ABSTRACT
We live in an age of post-s. Pick almost any key notion of the twentieth century and you will invariably find a post- variety nowadays. Some of these post-s are mere frippery, intellectual game-playing. But, equally so, many post-s signify, at the very least, the movement of time and the need to newly label a new era. Similarly, some key twentieth-century movements were designed to achieve material gains or objectives. Once key participants or activists believed those goals or objectives had been achieved it was not unreasonable to propose that the enhanced position be characterised as ‘post-’. This both is and is not the case with feminism and post-feminism. The term is used with great frequency and doesn’t always appear to have semantic stability (as is often the case with post- words). Yvonne Tasker published the essay from which the following is extracted in 2003. Before moving on to analyse the 1994 film Disclosure she seeks to clear the decks by offering succinct definitions of the varied meanings and understandings of post-feminism.
It is partly in this context that the term ‘post-feminism’ has acquired its significance. Since post-feminism is a controversial term, let me be clear what I mean by it here. First, post-feminism signals that certain principles of gender equality are accepted within the legal frameworks of particular Western economies, however patchily that is actually translated into opportunities. Second, post-feminism suggests how discourses of independence and self-definition for women widely inform popular culture, however compromised they might be or are perceived to be. For some writers post-feminism has a straightforward – reactionary – political meaning: it encapsulates an assumption that feminist battles for equality are either already won or no longer relevant. It is in this context that journalist Susan Falu di’s 1991 be st-sel ler Back lash explored a contradiction between women’s continuing struggles and an equality that is not only perceived to be somehow already achieved, but actually damaging to women. In another book first published in 1991, Feminism without Women: Culture and Criticism in a ‘Postfeminist’ Age, Tania Modleski identifies a trend in both mass culture and academic thought – or at least in certain texts of both – which ‘in proclaiming or assuming the advent of postfeminism, are actually engaged in negating the critiques and undermining the goals of feminism – in effect, delivering us back into a prefeminist world’ (1991: 3). As my qualifications indicate, I’m also skeptical about the term. And yet negation is also a response of sorts to achievement. For me, the significance of the appearance of post-feminism at the beginning of the 1990s was not so much a term without a referent, as an indication of both how much and how little had changed. The images that I’ll discuss in this chapter are not, I would argue, prefeminist in Modleski’s terms, though they are certainly equivocal about feminism.
(Tasker 2003: 170) What's Next?To what extent have feminist battles for equality been won?
Read Sadie Plant Zeroes + Ones: Digital Women + the New Technoculture (1997) London: Fourth Estate.
