Diane Negra

Interrogating Postfeminism: Gender and the Politics of Popular Culture

This timely collection brings feminist critique to bear on contemporary postfeminist mass media culture, analyzing phenomena ranging from action films featuring violent heroines to the “girling” of aging women in productions such as the movie Something’s Gotta Give and the British television series 10 Years Younger . Broadly defined, “postfeminism” encompasses a set of assumptions that feminism has accomplished its goals and is now a thing of the past. It presumes that women are unsatisfied with their (taken for granted) legal and social equality and can find fulfillment only through practices of transformation and empowerment. Postfeminism is defined by class, age, and racial exclusions; it is youth-obsessed and white and middle-class by default. Anchored in consumption as a strategy and leisure as a site for the production of the self, postfeminist mass media assumes that the pleasures and lifestyles with which it is associated are somehow universally shared and, perhaps more significantly, universally accessible. Essays by feminist film, media, and literature scholars based in the United States and United Kingdom provide an array of perspectives on the social and political implications of postfeminism. Examining magazines, mainstream and independent cinema, popular music, and broadcast genres from primetime drama to reality television, contributors consider how postfeminism informs self-fashioning through makeovers and cosmetic surgery, the “metrosexual” male, the “black chick flick,” and more. Interrogating Postfeminism demonstrates not only the viability of, but also the necessity for, a powerful feminist critique of contemporary popular culture. Contributors . Sarah Banet-Weiser, Steven Cohan, Lisa Coulthard, Anna Feigenbaum, Suzanne Leonard, Angela McRobbie, Diane Negra, Sarah Projansky, Martin Roberts, Hannah E. Sanders, Kimberly Springer, Yvonne Tasker, Sadie Wearing

What a Girl Wants? : Fantasizing the Reclamation of Self in Postfeminism

1: Introduction 2: Postfeminism, Family Values, and the Social Fantasy of the Hometown 3: Time Crisis and the New Postfeminist Life Cycle 4: Postfeminist Working Girls: New Archetypes of the Female Labor Market 5: Hyperdomesticity, Self-Care and the Well-Lived Life in Postfeminism

Gendering the Recession: Media and Culture in an Age of Austerity

This timely, necessary collection of essays provides feminist analyses of a recession-era media culture characterized by the reemergence and refashioning of familiar gender tropes, including crisis masculinity, coping women, and postfeminist self-renewal. Interpreting media forms as diverse as reality television, financial journalism, novels, lifestyle blogs, popular cinema, and advertising, the contributors reveal gendered narratives that recur across media forms too often considered in isolation from one another. They also show how, with a few notable exceptions, recession-era popular culture promotes affective normalcy and transformative individual enterprise under duress while avoiding meaningful critique of the privileged white male or the destructive aspects of Western capitalism. By acknowledging the contradictions between political rhetoric and popular culture, and between diverse screen fantasies and lived realities, Gendering the Recession helps to make sense of our postboom cultural moment. Contributors. Sarah Banet-Weiser, Hamilton Carroll, Hannah Hamad, Aniko Imre, Suzanne Leonard, Isabel Molina-Guzman, Sinead Molony, Elizabeth Nathanson, Diane Negra, Tim Snelson, Yvonne Tasker, Pamela Thoma

The Irish in Us: Irishness, Performativity and Popular Culture

Over the past decade or so, Irishness has emerged as an idealized ethnicity, one with which large numbers of people around the world, and particularly in the United States, choose to identify. Seeking to explain the widespread appeal of all things Irish, the contributors to this collection show that for Americans, Irishness is rapidly becoming the white ethnicity of choice, a means of claiming an ethnic identity while maintaining the benefits of whiteness. At the same time, the essayists challenge essentialized representations of Irishness, bringing attention to the complexities of Irish history and culture that are glossed over in Irish-themed weddings and shamrock tattoos. Examining how Irishness is performed and commodified in the contemporary transnational environment, the contributors explore topics including Van Morrison’s music, Frank McCourt’s writing, the explosion of Irish-themed merchandising, the practices of heritage seekers, the movie The Crying Game , and the significance of red hair. Whether considering the implications of Garth Brooks’s claim of Irishness and his enormous popularity in Ireland, representations of Irish masculinity in the TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel , or Americans’ recourse to a consoling Irishness amid the racial and nationalist tensions triggered by the events of September 11, the contributors delve into complex questions of ethnicity, consumerism, and globalization. Ultimately, they call for an increased awareness of the exclusionary effects of claims of Irishness and for the cultivation of flexible, inclusive ways of affiliating with Ireland and the Irish. Contributors . Natasha Casey, Maeve Connolly, Catherine M. Eagan, Sean Griffin, Michael Malouf, Mary McGlynn, Gerardine Meaney, Diane Negra, Lauren Onkey, Maria Pramaggiore, Stephanie Rains, Amanda Third

Claiming feminism: commentary, autobiography and advice literature for women in the recession

Feminist academics have grown accustomed to the disparagement and misrepresentation of our intellectual endeavours in a climate of antifeminist postfeminism. Yet, in recent years, the position of public feminism has shifted as it is increasingly invoked by celebrities for whom it often functions as a credential of entrepreneurial self-branding. This article identifies and conducts a preliminary analysis of a set of female-authored print texts published in the wake of the ‘Great Recession’ and marked by a distinctly emergent monetisation/corporatisation of feminism. It suggests that these books respond to and further a sense of fraught female aspirationalism in an era of economic contraction and growing signs of neo-patriarchalism.

Neoliberal frames and genres of inequality: Recession-era chick flicks and male-centred corporate melodrama

Media forms play a vital role in making cultural and political sense of the complex economic developments and profound ideological uncertainties which have accompanied the global recession. This article analyses how popular genre cinema tackles the inequalities – in particular, gender inequalities – that follow from the financial crisis, situating Hollywood’s representational strategies in the context of recessionary media culture. It posits and analyses two sub-genres which demonstrate different approaches to an altered socio-economic climate: the recessionary ‘chick flick’ and the corporate melodrama. Amid the financial crisis these sub-genres shift emphasis to respond to changing circumstances, notably in relation to the once-ubiquitous trope of choice central to post-feminist media culture; neoliberal choice rhetoric is now considerably harder to maintain. The two case studies contrast the different ways in which female-centred chick flicks and male-centred corporate melodramas address unemployment, downward mobility and the challenges of work–life balance.

Emigration, return migration and surprise homecomings in post-Celtic Tiger Ireland

Abstract This article explores the cultural and ideological management of mass migration in twenty-first-century Ireland, arguing that narratives of return have come to dominate representations of emigration. The almost universal focus on the moment or experience of return distinguishes the current era from other periods of high emigration in Ireland. The phenomenon of the surprise homecoming video is scrutinised alongside recent cinematic releases, newspaper articles, blogs and cultural events including The Gathering (2013) and the Marriage Equality Referendum (2015). By drawing these sources together, the article exposes how cultural representations of emigration have been shaped to fit with official narratives of a business-friendly nation in recovery. By repeatedly showcasing the emotional pleasures of return these popular culture forms support a fantasy of easy return and mask the real economic and social problems driving the latest wave of emigration.

Neoliberalism, Magical Thinking, and Silver Linings Playbook

A word-of-mouth hit in 2012, David O. Russell’s Silver Linings Playbook has been popularly discussed as successfully targeting an adult audience under-served in contemporary Hollywood, as “authentically” reflecting the parenting challenges of its star and director, and as portraying a “modern” romance about a sympathetic, deeply damaged protagonist couple.1 Less frequently recognized is how Silver Linings Playbook consolidates forms of social damage arising in neoliberal societies. Accordingly, we read the film as reflecting a postfeminist, post-recession narrative of social, familial, and economic pressures, and exposing the effect of those pressures on the struggle for intimacy in the twenty-first century. SLP engages a set of cultural narratives that produce a post-recession subject who restores his or her sense of self by re-narrating gender and family relationships. This re-narration reflects fictional control over psychological circumstances in order to compensate for uncontrollable material conditions. Specifically, the film, through a fantasy maneuver, invokes the compulsive nature of the current financial system in order to provide salvation for disenfranchised subjects by cathecting them to a flawed financialism.

Broadcasting Irish emigration in an era of global mobility

This article examines how pre-existing Irish migratory cultural logics have been re-tooled in the post-Celtic Tiger period as a form of adaptation to the new imperatives of global capitalism. In this analysis, we show that just as Julien Mercille has discovered in regard to the Irish press and its role in normalizing and promoting neoliberal responses to the economic crisis, representations of the new emigration in the Irish broadcasting environment traverse a narrow spectrum that runs from optimism to resignation. Reality genres heavily tout the values of enterprise and resilience as well as the material affordances that are seen to accrue from emigration, while dramas are more customarily committed to the emotional management of experiences of loss and separation. Structural inquiry into national economic programmes and priorities is customarily excluded in such an environment, although it may be seen that more vernacular forms such as YouTube videos and a low-level but consistent preoccupation with the experiences and concerns of the returned migrant in the Irish press suggest public interest in unsettled questions about the permeability of Irish society and what it means to be located within or dislocated from it.

Animality, domesticity and masculinity in My Cat From Hell

This article analyses a US reality TV series for the way it reflects two coinciding phenomena: the elevation of animals to a new domestic status in which their needs and interests demand significant time, care and money and the rise of male-fronted instructional lifestyle television. The commercial dimensions of what has been characterised as ‘America’s hyper-profitable obsession with its dogs and cats’ are apparent in dramatic sales rises of premium pet food, the dramatic growth of pet care and grooming industries and the expansion of care animals in the public sphere. Considering the ways in which we are now called upon to cultivate and monitor the emotional well-being of our pets and to take part in an animal-centred economy on their behalf, I turn to the example of Animal Planet’s My Cat From Hell. This series emphatically repositions cat care and empathy as congruent with masculinity while demonstrating, as I will argue, the relevance of hipster entrepreneurialism to the vastly expanded pet economy.