2009/01/01 by Stéphanie Genz · 1 citation
Social Sciences · #Gender, Feminism, and Media #Media, Gender, and Advertising
paper · doi:10.1057/9780230234413_5
openalex publication_date 2009/01/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/31
If, as we have seen, the 1980s can be discussed as a rather muted period of disillusionment, revisionism and political reprisals against second wave feminism, the following decade came to represent a more upbeat, rejuvenated and “popular” version of feminism, both in terms of its increasingly mediated existence as part of the cultural field as well as in terms of its capacity to act as a commodity, selling empowerment and agency to female consumers. It was during this time that “postfeminism” became more recognizable and concretized as a cultural phenomenon and journalistic buzzword; while there had been some mention of postfeminism early in the 1980s (predominantly, interpreting it as symptomatic of a backlash against feminism [for example, Bolotin]), the 1990s witnessed a veritable explosion of the term in popular culture and its diversification into a number of sub-categories: “do-me” feminism, power feminism, DIY feminism, “bimbo” feminism, raunch feminism and, perhaps most famously, Girl Power (Neustatter; Shalit; Wolf; Albury; Levy; Kim; Siegel, Sisterhood, Interrupted ). Although varying in terms of content and focus (in particular, the degree of sexualization and the age groupings of the women/girls addressed), these differently named classifications are part of a prevalent, late-twentieth-century postfeminist discourse that blends a more mainstream — or commoditized (depending on your view/critique of popular culture) — and individualized version of feminism with a range of feminine and/or sexual markers. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.