Feminism and Popular Culture: Investigating the Postfeminist Mystique

By Rebecca Munford, Melanie Waters and Imelda Whelehan

When the term “postfeminism” entered the media lexicon in the 1990s, it was often accompanied by breathless headlines about the “death of feminism.” Those reports of feminism’s death may have been greatly exaggerated, and yet contemporary popular culture often conjures up a world in which feminism had never even been born, a fictional universe filled with suburban Stepford wives, maniacal career women, alluring amnesiacs, and other specimens of retro femininity.

In Feminism and Popular Culture, Rebecca Munford and Melanie Waters consider why the twenty-first century media landscape is so haunted by the ghosts of these traditional figures that feminism otherwise laid to rest. Why, over fifty years since Betty Friedan’s critique, does the feminine mystique exert such a strong spectral presence, and how has it been reimagined to speak to the concerns of a postfeminist audience?

To answer these questions, Munford and Waters draw from a rich array of examples from contemporary film, fiction, music, and television, from the shadowy cityscapes of Homeland to the haunted houses of American Horror Story. Alongside this comprehensive analysis of today’s popular culture, they offer a vivid portrait of feminism’s social and intellectual history, as well as an innovative application of Jacques Derrida’s theories of “hauntology.” Feminism and Popular Culture thus not only considers how contemporary media is being visited by the ghosts of feminism’s past, it raises vital questions about what this means for feminism’s future.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Release date: May 1, 2014
• ISBN: 9780813571829

Rebecca Munford

Rebecca Munford is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Cardiff University

Book preview

Poppy.

Introduction

Wonder Women: ‘All the world is waiting for you’

‘Wonder Woman for President’. This demand, emblazoned in scarlet above the arresting image of a colossal Wonder Woman storming through main-street America, heralded the arrival in 1972 of a new feminist magazine on news-stands across the United States. Ms. magazine, co-founded by feminist journalist and activist Gloria Steinem, featured articles on abortion, domestic violence, pornography, housework and national politics and represented a vital intervention in mainstream media coverage of the women’s movement by providing an explicitly feminist account of its aims and activities to a mass readership. In providing a link between women’s glossy magazines and feminist political periodicals, the format of Ms., writes Imelda Whelehan in The Feminist Bestseller (2005), ‘aimed to counteract the more pernicious effects of the mass media in the US by offering a more reliable account of Movement activities and of issues of importance to women’ (59). A public emissary of feminist perspectives, Ms. soon became, ‘like the acronym NOW, a verbal symbol of the women’s movement’ (Cohen 325; qtd in Whelehan 59); as co-founding editor Letty Cottin Pogrebin puts it, the Ms. authors translated a ‘movement into a magazine’ (‘HerStory’ para. 2). Reproducing the outward format of traditional women’s glossies and framing its debut appearance in such a clearly demarcated space of popular culture, the magazine represented an attempt to mobilize the commercial marketplace for political ends. As Amy Erdman Farrell chronicles in Yours in Sisterhood: Ms. Magazine and the Promise of Popular Feminism (1998), in making an ally out of capitalism, Ms.

worked to disrupt cultural hegemony from the inside, to fashion a new representation of women, and of women’s magazines, within the context and the constraints of the commercial market. […] The strength of this ‘new magazine for women’ was its ability to be both a women’s magazine, which had a place on the battlefield of existing women’s magazines, and a resource within the women’s movement, a mass circulation text that could connect women to a national community of feminism. (16)

The magazine’s dual identity facilitated the dissemination of a feminism that could not only coexist with, but was enabled by, consumer culture. Its launch in the early 1970s, announced by the formidable body of Wonder Woman, thus marked a seminal moment in the evolution of ‘popular feminism’. That is, Ms. articulated the possibilities and potential of a mode of feminism that was ‘popular’ in terms of both its communality and its cultural location.¹ This was a mode of feminism that was, nonetheless, ‘unpopular’ for those detractors who deemed its alliance with the commercial marketplace to be tantamount to political betrayal (see Farrell

Reviews for Feminism and Popular Culture

[darthdeverell · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

In Feminism & Popular Culture: Investigating the Postfeminist Mystique, Rebecca Munford and Melanie Waters draw upon Jacques Derrida’s theories to argue, “The seeds of women’s future empowerment lie in the past as much as in the present…These ghostly visitations reveal the vexed and volatile relationship between feminism and popular culture. If media speculation about the ‘death of feminism’ has given rise to a body of popular texts that seek to define and diagnose the condition of postfeminism, then this book seizes on a selection of these texts in order to investigate the implied ‘afterlife’ of feminism, querying the extent to which contemporary culture is haunted by the ghosts of an undead feminism” (pg. 8). Munford and Waters largely draw upon television, as it is the most widespread medium of the past fifty years and broadcasts images directly into the home. They juxtapose their study of television shows against written work in the zeitgeist at the time of the various shows’ broadcast and the occasional film, such as The Stepford Wives. Remarkably, Munford and Waters demonstrate how empowering tropes from 1990s television shows, such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, morphed by the early 2000s to offer more conservative fare, undercutting much of the second-wave feminism narrative. Interestingly, some of these changes appeared in shows with the same creators or stars as their 1990s forebears, such as Dollhouse and Tru Calling. Munford and Waters conclude, “Resuscitating and reanimating images and styles of femininity that belong to the past, the postfeminist mystique speculates readily and obsessively on the death of feminism” (pg. 169). To this end, “Feminism refuses to leave because its business remains unfinished” (pg. 171).