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Week Four: Contemporary Feminist Debates - Introduction: In Exchange of Feminism

McRobbie, A. (2009). ‘Introduction: In Exchange of Feminism’, The Aftermath of Feminism: Gender, Culture and Social Change. London. Sage, pp.1-10

"Elements of feminism have been taken into account, and have been absolutely incorporated into political and institutional life." p.1

"'Feminism' is instrumentalised, it is brought forward and claimed by Western governments, as a signal to the rest of the world that this is a key part of what freedom now means. Freedom is revitalised and brought up-to-date with this faux-feminism."

"The young woman is offered a notional form of equality, concretised in education and employment, and through participation in consumer culture and civil society, in place of what a reinvented feminist politics might have to offer." p.2

"Does capitalism actually give women, more or less what they want, if indeed it provides them with such cheap and available narrative pleasures, in the form of popular entertainment, which also now incorporate something like a feminist agenda in their plots and story lines?" p.3

The author expressed disquiet "when confronted with new issues such as the trend for pole-dancing being promoted as yet another form of women's empowerment." p.3

The author notices how "little serious scholarly debate there is about what mass participation in sex entertainment by women means for the now out-of-date feminist perspectives on pornography and the sex industry (McRobbie 2008)." p.3

On women's magazines: "generic features of the magazine format, which seemed to be set in stone, the centrality of the fashion-and-beauty complex, for example, the dominant heterosexuality, the hermetically sealed world of feminine escapist pleasures" p.5

Feminist retrieval and renewal

Double entanglement: "the way in which there was a regard to sexuality and family life, both a liberalisation on the part of the state through the granting of specific family and kinship rights and entitlements to gays and lesbians, and also a neo-liberalisation in this same terrain of sexuality, with a more punitive response being shown to those who live outside the economic unit of the two parent family." p.6

"Spivak, for example, would surely see this as a capitalist mobilisation of 'global girls' in the service of the now multicultural corporations, and at the expense of the impoverished people who remain at the point of departure, who also lose a class of possible radical teachers, educators, doctors and others, who are lured into a kind of migration-trap (Spivak 2002)." p.8

The female make-over programme: "there is a specific entanglement of class and gender relations underpinning these programmes, the desirable outcome of which is a more glamourised and individualised feminine subjectivity. The woman who is made-over embodies the values of the new, aspirational lower middle-class, in which she has a more autonomously feminine identity." p.10

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