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This chapter situates the music video between feminism and popular culture. The notion of postfeminism became a key weapon in the ‘pre-emptive strike’ that prevented feminism reaching its political terminus. Pink's ‘Stupid Girls’ is regarded as distinctly postfeminist. In terms of ‘Stupid Girls’, the video's own irony and playfulness is activated to drive home its critique of women who now have choices but use those choices to turn themselves into sexual objects. It is assumed that patriarchy is no longer a problem and that real choices can be freely made. Specifically in terms of music video, there are a number of important factors which bear on the ‘way they turn out the way they do’ and, moreover, how they make their meaning.

The chapter introduces and historicises the key debates about the female action hero, before offering an extended investigation of the representation of the female action hero in contemporary action cinema. Identifying an action heroine who is physically and economically empowered while also sexualized, the chapter argues that this figure is defined by her proximity to postfeminist discourses of female power and sexual agency, while suggesting that the potentially unsettling prospect of a physically violent woman is minimised by traditional containment strategies that locate her in comic or overtly fantastical settings. Using Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle and Kill Bill as illustrative case studies, the chapter shows how, in this dominant representational mode, images of physical stress and damage are suppressed for ideological reasons, but also argues that more ‘untidy’ forms of female physical agency are emerging in the margins of the mainstream.

This chapter argues that the television programs Family Ties and The Wonder Years advanced the neoconservative politics of the eighties even as they appeared to evince halting nostalgia for sixties-era dissent. The caricature of the hippie-turned-yuppie in eighties era television teaches viewers that radical beliefs, countercultural lifestyles, and women’s liberation were forms of youthful indiscretion that the baby boomer generation learned to outgrow. These programs recentered the family as the site of individual agency and moral activism, giving televisual form to the ideas undergirding neoliberalism and postfeminism.

Chapter 3 examines recent state-level informed consent laws, with a focus on laws that mandate ultrasounds before abortion. Beginning with an exploration of gender, neoliberalism, and biomedicalization, it shows that current debates over reproductive health and services are entangled with and informed by neoliberal and postfeminist perspectives, which emphasize the freedom and independence of agents and obscure power relations and social context. Feminist ideas of rights and empowerment are thereby perverted and employed to justify calls for individual responsibility and heightened surveillance of women. The chapter argues that in recent reproductive law, neoliberal and postfeminist perspectives converge with the tradition of autonomy as proper self-management to produce a new understanding of autonomy as risk avoidance. Moreover, the biomedicalization of reproduction, which frames reproductive health as a matter of individual moral responsibility, has facilitated and converged with these frameworks. The frameworks of postfeminism, neoliberalism, and biomedicalization provide context for the examination of recent state-level abortion restrictions and the role of ultrasound within them. The chapter shows that sonograms play a key role in shaping and representing cultural and political understandings of pregnancy and fetuses.

The Introduction, “Situating Schoolgirlhood,” introduces readers to the local context of the case-study communities in Kajiado County, Kenya, and elaborates key concepts, including inhabited agency, girl-effects logic, and gendered responsibility and obligation. The chapter argues for the relevance of “postfeminism” and “girlpower”—concepts derived through analysis of girls’ lives in the Global North— for understanding Kenyan Maasai schoolgirls’ compelling insights that trouble the reductive demographic notion of “a girl enrolled in school” that animates development discourse targeting girls’ lives for intervention and investment. By tracing the outlines of “schoolgirlhood” as a specific kind of gendered and generational cultural space for girls who go to school, the introduction foreshadows subsequent chapters that each elaborate aspects of schoolgirlhood as narrated by schoolgirls, mothers, and teachers.

The introduction explores the terrain of women’s writing in French over the course of the late twentieth century and into the new millennium. It locates the place of women’s writing on the contemporary French literary scene, arguing for the ongoing fertility of the term in relation to contemporary feminist and postfeminist debates, and analysing the evolving relationship between body and text. It identifies an emphasis on the transformative becoming of the body in contemporary culture and begins to open out the possible intersections between feminist criticism, the philosophies of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari and authors Amélie Nothomb, Ananda Devi, Marie Darrieussecq and Nina Bouraoui.

This chapter engages an ongoing conversation within Hip Hop Studies in regards to masculinity. Instead of asking what Hip Hop masculinity does to girls and women, whereby they become victims of masculine gender performance, this chapter asks what graff grrlz do with masculine gender performance. Examining the self-presentation, aesthetics of, and approach to graffiti art by graffiti writers Are2 (USA), Miss17 (USA), Motel7 (South Africa), Jerk LA (USA), EGR (Canada), and Ivey (Australia), the chapter proposes “feminist masculinity” to name performances of masculine gender characteristics that empower rather than subjugate. Rather than reproducing oppressive toxic masculinity at the center of Hip Hop’s discourse of “realness,” upholding hegemonic liberal feminism, or accepting a politically sterilized postfeminism, these grrlz fashion the traits of masculinity to demand equity on behalf of their graffiti grrl community.

If, as Jane Gaines (2012) suggests, instead of ‘transgressing’ the formal dictates of the industrial genre (that is, instead of ‘going against genre’), some women filmmakers ‘go with genre’, this might be particularly so in the case of horror cinema. The analysis of the much-maligned Jennifer’s Body (2009), written by Diablo Cody and directed by Karyn Kusama, demonstrates precisely this point. The chapter begins by discussing the marketing of Jennifer’s Body, in order to show how those in charge of film distribution and publicity used the director’s and writer’s gender as a promotional tool, and how the filmmakers themselves might have determined certain feminist and postfeminist readings of their film. These readings are contextualised within Diablo Cody’s broader self-promotional activities and her “commercial auteurism” (Corrigan 1991) and raise several questions about what is at stake when women practitioners make horror films and the implications should a filmmaker self-identify as a feminist filmmaker. The chapter then offers a close examination of Jennifer’s Body by rethinking the theories of Barbara Creed (1993) and Carol J. Clover (1992) and by inscribing the film within the wider context of teen movies and postfeminist media culture, making room for reflection on female spectatorial pleasures. It concludes that rather than undoing the horror genre, Jennifer’s Body explores its productive potential, participating in its continuous re-inscription of the relationship between women and violence.

This chapter discusses the continuing relevance of postfeminist gothic works in literature. “Postfeminism” is used throughout this book to describe a powerful cultural sensibility that assumes that gender equity has been achieved, and that feminism is now both obsolete and undesirable. Postfeminist gothic novels, however, violently intrude on the well-constructed fantasy of a safe and equitable world. They feature abject protagonists who are socially invisible, physically broken, or speaking from the grave. Emphasizing women's disempowerment, they go against the grain of a victim-resistant, empowerment-oriented age. In their very narratives, which often foreclose happiness, these works also eschew the therapeutic structures embedded in postfeminist popular culture.

In this preliminary chapter, the author, a leading Franco-American scholar, discusses the spatial and temporal discrepancies that affect her view of the theoretical and political landscape she is attempting to map out: in the North-American academy, everything having to do with sex and gender is now treated retrospectively as if these issues and concerns belonged to the past, albeit a recent past. In France, gender and queer theory are up and coming. What happens, then, when one looks at these theories through lenses that are both “American” and “French”, thus simultaneously retrospective and anticipatory? How can one account for both their alleged exhaustion and their currency?

The introduction presents the framework of the book and explains how female-centered romance films made since the early 1980s operate as a cycle, with both comedic and dramatic films reflecting contemporary women’s anxieties and perhaps more importantly, anxieties about women during the postfeminist period. The chapter outlines the mechanics of the cycle, discussing first, its narrative conventions and expectations,and second, its discourses about romantic love that have particular relevance forwomen who are both at thecenterof, andmake up the audience for, these films (and media texts). Using the scholarship of Angela McRobbie, Diane Negra, Yvonne Taskerand Mimi White as a foundation, the remainder of the chapter discusses how the postfeminist romance cycle reveals the reciprocal relationship between the romance formula and the most salient concerns of the postfeminist era, and furthermore, how romance frames the central tensions and paradoxes that dominate the postfeminist period. These tensions—pragmatism versus sentimentality, the past versus present, sexy versus funny, and independence versus dependence— frame the case studies in chapters two through five.

Chapter One puts the postfeminist romance cycle into historical context by examining how it both follows, and deviates from, its predecessors: the classical romance film, and the feminist romance film. This comparison sheds light on how romance’s structural and discursive traits operate in three films from different historical periods, and the degree of interchange between these conventions and the representation of women’s politics. The 1940 film Kitty Foyle (Wood) maintains a precarious balancing act between its commentary on the relationship between women’s rights, their professional aspirations and romantic relationships, keeping its political content largely within the boundaries of a conventional romance structure. The 1978 feminist romance film An UnMarried Woman(Mazursky) is more contemplative and exploratory in both politics and style. The 2008 postfeminist romance film 27 Dresses (Fletcher) combines structural, discursive, and stylistic elements from the classic and feminist romances while reflecting the anxiety surrounding women’s changing social and political status over the last 30 years. Outlining the terrain of the romance film in these different periods of Hollywood cinema is an excellent starting point for gaining a historically nuanced understanding of the origins and operations of the postfeminist romance cycle.