This article argues that the ‘Third Way’ philosophy that has been adopted by centre-left parties throughout Europe and the United States provides the conceptual framework to analyse contemporary postfeminism and its contentious micro-politics that emerges out of personal and daily gender-based struggles. The notion of a postfeminist micro-politics complicates the critical perception of postfeminism as a depoliticized and anti-feminist backlash and offers a dynamic model of political action that takes into account the multiple agency positions of individuals today. Postfeminism and (...) the politics it endorses differ from emergent political movements such as third wave feminism in that they are not founded on second wave feminist theory and activism. Instead, postfeminist politics adopts a Third Way perspective to reconcile a number of conflicting concerns, from feminist calls for female equality and theoretical debates on anti-essentialism to the consumerist demands of capitalist society. These controversial new junctures are examined by paying particular attention to postfeminism’s female sexual agent who becomes the ‘entrepreneur’ of her own image, buying into standardized femininities while also seeking to resignify their meanings. In particular, the article discusses the paradoxical possibilities of ‘active consumption’ and ‘fashion feminism’ whereby women endeavour to achieve empowerment by exerting their consumer agency and using their bodies as political tools within the parameters of a capitalist economy. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

Research on female stereotypes in online advertisements is particularly scant, and thus, we lack evidence on whether women are depicted in derogatory (stereotypical) terms on the Internet or not. This theme has significant ethical implications. Hence, the objectives of this study are: (1) to provide evidence on female role portrayals in online advertisements of global products, and (2) to explore female role portrayals across web pages for different audience types. The results indicate that women are generally portrayed in a stereotypical (...) way, supporting the notion that sexism is prevalent in online advertisements worldwide. Portrayal of women across web pages varies considerably, with female-audience web pages embracing “decorative” female images; male-audience web pages promoting polarizing depictions of women in “dependent” or “non-traditional” roles; and general-audience web pages using portrayals of women as housewives or equal to men. Overall, the findings suggest that “traditional” or “decorative” stereotypes are largely evident in all three audience types, although some “non-traditional” roles may occur. Implications and future research directions are discussed. (shrink)

Contemporary consumer culture sees the body as the crucial indicator of the self and apparent bodily ageing as problematic. All bodies age, but how is evidence of ageing culturally interpreted? This article develops a critical-pragmatic analysis of consumerized body discourses, with particular focus on the semiotics of the visibly ageing face, in the context of lifestyle magazine features and advertisements on skin care. Such texts work to equate ageing with the look of ageing, problematize ageing appearance, and offer marketized solutions (...) to the ‘problem’ of ageing, using markedly gendered strategies. Texts aimed at a female market project skin care as a serious issue, pathologize the look of ageing, offer highly technologized solutions, and naturalize surgical intervention. The male market is being discursively engaged by strategies designed to normalize male investment in products and processes traditionally seen as in the domain of female bodily grooming. Consumerized male narcissism is enabled by ironic, ‘uncommitted’ discourses, the use of highly masculinized images and text, and, more recently, discourses which draw attention to the salience of the female appraising gaze. (shrink)

This article analyzes ‘commemorative’ images of Diana Spencer for how they invoke tropes of charity and sympathy to produce racialized mediations of history, memory, motherhood and US national identity. Drawing from cultural theory that establishes technologies of memory and forgetting as material forces, this discussion illumines how images of Diana appearing in such popular US magazines as People and Life incorporate visual scripts of race and sentiment that have historically demarcated the relative social value(s) of maternity and reproduction. Understanding visual (...) culture as a force that is both structured by and structuring of hierarchies of power enables us to see how the posthumous circulation of images of ‘Our Princess’ are indeed not ideologically innocent memorializations. Rather, these images are the physical, embodied material of a national monument that provides faithful ‘visitors’ an affective connection to historically idealized notions of whiteness, motherhood, and the family. (shrink)