“Emerging Feminisms?” – Pop-feminism and the re-articulation of the Personal

Description

This paper contributes to debates about the emergence of feminism within popular culture. It seeks to analyse a particular phenomenon within pop-feminism: the public articulation of intimate experiences. This unveiling of private information is to be found in movies, series, blogs, books or star interviews and is often connected to feminist messages concerning sexuality, the body or experiences of abuse or violence. This phenomenon can, on the one hand, be interpreted as a certain form of self-branding, which is supposed to be especially useful within our culture of 'digital intimacy' (Thomson 2008, Banet-Weiser 2012). On the other hand, it can be seen as manifestation of the feminist slogan “The Personal is political” and therefore, as a way to uncover invisible power structures in the private sphere. To fully understand how personal experiences are articulated within pop-feminism, this paper focuses on Lena Dunham’s series Girls (2012-2017) and her autobiography Not that kind of Girl (2014) as well as Hannah Gadsby‘s Netflix-Special Nanette (2018). With the help of semiotic and discourse analytical methods (Hall 1997, Gill 2007) this paper shows that pop-feminist media texts indeed reveal the persistence of patriarchal power structures and the dangers of postfeminism and are not merely a practise of self-branding. Ultimately, my paper argues that even though pop-feminism is still entangled in a postfeminist dispositif, it has the ability to destabilize the hegemony of postfeminism through the re-articulation of the Personal. Further research is needed to analyse whether this phenomenon has the potential to change popular culture in a long-term perspective.

Period	07 Jun 2019
Event title	CMCI Emerging Voices "Beyond Disciplines"
Event type	Conference
Location	United KingdomShow on map