ABSTRACT
This article presents a series of possible conceptual frames for engaging with what has come to be known as post-feminism. It understands post-feminism to refer to an active process by which feminist gains of the 1970s and 1980s come to be undermined. It proposes that, through an array of machinations, elements of contemporary popular culture are perniciously effective in regard to this undoing of feminism, while simultaneously appearing to be engaging in a well-informed and even well-intended response to ‘feminism’. It then proposes that this ‘undoing’, which can be perceived in the broad cultural field, is compounded by some dynamics in sociological theory (including the work of Giddens and Beck) that appear to be most relevant to aspects of gender and social change. Finally it suggests that by means of the tropes of freedom and choice that are now inextricably connected with the category of ‘young women’, feminism is decisively ‘aged’ and made to seem redundant. Feminism is cast into the shadows, where at best it can expect to have some afterlife, where it might be regarded ambivalently by those young women who must in more public venues stake a distance from it, for the sake of social and sexual recognition. I propose a complexification then of the backlash thesis that gained currency within forms of journalism associated with popular feminism (Faludi 1992).
