do not have children, or are not married, like all our titles, its
racialised core and imaginary remain unchanged.
The Weekly’s dreamscape of domestic plenitude is not so much about
offering escape; it is instead an attempt to manage the tensions surround-
ing contemporary Australian domesticity for both full-time homemaker
and working woman, as symbolised in its key framing device of domestic-
ating the extraordinary woman. The recurrent stories or content of The
Weekly is that Australian women now achieve in every field, however they
are domestic beings as well, if not primarily so. Thus, the magazine
appeals to women whose identities and/or lives are not centred on paid
employment, or who are conflicted by work and domestic or family
responsibilities. The Weekly affirms their role and offers hope that the con-
flict can be overcome. Second, as a dreamscape The Weekly offers an
optimistic vision of the home for women, even as statistics on domestic
violence, child abuse, and increasing economic inequality suggest other-
wise. In article after article, whether about a female politician, an athlete,
an actor, a CEO, an activist, a failed celebrity, or a lesbian, the home is
positioned as a place of stability, care, and traditional Australianness – a
locus of comforting ‘ordinariness’ in a competitive and demanding world.
Even if one feels left behind by the neoliberalising outside world, the home
allows a sense of contentment, a familiar identity, and a means to make a
valuable (and valued) self.
And finally, The Weekly’s greatest marker of difference from our other
titles is its attitude to consumerism. Amongst its plethora of relatively
inexpensive commodities for cooking, babies, family health, home renova-
tions, and budget fashion, The Weekly’s relentless practicality (how to
make the domestic work by hands, heart, and brain) and egalitarianism –
signified by its transubstantiation of the extraordinary into the ordinary
woman – valorise human relationships and the non-material: love, care,
human connection, persevering, and getting by. In attempting to look
both forward and back, domestic plenitude offers women some sense of
114  Women’s magazines
worth, stability, and hope in a time of rapid social change, widening
inequality, cosmopolitan aspirationalism, consumerist femininity, and
economic insecurity.

Conclusion
By positioning them as dreamscapes, as textualised forms of wish fulfil-
ment, we have been able to draw out the potential of postfeminist
women’s magazines. As we have demonstrated, the semioscape of abun-
dance suggests the pleasures on offer to, and conflicts faced by, con-
temporary Australian women. In addition, we argue that there is cause for
optimism concerning Australian women’s magazines in postfeminist times.
Although the abundance on display continues the traditional and pejora-
tive association of women with consumerism, we read such abundance not
as a sign of women’s putative frivolity, but rather as a marker of con-
temporary women’s relative emancipation. Hedonistic and luxury con-
sumption as imagined in these magazines signals increased economic and
subjective freedom for Australian women. To desire excessively, to spend,
to waste, are marks of freedom so long allowed only to men. It is far too
easy to dismiss or criticise such dreams rather than seeing them as textual-
ising an historically monumental shift.
As Freud identified, however, dreams arise out of the conflicts of our
waking lives, therefore our titles, being dreamscapes, will exhibit some
strange if not contradictory features (much like postfeminism itself). The
way in which the various dreamscapes are partially but continually inter-
rupted by those stories from ‘the real’ (as in the anorexic model, the victim
of domestic violence, the gender pay gap, the career woman who is prim-
arily a mum), testify to the contradictions facing Australian women and
inherent to such a model of prosthetic femininities. The various dream-
scapes articulate some of the class and age-specific compensations avail-
able to Australian women with which to deal with these contradictions:
young women’s sexual hedonism of Cosmo-Cleo, Marie Claire’s mature
woman’s quest for exotic distinction and cosmopolitan social justice, and
the domestic pragmatics and fulfilment of The Weekly for a broad and
older readership.
Regardless of the degree to which the Australian context is acknow-
ledged, all the magazines are relentlessly about and for white women.
While they like to appear up to date or in advance of social trends, and
have shifted to address changes in white women’s lives, the world of Aus-
tralian women’s magazines remains largely oblivious to Australia’s multi-
cultural or postcolonial nature. We surmise that such a repression suggests
two related things. First, hegemonic middle-class whiteness announces
itself as the ideal for non-Western women, whether in the emerging middle
classes or the working classes that produce so many of Australia’s con-
sumer commodities and services. For Australian Indigenous women, their
 Women’s magazines  115
highly restricted participation in these worlds of beauty and things is both
a repression and an accurate reflection of their ongoing dispossession. And
second, the fashion industry (and its close sister, the manufacturer of con-
sumer goods) relies on the exploitation of non-white women’s labour –
both locally (as piece workers, for instance) and internationally – as
McRobbie notes in the UK context (1999, p. 60). Their effacement in the
dreamscape is the women’s magazines’ version of secondary revision.
For highly commercial genres – as McRobbie puts it, ‘Their business is,
in effect, the nature of womanhood’ (1999, p. 48) – they show an ability
to be more feminist than many other commercial genres, and complicate
feminism’s traditional antagonism to women’s magazines (Friedan 1963;
Greer 1970; Ferguson 1983), and its problem with the genre’s postfeminist
iteration. Most surprising is the way in which feminist tenets are taken for
granted but also explicitly articulated by every title: women are equal to
men, women should be able to do anything they wish with their lives, and
women are still subject to systemic discrimination, and it will take activism
to change this. In this regard, although McRobbie argues that postfeminist
culture takes feminism for granted in order to disavow it, every title expli-
citly claims itself to be feminist and a champion of women’s causes. More-
over, there is no sense of the irrelevancy or pastness of feminism: all
magazines are far more political and socially aware than expected and
have run campaigns and uncompromising articles on feminist issues
throughout the 20 years: anti-domestic violence, sexual violence, paid
maternity leave, sexual harassment, and equal pay. The semioscape of
magazines is therefore evidence of the potential of popular feminism.
Indeed, we happily claim them as mainstream feminist publications, well
aware of their limitations, but optimistic about their potential. Like Shelley
Budgeon and Dawn Currie (1995, p. 184), therefore, ‘we view these texts
as actively constructing a discourse which draws upon, and in so doing
transforms, public understandings of feminism’. In the next chapter, we
turn to the obvious successor to women’s lifestyle magazines: the digital
‘glossies’ of the beauty vlogs and their semioscape of postfeminist confi-
dence, care, and self-empowerment, and the particular intimate publics
that they bring into being.

Notes
  1 Women’s magazines are still popular, attracting between 269,000 (Cosmopol-
itan) to over 1.5 million readers (The Australian Women’s Weekly), per print
issue (source: Roy Morgan, September 2018), with much larger readerships for
their cross platform editions. For example, Marie Claire’s readership increases
from 379,000 readers of the May 2017 print issue to 464,000 readers for its
cross platform version (Source: emma readership survey: www.emma.com.au/
reports).
  2 There have been some excellent general analyses of certain Australian women’s
magazines such as those by Bonner and McKay (2000), Le Masurier (2007,
116  Women’s magazines
2009, 2011), Sha and Kirkman (2009), Schneider and Davis (2010), and Campo
(2010).
 3 This generalist criterion thereby excludes specialist women’s titles such as
Women’s Health and Fitness Australia or gossip/celebrity magazines like Who.
The date range also excludes relatively idiosyncratic titles such as HQ maga-
zine, a publication that did attempt briefly to be a very different sort of
women’s magazine that did not include beauty or fashion articles. Its short
publication span (1990–2003) and a shift towards a male as well as female
readership exclude it from our discussion.
 4 Sadly, Cleo ceased publication in March 2016. In her final editorial, Lucy
E. Cousins declares that ‘Australia is home to incredible women from all walks
of life, and we all want to be heard because we all have important things to
say’ (2016, p. 7).
  5 We note with interest the success of the alternative Frankie magazine (started
in 2004). However, our focus on mainstream publications, as well as the cen-
trality of young women’s glossies typified by Cosmopolitan to postfeminist
culture and theory precludes Frankie’s inclusion.
  6 We do acknowledge Hermes’ finding of the lack of correlation between a read-
er’s lifestyle and chosen magazines (1995, p. 144).
  7 Gough-Yates (2003), citing Sean Nixon (1996), explains the impact of psycho-
graphic research on market research thus:
Lifestyle research represented consumers as more diverse and changeable
than ever before, and produced more individualistic images of them. More-
over, lifestyle research emphasised the differences between consumer groups
in cultural, as well as economic and motivational terms.
(p. 2)
For McRobbie (1999, p. 60), the impact on magazines is that:
‘readers’ exist as much as concepts and strategies as they do as active con-
sumers … Instead of being at the far end of the chain which begins with
production, the practices of consumption are built into the ‘front end’ pro-
cesses of production.
  8 Such an interpellation becomes important in a context of accelerated immigra-
tion from non-Western countries from the Howard government onwards, and
the increased political demands from, and visibility of, Indigenous people –
including Indigenous women.
  9 The academic interest in young women and postfeminism has boomed in recent
years, ranging from Sue Jackson and Tiina Vares’s (2013) work on the sexuali-
sation of young girls, Jessica K. Taft’s (2004) analysis of Girl Power, to Shauna
Pomerantz and Rebecca Raby’s (2017) critique of the overachieving ‘smart
girl’. We now have a formal disciplinary field of girl studies, perhaps taking up
the space once occupied by women’s studies in the academy. Even in the
academy, one should stay young.
10 Gough Whitlam was Australia’s Prime Minister from 1972–1975, and imple-
mented a left-wing agenda that included free tertiary education. He appointed
an advisor on women’s issues, Elizabeth Reid, and a Women’s Affairs Unit in
the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet was established in 1974.
11 The titles of these examples are indicative of this non-lesbian tendency: Patricia
Flokis (2004), ‘I’m not bi, I just pash other women’ and Hannah Gadsby
(2016), ‘Sex tips for ladies who like ladies’.
12 Note that articles frequently have two different titles: one in the Table of Con-
tents and one where it appears in the magazine. Alix Johnson’s article is also titled
‘8 beauty promises’; Georgia Cassimatis’s article is also titled, ‘I must, I must’.
 Women’s magazines  117
13 See, for example, ‘He said what at work?’ (2015) regarding sexual harassment;
Johnson (2002); Gawthorne (2009); and ‘Get paid like a man’ (1999).
14 See Felicity Percival (2004) on sex toys and Lizza Gebilagin (2015) on women
making porn.
15 The Australian-born Frank follows a similar transnational path in her career,
having worked for Harper’s Bazaar, Elle, Mademoiselle, and the US and UK
editions of Marie Claire, before setting up the Australian edition. She is the
daughter of Jewish post-Second World War migrant, and Melbourne proto-
celebrity hairdresser, socialite, ex-social columnist, and philanthropist, Lillian
Frank. We suspect that this family background influences Frank’s social con-
science as expressed in Marie Claire.
16 www.marieclairegroup.com/pageEN_Humanistic+commitment.html, viewed 7
July 2016.
17 ‘48 hours in Dubai’ (2016), Marie Claire, December, pp. 264–266; Martin (2016).
18 July 1999, August 2002, June 2012, and May 2013 are anti-ageing special
issues; February 2005 features ‘Your look younger for longer: your stop-the-
clock shopping guide’; April 2006 includes the ‘Celebrity report: when will
your looks peak?’.
19 As listed above, examples include October 2009, January 2015, and January
2016. These are articles that take a political view of multiculturalism, that is,
they look at Australian racism rather than celebrating pluralistic tolerance.
20 The Weekly became a monthly publication from January 1983.
21 Joanne Hollows (2006, p. 106) makes a similar observation regarding the attrac-
tion of Nigella Lawson’s How to Be a Domestic Goddess, namely, that it offers
a domestic fantasy for time-poor working women.
22 Unlike our other titles that show a noticeable increase in celebrity content, The
Weekly is more uneven, with the particular editor seeming to be a major factor
in how much celebrity material is included. Deborah Thomas, for example,
reduces celebrity content and increases feature articles.
23 For instance, ‘Paula Duncan inspired us!’ (1997); Deborah Hutton (1998); ‘Food
in a flash’ (1998); Larry Writer (2007); and Sharon Krum (2009).
24 See Vanessa Gordon (2006), ‘ “New year, new you” special: tone up your body,
mind, relationship and home’.
25 Wendy Hughes (May 2001) on the impact of Germaine Greer’s The Female
Eunuch; Sharon Krum (2005) on Rachel Griffiths; Margaret Pomeranz’s film
reviews; Juliet Rieden (2013) on Magda Szubanski.
26 Celia Barnes (1998) on Hayley Lewis’s return to swimming; Annette Allison
(1997) on Lisa Currie-Kenny’s desire to have another baby.
27 Stories on Greer include Suellen Dainty (2000); Greer’s lengthy essay (2001) on
the impact of The Female Eunuch; and Susan Chenery (2006).
28 Indigenous actor Deborah Mailman features in at least three stories: Williams
(2004); ‘Paradise found’ (2010); Corbett (2012).
29 Ita Buttrose fiercely critiques the lack of paid maternity leave.

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4 YouTube beauty vlogs
Intimate publics and postfeminist
confidence and care

In this chapter, building upon our earlier examination of postfeminist

kinship, and the refigured modes of intimacy it entails, we turn our atten-
tion to a youth-oriented and transnational form of participatory postfemi-
nist media culture, beauty ‘vlogs’ (video logs), illuminating a semioscape of
confidence and care (of both self and other). In the context of ‘conver-
gence culture’ (Jenkins 2006), young women’s opportunities for public self-
representation have expanded considerably. New media platforms, such as
YouTube, have enabled women to author themselves in innovative and
often lucrative ways, for potentially global audiences. One of the most
common forms of content to be uploaded to YouTube by and for young
women – including those based in Australia – is the beauty tutorial. Such
beauty vlogs are ‘big business for media companies such as YouTube,
where the search for “beauty” is among the top search categories’ (Banet-
Weiser 2017, p. 272). With millions of followers, beauty vloggers are often
able to successfully monetise their public personas or ‘self-brands’, attain-
ing (to varying degrees) ‘influencer’ status (Abidin 2018) and corporate
sponsorship and investment from prominent beauty brands. They are not
simply about looking like a successful young woman but being one as well
(the degree to which they are successful, as well as what constitutes
success, is something we discuss).
As suggested in our analysis of Cleo and Cosmopolitan, young women
are commonly seen to be identified with, and to be deeply affected by,
postfeminism.1 The beauty vlogger, as an entrepreneur committed to per-
forming and fostering a desire for normative beauty standards, and as a
subject ‘responsive to the regime of personal responsibility’ (McRobbie
2009, p. 19), is perhaps the quintessential young neoliberal postfeminist.
However, as we argue here, that is not all she is, especially given this
increasingly common trajectory of augmenting content videos (i.e. the
beauty tutorial or review of particular products) with advice vlogs once a
sizeable fan base has been achieved. While feminist debates around beauty
practices have been well-rehearsed (Wolf 1990; Hollows 2000; Scott
2006), we are more interested here in the hybridised confessional-advice
vlogs produced by and addressed to girls and women in their teens to
124  YouTube beauty vlogs
early-mid-twenties. The Australian vloggers we analyse in depth here –
Lauren Curtis and Danielle Mansutti – provide (as well as themselves seek)
advice, not just on make-up application, but on bullying, friendship, sexu-
ality, health and nutrition, depression and anxiety, and the normative
gender expectations fuelled by social media itself. In some ways, adopting
‘big sister’ style personas (Berryman & Kavka 2018), they offer a form of
online self-help for the generation of women attempting to negotiate the
thoroughly imbricated demands of neoliberalism and postfeminism.
Such YouTube vlogs, whether mobilising positive or negative affect (or
both at once), provide crucial insights into ‘how postfeminism feels’
(McDermott 2018, p. 53, emphasis added). Therefore, while Sarah Banet-
Weiser (2017) – preoccupied more with their reinscription of hegemonic
beauty ideals – has identified beauty vloggers as ‘aesthetic entrepreneurs’,
here we demonstrate how their movement from beauty tutorials to advice
vlogs renders them what we call ‘affective entrepreneurs’, recommending
not just beauty regimes but viable ways of approaching the ‘problem’ of
the self. Indicative of the contradictions of postfeminism, these vloggers, to
varying degrees, advocate self-empowerment through greater self-­
confidence, while also underscoring the roadblocks (internal and external)
to such actualisation; hence our designation of this semioscape as one of
(self)confidence and (self)care. In terms of care, itself a gendered form of
affective labour (as we saw in the case of Offspring’s Nina Proudman),
they provide a form of ‘virtual extended sisterhood’ (Leppert 2015, p. 217)
and support for their followers that cannot be discounted (Ouellette &
Arcy 2015) – especially as, given the affirmative subscriber comments, it
seems to have pronounced resonance. This is not to suggest that our
approach is celebratory, particularly as we are aware there are risks in a
form of ‘intimate world-building that doubles as commercial platform-
building’ (Dobson et al. 2018, p. 22), but as throughout this book, rather
than dismissing such popular forms as further indicative of the limits of
postfeminism, we seek to explore their feminist potentialities or at least
their generative tensions.

Postfeminist automediality: ‘authenticity’ and

self-disclosure online
We focus here on the postfeminist stories that these young vloggers (are
able to) tell about their lives, relationships, and work, and how these
stories and selves are shaped not just by the discursive context of their pro-
duction but by the YouTube form – its technological affordances, its impli-
cation in commercialised culture, and its mode of address – and by
reception, where audiences value (and expect) a sense of ‘authenticity’ and
consistency in the selves being constructed and the private lives which are
depicted as part of this process (Rak 2015; Smith & Watson 2015;
Marwick 2016; Maguire 2017; Poletti 2017; Faleatua 2018). Indeed, for
 YouTube beauty vlogs  125
girls and young women in particular, such ‘visibility and self-disclosure are
encouraged as the path to success and empowerment’ (Dobson 2008,
p. 126). Of course, these stories are also essential to the work of maintain-
ing a desirable brand in which audiences and corporations can invest
(affectively in the case of the former and literally in the case of the latter).
As automedial sites (Smith & Watson 2015, p. 168) – new media tech-
nologies that work to help shape, rather than simply reflect, selfhood –
they are important both in terms of young women’s public self-construction
and in terms of the communities that are brought into being through the
technological affordances of the YouTube platform (Raun 2018). We are
interested in thinking through the reasons for the popularity of these
largely confessional figures and how their advice and their own modes of
being may be resonating with those coming to terms with the uncertain-
ties, and insecurities, of femininity in a neoliberal postfeminist context
(while themselves contributing to such a regulatory climate). We are also
interested in these vloggers’ high-level of self-reflexivity around their self-
representational practices, and the ethics thereof, especially when they high-
light social media’s effects on young women (as Mansutti’s vlogs in
particular routinely do).
The autobiographical aspects are significant, too, as they provide the
grounds of their claims to authority (much like the self-help authors of the
next chapter) – and their celebrity. Their life advice is based on their per-
sonal experiences of being Australian young women; their authority is
predicated on their ‘ordinariness’ (manufactured though it may be) and its
successful narration/performance. Against the idea of beauty vloggers as
simply the new postfeminist disciplinarians, exhorting women to ‘perfect’
femininity and internalise self-hatred for failing to achieve it (McRobbie
2015; Banet-Weiser 2017; Lazar 2017), these young women draw atten-
tion to the tensions between ideal and embodied/lived femininity – while
beauty tutorials may depict the former, advice vlogs attend to the latter
(though sometimes they merge as in the ‘Get ready with me’ vlogs). They
recognise young women’s ongoing anxieties around their ‘to-be-looked-at-
ness’ (Mulvey 1975; see also Berger 1972); even while their channels may
in fact reinscribe such cultures of surveillance, regulation, and judgement,
they do not lack awareness or reflexivity about these contradictions.

Micro-celebrity, vlogging, and digital intimacy

The beauty vlogger is what Teresa Senft (2008) has identified as a ‘micro-
celebrity’, commonly now produced and maintained via social media plat-
forms, where the self is constructed as a brand for public consumption.
Such celebrities are reliant upon their followers, whom they consider
‘fans’, and they ‘use strategic intimacy’ to help increase this audience base
(Marwick 2016, p. 333; see also Marwick & boyd 2011). In the case of
beauty vloggers, they have established themselves as experts in make-up
126  YouTube beauty vlogs
application techniques, and they are valued for passing on these skills and
techniques to apprentice viewers. In this respect, their celebrity can be seen
to have been, in Chris Rojek’s (2001) terms, ‘achieved’, but it is the exten-
sion of ‘expertise’ into realms beyond the aesthetic that most interests us
here. Nonetheless, the fact they are believed to have earned their celebrity,
via the public performance of their specific skills, ‘plays an important role
when [audiences are] evaluating their legitimacy’ (Garcia-Rapp 2017).
Indeed, their perceived ability to speak authoritatively on non-beauty spe-
cific topics is tied to this legitimacy. As is common with figures of renown,
their celebrity affords them some ‘discursive power’ (Marshall 1997) to
intervene in other, unrelated, terrain such as mental health advice. As we
will show, frequently lauded by followers for their honesty and inspira-
tion, audiences clearly affectively invest in these micro-celebrities. As
Graeme Turner et al. (2000, p. 15) emphasise, celebrities become ‘folded
into our ways of making sense of the world’, and these vloggers appear to
be no exception – especially for their young women followers.
As a specific form of micro-celebrity, beauty vloggers deploy particular
techniques to establish and maintain the intimacy and ‘authenticity’ that is
integral to their success (i.e. gaining and retaining both followers and cor-
porate support and investment), and indeed – as shown here – to establish-
ing themselves as trustworthy advice-givers. Although we recognise that
the work of fostering such intimacy is crucial to selling themselves as com-
modities, and thus is part of their ongoing celebrification (Berryman &
Kavka 2017), it is also the case that such intimacy can play an important
role in drawing attention to social and political issues relevant to young
women (Lange 2007; Lovelock 2017; Raun 2018). They may appear to
be postfeminism’s ‘can do girls’ (Harris 2004), but they – and their audi-
ences – are also anxious subjects in need of a form of sisterly care and
community.
Rather than simply decrying the commodified nature of such modes of
digital intimacy and sociality, we ask what are they making possible for
girls and young women (both as producers and as consumers), and how
might they be responding to the tensions of contemporary lived feminini-
ties in a postfeminist environment? What cultural and indeed affective
needs may such vloggers be fulfilling for audiences who are by no means
passive consumers? And, in line with Rosalind Gill and Shani Orgad’s
(2015, 2017) Foucauldian-informed work on ‘confidence’ as a technology
of self, within what discursive limits? Responding to calls for further con-
sideration of the ‘psychic life of postfeminism’ (Gill & Orgad 2015; Gill
2017; Gill & Kanai 2018), we outline how the vlogs function as spaces
of both positive and negative affect, exhorting young women – consist-
ent with the semioscape of confidence and care – to love and empower
themselves while at times being unable to do so in an (online) environment
that is often toxic for them. In contrast to previous scholarship, including
the disciplinary ‘girlfriend gaze’ theorised by Alison Winch (2013), we
 YouTube beauty vlogs  127
c­ onceptualise these vlogs as more than just a postfeminist way to regulate
women’s bodies and/or psyches.
Instead, bringing into being what Lauren Berlant (2008) dubs an ‘intimate
public’ – ‘a porous, affective scene of identification among strangers that
promises a certain experience of belonging and provides a complex of conso-
lation, confirmation, discipline, and discussion about how to live as an
“x” ’ (2008, p. viii) – these vloggers use their attention capital as micro-
celebrities to provide crucial forms of sociality and sisterhood, and ways to
negotiate a representational and political environment that is particularly
fraught for young women. Rather than merely seeing vlogs and vloggers as
indicative of postfeminism’s sophisticated adaptations (and, relatedly, neu-
tralisations) of feminism in changing cultural conditions (Gill 2016; Gill &
Orgad 2017; Banet-Weiser 2018; Kanai 2019), we are interested in what
they make possible for audiences, and indeed for the vloggers themselves.
Digital intimate publics in particular can ‘trouble or call into question the
dominant hierarchies of social life’ by rendering visible relations and iden-
tities previously ‘concealed from public spaces’, including those of girls
and young women (Dobson et al. 2018, p. 18). Furthermore, while it has
been suggested that ‘post-feminist neoliberalism … fosters a new sense of
isolation among women’ (Braidotti 2006, p. 45), we see these vloggers as
significantly contesting such atomisation. As in our television chapter,
intimacy and affective bonds between women are central to the vlogo-
sphere’s semioscape of confidence and care.

Postfeminist ‘travels’: beauty vlogs and transnationalism

As briefly noted, more than any other form dealt with here, and indicative
of what Arjun Appadurai (1996) dubs ‘technoscapes’, digital media cul-
tures ‘criss-cross’ national boundaries and territories, with users commonly
speaking to audiences in very different locales, enabling postfeminism itself
to ‘travel’ (Dosekun 2015). Given ‘YouTube is one of the largest databases
of global shared experiences’ (Kennedy 2016), vlogging is a form where
national boundaries are inevitably porous, and audiences span well beyond
Australia (as subscriber comments make clear). They are further indicative
of the transnational flow of postfeminist and neoliberal logics (Dosekun
2015), as many of their representational techniques, as well as their discur-
sive frames, are also evident in vlogs from other contexts. In contrast to
vloggers who foreground a ‘performative Australian-ness’, such as Asian
Australian comic vlogger Natalie Tran (Tomkins 2019, forthcoming), the
beauty vloggers we examine do not commonly foreground their national
identity or their ‘Australian-ness’, and, consistent with this view of a trans-
national postfeminism, instead situate themselves more within a globalised
collective of women. The femininities they embody suggest, therefore, less
a distinct Australian cultural sensibility and more of a transnational way of
making femininity intelligible and consumable. They are also indicative of
128  YouTube beauty vlogs
the actual mobility of women, as both Danielle Mansutti and Wengie (an
extremely popular Asian Australian vlogger) geographically relocated after
their micro-celebrity afforded them both wider audiences and new employ-
ment opportunities in the United Kingdom and United States respectively.
But, given that ‘the resources to become an entrepreneurial subject are
unevenly distributed’ (Elias et al. 2017, p. 23; see also ­Banet-Weiser 2017,
p. 272), in the beauty vlogosphere we see the elision of marginalised sub-
jectivities, such as Indigenous women, and the whiteness of the most
popular vloggers is stark (with Wengie being a welcome exception).2
In this chapter, we offer a detailed analysis of two of Australia’s more
popular beauty vloggers, Lauren Curtis and Danielle Mansutti, from 2013
to 2018. Both of these women have YouTube channels with millions of
subscribers, are now in their mid-late twenties after beginning their vlog-
ging careers as teenagers, and follow the familiar trajectory for YouTube
micro-celebrities: achieving their fame through their expertise in beauty
practices, imparted to audiences in the form of beauty ‘tutorials’, then to
varying degrees – after having accumulated a high degree of followers and
a self-brand that clearly resonates – moving into personalised vlogs that
address questions around women’s self-esteem, empowerment, and
anxiety. As we will demonstrate, this is in some ways consistent with the
wider ‘confidence cult(ure)’ (Gill & Elias 2014; Gill & Orgad 2015, 2017;
Banet-Weiser 2017; Kanai 2019) which sees feminism not disavowed but
repackaged into a neoliberal rhetoric of self-love and acceptance that fol-
lowers endorse and reinscribe – though not without question, either by the
vloggers themselves or their audiences. We have also chosen these vloggers
as one, Curtis, embodies more of the positive affect said to be central to
this confidence culture (and indeed to YouTube more generally), while the
other, Mansutti, offers vlogs marked more by the negative affect central to
establishing intimacy, achieving ‘relatability’, and, most importantly, offer-
ing online support to subscribers (Berryman & Kavka 2018).

YouTube, young women, and vlogging

Consistent with its mantra ‘Broadcast yourself’, YouTube, launched in
2005, is often lauded as a democratised space in/through which ‘ordinary’
citizens can create and circulate various forms of media content. As Jean
Burgess and Joshua Green argue (2009, p. 6), YouTube possesses ‘a
double function’: it is ‘both a “top-down” platform for the distribution of
popular culture and a “bottom-up” platform for vernacular creativity’. In
this chapter, we are most concerned with its functioning in the latter sense,
shifting our focus to the content of, as well as communities or publics
enacted by, video blogging. Vlogging, the portmanteau term deployed to
signal content videos reminiscent of the online diary form or blog, is seen
to represent YouTube participatory culture, not just through ‘ordinary’
Australians creating content, but through the way its affordances work to
 YouTube beauty vlogs  129
exhort the viewer to respond. In this sense, vlogging has been seen as
‘fundamental to YouTube’s sense of community … it is a form whose per-
sistent direct address to the viewer inherently invites feedback’, revealing ‘the
dialogic opportunities of YouTube’ (Burgess & Green 2009, pp. 94–95). We
will return shortly to the kind of publics that are able to come into being
through such a platform.
These vloggers and the material they produce also need to be seen in the
broader historical context of girls and young women making media
(Kearney 2006, 2011; Piepmeier 2009; Keller 2015), as well as ‘homecam-
ming’, where young girls used webcams in their domestic spaces to docu-
ment their quotidian lives in a way that has been interpreted as
empowering (Senft 2008; see also Harris 2004; Dobson 2008, 2015a).
Despite technology having been historically gendered masculine, young
women’s uptake has been immense (Kearney 2006; Banet-Weiser 2017),
particularly in terms of social media platforms. As Banet-Weiser notes,
‘One way that gendered asymmetries have been restructured by girls them-
selves is through the production of content on digital media’ (2018, p. 271).
These vloggers evidence how convergence culture is enabling women to
become producers of media (and of self) in new, and at times quite innov-
ative, ways. However, what is different from these earlier popular forms is
the constitutive participatory nature of the YouTube environment (Jenkins
2006; Burgess & Green 2009).
That said, it is vital not to overstate the so-called democratisation of
media or the progressive potentialities of such forms (Hindman 2009;
Turner 2010). Such a gesture elides the ways in which intensified judge-
ment and regulation of women pervades the postfeminist representational
environment, and that which constitutes ‘value’ in the online attention
economy remains deeply gendered. Increased visibility has concomitantly
resulted in the increased surveillance and disciplining of girls and young
women (Andrejevic 2004; Banet-Weiser 2012; Dobson 2015a). However,
while such platforms can undoubtedly ‘be a hostile space for girls and
young women’ (Maguire 2015, p. 72), it is also important to be conscious
that ‘these dominant tendencies are not written into digital media, nor are
they totalizing’ (Ouellette & Arcy 2015, p. 72; see also Mendes et al.
2019). To continue our exploration of these issues, and further elucidate
the beauty vlogosphere’s postfeminist semioscape of confidence and care,
we begin with an analysis of Lauren Curtis’s YouTube channel.

Lauren Curtis, authenticity, and intimacy: ‘I want each

and every one of you to love every version of yourself, with
or without make-up’
At the time of writing Lauren Curtis has almost 3.6 million YouTube sub-
scribers, while many more have viewed either her content videos (make-up
tutorials) or vlogs (which she commenced in August 2011, at age 18). Like
130  YouTube beauty vlogs
most vloggers, her online presence is multi-modal, with linked Facebook,
Instagram, and Twitter accounts as well as a personalised website.
Common to the YouTube platform, her channel consists of beauty tutori-
als, ‘haul’ videos,3 ‘day in the life’ style vlogs, filmed international trips
(paid for by beauty companies)4 and, increasingly, more confessional and
advice pieces (often one and the same). Humorous, seemingly ‘genuine’,
and down to earth, Curtis – or ‘Loz’, as she encourages followers to call
her, in line with the Australian tendency of shortening names – commonly
refers to her shyness, experiences of bullying, and difficulties with main-
taining a healthy self-esteem. Indeed, this transition narrative, from
bullied, insecure teen to confident, successful beauty guru, is an important
part of her ‘public private persona’ (Marshall 2010) and arguably helps
account for her extensive following.
In terms of aesthetics, however, Curtis is the sun-kissed (even if from a
bottle), blonde-haired, blue-eyed ‘Aussie’ girl. White, thin, conventionally
attractive, heterosexual, she is the kind of subject who is eminently
‘ “brandable” in the current media economy of visibility’ (Banet-Weiser
2012, p. 79). Curtis, as has been noted of other beauty vloggers, ‘embodies
“niceness”, a sort of adorable girl-next-door banality’ (Banet-Weiser 2017,
p. 276). Rather than offering the kinds of performative ‘sexiness’ that
often characterises postfeminist culture (Dobson 2015a), and as a point of
brand differentiation, she repeatedly draws attention to her modesty (that
she does not like to show cleavage or wear revealing clothes, and prefers to
relax at home rather than party). Furthermore, in line with what Rachel
Berryman and Misha Kavka (2017) refer to as the ‘intimacy pact’, Curtis
continuously invokes her love for her audience and recognition that her
professional success is thoroughly dependent upon their support – in
viewing and circulating her content, in following her product recom-
mendations, and in publicly engaging with her.
Curtis, like all beauty vloggers, given the interactivity upon which the
form relies, commonly encourages viewers to express their appreciation (or
indeed dislike) of specific videos. As Caron Raby et al. note (2018, p. 506),
‘vloggers on YouTube are immersed in a social platform that encourages,
and depends on, user interaction’, both with the vloggers and other subscrib-
ers, thus creating a sense of online community. As Curtis remarks, in a
gesture common to vloggers, ‘You guys are my second family’ (Curtis
2014a), and while confessing that her job is very ‘emotionally draining’ she
adds that she ‘loves what she does’ and is ‘so incredibly grateful … and
humble’. This is a common refrain from beauty vloggers, where such labour
‘is expressed in earnest terms as just doing something one loves to do’ and
thereby is not recognised as ‘work’ (Banet-Weiser 2017, p. 276; see also
Duffy 2017). Conversely, in some vlogs she highlights the many limitations
of her job, reveals it is not the glamorous life it may appear, and discourages
others from that path. Nevertheless, the attribution of ‘family’ suggests much
in terms of the affect and intimacy being staged in and through these vlogs.
 YouTube beauty vlogs  131
Curtis’s channel reveals the inherent paradox of these beauty vloggers,
and indeed of postfeminism itself. In her tutorials, as in the chick lit novels
we examined, there is an emphasis on the labour involved in making and
remaking the feminine self (rather than femininity as innate), externally
written on the body in specific ways, while the vlogs shift the focus to inte-
riority and self-acceptance. As all her vlogs make clear, while underscoring
the pleasures of make-up, Curtis is preoccupied with both outer and
‘inner’ beauty. These advice vlogs suggest that in addition to bodies, ‘sub-
jectivity and interiority are now also subject to requirements for (self)
transformation’ (Elias et al. 2017, p. 6). Like others in this realm, Curtis
seems to care for her subscribers (itself a precondition for a successful
branded feminine self) and wishes to give them tools to help them succeed
– not just aesthetically but professionally and personally (all of which can,
of course, be intertwined). Indeed, as Akane Kanai and others have
emphasised, ‘digital cultures fostered the capacity to build relations with
unknown publics through affective labor’, building forms of intimacy
upon which the self-as-brand relies for success and ongoing commercial
viability (2017, p. 296). For Curtis, there appears to be no tension between
this focus on both outer and inner selves.
Curtis – like many others – offers multiple ‘CHATTY GRWM (Get
ready with me)’ videos, in which she increasingly blurs the boundaries
between tutorials and vlogging, shifting to the confessional mode while she
applies her make-up. In such vlogs, she engages in revelatory practices that
are central to sustaining intimacy with followers/girlfriends (see ‘CHAT
WITH ME/GRWM: Life Updates & Embarrassing Stories!’ [Curtis 2015b]
and ‘CHAT WITH ME: Current Favourites, Why I’ve “Changed” & Per-
sonal Stories!’ [Curtis 2016a]). As Stéphanie Genz (2015, p. 548) makes
clear, such ‘authenticity labour’ is integral to the neoliberal reflexive self
which is seen to characterise ‘post traditional’ society and which (as briefly
mentioned) itself opens the discloser up to new forms of surveillance and
regulation (Andrejevic 2004; Harris 2004; Banet-Weiser 2012). Moreover,
the exposure of applying make-up itself, usually a ‘private’ act, is also seen
to be crucial to this establishment of intimacy (Affuso 2017). The spaces of
intimacy, too, do important work in fostering the sense of accessibility and
authenticity upon which micro-celebrity relies (Burgess & Green 2009;
Tolson 2010; Marwick 2016; Berryman & Kavka 2017; Garcia-Rapp
2017). For instance, as is common for vloggers, Curtis films from within
the domestic space of her home, in her bedroom, lounge-room or the
public–private space of her car, spaces in which only ‘our intimates’ are
typically welcome (Affuso 2017).
In the introductory video that features on her channel she explicitly
refers to her shift from beauty vlogger to lifestyle expert: ‘Hi everyone,
what began as an intro to beauty grew into a space for sharing everything’.
This trajectory is not unique to Curtis; an audience is secured primarily on
the grounds of beauty pedagogy yet sustained by this shift to a more
132  YouTube beauty vlogs
automedial form, via which the micro-celebrity constitutes her very relata-
bility. The confessional is one of the central authenticating strategies
deployed by beauty vloggers, and indeed celebrity in a much wider sense,
and draws upon ‘the now well established genre of private exposé of a
celebrity-being-ordinary’ (Genz 2015, p. 552; see also Redmond 2008;
Nunn & Biressi 2010; Kennedy 2016). Female celebrities, more so than
their male counterparts, have been active in the production of a private self
for public consumption, suggesting that ‘the public display[s] of once-­
private feelings are intrinsically gendered activities’ (Genz 2015, p. 553).
As part of such publicly staged moments of self-disclosure, which them-
selves are important both to self-branding and to postfeminism (Banet-
Weiser 2012, p. 60), in the ‘Fifty Facts about Me Tag’ (2013b), Curtis
announces that she will be letting her audience into her life more, helping
to ‘establish [her] branded persona as truth’ (Berryman & Kavka 2017,
p. 316, original emphasis). This shift in content, capitalising on audience
desire for insights into her private life, solidifies her status as a YouTube
micro-celebrity: as someone in whom audiences can affectively invest, and
with whom, via new media, they can actively engage (Marwick & boyd
2011).5 In terms of interaction with audiences, Curtis – like other
­Australian vloggers such as Brittney Lee Saunders, Chloe Morello, Shani
Grimmond, and Danielle Mansutti – also livestreams question and answer
sessions, with questions generally posted by followers on Facebook or
Twitter, furthering a sense of openness, transparency, and accessibility, as
well as the requisite responsiveness to the fan base (e.g. ‘Q&A: My
Breakup, My Income, My Body’, 2014a). Indicative of the participatory,
dialogic nature of the form, the Q&A format allows the audience to help
shape the content of her channel and her self-presentation.
While not offering advice in the same overt sense of some other vlog
genres, Curtis’s regular ‘day in the life’ vlogs are also instructive, as they
provide ways of living, being and consuming that subscribers can (should?)
emulate.6 (In comparison, travel vlogs are more aspirational, seen as the
reward for the public performances of an empowered, authentic, self
whose ‘brand’ value has been recognised by beauty companies.) In weekly
‘follow me around’ vlogs, Curtis films herself doing mundane tasks:
grocery shopping, eating breakfast, cooking, having a picnic with her boy-
friend, going to the bank, playing with her dog, going to the gym, driving,
and the like. ‘Everyday mundane practices’, Genz (2015, p. 552) argues,
‘are turned into items of consumption, underlining the importance of indi-
vidual identity as a lucrative self-project and entertainment for others’.7
Letting audiences into aspects of her domestic life, including what she
might cook or the music she likes, then, is part of the autobiographical
self-construction central to this sense of authenticity and ordinariness that
makes her advice seem legitimate. Furthermore, ‘Whilst these texts may
seem apolitical in their focus on the personal and emotional contours of
the vloggers’ lives, they are engaged profoundly in the cultural politics of
 YouTube beauty vlogs  133
everyday life’ (Lovelock 2017, p. 89). Through these insights into their
daily lives, as well as the explicit advice vlogs, these vloggers perform the
self-confidence they exhort their followers to also adopt. This is young
women’s (self)empowerment as lived, albeit mediated via the screen.
Through more overtly confessional vlogs such as ‘Surviving High
School – yuck!’ (2014c), Curtis seeks to provide audiences – many of
whom would be teenage – with the tools to negotiate the fraught gendered
experiences of high school (like those that continue to be the source of
trauma for the ‘girls’ in Winners and Losers); these confessionals are prim-
arily pedagogical. The expertise of such women is that they have passed
through adolescence gendered feminine and therefore have some wisdom
to impart to their younger sisters.8 As she introduces this vlog, ‘I didn’t
have the best high school experience but I came out on top, so I wanted to
share my pearls of wisdom with you all’ (2014c). Curtis presumes, as is
common in postfeminist rhetorics, a universalised experience of girlhood
and invokes the authority of (gendered) experience, mobilising discourses
of self-acceptance, self-love, resilience, and ultimately empowerment (Gill
& Orgad 2015, 2017). She seeks to demonstrate to followers that she is
just an ‘ordinary’ girl, with experiences that would be familiar to her sub-
scribers. Consistent with the ugly-duckling-turned-swan narrative of
female adolescent development, she even includes ‘daggy’ before photo-
graphs from high school in the left-hand corner of the vlog – the contrast
between the current beauty vlogger and her past self is visually stark, indi-
cating that change is indeed possible.
As part of bringing such intimate publics into being, vloggers ‘adopt
particular techniques in order to amplify the affective relatability or gener-
ality of posts’, one of which is ‘the ability to synthesize the personal and
the generic for an imagined girlfriend audience’ so that the viewer has the
sense she is ‘just like’ the vlogger (Kanai 2017, p. 298). Curtis, like Man-
sutti, is adept at doing just that. One subscriber remarks that Lauren is her
‘favourite Youtuber’ because she ‘always keeps it real, doesn’t think she’s
better than everyone else … she’s always someone I will look up to’ (AJ, in
response to Curtis 2018). In sum, she is a down-to-earth ‘Aussie’ girl, who
is not – in popular Australian parlance – ‘up herself’. And the public
sharing of moments of failure and vulnerability is also seen to render vlog-
gers more authentic and genuine (Nunn & Biressi 2010; see Curtis 2016b),
and consequently worthy of emulation.
Like other beauty vloggers turned lifestyle-coaches, Curtis is self-­
reflexive about the grounds of her authority. For example, in ‘BOY TALK:
Overcoming Insecurities & Breakups, Finding “The One” ’ (2015a), she
films herself in her pyjamas (as if she and the audience are having a
‘sleepover’, as one viewer remarks) without make-up, signifying a more
‘raw’ emotional state. One subscriber, explicitly invoking her sisterly posi-
tioning, posted: ‘I love when you give advice and wear pjs it makes me feel
like you’re my big sister’ (KM). However, she warns her audience – with
134  YouTube beauty vlogs
what she calls a ‘mini disclaimer’ – that she is by no means a relationship
expert. Far from undermining the legitimacy of her advice, this denial of
any ‘real’ expertise further shores up her ‘ordinariness’ (Jerslev 2016,
p. 5242). Indeed, she reveals that she has had very little history with men,
so her expertise – as she freely admits – is simply predicated upon her own
limited personal experience which others may find valuable. Her number
one tip, she tells subscribers, is that break-ups ‘happen for a reason’ and
you will find ‘100% unconditional love’ in the future; this kind of new age
style rhetoric is common throughout Curtis’s vlogs. As she says, and like
the ‘calculating magic’ of self-help discussed in the subsequent chapter, she
is a ‘huge believer in: ask, believe, receive’ (Curtis 2015a).
Mobilising the trope of ‘the One’, and in contrast to its destabilisation
in our dramedies, Curtis also perpetuates heteronormative romance narrat-
ives and the celebration of the dyadic imaginary. Moreover, such vlogs
imply that part of the neoliberal postfeminist regime of taking responsib-
ility for oneself includes managing, and achieving, one’s own romance
goals (and arguably compulsory heterosexuality) with self-confidence. She
follows this up with advice on how to manage insecurities – because ‘we
[women] are so hard on ourselves’ (Curtis 2015a), and this limiting atti-
tude needs to shift. As these audience comments make clear, Curtis’s focus
is on how the individual can successfully manage her affective responses to
difficult life situations, but such advice ‘really hits home’ (JJ), with many
noting that they are in the process of negotiating break-ups and benefited
enormously from her vlog: ‘your [sic] so inspirational, this helped me and
im [sic] sure it helped alot [sic] of other people too please do more videos
like this one xx’ (AD). As in this instance, many subscribers request that
she film more such videos, thereby helping to shape her content – and her
publicly performed self – in significant ways. Audiences clearly value
Curtis on therapeutic not just aesthetic grounds. After narrating her own
break-up, one subscriber, echoing the sentiments of many, notes: ‘Thank
you for helping us girls out when we need it the most’ (MB).
Like all highly successful beauty vloggers, Curtis is positioned, and
indeed positions herself, as a role model, especially for adolescents. For
example, as early as 2013 she was offering hybridised advice–confessional
style vlogs, such as ‘Advice on BOYS, BULLYING & SELF CONFI-
DENCE!’ (2013a). This vlog was a question and answer session based on
subscriber Facebook responses to a status she posted asking followers
what kinds of advice they needed – the new media equivalent of an ‘agony
aunt’ (or in this case older sister) magazine column. In answering subscrib-
ers’ questions, she offers commentary on how to deal with online hate; cri-
tiques the sexualisation of tweens; and provides suggestions on how to
handle high school bullying. In alignment with the ‘performative insec-
urity’ that is ‘a mandatory element of femininity’ (Gill & Kanai 2018,
p. 322), there is a recurrent narrative about Curtis not always having had
self-confidence, being shy and insecure in high school, and this vlog is no
 YouTube beauty vlogs  135
exception, as she again models this transition to the ‘high self-esteem’ she
now has. Like our dramedy heroines, she has successfully transitioned
from a ‘loser’ to a ‘winner’. As Gill and Orgad (2017, p. 27) note, ‘The
trajectory is always linear: from low to high self-esteem, from poor to high
levels of confidence and resilience’. Her aspirational narrative suggests that
it is possible, for all women regardless of ‘identities, ages, backgrounds
and contexts’, to personally overcome these gendered insecurities (Gill &
Orgad 2017, p. 27), something we also identify as central to the next
vlogger we examine (Danielle Mansutti).9 For example, Curtis (2013a)
tells followers to identify their insecurities as the first step to successfully
overcoming them: ‘Start from the very core of the problem and work your
way outward from them’. Again, viewers respond effusively: ‘You have
such great advice, and you are an inspiring role model’ (PT) and Lauren
‘gets everything that most of us teenage girls feel insidee x’ (‘a’). Self-
acceptance is the remedy, and these beauty instructors commonly and
unironically offer the refrain: ‘You are beautiful as you are’ (Curtis 2018).
Given that positivity has been seen as a key trope of social media,
important to the micro-celebrity’s success (Berryman & Kavka 2018,
p. 86), in a recent post purporting to reveal ‘the truth about social media’,
Curtis (2018) notes: ‘I want people to feel empowered, or happy, or
inspired, or any kind of positive feeling’. Indicative of vloggers’ roles as
emotion managers, Curtis is effectively tutoring audiences in ‘having the
correct set of affective dispositions’ (Elias et al. 2017, p. 26), but she also
emphasises the difficulties of maintaining such positive affect in a climate
of gendered judgement and regulation. In this respect, she offers a critique
of the online attention economy in which she is deeply implicated, but the
advice she offers is for the individual to realise that social media is manu-
factured and to not take (gendered) criticisms on board. As Kanai notes,
difference is flattened out and ‘The [viewer] is positioned as implicitly
belonging in a collective of girlfriends who “get” the joys, dissatisfactions,
and annoyances of doing youthful femininity in an environment of inten-
sive regulation’ (2019, p. 162). In this vein, her followers respond enthusi-
astically: ‘I struggle so much with the mental effects of social media so this
really spoke to me!’ (SB) and ‘You should go around to schools and do
talks about this issue, you are so loved by many people and it would really
help young girls. Your [sic] such an inspiration!!’ (LB). With one even
calling her ‘super brave’ (AB) for making such a video, many subscribers
note that they appreciate her honesty in underscoring the labour associated
with social media, and how it works to create the impression of gendered
perfection which results in followers like themselves feeling inadequate.
For example, she reveals the strategies used by women YouTubers to
accentuate their positive aspects, taking photos in certain light and deploy-
ing certain poses. In true postfeminist and neoliberal fashion, however, the
solution is not to engage in a systemic critique but to simply ignore this
judgement and be more self-confident and become less susceptible to such
136  YouTube beauty vlogs
regulatory gazes (see also Brittney Lee Saunders’ ‘How to stop caring what
other people think of you’ [2018]). There appears, nevertheless, to be a
challenge to online gendered judgements that is met by an appreciative
audience of girls and young women.
Like those on other beauty vloggers’ channels, subscribers commonly
thank Curtis for her valuable ideas, express love and admiration, and praise
her relatability – for so aptly capturing how they themselves feel and
making them feel connected to a broader public of likeminded girls and
women.10 However, we cannot presume women viewers (for they are pre-
dominantly women) are unquestioningly adopting the strategies advocated
by these beauty vloggers-turned-life-coaches. Upon closer inspection, such
communities are revealed not to passively imbibe these vloggers’ maxims
about either beauty or life but to actively engage with them, including to
highlight their ethical and political limitations. In this respect, tellingly, one
particular post of Curtis’s reveals what happens when this advice, and the
authority upon which it is predicated, is seen to be problematic by audi-
ences. In the post ‘The Best Advice I’ve Ever Given’ (2017), Curtis offers
subscribers an insight into what she frames as her own life ‘philosophies’:
‘Hey guys! This video summarises the philosophies that I live my life by …
and why! They’ve changed my life in so many ways; maybe they’ll even
change yours:) xxx’. The gist of this particular vlog is that women need to
stop considering themselves victims; assuming an agency that many young
women – especially in a climate of austerity and precarious employment –
simply would not possess, she advises that ‘if you hate your job, leave’. She
continues: ‘Everything happens for a reason’, and that negative experiences
are always valuable. This post was criticised for downplaying women’s
experiences of victimisation and subordination, and the idea that the indi-
vidual just needs to change her attitude in order to feel better or to over-
come depression: the ultimate form of neoliberal postfeminist logic.
As Sophie Bishop (2018, p. 92) argues, such apparent transgressions by
vloggers can ‘cause a significant backlash’ from regular followers. Along
these lines, in addition to suggestions she delete the vlog completely, sub-
scriber criticisms include: ‘You know someone has never faced real
troubles in life when they spout things like this. So naïve’ (QK) and ‘Lauren
you do makeup tutorials for a living, you clearly are comfortable in your
financial situation and I doubt there is anything you have gone through that
would deem you qualified to speak like this and give “advice”. Stick to
what you know’ (EA). Curtis subsequently edited the post to take account
of this criticism:

EDIT: I am in NO way trying to discredit those who are suffering tre-

mendously (whether it be illness, living in a war-torn country, etc) and
I’m truly sorry I didn’t make that clearer in this video … I also
NEVER, ever want to criticise or belittle those who ARE victims –
whether it be of abuse, mental illness or bullying (to name a few).
 YouTube beauty vlogs  137
Here Curtis redrafts her post, and thus her public self, in response to audi-
ence indignation and opprobrium; this reaction and updating of self is
integral to the ongoing labour of YouTube visibility, and also makes clear
that her subscribers are not simply internalising her advice but critically
engaging with it and are willing to challenge her authority. As Maguire
notes, in such a participatory environment, the ‘audience has the capacity
to shape, speak to, and change her self-representations as they interact
with these texts’ (2017, p. 85). These women can, and do, refuse Curtis’s
postfeminist affective rhetoric of positivity, critique her privilege, and
deem her ‘solutions’ naïve and unproductive. Nevertheless, the majority of
commenters thanked her profusely for her ‘inspirational’ words, evidenc-
ing the pervasiveness of this kind of ‘take control of your own destiny’
rhetoric, presuming a self that is unhindered by gender, race, class or eco-
nomic limitations (an aspirational narrative involving the transcendence of
racial and class boundaries is similarly mobilised by Wengie).11 Another
vlogger who has likewise successfully transitioned from offering just
beauty content to focusing on the affective and psychic realm is Danielle
Mansutti, whose channel offers more in the way of ‘negative affect’ than
Curtis’s (known – like Wengie – for her upbeat, some might say ‘Pollyanna’,
attitude).

Danielle Mansutti: mental health vlogs, social media,

and the possibilities of negative affect
Danielle Mansutti has nearly 1.6 million subscribers and, like Curtis, has
transitioned from just make-up advice to all manner of ‘lifestyle’ topics –
from more superficial concerns, to issues around mental health, including
anxiety and social media bullying. Indeed, Mansutti has recently changed
(following her relocation to England) her description on YouTube to
underscore the latter. With the characteristic intimate greeting, she now
introduces herself: ‘Hey lovely! I’m Danielle Mansutti, a makeup/beauty,
lifestyle, vlog & mental health YouTuber currently living in Brighton,
England!’. On the extremely popular ‘Me and My Mental Health’ section
of her channel, Mansutti notes: ‘This is the more personal side of my
channel, where I open up about depression & bullying, offer advice and let
you know who I truly am’.12 The latter point is a familiar sentiment in
these vlogs, where vloggers note that they hope to use their platform, and
their own self-disclosure, to reach and help what are perceived to be vul-
nerable young women struggling with similar anxieties. Of course, as noted
above, philanthropic and political engagement is now an important part of
celebrity culture (Littler 2008; Hearn 2012; Rojek 2013). Not unproblem-
atically, targeting girls and young women as those seen most in need of
expert intervention is common on YouTube, through more traditional
celebrities as well as those we consider here (Taylor 2016). However, the
centrality of anxiety and panic to beauty vloggers’ brands is not a distinctly
138  YouTube beauty vlogs
Australian phenomenon, as much recent work on the British vlogger Zoella
has demonstrated (Berryman & Kavka 2018; Bishop 2018).
Mansutti’s vlogs on this section of her channel, particularly her own
confessional account of depression, accord with Berryman and Kavka’s
(2018) recent work on the productivity of negative affect in vlogging. As
they argue, despite the assumption that the online attention economy
demands positivity, negative affect and its public performance – via these
filmed expressions of anxiety, emotional vulnerability, and distress – can
further the sense of an intimate bond between vlogger and subscriber
­(Berryman & Kavka 2018, p. 87). Though such self-exposure does clearly
work to facilitate the online intimacy vital to micro-celebrity, and is thus
beneficial to their brand:

The growing prevalence of such vlogs is testament to the value of

YouTube both as a repository of anecdotal resources in the age of
emotional precarity and as a potential community for those seeking
support in dealing with their mental well-being.
(Berryman & Kavka 2018, p. 87)

Audiences also work to support vloggers after they post material charac-
terised by negative affect, as well as themselves sharing their own stories
(as the myriad comments in response to such revelatory vlogs indicate).
Mansutti – in the confessional mode that marks many vlogs – narrates
her own struggles with depression, anxiety, and self-esteem issues. On
22 May 2017, for example, she uploaded a ‘Depression and Suicide’
vlog, in which – while lying on her bed, in full make-up – she reveals she
has suffered from depression and anxiety from a young age.13 She tells
followers, rather optimistically and problematically, ‘all you need to do is
punch that depression in the face … not give it the power to take over
who we are’ (Mansutti 2017a). Like Zoella, she implores audiences to
respond to ‘panic and anxiety by simply willing it away, assuming such
transformative power is available to all social actors’, rather than just to
white, heterosexual, middle-class subjects like herself (Bishop 2018,
p. 98). However, despite this individualising rhetoric, she also argues that
depression needs to feature more in public discourse, be socially normal-
ised, and medically treated like any other illness. As throughout, and
contra both postfeminist and neoliberal logics, she refuses to position the
individual as responsible for any anxieties or insecurities she may be
experiencing, noting ‘industries thrive on us feeling bad about ourselves’
(a somewhat ironic statement given her beauty tutorials also produce
such affect).
Confessing to having been taken to ‘dark’ and ‘damaging places’ as a
result of her depression, implicitly referring to suicide, Mansutti seeks to
combat the sense of isolation that often marks periods of depression
(2017a). She reassures audiences that she speaks with authority about the
 YouTube beauty vlogs  139
dangers of suicidal thoughts because she has lived it, and perhaps more
importantly, survived. As we have shown with Curtis, such ‘revelation-
based intimacy’ is central to fostering online sociality (Kanai 2017,
p. 298), while also itself being crucial to the maintenance of an affectively
resonant celebrity. These vloggers are, in effect, a form of ‘ordinary
experts’ (Tolson 2010, pp. 283–285), and copious audience responses
reveal that their advice is seen as legitimate and appreciated, not least
because of this (albeit performed) sense of ordinariness. Moreover, the pre-
valence of ‘postfeminist disorders’ such as depression and anxiety amongst
girls and young women can be read, in McRobbie’s terms, as forms of
‘illegible rage’ (2009; Elias et al. 2017, p. 26). However, Mansutti does not
always ‘parcel’ her distress and pain ‘into a consumable, funny, light-
hearted package’, as Kanai (2017, pp. 304–305) has argued of the Tumblr
bloggers she studied, but foregrounds it. Like Kanai, Gill and Orgad
suggest that self-confidence permits no space for feeling bad; in such a
context, ‘other affects are systematically disallowed and viciously policed –
particularly insecurity’ (2017, p. 33). Conversely, Mansutti encourages her
audience to render these more negative affects visible, in the way that she
herself does through this channel.
Another vlog, ‘We need to talk about depression’ (2016c), features
Mansutti, again in the intimate space of her bed, noting that because she
has such a large platform, she needs to take the opportunity to ‘openly
discuss’ depression further. In the psychoanalytic logic of the ‘talking cure’
familiar to reality television (Shattuc 1997), she urges those suffering to
avail themselves of the participatory, confessional capacities of the form,
to ‘just talk about it, even if it’s just writing a comment below’. However,
it is common to dismiss such vloggers as engaging in a strategic form of
self-branding, underpinned by ‘entrepreneurial intent’ (Bishop 2018, p. 95)
that benefits only themselves (and the beauty companies and products with
which they are associated). Such criticisms are commonly made of celeb-
rities who engage in philanthropic (or what Rojek [2013] dubs ‘celan-
thropic’) work – that it is merely a cynical branding exercise. In contrast,
we argue this is a very limited way of responding to the cultural and affec-
tive work vloggers are doing. Vloggers are similar to reality TV lifestyle
experts, who have increasingly adopted roles formerly undertaken by those
more closely associated with the State (Lewis 2008). In such a context,
‘coaches, motivational speakers, corporate sponsors, and [micro] celeb-
rities take over the dispersed governmental work once performed by social
workers, educators and other professionals’ (Ouellette & Hay 2008,
p. 474), and via which individuals are seen to be ‘governed at a distance’
(Rose 1996). But the support, recognition, and the intimate publics they
help produce should not just be discounted as a form of governmentality.
As Amy Dobson notes in her analysis of pain memes, and as Michael
Lovelock (2017) and Tobias Raun (2018) have similarly argued in their
analyses of coming out and trans vlogs respectively, ‘young people may go
140  YouTube beauty vlogs
online for support from peer audiences because speaking to healthcare
practitioners is experienced as fruitless at best and abusive at worst’
(Dobson 2015b, p. 177; see also boyd 2014).
In ‘Living with Social Anxiety’ (2016b), which received over 3,000 sub-
scriber comments, Mansutti again encourages those who feel they cannot
discuss such issues elsewhere to form a ‘community’ in the comments
section and ‘help each other out’.14 Here, she explicitly calls upon her audi-
ence to form a digital intimate public, providing each other with empathy
and online support. Such vlogs, then, help create ‘networked communities
that foster care of the self’ (Ouellette & Arcy 2015, p. 103). As in earlier
vlogs, she emphasises that her advice is in no way professional, just her
‘personal story’ about how she has managed social anxiety, and – rather
than simply changing their attitudes (though she does this at points too) –
she encourages viewers to seek professional help as she has done. While
Mansutti may appear outwardly to be successful she is at pains to establish
that her inner life (like those of her subscribers) is much more complicated
than her make-up tutorials imply, and she routinely draws clear distinc-
tions between these performances and the ‘real’ Dani accessible via vlogs.
In her automedial advice vlogs, Mansutti constructs herself as a highly
insecure, unconfident woman, seeking to demonstrate that she suffers in
the way many women do – despite her beauty vlogger celebrity. In ‘I’m
Not Good Enough’ (2016a), which is explicitly framed as ‘sharing advice’,
she confesses to having life-long ‘self-esteem issues’. She remarks: ‘Just
because I post photos of myself doesn’t mean that I’m super confident …
the biggest journey I am going on in my 20s is learning to love myself’.
Throughout such vlogs, Mansutti underscores that it is social media
and especially her profession that results in her subjection to an intensi-
fied, regulatory (largely female) gaze – itself a mark of postfeminism
(Banet-Weiser 2012; Winch 2013). Social media lives, she emphasises, are
not ‘reality’, but heavily curated, and merely work to ensure audiences feel
bad about themselves. This is a familiar, if ironic, refrain in the beauty
vlogosphere (as the previous section on Curtis has shown).15 Rather than
simply unequivocally celebrating her job as a beauty vlogger, as is common
(Banet-Weiser 2017), she notes ‘I am scrutinised so hard on everything
that I do online’ and that this kind of labour, without the face-to-face
sociality of a regular workplace, is isolating and anxiety-provoking. She
tells her audience that she ‘plays a little bit of character online’, perform-
ing as ‘so much more bubbly and lively’ to ‘come across as really happy
and carefree and everything’ (Mansutti 2016a). Indicative of the ‘limitless
positivity’ (Bishop 2018, p. 102) said to be required of women vloggers,
she underscores how being a YouTuber is, like other forms of micro-­
celebrity, a ‘performative practice’ (Marwick & boyd 2011) – including in
terms of embodying positive affect: ‘If I’m not really happy that day, I just
put on a smile for work’. Conversely, in advice vlogs (as opposed to
beauty tutorials), she disavows this performative aspect and positions
 YouTube beauty vlogs  141
herself as genuine and authentic, using this vlog’s lack of a ‘script’ as
further evidence of its purportedly unmediated nature. As Berryman and
Kavka argue,

if forced positivity is fake, then unforced negativity must be ‘real’. The

validation for engaging in negative affective labour is thus the
increased credibility that accompanies self-exposure, to the extent that
the more negative the personal material exposed, the more ‘real’ it is
taken to be.
(2018, p. 90)

As she notes in the paratext of ‘I’m Not Good Enough’ (Mansutti 2016a),
in the form of a short, written blurb located beneath it: ‘Today’s video is
an important video focusing upon self-worth, insecurities, low self-esteem
and negativity. I hope this helps at least one of you. Please remember that
you’re amazing. x’. As evidence of its resonance, viewer commentary (over
1,770 posts) in response to this vlog is overwhelmingly supportive, with
many noting how ‘relatable’ she is and how much this particular video has
helped them in terms of their own self-esteem issues. She also suggests that
her project represents an ethical use of the audience she has secured; that
is, as a micro-celebrity with a platform for reaching so many, she tells us it
is her duty to help her (women) viewers reconceptualise themselves and
their bodies:

I am so blessed to have an audience of 1.4 million of you, I just feel

that if there’s any way I can make your day better or make you see
yourself in a different way … then I couldn’t ask for anything more.
(Mansutti 2016a)

This ethical stance is seen to be important in terms of how audiences per-

ceive beauty vloggers, and whether they will continue to receive audience
support; they cannot be merely product ambassadors. As Florencia Garcia-
Rapp notes, for the audiences who consume them, ‘participating in order
to help and inspire others is seen as a legitimate reason to create videos,
while looking to become famous or rich are examples of unacceptable
motivations’ (2017, p. 7). In this respect, by branding herself as compas-
sionate and caring, Mansutti (like Curtis) appears to be in it for the ‘right’
reasons not simply commercial reward or fame, ensuring she remains at
once ‘true to herself’ and ‘just like us’ (Garcia-Rapp 2017). Nevertheless,
while we could dismiss these personal revelations or experiences as merely
being ‘shared in exchange for quantifiable signifiers of popularity … which
in turn can be translated into celebrity status and monetary gain’ (Lovelock
2017, p. 90), such negative affect vlogs – due to their often confronting
and ‘raw’ content – are not likely to result in monetisation (Berryman &
Kavka 2018, pp. 93–94).16 Their value, as we will suggest, lies elsewhere.
142  YouTube beauty vlogs
Confidence culture and (post)feminism
As we have noted, such vlogs in some ways exemplify the ‘confidence
cult(ure)’ of postfeminist neoliberalism; for Gill and Orgad, the ‘cult(ure)
of confidence … lets patriarchal culture entirely off the hook –
­apportioning blame to women’ (2015, p. 340). As part of a wider culture
of self-help, Gill and Orgad emphasise, such discourses have a much
longer history, but in the contemporary climate ‘what makes it distinctive
is its gendered address to girls and women, and its apparent embrace of
feminist language and goals’ (2015, p. 325). While Gill and Orgad (2017,
p. 26) argue that confidence culture ‘turns on its head the notion that the
personal is political, and turns away from political critique and any ques-
tioning of the culture that might produce self-doubt or lack of confidence
in women’, Mansutti does not locate women’s insecurities in themselves
(as is common in self-help) but sees them as the product of a wider perni-
cious, gendered culture of surveillance. Although generally no collectivist
solutions are directly offered, women are not seen to be responsible for
their anxieties.
Consistent with Gill and Orgad’s (2015, p. 340) analysis, Mansutti at
times sees gendered insecurities as surmountable, something that ‘could
and should be “overcome” with the right techniques or self-regulation
practices or a suitably “adjusted” (mind)set’. Yet a recurrent theme in her
mental health vlogs is that this is much easier said than done, and her own
ongoing struggles in this regard are narrated as evidence of the persistent
judgement of women’s bodies in the online environment. However, we
must be mindful that Mansutti – as a beauty vlogging star – directly parti-
cipates in and benefits from the postfeminist ‘injurious culture of body per-
fection and women’s perfectionism’ (Gill & Orgad, 2015, pp. 340–341),
and women’s desire to aesthetically always be otherwise. This is the
tension that marks all these beauty-turned-advice channels, and upon
which Mansutti herself persistently reflects.
At the heart of Mansutti’s rhetoric of self-acceptance and self-love is a
critique of the judgement and regulation of women’s bodies, that, at the
very least, and similar to our self-help books, is indebted to feminist inter-
pretive frameworks. In a number of vlogs (2016a, 2017b, 2017c), Man-
sutti confesses to having had extremely ‘unhealthy’ moments regarding her
body, and her audience commonly reciprocate, revealing their personal
‘struggles’ in the comment sections. As she tells audiences, in a rhetoric
consistent with that of popular feminist authors such as Naomi Wolf
(1990), ‘We have grown up surrounded by these ideal Westernised bodies,
and if we don’t fit that standard, we believe there is something wrong with
us … we teach ourselves to feel inadequate and that’s not right’ (2017a).
Importantly, she does not advocate consumption – of beauty products or
other commodities – as the way to move beyond such feelings of inad-
equacy, as other vloggers such as Zoella have done (Bishop 2018). For
 YouTube beauty vlogs  143
Mansutti, aesthetic labour does not produce self-confidence and therefore
she does not explicitly propose this as a way for her audience to manage
such negative affect. She does, however, advocate a change in attitude.
In another vlog, ‘Hating Your Body and Unhealthy Relationship with
Food’, she addresses her intended audience:

This video is for anyone who has ever looked at themselves in the
mirror and hated what they saw, for anyone who has ever spent hours
comparing themselves to girls on Instagram or in magazines … I want
to teach you how to love your body. It’s the most amazing mechanism
in the world. It just wants to feel the love from you that it deserves.
(2017b)

Such ‘love your body’ (LYB) discourses have been cast as fundamentally
ambivalent, especially as they appear to reinscribe the female body as
pathologised: ‘LYB discourses rely upon and reinforce the cultural intelligi-
bility of the female body as inherently “difficult to love” ’ (Gill & Elias
2014, p. 184). Naturalising and normalising this bodily hatred, position-
ing it as a universalised feminine experience, serves simply to buttress the
kinds of gendered assumptions advertisers, such as Dove, purport to be
contesting (Gill & Elias 2014; see also Banet-Weiser 2017). For Gill and
Elias (2014, p. 185), such LYB discourses simply represent a new form of
regulating women, not just physically but also psychically. As we con-
clude, however, responses to these vlogs complicate such framing.
The emphasis in Mansutti’s mental health vlogs, as the above examples
make clear, is on ‘self-love not self-hate, self-assurance not insecurity,
building the self, not self-harm, positive image not self-criticism etc’ (Gill
& Orgad 2015, p. 341). While Gill and Orgad dismiss the feminist
potentialities of such discourses, we are more circumspect, given that
such advice appears to be reverberating with audiences; they offer, we
would suggest, more than just an ‘instrumentalised’ and/or reactionary
form of feminism that works to merely buttress postfeminism in a more
complicated way than disavowal (Kanai 2019; see also Gill 2017; Gill &
Orgad 2017; Banet-Weiser 2018). For example, in a recent vlog about
doctoring photos of herself using the ‘Facetune’ application (Mansutti
2018), which begins with a deep sigh to signal some difficulty in raising
the forthcoming material,17 Mansutti critically reflects upon the effects of
her self-representational practices on her audience, especially as young
girls often write to her about their imperfect bodies after consuming her
heavily edited photographs: ‘We [beauty vloggers] are contributing to
this problem, and I am being such a hypocrite. How on earth can I put
up a photo about body acceptance and self-love if that photo is edited?
… I’m so done with sending out a false image of who I am’ (Mansutti
2018). She thus frames ‘authenticity’ as a moral duty, and remarks that
she hopes to ‘start a movement’ against airbrushing and photo-shopping,
144  YouTube beauty vlogs
given the damage it is causing to her young women subscribers. Again,
the response from audiences is effusive, celebrating her generosity, open-
ness, and self-reflexivity; one tells her it is one of the ‘rawest and realist
videos you’ve ever made and I’m proud of you’ (SS) – numerous fol-
lowers express such pride at her public refusal to no longer ‘mask’ her
real self and to take a stand about these formerly invisible practices of
apparent misrepresentation.
Guaranteeing subscribers that she will no longer use such apps, because
of how they make young women feel about themselves, Mansutti encour-
ages others with power in this attention economy to do the same: ‘I want
to apologise to you for what I’ve done … it would be great if other influ-
encers would join me on this’. Here, the ‘problem’ is not insecure audi-
ences who just need to accept themselves and develop self-confidence, but
the beauty vloggers who are thoroughly implicated in, and whose practices
work to foster, the judgement and regulation of women’s bodies. This may
not appear to be what some would consider feminist work in a traditional
sense, but there is no doubt that this is a noteworthy political gesture,
calling into question the impetus towards bodily perfection for women,
and how a collective of women (i.e. beauty vloggers) can take action to
transform attitudes and gendered behaviours.
Intimate publics, such as those brought into being in and through these
vlogs, can be conceptualised as ‘juxtapolitical’, signalling a form of social-
ity which:

thrives in proximity to the political, occasionally crossing over in

political alliance, even more occasionally doing some politics, but
most often than not, acting as a critical chorus that sees the expression
of emotional response and conceptual recalibration as achievement
enough.
(Berlant in Douglas & Poletti 2016, p. 200;
see also Dobson 2015b; McDermott 2018; Kanai 2019)

Crucially, as Kate Douglas and Anna Poletti (2016, p. 201) underscore,

though she is concerned with why these feelings and their public articu-
lation do not translate into social and political change, Berlant does not
devalue such affective work in favour of political organising (as more tan-
gible political work with ‘real’ outcomes). As Berlant notes:

One of the main jobs of the minoritized arts that circulate through
mass culture [in which we can now place vlogs] is to tell identifying
consumers that ‘you are not alone (in your struggles, desires, pleas-
ures)’: this is something we know but never tire of hearing confirmed,
because aloneness is one of the affective experiences of being collec-
tively, structurally unprivileged.
(2008, pp. ix–x)
 YouTube beauty vlogs  145
Young women’s experiences are not individualised in these vlogs, but – in
addition to being ‘powerful forces for the discussion of the life experiences
of young people’ – something that unites these anxious postfeminist sub-
jects, even if not necessarily resulting in ‘substantive cultural change’
(Douglas & Poletti 2016, p. 201).
Indicative of its power, Mansutti’s critique of the judgement and self-
surveillance of her body (2017b) appears to resonate with women sub-
scribers, who overwhelmingly dub her ‘inspirational’ in the comments
section: ‘Your words are so empowering. You go Dani!!!’ (AM), for
instance. Another follower draws attention to her implicitly feminist work:
‘Ah this is just what I needed to hear; made me cry; thankyou for sharing
how you’ve felt and doing all you can to make a difference. Women sup-
porting women’ (AC). Many others also note that they watched with tears
in their eyes, and reciprocate by sharing their own deeply held bodily anxi-
eties. Similarly, in response to another vlog (2017c), a young girl posts:
‘I’m 12 and every time I go on social media I feel pressured to be perfect
and to have looks and body and it makes me feel so down but I just
watched this video and it was so relatable and special! all your videos help
me live through everyday! thank you for everything xxx’ (TM). The
majority of this intimate public appear grateful to know that they are not
alone, indicating such vlogs are fulfilling an important affective function
that should not, we argue, be discounted – despite its emergence from a
beauty channel. As Ouellette and Arcy (2015, p. 111) note, drawing upon
Sara Ahmed, ‘we need to be careful about collapsing all forms of self-care
under the banner of neoliberalism [or indeed postfeminism]’, and recognise
the affective and political potential of such vlogs.

Conclusion
As we have shown, these vloggers help to bring into being intimate
publics, and act as sites for the public performance of both positive and
negative affect, offering feminist-informed critiques of gendered judge-
ments that speak to large audiences of girls and young women. Central to
this transnational semioscape of confidence and care is a form of postfemi-
nist kinship (like in the dramedy chapter), much needed in a neoliberal
environment in which the individual is supposed to ‘do it herself’. While
they may seek to sell make-up, they also use this platform in another way:
to make explicit and help to manage the anxieties, tensions, and often pain
that constitute contemporary girls’ and women’s subjectivities. We are not
suggesting this is unproblematic, especially given the positioning of anxiety
as something all young women must now face and manage in the same
way (Gill & Orgad 2015), but we cannot ignore that ‘the emotion work of
advice-giving and the communication of support constitute important
arenas of political activity’ (Renstchler 2014, p. 77). These vloggers
provide a space for, and themselves model, the sharing of experiences and
146  YouTube beauty vlogs
strategies (at times consistent with postfeminism and neoliberalism, at
others not), performed by the individual but recommended to the
collective.
Although, of course, engaged in acts of self-representation that are pro-
foundly shaped by the platform, they are best conceptualised as ‘suffering
actors’, working to publicly make sense – both for themselves and for
those who become enfolded into these intimate publics – of their contra-
dictory positioning within neoliberal and postfeminist logics, and are argu-
ably interested ‘less in changing the world than in not being defeated by it’
(Berlant in Harris & Dobson 2015, p. 9; see also Dobson & Kanai 2018;
McDermott 2018). Such vlogs, though not conventional political forms,
do evidence young women’s ‘struggles for coherence, social acceptance and
survival’, which need to be better understood as agentic, and we would
add feminist, acts (Harris & Dobson 2015, p. 9, emphasis added; see also
Dobson 2015b). However, this is not a simple attempt to recuperate these
vlogs as resistant rather than normative, the problems of which have been
outlined by other critics (Garcia-Rapp 2018; McDermott 2018), but to
emphasise that we need to further attend to the affective and psychic life of
popular culture, as well as to the kind of feminisms that may be mobilised
therein (Gill & Kanai 2018; Kanai 2019), something we also take up in
the next chapter on self-help literature.
In feminist terms, the supportive networks we have identified as consti-
tuting the beauty vlogging semioscape are significant, especially in offering
affective bonds to, at times quite isolated, women (in Australian rural set-
tings as well as regional towns, for instance). These networks also offer a
kind of solidarity, particularly around the ongoing judgement and regula-
tion of women’s bodies, with many increasingly using their vlogs to
provide tools for girls and young women to negotiate this, often toxic,
environment by means other than withdrawal. As we have posited, despite
their reinscription of ‘confidence culture’ rhetoric, it is not productive to
completely dismiss these vloggers’ affective ties and advice, and to criticise
them for not offering manifestos to collectively dismantle the patriarchy is
misplaced. But we can further think through the needs these young women
are fulfilling and the kinds of femininities they, and their audiences/fans,
are being expected to embody in contemporary Australia – and, given the
transnational nature of postfeminism, beyond.
If this feminism of self-love, confidence, and acceptance – even when it
is perhaps contradicted by the beauty pedagogies in which it is implicated
– is the kind that is resonating with young women, we need to engage with
why this might be the case, including via more empirical work. Finally,
despite much scholarship that presumes postfeminism successfully captures
unwitting female audiences (a deeply gendered position critiqued by cul-
tural studies long ago), they are no more ‘duped’ by these vloggers than
they are by other forms of popular culture – something which applies as
much to its creators. As Mary Celeste Kearney (2015, p. 272; see also
 YouTube beauty vlogs  147
White 2015) argues, ‘Surely there is more to these … girl-made media than
their creators’ passive absorption of postfeminist rhetoric’. The next
chapter, building upon the ideas canvassed here, focuses on the ways in
which feminism has come to inform self-help discourse, itself a space for
thinking through how macro political shifts may play out at the micro
level of individual women’s lives, and how a spectral form of feminism is
being invoked to help make sense of, and negotiate the ongoing tensions
in, contemporary Australian women’s lives.

Notes
  1 Although it is beyond the scope of this chapter to further take up how girls are
framed in scholarship on postfeminism, it is worth noting that in myriad
studies, girls and young women are considered to be particularly problematic
within postfeminist (and indeed neoliberal) discursive frameworks. For
example,
Girlness – particularly adolescent girlness – epitomizes postfeminism. If the
postfeminist woman is always in process, always using the freedom and
equality handed to her by feminism in pursuit of having it all … but never
quite managing to reach full adulthood, to fully have it all, one could say
that the postfeminist woman is quintessentially adolescent … no matter
what her age.
(Projansky 2007, p. 45)
For a critique of such critical positioning, see Kearney (2015) and Driscoll (2018).
  2 While our central preoccupation here is not labour, it is crucial, as Brooke Erin
Duffy (2017, p. 48) reminds us, to not just dismiss vloggers as dupes of capit-
alism – or, we would add, patriarchy – unwittingly providing ‘free’ labour,
‘just for the fun of it’, or in the service of pernicious beauty industries. Rather,
as she found, young women ‘approach social media creation with strategy,
purpose, and aspirations of career success’ and ‘the production of social media
content’ provides an opportunity through which young can women ‘manage
one’s employment prospects in the face of radical uncertainty’ (Duffy 2017,
pp. 48, 54, original emphasis). This is not to normalise or be uncritical of such
precarity, but to highlight young women’s creative responses to it. Although
contracts with corporations or sponsorship deals, or the creation of their own
beauty and/or fashion lines, are not available to all (Banet-Weiser 2017,
p. 272), the vloggers we look at have achieved success and transformed their
labour into a viable career, reliant, of course, on a consistent self-brand.
  3 As Gill notes (2007, p. 182) of women’s magazines, ‘Beauty editors routinely
receive huge boxes of free gifts from the cosmetic companies eager for their
new product to get a write up; fashion editors “borrow” clothes from design-
ers, fashion houses and clothes stores to photograph or describe …’. This role,
as previously remarked in our chapters on chick lit and women’s magazines,
has now in many ways been taken up by beauty vloggers, especially through
what are referred to as ‘haul’ vlogs where vloggers review products that have
been sent to them.
  4 They commonly offer travel vlogs, where trips are usually sponsored by a cos-
metics company, such as Benefit, and there is commonly a group of beauty
vloggers. These filmed holidays to luxury destinations such as the Maldives, in
addition to providing further insight into vloggers’ lives, work to create the
148  YouTube beauty vlogs
sense of the desirability and viability of beauty vlogging as an occupation for
young women. Their lives are considerably glamourised and their online labour
is shown to significantly pay off; of course as many scholars have pointed out
(Duffy 2017; Banet-Weiser 2017), this is not the case for all vloggers.
  5 As Turner (2004) argues, such a shift is itself constitutive of celebrity.
  6 The many ‘follow me’ style vlogs – where she speaks directly into a hand-held
camera, or perhaps phone, with the audiences effectively accompanying her on
her various errands – purport to offer an unmediated access (itself, of course,
impossible) to the ‘real’ Curtis (see ‘Snoop in My Bag, Closets and Fridge’,
2014b), and thus are integral to this sense of intimacy (Smith & Watson 2015).
That is, they are central to establishing the authenticity upon which this form
relies for its success. In a piece titled ‘WeeklyVlog: Whaaat Did I Just Eat?!’,
Curtis (2016c) tells viewers: ‘I’m really enjoying vlogging cos I feel like it
allows you guys to get to know me better, which is super important to me! Let
me know what you thought!:) xxx’.
  7 Such vlogs often dually function as promotional videos, as she sometimes lists
the brands of clothes she is wearing or the various products she is consuming.
  8 See Berryman and Kavka (2017) for an analysis of the ‘big sister’ positioning of
beauty vloggers.
  9 Viewers, however, are aware of the contradiction of such advice coming from a
beauty influencer: ‘I like your videos but this is a little hypocritical – you’re
saying you shouldnt [sic] wear too much make up but your whole job revolves
around beauty, make up and looking a certain way’ (HS, in response to
‘Advice on Boys, Bullying and Self Confidence!’).
10 In this respect, though of course very different texts, their responses are remin-
iscent of those sent to authors of ‘feminist blockbusters’, such as Betty Friedan
and Germaine Greer, who are routinely credited with articulating what women
readers themselves simply could not (Taylor 2016).
11 Enormously popular Asian-Australian beauty/lifestyle vlogger Wengie (nearly
13.4 million followers), who mounts a significant challenge to the whiteness of
the beauty vlogosphere, reassures her followers that it is possible to ‘come from
nothing and create a really good life for yourself … You shouldn’t be limited
by any circumstances you were born in’ (2015). She emphasises the agency,
self-motivation, and creativity of the refugee subject, one who is unhindered by
race or class and who uses their adversity to become a successful, upwardly
mobile entrepreneur.
12 This section was available during 2017 and 2018 while we were undertaking
this research, however it appears to have been removed. Individual vlogs that
made up this section are still available on YouTube.
13 Her first vlog along these lines, ‘Bullying and Depression: My Story’, was
uploaded in December 2014, focusing on the bullying she had experienced at
school and on Facebook (including groups such as ‘Dani’s an ugly whore’ and
‘Dani’s a fat slut’ where photos would be uploaded without her consent and
she would be ridiculed). She suggests that Tumblr was her ‘saviour’, where she
blogged about these issues and took control of her representation (2014).
14 This vlog is very similar to one offered by the UK’s most subscribed beauty
vlogger, Zoella, entitled ‘Dealing with Panic Attacks and Anxiety’ (7 Novem-
ber 2012).
15 She notes that ‘social media is the edited existence of our being, so it isn’t
“us” ’ (Mansutti 2017c).
16 As Berryman and Kavka note (2018, p. 93),
At odds with the YouTube Partner Policy updated in late August 2016,
these vlogs run the risk of being judged ‘not advertiser friendly’ should they
 YouTube beauty vlogs  149
involve profanities or discuss ‘sensitive subjects’ (YouTube, n.d.), in turn
preventing vloggers registered with the Partner Program from generating
revenue through the adverts placed before, during and around these videos.
17 As Berryman and Kavka further note, ‘YouTubers proclaim that their uneasi-
ness at discussing such personal information will be “worth it” if the message
of their videos resonates with their viewers’ (2018, p. 89).

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150  YouTube beauty vlogs
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5 Self-help books
Calculating magic as postfeminist
everyday philosophy

In the previous chapter we observed the semioscape of confidence and

care: young women’s expertise in, and methods of, care for the self and for
others in an online platform. This chapter continues our interest in the
affective and psychic dimensions of postfeminism as advocated by Ana
Elias et al. (2017, p. 5), however, we turn to the print form of women’s
self-help books, and a more diverse (in terms of age) readership. We argue
that the semioscape of Australian women’s self-help books takes the form
of an everyday philosophy for the ideal postfeminist woman: a way of
thinking, feeling, and acting that we term ‘calculating magic’. This philo-
sophy hybridises the calculating mentality characterising neoliberalism
(Brown 2009, p. 43) and a non-scientific mode of belief and ‘knowledge’.
This hybrid term suggests not so much a double-entanglement of feminist
and anti-feminist ideas (as in Angela McRobbie’s influential formulation of
postfeminism [2009, p. 13]), but rather, the ideologico-historical location
of contemporary women’s self-help. It is caught between second wave fem-
inism and neoliberal times and precepts. While Australian chick lit uses
tropes of aspiration and independence to stage a feministic remake of the
economy of signs and space, self-help books act as a prime site for the fem-
inisation of neoliberalism – the process by which neoliberalism is ‘made
over’ in terms attractive to a female audience (as also observed by Gill
2007b; Taylor 2012, amongst others). Simultaneously, however, self-help
continues, in attenuated form, the legacy of second wave feminism.
The category of self-help and advice books refers to the range of sub-
genres purporting to offer guidance to readers, spanning self-actualisation
texts, health and fitness, parenting advice, domestic etiquette, personal
finances, and career help. Indeed, this range suggests the expansion and
increasing appeal of the genre, which dates from the 1980s in the United
States (Ebben 1995, p. 111) – the decade of Reaganism and its intensifica-
tion of neoliberalism. Alongside the proliferation of self-help books,
according to Kylie Murphy Murdoch, ‘in the 1980s it was the sub-genres
of self-help that were gendered’ (2001, p. 161), with many titles being
published specifically for women. In the twenty-first century, women are
now major producers of self-help advice, the main readership (Miller &
156  Self-help books
McHoul 1998, p. 145), and the implied subjects of so many of these
books.1 As a consequence, self-help is a focus in analyses of postfeminist
culture (McRobbie 2004; Gill 2007b; Taylor 2012; Adamson & Salmen-
niemi 2017). In these accounts, self-help’s typical mode of privatising, indi-
viduating, and disciplining the female self along heteronormative and/or
neoliberal lines exemplifies the postfeminist trope of the makeover (Gill
2007b), thereby making it a core and problematic postfeminist genre.
To better understand its popularity and its feminist potential, we take a
slightly different approach, one suggested by Eva Illouz’s study of self-help
culture, in which she advocates exploring how the discourse of self-help
‘accomplishes certain things that “work” in people’s everyday lives’ (2008,
p. 21). This approach allows us to position women readers as agentic
rather than passive subjects, an identity confirmed by studies that show
self-help readers to be critical and strategic readers (Grodin 1995, p. 126;
Nehring 2016, p. 161). To see how self-help ‘helps [women] do things’
(Illouz 2008, p. 20), and to identify its affective mechanics and rhetorics,
we analyse selected texts from four sub-genres. Our focus is on self-help
books written by women based in Australia, using Australian publishers,
and directed at an implied female audience.2 We first provide a brief over-
view of the structure and development of the field of Australian women’s
self-help texts, a broad but invaluable contextual focus largely absent from
accounts of postfeminist self-help, and one that demonstrates self-help’s in
between location. We then analyse the way in which the semioscape of
calculating magic is figured in examples from four key sub-genres of
­Australian self-help literature: self-actualisation guides, health and fitness
books, mothering guides, and career advice.
Our chapter contends that postfeminist self-help is a modification of,
and replacement for, the second wave feminist practice of consciousness-
raising. Extending Cynthia D. Schrager’s observation that self-help appro-
priates feminist elements (1993, p. 188), we argue that women’s self-help
is dependent on second wave feminist insights – that women are full,
complex, and agentic subjects; that women’s lives and issues matter; and
that there is a specifically female audience who must be addressed. Further-
more, self-help revisits unresolved feminist issues, such as work, mother-
hood, and relationships. These issues, however, are increasingly articulated
by neoliberal languages and frameworks – the calculating magic of the
semioscape – rather than the collective and political analysis of conscious-
ness-raising. Self-help, however, does not so much co-opt feminism for
purely commercial purposes, as Arlie Russell Hochschild (1994) argues of
1970s and 1980s self-help, an argument that returns now in terms of femi-
nism’s putative instrumentalisation in popular culture (Kanai 2017). Nor
is self-help antagonistic to feminism, as many accounts of postfeminism
suggest (for instance, Faludi 1991; Gill 2007a; McRobbie 2009). Rather,
postfeminist self-help is a palimpsestic form, its feminist substrate now
being partly overlaid with neoliberal ideology or discourses amenable to
 Self-help books  157
neoliberalism, such as the therapeutic and the aesthetic.3 This superimposi-
tion occurs for reasons of historical context (discussed below) and conven-
tions of genre. The very textual features that made self-help attractive to
second wave feminist self-help classics such as Our Bodies Our Selves
(1971) and Fat Is a Feminist Issue (1979) – its teleological and optimistic
narrative structure of personal transformation, valorisation of the agentic
reader, use of alternative knowledges, and respect for emotions – also
make it ideal for personalising and textualising aspects of the neoliberal
project for women readers.4
Self-help books continually echo feminism – an echo only growing
louder given feminism’s new visibility or ‘luminosity’ (McRobbie 2009;
Gill 2016) – but are constrained by their form, and by the related broader
historical context in which collectivist and redistributive politics and idea-
tional frameworks are marginal. At the same time that ‘therapeutic
culture’ extends its reach and power (Illouz 2008, p. 217), the neoliberal
project of the self is valorised throughout Western culture. As in most of
our chapters, we therefore reveal much more complicated discursive
terrain than feminism’s disavowal or, in more recent accounts, its contain-
ment through instrumentalisation. Similar to Rebecca Munford and
Melanie Waters’ analysis of popular culture (2014), self-help preserves
feminism, rather than marking its pastness, even if in a spectral form.

From consciousness-raising to self-help

Anthony Giddens (1991) places self-help books in the broad context of
late modernity and its process of individualisation (briefly discussed here in
Chapter 2). Giddens (using the example of a self-help book) characterises
the late modern self ‘as a reflexive project, for which the individual is
responsible … We are, not what we are, but what we make of ourselves’
(1991, p. 75).5 Such a self is brought into being by the post-traditional
order: ‘In conditions of high modernity,’ he explains, ‘we all not only
follow lifestyles, but in an important sense are forced to do so – we have
no choice but to choose’ (1991, p. 81). For Giddens, self-help books
express and help us to negotiate the lifestyle choices defining the late
modern self, and thus as women become full participants in modernity,
they too have to negotiate increased choices, a negotiation we discussed as
central to television dramedy. Thus, Giddens’ account suggests that self-
help is an unavoidable contemporary textual form rather than a specifi-
cally neoliberal, and hence intrinsically compromised, genre.
This potential of self-help is evident in accounts that have explored the
relationship between post-Second World War self-help books and the
women’s movement. Steven Starker and Anthea Taylor, for instance, both
note the importance of Helen Gurley Brown’s Sex and the Single Girl as a
proto-feminist self-help book (Starker 1989, p. 90), while Wendy Simonds
(1992, p. 5) argues that ‘the current wave of [women’s] self-help books’
158  Self-help books
begins with Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique in 1963. As mentioned
above, second wave feminism went on to use self-help for collective and
political purposes, and, given the huge popularity of women’s self-help
books and the decline of consciousness-raising, some critics now argue
that feminism needs to reoccupy the space of self-help books (Schrager
1993, p. 189; Murdoch 2001, p. 160), as it clearly has much potential as a
form of popular feminism.
A closer examination of the components that comprise Australian
women’s self-help texts provides insights into the way in which the genre
operates in the Antipodes.6 First, our analysis of the genre’s contents iden-
tifies the particular authorial subject and implied reader. Like other ver-
sions of women’s therapeutic culture (Swan 2017, p. 279) and the ideal
postfeminist subject (Tasker & Negra 2007), authors and readers are over-
whelmingly white – or at least racially unmarked, heterosexual (often
married or divorced), nominally middle class or aspiring to a middle-class
lifestyle, and often having children. Regardless of the esoteric nature of
some of the philosophies and techniques, self-help is about conventional
Australian women.
Second, the genre has expanded significantly, though it has attracted
scarce scholarly attention.7 The number of women’s self-help books pub-
lished has increased, particularly at the start of the twenty-first century.
Paralleling this is an increased range of books, expanding beyond domestic
guides and etiquette books to include finance, careers, relationships, sexu-
ality, fitness, and philosophy. Moreover, each sub-genre shows an increase
in titles: the category of women’s financial guides, for instance, increases
from zero texts in the 1970s, two in the 1980s, to fifteen in the 2000s, and
seven so far in the 2010s. And although boundaries between sub-genres
are porous, self-actualisation texts appear to dominate the field: from 1996
to 2017 it has 70 works compared to health and fitness at 50; followed by
parenting advice, relationship guides, and inspirational memoirs with
similar numbers (the low 30s).8
This increase in the range and volume of women’s self-help books, and
the predominance of self-actualisation texts, should be framed by three
historically overlapping and partially complementary contexts. The
augmentation of women’s self-help suggests a post-women’s movement era
marked by the full participation of women in society, their attainment of
subject status, and the resultant roles required of women. In addition,
­Australian women’s self-help seems evidence of the ‘therapeutic culture’
that, as Frank Furedi (2004) and Illouz (2008) argue, has permeated
everyday life, public institutions, and the corporate sector in the West.
Therapeutic culture ‘posits the self in distinctly fragile and feeble form and
insists that the management of life requires the continuous intervention of
therapeutic expertise’ (Furedi 2004, p. 21). In Australia, as in other
advanced capitalist nations, individualistic, therapeutic, and hence apoliti-
cal solutions to, and understandings of, the contemporary female self at all
 Self-help books  159
stages and in all aspects of life are dominant, paralleled by an increased
postfeminist visibility of women and girls as valuable (to capitalism) sub-
jects. At the same time, the self-help industry is now a ‘hybrid trans-
national phenomenon’ (Nehring 2016, p. 157), with self-help books being
an informal and inexpensive form of therapeutic expertise.
Micki McGee’s concept of the ‘belabored self’ (2005) as product of con-
temporary capitalism is also applicable to these Australian texts. McGee
links American self-help books to changes in late capitalism, particularly
the entry of women into the workforce (see also Salecl 2009, p. 161) and
in terms of labour market requirements, two contextual factors that
­Australia shares. For McGee, self-help books are coping guides for inse-
cure working lives, providing advice for self-improvement to keep the indi-
vidual marketable, and offering the hope of an authentic self (2005, p. 16).
As a consequence, the notion of the ‘self-made man’ is replaced by ‘the
belabored self’ (including women): ‘overworked both as the subject and as
the object of its own effort at self-improvement’ (2005, p. 16, emphasis
added). The belaboured self is belaboured on two levels: in the workplace,
namely, in the way in which workers must relentlessly self-improve to
remain relevant, and, on a more personal level, with the requirement that
now women as well as men must ‘focus on inventing an autonomous or
self-sufficient self’ (2005, p. 16). We argue that this second level of the
belaboured self also aligns with the neoliberal reduction in the Australian
welfare state and the public sector and its turn to self-responsibilisation,
expressed in palatable-sounding policies such as ‘mutual obligation’
(Castles 2001, p. 542) and building community and individual ‘resilience’
(Bottrell 2013). And, given their traditional and ongoing role as care-givers
(something Offspring considers), the belaboured self has especial valence
for women.
McGee’s insights are borne out in the proliferation and contents of
Australian self-help texts: like women’s magazine titles, all stages and
­
activities of a woman’s life are subject to the regimes of self-help. In effect,
women’s supposed formal equality and liberation have paradoxically
increased the ways women are seen as lacking – we become the vulnerable
self of therapy culture (Furedi 2004, p. 21). We are free to work or be
sexual beings, but that means we require work on the self to make this
happen effectively. In this typically postfeminist dynamic, we have been
‘deregulated’ by the twin forces of feminism and consumer capitalism only
to find we need to be self-regulated, indeed, policed, by neoliberal pro-
cesses of subjectification in the appealing form of self-help and its ‘neolib-
eral romance of upward mobility’ (Blum 2018, p. 1099). Australian
women, therefore, are subjects of, but also subject to, the broader regimes
of late modernity and advanced capitalism (Rimke 2000, p. 62; Hazleden
2003, pp. 424–425). Murdoch is correct when she links the popularity of
self-help books for women to the fact that feminism ‘has never promised
to produce happiness. Self-help does’ (2001, p. 166). And happiness has
160  Self-help books
never been more valued by our culture (Ahmed 2010; Binkley 2014).
We turn now to the most prolific form of self-help – self-actualisation
guides – to observe how the everyday philosophy of calculating magic is
constructed.

Self-actualisation: calculating magic as everyday philosophy

The sub-genre of self-actualisation – that is, guides to self-realisation and
personal fulfilment – contains a range of approaches, the major ones being
New Age spirituality, including feminist versions (as in Evolving Women
[Wesson 2015]); a plethora of New Thought movement derivatives (Atti-
tude Goddess [Gay 2008]), which is the dominant form; the ‘tough, no-
nonsense’ and non-spiritual school of self-help, exemplified by Whip Your
Life into Shape (Dubberly 2006); as well as books that borrow from some
of these. Indeed, if there is one definitive feature of self-actualisation titles,
it is an ideational eclecticism – a feature linked to its ‘curatorial function:
to mine, collate, and reorganise the archive of textual counsel’ (Blum
2018, p. 1100). The clear dominance of self-actualisation in Australian
women’s self-help can be interpreted both optimistically and pessimisti-
cally. Women’s desire for self-actualisation (and female authors willing
and confident enough to write such works) suggests a desire for some
philosophical basis to life, some quest for a fuller subjectivity, and hence a
sense of agency and potentiality of the female self. Less optimistically, its
methods of thinking and feeling as a coping mechanism also signals
women’s existential pain under patriarchal late capitalism, resulting from
what Hochschild, in her study of American self-help, terms ‘a stalled
gender revolution’ (1994, p. 19).
We discuss Julie Gibson’s compilation You Can … Live the Life of
Your Dreams (2012) as representative of the New Thought movement
version of self-actualisation. Given the popularity of self-actualisation, its
broad implied readership of mature women, and its influence on the other
sub-genres, we undertake a relatively detailed close reading of Gibson.
Self-actualisation is the sub-genre that most explicitly functions as a type
of women’s everyday philosophy, offering a set of principles of thinking,
feeling, and being able to achieve realisation in, and transformation of,
everyday life. As such, it is the sub-genre that most clearly demonstrates
calculating magic at work, with its everyday philosophy articulating the ideal
postfeminist subject in neoliberal times. This is a female subject somehow
managing to blend elements of a soft feminist and pro-femininity ideology
with a degree of entrepreneurial panache and economic reasoning. Moreover,
we contend that the calculating magic found in self-actualisation is an Aus-
tralian variant of the ‘magical thinking’ that surrounds ‘issues of economic
security and mobility’ identified by Diane Negra and Yvonne Tasker in
American recessionary postfeminist culture, one that both ‘acknowledges
and evades’ questions of equality (2014, pp. 3, 10).
 Self-help books  161
The format, techniques and rhetoric, authorial sources, and advice of
You Can … Live the Life of Your Dreams is paradigmatic of self-­
actualisation’s everyday philosophy, and reveals the powerful influence of
contemporary versions of the nineteenth-century New Thought movement.
It is based on a belief in the power of thoughts and feelings to determine
actions and outcomes, that is, to create reality, hence its core element of
the power of positive thinking. Late twentieth-century American superstars
of self-help such as Wayne C. Dyer and Anthony Robbins make positive
thinking core to their work, adding elements of Eastern mysticism,
physics, and spirituality for intellectual ballast.9 Gibson’s title is a simple
restatement of New Thought movement philosophy and its goal of trans-
formation. A glance at the editor’s website shows that there is a small
industry at work to help attain one’s dream, with MP3s, weekend
‘events’, e-books, weight loss advice, and workbooks all a testament to the
author’s knowledge, energy, and effectiveness. Gibson, like our other
authors, is highly adept at marketing and working across other platforms
and hence embodies the entrepreneurial spirit that infuses our self-help
texts, and the enterprising self of neoliberalism theorised by Nikolas Rose
(1992, p. 150), and in dominant accounts of postfeminism (McRobbie
2009, p. 75).
Gibson assembles a team of female experts (bar one) – ‘expert’ being a
key term for self-actualisation books and evidence of its technocratic ori-
entation – to each write a chapter on a particular topic. These topics indi-
cate the issues that the postfeminist subject must address to attain one’s
dream life: mindset, language, appearance, career and business, money,
health and fitness, sexuality, relationships, and happiness and personal
growth. That is, it is a total project of the self, and an example of the per-
fectionism that McRobbie sees as marking the postfeminist woman (and
masking her ‘illegible rage’ against the stultification of late capitalist patri-
archy [2009, p. 105], a displaced anger that we saw expressed by younger
women in the preceding chapter). These are interspersed with inspirational
stories: a type of theory being put into practice and form of motivation. As
the range of chapters suggests, matters of the spirit meet the convention-
ally feminine issues of physical appearance and more worldly matters of
money and work. The phrasing of the chapter titles reveals the particular
ideology at work in Gibson’s everyday philosophy. For example, ‘Your
money – creating wealth’ equates money with building wealth rather than
subsistence or security, ‘Your look – be dressed to impress’ places physical
appearance as part of accumulating personal capital, while the pairing of
‘Your career and business – do what you love’ seems to reverse this instru-
mentalisation of the inner and outer self. Moreover, work is phrased as
career and business. The entrepreneurial subject and an associated calcu-
lating attitude are evident in the transformational project.
The experts’ backgrounds are equally significant; evidence of the types
of expertise and knowledges constructed and disseminated in women’s
162  Self-help books
self-help and where the magical elements of self-actualisation start to take
shape. Each author’s biography shares a similar pattern of being successful
at life, and then reaching a personal crisis (divorce, serious illness) that
leads to a massive life change resulting in them ‘living the dream’: beach-
front homes, new partners, and thriving businesses – some distance from
the feminist telos of liberation from patriarchal oppression. As a con-
sequence, they want to share their knowledge, a sisterly generosity also
displayed by our vloggers. Jennifer Burrows, author of the chapter, ‘Your
Language – The Power of Words’, for instance, is:

Director of Value for Life Pty Ltd; Pitch Consultant and leading edge
Presentation Skills Coach; Executive Coach and Mentor; Author;
Motivational Speaker; Master Practitioner of Neuro-Linguistic Pro-
gramming; Practitioner of Time Line TherapyTM; Certified Master
Practitioner of Matrix Therapies and Hypnotherapy; Certified Neuro-
Linguistic Programming Performance Coach; Accredited Consultant
and Trainer – Extended Disc®.
(2012, p. 249)

The language used is instructive. First, it is commercial: trademarks, pitch

consultant, executive coach. Second, it is technocratic and quasi-medical
science: matrix therapies, hypnotherapies, neuro-linguistic programming.
Third, it is the language of accreditation and the academy: the repetition of
‘certified’ and ‘master practitioner’. Finally, there is the sporting associ-
ation with various types of ‘coach’, ‘performance’, and ‘trainer’. These dis-
tinct registers are brought together in an eclectic type of terminology that
is at once authoritative but also mystifying. What exactly is a ‘Master
Practitioner of Neuro-Linguistic Programming’, and what might a perfor-
mance coach in that field actually do? Laura Favaro (2017, p. 285) terms
such expertise as ‘psycommerce’ – an amalgam of ‘gendered psychothera-
pies with commodity logic’.
Burrows’ resumé here is similar to the other contributors, regardless of
their area of expertise: a similar set of ‘qualifications’ is found. Self-actuali-
sation is underpinned by a material and immaterial infrastructure, or a
‘glocalised therapeutic assemblage’ (Tiaynen-Qadir & Salmenniemi 2017,
p. 382) of commodified theories, techniques, knowledges, classes, and
products that construct a philosophy of everyday life – its calculating
magic – in terms amenable to neoliberal capitalism, namely, that life is a
business. This is a prime example of what Illouz terms ‘emotional capit-
alism’: a process in which emotional and economic discourses mutually
shape one another (2008, p. 60). In a blend of various registers that makes
such an ideological position more attractive, Burrows begins her biograph-
ical entry with ‘Jennifer Burrows believes in getting the maximum value
from every moment of life’ (2012, p. 248). Therefore, sport – masked by
the palatable role of the coach – contributes to the notions of competition
 Self-help books  163
and the performance principle. The pseudo-medical and technocratic dis-
course makes the commercial imperative sound inarguable and appealingly
related to one’s health. And these ‘psycommercial’ experts (Favaro 2017,
p. 285), with their various consultancies and directorships, embody the
commercial framing and teleology of the postfeminist woman’s life. The
journey (a favourite metaphor in self-help books) and its goal are implic-
itly associated with individual business success – a selling off of the old
self, just as the nation state has sold off various publicly owned assets (the
telecommunications provider Telstra and QANTAS airlines, amongst
many others).
Self-help’s core approach to one’s life and to self-actualisation is highly
technocratic, and demonstrates the gulf between 1970s consciousness-rais-
ing and the practices of self-help. For You Can … Live the Life of Your
Dreams, a ten-week programme is offered: one aspect of life is dealt with
per week (sexuality, for instance, is week eight). The programme is
reinforced by checklists, questions to the reader, short chapters, action
points, self-assessment exercises, and goal-setting. Simonds describes these
characteristic devices as ‘the break-down technique’ that carefully guides
the reader (1992, pp. 137–138), while Scott Cherry (2008, p. 345) argues
that these activities make the reader act, and are therefore evidence of self-
transformation. In every chapter, and similar to the other sub-genres we
discuss, the reader is exhorted to complete various self-reflection and diag-
nostic activities, such as creating short narratives, diagnosing life balance
using the wheel-of-life diagram, and so on. The level of detail required for
each activity is further evidence of the technocratic element in calculating
magic. In her conclusion, Gibson, for example, recommends that you
‘Review your dreams and goals – daily, weekly, monthly, every 90 days,
yearly, 3-yearly, 5-yearly’ (2012, p. 242). Repetition and fine-grained focus
on specific areas of the self are characteristic – a model borrowed from
corporate and sports training, making the time of self-actualisation com-
partmentalised, repetitive, incremental, and hence instrumental. Using
these techniques allows the reader to write a personal mission statement
and a personal vision statement, as personal transformation and philo-
sophy meet the corporate world.
This technocratic approach is humanised, or more accurately, femin-
ised, however, by the book’s emotionalism. It carefully constructs intimacy
between author and reader, as a quasi-feminist sister-to-sister mode of
address, found throughout our postfeminist genres, and which we consider
a specifically postfeminist form of affect. Rather than Hochschild’s cool
modern women constructed in 1980s self-help (1994, p. 11), we have
warm Australian postfeminists at the turn of the century: a version of the
‘relational entrepreneurial femininity’ Elaine Swan (2017) observes in her
study of women’s executive coaching websites. Gibson begins with her
autobiography in the form of ‘A letter to you’ (2012, p. 7), with the episto-
lary form setting up the text as a personal and intimate space, one where
164  Self-help books
the reader is made to feel special. This relationship is continued by the
constant reiteration of ‘you’ and ‘yours’, and the use of emotive adjectives
such as ‘amazing’ and ‘ultimate’. The reader is no ordinary soul, but one on
the verge of becoming extraordinary (hence the common trope of readers as
‘goddesses’ in this sub-genre), with the help of these intermediaries.10
Regardless of which aspect of the self is being worked upon, the core
principle is that of the power of positive thinking: a replacement for fem-
inist political analysis (as we saw in the previous chapter, one of our vlog-
gers, Lauren Curtis, also advocates this method).11 The reader is guided on
how to change negative thoughts about some aspect of themselves – their
body or financial situation, for example – to positive thoughts. These
altered mindsets are not just about increasing self-esteem; they are the
method necessary to alter the reader’s reality. Thoughts create reality, and
a reader has choices about how she thinks. As a consequence, she can
change her life. Gibson’s explanation of this principle is also a succinct
statement of positive thinking as fundamental to calculating magic:

People are like magnets. We attract into our lives whatever we give
out and focus on. Whatever we concentrate on, our subconscious
mind helps us to manifest. Even while we are sleeping, our minds are
working on how to make our goals a reality. The fact is what we focus
on we attract and get more of. If you focus on struggling to pay the
mortgage, rent, or bills then that is what you will get – more bills,
more struggle. If you focus on abundance then this is what you will
attract into your life.
(2012, pp. 28–29)

By the careful disciplining or calculation of one’s ideas and feelings, a form

of magic occurs. The repetition of first-person pronouns here underlines
the individual and voluntaristic nature of this process. Accordingly, self-
responsibility and choice are continually emphasised throughout. There
are no historical or social limits to what can be achieved; indeed, the
reader is encouraged to ‘dream big’, leave the past behind, and practise
forgiveness and gratitude for painful experiences. In an echo of the optim-
istic and voluntaristic DIY feminist self discussed in our Introduction, the
self being transformed is a self without limits, that is, without any context,
the reverse of a collective, historically determined, and socially constructed
feminist subject. Such an everyday philosophy is ideal for postfeminist and
neoliberal times.
Contributor after contributor recalls an autobiographical narrative of
women’s frustrations and pains – relationship breakdowns, career dead
ends, and financial troubles – all feminist issues. The solution is a celebra-
tion of an intrinsically special female self, one who has the potential to
alter the constraints of her life by taking a risk and dutifully applying new
knowledges to the self in order to move out of her ‘comfort zone’ (rather
 Self-help books  165
than her gendered role) towards various goals – a personal entrepreneurial
teleology. Any feminist structural analysis of her frustrations and pain is
absent. This conceptual deficiency is not, however, the postfeminist dis-
avowal of feminism discussed by Gill (2007b) and others. Rather, it points
to the power of neoliberal schemata, and how the real world destructura-
tion of the social plays out on a cognitive-conceptual level, where struc-
tures are invisibilised even as a feminist residue of personal radical change
makes the telos possible. In the place of structure and analysis is a way of
thinking–feeling that is calculating magic, with its appealing, feminine ele-
ments of joy, (quasi)spirituality, and passion, and the hope and agency
they offer to women in neoliberal times. As the next section shows,
however, calculating magic can also take a more specific focus, namely,
women’s bodies, so that anatomy is no longer destiny.

Health and fitness books: working out corporeal femininities

From the mid-1990s onwards, feminist theory gave increased attention to
the role of the female body and, specifically, corporeality as the basis for a
new direction in feminist thought (Braidotti 1994; Grosz 1994; Gatens
1995; Grosz & Probyn 1995). A corporeal feminism meant a rejection of
the Cartesian mind/body split, the traditional association of woman with
body and man with mind, and the essentialist/social constructionist binary
of gender identity, presenting a way forward for a feminist understanding
of female subjectivity. However, Amber Wiest et al. outline changes in
ideas of health and fitness at roughly the same time occasioned by the
impact of ‘neoliberal logic’, as in ‘the commercial co-optation of “healthi-
ness,” the responsibilization of health, and the marginalization of col-
lective interests’ (2015, p. 22). As a consequence, the semioscape of
calculating magic takes shape in health and fitness books for women from
the early 2000s onwards, reconfiguring the meaning of the female body – a
working through (in the psychoanalytic sense) of corporeal feminism by a
‘working out’ of the embodied female self using calculating magic. In the
terms of this rapidly growing form of self-help book, the female body is
revalued from being inert object of the male gaze to subject of the everyday
philosophy of corporeal femininities. Physical transformation and health
and fitness are key to personal transformation, and even redemption.
Simultaneously, a philosophy of the female body is a philosophy of being a
functional, aesthetic, and actualised woman in contemporary Australia.
This philosophical basis to women’s health and fitness has so far been
largely absent from analyses of postfeminist embodiment (Evans & Riley
2013; Tsaousi 2015; Toffoletti et al. 2018, for example), even as this philo-
sophy is a distinctive and alluring feature.
We concentrate here on Jessica Sepel’s (2015) The Healthy Life: A
Complete Plan for Glowing Skin, A Healthy Gut, Weight Loss, Better
Sleep and Less Stress and Hayley Roper’s (2013) Lighten Up: A Female’s
166  Self-help books
Modern Day Guide to Physical Transformation because of their differing
emphases yet shared features. Sepel, a qualified nutritionist, concentrates
on food and diet while Roper, a sports model and trainer, focuses on
fitness. Like the other sub-genres of self-help, there is a minority strand of
mainstream, no-nonsense diet and exercise books; however, we wish to
identify the features of an emergent women’s health and fitness culture
demonstrated by these two books.12 This sub-genre is the one most closely
related to two of the most important second wave feminist self-help books –​
the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective’s Our Bodies, Ourselves
(1971) and Susie Orbach’s Fat Is a Feminist Issue (1979) – though in a
significant omission, neither discusses fitness in detail, a topic outside the
purview of much feminist activism at that time.13 Sepel and Roper show a
similar drive to reclaim understandings and knowledges of the female body
and health for women so that they may more fully experience and enjoy
their physical being. What we find, however, within the powerful message
of living life physically to reclaim the self – one that has especial valence in
Australia given our traditional love of sport (and women’s traditional sec-
ond-class treatment by sporting institutions) – is an uneasy mix of commodi-
fied expertise, technocratic instrumentalisation, and a quasi-spiritualisation
of the female body.
The body in corporeal femininities is not so much a sex object, as it is in
second wave feminist critiques, but instead a body to be self-disciplined
and thereby instrumentalised into an aesthetic and functional object who,
as a consequence, feels better about herself: a process made palatable by its
philosophical basis. Women’s health and fitness books thereby suggest
another emanation of the pressures surrounding female embodiment iden-
tified throughout analyses of postfeminist culture (Whelehan 2000; Lazar
2009; Genz 2010; Elias et al. 2017), and some of the mechanisms by
which they take hold. The freedoms and pleasures of physical well-being
and activity, and the feminist valorisation of the female body become par-
tially articulated and hence constrained by elements complementary to
neoliberal discourse. As a consequence, proclaiming a corporeal femininity
means investing in remaking the body: the embodied woman is now a self-
produced commodity.
These pressures on female bodies are evident in Sepel’s introduction
(2015, pp. 6–8) which, following the formula of self-help books, takes the
form of confessional autobiography, and also draws upon the feminist val-
orisation of the authority of personal experience. Similar to our vloggers,
Sepel recalls her teenage years when she became an obsessive fad dieter,
which she links to her perfectionism, and explains how her sense of worth
and happiness were related to her ability to lose weight. Sepel is the typical
pathological young female subject discussed in McRobbie’s account of
postfeminist perfectionism (2015): intelligent, seemingly empowered, but
paradoxically crippled by low self-esteem and therefore disciplined (more
accurately, tortured) by an emphasis on appearance, norms of feminine
 Self-help books  167
desirability, and a general sense of perfectionism, a punitive nexus also
experienced by our beauty vloggers. Her solution to this psychic impasse
is, therefore, highly significant.
Sepel turns to an amalgam of nutritional science, willpower, and per-
sonal philosophy to attain a healthy life. With echoes of the positive think-
ing in You Can … Live the Life of Your Dreams, she explains:

I have taken control of my life and my thoughts. I now take a more

gentle approach to nutrition, health and well-being. It’s as simple as
this: I listen to my body and I give it exactly what it needs.
(2015, p. 7)

She adds: ‘I learnt that I am good enough, just as I am. Thanks to this
shift, I am now able to say I love my body’ and that her body is ‘beautiful’
just the way it is (2015, p. 7). Her approach to the body is couched in the
feminine and emotive terms of ‘gentle’, ‘love’, ‘beautiful’; similarly, her
relationship to her body is emotional and nurturing: of acceptance and lis-
tening. The mind, however, remains separate from, and controls, the body –
a return to pre-corporeal feminist times.
This emotionalised, even maternal, self–body relationship is replicated
in the relationship between Sepel and her readers, and also parallels the
postfeminist sisterhood we saw constructed by beauty vloggers, based on a
collective but relatively apolitical sense of the travails of young woman-
hood. See, for example, the book’s dedication: ‘To the JSHealth com-
munity. Thank you for being by my side, understanding me, supporting
me and being so passionate about healthy living. We are in this journey
together. I am so proud of you’ (2015). Apart from the intimacy
expressed, the ‘JSHealth community’ is key to understanding Sepel’s
framework. Community seems a somewhat hyperbolic term to use. And
regardless of the soft language of caring and belonging, a branding and
ownership exercise is occurring: this is Jessica Sepel’s health community,
evidence of the contemporary commercialisation of health and fitness
(Maguire 2008, p. 5). We soon return to this uneasy nexus of femininity
and commerce.
A similarly uneasy combination occurs in Sepel’s prescription for a
healthy life: a mix of detailed nutritional science and the soft, semi/quasi
spiritual feminine philosophy characterising many of our self-help texts,
and which is health and fitness’s version of calculating magic. Sepel offers
‘a complete plan’ to the healthy life comprising these two elements. ‘Plan’
is the operative word here. Regardless of her claimed rejection of perfec-
tionism, she offers a pedagogy of rigorous self-policing enacted through
nutrition. First, the reader fills in a questionnaire to ascertain where they
are located, not so much in terms of health and body image, but rather,
existentially. Questions include ‘At what point in your life did you feel
your best?’ and ‘Do you feel incredibly alive and present in your life?’
168  Self-help books
(2015, p. 10). This questionnaire becomes a benchmark of the reader’s
progress. Sepel includes a ‘Commitment Contract’ with vows such as ‘I
promise to embark on this health journey with optimism. I am dedicated
to making health a priority – the number one priority – in my life’ (2015,
p. 11). She later includes a food diary (2015, p. 116), a self-love planner!
(2015, p. 119), and a ‘7-day slim-down meal plan’ (2015, p. 120). These
self-monitoring devices are complemented by lengthy nutritional informa-
tion in which the natural is a primary value. As in the case of self-­
actualisation books, attaining Sepel’s healthy life is a serious, organised,
and complicated quest.
Her philosophy of the healthy life, however, moderates this scientism
and self-discipline. She draws upon the usual elements of contemporary
women’s self-actualisation: the power of the mind; techniques of medita-
tion and visualisation of dreams; finding your passion; following your
heart and intuition; using mantras; acknowledging a spiritual dimension to
the self; and a soft feminist politics. She declares that ‘I want to empower
women to support each other, not tear each other down’ (2015, p. 314),
another articulation of postfeminist sisterhood that we observe within and
across genres. Sepel’s good nutrition plan is holistic and transformative.
Body and soul are mutually informing; consequently, the plan requires the
‘soul’ to be explored, understood, and reformed using the abovementioned
techniques. In return, the plan enables a transformation in lifestyle that
affects both body and soul. Good health, therefore, is more than bodily: it
has a strongly moral and semi-spiritual dimension, a revelation of the
authentic self. As she ends her welcome, she is now ‘free from everything
that was holding me back. (2015, p. 8).
This feminine philosophy masks the entrepreneurialism and commer-
cialism of the endeavour. Sepel’s experiences and knowledge not only
result in a book, but also in a cottage industry, including a health blog,
and work as a nutritionist and wellness coach. We do not want to discount
the often practical and reasonable advice Sepel offers her readers; we are
more interested in the conflicted nature of the text’s semioscape, in which
soft feminism (its use of sisterhood to liberate us from low self-esteem and
poor body image), a feminine philosophy of the everyday, nutritional
science, self-improvement, and twenty-first-century commerce intermingle
in what Sepel terms her ‘health brand’ (2015, p. 314). Sepel’s corporeal
version of calculating magic genuinely wants to free us from the oppres-
sion represented by diet books and glossy images of female perfection;
however, the terms of her philosophy subject the female body to another
form of control.
The recent reclamation of the female body as a strong and fit body, as
seen in phenomena such as #fitspo (Riley & Evans 2018), women’s
running groups, and the uptake of weight training by women, appears to
mark progress for conceptions and practices of female embodiment: we are
no longer victims of our bodies. Our reading of Roper’s Lighten Up: A
 Self-help books  169
Female’s Modern Day Guide to Physical Transformation (2013) shows
something more problematic. While Hayley focuses on exercise rather than
food, her text shares a number of characteristics with Sepel’s. As the title
suggests, this is not only a book about diet and exercise. It also promises
transformation of the self – an exercise-based version of Gill’s makeover
trope (2007b). Roper offers the body as capable of complete change;
accordingly, she takes a holistic approach. In postfeminist health and
fitness guides for women, for example, you do not just limit your goals to
weight loss or improved muscular strength. Instead, the body and the mind
must both be involved, and this combination requires an informing philo-
sophy. Lighten Up therefore constructs a philosophy of the self that is
fundamental to improved diet and exercise, and which in turn allows
women to reclaim their bodies.
This philosophy is apparent from the opening pages, where Roper
declares that:

[this book] will take you on a physical and spiritual journey with the
end result being so much more than just a slimmer and healthier
version of your former self. You will finish this book with not only the
tools to change your body, but also the tools to change your life.
(2013)

Accordingly, the first two chapters of the book are ‘The Inner Voice’ and
‘Tune Into Your Soul’, replicating Sepel’s mind–body split. In these, Roper
instructs us how to listen to our inner voice as a path to spiritual and then
physical enlightenment: the inner voice is ‘our soul or spirit. It is the real
you’ (2013, p. 9). Doing so means we are more in alignment with the uni-
verse, and therefore less likely to indulge in negative behaviour, such as
poor eating or being unmotivated. In what is something of a postfeminist
moral code, she restates the core elements of self-actualisation philosophy:
think positive thoughts, do daily good deeds, live in the present, practice
visualisation, and so forth. This dictate suggests that women have a moral,
even spiritual, rather than hedonistic relationship to the body. The goal of
her philosophy is more than health or fitness, it is ‘to have women bursting
with energy, happiness and positivity’ (2013, p. 4). This reworked female
body exemplifies the neoliberal ‘new vitalism’ theorised by Rose (2009,
pp. 49, 63, 70), whereby the individual is responsible for self-care, and
also a specifically female version of this vitalism, which Tasker and Negra
argue actually masks a social death – of once-sustaining institutions such
as welfare and public health (2007, p. 9).
The exercise and diet section – in which a fairly typical set of exercise
routines and eating guidelines is described – is something of a let-down
after the metaphysics of the preceding chapters. Like Sepel, ‘natural’ foods
are valorised, and exercise equates with toning exercises and fat-burning
cardiovascular work rather than muscle-building regimes so as to achieve a
170  Self-help books
conventionally feminine figure – the bodily ideal of contemporary women’s
health and fitness (Markula & Kennedy 2011, p. 4). The magical elements
of self-actualisation also play their part. For instance, Roper notes the
importance of visualising the body you want to achieve: ‘Focus on the area
you want to change … and imagine it decreasing in size or changing in
shape’ (2013, p. 58). Although this sounds enticing, it is also a good
example of McGee’s belaboured self: it is now a reasonable requirement
that intense and constant mental as well as physical work is performed
upon the female body in order to achieve the supposed goal of realisation.
Like Sepel, Roper displays a strong entrepreneurial and commercial
imperative that is softened by the self-actualisation philosophy, emotional-
ism, and pro-woman stance. The opening sentences in her introduction lit-
eralise these intermingled discourses:

As a result of my passion for healthy living and my inner drive to help

others, I started my own business called ‘Love My Body’ … Love My
Body empowers women to look and feel their best through mentoring,
providing dietary guidelines, the right forms of exercise and constant
support.
(2013, p. 4)

In the commercial enterprise that is ‘Love My Body’, we have the feminis-

tic ‘empowers women’, ‘mentoring,’ and ‘support’ meeting the ethical
‘drive to help others’. ‘Love My Body’, an appealing, emotive, and
common affirmation found in women’s health and fitness books and
culture, is co-opted as a brand, a commercial practice. Moreover, as
Rosalind Gill and Ana Elias argue regarding the ‘love my body’ discourse
in general, and as we saw in our beauty vlogger chapter, ‘love my body’ is
actually based on, and profits from, women feeling bad about their bodies
(2014, p. 184).
The calculating magic imbuing and producing corporeal femininities
suggests the body as a prime site for constructing female subjectivity in
postfeminist times – a working out of corporeal feminism into substan-
tially altered terms. In a version of the dualisms that characterise women’s
self-help (DeFrancisco & O’Connor 1995, p. 109), the Cartesian split
returns, as mind and body are separate but connected in the contemporary
project of bodily transformation, with the mind in control. A healthy body
is a necessity to function effectively and authentically as a woman. And
both texts emphasise the body’s plasticity – a blended feminist and neolib-
eral fantasy of possibility, and the complex physical, mental, and emo-
tional labour required by this telos. These disciplinary techniques of the
embodied female address women’s desires for bodily pleasure and empow-
erment, yet also articulate with the growing health and fitness industry
that commodifies women’s bodies as effectively as the fashion–beauty–
media complex (Maguire 2008, pp. 5, 41). In our examples, a feminine
 Self-help books  171
philosophy, spiritual overtones, and a residual feminist ethos of empower-
ment and reclaiming the pleasures of the body (and sport) make attractive
and feminise the commercial and instrumental imperatives of preparing
‘fit’ subjects (i.e. self-disciplined, reliable, productive, and with an atten-
tion to physical presentation) for the services- and signs-based economy
heavily reliant on female labour. For, as Jennifer Smith Maguire argues,
‘Fitness is a measure of aptitude for life in consumer culture and a service
economy’ (2008, p. 190), and these books offer women a way to attain this.
In the next section we look at another type of fitness required by the
advanced capitalist economy – a broader type of fitness that is now required
by mothering.

Mothering guides: aestheticising the domestic

The range of advice offered to mothers by Australian self-help books is
vast, suggesting the choices available to mothers and the complexification
of, and professional expertise surrounding, contemporary motherhood,
and hence its location in a vast disciplinary network. There are guides to
balancing work with mothering, improving pelvic floor muscles, dealing
with postnatal depression, child rearing New Age-style, and breastfeeding.
In this section, we focus on general advice guides to mothers, that is,
books that cover a number of topics as a complete manual for mother-
hood. In particular, we engage with guides that reveal a shift in conceptu-
alisations of how mothering might be done. Mothers and the maternal
have been a key focus in analyses of postfeminism, exemplifying the twin,
if potentially contradictory, movement of mothering towards retraditional-
isation (as in Negra’s ‘maternal retreatism’ [2009]), or its postmodern
updating, such as Jo Littler’s (2013) reading of the sexualised, glamorous,
and hyper-consuming ‘yummy mummy’ figure. We discuss Jodie Hedley-
Ward’s You Sexy Mother: A Life Changing Approach to Motherhood
(2008) as representative of an emergent group of self-help texts that use
calculating magic to remake mothering in highly aesthetic terms (aesthetic
here meaning a foregrounding of notions of beauty and the beautiful).14 It
thereby is evidence of ‘aesthetic labour as a new(ly) added, previously
unrecognised dimension of contemporary maternal labour that has
emerged under neoliberalism’ (De Benedictis & Orgad 2017, p. 102).
As her arresting title suggests, Hedley-Ward offers a transformational
approach (‘life changing’), one that rests on identifying the mother as ‘sexy’
– thus seemingly part of the sexualised mother figure denoted by the yummy
mummy (Allen & Osgood 2009; Littler 2013). As we show, however, the
sexy mother symbolises not so much a resexualisation of the mother, but,
more importantly, an aestheticisation of stay-at-home mothering, or what
Negra describes as ‘postfeminist domesticity and new discourses of “home-
maker chic” ’ (2009, p. 152). With parallels to the embodied women of the
previous section, the stay-at-home mother is transformed along stylish and
172  Self-help books
moral lines by investing her desires in the home into ‘the program of post-
feminist lifestyling’ (Negra 2009, p. 142). Making the domestic realm beau-
tiful is the central advice and compensation offered to full-time mothers,
and a method by which to discover an ‘authentic’ self. Through calculating
magic, the domestic realm via the maternal role is reconfigured from second
wave feminist understandings of it as a space of repetitive unpaid labour,
isolation, and frustration (Oakley 1974; French 1977) into a space of per-
sonal fulfilment and invisible children, thereby reinscribing patriarchal
values. A traditional identity for women returns but is recast in new, specifi-
cally neoliberal, almost fantasmatic terms – sexiness, aesthetics, autonomy,
and self-realisation rather than sacrifice. The result is the alluring figure of
the mother whose children (possibly not alluring) are largely offstage.
As seen in all sub-genres of self-help, the figure of the author – their
education and life experiences – is a crucial textual strategy of con-
temporary self-help books and an echo of feminism. In You Sexy Mother,
this is highly indicative of the middle-class quality of contemporary self-
help books, even as they gesture towards working-class women’s anxieties
and aspirations. Hedley-Ward begins her book by recounting her epiphany
regarding motherhood:

It began following a vivid dream one night, after which I woke up and
decided that I was no longer going to be defined by ‘tired mum’ syn-
drome. I was not going to allow myself the luxury of wallowing in
tiredness and playing the harassed, worn-out mum card again. What if
I was to approach each day with a sense of grace and playfulness?
What if the next time someone asked me how I was feeling, I was to
reply ‘exuberant’, ‘enlightened’ or, God forbid, ‘sexy’?
(2008, p. 9)

From that moment she realises she ‘had choices and was about to waste no
time in exercising them’ (2008, p. 9). As we saw in earlier examples, will-
power and choice here are paramount to becoming a sexy, postfeminist
mother. Hedley-Ward decides she has to renounce her pre-motherhood
identity of tertiary-educated marketing professional with a successful inter-
national career (her words), and instead embrace motherhood – by chang-
ing her attitude:

I started to really consider my roles as mother, homemaker, wife …

connecting with the wisdom of generations of women who have
walked this path before me I began to redefine my various roles in a
way that was empowering. With new insights came power. Why
hadn’t I realized that I wasn’t simply cooking but providing nourish-
ment to hungry bodies and minds? … I knew I had to create a new
image of myself rather than reverting to the old me.
(2008, p. 10)
 Self-help books  173
So although Hedley-Ward does not explicitly refer to cognitive behavi-
oural therapy or positive thought – mainstays of contemporary self-help
(Binkley 2011, p. 376) – she is providing her own version of these sche-
mata. Changing the language and interpretive frameworks of the self
changes the reality of being a mother. Moreover, this version of calculating
magic aligns with neoliberalism’s focus on self-responsibilisation (Rose
1996, p. 59) also observed in our vloggers, which leaves unspoken the
issues giving rise to the need for transformation, such as the difficulties of
raising children or the drudgery of domestic labour, and giving up work to
do so.
As the above passage highlights, domestic chores and self-image are key
to becoming a sexy mother; the actual business of mothering, as in raising
children, is an extremely minor presence, possibly aiding the aestheticisa-
tion process. Mothering is therefore about creating (an emotional) separa-
tion from children, a re-imaging of the self, and an immersion in the
domestic as a space of feminine expertise. This is, however, a different
version of maternal retreatism from that discussed by Negra (2009) or the
luxury consumption of Littler’s ‘yummy mummies’ (2013). Hedley-Ward
provides a detailed guide to achieve this new image using the typical tech-
nocratic devices of self-help: the visual diary, a ‘Ten-Day Turnaround
Plan’, and making a commitment (a ‘declaration’) to change the self. These
rely on both practical techniques and large amounts of emotional discip-
line, which are undertaken solely by the mother. While there is a chapter
recommending that mothers form support networks, the actual project of
becoming this new type of mother is an individual job. Rather than the
mother being the relational self as in Nancy Chodorow’s (1978) classic
second wave feminist formulation, she is now an autonomous, possibly
isolated agent of domestic (unpaid) aesthetic labour, thereby moving the
mother role more fully into the logics of neoliberal capitalism and its
exploitation of the most vulnerable workers. Mothering thus takes its
place in the postmodern culture of images and surfaces and its concomi-
tant ‘hyperaestheticization of everyday [postfeminist] life’ (Tasker &
Negra 2007, p. 7).
What You Sexy Mother is really offering is a way for working (and
often highly educated) women to adapt to motherhood, making the trans-
ition palatable by its calculating magic of simple, emotive philosophy,
techniques with which to aestheticise everyday domesticity, and the
promise of discovering the authentic self. ‘For people like me’, she
explains,

who have stifled their feminine side in a bid to achieve worldly status
and rewards, the journey back to femininity and all things womanly in
the traditional sense can be most liberating. Far from feeling down-
trodden and resentful, once I took over the role of master of my home
and leader of my family’s emotional well-being I felt liberated beyond
174  Self-help books
belief. I felt truly in touch with the essence of who I was and why I
was here, and relieved that I didn’t have to prove myself in a corporate
way any longer.
(Hedley-Ward 2008, pp. 20–21)

Hedley-Ward makes this classic statement of female essentialism and

domestic retreatism – seen by many as a key marker of postfeminist
culture (Probyn 1990; Faludi 1991; Kingston 2004; Vavrus 2007) –
appealing by its use of the typical language of self-actualisation: an
amalgam of emotionalism, hyperbole, and New Age spiritualism. Chapter
titles and their summaries make this strategy apparent. The first chapter
promises that you will find ‘The Real, Most Wonderful You’:

Learn how to give yourself the love and respect you deserve and watch
as you blossom into an exciting, vibrant expression of the new you –
one that is stronger and infinitely more beautiful now that you have
added ‘mother’ to your resume.
(2008, p. 7)

Similarly, Chapter 5 is titled ‘Dream Big and Rediscover the Magic in

Life’, and advocates that ‘Motherhood is a wonderful time of creation, and
pursuing your own dreams and passions should be part of this’ (Hedley-
Ward 2008, p. 8). In these terms, domesticity is a space of magical poten-
tial, heightened emotion, and relentless positivity for the mother, and we
suggest that this tonality articulates in inverted form the real issues for the
would-be sexy mother: the dullness of paid employment and of its substi-
tute, the working woman’s relocation to the domestic and the maternal.
The first step in Hedley-Ward’s plan is to literally refashion the self into
one that is no longer the career woman or an extension of her children.
Rather, she exhorts readers that ‘You deserve a life that feels soft and
wonderful, like your favourite pair of pyjamas or a well-worn pair of
jeans’ (2008, p. 25). Indeed, changing one’s clothes into something chic is
a key part of this strategy, but the interior self must also be refashioned.
The sexy mother is one who finds her creative passions, inspires others,
and can even turn these pursuits into a profitable endeavour. The home,
too, must be refashioned so that it is ‘authentic’, meaning ‘a sanctuary for
you and your family from which you can all go out into the world feeling
great’ (2008, p. 7). Again, this is the mother’s task, and it has a moral
imperative: ‘Decide today that this is the home you deserve and honour
yourself by setting about creating it’ (2008, p. 7). Hedley-Ward’s practical
suggestions to achieve authenticity – decluttering, painting a room – are
given therapeutic value as well, expressing the mother’s sense of control
and being in touch with her true self.
Like our potentially fit and healthy women, the mother needs to refash-
ion and simplify her habits via similarly technocratic self-policing means.
 Self-help books  175
The sexy mother is a disciplined one: she must learn to be organised, to
make plans, and to take control of finances, material possessions, and
‘commitments in your life’ (2008, p. 173). She must also learn to be prag-
matic and calculating about her relationships, with Hedley-Ward offering
what Alison Winch terms as ‘calculated guidance in the maintenance of
social networks’ (2013, p. 56): ‘Seek out those relationships that will take
your life to the next level – ones that offer unconditional love, support
and understanding’ (Hedley-Ward 2008, p. 8, emphasis added). This
behavioural and spatial control enables a sense of empowerment: the
ability to go on and be that creative, ‘amazing’ (2008, p. 10) mother. Yet
as Hedley-Ward’s prescriptions suggest, mothering and the domestic can
reach their potential only by techniques equally at home in the neoliberal
workplace.
Finally, just how sexy is the sexy mother idealised by the text? Curi-
ously, the mother’s sexuality and sexual desire are barely mentioned,
except in the displaced terms of looking good as improving self-esteem,
and the suggestion of regular date nights. Sexiness, then, is redefined as an
empowered and authentic self; similarly, passion is about finding one’s
true mission rather than taking sexual form. It is highly indicative of the
tensions inherent in stay-at-home mothering that this sexy mother is all
about self-oriented, rather than heterosexual or consumerist, erotics.
You Sexy Mother gives some salutary advice, legitimising a sense of
autonomy and emphasising the self-worth of mothers, without proffer-
ing luxury consumption as part of the deal. It does, however, also
encumber mothers with the burden of life as a highly charged project
undertaken alone – a teleological quest to find the authentic (i.e. crea-
tive) self, which Sara De Benedictis and Shani Orgad argue increases and
masks maternal labour (2017, p. 114). The self and the home as aes-
thetic objects are demanding tasks and, unlike The Weekly’s dreamscape
of domestic plenitude, there is little sense of any practical constraints. In
effect, You Sexy Mother provides its own attractive textualised haven for
stay-at-home mothers, but in very different terms from those of The
Weekly. Hedley-Ward’s maternal home is a space of autonomy, thereby
reversing the usual understanding of the domestic as entrapment and
motherhood as being other-directed. It thus exemplifies the postfeminist
complication of the conventional oppositions structuring domesticity
(Genz 2008, p. 52). Women’s traditional association with physical
beauty is now extended to include the domestic as site of beauty, while
the near invisibility of children in the text mirrors the erasure of the ten-
sions surrounding working women with children (such as childcare,
guilt, career progression), and the unpaid labour that mothers perform.
The calculating magic of our final sub-genre, career guides, reveals the
anxieties of the woman in paid employment, and the unpaid labour she
must undertake to remain an employable and coping worker in the con-
temporary workplace.
176  Self-help books
Career guides: healing the alienated woman worker
Considering the vexations of the workplace hinted at by Hedley-Ward and
the centrality of working women to postfeminist culture – whether in cul-
tural representations (Press & Strathman 1993; McRobbie 2007; Genz
2009; Adamson 2017), or in women’s experiences as workers in an era
when being able to pursue paid employment and a career is simply
assumed (Gill et al. 2017) – what types of advice do contemporary
women’s career guides offer? Does career self-help challenge the deep
ambivalence found in postfeminist cultural narratives of working women
(Negra 2009, p. 87) and/or rectify these texts’ ‘inattentive[ness] to the
material conditions and pressures of actual work’ (Leonard 2007, p. 104)?
Do they bring into being the neoliberal feminist subject who, as Catherine
Rottenberg argues in her reading of Sheryl Sandberg’s 2013 blockbuster
career guide, Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead, ‘convert[s]
continued gender inequality from a structural problem into an individual
affair’ (2014, p. 420; see also Negra 2014; Taylor 2016)?
Surprisingly, career guides are one of the relatively minor sub-genres of
self-help – though we should remember that career is often discussed in
other sub-genres, usually in terms of ‘finding your passion’, and there is an
entire industry devoted to executive coaching (Swan 2017) and leadership
training.15 We discuss a text that exemplifies the way in which capitalist
values intermingle with softer, feminine, and therapeutic discourses so that
the understanding of work and the workplace are fundamentally altered
from that of second wave feminism, while still echoing it. Kristine Martin-
McDonald’s Energise Your Career: A Guide to How Any Woman Can
Have the Success She Wants (2015) blends supposed insights from psych-
ology with marketing – itself a highly indicative combination – to position
the woman worker as lacking and in need of healing. The topics covered
and her use of the term ‘career’ suggest that Martin-McDonald addresses
the white collar woman worker experiencing workplace difficulties (such
as bullying) or career stagnation. Moreover, similar to the absent child in
Hedley-Ward’s mothering guide, Martin-McDonald keeps the workplace
offstage, absolving it of any responsibility for the worker’s situation, and
instead uses psychological and emotional management as methods of over-
coming alienation. Feminist or leftist institutional and structural analyses
of women and work are therefore also offstage. Instead, in the calculating
magic of the career guide, work and the woman worker become demateri-
alised, psychologised, and spiritualised.
Considering Martin-McDonald’s profession as a nursing academic, her
use of more conventional, apparently scientific methods and an emphasis on
healing are not surprising: she advocates ‘positive psychology and fem-
inine practices’ (2015, p. 4). Like Sandberg’s Lean In, Martin-McDonald’s
Energise Your Career’s diagnosis of the problem for women in the work-
place is that women lack confidence – a deficiency that, according to
 Self-help books  177
­ artin-McDonald, is biological and social in origin (2015, p. 23). This
M
simultaneous acknowledgement and repudiation of feminist understandings
of gender identity is replayed throughout the book, with this dual under-
standing producing two methods of self-help: the first part, ‘You in the
World’, is devoted to improving women’s sense of self-worth. By building
women’s confidence and resilience, they can better navigate the workplace
and feel deserving of career success. In this respect, it is a perfect example of
what Rosalind Gill and Shani Orgad term ‘confidence culture’ – ‘a gendered
technology of self’ that is directed at women, and which requires much ‘self-
work’ to overcome feminine shortcomings in work, body image, and so on
(2015, pp. 326, 333), similar to what we observed in our beauty vlog
chapter. Energise Your Career thereby advocates the typical calculating
magic methods of self-reflection, keeping a journal, identifying goals, living
by a new moral code (specifically, practising gratitude and generosity), and
features self-help’s characteristic bricolage of aphorisms and anecdotes,
practical insights, and inflated emotionalism. Echoing all of our authors, a
reader must learn to value and honour herself and aim for joy and abun-
dance because she deserves to live the life of her dreams. In addition, the self
must be renovated into a far more intense, energised emotional landscape –
a psychological variant of Rose’s neoliberal ‘vitalism’ we observed in the
women’s health and fitness guides. Moreover, regardless of the section title,
the world here is that of the psyche, not the social, and the condition of the
psyche is key to worldly, or ‘career’, success.
The second part, ‘You as a Career Woman’, addresses the workplace,
shifting register to the languages of marketing and the corporate. Rather
than critiquing the deregulated neoliberal workplace – one shown to dis-
advantage women (Pocock 2003; Van Gellecum et al. 2008) – Martin-
McDonald advocates the entrepreneurialism of personal branding as key
to career advancement. Personal branding is something constructed
through physical image, skills, social media, and behaviours, and ‘will
follow you throughout your career as it lets people know who you are and
what you stand for’ (2015, p. 134). Moreover, we suggest it epitomises
neoliberal notions of work: the self as commodity and image. As Alice
E. Marwick explains, ‘The personal brand extends to individuals the philo-
sophy and tactics of contemporary “promotional culture”, in which
information, economics, and persuasion are inextricably linked’ (2013,
p. 165). In effect, branding is a mark of distinction – distinguishing you
from the other workers – and mark of value – what you, as human capital,
add to the workplace. Martin-McDonald is at pains to distance personal
branding from negative connotations of narcissism or egotism, instead
redefining the practice more appealingly as a response to two existential
questions: ‘Who am I?’ and ‘What do I want to achieve in my lifetime?’
(2015, pp. 116–115). Answers to these should inform self-branding.
Regardless of her rebranding of branding, the actual how-to of personal
branding that Martin-McDonald discusses focuses on techniques of image
178  Self-help books
construction and self-presentation, producing a consistent and appealing
self to the world. In this way, it demonstrates the paradox of self-branding
outlined by Marwick: the conjoining of authenticity and intensified self-
regulation (2013, p. 199), and, we add, the triumph of surface over depth
to supposedly express depth. Moreover, Martin-McDonald’s version of
self-branding is founded upon an updated and even more commodified
version of women’s traditional requirement to always look good and be
valued for their appearance. Her advice bears out Elias et al.’s insight that
‘Neoliberalism makes us all “aesthetic entrepreneurs” – not simply those
who are models or working in fashion or design’ (2017, p. 5, original
emphasis). In Martin-McDonald’s schema, self-image (rather than educa-
tion, experience, social networks or work ethic) is the most valuable attrib-
ute of the career woman.
Martin-McDonald includes two other chapters on career advice: one on
leadership and one on workplace bullying. The first emphasises how
women’s personality traits (most notably, empathy, communication skills,
and a collective ethos) make them ideal leaders in the contemporary work-
place. Again, she attempts to motivate women to think of themselves as
leaders – leaders of themselves and then of their workplace. Rather than
representing a disadvantage, she argues, women’s innate femininity actu-
ally makes them well-suited to the world of work (2015, pp. 149–151) –
although Australian statistics on women’s representation at senior levels
do not reflect this. So again, the female psyche and positivity obscure, even
replace, the actual workplace and its continuing systemic discrimination
against women. The chapter on bullying is the sole instance in which the
workplace is framed in institutional rather than emotional, psychological,
or optimistic terms (2015, pp. 160–162). Martin-McDonald’s prescription,
therefore, makes female psychology and attitude central to a woman’s
career outcomes and hence her own responsibility. Women are presented
as lacking until now, but with self-monitoring, emotional resolve, and
belief – a variant of positive thinking – this insufficiency can be overcome
and transformed into leadership ability. The impersonal and social ele-
ments of work (including qualifications, pay and conditions, promotions,
social capital, and institutional structures) are absent, and the only neg-
ative element present is not sexual harassment but bullying – with its
infantile and non-gender specific connotations.16
Energise Your Career’s calculating magic constructs an optimistic and
individualised account of career advice and hence the workplace, using
conventionally feminine terms and techniques of the emotional, the thera-
peutic, and physical appearance. In a sleight of hand ideal for neoliberal
times, Energise Your Career, like the confidence culture of which it is part,
‘relies upon both an expression and a repudiation of injury’ (Gill & Orgad
2015, p. 336) – in this case, that afflicting working women. As was the
case with the advice given to mothers, alienation is a result of women’s
psychic lack, rather than being an economic and institutional condition.
 Self-help books  179
Conclusion: an Australian postfeminist self-help?
Although a vast and diverse field, the semioscape examined here reveals
some recurrent features of contemporary Australian women’s self-help that
delineate the ideal Australian postfeminist subject, postfeminism’s relation-
ship to feminism and to neoliberalism, and the attractions of the genre.
What work do these ideas do? In the affective mechanics and rhetorics of
calculating magic, the postfeminist subject constructed and interpellated is
a valuable being – a subject worthy of an everyday philosophy. She
deserves realisation and happiness; she has enormous potential; she con-
tains an authentic self; and is aspirational and agentic rather than static. In
these highly desirable qualities, we see the legacy of second wave feminism:
women are full and complex subjects, seeking change and fulfilment, and
able to change. At the same time, however, the postfeminist subject is also
lacking, trapped, and/or alienated, and therefore in need of not just advice,
but transformation.
The term ‘transformation’ is highly significant. First, it can be read as
an index of her unsatisfactory position in neoliberal Australia and after
nearly 50 years of feminism. Second, it connotes something far more
encompassing and deep-seated than the makeover imperative that Gill
(2007b) examines, suggesting a significant historical shift – from (col-
lective/political) revolution and liberation to personal transformation.
These books all promise total solutions, but solutions limited to the self.
Postfeminist self-help continues in altered form the revolutionary impetus
of women’s liberation, while also articulating the major social and indi-
vidual transformations caused and called for by neoliberalism in Australia,
including the continuing pain or discontent of many women’s lives,
addressed overwhelmingly in ‘practical’ and supposedly apolitical terms
(health, career, mothering, fulfilment).
In terms of self-help literature, what is the nature of advice given to the
postfeminist woman, and how is it constructed textually? Primarily, she is
exhorted to take control of her life via her choices using the attractive
terms and techniques of calculating magic, which align with neoliberal
requirements for the postfeminist subject. This control is exerted by self-
reflection, changes in attitudes and thought patterns, and a range of
detailed techniques of self-discipline that exude technocratic power. She
may use quasi-knowledges of late capitalism; regardless, her programme of
change will be moral (practise forgiveness and gratitude) and emotional
(follow your passions). Thus, we see an uneasy mix of feminist-derived
insights (take control, the emotions matter, women are deeply ethical
beings, the importance of female role models) with neoliberal elements
(exerting choice, personal aspirations, technocratic approaches to the self,
the cult of expertise, and entrepreneurship as path to freedom). Calcu-
lating magic, though operating as philosophy, is actually the Australian
postfeminist woman’s micro-economic theory: what to invest in, how to
180  Self-help books
increase individual gross domestic product, and how to engage with
broader economic structures.
Moreover, we should not underestimate the attractions of an optimistic
future, a sense of energy and agency, and the respect offered by self-help
books. Their everyday philosophy enables women to think of their poten-
tial and agency in the conflicted times of neoliberalism – for the postfemi-
nist woman has no past worth returning to. She was never the ideal subject
of pre-neoliberal Australia, as the second wave women’s movement makes
evident, and so she may just be able to benefit by taking a punt on the
forms of magic these books offer, just as high-profile late capitalist male
entrepreneurs seem to have magic at their disposal, and the capitalist
economy similarly operates along mysterious and mystifying lines.
While seemingly telling a less optimistic story of Australian postfeminist
culture, the palimpsestic form of women’s self-help gives cause for hope.
These books show the enduring legacy of second wave feminism’s quest for
women’s liberation. Self-help’s ideational and ideological frames are abso-
lutely dependent on the women’s movement: it is something of a ghost
story of feminism; its spectral presence is everywhere. This legacy is,
however, mediated and reconfigured by the languages of neoliberalism, as
our semioscape of calculating magic reveals. Postfeminist self-help is there-
fore not antagonistic to feminism. Indeed, it relies on and accommodates
feminism, but finds itself deeply determined by, and entangled in, a broader
and more powerful historical context. Consciousness-raising gives way to a
self-help that aids women through thinking, feeling, and acting, to cope
with and conform to late modernity. It is not inevitable, however, that only
the neoliberal codes are the ones acted upon by the reader, and time will
inevitably add another layer to the genre. In the final chapter we see a set of
coping strategies for women political leaders, the masculinist Australian
polity, and political journalism to deal with postfeminist times.

Notes
  1 See also Youyou Zhou’s 2017 analysis of Goodreads data.
 2 The implied female readership is suggested by the titles of books (e.g. A
Woman’s Guide to …), cover illustrations, modes of addressing the reader (‘okay
girl, go for it!’), and/or topics covered (such as motherhood and female sexual-
ity). The four sub-genres we examine – self-actualisation, health and fitness,
mothering advice, and career help – imply a particular age-related, racially
unmarked, and amorphously middle-class demographic – to which we return.
Health and fitness and mothering advice, for instance, targets 18 to 45 year
olds (or young to mature women), while the guides to career and self-actualisa-
tion aim at a slightly older readership of mature to middle-aged women. Note
that each sub-genre, however, also contains texts that address other reader-
ships, such as health and fitness guides for elderly women, suggesting the
expansion and broad appeal of self-help.
  3 Munford and Waters (2014, p. 30) similarly observe postfeminism’s palimpses-
tic relationship with feminism.
 Self-help books  181
  4 Illouz observes that ‘feminism was one of the major political and cultural for-
mations to adopt the therapeutic discourse, as early as the 1920s and most
forcefully in the 1970s’ (2008, p. 167).
 5 He chooses Janette Rainwater (1989), Self-Therapy: A Guide to Becoming
Your Own Therapist, HarperCollins, London.
  6 We examined the National Library of Australia’s (NLA) holdings. The Copy-
right Act 1968 states that Australian publishers should provide a deposit copy
of every book published to the NLA, whether print or electronic, industry or
self-published. The NLA’s holdings, therefore, are a reasonable indicator of
Australian publishing.
 7 Tom O’Regan’s 2007 work on personal financial advice, and Catherine
R. Delin and Peter S. Delin’s 1994 analysis of Australian readers of self-help
books are two exceptions.
  8 These figures are based on research that was conducted in February 2016.
  9 See Steve Salerno (2005) for a journalistic exposé of the US self-help industry.
10 See Lea Gay’s Attitude Goddess: Every Woman’s Guide to Having it All!
(2008), Danette Hibberd’s How to Find the Goddess in You (2008), or Melissa
Scott’s compilation, The Enlightened Goddess: Life Changing Secrets of
Soulful Women (2009), amongst others.
11 See Sam Binkley (2011) or Barbara Ehrenreich (2009) for detailed accounts of
the contemporary power of positive thinking.
12 Two examples are Ita Buttrose and Lee Campbell’s Get in Shape (2007) or
Fiona Thomas Hargreaves’s Fit and Fabulous for Life after Babies (2009).
13 Although in America, Title IX – a major breakthrough for women in sport –
was passed into law in 1972.
14 Other examples include Kerry Townsend (2009), Mother’s Essential Toolkit;
Christie Nicholas (2011), The Mum Who Roared: A Complete A-Z Guide to
Loving Your Mind, Body and Attitude; Eunice Hunter (2012), Have Fun and
Make Money: An Easy Guide to Social Selling for Mums Who Want to Work
from Home; and Dijanna Mulhearn (2014), Wardrobe 101 for Mums: Fashion
Formulas for Modern Mothers.
15 We should note, however, that there is a plethora of career advice authored by
state and federal governments taking non-book form, though this is usually
aimed at younger women and girls.
16 Gill et al.’s (2017) study of the permeation of postfeminist thought in the
workplace makes similar findings: gender inequality is presented as an individ-
ualised issue rather than a structural one.

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6 Political journalism
Women leaders, constrained power,
and the rhetoric of post-gender

In this final chapter, we have made a strategic decision to engage with a

form that claims to represent ‘fact’ and ‘reality’: news discourse. In this
respect, our case studies have progressed from the most overtly fictional
forms to the least, with news being perceived as the most non-fictional
(though, of course, it also actively constructs the reality to which it lays
claim). Here we attend to the ways in which postfeminist rhetorics have
been/are being mobilised to make sense of, and often to contest, Australian
women’s contributions to political life and access to power. To do so, we
focus on the print news coverage of three women politicians, from
different parts of the political spectrum, in different leadership roles:
Pauline Hanson, leader of her own political party, Pauline Hanson’s One
Nation, and current senator; Julia Gillard, Australia’s first woman Prime
Minister; and Julie Bishop, recently retired Deputy Leader of the Liberal
Party and Foreign Minister. As in previous chapters, we find some of the
familiar postfeminist logics mapped elsewhere, yet specific Australian his-
tories and mythologies, and the tropes upon which they rely, result in a
way of figuring gender, power, and class that is distinctive to this locale.
We also find in the field of political journalism (perhaps unsurprisingly
given that both journalism and politics are largely still masculinist spaces)
a much more pessimistic story than in our other genres, making clear that
postfeminism plays out differently, not just in different geographical and
cultural contexts, but in different media forms.
There is, we reveal, a persistent uneasiness about women and power in
Australia, and women in leadership roles continue to pose a representa-
tional ‘problem’ for journalists who persistently reinscribe limited gen-
dered tropes and metaphors in their reporting; such coverage constitutes
what we call a semioscape of constrained power. Importantly, of all the
forms we examined in this book, it is the field of news discourse that prof-
fers much less creative, more ambivalent, and often contradictory
responses to feminism, and we see the mobilisation of limited gendered
frames and narratives to publicly make sense of their power and to, in the
process, discipline them (Trimble 2017). In addition to the nature of the
form, this relates to culturally specific factors, such as persistent white
188  Political journalism
national fictions predicated upon masculinist concepts and tropes – mateship,
the bushman, the Aussie ‘battler’ and the ‘digger’ – which have profoundly
informed the Australian nation: ‘The difficulty of being a woman leader’,
Jack Holland and Katherine Wright (2017, p. 594) suggest, ‘is particularly
acute in A­ ustralia, due to the interweaving of gender expectations with
foundational and exclusionary national identity narratives’. It is the exclu-
sivist nature of these core mythologies, alongside the ‘double bind’ faced
by women leaders in other contexts, they argue, that sees women leaders
occupy a ‘doubly oxymoronic role’ in relation to the Australian state.1 In
media coverage and more broadly, they are rendered problematic both as
women leaders, figures coded as aberrant here as elsewhere, and women
leaders in an imagined ‘Australia’, itself predicated on the exclusion of
women (Holland & Wright 2017, p. 594). In many ways, therefore, these
enduring national mythologies work to ensure that, when it comes to
women in positions of political power, postfeminism plays out in ways
that are specific to Australian news discourse.
In terms of their gendered discursive construction in the press, what
constituted ‘legitimate’ – or rather ‘illegitimate’ – femininity was not con-
sistent across the three figures. For Hanson, it was her embodiment of a
working-class femininity, and especially sexuality, that was persistently
ridiculed; for Gillard, it was her active role in a leadership coup that called
her authority into question throughout her tenure and her failure to simply
ignore the intense misogyny directed towards her. At the same time as
gender is presumed irrelevant and no hindrance to women’s political ambi-
tions, both Hanson and Gillard were seen to be doing their femininity –
whether through their bodies or through their deeds – wrong. For Bishop,
however, her Thatcher-style reconciliation of a normative femininity with
a strong, measured public persona, alongside her patent unworking class-
ness, ensured that she was seen as a much less problematic figure than
Hanson or Gillard. This tension, between a rhetoric of gender’s irrelevancy
and a heightened public engagement with it, we posit, is especially pre-
valent in recent Australian political discourse, revealing much about post-
feminism’s culturally specific dynamics.
Like other critics, we argue that the public performance of gender is
especially complicated for political women (Johnson 2015; Trimble 2017),
and has become even more so in the context of postfeminist presumptions
of gender’s (and feminism’s) irrelevancy. A number of contradictory, yet
interrelated, elements coalesce in this semioscape of constrained political
power: the (unsuccessful) elision of gender; ambivalence towards feminism
and, relatedly, reanimated sexism; and the intensified regulation of femi-
ninity. Such gendered news coverage, we suggest, works to undermine
enduring postfeminist claims that gender matters little (if at all), and that
sexism in Australia has been eliminated. Within postfeminist frameworks,
‘feminism is seen as having done the political work needed to eradicate
gender asymmetry’ (Banet-Weiser 2018, p. 19). In this respect, being
 Political journalism  189
­ostfeminist is synonymous with being ‘post-gender’ (and indeed post-­
p
sexism). As we demonstrate, each of these women – like postfeminism
itself – has had an ambivalent relation to Australian feminism, ranging
from and indeed shifting between complete dismissal and repudiation, to
strategic identification to achieve political goals. Although Angela
­McRobbie has argued that postfeminist culture entails ‘repudiation rather
than ambivalence’ (2004, p. 257) towards feminism, it is significant that
we see more of the latter emerging, both by journalists and by the politi-
cians themselves. Indeed, we argue that a performative ambivalence
towards feminism, though not always sustainable, is a requirement for
women leaders, part of the condition of their very public visibility. Such
ambivalence, of course, is nothing new; many studies have found ambiva-
lence both in how women engage with feminism (Skeggs 1997; Scharff
2012) and in how mainstream media has variously incorporated, adapted or
revised it: indeed this is how many define postfeminism itself (Rosenfelt &
Stacey 1990; Dow 1996). But, in Australian news discourse at least, it is the
figure of the political woman who both prompts and herself embodies this
equivocation.
Here we find a familiar series of gendered tropes being deployed around
these women leaders, ideological strategies that work – in different yet
related ways – to undermine their authority.2 In this respect, contradictory
tropes at play include: woman-as-seductress or wily sex symbol (Hanson);
vulnerable woman in need of protection (Hanson); manipulative, scheming
woman or, in Gillard’s case, ‘Lady Macbeth’; unwitting pawn of ‘faceless
men’ (both Hanson and Gillard); and celebrity fashionista and hyper-­
feminine ‘glamour girl’ (Bishop). Such sexist coverage is implicitly seen as
permissible in a ‘postfeminist’ context as the fundamentals of feminism are
presumed incontestable, with inequality and sexism firmly relegated to the
past – especially given Australia’s presumed ‘egalitarianism’ (Stevenson
2013; see also Gill 2007, 2011).
As there is a huge corpus of Australian media coverage of these figures,
this chapter is organised around a series of heavily reported cultural ‘flash-
points’ during their public careers, each of which allow us to foreground
the gendered politics of representation. In particular, the way women
political actors – perhaps more so than other forms of celebrity – ‘position
themselves in relation to femininity and feminism’ is ‘closely scrutinised’ in
the press (Lee-Koo & Maley 2017, p. 329). In each section, accordingly,
we begin with how these leaders have been gendered in news discourse, the
kinds of femininity they are seen to embody, and then move on to news-
paper reporting of their varied attempts to frame their relation to feminism
in certain ways. With Hanson, our focus is on coverage of the 1998
Queensland state and federal election campaigns (after her political party
had been established), most of which works to frame her electoral appeal
in terms of sexuality; and more recently when she was re-elected to the
Australian senate on an anti-immigration platform that involved attacks
190  Political journalism
on Muslim Australians. For Australia’s first woman Prime Minister, Julia
Gillard, we focus on the leadership coup in 2010, which led to her polit-
ical ascension, and how she publicly negotiated her gendered persona after
taking office, and her ‘sexism and misogyny speech’ in 2012 – internation-
ally lauded but locally seen by some as a cynical political gesture. Finally,
we examine the media coverage of former Foreign Minister Julie Bishop’s
repeated public defences of femininity in 2014 and her National Press
Club address in October the same year, during which she disavowed fem-
inism in favour of a neoliberal celebration of the individual.
Analysing the 2008 presidential election campaign in the United States,
Kristina Sheeler and Karrin Anderson argue that it marked an important
transition for postfeminist rhetoric, as ‘strategies that previously were con-
fined to entertainment and pop cultural spheres emerged forcefully to shape
political dialogue’ (2013, p. 5). Here, beginning with Hanson in the 1990s,
we suggest that in Australia – similar to the British media coverage of ‘Blair’s
babes’ (Ashby 2005) – we can see the emergence of such a shift from the late
1990s, a shift that we note is concurrent with the increased celebritisation of
politics and the intensified focus on personal over public subjectivities in
political reportage (Street 2004; Turner 2004; Van Zoonen 2006; Wheeler
2013). Moreover, in starting with Hanson, who became publicly visible at
the beginning of the temporal frame we are designating postfeminist, we are
able to show that rather than ‘gendered mediation’ – defined as how ‘prod-
ucts and processes of news-making reflect [and indeed help constitute]
gender norms, binaries, and power relations’ (Trimble 2017, pp. 9–10) –
becoming less important, it is being amplified, despite (or perhaps because
of) feminism’s apparent newfound ‘luminosity’ (McRobbie 2015; Gill 2016).

Disciplining political women in a ‘post-gender’ context

In the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, women have increasingly
taken on positions of political power. At the time of writing, there are women
state leaders in a number of countries including the United Kingdom, New
Zealand, and Germany. That said, despite the successes of Australian ‘femo-
crats’ in the 1970s and 1980s (and indeed the fact that Australia was one of
the first countries to grant women suffrage), here, as in other Western nations,
women politicians remain in the minority. For example, as at 2016, women
represented only 29 per cent of elected members in the current House of Rep-
resentatives, and a slightly better 39 per cent in the Senate, figures which are
comparable to New Zealand and Canada (Hough 2016). Moreover, there are
concerted efforts at the discursive level to render such women problematic, to
police the boundaries of femininity itself, and to further establish the incon-
gruence of women as political actors (despite the postfeminist assumption that
there are no structural barriers impeding their political progress).
Relatedly, and as our Australian examples also indicate, ambition in
women continues to be publicly constructed as atypical (Hall & Donaghue
 Political journalism  191
2013), operating as a means to curtail the actualisation of women’s power.
Here we consider the various ways in which these three women were dis-
cursively constructed ‘feminine’ and ‘unfeminine’, and how this functioned
as a disciplinary mechanism (Butler 1990; Appleby 2015; Trimble 2017).
Gendered narratives circulated in and through the press necessarily have
material effects, which is why rendering them visible is such important
feminist work. As Judith Butler (1990, 2004) has argued, certain ways of
performing gender come to be seen as legitimate, as inhabitable, and there
can be significant material consequences for those who transgress such
norms. While women have long been subject to such regulatory regimes,
postfeminism, including in its Australian articulation, in many respects
seeks to shore up rigid and clearly delineated gender binaries (Gill 2007)
rather than effect their destabilisation. These regulatory norms are espe-
cially evident around the figure of the woman political leader, who is often
discursively positioned as an ‘unintelligible being’ (Appleby 2015, p. 285;
see also Johnson 2015; Holland & Wright 2017; Varney 2017), an aberra-
tion in a sphere that continues to be overwhelmingly coded masculine.
Women may be political actors, and access power, but only within specific
limits (hence our semioscape of constrained power).
Our analysis of these three Australian politicians reveals the ‘possible
models of femininity that can be deployed by women political actors’ (Lee-
Koo & Maley 2017, p. 330; see also Johnson 2015; Trimble 2017; Lonie
2019; Sorrentino et al. 2019), and indeed how such models came to be con-
tested as well as revised over time by the women themselves – not least in
strategic acts of persona-building. In the public lives of these three women,
gender (like feminism) occupies a complicated position, and all of them at
various points refuse to publicly acknowledge its significance in their
careers or representations. For such figures, this sense of what we are
calling ‘post-gender’ does not relate to a destabilisation of binary logic or
gender queerness or to the post human, but is similar to ‘post-race’ dis-
courses (mobilised most vigorously in the United States) which presume
that race no longer matters, that there are no longer any structural impedi-
ments to becoming a full, self-determining neoliberal citizen (Squires 2014,
p. 6). Here, we show how these ‘post-gender’ assumptions, like those
around post-race, are integral to a neoliberal imaginary, including here in
Australia, but we also demonstrate how intensified gendered scrutiny of
women political actors undercuts this post-gender rhetoric.3 Before com-
mencing our analysis of Australian newspapers, it is important to place
this work in a wider political, cultural, and historical context that has been
dubbed – including by a Prime Minister – ‘postfeminist’.

Political context: ‘the postfeminist phase of the debate’

From 1996 to 2007, John Howard’s conservative Liberal-National Coali-
tion was in power federally, having replaced the Labor Prime Minister
192  Political journalism
Paul Keating, keen proponent of reconciliation and Australia’s relationship
with Asia. Distancing himself from Keating’s cosmopolitanism, and
seeking to re-emphasise Australia’s historical ties to Britain (Johnson
2007), Howard ‘tapped into long-held concerns about geographical isola-
tion and more recent anxieties opened up by the uncertain fluidity of glo-
balization’ (Brookes 2017, p. 56). Howard and his government desired a
nostalgic return to a simpler Australia, where its citizens could be – as he
famously remarked during the 1996 election campaign – ‘relaxed and
comfortable’ (see Brett 2005). For Howard, Australia was coded a ‘class-
less society’, with no structural impediments limiting the potential for
­Australian citizens, including women, to succeed (Brett 2005, p. 33). Over
the course of his leadership, Howard successfully appropriated egalitarian
(and, of course, deeply gendered and exclusionary) rhetoric around ‘mate-
ship’, ‘a fair go’ and the ‘battler’ (Dyrenfurth 2007, p. 211). Moreover,
Howard persistently mounted a critique of ‘political correctness’ (see Rolfe
1999) and the Left’s alleged stranglehold on university curricula and the
promulgation of what he called a ‘black armband view of history’.4 As
part of this project, he also proclaimed the feminist struggle over.
In 2002, in an interview in the Sydney Morning Herald, Howard first
explicitly characterised Australia as a postfeminist nation (‘The Mother’s
Club’, 2002):

I find that for the under-30s women … the feminist battle has been
won. That is not an issue. Of course, a woman has a right to a career.
Of course, women are as good as men. Of course, they are entitled to
the same promotion and they can do it [the job] as well.

For Howard, who publicly invoked the term a number of times during his
leadership, ‘postfeminism’ signals the way in which women no longer feel
encumbered by feminism and can now freely ‘choose’ to embrace marriage
and motherhood. His definition, therefore, is consistent with the idea of
postfeminism as a reclamation of the pleasures that feminism had pro-
hibited, as well as a retreatist vision that reprioritises women’s roles in the
domestic sphere (McRobbie 2009; Negra 2009); a form of what Elspeth
Probyn (1990) has analysed as the ‘new traditionalism’, which sees tradi-
tional gender roles recoded as individualised ‘choice’. As Howard told the
Sunday Telegraph, in a later article unambiguously entitled ‘Feminism
dead’ (Akerman 2006), ‘Fortunately, I think today’s younger women are
more in the post-feminist period, where they don’t sort of measure their
independence and freedom by the number of years they remain full-time in
the workforce without having children’ (in Akerman 2006). If we accept
the position that ‘postfeminist culture presents the view that women’s
equal worth and equal rights have been established beyond doubt’ (Hall &
Donaghue 2013, p. 250), coupled with the centrality of ‘choice’ discourses
and the revalorisation of matrimonial and maternal subjectivities for
 Political journalism  193
women (Negra 2009; Taylor 2012), then Howard’s comments clearly align
with such a notion. The first figure we analyse in terms of these prevalent
postfeminist tropes and discourses is the populist Pauline Hanson.

Pauline Hanson: postfeminism’s vulnerable seductress

Pauline Hanson was first elected to the Australian House of Representa-
tives in 1996 as the Member for Oxley, a Queensland electorate
40 ­kilometres west of Brisbane, centred on the ex-mining town of Ipswich.
After winning her seat as an independent (having been dis-endorsed by the
Liberal Party), she registered her own political party, Pauline Hanson’s
One Nation in 1997, with a platform based on nationalistic, protectionist
discourses – articulated in the anti-immigration sentiment that Australia
was being ‘swamped by Asians’ (Hanson 1996). This xenophobic position
has clear echoes of Australia’s White Australia policy, coupled with a
newer concern about the economic effects of globalisation and immigra-
tion, especially on rural Australia and its men (Curthoys & Johnson
1998). As Jennifer Rutherford remarks, ‘horror of difference was pro-
foundly integral to the One Nation imaginary’ (2001, p. 186; see also
Hage 2000). Part of a global revival of the far right in the late twentieth
century (Deutchman & Ellison 2004), and which has continued unabated
into the current one (symbolised most obviously by the election of Donald
Trump in the United States), Hanson’s One Nation party was, as one jour-
nalist remarked in the Age, ‘at heart still a symbol of deep disillusionment
with the Australian political system’ (Alcorn 1998).
Seen as an anti-establishment figure, not unproblematically compared to
Princess Diana and Sarah Palin, and positioning herself in opposition to
the political elite (as populists commonly do [Moffitt, 2016, p. 58]), she
has been described as an ‘anti-politician’ (Duruz & Johnson, 2002, p. 145;
Ustinoff 2005; Mason 2010) – a working-class every woman: ‘I come here
not as a polished politician but as a woman who has had her fair share of
life’s knocks’ (in Probyn 1999, p. 168). She attempted to position herself
as the (maternal) defender of ‘maligned masculine embodiments of nation-
hood’ (Mason 2010, p. 190), restoring order to the ostensibly imperilled
gender binary (which her status as a woman leader paradoxically worked
to compromise). She also, as Fiona Probyn notes, ‘embodies the figure of
the femininised battler who makes good’ (1999, p. 167): the ultimate
‘PFW (postfeminist woman)’ (Genz 2009) who has pulled herself up by her
bootstraps and succeeded on her own merits, rather than acknowledging
any debt to the women’s movement. Her initial federal parliamentary term
lasted just two years, but after making several unsuccessful bids to return
to politics she was finally elected to the Australian senate in 2016 (see
Broinowski 2017).5
As an opinionated, ambitious woman exercising her agency in the
public sphere, Hanson is the product of active feminist intervention into
194  Political journalism
the Australian state and attempts to legitimise women as political actors
and leaders. As Kylie Murphy writes, ‘She is a woman propelled to her
position by changes feminism has wrought in society’ (2002, p. 204). In
1997, when she formed her political party, she was one of only two
women political leaders (with the Democrats’ Cheryl Kernot being the
other). Hanson emerged at the moment that we suggest marks postfemi-
nism’s pronounced arrival on the Australian political and cultural land-
scape: 1996. As noted in our introduction, this was the period of ‘DIY
Feminism’, as Kathy Bail’s (1996) edited popular book of the same name
suggested. In Australia, ‘DIY feminism’ was effectively ‘girl power’ glocal-
ised; for Bail, in an all-too-familiar postfeminist narrative, organised fem-
inism – due to what she perceived to be its overwhelming success – was
redundant. As Marea Mitchell (2000, p. 72) argues, Bail’s approach advo-
cated ‘doing it for yourself alone, rather than for others’, with postfeminist
individualism being privileged over feminist collectivism. However, as
press coverage illuminates, the woman embodying power, even on an indi-
vidual level, has posed representational difficulties in Australia.

Postfeminism, political celebrity, and sexualisation

Australian media coverage of Hanson, from 1996 to the present, has been
extensive, and many critics have argued that she is a phenomenon largely
created by journalists (Trioli 1997; Bartlett 1998; Ellison & Deutchman
1999; Franklin 2001a, 2001b); that, as one remarked, they turned a
‘ “misfit into a megastar” ’ (in Leser 1996). In newspapers, her policies, like
those of Margaret Thatcher, have been overwhelmingly ‘framed in highly
personal and overtly gendered terms’ (Walsh 2015, p. 1028). Gender has
been seen to be responsible for her pronounced media visibility: ‘Paul
Hanson would never have developed into the media event that became
known as Pauline Hanson’ (Ellison & Deutchman 1999, p. 47, original
emphasis). As an independent right-wing woman politician, Hanson con-
founded the Australian news media, which relied upon a series of familiar
(gendered) tropes for making sense of this anxiety-provoking figure. As
Louise Milligan notes, ‘despite the inherent weaknesses in Pauline Han-
son’s policies and the ignorant, xenophobic nature of her ideology, jour-
nalists have still felt the need to undermine her on sexual and sexist levels’
(1999, p. 14; see also Van Acker 2003; Ustinoff 2005).
The ‘fish and chip shop lady’ moniker (she owned and operated such a
small business before entering parliament) was clearly invoked with a mid-
dle-class sneer, itself substantiating Hanson’s repeated claims of journal-
ism’s elitism (Kingston 2001). Moreover, although media coverage at
times dismissed her (like Gillard) as the puppet of a number of men
around her – such as John Pascarelli, David Ettridge, David Oldfield (jour-
nalists referred to the latter as ‘her svengali’ [Este 1998; Morris 1998]),
and, more recently, James Ashby – as an empowered woman in a
 Political journalism  195
l­eadership position in a right-wing political organisation, Hanson poses a
particular ‘problem’ for feminism: ‘She is feminism’s Frankenstein: built of
feminist parts but ultimately all wrong’ (Murphy 2002, p. 21), also an apt
description for some aspects of postfeminism itself. Her subsequent very
public disagreements with various members of her own party suggest that
she is also a problem for an ultra-right political party.6
Although the stories that Hanson seeks to tell about the Australian
nation are consistent with the key exclusionary national mythologies out-
lined earlier, this did not make her relation to power any less problematic.
Indeed, as is common for women celebrity politicians, the media ‘used her
physical appearance and amateurish public performances to continually
parody her’ (Ustinoff 2005, p. 104), with her lack of educational and cul-
tural capital especially being overplayed. For many journalists, it seemed it
was not her politics but her embodiment of a femininity that could be
coded working class that rendered her most objectionable (Perera 1999;
Murphy 2002). That is, Hanson may have enjoyed being ‘feminine’, as she
told journalists (McCabe 1998a, 1998b), but she was seen – unlike the
‘classy’ Bishop – to be doing it incorrectly. As media academic Catherine
Lumby (1998) remarked in the Age, ‘her clothing is garish, her make-up
draws attention to itself and she talks with all the natural charm of
someone delivering a prepared speech at a Rotary function’ (see also
Alderson 2001; Summers 20017). Hanson here is dismissed as having ‘bad’
taste, and thereby is used to shore up the ‘proper’ or legitimate femininity
embodied (or in the case of male commentators, endorsed) by those who
publicly mock her; this, of course, is not a unique strategy when it comes
to women and class (Skeggs 1997). Without doubt, class is deeply imbri-
cated in these critiques of Hanson’s failure to embody the ‘right’ kind of
femininity, something which is policed by women journalists (including
feminists like Lumby and Summers) as much as by others.8
During the 1998 Queensland state and federal election campaigns, jour-
nalists were preoccupied with attempting to account for Hanson’s appeal;
rather than her politics, her sexuality and apparent vulnerability (Duruz &
Johnson 2002, p. 145; see also Perera 1999) were seen to be the reason for
her resonance with the electorate. In one example, the Daily Telegraph
featured a photograph of Hanson alighting from a plane, the wind
blowing her skirt up and exposing her thighs, which appeared with the
caption: ‘Forget Policy, I’ve got great legs’ (McCabe 1998a). As Ustinoff
argues, this article, and myriad others like it, ‘openly negated Hanson as a
serious political force’ (2005, p. 97). As Helen McCabe continued, Hanson
was described as having ‘uncovered a secret [campaign] weapon – her
legs’.9 The Sydney Morning Herald’s political journalist, Margot Kingston,
similarly reported: ‘Ms Hanson dressed for the occasion yesterday, playing
on her sex appeal among over-45-year-old rural men, by wearing a black
pleated mini skirt’ (1998). With her political appeal ridiculed and reduced
to ‘sexiness’, Hanson failed to achieve, as Linda Trimble puts it, ‘mediated
196  Political journalism
legitimacy’. For women politicians, such sexualisation ‘in the news acts as
a form of discipline because it undermines their agency and legitimacy as
political actors’ (Trimble 2017, p. 139). Given that postfeminism presumes
that sexism has been eradicated, such coverage also evidences its reanima-
tion via irony and satire (Gill 2011), which works nonetheless to constrain
women’s political power.
Coverage of Hanson is reminiscent of that of the ‘postfeminist Sarah
Palin’ in the United States, who was – as Sheeler and Anderson argue –
‘pornified’ and discursively constructed as a ‘MILF’ (an offensive slang
acronym for ‘mother I’d like to fuck’). As they note, ‘Framing women’s
political agency in terms of sexual influence is a familiar strategy’ (2013,
p. 138). It is also a strategy that has intensified due to postfeminism and
the celebritisation of politics with which it has been coterminous, and
which has been commonly mobilised to undermine women’s political
authority (as with the ‘Blair’s babes’ coverage in Britain). Like Palin,
Hanson is discursively constituted as a kind of femme fatale, dangerously
seducing unwitting male voters: ‘How sex won Pauline more than her 15
minutes of fame’ (Stevenson 1998) and ‘The Sum of the Parts that make
Pauline – Sex appeal’ (Hickman 1998).10 In the Australian, David Marr
(1997) wrote: ‘Men respect her for showing courage they know they lack.
It’s sexy – and so is she’. Indicative of the unease yet provoked by women
in power, such coverage draws attention to the profound difference of a
woman’s body in a political sphere, and nation, that remains overwhelm-
ingly masculinist (Murphy 2002; Holland & Wright 2017).
Continuing such press coverage, and indicative of the destabilisation of
the boundaries between broadsheets and so-called tabloid newspapers over
this period (Lumby 1999), in the Australian Shelley Gare (1998) writes
that iconic women must have ‘a haze of sexuality’ coupled with a ‘quiver
of vulnerability’; with Hanson, she continues, ‘we got both’. Likewise, in
‘Hanson’s Sexual Power’ (1998), published in the Herald Sun, Helen
Elliott offers this contradictory discursive construction of Hanson: as
simultaneously vulnerable and extremely self-assured, offering a combina-
tion of a nostalgic form of femininity coupled with a new postfeminist
form of confidence: ‘She is always female in the most traditional sense. Her
clothes emphasise her vulnerability, as does her hesitant speech and lack of
confidence in this playground. She is crying out for a protector’ (Elliott
1998). Hanson is, then, the ‘vulnerable empowered woman’ of postfemi-
nism, simultaneously empowered and at risk (Dubriwny 2012), with the
latter being seen to render her more palatable to her core constituency –
disaffected male rural voters (Rutherford 2001). However, using her sexu-
ality, as well as her strategic adherence to aspects of traditional femininity,
as an explanatory framework for her appeal with voters considerably
simplifies the apparent pull of her white nationalist politics, as well as
the politics themselves. As such reporting suggests, it is easier to identify
anti-feminist sentiments or ‘questionable gender perspectives’ in media
 Political journalism  197
coverage of Hanson ‘than in Hanson herself’ (Curthoys & Johnson 1998,
p. 107). Nevertheless, Hanson’s relationship to feminism has been espe-
cially fraught, entailing both explicit public disavowal and, more recently,
strategic deployment of ostensibly feminist rhetoric for more reactionary
political ends.

Hanson’s ‘feminism’, then and now

Hanson, like Bishop, has publicly disavowed feminism a number of times,
including in a profile by David Leser (1996) in the Sydney Morning Her-
ald’s Good Weekend magazine (likewise in a 2017 interview on A Current
Affair).11 Such refusal to express an affiliation with feminism is also a key
aspect of her conservative populist ‘brand’, but the disavowal of feminist
politics (though often less overt) is also seen to be a core element of post-
feminism itself (Gill 2007; Tasker & Negra 2007; Banet-Weiser 2018). In
addition, Hanson has made a number of patently antifeminist statements,
such as when she accused women of making ‘frivolous’ domestic violence
allegations (Moody 2016). Of paid parental measures being debated in
parliament, she remarked that women would become pregnant simply to
access them: ‘I’ve gone through a bloody tough life myself as a single
mother and held down a part-time job. I had no assistance, no help from
anyone. But we have such a welfare handout mentality’ (in Karp 2017). As
a neoliberal, entrepreneurial actor, Hanson’s personal success is deployed
to justify her politically reactionary stance against the welfare state; it also
exemplifies the ‘rugged individualism’ said to be ‘endemic’ to postfeminism
(Sheeler & Anderson 2013, p. 108).
Such comments are consistent with those she made in the 1990s around
the ‘single mother industry’ (in Curthoys & Johnson 1998, p. 104). Hanson’s
self-representation as a self-sufficient single mother (she even dubbed
herself ‘mother of the nation’) was used as the grounds on which she could
critique others. Moreover, as part of their active cultivation of the ‘angry
white male’ vote (Sawer 1999) – ‘I think the most downtrodden person in
this country is the white Anglo-Saxon male’, she said (in Leser 1996) –
One Nation also sought to appeal to non-custodial fathers, who they tar-
geted in their proposed policy initiative of abolishing the Family Law
Court. Like postfeminism’s, Hanson’s relation to feminism is complicated:
she does not reinscribe a ‘family values’ style discourse, does not advocate
women’s retreat into the private sphere, is pro-choice, defends affordable,
quality childcare, and she herself embodies an independent, successful,
agentic femininity (Curthoys & Johnson 1998, p. 105; Rutherford 2001).12
But Hanson’s relationship with feminism has become even more compli-
cated as revealed by our next flashpoint: the 2017 burqa ‘stunt’.
In 2016, still preoccupied with Othering immigrants, Hanson’s focus
shifted from Asians to Muslims, with one of her policies being the intro-
duction of a Royal Commission ‘to determine if Islam is a religion or
198  Political journalism
­olitical ideology’ (in Ludlow 2016). The political climate in which
p
Hanson made her comeback is markedly different from when she first
came to public prominence, particularly in terms of the geopolitical real-
ities of post-September 11 and Australia’s involvement in the ‘War on
Terror’, as well as feminism’s new-found visibility. In a recent incident
Hanson appropriated a form of feminist rhetoric for reactionary political
purposes, and thereby drew these new contexts together (in the same way
as Sarah Palin had done; see Sheeler & Anderson 2013). In 2017, Hanson,
in one of her most offensive public stunts, arrived in the Australian Senate
chamber wearing a burqa. Initially, she attempted to couch the stunt in a
rhetoric of national security but to the Canberra press gallery she outlined
the ‘feminist’ underpinnings of this gesture:

I feel for these women. I wore that burqa for half an hour and I
couldn’t wait to get it off … And yet we expect women to wear it in our
climate, covered up. Why? Because they’re being forced to, by men?
(In Elton-Pym 2017)

As McRobbie (2009, p. 26) underscores, such framing is entirely consist-

ent with postfeminism: ‘In a post-feminist frame, the only logic of affili-
ation with women living in other, non-Western cultures, is to see them as
victims’. In this respect, postfeminism and racism are co-constitutive.
In media interviews following the incident, Hanson continued this
attempt to (re)claim the heavily criticised act as a feminist one, arguing
that she was merely seeking to liberate her ‘oppressed’ Muslim sisters, a
task she charges feminists with neglecting (Remeikis 2017). Thus Hanson,
in the mode of colonial saviour, is coming to the rescue of downtrodden
Muslim women. Like Christina Scharff’s (2011, pp. 128–129) interview-
ees, Hanson mobilises the ‘trope of the “oppressed Muslim woman” ’ to
buttress the assumption that feminism is unnecessary in Western contexts
while also suggesting that she is supportive of gender equality. Ngaire
Donaghue suggests that in Australia the ‘solvedness’ of feminist issues
implied by the term ‘postfeminism’ is ‘rhetorically scaffolded … by con-
trasting the apparent freedoms of Australian women with images of
oppressed women in developing nations’ (2015, p. 163). Hanson’s burqa
stunt is further evidence of such postfeminist framing.
In addition, Hanson’s focus on feminists who have purportedly failed to
take action on this issue invokes the ‘straw feminist’, who ‘is an apologist
for Islam, so obsessed with anti-racism and multiculturalism that she is
unable to save her Muslim sisters’ (Dux & Simic in Hussein 2016, p. 38).
For Hanson, in what is undoubtedly a form of ‘orientalist feminism’ (Ho
2010), such women, whom she clearly and problematically discursively
‘Others’, are those who continue to experience oppression and discrimina-
tion on the basis of their gender – not ‘free’ women like herself (Scharff
2011, p. 130). In her rendering, (white) Australian women are
 Political journalism  199
­ ostfeminist, in the sense of having immensely benefited from, and been
p
liberated by, the second wave, while Muslim women remain oppressed and
in need of feminist salvation. For some conservative commentators, this
framing was entirely appropriate; conservative columnist and television
presenter Andrew Bolt (2017b) in the Herald Sun newspaper utters what
he professes to be ‘feminist truth’: that the burqa is ‘an abomination’. Sim-
ilarly, former conservative Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s Chief of Staff
(and current Sky News host), Peta Credlin, writing in the Daily Telegraph
in Sydney, problematically appropriates feminist rhetoric in support of
Hanson: ‘The burqa is about control and subjugation of women; it is not
about religion’ (2017).
This position, however, did not go uncontested; the title of Jill Poulsen’s
(2017) article in the Herald Sun is indicative here: ‘Hanson and her ilk are
not interested in women’s issues’ (see also Kurti 2017). For many, Han-
son’s mobilisation of what she presumed to be feminist modes of interpre-
tation was seen as a strategic political gesture, which itself unsurprisingly
backfired and brought much public opprobrium. This more recent
coverage tends to address her politics, rather than dismiss her on classed
and sexist grounds, suggesting a discursive shift in how the media now
respond to this troublesome figure. Nevertheless, over the course of her
20-odd years in the mediasphere, Hanson’s power has been constrained
primarily on the same gendered grounds as other women leaders. Although
coverage of her is certainly problematic from a feminist perspective,
Hanson has experienced less of the overt misogyny and widespread vitriol
experienced by Australia’s first woman Prime Minister, suggesting that the
closer women come to power, the more we must be disciplined.

Julia Gillard: the ‘accidental feminist’13

In this section, we turn to Australia’s first female Prime Minister, Julia
Gillard, and analyse newspaper coverage of two key moments in her
public career: her role in toppling a sitting Prime Minister (Kevin Rudd),
and her so-called misogyny speech. These flashpoints elucidate much about
the gendered nature of public discourse, and how the woman politician –
indeed like other forms of female celebrity – is judged, scrutinised, and
regulated in deeply troublesome ways (Negra & Holmes 2011). They also
severely compromise assumptions, including those made by Gillard herself,
about the irrelevancy of gender in twenty-first-century Australia. For Ana
Stevenson, who argues that this coverage is indicative of the pervasiveness
of postfeminism in Australian public discourse, ‘the [relentless] focus upon
Gillard’s gender existed alongside the assumption that sexism and mis-
ogyny remain characteristics of the “unenlightened” past’ (2013, p. 54) – a
point to which we will return.
Julia Gillard, from the Australian Labor Party’s left faction, became the
country’s first female Prime Minister in June 2010; she issued a challenge
200  Political journalism
to the sitting leader, Kevin Rudd, who had taken power at the 2007 elec-
tion in a landslide victory. Gillard and her supporters took issue with
Rudd’s autocratic style and, following a spate of dire opinion polls,
decided to take action against him; she won the leadership ballot and thus
the Prime Ministership. In an attempt to shore up her legitimacy, Gillard
called an election in August 2010, however, the ALP failed to win a
majority and was forced to form a minority government with the aid of
three independents. Importantly, out of all the women in this chapter, only
Gillard has publicly claimed an affiliation with feminism. That said, her
decision to articulate an overtly feminist position came – in the form of a
15-minute parliamentary speech which ‘called out’ the Opposition Lead-
er’s sexism – rather late in her public life.
While Gillard may have sought to downplay her gender and its impact
upon her political career – a strategic form of ‘non-feminism’ – that gender
significantly mediated the way she was discursively constituted in news
coverage is undeniable (Hall & Donaghue 2013; Lake 2013; Stevenson
2013; Summers 2013; Walshe 2013; Goldsworthy 2014; Trimble 2016,
2017). This is especially clear in the way her lack of a husband, and indeed
a child (with one senator even denouncing her as ‘deliberately barren’),
was seen to render her an ‘illegitimate’ leader (Taylor 2015): ‘Furnishing a
gender nonconforming woman with the power to act on a political stage is
one step too far, at least in Australia’ (Jones 2014, p. 205). She was not, as
she herself remarked, ‘a man in a suit’ (in Johnson 2015, p. 303). Further-
more, as Denise Varney (2017, p. 25) argues, Gillard was made the
‘primary public scapegoat’ for all the failures of Australian neoliberalism
(redundancies in the manufacturing sector; reduced social services; eco-
nomic decline), an important factor which also impacted this gendered
coverage. There was also a significant class element in these critiques of
Gillard, whose accent (a kind of Australian drawl) was seen, like Han-
son’s, to firmly code her as working class (Madigan 2010; Frenkel 2011).
Making explicit this (negative) positioning of Gillard as working class, an
article in the Australian was entitled ‘All hail the Queen of the bogans’
(Maiden 2010). This class denigration of both Gillard and Hanson repres-
ents another attempt to undermine their authority and to publicly discip-
line them (a disciplining that the upper-class Bishop has avoided) – so
much for Australian egalitarianism.
In Australian media coverage Gillard’s role in the leadership coup was
seen to be profoundly at odds with her gender (Taylor 2015). On this
point, Blair Williams – comparing Malcolm Turnbull’s overthrowing of
sitting Liberal prime minister Tony Abbott with Gillard’s – has argued that
the media representation of the latter’s leadership challenge is illustrative of
‘how the media weaponise gender in their portrayal of women politicians
as deviant when they exhibit what are deemed to be traditionally “mascu-
line” traits’ (2017, p. 550). In terms of the gendered nature of the media
coverage following the challenge, Gillard remarks that, despite the fact that
 Political journalism  201
other political leaders have similarly challenged their predecessors, ‘the
word “backstabber” or the dramatic image of having knifed a colleague
have not been routinely employed against them’ (2014, p. 107). Indicative
of this were veteran political journalist Laurie Oakes’ (2010) comments in
the Courier Mail: ‘the ambitious Gillard did not hesitate to take up the
knife and plant it in Rudd’s back’. Women journalists, too, reinscribed this
trope; as Michelle Grattan (2010) remarked in the Sydney Morning Herald:

Nice girls don’t carry knives. So Julia Gillard, who has arrived in the
prime ministership with the image of the clean, fair player, knows she
has to be persuasive in explaining how she came to plunge one into
Kevin’s neck.14

The Lady Macbeth trope was a recurrent one (Hartcher 2012), and her
ascension to power, and her (albeit precarious) leadership, was seen ‘as a
deeply transgressive performance of femininity’ (Johnson 2015, p. 304).
Throughout her tenure, the public criticism of Gillard was fierce; as
Varney notes, ‘an avowedly anti-feminist media placed itself in the service
of the neoliberal backlash against the carbon and other taxes that she
introduced’ (2017, p. 31, original emphasis). As part of the failure to
recognise the legitimacy of her leadership, Gillard, as many critics have
demonstrated, faced some of the most vile, outrageously sexist insults
during her time in public office. Although, of course, misogyny is not
merely an Australian phenomenon, and impacts political women especially
– witness Hillary Clinton’s treatment in the media (Bordo 2017) – in
­Australia it is clearly tied to those masculinist national mythologies dis-
cussed earlier (Holland & Wright 2017; Taylor 2019). In a remarkable
sign of self-control (and perhaps astute self-branding), Gillard chose to
publicly ignore what Anne Summers (2013) dubs the ‘misogyny factor’
until her October 2012 speech. For some, this tells us much about the
operations of postfeminist logic. In a postfeminist discursive framework,
‘Being offended by sexism is positioned as a “choice”, and a woman can
enhance her capital by showing herself to be unaffected by sexism’
(­Donaghue 2015, p. 164). Gillard’s ‘choice’ to not make an issue of the
sexism she was experiencing – that is, until the misogyny speech – renders
her, for Donaghue, ‘a post-feminist Prime Minister’ (2015, p. 164).
Women politicians need to carefully negotiate their public talk about
gender (Sorrentino et al. 2019), even more so in a postfeminist discursive
environment. In this respect, key to Gillard’s self-construction, and to her
refusal of the ‘deviancy’ commonly attached to women politicians (Ross &
Sreberny-Mohammadi 1997, p. 104), is the idea of ‘getting on with it’
(Goldsworthy 2014), evidence that ‘Gillard was well aware that her gender
could be used against her’, something she sought to manage by simply
refusing to acknowledge that it mattered at all (Johnson 2015, p. 300). As
Jasmin Sorrentino and Martha Augoustinos (2012, p. 385) argue, ‘Gillard
202  Political journalism
worked to strategically mitigate her gender as merely inconsequential to
her role as Prime Minister’. She refused to foreground her gender, or her
remarkable achievement, performing a rhetorical move common to female
politicians – especially conservative women like Margaret Thatcher (Nunn
2002): ‘I never conceptualise my prime ministership around being the first
woman to be doing this job’ (in Goldsworthy 2014, p. 64). Consistent
with postfeminism, she also sought to frame her personal success as evid-
ence of women’s transformed status in Australian society, thereby down-
playing the need for any further structural changes (Hall & Donaghue
2013, p. 641). In this vein, a Sydney Morning Herald article quotes her
distancing herself from any overtly feminist goals: ‘Gillard says she “didn’t
set out to crash my head on any glass ceilings” ’ (Murphy 2010). Signifi-
cantly, since leaving office (and arguably able to exercise more control
over her public persona) she has conceded that this refusal to acknowledge
the role of gender in terms of how she was being represented, and how she
was able to represent herself, was misguided (Gillard 2014). Her feminism,
too, has since become much less ambivalent (Taylor, forthcoming).
While feminist identification by celebrities seems entirely normalised
(and indeed is now expected for women as part of building a viable
brand), it continues to have negative consequences for political women
(see Lonie 2019). In recognition of this, Gillard repeatedly worked to act-
ively distance herself from feminism (Hall & Donaghue 2013, p. 641),
itself by no means a unique strategy for women leaders. For example, a
journalist in the Australian emphasises that Gillard ‘avoided being the fem-
inist poster girl’ because of the push back other prominent feminist Labor
women had encountered: ‘Gillard was again careful to distance herself
from any feminist symbolism by arguing her pursuit of power has been
about fairness and hard work, not smashing the glass ceiling’ (Karvelas
2010).15 Here, Gillard’s tactics of self-representation are laid bare, and
found to have been successful. Furthermore, as well as potentially alienat-
ing voters (Hall & Donaghue 2013, p. 641), the ‘blokey’ culture of the
ALP – ‘a party still essentially run by and for mates, usually defined on
male terms’ (Cox 2013) – may also have been a factor in this reluctance to
publicly identify as a feminist or indeed to draw attention to her gender.
Such efforts, of course, were ultimately unsuccessful, and Gillard was
unable to ignore the ways in which gendered assumptions shaped the way
she was being discursively constructed, including by her political oppon-
ents. The ‘misogyny speech’, the next flashpoint examined here, marked ‘a
turning point in Gillard’s own performance as a recognizable gendered
[and feminist] being’ (Appleby 2015, p. 153).

Gillard’s ‘misogyny speech’: from postfeminist to feminist PM?

On 9 October 2012, Gillard used a parliamentary speech to finally take
the conservative Opposition Leader Tony Abbott to task for the many
 Political journalism  203
offensive criticisms he had directed towards her throughout her period of
leadership. Speaking for around 15 minutes, Gillard was passionate, obvi-
ously angry, yet composed; she was a woman who had clearly had enough,
and whose working conditions were now intolerable (Summers 2013). It
was Abbott’s hypocrisy that seemed to most provoke her ire:

I say to the Leader of the Opposition I will not be lectured about

sexism and misogyny by this man. I will not. And the Government will
not be lectured about sexism and misogyny by this man. Not now, not
ever. […] I was offended when the Leader of the Opposition went
outside in the front of Parliament and stood next to a sign that said
“Ditch the witch.” I was offended when the Leader of the Opposition
stood next to a sign that described me as a man’s bitch. I was offended
by those things. Misogyny, sexism, every day from this Leader of the
Opposition.
(Gillard 2012)

Here, as Varney (2017, p. 27) argues, drawing upon the work of Judith
Butler, Gillard makes explicit the extent of the ‘injurious force’ of Abbott’s
utterances, giving her speech an intense affective power. Most important
for our purposes is the claiming of a clearly feminist subject position. As
Kate Chapple (2014, p. 7) argues, through the speech ‘Gillard had
unleashed her feminist voice, a voice that was hitherto unknown to the
Australian electorate’.
Gillard’s speech effectively punctured postfeminist assumptions about
feminism’s unmitigated success and the successful relegation of overt
sexism to the past (Donaghue 2015), exposing the ‘sexism which is so
deeply embedded in the Australian body politic’ (Pini in Rourke 2012) and
which works to place significant limits on women’s power. For a woman
in the public sphere, let alone the Prime Minister, to publicly contest the
sexism and misogyny that continues to pervade Australian public life was
remarkable, and most certainly newsworthy. Though international media
coverage was extensive, and largely supportive (Barnett 2012; Lester 2012;
Morrissey 2012) – propelling Gillard ‘to the status of global feminist icon’
(Wright & Holland 2014, p. 455) – local news media was more hostile
and sceptical of the political motivation behind Gillard’s publicly per-
formed feminism.16 Journalistic responses to the speech saw a number of
problematic gendered assumptions being invoked, including that Gillard
was overly emotional and hysterical (Wright & Holland 2014, p. 463), or
– as one journalist characterised the speech – ‘shrill and strident’ (Shana-
han 2012). In line with the idea that her feminist ire was politically manu-
factured, her speech was also seen as ‘inauthentic’ (Devine 2012), as she
‘feigned outrage’ and ‘pretended to be upset’ (Campbell 2012). In sharp
contrast to the public response to the speech, another journalist later
labelled it ‘fake feminism’ (Albrechtsen 2013).
204  Political journalism
As many feminist scholars – along with Gillard (2014) herself – have
emphasised (Sorrentino & Augoustinos 2012; Donaghue 2015; Johnson
2015; Trimble 2016, 2017; Worth et al. 2016), the pejorative phrase
‘playing the gender card’ circulated widely in press coverage, a gesture which
sought to undermine the affective power of Gillard’s ‘political rage and
passion’ (Varney 2017, p. 35). Newspaper article titles are indicative here:
‘Gillard reveals true nature in playing the gender card’ (Sheehan 2012) and
‘Gender card is a loser for Gillard’ (Devine 2012). For feminist critics, and
indeed the wider Australian public, the speech represented ‘a resistant fem-
inist performance’ (Varney 2017, p. 35), yet in the context of its media
reception it was refigured as a cynical, and indeed instrumentalist (Wright &
Holland 2014, p. 462), gesture. For journalists, conservative and progressive
alike, Gillard’s public feminist identification – her ‘gender opportunism’
(Maley 2013) – at that particular temporal juncture was entirely at odds
with many of her own policy initiatives, including those that disadvantaged
single mothers (Maley 2013), and attempted to mask her government’s defi-
ciencies: ‘Gender card hides failures’ (Pearson 2012) and ‘Julia Gillard is no
feminist hero’ (Pilger 2012;17 see also Sheehan 2012; Taylor 2012).18 Sim-
ilarly, in the Australian newspaper, Dennis Shanahan (2012) framed the
speech as an ‘attempt to destroy Abbott instead of concentrating on govern-
ing’, with the Opposition leader being positioned as a ‘good Aussie bloke’
under siege (Holland & Wright 2017).
Such reactions, given they seek to forestall a more productive feminist
dialogue, are testament to the disruptive potentialities of such a perfor-
mance. Further, given that her speech was made as she spoke against a
motion to remove the Speaker of the House, Peter Slipper, due to allega-
tions that he had sent offensive, sexualised text messages (including those
that were degrading to women) to his male staff member, James Ashby,
one journalist in the Sydney Morning Herald argued ‘she [Gillard] showed
she was prepared to defend even the denigration of women if it would help
her keep power’ (Hartcher 2012; see also Albrechtsen 2013). These jour-
nalists, however, expressed no concerns about the similar ‘denigration’
(also via heavily sexualised insults) of Gillard herself (Trimble 2016; see
also Summers 2013). Another journalist accused Gillard of ‘betraying’
feminism through her political support of Slipper (Grattan 2012). Such
readings, of course, worked to help undermine and call into question the
legitimacy of Gillard’s impassioned critique of sexism and misogyny, a
gesture that potentially ‘damages these arguments for future use’ (Don-
aghue 2015, p. 172; see also Trimble 2016, 2017).19
In the dominant interpretive frames used by journalists, rather than
Abbott’s misogyny being figured as an issue, ‘speaking about sexism,
failing to ignore it, failing to rise above it – this is the behaviour that is
constructed as abnormal and problematic’ (Worth et al. 2016, p. 61, ori-
ginal emphasis). This is a failure to adhere to the pervasive national (and
postfeminist) narrative that gender, along with other modalities of
 Political journalism  205
­ ifference, is inconsequential. Conservative commentator Miranda Devine
d
(2012) made this explicit in her column after the speech: ‘Playing the
gender card is the pathetic last refuge of incompetents … It offends the
Australian notion of the fair go.’ In this respect, Gillard’s speech contested
the notion that Australia, like others in the West, is a country with little
need for feminism or organised feminist activism; responses to the speech
(such as Devine’s) reveal a deep investment in this narrative. That is, it was
seen as incongruous in a context where gender is (wrongly) thought to
barely register. As Varney argues, the speech served to ‘expose the hollow-
ness’ of these ‘mythical Australian values’ (2017, p. 28; see also Trimble
2016), such as egalitarianism, myths Gillard herself had previously worked
hard to reinscribe (Hall & Donaghue 2013). Gillard, therefore, embodied
a threat to dominant ways of framing the Australian nation, and accord-
ingly had to be rebuked. It was Gillard’s contestation of sexism, not the
sexism itself, that was seen as an act of ‘extreme political violence’
(Trimble 2016, p. 297).
Gillard’s speech was also framed as a sign of weakness: ‘I never heard
Thatcher scream out in the House of Commons that her critics were sexist
misogynists. She would have thought that sounded weak’ (Advertiser, 15
October 2012). One article cited Julie Bishop, who suggested that Austral-
ian women had high expectations of Gillard as the first female prime
minister, and that – by claiming she was a victim of sexism – she had
effectively ‘let [them] down’ (in Wright 2012). Similarly, Janet Albrechtsen
(2013) wrote in the Australian, ‘the gender-card-waving PM rates poorly
as a feminist role model’ because, she implies, she didn’t exhibit neoliberal-
ism’s and postfeminism’s, ‘compulsory individualism’ (Cronin 2000); that
is, she failed to do-it-herself. The ‘gender card’ metaphor, and its assump-
tion that women politicians bring attention to their gender as a tactical
choice, ‘suggests that the voters might not notice that the candidate is a
woman unless she proactively calls attention to the fact’ (Falk 2013,
p. 198). That is, in this purportedly postfeminist political environment,
gender plays no part in politics or its reporting unless women choose for it
to be a factor; this, as we have shown, is patently not the case. Assertions
of politicians ‘playing the gender card’, therefore, are rooted in postfemi-
nist assumptions about gender’s contemporary irrelevance and presume
that it is only ever strategically deployed for political purposes. Finally, it
is significant that in subsequent media interviews, perhaps in response to
this negative press coverage, Gillard worked to downplay these gendered
attacks, acknowledging sexism but ‘simultaneously restricting it to a small,
extremist minority’ (Sorrentino et al. 2019, pp. 13–14); rather than being
at the heart of the Australian nation, sexism and misogyny were refigured
as an aberration. Although she has publicly rewritten this narrative
(Gillard 2014) since herself being deposed by Rudd in 2013, after the
speech, and for the remainder of her tenure, her belated feminist voice was
largely silenced, and the postfeminist order was thereby restored.20
206  Political journalism
Julie Bishop: Australian politics’ (and postfeminism’s)
glamour girl
In this concluding section, we focus on a high-profile leader at the conser-
vative end of the Australian political spectrum, the Liberal Party’s Julie
Bishop. She was first elected to the Australian Parliament in 1998, as the
member for the West Australian electorate of Curtin, and she has served
as a Minister in the Howard, Abbott, and Turnbull governments. Until
recently, she was the Australian Minister for Foreign Affairs – the first
woman to be appointed to this highly significant international role – and
Deputy Leader of the Liberal Party from 2007. As Foreign Minister, and
like Hillary Clinton as US Secretary of State, Bishop took on a role
usually reserved for men; Bishop herself, though, worked to feminise this
role: ‘I see myself as Australia’s relationship manager’, she told a journal-
ist (Sams 2014).
Overall, while Bishop refuses to acknowledge her gender, and especially
how it may have hindered her (or other women) in the Australian political
sphere, she consistently performs an overt celebration of femininity. She
embodies what has been described as the ‘Iron Butterfly’ model of conser-
vative femininity, which is

non-disruptive of the gendered social order and does not openly chal-
lenge the masculinist status quo hierarchy. It is a model that sees
women succeeding within the current system ‘on merit’ and refuses to
advocate for structural reform to rebalance male privilege.
(Lee-Koo & Maley 2017, p. 320)

The ‘iron butterfly’ model, we suggest, is the Thatcherite ‘iron lady’

adapted for the Australian postfeminist context, encompassing a ‘gentler’
leadership style (consistent with the ‘soft power’ of diplomacy) as well as a
more stylised, fashionable version of femininity.
Media coverage of Bishop often focuses on her seemingly immaculate
appearance and fashion sense; she successfully embodies normative fem-
ininity: she is slim and fit, appears much younger than her 63 years, is
stylish, heterosexual, white, and conventionally attractive. Though
physically she may be seen to ‘do’ her gender correctly (Butler 1990),
her life choices are so not conventional: she is unmarried and childfree.
Unlike Gillard, however, these behaviours have not been coded as aber-
rant or figured as a problem, either to her party or to the nation. Argu-
ably, any fear or cultural anxiety that such transgressions may have
evoked are mitigated by her investment in, and overt display of, more
traditional signifiers of femininity; it is also, we will argue, because of
class.
In 2014, Bishop’s comments contesting the devaluation of femininity
were widely reported:
 Political journalism  207
I don’t think we should apologise for our femininity … I don’t think
we should apologise for our interest in fashion. I have always loved
fashion and beautiful clothes and magazines and all of that, that
doesn’t mean I can’t have a serious career and hold deeply complex,
serious conversations about world events with people. To suggest you
can’t do both is insulting.
(In Baker 2016; see also Quaggin 2016)

Bishop reassures readers (and, more importantly, voters) that she can be an
independent, empowered political actor while simultaneously embodying a
femininity that is not disruptive to the patriarchal status quo; this is, we
would suggest, a conventional form of postfeminism-in-action.
While such defences from Bishop are common, it is a very specific kind
of glamorised femininity that she seeks to defend – one that is based on
various forms of capital (economic, symbolic, cultural, corporeal) for its
successful enactment. Bishop’s repeated claims about femininity are entirely
consistent with those of feminist critics who take issue with the positioning
of feminine cultures and consumption practices as devalued, trivialised and
frivolous (Heywood & Drake 1997; Hollows 2000; Baumgardner & Rich-
ards, 2002; Scott 2006). While, critically, the relationship between these
two loaded signifiers has been exposed to be especially fraught, Bishop rhe-
torically appears to combine third wave feminism with postfeminism,
adopting the celebration of consumption, fashion, femininity and their
pleasures as per the former, while presuming that women, like herself, are
now unimpeded agents in the public sphere, as per the latter.21 Within such
a representational economy, ‘Fashion is a signifier of the postfeminist and
essentialized norm: women love to shop and to covet designer labels’
(Winch 2013, p. 124). But, in Bishop’s case, they also ‘love to’ broker
foreign trade deals, sanction dictatorships, and administer international aid
programmes. It is such reconcilability that both she and journalists under-
score; one title sums it up: ‘Julie Bishop: a leader of style and substance’
(Sams 2014). In this way, she is the ideal addressee of one of our women’s
magazines, Marie Claire, whose slogan consists of these two signifiers.
Within postfeminist culture, as our previous chapters have underscored,
‘beauty, fashion and adornment remain highly prized as part of the arsenal
of the high-achieving woman, so that postfeminism equates with excessive
consumption, while at the same time expressing sentiments of empower-
ment and female capability’ (Whelehan 2010, p. 156). In alignment with
such logic, and while ‘excessive attention to fashion trends can suggest a
frivolous attitude that may tarnish the image of a politician’ (Campus
2013, p. 83), in media coverage of Bishop it is used as evidence of an
agentic, self-assured femininity that remains uncompromised by her parti-
cipation in the ‘masculine’ world of politics. While Mary Douglas Vavrus
(2002, p. 2) argues that postfeminism ‘encourages women’s private, con-
sumer lifestyles rather than cultivating a desire for public life and political
208  Political journalism
activism’, this (self)representation of Bishop dismisses any tension between
them. These journalists appear to accept Bishop’s formulation – that is, her
refusal to position femininity and politics antithetically – but this reporting
is not without its limitations. For example, one article notes, ‘We look
back on some of Bishop’s best outfits, proving you can dress like a fem-
inine fashionista while being a total boss at the same time’ (Quaggin
2016). The remainder of the piece consists, not of policy achievements, but
of photographs of Bishop in some of her more noteworthy designer
dresses. Such stories are reserved for women politicians, and further evid-
ence that ‘clothing is a clear indicator of media confusion about how to
cover women in public life’ (Campus 2013, p. 87). Moreover, such ‘red
carpet’ stories indicate the extent to which the political sphere has become
thoroughly entangled with celebrity culture – especially for women.
Dubbing her the ‘Minister of Fashion’ (Salemme 2014), one newspaper
article also underscores her consumption of luxury items: ‘Like her expen-
sive taste in clothing, Ms Bishop favours Giorgio Armani and Chanel cos-
metics’ (see also Konstantinides 2017). Reminiscent of Sex and the City’s
resident shoe fetishist Carrie Bradshaw, she also confesses: ‘Yes, I’m a shoe
lover, I admit. Absolutely, absolutely. Give a girl the right shoes and she
can take on the world … Shoes are part of your self-expression, they can
give you confidence. I think they’re so important’ (in Salemme 2014). Rep-
resenting as it does a yoking of a celebratory attitude towards consump-
tion with a feminist-informed vision of women as high-level actors on the
global stage, such self-positioning appears consistent with the kind of neo-
liberal postfeminism mapped by critics in other contexts (McRobbie 2015;
Banet-Weiser 2018; Rottenberg 2018). Bishop is the idealised subject
brought into being in the women’s magazines we examined in Chapter 3,
and who young Australian women can aspire to become. Additionally,
though postfeminist culture has long been known for its celebration of a
youthful, idealised feminine subject (Wearing 2007; Negra 2009; Jermyn
& Holmes 2015; Whelehan & Gywnne 2015), Deborah Jermyn notes that
recently there has been a pronounced discursive shift, where ‘older women
seem increasingly positioned as credible fashion consumers and arbiters’
(2016, p. 575). These local representations of Bishop are consistent with
this apparent shift.
As mentioned earlier, it is not just femininity that is key to these repre-
sentations of Bishop as a desirable figure but also class. In terms of class
dynamics, these representations shore up not just her political legitimacy in
a wider sense, as Katrina Lee-Koo and Maria Maley argue (2017, p. 327),
but her status as a legitimate representative of her party. The Australian
Liberal Party, like the Conservatives in the United Kingdom or the Repub-
licans in the United States, promotes a free market logic and critique of
over-regulation and taxation, but also has broadened its voter base to the
‘aspirational’ voters who equate support for the party – at least at the
ballot box – with the trajectory of upward class mobility. Such celebration
 Political journalism  209
and normalisation of a desire for upward mobility are written into the
enduring national myth of egalitarianism (Elder 2007, p. 58), as well as
neoliberalism, both of which presume that gender does not inhibit Austral-
ian women, that all Australians are entitled to a ‘fair go’ (a fiction that
continues to do deeply ideological work, in both progressive terms as
Chapter 1 shows, and more retrograde forms, as we see here).
Bishop suggests that all Australian women can access the privileges gar-
nered by second wave feminism – education, professionalisation, inde-
pendence, success, wealth – without destabilising normative femininity in
any significant respect; again, classic postfeminism. In addition, her
interest in expensive, luxury designer items positions her as part of an
upper-class elite, and, like chick lit, offers an aspirational narrative for
post-second wave Australian women and girls, thereby shifting the focus
from the masculine working-class Aussie ‘battler’ (with whom Hanson was
preoccupied) to the young woman on the move, literally through her posi-
tioning on the global stage, and symbolically in class terms. One journalist
framed this concerted embrace of femininity as one of the key differences
between Bishop and her Labor party counterparts, who – indicative of
class-based distinctions – reportedly ‘view her Armani suits, trademark
polish, mannered debating style and mildly flirtatious manner with suspi-
cion’ (Snow 2013). Moreover, as myriad media profiles foregrounding her
designer wardrobe underscore – itself also consistent with ‘postfeminist
consumerist enchantment’ (Negra 2009, p. 118) – Bishop clearly displays
‘signifiers of wealth … that speak to the kind of class privilege that enables
“successful ageing” ’ (Jermyn 2016, p. 579). Thus, while some women are
permitted visibility as ageing bodies, this cannot be easily detached from
class dynamics. Bishop’s very public ageing, as well as her status as
‘unwife’ (Kingston 2004) and ‘unmother’, is permissible because of her
class location and the ways in which it is, quite literally, written on her
designer-clad body. We conclude with our final flashpoint: Bishop’s
October 2014 speech to the National Press Club.

Disavowing feminism: National Press Club speech

In her ‘Women in Media’ speech to the National Press Club on 29 October
2014, Bishop explicitly addressed her relationship to feminism. This
speech, and particularly her patent antipathy towards feminism, was the
subject of extensive media coverage. Bishop’s feminist disidentification is
an important ideological gesture, consistent with the Liberal individualistic
ethos as well as with postfeminism, and has become integral to her self-
brand; as a celebrity, she is not alone in this publicly staged renunciation
(Taylor 2016). Her speech precipitated debate about whether an expressed
affiliation with feminism was even necessary when Bishop herself appeared
to be living a feminist politics, while some journalists pondered ‘What’s
made Julie Bishop so afraid of feminism?’ (Price 2014).
210  Political journalism
As far as Bishop is concerned, though avoiding the historical amnesia
seen to govern postfeminism (Munford & Waters 2014, p. 30), the
­Australian women’s movement has done its work: ‘[Feminist] is not a term
that I find particularly useful these days. I recognise the role it has played. I
certainly recognise the women’s movement and the barriers they faced and
the challenges they had to overcome’ (in Medhora 2014). Clearly, distanc-
ing herself by using the pronoun ‘they’ (as opposed to the more sisterly
‘we’), Bishop presumes that such ‘challenges’ are no more, and feminism’s
‘pastness’ – as is common in postfeminist rhetoric (Tasker & Negra 2007;
McRobbie 2009) – seems assured. With the use of such individualistic
rhetoric, ‘the notion of collective struggle becomes almost meaningless in
this context where structural constraints are undone through the process
of responsible, autonomous individualization’ (Scharff 2011, p. 126).
Bishop qualifies her position in relation to a feminist identity:

I’m not saying I’m not a feminist, I don’t reject the term, I’m just
saying it’s not a way I describe myself. First and foremost I’m a
parliamentarian, a minister. I don’t find the need to self-describe in
that way.
(In Medhora 2014)

Significantly, Bishop also claims that her lack of an explicit identification

as a feminist is the result of her privilege, leaving open the possibility that
it may be a more appropriate or viable gesture for other women not sim-
ilarly placed: ‘I’m not saying there is no glass ceiling. But you’re not going
to get me saying that my career has been stymied because of a glass ceiling.
That would be inappropriate for somebody in my position to suggest’ (in
Medhora 2014). Overwhelmingly, journalists did not contest this narrative
about the irrelevance of gender, simply noting Bishop’s refusal, unlike
Gillard, to ‘blame gender for any obstacles in her career’ (Medhora 2014;
see also Callick 2013; Ireland 2014).22 Moreover, her refusal to concede
that gender has played a role in her public life, a postfeminist assumption
upon which her feminist disavowal is predicated, seeks to foreclose an
understanding of feminism as an unfinished political project (Fraser 2013).
As she makes clear, in true neoliberal style, if women are unsuccessful, it is
their own fault: ‘I’m not going to blame the fact that I’m a woman for it
not working. I might look at whether I was competent enough or I worked
hard enough … but I’m not going to see life through the prism of gender’
(in Medhora 2014; see also Shanahan 2012; Sams 2014). Here, structural
inequalities are downplayed and the individual is coded as being capable
of overcoming any social and political constraints, and the vocabulary
deployed by Bishop is indicative of the ostensible ‘unlimited individuality
and freedom’ consistent with the individualisation thesis (Scharff 2011,
p. 212; see also Rottenberg 2018). For Lee-Koo and Maley (2017, p. 329),
such a position is integral to the ‘iron butterfly’ model of femininity:
 Political journalism  211
‘Bishop refuses to identify bias in the political system, and instead lays
responsibility for gender inequality at the feet of women. In this way the
Iron Butterfly is non-disruptive of the system and its accompanying male
privilege’. As per both postfeminism and neoliberalism, no structural rem-
edies are required, and certainly no overtly feminist solutions.
Only a year after she delivered the speech, however, Bishop’s relation to
feminism shifted, and it is worth briefly considering how her recent repur-
posing of discourses around gender difference was reported. In October
2017, not insignificantly the month after the less socially conservative
Liberal Malcolm Turnbull usurped Abbott as Prime Minister, her com-
ments at an Australian Women’s Weekly event about the difficulty of
being the only woman in Cabinet (under the Abbott Government) were
widely reported. In the Sydney Morning Herald Judith Ireland (2017)
observed:

Ms Bishop spoke of her frustration at suggesting ideas, only to have

them ignored and then copied by other (male) members of cabinet …
Ms Bishop put her experiences down to ‘unconscious bias’ on the part
of her male colleagues. ‘It’s almost a deafness that we still see in
­Australian society’.

Such a critique of her male colleagues’ behaviour, and the symbolic silenc-
ing of women parliamentarians, is clearly a feminist one. Perhaps this shift
and willingness to publicly discuss the gendered behaviours that have
marred the Cabinet process, and politics more broadly, is the product of
an increased cultural visibility of (a certain form of) feminism over the past
few years (Gill 2016; Taylor 2016). In this press coverage, and in stark
contrast to Gillard in 2012, she becomes repositioned as a valiant feminist
warrior, cited on the differences in men’s and women’s leadership styles;
(re)branding herself this way has a new kind of cultural currency (Hamad &
Taylor 2015). For some, though, it was seen to be a strategic political
gesture to differentiate herself from the more conservative branch of the
Liberal Party, which includes former Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s sup-
porters, to help support leadership ambitions (Bolt 2017a). As with Gil-
lard’s misogyny speech, the articulation of feminist sentiments comes to be
publicly dismissed as a strategic political gesture.
As we were finalising this chapter, Bishop was a casualty in a leadership
coup that saw Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull replaced by the ‘family
values’ focused, Evangelical Christian Scott Morrison. After unsuccessfully
putting herself forward in a leadership ballot, she announced on 28 August
2018 that she would not be seeking a position in Morrison’s cabinet, and
media coverage focused extensively on her appearance: Bishop fronted a
press conference in the courtyard of Parliament House wearing (remin-
iscent of Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz) a pair of sparkly red high heels,
with matching painted fingernails. As in previous coverage of Bishop,
212  Political journalism
which saw empowerment and femininity as entirely reconcilable, women
journalists praised her ‘awesome power heels’, with this sartorial gesture
being figured as one of (feminist) resistance and defiance (Sullivan 2018).23
Some journalists queried whether Bishop would now pronounce an affili-
ation with feminism, given that gender was clearly a factor in her failure to
win the leadership ballot (Baird 2018). Shortly after her resignation,
Bishop spoke at another Australian Women’s Weekly event (‘Women of
the Future’) and called into question the Liberal Party’s poor record on
women’s representation: ‘It is not acceptable for us in 2018 to have less
than 25 per cent of our parliamentarians as female’ (in Truman 2018). As
yet she has not explicitly revised her public stance in relation to feminism,
but now that she is no longer a high-level government minister, her posi-
tion, and the kind of public persona she constructs, may indeed shift (as
Gillard’s has since leaving politics).

Conclusion
As we have made clear, when it comes to women and institutional power
and how it is publicly conceptualised, there is a much less optimistic story
to tell about Australian postfeminist culture than in our other chapters;
women are permitted access to power, but only within very real material
and discursive limits. In this way, in our semioscape of constrained power,
we see some similarities between Australian political leaders and those
elsewhere, such as Hillary Clinton whose appalling media treatment has
been well documented and critiqued (Bordo 2017). We concur with
Sheeler and Anderson that ‘even as legal barriers to women’s participation
in electoral politics have been dismantled, their cultural, discursive, and
rhetorical constituents remain’ (2013, p. 3). Regardless of feminism’s
increased visibility over the past few years, the more recent examples here
(Gillard and Bishop) suggest not that troublesome gendered news report-
ing has become less prevalent since Hanson’s appearance on the political
stage in 1996 but that it has become more pronounced. That is, despite the
post-gender rhetoric, political representation has still not managed to shift
its codes of representation.
This chapter, like previous ones, has made clear that Australian news
coverage at once draws upon and complicates a number of key tropes and
discourses mobilised elsewhere in relation to neoliberal postfeminism. We
have shown that these three political figures, Pauline Hanson, Julia
Gillard, and Julie Bishop, each have had an ambivalent relation to fem-
inism, and indeed to femininity, and it is in such a space that we can see
the intersections of postfeminism and gendered discourses around
women’s leadership. While myriad studies have demonstrated how women
politicians are discursively constituted in ways which serve to undermine
or call into question their ability to lead or occupy key sites of political
power, we have located our analysis of Hanson, Gillard, and Bishop in
 Political journalism  213
Australia’s specific political and cultural histories. Following Holland and
Wright’s (2017) recent work, we have conjectured that each of these
women, to varying degrees, faced a unique form of ‘double delegitimisa-
tion’, based on their status as both women politicians and political leaders
in a context founded on ‘exclusive and exclusionary male narratives[s] of
the national identity’ (p. 593). Enduring Australian nationalist mythologies
can be seen to inform these gendered discursive constructions in particular
ways. Further to this, we have shown that despite post-class assumptions,
class significantly inflected the way these women have been figured in
public discourse. In this respect, we have attempted to foreground how
postfeminism, nationalism, classism, ageing, and heterosexism ‘work
together to reproduce social inequality and relations of power’ (Butler
2014, pp. 53–54).
In terms of our findings, this chapter is the most atypical, suggesting
much about the need for further institutional and cultural shifts, both in
terms of Australian parliamentary politics itself and in terms of how
women’s relation to power is discursively constructed (including by
women themselves). The previous chapters show that cultural forms pro-
duced by and for women outstrip the capacity of ‘the real’ to actually
engage with a changed gender regime. The news coverage we have exam-
ined also reveals a deeply conflicted position regarding feminism: these
female politicians were damned if they declared they were feminists, and
damned if they did not. Indeed, feminism itself has become another way of
disciplining women politicians. Further, the flashpoints analysed here
mobilise a number of familiar postfeminist tropes, especially around sex-
ism’s, and thus feminism’s, ‘pastness’, and such narratives themselves come
to be disrupted, including by the political women at their centre (Gillard’s
misogyny speech and Bishop’s critique of the patently masculinist culture
of parliamentary politics, for instance).
In Australia, as elsewhere, there is now a greater public awareness of
gender politics, and in 2018 the question of women’s political representa-
tion is the subject of almost daily news coverage. These case studies have
demonstrated the limited discursive frames being mobilised to report on
women in power, suggesting – not simply that political institutions need to
be further transformed – but that the language for publicly making sense
of such powerful women also needs to be fundamentally overhauled, espe-
cially as such representations potentially have very real effects (such as
whether women will pursue a career in politics at all).24 It is in this space,
we argue, that the unfinished business of Australian feminism comes most
clearly into focus. Contra egalitarianism – itself a discourse, consistent
with postfeminism, used to suggest feminism’s redundancy – women as
political actors are far from being given a ‘fair go’. In the book’s conclu-
sion, drawing together our insights from each case study, we offer some
suppositions as to why postfeminism appears to be playing out in some
markedly different ways in Australia.
214  Political journalism
Notes
  1 As many critics have argued, women in politics are subject to a ‘double bind’
(Jamieson 1995), where they must negotiate the expectation that they remain
stereotypically feminine while consistently proving that they (in spite of this)
are capable of successfully acting in the masculinist world of politics.
 2 The problematic way women politicians have been represented in the
­Australian media has been taken up extensively by a number of critics (Baird
2004; Muir 2005; Taylor 2015), as it has in other contexts (Norris 1997;
Vavrus 2002; Van Zoonen 2006; Campus 2013), especially given the focus on
their appearance and intimate bonds.
  3 It is worth mentioning that Australia’s news landscape is undoubtedly shaped
by the concentration of media ownership, with two companies controlling the
overwhelming majority of newspapers: News Limited (including national
broadsheet, the Australian, the Daily Telegraph, the Herald Sun and the
Courier Mail) and Fairfax (including the Age, the Sydney Morning Herald, the
Financial Review, the Sun Herald and the Canberra Times). Given such con-
centration, there is a degree of consistency and homogeneity in terms of how
Australian women politicians are reported, especially depending upon their
political affiliation (e.g. as we shall see, News Limited coverage of Gillard was
overwhelmingly negative).
  4 Howard (‘PM Calls for End to History Wars’, 2009) explains this: ‘The black
armband view of our past reflects a belief that most Australian history since
1788 has been little more than a disgraceful story of imperialism, exploitation,
racism, sexism and other forms of discrimination’.
  5 Hanson was convicted of electoral fraud in 2003, but served only 78 days of
her sentence (Mackenzie 2003). She maintained her celebrity status, appearing
on Dancing with the Stars in mid-2004 and Who Wants to Be a Millionaire in
2005, and the Australian adaptation of Donald Trump’s The Celebrity
Apprentice in 2011.
  6 See Kingston’s 2001 book for the collapse of Hanson’s relationship with One
Nation power brokers. More recently, these include James Ashby, who – as we
discuss in the Gillard section – had been a staffer to the Speaker of the House,
Peter Slipper.
 7 One of Australia’s more prominent celebrity feminists, Anne Summers, prob-
lematically wrote:
Hanson’s frock said it all. The zebra stripes implying wildness and unpre-
dictability combined with the sexual allure of the tropical hibiscus epito-
mised Pauline’s political potency. The packaging, too, was pretty much
perfect. The neckline plunged, but not too far. The skirt was decorously
long, but frivolous with its spiralling ruffles. She was unencumbered by a
Thatcherite handbag, the sandals matched and let’s face it she has the body
to wear such an outfit.
(2001)
  8 Similarly, as Melissa Gregg remarks, in the case of Gillard ‘it was female jour-
nalists who were primarily raising questions regarding Gillard’s appearance,
clothing, and accent’ (2011, p. 73). For an analysis of how Hanson was
handled by Sixty Minutes journalist Tracey Curro, during the infamous ‘please
explain interview’ (when Hanson asked what ‘xenophobic’ meant), see
Meaghan Morris’s 2000 article.
  9 In the Herald Sun adaptation of this story, McCabe (1998b) quotes one of the
Who Weekly judges of the worst dressed celebrities (Hanson came in at
number two) without editorialising: ‘This is someone who has absolutely no
 Political journalism  215
idea how to dress for her figure, her coloring, or her age’. Hanson, this comment
implies, as a woman, lacks appropriate cultural competencies (something for
which we later see Bishop celebrated).
10 Of course, this persistent reference to her by first name (as with Gillard) can be
seen as part of a wider culture of disrespect towards women political leaders in
Australia (Summers 2013, p. 111).
11 Some scholars have attempted to recuperate Hanson as a feminist figure, arguing
that her life choices and her active engagement in the political sphere work to
position her as such even if she does not explicitly identify as feminist (Ellison &
Deutchman 1999; Deutchman & Ellison 2004).
12 As a profile in the Age observes, ‘Twice-divorced Hanson is not a “family
values” conservative’ (Alcorn 1998).
13 Kennedy (2014) refers to Gillard this way in her review of My Story.
14 Trimble’s comprehensive study, however, underscores how journalists deprived
Gillard (like Hanson) of agency, positioning her as the subordinate ‘puppet’ of
the ALP’s ‘faceless men’ (2017, p. 57).
15 For example, Labor State Premiers Carmen Lawrence (Western Australia) and
Joan Kirner (Victoria) were widely denigrated in press coverage (Baird 2004).
16 Many feminist commentators have remarked upon differences between the
international and the local reception of Gillard’s speech (Summers 2013;
­Stevenson 2013; Goldsworthy 2014; Wright & Holland 2014; Donaghue 2015).
17 Pilger suggests:
Promoted by glass-ceiling feminists with scant interest in the actual politics
and actions of their hero, Gillard is the embodiment of the Australian Labor
party machine – a number-crunching machine long bereft of principle that has
attacked and betrayed Australia’s most vulnerable people, especially women.
(2012)
18 Well-known Australian feminist academic and founder of the Australian
Women’s Electoral Lobby, Eva Cox (2013), also took issue with Gillard’s fail-
ures in terms of policies benefiting women.
19 That said, it also helped to bring into being various forms of feminist counter
publics, especially online, and thereby is central to a form of feminist visibility
which is ongoing in Australia (as elsewhere). For example, the ‘Destroy the
Joint’ Facebook group was formed in response to radio shock-jock Alan
Jones’s offensive comments about Gillard and continues to make a range of
feminist issues visible via this platform (see McLean & Maalsen 2017).
20 In her final press conference as PM, she revisited the question of gender, noting
rather non-committally: ‘It doesn’t explain everything, it doesn’t explain nothing,
it explains some things’ (Gillard 2013; see Sorrentino et al. 2019).
21 While some critics, such as Munford and Gillis (2004), work to underscore the
similarities between the two, others such as Shelley Budgeon (2013) emphasise
their points of divergence.
22 Her attitude to misogyny was seen to significantly differentiate her from Gillard; as
Callick (2013) remarked, ‘if anyone expects Bishop to take up where former PM
Julia Gillard left off, railing against sexism and misogyny, they will be disappointed’.
23 On 30 November 2018, Bishop donated these shoes to the Museum of
­Australian Democracy, dubbing them a symbol of women’s empowerment.
24 For an analysis on how media coverage impacts young women’s engagement
with politics, see Lonie (2019).
216  Political journalism
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Conclusion
Australian postfeminism as popular
feminism

When we began our research for Postfeminism in Context, we did not neces-
sarily expect to find such a different approach to postfeminism expressed in
Australian popular culture. Our texts, however, have unsettled the critical
hegemony around this term, which sees a handful of theorists and their
approaches mapped onto cultural analyses, with little consideration for the
applicability or viability of an acontextual postfeminism. Such a method, we
have argued, can limit our ability to theorise the varied and complex ways in
which feminism is articulated in and through popular texts in culturally spe-
cific ways. Over the 20 or so years we have examined, we find Australian
popular culture has a much more complicated and productive engagement
with feminism than previous, and now semi-canonical, understandings of
postfeminism allow. Nevertheless, given the nature of transnationalism and
global political and cultural flows, including in terms of genre itself, not sur-
prisingly we have found some notable similarities between Australian texts
and Anglo-American texts – in particular, that postfeminism in some aspects
functions as a gendered form of neoliberalism.
Our readings resist a universalised postfeminist theory, offering instead
a more hopeful and nuanced picture in terms of how popular culture has
responded to feminism. Rather than an innate suspicion towards popular
culture – another quality limiting accounts of postfeminism – we have
allowed other possibilities to be seen. There are, of course, many tensions
and contradictions in the gendered representations we have examined, but
in general there is little ‘classic’ postfeminist disavowal of feminism, and
little evidence of an anti-feminist reaction. Instead, a clear and positive
recognition of changes in women’s lives occasioned by the women’s move-
ment is apparent, as well as an acknowledgement of the unfinished busi-
ness of modern feminism, most notably: the tensions between work and
care demands, the constraints of conventional ideologies of femininities,
the need for freedom as well as intimacy, and the structural and discursive
obstacles to personal fulfilment. As popular culture attempts to process
and work through second wave feminism’s legacy, it also points to the
necessity of further feminist work – including in terms of the cultural pol-
itics of the mainstream imaginary.
 Conclusion  227
Unlike other scholars who, in recent accounts of postfeminism, see such
incorporation of feminism by popular culture as a form of instrumentalisa-
tion (Gill & Orgad 2015; Gill 2017; Banet-Weiser 2018; Kanai 2019) that
ultimately undermines feminism in the same way disavowal does, a less
troubling relationship emerges in our analyses. As we have made clear
throughout, Australian postfeminism for us is both after and informed by
second wave feminism. The semioscapes we have identified clearly demon-
strate that the representational landscape in Australia, across a number of
forms and texts, has been irrevocably altered by second wave feminism:
another form of unsettling. These texts, by and large, are comfortable
with, if not celebrate, women’s relative emancipation – whether bodily,
sexual, economic, affective, or intellectual.
Our first case study, chick lit’s semioscape of aspiration and independ-
ence, reveals how work for women is taken for granted, and female
pleasure is guilt-free and valid, two thematics that mark virtually every
form examined. The semioscape of postfeminist kinship characterising
television dramedy demonstrates an expanded range of definitions of the
family and a reduced importance of heterosexual relations to women’s
self-definition and life course – another two features that are shared across
genres. Women’s magazines and their semioscape of abundance also prop-
agate an extended range of femininities and life choices for women. The
semioscape of confidence and care that we find in our beauty vloggers
evinces a reworked but powerful form of mediated sisterhood and fem-
inine expertise that helps young women to cope with the disciplinary
apparatus of the fashion–beauty–media complex. And while self-help’s
semioscape of calculating magic tells a similarly problematic story, this
time of coping as a woman in neoliberal Australia, the sense of self-worth
and agency we identified signals an energised and energetic female subject
who (like the vloggers) should not be readily dismissed as being a bearer of
neoliberal false consciousness. However, our final semioscape of con-
strained power is a sobering reminder of how certain domains – namely,
the mediated form of institutional political power – want to hang onto an
older Australia via prescriptive versions of a feminine, non-feminist,
correctness.
On another less positive note, although some of our texts have engaged
explicitly with race and how it intersects with gender (particularly in
Chapter 1), we have identified a flattening of cultural and ethnic difference
which is troubling in light of Australia’s history of colonialism and dispos-
session of Indigenous people, and post-Second World War migration. If
women of colour do feature in narratives, as is the case with chick lit, a
Western postfeminism is very much the ideal. Unfortunately, Australian
postfeminism does appear to bear out Gisela Kaplan’s (1996), among
others’, contention that white women were the main beneficiaries of
second wave feminism. Another concern is the ongoing anxieties nearly
every semioscape displays regarding the importance of physical appearance
228  Conclusion
(and its related issue of ageing) to women’s self-worth and identity. And
there is no denying the impact of neoliberalism as an ideologico-historical
context, especially in genres such as self-help, and in the permeation of
certain tenets of neoliberalism throughout: the related notions of the entre-
preneurial self, the project of the self, and the management required of the
self at all levels of being. Even so, it is reductive to see postfeminism as just
a form or ‘helpmate’ of neoliberalism; rather, postfeminism is located at
the nexus of the aftermath of second wave feminism and the neoliberal
turn, and particular elements of both are complementary (just as second
wave feminism emerged at a juncture in late capitalism that was beneficial
to both). So, for instance, the agentic self of feminism is echoed by the
entrepreneurial self of neoliberalism; the sexually liberated woman of fem-
inism finds parallels in the hedonistic consumer of neoliberalism. Regard-
less, it is incorrect to see such echoes and overlaps as unambiguous
evidence of neoliberalism’s dominance and/or its incorporation of feminist
demands and gains. To do so is to delegitimise the feminist project –
making it a dupe of capitalism – and to ignore the expanded range of free-
doms available to predominantly white Australian women (and the
aspirations to these freedoms by those women who are still yet to benefit).
Moreover, to read postfeminism as only indicative of the limits of gen-
dered neoliberalism is to underrate readers and audiences. Much recent
scholarship that seeks to mine ostensibly ‘postfeminist’ texts for signs of
their antifeminism fails to take account of sophisticated audience responses
to them (Horbury 2014) and undermines the legitimacy of reader or audi-
ence pleasure. That is, reinforcing the ‘cultural dupe’-style position long
critiqued by cultural studies, the emphasis on the seemingly regressive pol-
itics of such texts (which themselves are also polysemic and thus open to
disruption) and their effects on women audiences, presumes that readers
and viewers need to have such texts demystified by the feminist critic in the
know (Brunsdon 2000). It also presumes that readers cannot think criti-
cally while simultaneously experiencing the pleasures of the text. We find
that being open to wider interpretive possibilities than current invocations
of postfeminism allow confirms that popular culture is made-to-mean in a
variety of ways, by diverse audiences who use their own ‘mattering maps’
(Grossberg 1992) to make use of these popular narratives. And part of this
is treating women’s desires for cultural pleasure with respect rather than
with automatic suspicion.
Through the aggregation of these varied case studies, we contend that
Australian postfeminism, by and large, can be seen as a transitional stage
between second wave feminism and the full emergence of a new, as yet
unnamed form of feminist politics, which can operate within (and hope-
fully resist) consumer capitalism and neoliberalism. When this new fem-
inism more fully emerges, postfeminism will no longer relate to the
contemporary, but instead will become a concept that describes the recent
past. Popular culture has always been central to attempts to expand the
 Conclusion  229
reach of feminism and to make it intelligible to as wide an audience as pos-
sible, and Australian media has been no exception (Henderson 2006;
Taylor 2008). Texts that have been deemed ‘postfeminist’ are merely part
of this much longer process of cultural translation (Fuller & Driscoll
2015). While critics have recently considered popular feminism as just
another, more crafty, articulation of postfeminism (Gill 2016; Banet-
Weiser 2018), in light of our findings in the Australian context we would
suggest that postfeminism is but a form of feminism in the popular (see
Genz & Brabon 2009; Fuller & Driscoll 2015). This need not lead to its
uncritical celebration, of course, nor a neglect of the ways in which the
State and corporations do attempt to manage and profit from feminism.
But it does resist a simplistic pessimism and an ignorance of feminist
change, instead emphasising feminism’s presence and role in popular
culture, and popular culture’s imbrication with everyday life, institutional
power, and political demands made by women. We ignore, or downplay,
the potential of popular culture in making a new feminist activist move-
ment at our peril.
But why might Australian postfeminist culture take this unsettling, non-
reactionary form compared to other contexts? We surmise that a combina-
tion of national cultural characteristics, the history of Australian second
wave feminism, and the ways in which neoliberalism has played out in this
country are factors. First, Australia does not have such a powerful Chris-
tian conservative right as the United States (though it is starting to
emerge), which has campaigned vociferously for years against feminism
and women’s rights. So, for example, the postfeminist trope of maternal
retreatism that Diane Negra (2009) identifies in US popular culture, gains
little traction here. Second, Australia’s uptake of neoliberalism, while far-
reaching, was also to an extent ameliorated, even disguised (in imagined, if
not in actual policy terms) by a continuing Australian ethos of fairness and
egalitarianism embedded in the welfare state, and a long period of afflu-
ence. In such a context, women’s postfeminist demands for equality and
fair treatment, and the legitimacy of these demands, do not align with neo-
liberalism’s ruthless individualism. Moreover, Australia avoided post-GFC
austerity measures. We suspect that economic prosperity – even if une-
qually shared – has some role in a lack of mean-spiritedness, a sense of
potential, exhibited across the semioscapes. Complementing this is the
success of the Australian women’s movement in widespread attitudinal
changes (that partly relied on the enduring Australian mythology of egalit-
arianism) and the rollout of policies and programmes benefiting women in
the mid-1970s onwards via the femocrat strategy. It is now taken for
granted that many women will be educated, have a career, lead full and
pleasurable lives, and be cultural producers, and that there are still barriers
to their equal participation and achievement. Consider, for instance, the
2019 Australian Federal election, in which ‘women’s issues’ were arguably
foregrounded more than ever before. And note that postfeminist culture is
230  Conclusion
often made by women, and feminism’s legacy is in their cultural
production.
We end with a few final thoughts regarding the concept of postfeminism
itself. If what we have found is that Australian postfeminism unsettles
dominant ways of conceptualising the intersections of feminism and popular
culture, what of the critical efficacy of the term itself? Should it continue to
be used, but with more nuance and regard to cultural and historical con-
texts, or is there a better way of thinking through the complexities of the
representational field when it comes to gender? Ultimately, we concur with
Rosalind Gill that postfeminism ‘should not be the only term in our critical
lexicon, but it does still have something to offer’ (2016, p. 612; see also
Keller & Ryan 2018). The critical practice we have employed here suggests
that it can be strategically useful, especially if we open the term up to re-
signification to allow for cultural, historical and political specificity; if we
are less preoccupied with designating texts and practices themselves ‘post-
feminist’; and if we turn our focus to the kinds of feminisms that are being
‘summoned’ and the ways in which they might (or might not) speak to
diverse audiences (Whelehan 2010, p. 128; McDermott 2018; Kanai 2019).
We have also argued that it is vital to attend to what Gill (2017) has
described as ‘the psychic life of postfeminism’, further coming to terms with
its affective pull. Indeed, our attention to its affective aspects has enabled a
more generous reading of postfeminist culture. And finally, the relationship
between feminism and popular culture has long been a complex one, and
here we hope to have offered some sense of both the limitations and the
possibilities of using a concept like postfeminism to help understand a
popular cultural field that, without doubt, bears a significant indebtedness
to Australian second wave feminism. Australian postfeminism is, therefore,
a potential crucible for a new and as yet unnamed feminist politics that can
continue the task of political, cultural, and social unsettling.

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Index
Abdel-Fattah, R. 30, 32–5, 42–3, 48–9
advertising 10, 27, 51n3, 93, 96
advice: in chick lit 34–5; self-help
155–6, 158, 161, 171–2, 175–6,
178–9; in vlogs 17, 123–6, 130–7,
140, 143, 146; in women’s magazines
91–2, 97, 99, 100, 104–5, 110–12
aestheticisation 102–4, 106, 165–6,
171–8
affect 144, 156, 203–4; negative
37–41, 143; see also postfeminism
affect
affective bonds 16, 57–8, 60–6, 72, 75,
80–1
affective labour 62, 64–6, 131, 139,
141, 144; see also emotional labour
affluence 17, 26, 31, 36, 45, 229
Air Kisses 30, 32–6, 38, 42, 46, 48
Alderson, M. 29–30, 32, 38, 40–2, 47
Appadurai, A. 4, 6, 127
aspirationalism 17, 132, 135, 137, 179,
208–9; see also chick lit; women’s
magazines
authenticity 5; and chick lit 39, 41; and
self-help 159, 168, 170–5, 178–9;
and vlogs 124–33, 141–3, 148n6; see
also inauthenticity
austerity 38, 136, 229
Australian, The 196, 200, 202, 204–5,
214n3
Australian governments: Australian
Labor Party 38, 96, 203–4, 52n14;
Liberal-National Party 7–9, 116n8,
206, 211
Australian Labor Party (ALP) 8, 33, 38,
199–200, 202, 209
Australian Women’s Weekly 17, 78, 91,
108–14, 211–12
automediality 124–5, 132, 140
Avoiding Mr Right 29–30, 32–55, 38,
42–3, 47, 49
Awad, A. 30, 32, 34, 36, 42–3, 47–8
Bail, K. 7–8, 10, 194
Banet-Weiser, S. 14, 124, 129, 130,
147n2, 188
beauty 17, 207; and chick lit 32–3, 43,
46–7; and self-help 171, 175; and
vlogs 123–5, 128, 130–1, 136–7; and
women’s magazines 90, 95, 99, 107,
115; see also fashion-beauty-media
complex
beauty vlogs/vloggers 17; and
automediality 124–5; and digital
intimacy 125–7; transnationalism
127–8; and YouTube 128–9; see also
Curtis, L. and Mansutti, D
belaboured self 159, 170
Berlant, L. 60, 66, 127, 144, 146
Bishop, J. 18, 44, 187–90, 195, 200,
205–12
Blair, T. 190, 196
blokette 100–1
Bonner, F. 90, 92, 115n2
Bourdieu, P. 47, 51n3, 102, 104
brands 44, 104, 167–8, 170, 197; and
self-branding 123–8, 130–2, 138–9,
141, 177–8, 201–2; see also Bishop, J
Bridget Jones’s Diary 26, 42, 47,
52n13, 57, 63
Brown, H. 96
Butler, Jess 29, 62, 99, 213
Butler, Judith 99, 191, 203, 206
calculating magic 18, 155–6, 160,
162–8, 170–3, 175–80
Campaign Ruby 30, 32–3, 35–6, 38,
42, 47

care of self 15, 47, 124, 140, 145, 169
care of others 10, 226, 227; and
dramedy 60, 64–9, 71–4; and self-
help 155; and vlogs 123–7, 131; and
women’s magazines 112–13; see also
sisterhood
careers 16, 189, 191; and chick lit 32,
34–6, 39; and dramedies 62–3,
69–71, 80; and self-help 158, 161,
172, 176–8; and women’s magazines
101, 105, 109–10, 114; and vlogs 128
celebrity, celebrification 14, 18; and
vlogs 137, 139–40; and politicians
189, 195, 199, 208–9; and micro-
celebrity 126, 128, 131–2, 135, 138,
140–1; and women’s magazine 90,
97, 109–10, 112–13, 125–6
Chanel sweethearts 30, 33, 38–42, 44,
46–7, 51n8
chick lit: Anglo-American 29, 31, 37,
62, 63, 226; bildung 28, 30, 43–4,
50; emergence of 28–9; and non-
Western 47, 50, 52n12
choice: and lifestyle 68–70, 157, 206;
and self-help 164, 172, 179;
postfeminist discourses of 6, 57, 192,
201, 227
cities see urban settings
class: and Australia 2, 27, 36–41, 44,
102; inequality 37, 78, 99, 229;
middle classes 27–32, 40–6, 78, 99,
105–8, 111–14; and postfeminism 4,
31, 52n12, 52n13; and working
classes 37–41, 50, 114, 188, 193–5,
200–9
Cleo 17, 90–2, 94–102, 104–5, 107,
116n4, 123
community 59, 80, 82, 159, 167; and
on-line 17, 126, 129–30, 138, 140
confidence culture 128, 142, 146,
177–8
consumerism 16–18, 209, 228; and
chick lit 26, 32, 37–9, 41–3, 45–8,
50; and self-help 171, 175; and
women’s magazines 90–1, 101, 104,
108, 113–15
conspicuous consumption 10, 27, 43,
44, 50, 75
corporeality 46–7, 165
Cosmopolitan 17, 28, 90–2, 95–102,
104–7, 114
cosmopolitanism 51n6, 91, 102,
104–6, 192
Index  233
couples 58, 63, 76, 81–2
Courier Mail 201, 214n3
Courting Samira 30, 32–3, 34, 36,
42–3, 47–8
cultural intermediaries 27, 31, 51n3,
51n8
Curtis, L. 124, 128–37
Daily Telegraph 195, 199, 214n3
depression 124, 136–9, 171
detraditionalisation 59, 64, 67, 74
Dobson, A. 100, 124–5, 127, 129–30,
139–40, 144, 146
domesticity 101, 104, 108–14, 117n21
Dosekun, S. 4–6, 127
dramedy 35, 58, 60–1, 75; Offspring
61–71; Winners and losers 71–80
dreamscape 17, 44, 62, 78, 82, 90–115
Driscoll, C. 12–14, 147n1, 229
economic growth 17, 31, 37, 38; see
also affluence
economic rationalism 20n8
egalitarianism 11, 37–40, 95–9,
107–13, 200–9, 229
Elder, C. 37, 209
emotional labour 16, 58, 67, 124, 170
Energise your career: a guide to how
any woman can have the success she
wants 176–8
entrepreneurialism 8–9, 139, 160–5,
170, 197, 228
everyday philosophy see calculating
magic
experience, power of 50, 73–5, 125–7,
130–6, 140–5, 164–8; see also
authenticity
‘fair go’, the see egalitarianism
familialism 61, 73, 81; see also family
family: traditional 16, 59–61, 71–2,
78–81, 108–13, 174; and non-
traditional 59, 61–70, 73, 81, 130
fashion 33, 43, 93–9, 106, 189, 206–8;
see also fashion-beauty-media
complex
fashion-beauty complex see fashion-
beauty-media complex
fashion-beauty-media complex 16,
27–8, 31–6, 46–50, 102–7, 113–15;
see also fashion
femininities: conventional 17, 47;
corporeal 165; non western 50;
234  Index
femininities continued
postindustrial 16, 17, 27, 28,
45–9, 109
feminism: Australian 6–9, 14–18, 67,
96, 189, 213; and consciousness-
raising 18, 34, 77, 156–8, 163, 180;
DIY 7–8, 17, 164, 194; emergent 14,
228–30; instrumentalisation of 14,
143, 156–7, 161, 166, 227; neoliberal
15, 176; and self-help 156–8, 166; as
spectral 14, 147, 157, 180; third
wave 7, 8, 15, 19n6, 19n7, 207
fetish see fetishism
fetishism 27, 31, 42–5, 47–50,
52n11, 208
fitness see also wellness 155–6, 158,
161, 165–71, 180n2
Foster, Z. 30, 32–6, 38, 42, 46, 48
Frankie 99, 116n5
Freud, S. 42, 52n11, 93–4, 97, 99, 114
Friedan, B. 77–8, 115, 148n10, 158
friends see friendship
friendship 49, 59, 61, 66–7, 71–6,
79–82; see also sisterhood
Genz, S. 14, 42, 104, 109, 131–2
Genz, S., and Brabon, B. 5, 12–13, 59
Gill, R.: efficacy of postfeminism as a
term 4, 14, 230; feminist visibility
14–15, 157, 190; neoliberalism 10,
155; makeover culture 44, 73, 112,
169, 179; postfeminist canon 57;
postfeminist sensibility 5; psychic life
of postfeminism 15, 126, 230;
women’s magazines 90–1, 99, 106
Gillard, J. 18, 187–90, 199–205
girl power 166n9, 194
girls 17, 72–6, 100, 123–7, 133–7,
141–5; as postfeminist ideal 10,
129, 147n1, 159; sexualisation of
91, 116n9
Global Financial Crisis 38, 229
glocalisation 63, 71, 92, 107, 162, 194
Goddess 164; domestic 109, 111,
117n21; see also homemaker
Greer, G. 77, 112, 148n10
Guardian, the 222
Gucci mamas 30, 33, 38–42, 44,
46–7, 51n8
Hanson, P. 18, 34, 187–90, 193–9
Harris, A. 10, 126, 129, 131, 146
Health 99, 113, 124–6, 155–8, 161–3,
165–71; mental health 137–43; see
also fitness
The healthy life: a complete plan for
glowing skin, a healthy gut, weight
loss, better sleep and less stress 165–8
Hedley-Ward, J. 171–5
hedonism 4, 16, 27–8, 41–5, 50, 91,
99, 114
Heiss, A. 29–30, 32–5, 38, 42–3, 47, 49
Henderson, M. 7, 13, 19n2, 20, 77–8,
229
Herald Sun 196, 199, 214n3, 214n9
heteronormativity 67–8, 76, 98, 134,
156
heterosexuality 42–8, 62–9, 79–82,
91–5, 134, 175
Holmes, S. 107, 110, 119, 208
homemaker 78, 85n24, 109, 111, 113,
172
housewife see homemaker
Howard, J. 7–9, 78, 116n8, 191–3,
214n4
humour 28, 49, 65, 81
inauthenticity 27, 31–3, 36, 47
Indigenous women 29–34, 47, 62, 95,
112–13, 128
individualism 6–10, 18–19, 57–64,
192–7, 205, 229; and
individualisation 59, 138, 145, 157,
178, 210
intimacy 16, 32, 226; and
detraditionalisation 59–61, 79–80;
and the family 61–7; and friends 71,
76; and spatiality 76–9; digital
intimacy 125–7, 148n6; and self-love
129, 137; digital intimacy and
negative affect 138–41; and self-help
163, 167
intimate publics 17, 115, 123–7, 133,
139, 144–6
Jacenko, R. 29–30, 34, 37, 42, 44
Jermyn, D. 92, 107, 208–9
Kanai, A. 13–15, 143–4, 146, 156, 227,
230
Keating, P. 52n14, 192
Kendall, C. 30, 33, 38–42, 44, 46–7,
51n8
Kinship 57–62, 65–73, 76, 81, 123,
145

larrikin 49, 96
Lean in 70, 176; see also Sandberg, S.
Lifestyle 7; and chick lit 33, 37, 39, 44;
and self-help 157–8, 168; and vlogs
131, 133, 137, 139; and women’s
magazines 96–9, 106–12
Lighten up: a female’s modern day
guide to physical transformation
165–6, 168–70
‘Love Your Body’ 143
Luxury 38, 42–50, 90–1, 102–6,
113–14, 173–5; items 31, 37, 39, 48,
208–9; see also conspicuous
consumption
Mansutti, D. 124, 128, 132–5, 137–45
Mad about the boy 29–30, 32, 38,
40–2, 47
Manhattan dreaming 29–30, 32–5, 38,
42–3, 47, 49
Marie Claire 17, 44, 90–2, 94, 101–2,
104–14, 115n1
marriage 33–6, 58, 68, 71–7, 109–10,
192
Martin-McDonald, K. 176–8
Marwick, A. 124–5, 131–2, 140
masculinity 35, 43, 65, 84n17, 82n2
maternalism 58–9, 83, 167, 171–5,
192–3, 229
McRobbie, A.: disavowal of feminism
3, 5, 26, 95, 115, 189; fashion-
beauty complex 4, 27; maternalism
58–9, 69; neoliberalism 10, 208;
postfeminist femininity 48, 63, 79,
101, 123, 139; perfectionism 36,
125, 161, 166; pessimism 12–13;
sexualisation of girls 91, 100; women
workers 31–3, 176
Media see social media
migrants, migration 3, 19, 189, 193,
197, 227
misogyny 15, 188–90, 199, 201–5, 211,
213; see also sexism
mononormativity 63
mothers see mothering
mothering: and television 58, 61–72,
77–8; and magazines 95, 99, 101,
105, 109–13; and self-help 156,
171–5, 179, 180n2; and politicians
192, 196–7, 204, 209
narrators 58, 62, 64
nationalism 96, 112, 193, 196, 213
Index  235
Negra, D. 34, 68–9, 77, 109, 171–3, 229
neoliberalism: Australian 7–11, 26–8,
50, 179, 200–1, 227–9; and gender
6–10, 18, 156, 172–9, 210, 226;
feminist 13–15, 45, 155–6, 176,
179–80, 228; postfeminist 10, 59, 81,
123–7, 134–8, 142–6; vitalism 169,
177
The New Woman 42, 44, 65, 90
No sex in the city 30, 34, 36, 44, 49
Not meeting Mr Right 29–30, 32–5, 38,
42–3, 47, 49
Offspring 16, 35, 58, 61–71, 80–2
ordinariness 45, 78, 108–13, 125–8,
132–4, 139
Pants on fire 29–30, 32, 38, 40–2, 47
Paris dreaming 29–30, 32–5, 38, 42–3,
47, 49
pecuniary emulation 43, 45; see also
conspicuous consumption
perfectionism 36, 135, 142, 144, 161,
166–8
Playing the field 30
pleasure 17, 227–8; chick lit 32, 36,
41–6, 48–50; dramedies 69; political
journalism 207; self-help 166, 170–1,
192; vlogs 131, 144; women’s
magazines 91, 93–7, 99–101, 114
political leadership 187–92, 195,
200–1, 203, 206, 211–12
politicians see Bishop, J; Gillard, J;
Hanson, P; Howard, J; and Keating, P
popular culture, Australian 1–3, 8, 13,
18–19, 96, 226, 228–30
popular feminism 1–8, 14–19, 91–6,
100, 115, 226–30
positive thinking 36, 161, 164, 167,
178; see also positivity
positivity 135, 137–8, 140–1, 169,
174, 178
postfeminism: academic accounts of
1–15; affect 15, 101, 155, 163, 179,
230; Anglo-American 1, 4, 6, 14,
62–3, 226; efficacy of term 11, 230;
and ‘Having it all’ 16, 58, 64, 70,
147n1
postfordism 26–32, 37–40, 44–50,
51n3, 102, 104
post-gender 187, 189–91, 212
postindustrial 4, 51; femininities 17,
31–2
236  Index
postraditionalism 157; families 59, 131
pregnancy 66, 68, 70, 73, 110, 197
recessionary culture 38, 160
relationships see marriage; romantic
love
reparative reading 3, 14
retraditionalisation 58, 60, 79–80, 171;
see also retreatism
retreatism 69, 77, 81, 174; domestic 34,
70, 91, 109, 192, 197; maternal 34,
171, 173, 229
romance: narratives 31–6, 41–6, 49–50,
80–2, 134, 159
romantic love 26–8, 31–2, 42–50, 58,
74–80, 109
Roper, H. 165–6, 168–70
Rose, N. 9, 139, 159, 163, 177
Rottenberg, C. 15, 70, 176, 208
Ruby blues 30, 32–3, 35–6, 38, 42, 47
Rudd, J. 30, 32–3, 35–6, 38, 42, 47
Rumour mill: a Jazzy Lou novel, The
29–30, 34, 37, 42, 44
Sandberg, S. 70, 176
self-actualisation see self-help; see also
calculating magic
self-help 1, 9, 17–18; career advice 156,
178, 18n15; health and fitness 155–8,
161, 165–71, 174–5, 180n2; industry
159, 161, 168, 170, 176; mothering
guides 156, 171–5; self-actualisation
70, 155–8, 160–3, 168–70, 174; see
also therapy culture
self-love 128, 133, 142–3, 146, 168
self-reflexivity 59, 125, 144;
postfeminist 42, 49–50, 59; parodic
feminist 16, 28, 41–2, 50
semioscapes 1, 4–5, 15, 19, 227, 229
Sepel, J. 165–8
service industries 11, 26
Sex and the city 57, 62, 71–2, 74–5,
79, 208
sexism 188–90, 196, 199–01, 203–5,
213, 214n4, 215n22
sexuality 2, 40–1, 60–1, 91, 96, 124,
158, 161, 163, 175, 180n2, 188–90,
195–6
Sheridan, S. 6, 108, 113
sisterhood 49, 61, 72–6, 124–7, 167–8,
227; see also beauty vlogs
social media 90, 124–9, 135–7,
140–5, 177
social mobility 28, 32, 38–40, 112
Spotlight: a Jazzy Lou novel, The
29–30, 34, 37, 42, 44
Strictly confidential: a Jazzy Lou novel
29–30, 34, 37, 42, 44
suburbia 59, 62, 76–9
Sydney Morning Herald 71, 192–7,
201–2, 204, 211
Tasker, Y and Negra, D. 4, 6, 38, 81,
160, 169, 173
Taylor, A. 10, 68, 137, 156–7,
200, 229
Thatcher, M. 188, 194, 202,
205–6, 214n7
therapeutic value see therapy culture
therapy culture 157–9, 162, 174
Tiddas 29–30, 32–5, 38, 42–3, 47, 49
Transnationalism: and chick lit 50; and
postfeminism 4–5, 10, 101, 226; and
postfordism 28; and self-help 159;
and vlogs 123, 127–8, 145–6; and
women’s magazines 109, 112
Trump, D. 15, 193, 214n5
Turner, G. 126, 129, 148n5
urban settings 30, 37, 44, 76
Versace Sisters 30, 33, 38–42, 44,
46–7, 51n8
vlogs 2, 9, 15, 17, 115, 123–49
wellness 103, 107, 168
Whelehan, I. 12, 36–7, 42, 48,
90–1, 230
Whitlam, G. 9, 96, 116n10
Winch, A. 48, 73, 75–6, 126, 140,
175, 207
Winners and losers 16, 58, 61–2, 67–9,
71–82, 113
women: and ageing 17, 67, 107, 207–9,
213, 228; and beauty 17, 47, 49–50;
Indigenous women 3, 19, 95, 112,
114, 128; lesbian 3, 99–100, 113;
migrant 3, 19; working women
10–11, 31–6; young women 5, 12,
16–17; chick lit 28, 31–2, 36, 45,
49–51; dramedies 59, 79; vlogs
125–9, 137–9, 144–5; women’s
magazines 91–7; see also girls
Women’s magazines: layout of 96–7,
102–13, 175; and plenitude 17, 91,
108–13, 175; readers of 90–7, 105,

108, 110–11, 114; as wish fulfillment
17, 94, 106, 114; see also Australian
Women’s Weekly; Cleo;
Cosmopolitan; Frankie; Marie Claire
work 10–11; in chick lit 31–4, 40, 51;
in dramedies 66, 71–2; segregation
51n4; in self-help 159, 173, 179–8; in
vlogs 139; in women’s magazines
105–6, 112, 115; see also careers
Wrong girl, The 30, 32–6, 38, 42,
46, 48
Index  237
You can . . . live the life of your dreams
160–1, 163, 167
Younger man, The 30, 32–6, 38, 42,
46, 48
You sexy mother: a life changing
approach to motherhood 171–3, 175
YouTube 1–2, 17; see also beauty
vlogs/vloggers
‘Yummy Mummies’ 171–5