ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the extent to which feminist discourse in recent decades has focused on an affective sense of loss, specifically the feeling of a loss of the kind of feminist activism seen in the past. In particular, this chapter looks at how such discussions of loss have become attached to aspects of feminine embodiment, where “fake” breasts have become the ultimate signifiers for an age of “false” feminism. According to these accounts, the silicone breast implant is a synecdoche for postfeminist sentiment. This chapter also explores how, under such accounts, exposure of the body is always already connected to raunch culture and false displays of sexuality, where sexual desire is a performance rendered as false. Further, it is shown how these accounts position feminine embodiment as inextricable from consumer capitalism, rendering femininity as complicit and inevitably oppressed. This chapter considers what might be absent from these accounts of feminist loss, where critique of feminine embodiment condenses issues of oppression and exploitation through and within the bodies of women themselves.
