ABSTRACT
A number of North American and British films and television shows from 1990 to the present reflect a keen interest in representing female psychics and their encounters with ghosts. This period coincides with postfeminism, a term that ‘emerged in the late twentieth century in a number of cultural, academic and political contexts’ (Genz and Brabon 2009: 1) to describe popular cultural phenomena such as Girl Power and postfeminist chick flick films (for example Bridget Jones’s Diary and Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason (2001, 2004), Legally Blonde (2001), and Sex and the City (2008)). Amanda D. Lotz (2001: 116) has indicated that postfeminists deconstruct ‘binary categories of gender and sexuality, instead viewing these categories as flexible and indistinct’. Postfeminism is not necessarily limited to a notion of failed feminism or anti-feminism (Genz and Brabon 2009: 5), although the reading of postfeminism as a backlash against feminism has been one interpretation of the term (Faludi 1991). Suzanne Ferriss and Mallory Young (2008: 4) indicate that postfeminists argue that ‘the admission of girliness … doesn’t mean the loss of female independence and power’, that for many postfeminists, ‘choice is individual’ (Young 2008: 4), thus reinscribing a common neo-liberal belief in the self that often surfaces in popular culture. However, for Hannah E. Sanders this does not mean that such texts entirely ignore ‘the power of collective strength’ (Sanders 2007: 92). 1 Postfeminism thus involves ‘inescapable levels of contradiction and diverse points of identification and agency’ (Genz and Brabon 2009: 9).
