ABSTRACT
Integrating insights from political science, women's and gender studies, Black Studies, cultural studies, and media studies, this chapter explores the range and scope of postfeminist, post-Civil Rights ideology in three narrative sites encountered in popular culture and electoral politics. The narrative sites are Grey's Anatomy, a popular, gender diverse, multiracial television series written by Shonda Rhimes, an African American female; Crash, an academy award-winning movie celebrated for its treatment of race; and Barack Obama's 2008 presidential campaign. The 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. Miscegenation fantasies are a raced-gendered aspect of post-Civil Rights, postfeminist melodrama that has profound implications for Black politics as a whole and Black feminists politics in particular.
