In this article, I discuss a postfeminist 'turn to interiority' which takes place in US postfeminist television from 2005 onwards. Drawing on the theoretical critiques of postfeminist retreatism and girlie femininity, this turn is characterised by a concern with interior spaces -reviving domesticity and the importance of finding and securing a home -as well as internalised consumption -replacing forms of material consumption with the quest for self-actualisation, particularly through eating and expressions of the authentic self. I analyse this shift through a comparative analysis of the television shows Sex and the City, Girls and The Mindy Project. I argue that the turn to interiority is a product of the US cultural context, but also that this examination evidences the malleability and longevity of postfeminist ideology. Accordingly, I argue for the continuing importance of critical scholarship on postfeminism as an insight into the failures and pervasiveness of neoliberal politics.
The styling and online circulation of food photography has become a phenomenon endemic to social media. In this article, I explore this digital “food porn” within the feminized space of food blogs and contextualize it within a postfeminist culture rife with contradictions about women’s bodies, consumption, and sexuality. Drawing on postfeminist and feminist corporeal theory, I historicize the longstanding associations between food and the female body, eating and sex. I then analyze digital “food porn” as a form of women’s media production that draws on conventional representations of the female body in pornography, fashion, and popular culture. It is these qualities that distinguish digital “food porn” from “food porn” on other media platforms, and allow it to offer useful insights into the postfeminist subject’s construction of digital femininity. I maintain that digital “food porn” can be read as a playful, pleasurable, and entrepreneurial response to postfeminist contradictions.
This article contextualises the body in cyberspace, using the specific examples of the performative body and the social networking site Facebook. Technology is established as a process which continually unfolds and illuminates new understandings of subjectivity, unfurling in parallel with the performative body – and gendered identities – that Judith Butler articulates. Here, the author conducts a close analysis of the technological affordances of Facebook as a site that fosters the construction of a phantasmic, performative subject that Butler describes. This argument relies on an understanding of technology and the body as having their meaning dynamically constituted through mutual interconnection – an understanding of interface that is taken from the theoretical work of Donna Haraway and Vicki Kirby. The purpose of seeking out the performative body in cyberspace is to explore the possibility of technologically-derived, subversive bodies. This is done by examining the emergence of pleasure in human engagement with technology. This pleasure suggests that subjects are enticed by the creative possibilities which technology offers, as it leads to regenerations that, under the right conditions, yield subversive bodies.
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