In this unconventional article, Sarah Banet-Weiser, Rosalind Gill and Catherine Rottenberg conduct a three-way ‘conversation’ in which they all take turns outlining how they understand the relationship among postfeminism, popular feminism and neoliberal feminism. It begins with a short introduction, and then Ros, Sarah and Catherine each define the term they have become associated with. This is followed by another round in which they discuss the overlaps, similarities and disjunctures among the terms, and the article ends with how each one (...) understands the current mediated feminist landscape. (shrink)

Down Girl is a broad, original, and far ranging analysis of what misogyny really is, how it works, its purpose, and how to fight it. The philosopher Kate Manne argues that modern society's failure to recognize women's full humanity and autonomy is not actually the problem. She argues instead that it is women's manifestations of human capacities -- autonomy, agency, political engagement -- is what engenders misogynist hostility.

This article considers how to go beyond the polarities of individualism and communitarianism in the analysis of contemporary political cultures in a global era. It is argued that there is a need to ground analysis in a presumption of social networks and coalitions, rather than in the concept of recognition. Political cultures are always already riddled with complexity and cross-cutting relations with other political cultures, coalitions and alliances. Within the politics of recognition, the conventional operationalization of the concept of the (...) ‘social’ via the concept of ‘community’ misleadingly narrows the analysis of key aspects of social relations. Rather, we should invoke a wider range of sociological concepts to capture the nature of the social including, among many others, coalition, network and reference groups. In particular, the selection of the ‘other’ against whom aspirational comparisons are made is a complex social process, much previously analysed by reference group theory. The contemporary framing of some political claims in reference to a socially constructed conception of the universal is an increasingly common strategy. The politics of recognition is shown to be subordinate to the politics of equality, when sociological analysis of contemporary political cultures, of how people actually do make ethical and political claims, is prioritized. (shrink)

Women’s right to exercise choice has been one of feminism’s central political claims. Where second wave feminism focused on the constraints women faced in making free choices, choice feminism more recently reorients feminist politics with a call for recognition of the choices women are actually making. From this perspective the role of feminism is to validate women’s choices without passing judgement. This article analyses this shift in orientation by locating women’s choices within a late modern gender order in which the (...) ideal of choice has increasingly been associated with a new form of femininity characterized as self-determining, individuated and ‘empowered’. Instead of offering an effective analysis of the changing social conditions within which the relationship between feminism, femininity and individual choice has become increasingly complicated, choice feminism directs criticism at feminist perspectives characterized as overly prescriptive. This critique fails to appreciate how feminist ideals have been recuperated in the service of late capitalism and neoliberal forms of governance. By failing to engage critically with processes currently impacting on the social organization of gender choice feminism aids in the constitution of an individuated neoliberal feminist subject which performs cultural work vital to the reproduction of neoliberal governmentality. (shrink)

Recent discussion of some user-generated material on the Internet has argued that its ‘freshness’ and ‘spontaneity’ offers a new form of ‘authenticity’ in mediated communication. With a focus on YouTube, particularly where extensive use is made of the facility to post text comments on vlogs, it has been suggested that such activities reproduce the feel of ‘face-to-face communication’. Interestingly such accounts echo previous debates about broadcast talk, although YouTube is defined as a species of ‘post-television’. This article assesses these claims (...) through a case study of one practice of user-generated communication on YouTube, the so-called ‘make-up tutorial’. It takes an approach to spoken discourse analysis previously developed in the study of broadcast talk, but it also makes some observations about the structure of the YouTube site, by comparison with the discursive ‘regime’ of television. This analysis finds that there are indeed some distinctive communicative practices on YouTube, but rather than assessing these in terms of their ‘authenticity’, it is more useful to consider their ‘communicative entitlements’, which throw new light on the constraints of traditional forms of broadcasting. (shrink)

A major work of feminist film criticism examining questions of sexual difference, the female body and the female spectator through a discussion of such figures as Pabst's Lulu and Rita Hayworth's Gilda.