Introduction: Postfeminism and Contemporary Hollywood Cinema

Abstract

Recent years have witnessed what can only be described as an explosion of scholarly interest in the representation of feminism and femininity at the turn of the millennium and beyond. Critical attention to this subject has been spread discursively across a number of genres, with critics such as Angela McRobbie, Rosalind Gill, Ann Brooks, Hilary Radner, Imelda Whelehan, Yvonne Tasker, Diana Negra, Sarah Projansky, Melanie Waters, Stephanie Genz and Benjamin Brabon, to name only a few, producing monographs and edited collections devoted to the configuration of gender across multiple mediums (literature, film, television and media studies) and within what has come to be termed as postfeminist cultural praxis. In the field of film studies specifically, Hilary Radner and Rebecca Stringer’s Feminism at the Movies: Understanding Gender in Contemporary Popular Culture (2011) and Melanie Waters’ Women on Screen: Feminism and Femininity in Visual Culture (2011) are noteworthy recent interventions, and both collections share with this one a sustained focus on gender for both are works of feminist film criticism committed primarily to analysing cinema across the first decade of the twenty-first century. Postfeminism and Contemporary Hollywood Cinema aims to extend current scholarship on postfeminist media culture and postfeminism as a cultural condition by exploring popular culture’s engagement with feminism through a range of cinematic genres.