| Is postfeminism a spectre trailing behind second wave feminism in the media, or a social phenomena harkening social change in the realm of gender and feminism? This dissertation analyzes postfeminism from the popular press, 1981-1992 in order to identify the characteristics of postfeminism and to delineate its relationship with feminism. As feminism has expanded into feminisms, and a divide has opened between academic and popular feminisms, postfeminism has emerged in the divide. Postfeminism is the natural by-product of televisual feminisms that have been cleansed of the richness of history, in which all theory has been reduced to slogan, and in which the politics of collective experience evolves into a micro-politics of the self.;A quantitative analysis of the data is presented first in order to describe where and how often postfeminism appeared in the popular press, the various forms of postfeminism, the dominant themes within the articles containing references to postfeminism, and the connotations and denotation of postfeminism with respect to feminism. Then, using qualitative data on postfeminism from 1981-1992, I analyze postfeminism within more general themes of feminism, gender, work and family, metropolitanism, the body, sexuality, and the contemporary media in order to capture the complexity of postfeminism.;Postfeminist discourse is intimately connected to altered material conditions and social relationships in contemporary society, such as the academicization of feminism, the postmodern cultural climate, the economic imperatives of late capitalism, changes in the relationship between work, family and gender roles, and the emergence of televisual epistemology under what Agger (1989) deems 'fast capitalism.' Postfeminism offers an empirical test site for analyzing the heretofore tenuous relationship between feminisms and postmodernism, and provides lessons about the usefulness and the dangers of such a theoretical merger.;Ultimately, postfeminism neither signals the death of feminism nor does it allow for the unaltered continuity of second wave feminism. Instead, by adopting liberal feminism as a Gramscian emergent incorporated ideology, and by diffusing existing radical feminisms, postfeminism marks a conceptual shift into a new paradigm for the new millennium: feminism as a spectrum of identities, politics, and perspectives from which alliances and coalitions may be formed. |
