Celebrity (post)feminism, the Sixties feminist blockbuster and Down with Love

Abstract

This article critically engages the 2003 film, Down with Love, directed by Peyton Reed and starring Renee Zellweger and Ewan McGregor, in terms of how it invokes feminist discourses (and indeed celebrities) from the Sixties as part of its attempt to rewrite feminist history in accordance with the broader cultural logics of postfeminism. Down with Love, the book within the film, engages intertextually with various forms of writing, including the 1960s “feminist blockbuster” (texts like Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique and Helen Gurley Brown’s Sex and the Single Girl) as well as the modern self‐help genre. Barbara Novak (Zellweger’s character) publicizes her prototypical feminist text through the American mediasphere and thereby develops a national profile as a celebrity feminist advocate of women’s sexual emancipation and greater participation in the public sphere. As this article shows, Down with Love intervenes in intramural feminist debates over the commercialization, and celebritization, of modern feminism while invoking assumptions about the so‐called “postfeminist” context of the film’s consumers.