relations are perpetuated. As bell hooks notes, audiences wish to reserve “a certain sense of magic” for the arena of media (Jhally, 1997). We do not deny media’s ability to create, inspire, entertain, and provide audiences with pleasure. In nearly all the cases featured here, we enjoyed viewing (or playing) the artifacts we analyzed. Barthes (1975) differentiates between plaisir, pure pleasure more akin to escapism, and jouissance, a joy grounded in play more akin to epiphany. Ott (2004, 2007) extends this, detailing the erotics of reading, emphasizing the joy of engaging with media texts. We experienced plaisir, and we derived an eroticized jouissance from analyzing them critically and deeply in order to render a complex, nuanced reading of each one.
Who We Are
We write as women, feminists, and scholars in the communication discipline. In interrogating representations of fierce feminine empowerment in contemporary mediated texts, we are fueled by our own intergenerational experiences as they relate to feminist activism and theorizing. Through individual encounters with sexism, sexual harassment, and sexual assault, we have witnessed, and felt, the truth of second wave feminists’ claim that “the personal is political” and the relevance of the contemporary #MeToo movement. We honor the truths women of color have voiced about second wave feminism’s erasures and ignorance of the positionalities of all but middle-class white women.2 We remain cognizant that, despite women of color repeatedly raising these points, the bias of white feminism is, in many ways, intact.
In our own teaching and writing, we have embraced the shifts in thinking and theorizing enabled by critical race theory, intersectionality, and whiteness studies; transnational, comparative, and postcolonial feminisms; Indigenous feminisms; ecofeminism; and posthumanist feminism, among others. We have witnessed the emergence of postfeminist narratives and have observed the easy alignments between hegemonic masculinity, neoliberalism, and the narrow definition of “feminism” as individual agency and sexual pleasure presented in postfeminist mediated texts. Our interest in writing this book ←10 | 11→emerges from the collisions of these frames, which are entangled within the media we engage with as well as within our own personal lives.
The embodied histories and present experiences informing our writing extend beyond and intersect with our gendered positions. Heather is white, U.S. American, a full professor and administrator, heterosexual, married, and from a rural, West Coast, middle-class family background. Hillary is white, U.S. American, an advanced assistant professor, married, cisgender, and from a rural, Great Plains, working class family background. Roberta is white, U.S. American, an early assistant professor, bisexual, femme, divorced, and from a rural, West Coast, lower middle-class family background. None of us are raising children. We are all the first person in our families to earn a PhD, and we all left the places we were raised and now live in urban or suburban environments. Although simple to list, these and other demographic aspects of our identities have complex effects on the perspectives we bring to our research, as do dimensions of our pasts that have led us to the study of feminisms, gender, and representation.
Heather’s interest in media began at an early age when, as a latchkey child of divorce, television and her brothers kept her company. As an adolescent in the 1970s and a teen in the 1980s, she encountered the emergence of shows featuring working women as their main characters, such as Police Woman, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Alice, One Day at a Time and The Bionic Woman, and she saw the movement of white women into mainstream rock music in performers like Heart, Blondie, and Linda Ronstadt. Growing up, she rejected stereotypical notions of being a girl (such as playing with dolls and wearing dresses) and instead enjoyed participating in sports and other outdoor activities considered to be reserved for “boys” at the time. In fact, in high school she was involved in creating her school’s first girls’ soccer team, noting the lower quality of field compared to the established boys’ team regardless of making the playoffs every season. Despite recognizing that boys were treated differently (read: better), she did not come to identify as a feminist until she was in her late 20s, although others told her that she was.
Hillary was an adolescent a decade later, in the late 1980s, a time featuring popular television with strong women such as Designing Women and The Golden Girls and outspoken musicians expanding the norms of gender expression, like Prince and Madonna. An avid reader, media geek, and gamer, she was always drawn to independent, strong female-bodied protagonists: Charlotte and her web; Anne of Green Gables; Eustacia Vye chafing at the open moors; Clair Huxtable’s work/life balance; Murphy Brown’s ←11 | 12→independence; the fierce battles waged by Buffy, Willow, and Cordelia. The experience that most stirred her to feminism was struggling with Chopin’s The Awakening. Her undergraduate education helped her to move from judging Edna Pontellier for a dereliction of duty to understanding how we, as a society, fail people when we constrain choice structurally and individually. She quickly evolved to a feminism that was intellectual and political.
Roberta’s adolescence in the early 1990s was marked by a continued expansion in the types of women’s roles on television, but her shows of choice were 90210 and Days of Our Lives, both centered around gender-stereotypic representations and heterosexual relationships. As a child, she was enamored with beauty, lipstick, and high heels, and she would even dress the family cat in frilly princess dresses. Following her father’s AIDS-related suicide in 1991, she and her sister were raised by her mother, a high school teacher who never remarried. Roberta’s identification as a queer feminist began in high school when she first started listening to Ani DiFranco’s music, in which lyrical assertions such as “I ain’t no damsel in distress” and “I am a one-woman army” illustrate the kinds of claims to power that characterize the media texts we analyze in this book.
For each of us, our feminist awakenings gave voice to experiences of subordination and inequality we had encountered. Despite the decades spanned by our childhood and adolescence and the range of positions we held in relation to femininity and feminism, one interesting commonality emerges from these stories of our early years: we all came to feminism around the same time, within a span of just a few years in the late 1990s. This is the same period during which sexy female-bodied protagonists became normal, displacing the previously male-dominated world of violence and action en masse. As stylized media representations of ass-kicking women in features like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Xena: Warrior Princess, Alias, Kill Bill, and Tomb Raider proliferated, seemingly empowered women took to screens, ushering in an era of postfeminist banality. Perhaps it is more than a coincidence that from our varied histories a mutual interest was born. Of course, all of our relationships to and understandings of feminism have changed drastically in the intervening years as we continue to read, engage in discussions with other feminists, and encounter more life experiences. We share these brief narratives of our subject positions to offer a starting point for considering our relationships to the artifacts we construct, drawn from texts in which a particular version of women’s strength—as dangerous, sexy, futuristic, and agentic—challenges and reinscribes gender norms, stereotypes, and binaries.
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From our feminist perspectives, the standpoints we bring to our analyses, of course, matter. Our experiences as white women understanding and living through second and third wave feminisms is the place from which we begin our inquiry of postfeminist media representations, their possibilities, and their limitations. To that end, however, we note that although we write as “we” throughout the book, given our collaboration on its content, we are cautious of the unifying voice as it relates to the historic and ongoing universalizing second wave aspirations for solidarity, similarity, and global sisterhood. We did not agree on every point initially, and points of disagreement, divergence, and alternative interpretations led to robust conversations that enriched the readings. We believe this layering reflects
