Rebecca Munford

In Feminism & Popular Culture: Investigating the Postfeminist Mystique, Rebecca Munford and Melanie Waters draw upon Jacques Derrida’s theories to argue, “The seeds of women’s future empowerment lie in the past as much as in the present…These ghostly visitations reveal the vexed and volatile relationship between feminism and popular culture. If media speculation about the ‘death of feminism’ has given rise to a body of popular texts that seek to define and diagnose the condition of postfeminism, then this book seizes on a selection of these texts in order to investigate the implied ‘afterlife’ of feminism, querying the extent to which contemporary culture is haunted by the ghosts of an undead feminism” (pg. 8). Munford and Waters largely draw upon television, as it is the most widespread medium of the past fifty years and broadcasts images directly into the home. They juxtapose their study of television shows against written work in the zeitgeist at the time of the various shows’ broadcast and the occasional film, such as The Stepford Wives. Remarkably, Munford and Waters demonstrate how empowering tropes from 1990s television shows, such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, morphed by the early 2000s to offer more conservative fare, undercutting much of the second-wave feminism narrative. Interestingly, some of these changes appeared in shows with the same creators or stars as their 1990s forebears, such as Dollhouse and Tru Calling. Munford and Waters conclude, “Resuscitating and reanimating images and styles of femininity that belong to the past, the postfeminist mystique speculates readily and obsessively on the death of feminism” (pg. 169). To this end, “Feminism refuses to leave because its business remains unfinished” (pg. 171).… (mehr)