A (Slightly) Satiric Dialogue with Post-Feminist Scholarship (Core Post 3)

In the mire of the recent exposure of overt sexual assault in Hollywood and the #metoo movement, this week's readings which situate and deconstruct Post-Feminism, for me, created an interesting dialogue in terms of personal responsibility, women's coalitions, and modern constructions of femininity. In reading McRobbie, Banet-Weiser, and Butler, I questioned my own identity as a modern, young, white, compulsory heterosexual woman forming my sense of subjectivity in a neo-liberal, corporatist, consumer economy. I now even question the pedagogical function behind the aesthetics of Dora the Explorer. Am I caught in a rigid spectrum of "Barbie" versus "Boss Bitch," doomed to be reduced and dismissed no matter my identification? To the extent that I am a more awakened woman because of these readings remains to be seen.

However, I couldn't quite help but feel annoyed during my readings, as if I was being "mansplained" by feminist scholarship, victimized by being told that my post-feminist existence cruelly distorts my worldview. Such distortion thereby causes the chains of oppression, those very chains that previous waves of feminism fought so hard to dent/rust/sever, such distortion causes them to insidiously strengthen. As these chains bind me, post-feminist jargon allays me with the impression that these chains have been permanently destroyed, now a subject of ancient history. Can't I see? My expression of femininity, the degree of my sense of sex-positive empowerment and liberation, even my own achievements have been internalized into the market, only to be marketed back at me just to propel me to "yas qween" GET that lifestyle lift, GET those power pant suits, GET that degree without no man! The post-feminist consumer rhetoric reinforces that I am a modern woman, empowered rather than structurally oppressed, no longer a part of the commune of self-proclaimed victims of the patriarchy. I overcame the patriarchy in my own way, through my own lifestyle choices, through my own success. I pulled myself up from my Manolo Blahnik bootstraps and I'll be damned if privileged women of the academy, who espouse that, you know, despite its exclusivity, second-wave feminism was really onto something in its collective political banner of "womanhood," tell me otherwise! Little do they know... I'm with it. I get the joke behind commercialized objectification. I understand that perhaps my current status is because of the efforts of those who came before me, but... did they have to be so pushy? And, before we start throwing out Ally McBeal and her weird CGI biological-clock-is-ticking dancing baby as proof of white-washed post-feminism, let's look at some of the top figures in pop culture consumption: Rihanna, Beyonce, the Kardashians - note how almost all are female and non-white! But, alas, these women and their sense of success, liberation, and expressions are all lies; they are simply pawns in the cynical, neo-liberal, post-feminist, post-racial landscape, reinforcing the structures of oppression which they supposedly, allegedly worked so hard to overcome.

[End satiric dialogue]

There were several revelations that I conceded to in the readings. The neo-liberal idea of personal responsibility and self-regulation and their very strong causal ties to notions of merit and success are ingrained, in my fervent belief, into millennial psychology, specifically younger members, our very students, whose sense of self-worth is inextricably linked to their curricular performance. While each scholar deconstructs the proverbial Times Magazine question of "Is Feminism Dead?" and connects it the tenet of Post-Feminism that feminism is an easily identified, cogent moment of history that has ended, I found that laced within this uncovering of revisionist, fallacious post-feminist historicity was a certain propagation of blame. Perhaps previous notions of feminism are dead because of post-feminist women. While these scholars assert that feminism is still ubiquitous, though in myriad forms, they also contend that among the female majority (i.e. among white women) "feminist" is a dirty word.I found that apt in my own relationship to feminism. I consider myself a (quiet) feminist, but the extent to which I identify with the broad movement of feminism remains is less asserted in my worldview. It takes a man to say that he is a feminist to suddenly restore credibility to the label. Post-feminism renders the term feminist and its political and social implications empty. Thus, post-feminism, while it re-worked feminism as a thing of the past, we as post-feminist women claiming that we understand the joke and relish in its satire rather than outwardly deploring it, are allowing patriarchal, neo-liberal post-feminist myth to quell overarching feminist activism.

So, when Butler asks if Post-Feminism is for white girls only, I had to agree on some level. Second-wave feminism certainly originated out of planes of privilege, the outrage of women making 78 cents to every dollar a man earns fails to recognize the racial implications of gendered wage disparities. Intersectional feminism certainly serves minority women, and hopefully, transgendered women, with fights and struggles that elude white, middle-class (heterosexual) women such as myself, and because these classified and racialized struggles that intersect the similar gender struggles that are seen, by many white women, as overcome, we can undercut new forms of feminist activism. To frame the feminist struggle within history as a generational struggle, I find, apt - it echoes the inner turmoil of liberal parties and institutions in which new ideas and forms of liberalism clash with previous conceptions (think of the current Democratic Party).

Still, however, my main bitterness results in the cynical stripping of agency of women, that no matter what, we can't escape or ever achieve true liberation, that our forms of empowerment or expressions of femininity are wrongfully conceived in the post-feminist landscape.