Keller, Jessalynn. “Girl power’s last chance? Tavi Gevinson, feminism, and popular media culture.” Continuum 29.2 (2015): 274-285.
This paper focuses on Tavi Gevinson, the teenage fashion blogger-turned-editor in chief of the online magazine Rookie, as a case study with which to interrogate the production and circulation of feminist politics within a ‘post-girl power’ era. Drawing on theories of performativity, I employ a discursive and ideological textual analysis of Gevinson’s self-produced media and media coverage to map how she uses the opportunities afforded by digital media to rearticulate narratives of ‘girl power’ and perform a feminist girlhood subjectivity that makes feminism accessible to her many readers. While I argue that Gevinson’s ability to do so is positive and demonstrates the porous nature of postfeminist media culture, I also suggest that we must be critical of the ways in which her feminism functions as part of her self brand that reproduces feminism as white, middle-class, and ‘hip’. Thus, I conclude by questioning a larger cultural trend towards the branding of feminism and advocating the need for an intersectional approach to understanding the resurgence of feminism within contemporary popular media culture.
Harris, Anita, and Amy Shields Dobson. “Theorizing agency in post-girlpower times.” Continuum 29.2 (2015): 145-156.
Post-structuralist youth studies theorists have argued for nuanced perspectives on agency that are not reliant on an assumption of subjects as rational and internally coherent individuals, and understand subjectivity and social structure as produced in concert. These are important theoretical developments that have shaped recent scholarship on girls’ identities and cultures. In this paper, we seek to give them some further sociological grounding by thinking through their resonance for the specific debate about young women and what feminist agency consists of, or looks like today. What we wish to further flesh out is how more familiar, modernist ideas about girls’ agency have started to reach their limits not merely because of the post-structuralist turn, but because of the socio-cultural conditions of neoliberalism, post-feminism and post-girlpower. We unpack some recent shifts and complexities around three concepts: choice, empowerment and voice. These are the terms by which the possibility of girls’ and young women’s agency has traditionally been understood in feminist scholarship and much work in girls’ studies. However, when we interrogate these concepts within the specific neoliberal, post-feminist, post-girlpower context, their usefulness for either understanding or enabling feminist agency is thrown into question.
Phillips, Jordan. “‘She Has To Be Controlled’: The Monstrous-Feminine and The Cinematic X-Women.”
The mythological phoenix and the female hero from the Hollywood superhero film are kindred spirits. As with the phoenix, the female hero is reborn from the ashes of her former self (in some cases both literally and figuratively). This paper will examine the problematic gender and sexual politics of the female heroes from the X-Men film series (2000-present). The „X-Women‟ are demonised, perceived as sexually caustic, and shown to be unable to control their monstrously feminine superpowers. The female heroes from the Hollywood superhero film mythos commonly go through what I term as the „Phoenix complex‟, drawing on one of the comic book superhero narrative‟s most renowned examples of the femme fatal: Jean Grey and the cosmic entity known as the Phoenix. Jean Grey, Rogue and Mystique are coded as dangerous women, their superpowers casting them as a threat to themselves and all those around them. Ultimately, the female hero is unable to control her power and is neutralised, the Symbolic, patriarchal order being restored. Like the phoenix from ancient myth, the female hero is unable to rise indefinitely, and is left defeated, powerless, and sexually confined.
Gill, Rosalind, and Ngaire Donaghue. “As if Postfeminism Had Come True: The Turn to Agency in Cultural Studies of ‘Sexualisation’.” Gender, agency, and coercion. Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2013. 240-258.
Our aim in this chapter is to examine what we see as a ‘turn to agency’ within feminism, in the context of the widespread take-up and popularisation of postfeminist ideas. Our particular area of focus lies in the field of media and cultural studies, and, more specifically, the growing interest in the ‘sexualisation’ of culture – a much contested notion that speaks to the growing sense of Western societies as saturated by sexual representations and discourses. We will argue that whilst agency has always been important to feminist theorising, in some recent writing it seems to have become a veritable preoccupation, endlessly searched for, invoked, and championed. In this chapter, we will explore the striking parallels between what we argue is a neoliberal and postfeminist sensibility circulating in popular culture and some contemporary feminist theorising in which agency, choice, and empowerment are given prominence. Both the feminist writing about agency considered here, and the popular cultural postfeminist sensibility are marked by a celebration of the capacity of female subjects to make free and autonomous choices and by a corresponding downplaying or even complete evacuation of any notion of influence, let alone coercion or oppression. Both focus upon areas of women’s lives in which trenchant feminist critiques have been articulated – and are now contested. Both rely on highly individualistic formulations of agency, which are thought in terms of personal acts rather than collective struggles. Moreover, both frequently position themselves as critical of feminism and indict feminists not only for ignoring women’s agency but also for imposing an orthodoxy of ideological constructs that are variously harmful to women or stand in the way of them acting in their own true interests.
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