Core Postfeminism (4)

Disciplinary genealogies are funny things. During my career at USC, McRobbie’s work on postfeminism has been on three syllabi, not including its appearance on a CTCS undergraduate course I taught; in three out of four of those instances, it was her article “Post-Feminism and popular culture” that had come to represent a distillation of her corpus. Her work’s appearance is remarkable to me because her texts had not been assigned to me as an undergraduate student in a Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies department (that is, if you trust my hasty perusal of my alma mater syllabi). Neither do I have a recollection of the term “post[-]feminism” manifesting in class discussions or other critical texts assigned in those seminars; I was introduced to that term at USC—although I do have some vague recollection of having crossed paths with it on Wikipedia, but remembered the term as marking a mode of feminist inquiry informed by and/or said to have informed (that always already was) poststructuralism. I wonder what, if anything, could be said about the appearance of McRobbie’s work, and why it appears then and there. 

I have problems interpreting where McRobbie stands, perhaps because of her writing style and tone (which strikes me as ironic, sarcastic, and satirical at moments—not unlike the ironic comportment that produces and is a product of the “smooth incorporation [of feminism] into the world of commerce and corporate culture,” mirroring a Gilin-ian logic), and relatedly, not knowing if she is a “post(-)feminist" or not, or whether my drive to categorize is a malignant one. When McRobbie introduces post-feminism as “an active process by which feminist gains of the 1970s and 80s come to be undermined (255),” what does she understand those gains to be, and on what terms does she understands those things/accomplishments to be progressive/of progress? Although McRobbie historicizes the construction and aestheticization of success (256) (and this is, in my part, to conflate success and gains), it’s unclear to me, then, if McRobbie believes there are vantages from which this success to be questioned. 

When McRobbie cites Judith Butler’s work on “[t]he concept of subjectivity and the means by which cultural forms and interpellations (or dominant social processes) call women into being (256)” is she critiquing Butler as a post-feminist, or is Butler deployed to critique post-feminism? 

What’s up with McRobbie’s zeroing-in on sex work (259-260) as the central (limit) case of the attitudes of postfeminism, of the contiguities of gendered and sexualized violence, and capitalist alienation/dispossession? The issue is that despite her (the postfeminist subject’s) knowledge of feminist critiques and debates, she is “called upon to be silent, to withhold critique;” rather, “[t]here is quietude and complicity” (260). Is the solution, then, to speak up? How, here, do we think about McRobbie’s own investments in choice and sovereignty?

And finally, do we believe in McRobbie’s, via Jess Butler, conception of feminism “as a radical political movement in which earlier feminist demands for equal rights, collective activism, and the eradication of gender equality” (44) to be what feminism is, and if we do, do we believe those things to be good things? I wonder particularly about the case of “collective activism,” which is shaded again the individualism made and demanded by postfeminism and neoliberalism. Is collectivity a good in and of itself? Can we not cite cases in which feminist collective action was built around colonial or gendered racial capitalist ideology? How do we incorporate that into the heart of what feminism is, and take account of that absence?