Abstract
Most commentators on today’s post-feminist social worlds confine themselves to bemoaning the ‘backlash’ against the feminist movement. Not Angela McRobbie. She argues that key feminist planks such as ‘empowerment’ and ‘choice’ for women are being taken into account today in unexpected though not salutary ways. In her reading, feminist demands have been co-opted and then converted into an individualist discourse that is reproduced in media and popular culture and by western governments as a kind of ‘faux-feminism’ that offers new freedoms to young women. Why? To ensure that another women’s movement does not re-emerge. Such contentious claims require a disclaimer on the very first page of The Aftermath of Feminism—if this sounds like a conspiracy, she is no conspiracy theorist. What she offers instead is an analysis that shows how the displacement of feminism takes place ‘at ground level’ where the consent and participation of young women in the neoliberal gender order is ‘sought, and seemingly secured, in a multiplicity of ways that defy the notion of a centralised power in charge of the demise of feminism, in such a way that it will never again rise from the ashes’ (p. 1). Thus, the right-wing backlash that vilifies feminism to make it unpalatable to young women is only part of the problem. Complicating matters are new forms of governmentality that offer promises of freedom, independence and wage-earning capacity to young women in order to make a post-feminist gender settlement attractive to them. Furthermore, the undoing of feminism, which can be perceived across a broad cultural field, is ‘compounded’ by masculinist sociologists such as Beck and Giddens who celebrate the new individualized freedoms of the ‘third way’ agenda. They are charged with failing to reflect on how processes which seem to give women more choices in fact help to re-instate masculine domination and protect it from ‘the possibility of a new feminism, in sociology as well as public life’ (p. 48). This all makes for a ‘complexification of backlash’ (p. 6). Complex, but also fascinating and erudite, as one would expect of a scholar of McRobbie’s calibre, this book certainly is.
Making her case for ‘complexification’, McRobbie draws on the work of an impressive array of cultural commentators to make sense of technologies that seem to offer possibilities of freedom to young women. For example, Judith Butler’s notion of ‘double entanglement’ is deployed to capture both liberalizing trends such as the granting of family and kinship entitlements to queers and a ‘neo-liberalisation in this same terrain of sexuality involving a more punitive response’ (p. 6) to those living outside the two parent family economic unit. ‘Double entanglement’ also helps understand the way that feminism has achieved the status of common sense but is as at the same time ‘reviled almost hated’ and crucially, understood as already passed (p. 6). Such an understanding enables a more thorough ‘dismantling of feminist politics and the discrediting of the occasionally voiced need for its renewal’ (p. 12). From Stuart Hall McRobbie borrows the concept of ‘disarticulation’ to help dissect the cultural politics in which institutional gains made by feminism over the last 30 years are being eroded. She traces the processes of post-feminist disarticulation that are conducted inside popular culture, a key site for the implementation of new forms of gender power (pp. 24–28). It is through popular culture, she argues, that the politics of disarticulation ‘disparages, ridicules, disavows and pre-emptively disarms’ (p. 46) the critical force and relevance of feminist and anti-racist critique. The confident, ‘luminous’ (per Deleuze) female consumer is empowered in a post-feminist gender settlement organized around choice and consent, but apathetic and de-politicized, she no longer needs a women’s movement. Furthermore, new subtle forms of ‘resurgent patriarchalism’ have been reinstated, determined to overturn feminist gains in the spheres of work and home (p. 46).
Chapter 3, a key chapter, maps the emergence of new forms of bio-political patriarchal power and regulation, focusing on a new sexual contract which allocates to young women a new important role in the global labour market, but comes at the expense of engaging with a women’s movement. In the new post-feminist global era, young educated women of different ethnic backgrounds—‘the lively, capable and becoming young woman, black, white or Asian’—become ‘the privileged subjects of social change’. Here she draws on Deleuze’s concept of ‘luminosities’ to highlight the ‘regulative dynamics’ at work in young women’s lives, tracking their new standing in four ‘luminous’ spaces. The first is the fashion–beauty complex from which emerges the ‘post-feminist masquerade’—the ‘highly-stylised disguise of womanliness’ (pp. 54–59) displayed in the too short skirt, the too high heels that emphasize female vulnerability. The second space is education and employment (‘the working girl’); the third is the space of sexuality, fertility and reproduction from which emerges ‘the phallic girl’ and fourth, there’s the space of globalization in which the ‘global girl’ participates in the production of commercial femininities in the developing world. Time does not permit us to follow all the permutations of this psychoanalytically inflected account of the ‘repeated incitements to perform a register of restricted acts’ (p. 66) which produce properly (hetero)sexed and gendered selves. It is enough to register the complexities of the account of the post-feminist masquerade which re-instates
the spectacle of excessive femininity (on the basis of the independently earned wage) while also shoring up hegemonic masculinity by endorsing this public femininity which appears to undermine, or at least unsettle the new power accruing to women on the basis of this economic capacity.
Suffice it to say too that young women are being conned into re-stabilizing gender norms so as to undo the gains of feminism and moreover, whiteness is being re-inscribed in the new gender order. Black and Asian young women find themselves caught up in the demand to conform to bodily norm of ‘complete perfection’ (p. 69). The fight for racial equality, like the fight for gender equality, is no longer deemed relevant.
But who, or what, is doing the conning? There’s a long list of culprits. Western governments (and the Blair government in particular), keen to promote and exploit the category of self-responsible girl within the new international division of labour. Films such as Fatal Attraction, Bridget Jones’s Diary and Working Girl that take feminism into account but then disavow it, requiring a relinquishing of political identities based on perceived inequalities and fashion magazines produce images of women that normalize feminine pathology and self-harm. ‘Make over’ television programmes—(here she draws on Bourdieu’s concept of ‘symbolic violence’)—that invite women to move forward as active participants in labour and consumer markets utilizing a ‘faux-feminist’ language of women’s empowerment that defuses the possibility of a ‘new solidaristic vocabulary being invented’ (p. 135). Young women are conned too by advocates of gender mainstreaming, a ‘technocratic managerial strategy’ (p. 155) that incorporates feminist demands and by advocates of ‘third wave’ feminism that casts earlier generations of activists as bitter and twisted. In short, young women are being duped by the new right which has made such creepy inroads into culture and institutions, notably the university now ‘more tightly embedded with capital’ than ever before as it busies itself with training the new international workforce (p. 168).
That seems to have it all covered, all the new constraining forms of gender power which, paradoxically, operate through the granting of ‘capacity to young women’. Moreover, academic feminism, or at least feminist and media studies are implicated in the new gender order, having lost sight, she argues, of a theory of sexual power. McRobbie is not averse to engaging in self-critique, wistfully reflecting on her earlier advocacy of subversive strategies centred on the resistance of ordinary people in their everyday life. Such strategies, she now sees, have been transformed into a celebration of women’s supposed capacity to subvert consumer culture and enjoy seemingly autonomous consumer-orientated pleasures and post-feminist femininities. This development calls for a major strategic re-think. In celebratory mode, media and cultural studies lost sight of the dynamics of power and constraint under neoliberal capitalism. Little wonder then that optimism about the power of popular feminism ‘ran into difficulties’ when confronted by more ‘aggressive’ developments in popular culture such as the mainstreaming of pornography. Not that McRobbie is about to take the pornographers on. Willing to express ‘disquiet’ about pole-dancing’s promotion as a form of ‘women’s empowerment’, she is quick to point out that she was ‘never part of the pro-censorship and anti-pornography campaigning back in the 1970s and 1980s’. Reticent about displaying a ‘puritanical streak’, she settles for bemoaning the lack of scholarly debate about the meaning of widespread participation in sex entertainment for the ‘now out-of-date feminist perspectives’ on pornography and the sex industry (pp. 2–3). It’s clear however, that she has no intention entering that debate herself.
Is it her stated reticence about questions of sex, or more especially ‘aggressive’ sex, that leads McRobbie to eschew the thorny issue of sexual violence against women? Her illuminating insights into the constraints placed on young women’s lives by the new sexual contract notwithstanding, nowhere does The Aftermath of Feminism address the impact of sexual violence on the ‘phallic girl’. While a whole chapter is devoted to ‘symbolic violence’, the physical abuse and violence which continue to constrain young women’s lives in public and private spheres is barely mentioned, a somewhat surprising omission from a book devoted to locating ‘faux’-feminism’s granting of sexual freedoms at ‘ground level’. One might have expected the countless surveys across all western jurisdictions recording high levels of men’s violence against women to rate a mention. It might have been anticipated too that a book exploring the post-feminist gender settlement that its author calls ‘the new sexual contract’ (p. 54) (my emphasis) would have clocked worrying developments in the sex lives of young women. She might, for example, have referred to research suggesting that the mainstreaming of pornography—mentioned only in passing—is closely linked to increasing pressures by young men for the unsafe sex practices that are contributing to soaring STD rates among young western women, rates that are especially high in the UK context which is McRobbie’s focus. Self-policing is not the only dubious practice constraining the lives of young women entering the new sexual contract.
It’s all very well to be wary of being contaminated with the ‘now out-of-date’ feminist label and certainly no self-respecting cultural theorist wants to be associated with promoting a feminist culture of injury and victimhood today (p. 163). But McRobbie may be pleased to learn that some feminist analysts are forging new ways of engaging the ‘Man Question’—the question, disavowed in so many fields of social inquiry, of whether it is ever culturally permissible to hold men responsible for their own violence—without resorting to outmoded radical feminist perspectives (e.g. Howe, 2008). One guesses she would be even more pleased to learn that that not everyone lost sight of the dynamics of power and constraint at play within the neoliberal gender order and that some feminists are providing decidedly up-to-date critiques of the child pornography industry. As Abigail Bray (2008: 331) argues in her superlative study of the emergence of tolerance as the ruling neoliberal (and most definitely post-feminist) virtue governing responses to the production of sexualized images of girls, challenging that production ‘is a critically risky experience’. It might be perceived as intolerant or even puritanical. But that hasn’t stopped her from querying corporate neoliberalism’s apologies for sexualized images of girls or exploring how current formations of neoliberal tolerance of those images operate to ‘depoliticise and dehistoricise heterosexual paedophilia’ and ‘the abject materiality’ of sexual relations between girls and men. Such neoliberal tolerance, Bray argues, depends on the disavowal of the bodies of sexually abused children, a disavowal that is ‘caught up in the displacement of feminist critiques of contemporary sexual politics of paedophilia’ (Bray, 2009: 174–177). A similar displacement of a critique of the sexual politics governing young women’s lived sexual experiences under the new neoliberal sexual contract can be seen in McRobbie’s book.
Finally, McRobbie’s conspiracy theory disclaimer and all the complexities of her nuanced argument notwithstanding, The Aftermath of Feminism does leave one with the impression that disembodied, malevolent right-wing forces are insidiously directing the faux-feminism show. Still, it’s a hell of a story she tells, one with a great deal of explanatory power when it comes to grasping the complexities of the malaise that fuels young women’s hostility to the demands and claims of one of the 20th century’s most significant social movements. Thanks to all the fascinating insights she provides into the undoing of feminism in our cowering post-feminist neoliberal world, we now have a much firmer grip on the wide array of forces that have helped produce the sullen resistance of so many young women to feminism. It remains to be seen whether new strategies can be forged that can complete the unfinished business of achieving gender equity for new generations of women.