Post-feminism is a discursive formation, a “Gramscian common sense” (McRobbie 256), or a “sensibility” (Butler 45). In order for to have occurred, then, feminist values have to have been at least partially internalized into the dominant culture. For Butler, postfeminism is necessarily a neoliberal discursive formation that offers “a more attractive alternative to previous forms of gender politics.” Postfeminism takes on the characteristics of post-Fordist capital - it easily takes the shape of new political and social terrains. Looking at the 6 characteristics of postfeminism Butler lists, half of them could be said to be characteristics of a neoliberal economy.
I do have several questions regarding the readings: While there are still young women who dismiss the idea of being a feminist, it is easy to observe how the meaning has transformed again. Butler’s line that “postfeminism requires is that women ‘be who they want to be” — just as long as it is not a feminist” (44) does not seem accurate any longer. How has the postfeminist landscape and popular media changed in the past decade or so?
While I think Butler’s argument that marginalized subjects are still interpolated by postfeminism even if it privileges a white, heterosexual subject is correct, I am bit hesitant to agree with the notion that women of color can symbolically fracture the whiteness of postfeminism. While Butler notes that a figure like Nicki Minaj consciously plays with and breaks down her racial and gender identity in her music and style, are these fluid qualities not the very same qualities of a neoliberal postfeminism she observes earlier? If postfeminism is a discursive sensibility, then is it is possible for a figure like Minaj to enthusiastically play with gender and race at the same time as it is commodified? Doesn’t postfeminism take advantage of this very ambivalence in order to sell this process as empowerment? Or, maybe a better question is: does (postfeminist) media necessarily reify things like culture, race, and gender?
I too am left thinking about the changing landscape and the remarkably swift transformation in what it means to identify as a feminist. It is probably impossible to disentangle something like the #MeToo movement from, say, commodity culture, its associations with Hollywood, etc. But within that entanglement, we do get some kind of significant political change--even if its consequences are differentially distributed, i.e. tending to benefit the already-privileged, not reaching the man in the White House beyond the level of discourse, etc. I wonder if the new acceptability of "feminism," with its variously commodifiable and politicizing dimensions, puts us in a post-postfeminist moment? Or is this just postfeminism by a new name?
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