ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an overview of common approaches to defining postfeminism and its central tenets. It outlines how a post-Civil Rights approach can introduce a broader spectrum of concerns regards to understanding melodrama as the narrative frame of choice in many popular forms of post-Civil Rights, postfeminist discourse. The chapter discusses the three narrative sites, Grey's Anatomy, Crash, and the Obama 2008 presidential campaign, in intertextual conversation. It explores several themes, grounded in a melodrama metanarrative frame, namely, a focus on individualistic interpretations of inequality, rehabilitation of the family and wounded masculinity, and racial and gender redemption centered in "fantasies of miscegenation". The chapter pays attention throughout to the implications of these themes for Black women and Black feminist politics. It argues that they render moot any ongoing critique of normative or hegemonic ideologies and short circuit exploration of Black women's lived realities and political agendas that could be socially and politically transformative.
