Postfeminism and Popular Feminism

Abstract

In the 1990s, as a feminist media studies scholar, I was reflecting on gender and popular culture and found myself intrigued by the various ways in which the rhetoric of “girl power” had found currency in so much of North America and Europe, from the Spice Girls to the Women's Soccer World Cup to television programs about self-confident, assertive, intelligent girls, for instance Nickelodeon's 1991 hit Clarissa Explains It All and the Cartoon Network's 1995 The Powerpuff Girls .1 “Girl power” practices and commodities were quickly becoming normative, and feminist and media scholars realized that these were not simply trends or fads, but part of an emerging culture: postfeminist culture. But postfeminism did not simply materialize within popular and commercial media. Like all political movements and practices, postfeminism has a history—not a linear one, to be sure—and its emergence as a normative frame for understanding gender relations is contingent on the struggles and contradictions of a broader feminist context. …