Postfeminist Sensibility Research Articles

Confidence as capital: pageantry and social reproduction

Pageantry has historically rewarded women who pursue normative standards of beauty. With neoliberal feminism focusing on women’s empowerment, United States pageantry is marketed to women as a space that awards well-rounded competitors with scholarships and other monetary rewards. Using the frameworks of neoliberalism and embodied capital, we investigate how pageant participants conceptualize confidence in the pageant context. Through an analysis of in-depth interviews with pageant stakeholders, we conclude that participants perceive confidence as a resource gained from competing on the pageant stage and a trait that is necessary for competing in pageants. Confidence is embodied capital obtained through self-investment that helps women construct and maintain the ideal pageant femininity. However, confidence is mostly available to middle-class and wealthy women, resulting in reproduction of the class and gender systems. These findings also reveal that pageantry instills and rewards neoliberal principles and postfeminist sensibility, specifically the notion that women’s social mobility in the U.S. is connected to individual effort and investment through capitalism. As such, the values of pageantry overlook systemic barriers to achievement for marginalized women.

Toxic Personal Care: Selling Gendered Marketing and Chemical Toxicity Through Personal Care Products

ABSTRACT This mixed-methods study examines the marketing of, and toxic ingredients found in, common personal care products (PCPs) such as shampoos or deodorants that are sold in the United States. Through qualitative analyses of the messaging presented by PCP packaging and quantitative analyses of the prevalence of toxic ingredients by product and target consumer, we reveal what we term “toxic personal care”: the usage of products sold to consumers as minimally necessary, and perhaps even beneficial, to their personal well-being through gendered messaging, yet introduce consumers to chemical toxicity. Supporting research on postfeminist sensibilities, we find that products marketed to women are no more likely to contain toxic ingredients than those marketed to men, nor do lower-priced products contain more toxic ingredients. Instead, product descriptions perpetuate a “cult(ure) of confidence” that not only encourages the usage of PCPs equally across women and men through drawing from traditional gendered stereotypes, but also masks the similarities in ingredients and toxins. These findings have implications for understanding consumption, well-being practices, gendered marketing, and constructions of confidence in the United States, including monetary and possible health costs to consumers.

Negotiating Patriarchal Relationship: Representation of Subjectification in Doja Cat’s Woman (2021) Music Video

This study aims to illustrate the subjectification of women's bodies as one of the notions of postfeminist sensibility. Subjectification involves depicting women in a patriarchal setting as empowered individuals with agency, highlighting their reservoirs of strength and spheres of influence, challenging the perception of complete powerlessness. The object of investigation in this study is the music video by Doja Cat entitled "WOMAN" (2021), with a primary focus on examining the dynamic interaction among female talents within the context of the surrounding characters and environment. The author employs textual and visual analysis with qualitative methods and Fiske's Television Culture. In terms of theory, the analysis of the objects was supported by drawing upon Rosalind Gill's postfeminist sensibility. The study's analysis reveals that female talents, initially characterized by power and agency, faces a threat in the presence of patriarchy. This compels them to leverage their bodies and traditional roles as tools for negotiation. This study finds out that subjectification also can be an effort for women to negotiate patriarchal relationships as the bodies were used as tools to assert control and authority over the opposite sex without engaging as an object instead as a subject. This also counters the typical male gaze that makes women look passive or disempowered.

Navigating the Labour Market: Women Job Seekers’ Mobilisation of a Postfeminist Sensibility

Job seeking is a crucial yet overlooked process through which people navigate the world of work. Yet there remains limited qualitative research examining the complex and nuanced experiences of job seekers in a contemporary labour market. This article explores 38 interviews with job-seeking women in England, all of whom were interviewed over a six-month period. Using a postfeminist sensibility, findings revealed an oscillation between empowerment and success on the one hand, and disempowerment and perceived failure on the other, including wanting to: find the ‘right’ job, but accept any job; convey an authentic self but imitate what they think employers want; negotiate salaries, but accept pay cuts; emulate ‘successful’ behaviours, but experience doubt, uncertainty and negativity. This article contributes to the sociological practice of employment, identifying that through this oscillation, women experience a form of postfeminist precarity that starts from the outset of job seeking.

STEMinist sensibilities in the promotion of STEM and tech participation to women and girls

ABSTRACT In recent years, organizations aiming to empower women and girls to participate in STEM have proliferated. While the issue of gender inequality in STEM is well documented, little is known about the feminist appeals these organizations make to girls. This study analyses the websites of five Australian ‘women in tech’ organizations to understand how they frame and respond to the problem of gender inequality, and what feminist sentiments they reflect. Combining a postfeminist sensibility (Gill, 2007) with Myers et al. (2019) concept of STEMinism, we propose a ‘STEMinist sensibility’ to interpret the ways in which gender issues and subjects are represented on STEM initiative websites. We identify four themes characterizing a STEMinist sensibility: 1) acknowledging the problem and promoting solutions to gender inequality, 2) a focus on tech girls as problem solvers, 3) cultivating community and connection for success, and 4) playing with girlification. We show how websites acknowledge the structural impediments women and girls face, yet simultaneously represent girls as both problematic and as problem-solvers in a way that renders them individually responsible for resolving the problems arising from gender inequality in their fields. These findings have implications for organizations promoting STEM initiatives to women and girls.

Girl Power and Brand Power: Postfeminist Sensibility in News Coverage of Tokyo’s Girl “Prodigy” Skateboarders

This paper analyses news media coverage of the Tokyo 2020 Olympic skateboarding competition, which paid significant and celebratory attention to the extraordinary youth of the medallists in the women’s disciplines. The coverage was marked by a postfeminist sensibility that constituted the girl-child skater via a ubiquitous and enduring girl power discourse, and idealised them as sites of extraordinary feminine capacity. These narratives located girls’ success in their exceptional youth, market potential, and personal agency, reinforcing neoliberal norms which privilege individualism, entrepreneurialism and choice. However, while offering the girl athletes as testaments to feminist progress in a historically male sport and culture, news narratives tended to render girls’ athletic labour virtually invisible and to elide larger issues that may impact women skaters and girl-aged elite athletes. This paper addresses a call for further attention to postfeminist sensibility as it manifests in contemporary media coverage of women’s sport in order to understand the kind of contradictions that can manifest in media narratives that simultaneously celebrate women’s achievements while denying the existence of larger structural issues affecting them. Additionally, it addresses a gap in feminist sport media research that has largely overlooked the girl-child elite athlete.

Empowering middle-aged women? A discourse analysis of gendered ageing in the Chinese television reality show sisters who make waves

ABSTRACT Sisters Who Make Waves is a popular Chinese reality show that affirmatively centres “middle-aged” women. Given its popularity and positive framing, the show has significant potential to shape Chinese discourses of gendered aging. To examine this potential, we performed a discourse analysis on Season 2 of Sisters Who Make Waves, identifying its discursive constructions of gendered aging; the subject positions within these discourses; and the rhetorical strategies interpellating the viewer to identify with these subject positions. Three discourses were evident: (1) “age is a problem for women” (an account articulated only to be refuted), (2) “age is a problem only if you let it;” and (3) “hyper resilience” (an expectation of psychological resilience in the face of severe challenges). Reading this analysis through the lens of a postfeminist sensibility, we show how the affirmative potential of Sisters Who Make Waves is undercut with the show’s entanglement of empowerment with regulation and synergies between postfeminist feeling rules and Chinese state ideology of Positive Energy 正能量.

Platform Spiritualities: Entrepreneurial Selves and Post-Feminist Sensibilities of Russian Influencers

In this article, we look at how preeminent Russian-speaking influencers spread sensibilities of entrepreneurialism and post-feminism on social media platforms, and specifically Instagram. Drawing on platform studies, critical theory and material from influencer accounts, we explore the ways that platform-based spiritualities are embedded in the neoliberal economies of self-presentation, micro-celebrity and branding in Russia and beyond. We understand spirituality as a broader figure encompassing both external beliefs in the divine, such as in magic, spirits and forces that lie beyond human understanding, as well as internal beliefs in spiritual tropes for reaching self-development, including exercise, mindfulness and life coaching, among others. By amplifying presentations of the self around regimes of happiness, positivity, self-growth and unfettered joy, platform spiritualities nullify critical thought and normalize a depoliticized conception of selfhood in the Russian public space. Influencers encourage women to focus on themselves, travel, dress up, dream about wealthy husbands and exotic sensations, and prioritize their own well-being and empowerment over social or collective concerns. The depoliticized discourse of these influencers is largely an outcome of the social media imperative to produce safe and riskless content under the fear of cancellation, which can lead to a loss of advertising and other forms of revenue. We argue that, rather than being simply progressive vehicles for democratic publics and participatory cultures, social media platforms, and Instagram in particular, are key to intensifying an entrepreneurial selfhood that relies on magical thinking and spiritual guidance from abstract authorities in repressive political contexts.

Academic mothers and the practice of embodied care: navigating and resisting uncaring structures in the neoliberal academy

PurposeRecent research has captured the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic in widening gender inequalities, by highlighting that academic women have been disproportionately affected. During the COVID-19 pandemic, women assumed most of the care labour at home, whilst working at normal patterns, leaving them unable to perform as normal. This is very concerning because of the short and long-term detrimental consequences this will have on women’s well-being and their academic careers. This article aims to stimulate a change in the current understandings of academic work by pointing towards alternative – and more inclusive – ways of working in academia.Design/methodology/approachThe two authors engage with autoethnography and draw on their own personal experience of becoming breastfeeding academic mothers throughout the COVID-19 pandemic.FindingsTo understand the positioning of contemporary academic mothers, this study draws on insights from both cultural studies and organisation studies on the emergence of discursive formations about gender, that is “postfeminist sensibility”. Guided by autoethnographic accounts of academic motherhood, this study reveals that today academia creates an individualised, neutral (disembodied), output-focused and control-oriented understanding of academic work.Originality/valueThis paper adds to the conversation of academic motherhood and the impact of the pandemic on working mothers. The study theoretically contributes with the lens of “motherhood” in grasping what academic work can become. It shows the power of motherhood in opening up an alternative way of conceptualising academic work, centred on embodied care and appreciative of the non-linearity and messiness of life.

Excusing Coercive Control in Popular Young Adult Fantasy Texts

This article utilises a feminist lens to conduct close textual analysis of A Curse So Dark and Lonely and the Cursebreaker series (Kemmerer 2019) and The Cruel Prince and the Folk of the Air series (Black 2018-2019) to demonstrate how elements of coercive control are excused and minimised in the narratives. By highlighting the postfeminist sensibility evident in these young adult fantasy novels, this article argues that female protagonists are characterised in contradictory ways. They are both ‘empowered’ and subjugated, yet this is diminished by a rhetoric of choice and agency. As female protagonists, Jude and Harper each possess physical strength, intelligence and humour which positions them as agential and empowered. Yet, at the core of their romantic and sexual relationships they are both victims of coercive control. While the novels ostensibly present strong female protagonists, implied girl readers are positioned to excuse the removal of agency, manipulation, and even physical violence towards these postfeminist heroines.

Gender equality at stake: women’s strategies, symbolic violence and resistance in Italian boards of directors

ABSTRACT Italy promulgated the ‘Golfo-Mosca Law’ obliging companies to introduce gender quotas on boards of directors. The goal was to analyse whether or to what extent women bring gender equality to boards’ debates as well as men’s reactions following the introduction of quotas. The authors interviewed 100 women directors and 34 men CEOs/Presidents between June 2020 and February 2021, referring to the concepts of ‘critical mass’, ‘symbolic violence’ and ‘post-feminist sensibility’ in order to interpret the data. The analysis shows that gender quotas are considered necessary for modifying boards’ routines. However, the introduction of the gender equality topic in the debate is difficult, also in a critical mass situation, depending on the experience of women within boards. In relation to this, the authors identify strategies adopted by women (‘avoiding’, ‘neutral’ and ‘empowering’) and forms of resistance they encountered within the boards (‘denial’, ‘second class citizenship’, ‘microaggressions’, ‘backlash and gender fatigue’), showing that the potential transformative role of women as board members is variable and limited. Men appear as the guardians of the gendered symbolic order, considering gender equality as a means to enhance companies’ reputations.

The psychological contract of women athletes in semi-professional team sports

ABSTRACT Within the dynamic landscape of women’s semi-professional and professional leagues, athletes and their employers are negotiating their employment relationship parameters. Positioning our research in a postfeminist sensibility, we explore both parties’ expectations and obligations through psychological contract (PC) theory. We conducted interviews across two semi-professional sports leagues, with 30 athletes, 20 coaches and managers and two league-level representatives. The data analysis identified three themes: 1. Obligations, commitment, and choice; 2. Expectations of conformity and power relations; 3. Fulfilling organisational goals. Many athletes spoke about power imbalances in the PC with employers “exploiting” athletes’ desire to be play in the league at almost any cost. Athletes felt they had little choice but to accept the current state of employment, endure sacrifices and hope for a better future where they could reach their potential through viable career pathways and a living wage. Our research provides a better understanding of the PC employment relationship and associated implications. Greater knowledge about PCs could be used to develop work practices and relations that enhance and benefit athletes and employers.

“You are the best… but can you twerk?” How twitter users challenge the messaging around female professional footballers in the 2019 UEFA women’s champions league final in a postfeminist context

ABSTRACT This paper analyses how fans engage on Twitter with the 22 players in the starting line up during the week of the 2019 UEFA Women’s Champions League final. It explores fans’ entangled representations of female professional footballers on Twitter from a postfeminist sensibility. Out of 200 tweets posted by the players during the day of the final and the week after, the research focuses on the 1468 fans replies to the 20 most engaged players’ tweets. To facilitate this, we developed an analysis instrument called the 3Fs Spiral, which helps to disentangle the complex meanings of the fans’ replies on Twitter. Results highlight the fans’ entangled representations and the continuous flow of disruption and reinforcement of the gender order that emerge from them in a set of tweets. The decentralised nature of Twitter has the potential to slowly promote the change of dominant gender narratives and frames in female football.

"I think women can do anything": Postfeminist Sensibilities and the Male Gaze in Charlie's Angels (2019).

This article considers Mulvey's male gaze in today's postfeminist media culture in the latest remake of Charlie's Angels. Male gaze is analyzed as form, as production ecology, and as narrative. Since the inception of Charlie's Angels in the 1970s, the TV and feature film franchise has tried to balance feminist concerns with notions of femininity, in more and less successful ways. Although the 2000 remake of Charlie's Angels could be considered as an exemplar of objectifying and sexualizing women, the 2019 film barely presents such instances. Instead, it offers a male gaze directed at a female audience and internalized as a measure of success for its female protagonists and the implied female audience. Through practices of othering, and by placing male characters in morally inferior positions, the female audience is presented with hegemonic conceptions of white, middle-class femininity as an ideal that female viewers can and should aspire to be.

“As tough as she is beautiful”: Discourses of female professional wrestlers in World Wrestling Entertainment’s “Evolution”

We present findings from a critical discourse analysis of commentary from World Wrestling Entertainment’s pay-per-view Evolution, an all-female wrestling competition. Approximately 10 minutes of match commentary were analysed, attending to the discourses operating within the text; the subject positions offered by them; and the implications these may have for subjectivity, action, and practice. Two discourses are presented: female wrestlers as “real athletes in a real combat sport” and “female wrestlers as conventionally feminine.” The operation of these discourses through the text was interpreted as offering opportunities for women wrestlers to construct identities as serious sportspeople while at the same time limiting those opportunities through the requirement that they also demonstrate heteronormative femininity. We discuss these findings within the framework of neoliberal feminism and a postfeminist sensibility. We conclude that, contrary to its superficially feminist agenda, Evolution offers a narrow and contradictory space for women to construct legitimate identities as professional wrestlers, where discursive positions may be simultaneously offered and undermined by commentators.

“It takes work ethic to get two-piece ready”: Neoliberalism, postfeminist healthism, and aesthetic labor in U.S. pageantry

Although research has documented neoliberalism's influence on pageantry in myriad ways, there has been less discussion about women's experiences of pageant preparation in the United States, particularly as cultural beauty norms shift and larger bodies are given space to be considered beautiful. At the same time, the ideology of healthism, which implores self-investment in individual health to be considered a good citizen, permeates American society. Using a social constructionist framework that centralizes the concepts of neoliberalism, aesthetic labor, and postfeminist healthism, I examine the preparation practices of pageant women. During preparation for the stage, pageant women strive to embody conventional ideals of gender and femininity through their outward appearances, becoming “entrepreneurial subjects” who devote numerous hours and material resources to researching and purchasing wardrobe and accessories to become pageant ready. They also devote countless hours to diet and exercise routines that are informed by supposed experts in these fields. I argue that pageant participants' explanations of their aesthetic labor reflect an internalization of the neoliberal logics of self-improvement and an adoption of healthist ideologies, which consequently can result in an idealized pageant body. My research contributes to the existing literature by uncovering and critiquing how pageant competitors enact a postfeminist sensibility in their pageant preparation practices.

Women's health magazines and postfeminist healthism: A critical discourse analysis

Daily, millions of North American women turn to popular media, like women's health magazines, for health-related advice and information. “Magazines continue to be a popular medium” and, given their power and reach, remain an important site for critical analysis. In this article, we examine the ways in which three popular women's health magazines provide “health” advice to their readers. We first provide an overview of research in feminist media studies exploring postfeminist sensibility, healthism, and now a postfeminist healthism. We then conduct a critical discourse analysis of articles from all 30 issues of Health, Women's Health, and Shape magazines published in 2018. Our investigation of how the magazines portray what it means to have “good health,” suggests that health continues to be conflated with appearance. Moreover, health is presented as confusing, such that maintaining health requires expert help, and as purchasable, and thus linked to economic practices.

She’s ‘sexssertive’ and she knows it!: a postfeminist reading of African femininities in Afrobeats music videos

ABSTRACT This paper engages a (post)feminist-aligned critical reading of women’s gendered performances in Afrobeats music videos to highlight—in the visual culture of this popular African musical genre—the visibility of sexually assertive black African women who variously subvert heteropatriarchal moral public scripts about “respectable” African womanhood and expression of their sexualities in relation to black African men. In my considerations of postfeminist sensibilities, I align with Simidele Dosekun by regarding postfeminism as a transnational cultural sensibility with flexible contours that render it analytically applicable and valuable as a scholarly lens in an African popular cultural landscape. I deploy a multimodal discourse analysis of five Afrobeats music videos (derived from a larger corpus of videos from my PhD study), their storylines, plot progressions, and the accompanying lyrical contents, to advance my arguments. The article draws significantly on postfeminist literature and key perspectives from bodies of feminist critiques of popular culture to demonstrate inflections of feminine subjectivities that I theorise as “sexssertive,” given their active constructions of counter-narratives in relation to conservative and restrictive meanings of black African womanhood. I conclude by considering the implications hereof for broader feminist efforts towards the just treatment of women across diverse African contexts in the domains of sexuality and sexual expression.

Persistent Paradoxes, Pragmatic Postfeminism: How Young Women Negotiate the Contradictions of Gender Equality

ABSTRACT Due to social change and gender detraditionalisation, young women in the Global North have been positioned as agentic subjects who can benefit from increasing freedom in education and work. However, there remains a gap between gender equality as a powerful cultural norm and the persistent inequalities that continue to shape people’s lives. Focusing on Finland, this article examines how this gap is negotiated by young women transitioning from post-compulsory education to work in two different fields: care and media. Building on the theories of postfeminism as a sensibility, the article analyses how field-specific conceptualisations of gender equality and patterns of gendered disadvantages in the two fields shape young women’s understandings of their imagined futures in the Finnish labour market. The article develops the notion of “pragmatic postfeminism” to show that young women selectively deploy elements of postfeminist sensibility as a pragmatic resource to manage the persistent gender equality paradoxes of the Finnish labour market.

Remembering learning to play: reworking gendered memories of sport, physical activity, and movement

ABSTRACT In this article, we explore young women’s memories of their experiences with sport, physical activity, and play during their childhood. Through collective memory work – sharing, discussing, writing, and analysing sporting memories/histories – we examine (re)constructions of young women’s experiences of gendered relations of power, bodily awareness, and regulation within movement-based practices. The approach taken explores relationships between theory and method, a feature of post-qualitative inquiry. Forming a collaborative memory workshop with six young women (aged 19–22) and two researchers, we illustrate how working memories facilitates the interrogation of taken-for-granted assumptions about women’s active bodies. Represented through two memories in this paper, their production, representation, and analysis were a collaborative effort, not solely representative of two individual experiences. Despite growing up within a period wherein women’s access to and engagement with sport and physical activity is more available, common, and diverse compared to the youth of past generations, young women’s experiences explored here illustrate the ways in which movement-based practices are located within the confluence of postfeminist sensibilities including, intensely scrutinised gendered body cultures, potent neoliberal configurations, and discourses of empowerment. It is these new sporting and active femininities and the gendering experiences of physical culture that are explored within this paper through memory work and collective biography.