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Budapest W6: Feminist Research - Class Notes

Post-feminism what does it mean and what are the impacts -

What is the politics of 'post' as a precursor to feminism? - post as disidentification, being more than, a gesture of depoliticisation in itself a cultural term because politicisation requires value judgements to be made.

What does implicate with regards to woman and femininity?

Postfeminism and femininity - presenting the figure of the woman as being accomplished in choice, work, life, marriage, however this leads to a danger of framing 'choice' as being the way to blame her. Assumption - there is a natural choice that a woman would choose motherhood (new traditionalist)
Post-feminist discourse - assumes a middle-class woman's privilege of education/career (choice implicates classed subject)
Parameters of choice of womanhood are 'career' or 'motherhood' - why can't we not think beyond the home? Choice implicates freedom, control and agency.
When is choice not an ideologically invested concept? - There are conditions of choosing: we are all in a system that creates mindsets for making certain decisions which restrict our choices.

The highlight of 'career' is positioned unequally (power) - intersection of what kind of relationships

Upper-middle class woman in 30's is positioned very specifically as free at the expense of other groups of women, but not necessarily at the expense of a man from the same stratification.

What does it mean to say that she is allowed to only choose between home and career?

Home is indirectly related to reproductivity - gendered concern - him is not considered or imagined, no ideal masculinity that is confined by the biological clock

Feminist femininity - you do not need to sacrifice your femininity to be feminist
New Traditionalist discourse ascertains that this is not possible, where feminism is expected to be given up for femininity

What does it mean to have a TV show where the central characters are ones that were marginalised? Does it make an art product feminist?
What is the affective purchase? (To buy in, emotional investment, identify with a character)

Women are re-centered in the family by popular media representations. Cultural space of soap opera is restructured into a binary space of prime-time series and soaps. Prime-time has cultural capital, whereas soap operas are seen as inferior (Art and Mass Culture).

Women are signifiers of home and family in popular media - if we want the media to produce another narrative, then these signifies should be broken

Female-centred TV programs aren't feminist, because they are just "Adding and stirring" - discourse is a reproduction of traditional discourse.

Political commitment - what type of reading is made possible through the reading? Female-centred shows a new-traditionalist, presenting as non-political. Feminist show would foreclose a post-feminist reading.

Why New Traditionalism and not Neo Conservativism? Conservative has a pejorative meaning
Anything that is traditional is appealing to the nation, traditions, home
Anything that is conservative is political

'New' - there is an acknowledgement of the need to update Traditionalism (however there is a contradiction, how can something that is a natural tradition be renewed?) Is there a possibility of working over this to appeal to the choice? 'New' implicates progress which is good, which resonates with the logic of fashion industry (keeping profit-making appealing)

Probyn - looks at which feminist approaches are possible to be appropriated by specific products using names of products or approaches

Why are feminist authors so easily appropriated by post-feminism?
What is it about feminist authors that allows them to be so easily appropriated?

How do we valorise the home in Probyn's examples p.150?

  • You fight the world and you come back to the home 
  • You try and juggle both the home and world (career) 
  • You chose the home as your career

If you hang on to your political agenda, then you are perceived as being anti-woman, anti-family, failure on all aspects

Liberal feminism - put more women in high positions, work within capitalism, but not against structural change
Hiding that free-choice is a choiceless choice - if you present something as ideological, it is not.

Naomi Wolf and Betty Freiden - we have gained all the rights, now it is up to the individual woman to act upon those rights in order to succeed

What is wrong with looking at the texts themselves? What is wrong with a hermeneutic close reading, semiotic analysis? How it is commodified, depoliticised?

Meaghan Morris paragraph p.155 - why can we do cultural studies? What is it that promises us the ability, that is taken for granted and never problematised?
A privileged positioned move for the researcher to watch the TV show and then talk about it - those who are the participants/audience are not freely able to criticise them.

The political is collapsed into the cultural
Feminism is collapsed into the 'post' in the name of femininity (contemporary ideal)

Embedding the television series (cultural products) into their political context and into the academic discourses

Post-feminism - circulating outside of academia and how it circulates within academia

The ideology of choice is what binds New Traditionalism with Post-feminism - traditions are renewed because now feminism has been achieved

There is space for the nomadic woman, provided they don't give up on the idea of an ideal household at the expense of others

We don't want to return to feminism (it is part of communist ideology where they were made into an asexual being) - they can be feminine again

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