Postfeminist Redux?

Abstract

Postfeminist Redux? assesses my book, Postfeminist News: Political Women in Media Culture (2002), in order to gauge its current significance to the discipline of communication and its implications for ongoing feminist media scholarship. The essay thus examines the contemporary status of three mutually constitutive sites the book's analysis was based on—postfeminism, neoliberalism, and media political economy—to determine whether the book's conclusions still stand, a decade after it was published.

Keywords:

• Postfeminism
• News Media
• Neoliberalism
• Political Economy

Notes

1. In Postfeminist News, I define political women as “women who, either consciously or inadvertently, appear in the media in formal, electoral political contexts” (p. 188, FN 1). Writing today, I would broaden the definition to include women who make sustained appearances in the media, whether consciously or inadvertently.

2. van Zoonen (1994) argues that: gender can thus be thought of as a particular discourse … a set of overlapping and often contradictory cultural descriptions and prescriptions referring to sexual difference, which arises from and regulates particular economic, social, political, technological and other nondiscursive contexts. Gender is inscribed in the subject along with other discourses, such as those of ethnicity, class, and sexuality. (p. 33)

3. Further evidence of gender-based wage inequity can be found in a recent report about salaries for new college graduates, among whom women's annual salaries average $8,000—or 17%—less than those of men (National Association of Colleges and Employers, 2011).

4. Some alternative media outlets such as New Deal 2.0 and The Nation have analyzed the gendered dimension of this issue.

5. Despite the wide diffusion of neoliberal philosophy, evidence suggests that it has not been fully embraced by the U.S. public: numerous polls show a majority of respondents favoring the preservation of Medicare and Social Security as federal programs, and rejecting their privatization (Cohen & Balz, 2011; Hart & Hollar, 2011; Quinnipiac University, 2011). Even larger majorities support government investment in infrastructure projects (Rockefeller Foundation, 2011; Ruggeri, 2009). In other words, what corporate media outlets circulate as widely agreed upon common-sense notions in these realms, the U.S. populace does not seem to be receptive to, preferring public support and investment instead.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Mary Douglas Vavrus

Mary Douglas Vavrus (Ph.D. University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign) is Associate Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Minnesota