ABSTRACT
The postmodern renegotiation of democracy finds little support in the popular media. Using feminist politics as a case in point, Kristyn Gorton argues that both print and television media take the complex and finite postmodern politics of equality (with everything that implies for perpetual negotiation and contest), and reduce it to single-issue politics where an ‘issue’ is hardly distinguishable from a commodity. Feminism as a political force diverges completely from fashionable ‘feminist’ media chic. Media representation works to disguise the socially complex and historically consequential feminist politics. Using material from a TV sitcom, a best-selling ‘woman’ novel, and articles on feminism in the popular ‘news’ press Gorton demonstrates how all of them undermine, in the name of feminism, anything recognizable as feminism. She argues that they accomplish this by pitching to ingrained modern habits of treating politics as a matter of single issues and of seeing political problems as instrumental problems. The cultural complexity of political life disappears into single issues that can be manipulated by any propaganda mechanism. Feminism and post-feminism alike collude in this reduction by clinging to individualistic ideas of agency that have no function in the discursive and differential environment of postmodern politics. This nostalgia for modern individualism also forecloses on any option to pursue the kind of individuality that thrives in postmodern conditions.
