Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Postfeminism is one of the most important and contested terms in the lexicon of western feminist cultural critique. The term signifies something that is either after or beyond feminism in some way, yet still maintains a distinctive relationship to it. The notion of postfeminism was first used in the 1920s to describe the reaction against women's activism in the early part of the twentieth century ( Faludi 1992 ), but it is only since the early 1990s that it has come to prominence as a central term in the field of gender and media. In recent years, debates within feminist media and communication studies about topics as diverse as the history and exclusions of feminism, the gender consciousness of young women, and the ideological nature of contemporary media have crystallized in disagreement about postfeminism. The term is used both to signal a theoretical orientation or approach, and to capture empirical changes in the way that gender is represented. Broadly speaking, it is possible to identify four major ways in which the term is used, each of which is considered below. For a number of writers, postfeminism represents an epistemological break with second wave feminism and marks “the intersection of feminism with a number of other anti-foundationalist movements including post-modernism, post structuralism and post colonialism” ( Brooks 1997 , 1). “Post,” as it is used in this sense, ... log in or subscribe to read full text