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The use of sexual, sexually derogatory and sexually violent imagery across Western popular culture does not appear to be waning. Network-television crime dramas arrange silent female corpses across our screens while social media users are invited to consider cosmetic surgery on every Facebook page they open. Hollywood continues to produce movies in which women are noteworthy celluloid presences only for the speed with which they can undress, receive violence or await rescue. Advertising campaigns in fashion magazines glamorize gang rape, but fashion designers protest that those (feminists and others) who complain fail to see the point that fashion is about aesthetics. Aesthetically butchering women is, it seems, quite desirable.
This book explores the intimate connections between representation, the politics of feminism and the cultural practices of modern, Western, consumer society. It explores feminism âmade sensibleâ through visual imagery and popular culture representations, examining feminismâs popular and commercial value. It investigates how popular culture is produced, represented and consumed to reproduce the conditions in which feminism is valued or dismissed. It asks where and how the sexualization of cultural products is maintained and to what effects. It asks, finally, whether sufficient evidence can be marshalled to argue that antifeminism exists in commodity form and is commercially viable.
This book argues, as many scholars have done, that representations matter. There are no âfactsâ that speak for themselves, nor âobjectsâ that exist apart from (that is, separate to) our knowledge of them. âMaterial objectsâ constitute reality only through our knowledge of them, and this is necessarily partial, contingent and fluctuating. This means also that our âknowledgeâ of the world organizes us, and not that we are necessarily in control of it. We do not just learn to speak, âwe learn to construct utterancesâ and we learn more than language, we learn the system, which speaks through us (Bakhtin 2004, quoted in Griffin 2009: 28). Popular culture offers us pictures, stories, fantasies and imaginings about the world, and we recognize and respond to these strongly because they create meaning for us. If what exists in the world is made real to us only by virtue of our knowledge of it, and if we possess âknowledgeâ only partially and inconsistently, according to the political, social, economic and cultural discourses in which we are located and that are available to us, it would be naĂŻve, I think, to dismiss the power that popular culture, and thus storytelling, bring to our knowledge of the world. This book is based on the assumption that the processes and practices of Western popular culture are, as Weldes articulates, intricate and extensive and help âto create and sustain the conditions for contemporary world politicsâ (2003: 6). The representative practices of contemporary popular culture are more than simply an aside to feminismâs waning or ascending influence, they have come to constitute and shape feminism and our responses to feminism.
When I began the research for this book, it seemed to me that the status of feminism in Western societies and the increasing sexualization of popular culture in Western societies more generally were related, and related inversely. Sexually explicit content and demeaning representations abounded, yet feminism appeared submerged by popular rhetoric and representations that questioned its relevance and obscured its incisiveness. Feminists appeared on television, when they appeared on television, as shrieking harpies devoid of humour, even across sources I otherwise admired and enjoyed. Tina Fey and Amy Poehler had not yet made feminism on TV âacceptableâ and any criticism of a male public figure behaving like a lecherous old pervert was immediately decried as conspiracy. Thus I wanted to know why sexism was so prevalent across popular culture, since it seemed to me as if popular culture could reproduce at best only uninspiring, and uninspired, representations of women, while sexism was all that consumer culture was selling. I wondered if, in the West at least, antifeminism was more viable in popular and commercial form than feminism and whether there were in fact links to be made between the development and maintenance of commercialized antifeminism and the sexualization of popular culture artefacts. Like feminists such as McRobbie, Whelehan and Levy, I was convinced that popular culture was indeed reproducing the conditions in which feminism was being dismissed and the sexualization of market products valorized.
McRobbie argues that feminist work is often dismissed as irrelevant to peopleâs contemporary lives, particularly the lives of young women, and that antifeminism is channelled routinely in and through the popular to disseminate aggressively âmodernâ ideas about women âso as to ensure that a new womenâs movement will not re-emergeâ (2009: 1). Despite initially being convinced of this, I wanted with this book to fashion an enquiry into popular culture and feminism that took seriously that there were other possibilities. I was reluctant to simply assume that there is a case for arguing that feminism is being dismissed in and through popular culture. I designed this book, then, to investigate the relationship between feminism and popular culture without (hopefully) starting from my unproven assumption in 2009 that popular culture and feminism are antithetical. Rather, I use this book to ask how the representative practices found in popular culture that have come to constitute and shape feminism (and our responses to feminism) might, or might not, make antifeminism a more appealing option, both for cultural producers and consumers.
To answer this question, however, I have found it increasingly important to expand my ideas about âfeminismâ. As a category subjectively created and sustained across cultural sites, negotiating feminism (as it is understood and practised) has proved a much more challenging prospect than I anticipated. Feminisms and antifeminisms are sometimes overtly identifiable and sometimes far more tacitly located, contradictory and difficult to describe within and across popular culture. This book represents an effort to identify and categorize feminism as it is created and sustained in the popular, but such an endeavour will always be constrained by the limitlessness of popular imaginings. Whether the representations deployed by contemporary capitalist societies relate to any definable erosion of political engagement, activism and support for feminism is exceedingly difficult to ascertain. Scholars, such as McRobbie, have argued that âpostfeminismâ represents the ârewardingâ of young women, with the promise of freedom and independence, for abandoning feminism, yet the âtruthâ of this argument depends in large part on knowing exactly (and being able to assert) what âactivismâ means today to young people, what young women actually think about feminist ideas and how feminism is perceived. The production of such knowledge is entirely fraught with peril. What diverse groups and generations believe to be and define as activism and feminism might not be recognizably activist or feminist to other groups, people or generations. Whether this is celebrated or dismissed involves judgements and claims to authenticity that are highly problematic.
Background
I found, like Shepherd, and as she so evocatively conveys in Gender, Violence and Popular Culture: Telling Stories (2013), that this book was easy to research but difficult to write. Finding sources to support analysis of popular culture artefacts and interpreting the artefacts themselves were ârelatively straightforward tasks to undertakeâ (ibid.: 2). Yet actually convincing oneself that the writing should be done (in the sense that the writing mattered) was much harder. My feminism is an intimate and constituent part of me, formed in waves of excitement for various literary, cultural and political theories. My earliest experiences of feminism were formed both within the academic and the popular (one might think that endless deconstructions of Moderato Cantabile, GĂŒten Morgen, Die Schöne, Fight Club or Boys Donât Cry would kill my love of popular culture sources, but no) and I have rarely separated my feminism from my experiences of popular culture. This, for me, is what made this research so important, and yet so impossible to describe in a wider, âso what?â, âwho cares?â sense. The point that has always made this book so important, personally, for me, and so difficult to come to terms with, is that feminism is not an objective category and cannot be written about as if it is. Just as my feminism was formed entirely from the specifics of my own, subjective, experiences of reading, listening and watching, so the feminisms of others develop and coalesce around the wider world of their various experiences. Feminism is very much about the promulgation of certain principles, ideas and assumptions, and yet there is no uniform project and no âauthenticâ feminism.
In terms of where my research comes from, I define myself as a scholar of International Political Economy (IPE), which some argue is a sub-discipline of International Relations (IR), while others assert exists as a discipline in its own right (I shall not attempt to negotiate this debate here). IR has frequently (and rather consistently) offered a picture of the world as a sequence of isolated events unrelated to everyday practices of social and cultural reproduction. Yet, if IR has struggled to take (frivolous and insubstantial) popular culture seriously (Weldes 2003: 4â5), IPE has not even got close. Popular culture is, in all its dimensions, a core part of the global political economy, its successful globalization, the enduringness of its corporate capitalist content, its legitimations, dominant narratives, practices, and sources of support and subversion, and yet IPE scholarship rarely considers it a worthy subject of analysis in and of itself.
It is thus a large hope of this book to generate an IPE that is more attentive to popular culture. This book argues that IR and IPE scholars need desperately to do more than investigate a variety of texts, sites and performances of meaning, they need, as Rowley notes, to put on their gendered lenses to see how world politics really works (2009: 322). I proceed here on the assumption that we cannot understand the processes and forms of our economic activity without being fully aware of the socio-cultural properties, biases and effects of the structures that govern us. Understanding the representational practices of contemporary popular culture requires a particular form of insight into world politics not elsewhere available and requires that we âemploy the full register of human perception and intelligenceâ, both to understand âthe phenomena of world politicsâ and, then, to engage with âthe dilemmas that emanate from themâ (Bleiker 2001: 519). Crucially, popular visual language is âincreasingly circulated through wireless networks onto the digital screens of our daily lives (computers, telephones, and televisions)â, is experienced âas much if not more by amateurs than it is by expertsâ and âis increasingly the language that amateurs and experts rely upon in order to claim contemporary literacyâ (Weber 2008: 137â8).
As Bleiker notes, many social scientists remain sceptical about approaches âwhose nature and understanding of evidence do not correspond to established scientific criteriaâ (2009: 44). Boundaries are, however, what have kept feminist international relations in place (Zalewski 2013: 127). Boundaries, though they offer comfort, exist to be violated. Cultural theorists have often discussed political economy in their considerations of culture and identity, but political economists (in their incarnation as a discipline in IPE, at least) have not often ruminated on the world of popular culture. I cannot say for certain that many IPE scholars would care what the relationship was between feminism, popular culture and political economy. The possibility that popular culture might undo some of IPEâs constructions of âlegitimateâ knowledge remains, however, too tantalizing a prospect to ignore.
Strategy(ies) of research
As a political economist, my focus is often on showing how questions of economics are relevant to finding answers to problems that, superficially, appear unrelated to economics. These are not questions that mainstream economists would necessarily ask or be interested in and my concern is not to promote economism and economic determinism in analysing social life.1 I do not suggest that there is a predetermined economic base to society, reproduced through a fixed mode of production. Where I look for the economics in questions that might not seem economically motivated, I try simply to find where we might ask questions about how, for example, the economic choices people face constrain their life chances, or how certain economic discourses reward particular behaviours that only a privileged few bodies have the resources to embody. The theoretical framework that underpins this research is relatively mixed, and this book draws from feminist theory, poststructural discourse analysis, cultural and communications studies, IR and IPE enquiry. As far as I know, there has been no sustained IPE scholarship that has, as yet, centred on the importance of analysing the meanings circulating in and though popular culture in order to answer questions relevant both to political economy and analysis of social life more generally.
As a feminist analysis of popular culture, this book takes seriously that feminism is important in and to understanding contemporary social life and the politics of social identity. By looking for representations of feminism in popular culture, this book, however, heeds Hollows and Moseleyâs advice to examine feminism in popular culture (rather than, say, as a political project standing outside popular culture and passing judgement on popular culture). Feminism here, therefore, is taken to be something shaped and understood through the popular. This book does not assume that there exists a ârealâ or âauthenticâ feminism somewhere outside popular culture, offering âa position from which to judge and measure feminismâs success or failure in making it into the mainstreamâ (Hollows and Moseley 2006: 1). As such, this book is less an examination of what feminism, or the feminist, can tell us about popular culture, than one of what popular culture can tell us about feminism (ibid.).
Feminist analyses of the media have so far, as Gill articulates, been drawn primarily from five key approaches. First, feminist approaches have examined representations and textual practices in some detail. They have, second, emphasized the active, creative negotiations that audiences make with their texts. Third, they have sometimes foregrounded the âpleasuresâ offered by the media or, fourth, foregrounded the ideological impact of the media. Lastly, they have sought to go âbehind-the-scenesâ and examine the production of particular media or the political economy of media industries. Feminist analyses of the media have, in particular, âbeen animated by the desire to understand how images and cultural constructions are connected to patterns of inequality, domination and oppressionâ (Gill 2007: 7).
This book deploys a combination, of sorts, of some of these approaches, examining in detail examples of contemporary popular culture, including particular cultural products, representations and textual practices, their constitution, symbolism and impact (through and on an active audience) and of the media that (re)produce them. Through the survey, research here also examines audience experiences of and opinions around popular culture. To a certain extent, this book seeks to go âbeh...
