ABSTRACT

This important and timely collection examines the troubling proliferation of anti-feminist language and concepts in contemporary media culture.

Edited by Michele White and Diane Negra, these curated essays offer a critical means of considering how contemporary media, politics, and digital culture function, especially in relation to how they simultaneously construct and displace feminist politics, women’s bodies, and the rights of women and other disenfranchised subjects. The collection explores the simplification and disparagement of feminist histories and ongoing feminist engagements, the consolidation of all feminisms into a static and rigid structure, and tactics that are designed to disparage women and feminists as a means of further displacing disenfranchised people’s identities and rights. The book also highlights how it is becoming more imperative to consider how anti-feminisms, including hostilities towards feminist activism and theories, are amplified in times of political and social unrest and used to instigate violence against women, people of color, and LGBTQIA+ individuals.

A must-read for students and scholars of media, culture and communication studies, gender studies, and critical race studies with an interest in feminist media studies.

chapter 1|20 pages

Vernacular Feminism

Whiteness, Femininity, and Gendered Discourses of Independence in 1920s Popular Fictions

chapter 2|15 pages

“A Matter of Survival”

The National Welfare Rights Organization, Black Feminism, and a Critique of Work

chapter 3|20 pages

Policing Integration, Punishing Sexual Freedom

Reactionary White Male Violence and the Politics of Rape in Civil Rights Exploitation Films

chapter 5|19 pages

Something Else Besides a Feminist

Little Fires Everywhere and Hollywood Anti-feminism

chapter 7|20 pages

Making Kin with Whiteness

Feminist Seductions of the Unwatchable

chapter 8|18 pages

Beware the Dancing Communist

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Snap-lash, and the Politics of Embodied Joy

chapter 9|21 pages

Natural Hair Matters

On Autobiographical Black Girlfriend Selfie Culture and Social Media