ABSTRACT
My argument is that postfeminism actively draws on and invokes feminism as that which can be taken into account in order to suggest that equality is achieved, in order to install a whole repertoire of meanings which emphasize that it is no longer needed, a spent force. This is particularly prominent first in The (U.K.) Independent newspaper column “Bridget Jones’s Diary” then in the book and film. Postfeminism is, for me at this stage, an enabling concept for the examination of a number of intersecting but also conflicting currents. These include shifts of direction in the feminist academy, as well as generational and political repudiations of feminism from a variety of directions. The notional consent, frequently invoked across political culture-that gender equality was a not unreasonable claim, now happily achieved-permits a wide range of responses, many of which indicate relief and closure; that there is no longer any need for sexual politics, which in turn gives license for such a politics to be undone. Broadly, I am arguing that for feminism to be taken into account, it has to be understood as having already passed away. This is a movement detectable across popular culture, a site where “power … is remade at various junctures within everyday life, [constituting] our tenuous sense of common sense” (Butler et al. 2000: 14).
