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Author Topic: is postfeminism = antifeminism?
anna_c
rabble-rouser
Babbler # 2845

posted 19 August 2002 06:47 PM      Profile for anna_c     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
my desire to open a discussion on this question was prompted by the "mysterious" comment made on another thread (and echoed elsewhere):

quote:
"feminism" as a movement is no more.


this may aid in directing our discussion:

quote:
In October 1982, when the New York Times Magazine featured an article titled “Voices From the Post-Feminist Generation,” a term was coined, and ever since the women of America have heard, ceaselessly, that we are, and forevermore will be, in a postfeminist age.

What the hell is postfeminism, anyway? I would think it would refer to a time when complete gender equality has been achieved. That hasn’t happened, of course, but we (especially young women) are supposed to think it has. Postfeminism, as a term, suggests that women have made plenty of progress because of feminism, but that feminism is now irrelevant and even undesirable because it has made millions of women unhappy, unfeminine, childless, lonely, and bitter, prompting them to fill their closets with combat boots and really bad India print skirts.

But to perpetuate this “common sense” about feminism and postfeminism requires the weekly and monthly manufacturing of consent. Postfeminism is, in fact, an ongoing engineering process promoted most vigorously by the right, but aided and abetted all along the way by the corporate media. Postfeminism is crucial to the corporate media because they rely on advertising.


full text


From: montreal | Registered: Jul 2002  |  IP: Logged
dale cooper
rabble-rouser
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posted 19 August 2002 07:59 PM      Profile for dale cooper     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
When I was attending university, I took a number of classes on the various 'theories' - post-modern, feminist, queer, etc. I also took classes in Women's studies/feminist philosophy. I always found the latter much more interesting because they seemed to deal with actual problems and solutions. Any 'theory' classes I ever took always seemed to be so mired in defining themselves that they skipped over any possibility of dealing with reality. Granted, I went to a second rate university where I'm not sure if the profs actual understood what they were teaching...

I can't remember what post-feminist theory was about, but I remember thinking it didn't make a lot of sense. It always seemed like people too immersed in intellectualism wanting to claim forerunner rights on a new theory.


From: Another place | Registered: Aug 2002  |  IP: Logged
anna_c
rabble-rouser
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posted 20 August 2002 10:27 PM      Profile for anna_c     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
to attempt a rough characterization, it seems that many who call themselves or their views "postfeminist" have failed to grasp the history, meanings, intentions, projects of "feminism." often, at the same time, they are oblivious to the sexual oppression still prevalent in society. but i do not wish to represent "postfeminists" as a monolithic group. some express affinities with postmodernism and are concerned mainly with cultural products and criticism; some are liberals who hold the view that feminism has succeeded in making women "equal" to men, and is therefore no longer necessary; others are conservatives who are all too eager to herald the end of feminism, claiming that as a society we have recognized how problematic, unnatural, heretical, and hopeless the feminist project is.
From: montreal | Registered: Jul 2002  |  IP: Logged
audra trower williams
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posted 20 August 2002 10:56 PM      Profile for audra trower williams   Author's Homepage     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
I'll be post-feminism once we're post-patriarchy.
From: And I'm a look you in the eye for every bar of the chorus | Registered: Apr 2001  |  IP: Logged
nonsuch
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posted 20 August 2002 11:48 PM      Profile for nonsuch     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
It's a meaningless term. These days, a movement or idea or social phenomenon or trend in art or science isn't allowed to last more than a couple of decades - becuse, once everyone has heard the term, it loses media-allure. The audience hears a word it's heard a few times before, says "oh, that again" and tunes out, so they can't keep using the word. But the next movement, idea, social phenomenon or trend hasn't begun (because the last one isn't finished), so they can't come up with a new name, so they just stick post in front of the old name, to make it sound different.

Don't worry about it: just keep doing whatever you need to do.
What you mostly need to do is resist labels, reject images and standards other than your own, refuse roles and functions that don't fit you, fight injustice whenever you get the chance, and live your life as fully and humanely as possible.


From: coming and going | Registered: Sep 2001  |  IP: Logged
dale cooper
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posted 21 August 2002 12:59 AM      Profile for dale cooper     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
At what point in time did people get to define their own movements/generations/grouplings anyway? I thought people were just supposed to do what they did and historians would decide who they were and what significance they had in the annuls of history. Did the Romantics actually refer to themselves as that, or did they just do what they were doing and get labelled posthumously?
From: Another place | Registered: Aug 2002  |  IP: Logged
nonsuch
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posted 21 August 2002 01:31 AM      Profile for nonsuch     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
1955, with the massive advent of television. Tv can't wait on historians: it's got to label things before they happen, in order to brings you live coverage.
Well, maybe the Americans started naming their decades earlier, like 1920.
But political factions, rebels, religious sects and movements always did choose their own names. Their enemies called them something else. How history refers to them depends on who won.

From: coming and going | Registered: Sep 2001  |  IP: Logged
dale cooper
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posted 21 August 2002 01:40 AM      Profile for dale cooper     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
That's bloody terrible.

From now on I want to be known as the founder of the pre-modern/pre-feminist generation. Perhaps I'll let history decide what I stand for.


From: Another place | Registered: Aug 2002  |  IP: Logged
anna_c
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posted 21 August 2002 08:19 PM      Profile for anna_c     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
quote:
I'll be post-feminism once we're post-patriarchy.

i'm interested, how do others respond when told that feminism has run its course, and that we are living in a postfeminist age?


From: montreal | Registered: Jul 2002  |  IP: Logged
scrabble
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posted 21 August 2002 08:30 PM      Profile for scrabble     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
Aaaaaaaall right, anna_c. Didn't I already tell all youse in another thread that I never wanted to hear this "p*st-feminism" word ever again?

This highschool student gets it.

So does this man, although this will be the last time I post a man as a source on any parafeminist issue:

quote:
If feminism is about oppression by men, post-feminism is clearly about oppression by postmen . . . For example in the old days all the top positions in society were monopolised by men, nowadays they are nearly monopolised by men. Times have changed.

From: dappled shade in the forest | Registered: Jul 2002  |  IP: Logged
Tommy_Paine
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posted 21 August 2002 08:44 PM      Profile for Tommy_Paine     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
In my mind, "post-feminist" means a feminist who grasps the idea that women should be empowered to make their own choices, and that this also includes whether to adopt all or part of the old "feminist" dogma.

It doesn't mean that the "struggle is over", just that feminists are now allowed to step out of the old orthodoxy where they believe it is wrong, or ill suited to them as individuals.

I see it as a good thing. New ideas will be allowed to surface, to be either adopted or repudiated.

It will serve to bring new life to the movement.


From: The Alley, Behind Montgomery's Tavern | Registered: Apr 2001  |  IP: Logged
chemelle
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posted 21 August 2002 09:33 PM      Profile for chemelle     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
I have to first say that I LOVE LOVE LOVE Feminist theory...hey there's a few in every crowd I guess.
I think that post-feminism is an unfortunate term, though the ideas behind what the term represents (depending, of course, on whose definition of the term you use - yet another theoretical problem)are pretty good. Let's not let the New York Times and Time magazine with their Ally McBeal feminism is obviously dead attitude define contemporary feminism.
I agree with others here who have said that post-feminism (again, I hate using that term, but like what it represent) isn't monolithic. IN fact, the book "Introducing: Post Feminism" (one of those brilliant study guides) does a great job of posing all of the questions associated with so-called post-feminism, and showing that it is basically a set of new ideas, or perhaps what might be better called third wave feminism.
We already know that this term was coined by the media. And I hope that we already know that the media in general does not much like feminism and very much enjoys perpetuating its stereotypes or insisting on its death/uselessness. Thus, this term needs to be taken with a grain of salt - but its ideas need to better understood.

From: kingston | Registered: Jun 2002  |  IP: Logged
anna_c
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posted 22 August 2002 05:20 PM      Profile for anna_c     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
quote:
In my mind, "post-feminist" means a feminist who grasps the idea that women should be empowered to make their own choices

but is this not precicely the feminist project?

to attempt a crude sketch of a history of feminists fighting for choice:

in the so-called "first wave" of anglo-american feminism, suffragists/suffragettes fought for the right to participate in the democratic process: i.e., to make formal political choices.
in both the first and subsequent "second" wave of feminism, the phrase "a woman's right to choose" became synonymous with the reproductive freedom feminists were agitating for. in fact, your very statement, tommy, is possible only given a long history of feminist struggle. the idea that women are capable of (let alone entitled to) making moral, political, religious, or personal choices is a historical one.

if this is postfeminism, it can only be characterized as ignorant of the historical conditions for the possibility of its very existence!


From: montreal | Registered: Jul 2002  |  IP: Logged

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