Girlfriends and Postfeminist Sisterhood


Book Description

From Mean Girl to BFF, Girlfriends and Postfeminist Sisterhood explores female sociality in postfeminist popular culture. Focusing on a range of media forms, Alison Winch reveals how women are increasingly encouraged to strategically bond by controlling each other's body image through 'the girlfriend gaze'.




Girlfriends and Postfeminist Sisterhood


Book Description

From Mean Girl to BFF, Girlfriends and Postfeminist Sisterhood explores female sociality in postfeminist popular culture. Focusing on a range of media forms, Alison Winch reveals how women are increasingly encouraged to strategically bond by controlling each other's body image through 'the girlfriend gaze'.




Young Women, Girls and Postfeminism in Contemporary British Film


Book Description

In the 21st century, films about the lives and experiences of girls and young women have become increasingly visible. Yet, British cinema's engagement with contemporary girlhood has - unlike its Hollywood counterpart - been largely ignored until now. Sarah Hill's Young Women, Girls and Postfeminism in Contemporary British Film provides the first book-length study of how young femininity has been constructed, both in films like the St. Trinians franchise and by critically acclaimed directors like Andrea Arnold, Carol Morley and Lone Scherfig. Hill offers new ways to understand how postfeminism informs British cinema and how it is adapted to fit its specific geographical context. By interrogating UK cinema through this lens, Hill paints a diverse and distinctive portrait of modern femininity and consolidates the important academic links between film, feminist media and girlhood studies.




Postfeminism and Health


Book Description

Winner of the 2021 BPS Book Award: Academic Text category, this groundbreaking book employs a transdisciplinary and poststructuralist methodology to develop the concept of ‘postfeminist healthism,’ a twenty-first-century understanding of women’s physical and mental health formed at the intersections of postfeminist sensibilities, neoliberal constructs of citizenship and the notion of health as an individual responsibility managed through consumption. Postfeminist healthism is used in this book to explore seven topics where postfeminist sensibility has the most impact on women’s health: self-help, weight, surgical technologies, sex, pregnancy, responsibilities for others’ health and pro-anorexia communities. The book explores the ways in which the desire to be normal and live a good life is tied to expectations of ‘normal-perfection’ circulated across interpersonal interactions, media representations and expert discourses. It diagnoses postfeminist healthism as unhealthy for both those women who participate in it and those whom it excludes and considers how more positive directions may emerge. By exploring the under-researched intersection of postfeminism and health studies, this book will be invaluable to researchers and students in psychology, gender and women’s studies, health research, media studies and sociology.




Postfeminism in Context


Book Description

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 postfeminism. While Henderson and Taylor identify some of the limited postfeminist 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.




Working Women on Screen


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Why Any Woman


Book Description




Women, Violence and Postmillennial Romance Fiction


Book Description

This book interrogates the significance of the revival and reformulation of the romance genre in the postmillennial period. Emma Roche examines how six popular novels, published between 2005 and 2015 (Twilight, Fifty Shades of Grey, Gone Girl, Sharp Objects and The Girl on the Train), reanimate and modify recognisable tropes from the romance genre to reflect a neoliberal and postfeminist cultural climate. As such, Roche argues, these novels function as crucial spaces for interrogating and challenging those contemporary gender ideologies. Throughout the book, Roche addresses and critiques several key attributes of neoliberal postfeminism, including a pervasive emphasis on individualism and personal responsibility; an insistent requirement for self-monitoring, self-surveillance, and bodywork; the celebration of consumerism and its associated pleasures; the prescription of mandatory optimism and suppressing one’s ‘negative’ emotions; and the endorsement of choice as a primary marker of women’s empowerment. While much critical attention has been devoted to those attributes and their pernicious effects, Roche argues that one crucial repercussion has been largely overlooked in contemporary cultural criticism: how these ideologies function together to effectively sanction gender-based violence. Thus, Roche exploits textual analysis to demonstrate the subtle ways in which neoliberal postfeminism can augment women’s vulnerability to male violence.




Perspectives on Crazy Ex-Girlfriend


Book Description

With an off-putting title and a decidedly retrograde premise, the CW dramedy Crazy Ex-Girlfriend is a surprising choice for critical analysis. But, loyal viewers quickly came to appreciate the show’s sharp cultural critique through masterful parody, and this strategy has made it a critical darling and earned it several awards throughout its run. In ways not often seen on traditional network television, the show transcends conventional genre boundaries—the Hollywood musical, the romantic comedy, the music video—while resisting stereotypes associated with contemporary life. The essays in this collection underscore the show’s ability to distinguish itself within the current television market. Focusing on themes of feminism, gender identity, and mental health, contributors explore the ways in which the show challenged viewer expectations, as well as the role television critics play in identifying a show’s “authenticity” or quality.




Women Writing Across Cultures


Book Description

This collection brings together an international, multicultural, multilingual, and multidisciplinary community of scholars and practitioners in different media seeking to question and re-theorize the contested terms of our title: “woman,” “writing,” “women’s writing,” and “across.” “Culture” is translated into an open series of interconnected terms and questions. How might one write across national cultures; or across a national and a minority culture; or across disciplines, genres, and media; or across synchronic discourses that are unequal in power; or across present and past discourses or present and future discourses? The collection explores and develops recent feminist, queer, and transgender theory and criticism, and also aesthetic practice. “Writing across” assumes a number of orientations: posthumanist; transtemporal; transnationalist; writing across discourses, disciplines, media, genres, genders; writing across pronouns – he, she, they; writing across literature, non-literary texts, and life. This book was originally published as a special issue of Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities.




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