Rosalind Gill

Postfeminist media culture: elements of a sensibility

The notion of postfeminism has become one of the most important in the lexicon of feminist cultural an alysis. Yet there is little agreement about what postfeminism is. This article argues that postfeminism is best understood as a distinctive sensibility, made up of a number of interrelated themes. These include the notion that femininity is a bodily property; the shift from objectification to subjectification; an emphasis upon self-surveillance, monitoring and self-discipline; a focus on individualism, choice and empowerment; the dominance of a makeover paradigm; and a resurgence of ideas about natural sexual difference. Each of these is explored in some detail, with examples from contemporary Anglo-American media. It is precisely the patterned articulation of these ideas that constitutes a postfeminist sensibility. The article concludes with a discussion of the connection between this sensibility and contemporary neoliberalism.

Body Projects and the Regulation of Normative Masculinity

Drawing on interviews with 140 young British males, this article explores the ways in which men talk about their own bodies and bodily practices, and those of other men. The specific focus of interest is a variety of body modification practices. We argue, however, that the significance of this analysis extends beyond the topic of body modification. In discussing the appearance of their bodies, the men we interviewed talked less about muscle and skin than about their own selves located within particular social, cultural and moral universes. This article shows that, in talking about seemingly trivial questions such as whether to have one’s nose pierced or join a gym, men are actively engaged in regulating normative masculinity. Our analysis lends support to the claim that the body has become a new (identity) project in high/late/post-modernity, but shows how fraught with difficulties this project is for young men who must simultaneously work on and discipline their bodies while disavowing any (inappropriate) interest in their own appearance. The analysis highlights the pervasive individualism of young men’s discourses, and the absence of alternative ways of making sense of embodied experiences.

Discourse: Noun, verb or social practice?

This chapter comments on some of the different senses of the notion of discourse in the various relevant literatures and then overviews the basic features of a coherent discourse analytic programme in Psychology. Parker’s approach is criticized for (a) its tendency to reify discourses as objects, (b) its undeveloped notion of analytic practice and (c) its vulnerability to common sense assumptions. It ends by exploring the virtues of ‘interpretative repertoires’ over ‘discourses’ as an analytic/theoretical notion.

Teen girls, sexual double standards and ‘sexting’: Gendered value in digital image exchange:

This article explores gender inequities and sexual double standards in teens’ digital image exchange, drawing on a UK qualitative research project on youth ‘sexting’. We develop a critique of ‘postfeminist’ media cultures, suggesting teen ‘sexting’ presents specific age and gender related contradictions: teen girls are called upon to produce particular forms of ‘sexy’ self display, yet face legal repercussions, moral condemnation and ‘slut shaming’ when they do so. We examine the production/circulation of gendered value and sexual morality via teens’ discussions of activities on Facebook and Blackberry. For instance, some boys accumulated ‘ratings’ by possessing and exchanging images of girls’ breasts, which operated as a form of currency and value. Girls, in contrast, largely discussed the taking, sharing or posting of such images as risky, potentially inciting blame and shame around sexual reputation (e.g. being called ‘slut’, ‘slag’ or ‘sket’). The daily negotiations of these new digitally mediated, heterosexualised, classed and raced norms of performing teen feminine and masculine desirability are considered.

Sexism Reloaded, or, it's Time to get Angry Again!

Happy birthday, Feminist Media Studies! And warm congratulations to Lisa McLaughlin and Cynthia Carter for a decade of editing this hugely important journal. The site of consistently interesting research and discussion, the journal has played a key role in constituting the field of study and becoming a critical space and “must read” destination for everyone interested in gender and the media. It gives me great pleasure to celebrate the journal’s tenth birthday and to witness it going from strength to strength, and I would like to express my appreciation to Cynthia and Lisa for their tireless work as editors, and also for giving me the opportunity to contribute to this special anniversary edition. I have chosen to title my piece: “It’s time to get angry again,” and aim to offer some brief reflections on “the state of the field.” These are necessarily selective—ignoring much that is important—and also rather polemical. I will argue that we need to start talking about sexism again, and call for a (re)turn to more politicised, intersectional, transnational and conjunctural thinking, which should also—I contend—pay attention to the psychosocial dimensions of power. Ten years ago, Katherine Viner (1999) warned that feminist academic research was in danger of losing its politics completely, falling into “High Theory” with overly complex and obscurantist language and becoming “conceptually sophisticated to the point of depoliticisation” (p. 3). In what follows I want to argue that conceptual sophistication and feminist politics need not be mutually exclusive. I want to make a plea for an attention to complexities, subtleties, and nuances that can and should aid and inform a feminist project, not depoliticise it.

“It’s Different for Men” Masculinity and IVF

Drawing on interviewdata with men andwomen who have engaged with in vitro fertilization (IVF) unsuccessfully, this article explores the ways in which men experience and make sense of the failure of treatment. Focusing on men’s experiences of infertility, their perceptions of IVF as a technology, and their involvement in the IVF process, the analysis highlights the ambivalent relationship between men and IVF as a technology; the predominance of hegemonic masculine culture in mediating the meaning of IVF for both men and women, particularly in relation to the association of fertility and virility in the normative construction of masculinity; and the very traditionally gendered emotional scripts that structure the experience of IVF and its failure.

Mediated intimacy and postfeminism: a discourse analytic examination of sex and relationships advice in a women's magazine

This article uses a discourse analytic perspective to analyse sex and relationship advice in a best-selling women’s magazine. It identifies three different interpretative repertoires which together structure constructions of sexual relationships: the intimate entrepreneurship repertoire, organized around plans, goals and the scientific management of relationships; men-ology, in which women are instructed in how to learn to please men; and transforming the self, which calls on women to remodel their interior lives in order to construct a desirable subjectivity. The article considers each repertoire in turn, and also looks at how they work together in order to privilege men and heterosexuality. Discussion focuses in particular on the postfeminist nature of the advice, in which pre-feminist, feminist and anti-feminist ideas are entangled in such a way as to make gender ideologies more pernicious and difficult to contest.

Post-postfeminism?: new feminist visibilities in postfeminist times

Abstract This article contributes to debates about the value and utility of the notion of postfeminism for a seemingly “new” moment marked by a resurgence of interest in feminism in the media and among young women. The paper reviews current understandings of postfeminism and criticisms of the term’s failure to speak to or connect with contemporary feminism. It offers a defence of the continued importance of a critical notion of postfeminism, used as an analytical category to capture a distinctive contradictory-but-patterned sensibility intimately connected to neoliberalism. The paper raises questions about the meaning of the apparent new visibility of feminism and highlights the multiplicity of different feminisms currently circulating in mainstream media culture—which exist in tension with each other. I argue for the importance of being able to “think together” the rise of popular feminism alongside and in tandem with intensified misogyny. I further show how a postfeminist sensibility informs even those media productions that ostensibly celebrate the new feminism. Ultimately, the paper argues that claims that we have moved “beyond” postfeminism are (sadly) premature, and the notion still has much to offer feminist cultural critics.

Rewriting The Romance: New Femininities in Chick Lit?

In the last 10 years popular publishing has been transformed by the development of a number of new genres that have claimed to “rewrite” contemporary romances. Many publishers have launched new imprints with more sexually explicit titles aimed at women (e.g. Black Lace), have commissioned fictions that deliberately build on the popularity of TV shows like Sex and the City and Desperate Housewives, and have marketed new subgenres such as “mum lit,” “lad lit,” and “dad lit.” Chief amongst these new genres is the phenomenon of chick lit, which burst onto the publishing scene in the wake of the extraordinary success of Helen Fieldings (1996) Bridget Joness Diary. The focus of this paper is on how chick lit should be understood. Is chick lit “rewriting” the romance? Do chick lit novels offer new versions of heterosexual partnerships? How different are their constructions of femininity and masculinity from those of “traditional” popular romances such as those published by Harlequin or Mills and Boon? To what extent do these novels break with conventional formulas, and how, if at all, are they positioned in relation to feminist ideas and concerns. In order to address these questions the paper is divided into two main parts. In the first section, a review of feminist writing on popular romance is presented, which outlines the different perspectives on romantic fiction and explores the extraordinary tenacity of notions of heterosexual romance against the backdrop of significant cultural and demographic changes, including divorce on a hitherto unprecedented scale, an increase in the number of single person households, and a diversification of family forms (including stepfamilies, lesbian and gay families, and the notion of “friends as the new family”). The second section offers a detailed analysis of twenty chick lit novels published between 1997 and 2004, examining constructions of sexuality, beauty, independence, work, and singleness. The paper concludes that chick lit articulates a distinctively post-feminist sensibility characterised by an emphasis on neo-liberal feminine subjectivities and self-surveillance and monitoring; the notion of the (sexual) body as the key source of identity for women; discourses of boldness, entitlement, and choice (usually articulated to normative femininity and/or consumerism); and a belief in the emotional separateness of mens and womens worlds. It is also characterised by an entanglement of feminist and anti-feminist discourses.

Spicing it up: Sexual entrepreneurs and The Sex Inspectors

The aim of this chapter is to discuss the emergence of a new feminine subject who we call the ‘sexual entrepreneur’. We will argue that the ‘modernization’ of femininity over the last two decades in the wake of the ‘sexual revolution’ and women’s movement, alongside the acceleration and intensi-fication of neoliberalism and consumerism, has given rise to a new and contradictory subject position: the sexual entrepreneur. This ‘new femininity’ constitutes a hybrid of discourses of sexual freedom for women, intimately entangled with attempts to recuperate this to (male-dominated) consumer capitalism. This makes this figure difficult to read, and helps to account for the familiar polarization between those feminists who appear hopeful and optimistic about the spaces that have opened up in recent years for female sexual self-expression and sexual pleasure in Western societies, and those who interpret the same phenomena as merely old sexual stereotypes wrapped in a new, glossy postfeminist guise. Contextualizing our argument in discussions about the ‘mainstreaming of sex’ (Attwood, 2009), we seek to develop notions of ‘sexual subjectification’ (Gill, 2003) and ‘technologies of sexiness’ (Radner, 1993, 1999) to explore the rise and proliferation of discourses of sexual entrepreneurship, and suggest a way of reading this that does not — or at least tries not to — fall back into the old binaries (e.g. either unproblematic liberation or wholesale recuperation).