my report in Media 304: Media and Identities at the University of the Philippines Diliman PhD Media Studies program at the College of Mass Communication

1. Neo-Feminism
Female|Feminine|Stealth Feminists
Neo-Feminist Cinema
Girly Films, Chick Flicks and Consumer Culture
Chona Rita R. Cruz (CINDY) 86-16518
PhD Media Studies
about.me/cindycruzcabrera en.gravatar.com/cindycatz
Media 304: Media and Identities
Dr. Elizabeth Enriquez

2. • What are your looks for your everyday life /
roles / places and spaces?
• How would you describe your personal style?
• What type of clothes, bags, and accessories do
you choose for yourself?
• Who are the women you can most identify
with, including the style angle?
• What image/s of yourself do you cultivate for
your identity/ies?

3. Definition of Terms

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Female
Feminine
Feminist
Feminisms
Patriarchy
Girly Film
Four quadrants
Fun, fearless female
GIRL as identity – always in a state of “becoming”
Singleton

5. The Feminisms
Alison Jaggar
Bell Hooks
Simone De Beauvoir
Betty Friedan
Shulamith Firestone
Helen Gurley Brown
Hilary Radner

6. • A collection of movements aimed at
defining, establishing, and defending equal
political, economic, and social rights for
women
• Equal opportunities for women in education
and employment
• United against institutionalized practices of
oppression, discrimination and biological
determinism and the appropriation of female
labor (within the patriarchy)
• Feminist theory aims to understand the nature
of gender inequality by examining women’s
social roles and lived experience

7. Liberal Feminism
• Equality through legal reform
• The integration of women into the existing
societal structure
• A proposal for equality for men and women
• “We may be women, but we have rights too.”
• Asserts that all women are capable of
asserting their ability to achieve equality
without altering the structure of society.

8. Radical Feminism
• Important foundation for “feminist flavors”
• Viewed the oppression of women as the most
fundamental form of oppression, which cuts
across boundaries of race, culture, and
economic class.
• A male-based authority and power structure
responsible for oppression and inequality
• The woman’s body as the site of oppression
• Total uprooting and reconstructing of society

9. Marxist Feminism
• Attributes the oppression of women to the
capitalist / private property system
• Friedrick Engels “The Origin of the Family”
• Women’s oppression will end only upon the
overthrow of the capitalist system
• Gender oppression will disappear with class
oppression and exploitation (Marx)
• Revolution to end capitalist mode of
production

10. Socialist Feminism
• The meeting of Marxist and Radical Feminism
• Unequal standing in the workplace and the
domestic sphere holds women down.
• The patriarchal system devalues women and
the work they do through institutionalized
mechanisms and practices
• Oppression of women as a part of the larger
pattern that affects everyone in capitalism
• Expresses the need to work alongside men
and all other groups

11. Post-Colonial Feminism
• Experiences endured during colonialism,
including "migration, slavery, suppression,
resistance, representation, difference, race,
gender, place and responses to the influential
discourses of imperial Europe.”
• centers on racism, ethnic issues, and the longlasting economic, political, and cultural effects
of colonialism, inextricably bound up with the
unique gendered realities of non-White nonWestern women
• React against both universalizing tendencies in
Western feminist thought and a lack of attention
to gender issues in mainstream postcolonial
thought

12. • First Wave Feminism – equality in suffrage,
marriage, and sexual desire; overturning of
legal obstacles to gender equality
• Second Wave Feminism – broadened the
debate to cover a wider range of issues
(sexuality, family, the workplace, reproductive
rights, legal inequalities). 1960s (Women’s Lib)
• Third Wave Feminism – identified with several
diverse strains of feminist activity and study;
arose as a reaction to the often assumed
universal female identity (upper middle-class
white women and their experiences).

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Fourth wave feminism – happening now
Spiritually informed activism
Post feminism
Neo-feminism
Stealth feminism
Developments with Gen X, Gen Y,
Millennials

14. Neo-Feminism
And its set of practices and
discourses that define a certain
position or “identities”

15. • “The tendency in feminine culture to evoke
choice and development of individual agency
as the defining tenets of feminine identity –
best realized through an engagement with
consumer culture in which the woman is
encouraged to achieve self-fulfillment by
purchasing, adorning, or surrounding herself
with the goods that this culture can offer.”

16. • “Choice, particularly in the form of
‘shopping’, as a process of weighing and
evaluating alternatives with a view to making
a decision that optimizes the individual’s own
position, is the fundamental principle that
governs neo-feminist behavior.”

17. • JOHN FISKE: “It is worth noting that not only
the pleasures are found in the ownership of
commodities through which people can create
or modify the context of everyday life and
thus many of the meanings it bears, but also
that the consumer’s moment of choice is an
empowered moment. If money is power in
capitalism, then buying, particularly if the act
is voluntary, is an empowering moment for
those whom the economic system otherwise
subordinates…. *P+roduction may be
essentially proletarian and consumption
bourgeois.”

18. Establishment of the
Neo-Feminist Paradigm

19. • Marrying later in life
• Holding salaried positions, now active
participants in the global economic system
• Devoted to the pursuit of pleasure
• Sexuality redefined as “a means of selfrealization rooted in pleasure and
unconnected to reproduction”

20. • Emergence of the single girl as a feminine
ideal
• Achieves her identity outside marriage and
does not define herself in terms of maternity
• Sexual pleasure is a right
• Defined through consumerism and her
function in feminine consumer culture
• Replacement of “maternal” as the defining
trait of femininity
• GIRL (or “yummy mommy”, as the case may
be)

21. Neo-Feminist Ideals

22. • Emphasis on “femininity” and the feminine
culture vs. a feminist culture
• Pursuit of happiness as an entitlement
• Woman at the center of her universe
• Pragmatic approach to men
• Identity achieved through achievement and
fulfillment
• Disassociates herself from traditional notions
of patriarchy and the family, but remains
convinced that her identity is largely defined
in terms of her intimate relations with others

23. • The preservation and enhancement of
glamour as a sign of the new and revitalized
feminine identity
• Self-fulfillment in CHOICES – singlehood,
motherhood, or other roles
• Normalizes sex as simply a fact of life and an
entitlement of pleasure for a woman
• Youthful, girlishness, a prolonged adolescence
• Participation in the feminine consumer culture

24. Post-Feminism/Neo-Feminism
Shared Qualities

25. • An obsessional preoccupation with the body
• The emphasis upon self-surveillance,
monitoring and discipline
• Women present as active and desiring
subjects
• A focus upon individualism, choice and
empowerment
• a dominance of the makeover paradigm
• The articulation or entanglement of feminist
and anti-feminist ideas

26. • A resurgence in ideas of natural sexual
difference
• A marked sexualization of culturue
• An emphasis on commodification and the
commodification of difference
• Irony and knowingness

27. Neo-Feminist
Icons and Trendsetters

28. Helen Gurley Brown

29. Bond Feminism

30. Madonna
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mn4g28fisz0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s__rX_WL100
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zMqIQhiJdvs
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P51LunEV3Sk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6RROzUp8kjI

31. Jennifer Lopez
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lYfkl-HXfuU
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_66jPJVS4JE

32. Chick Lit and Chick Flicks
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w9rbadSnlVc
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RS0KyTZ3Ie4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FKx_14vJNZg

33. Neo-Feminist Cinema
Features and Implications

34. • Chastity no longer a valued characteristic
• Self-interest at the forefront – prioritizing
oneself
• Power of choice
• Love (and a man) is an angle lovely to have
but ultimately not necessary
• Friendships
• Relations with and among women
• Cinderella success – work and love
• Boyfriend / marriage plot
• Do-over, repeated reinvention

35. • Conspicuous consumption tied to identity
formations, transformations, renewals, shifts
• Happiness in material goods and surroundings
– fashion, abode and workplace design
• Fulfillment in acquisition of material goods
• Makes the aspirational accessible
• Films do not situate themselves against
feminism but are indifferent to social and
political concerns that set feminists apart from
“strivers”

36. Traits of the Genre

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Heroine at the center of her universe
Female bonding, female friendship
Redefined “marriage plot”
Protagonist usually a single woman who works
for a living, and whose work defines her
• Girlish personality and looks
• Consumer culture and consumer-culture
competence are crucial elements in the
setting
• Consumer culture as a central aspect of the
plot or as an incidental detour

38. • Thematically often exhibit a profound
ambivalence about certain issues – role of
romance, marriage, or work
• Set in well-defined geographic locations that
are urban in nature (New York, LA,
Manhattan)
• Concerned with theme of transformation –
magical makeover – to give expression to an
internal process of education (thus linked to
consumer culture)
• Do-over – past mistake is rectified
• Intertextuality and nostalgic perspective for
the past

39. Neo-Feminist
Girly Films / Chick Flicks
followed by Hilary Radner’s review

40. • The girly film illustrates how popular culture
for women may constitute a way of thinking
about issues that might be called women’s
issues outside the context of academic or
political debate.
• A means of expressing and interrogating the
terms of an evolving feminine identity in
contemporary culture
• Often offer satirical and critical perspectives of
neo-feminist culture
• Highly self-deprecating, mocks itself

41. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jvd3TjJaf3c

42. • Fairy tale
• Becomes a template for feminine dreams of
achievement
• Instrumentalism negated by fantasy impossible endings
• A relationship that begins with fellatio can end
with a kiss.
• Girlishness as a mode of being (independent
of age)

43. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYPnUrREbRg

44. • Film evolves out of an ironic, critical
perspective
• Undermines and ridicules the values and
perspectives represented by “Michelle”
• Ability to mock itself while paradoxically
sustaining and reproducing its objects of
derision
• Fantasy in which consumer culture might
come to fulfill the need of women in a world
that undermines traditional models for
femininity without offering new possibilities

45. • Lowly “working girls” who struggle to make
ends meet, surviving on a limited budget
while admiring and attempting to emulate the
lives of “It Girls”
• “failure” to find adequate employment and
husbands
• Appear to be immune from the kinds of
material concerns that plague others
• Engage feminine consumer culture in fashion
garments that they construct themselves
• Ambiguous lesbian film

46. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E8I-Qzmbqnc

47. • About the idea that a person’s worth can’t be
judged one way or the other by what they look
like, how they dress, what their vocabulary is….”
• “Clueless” goes to Harvard (education is a luxury
rather than a necessity)
• Heroine moves outside the marriage plot
• The ability to change her look [for her goals] is an
important weapon in her cultural arsenal.
• Empowerment and sisterhood… creating a
connection to cross class boundaries
• Appearance is crucial to a woman’s career, while
implying that Elle’s focus on style is somehow an
anomaly.

48. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lYT12-NQUag

49. • The Latina as the “other white” in the nation’s
“dream of integration”
• She is invisible in her maid’s uniform.
• A man is important but a career is even more so.
• “We’ve got to prove our mothers wrong.”
• Differences in “race” can be accommodated
through the acquisition of appropriate consumer
culture items and become arbitrators of status in
a system of privilege that depends solely upon a
subject’s individual economic achievement.

50. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LG0xYJJbko8

51. • The film, in typically girly manner, stresses
both a work ethic that is almost Protestant in
its fervor and also the need to be true to one’s
self.
• Coming-of-age tale about a smart Cinderella
named Andy who undergoes a total makeover.
• Meryl Streep on Miranda Priestly: “Most of
the models for the character were on the male
end of the species.”
• The movie, while noting that she can be
sadistic, inconsiderate and manipulative, is
unmistakably on Miranda’s side.

52. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x71HBCWXy0g

53. • The film promotes the fantasy through these
endless do-overs, that girlishness as the sign
of perpetual adolescence, with its promise of
change and development and its rejection of
stasis and fixity as the fate of the mature
woman, offers a desirable and attainable
identity, biological age notwithstanding.
• These young women, unmarried and with an
income whose primary purpose is their
sustenance and gratification, represent an
important market for the selling of consumer
non-durables.

54. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zVzIaEuXS4

55. • This persona highlights how neo-feminism
assumes that men are disadvantaged within
the feminine realm, and thus must be
managed and manipulated, according to
Cosmo tradition, or need to be educated.
• An example of masculine self-absorption and
insensitivity, and hence unworthy of the
viewer’s sympathy.
• Representation of masculinity as something
that must be tamed or surmounted if the neofeminist heroine is to reach her goals.

56. My Critique

57. • Offers an accurate and comprehensive
discussion (not “all-encompassing” but
broadly representative) on the observations
(and accompanying implications) of American
female society and perhaps a segment
Philippine female consumerist society
• Radner makes a diagnosis of a stealth feminist
“response” or “tendency” (as opposed to an
organized movement) that arose from rebel
and visionary trends in popular culture
appropriated for profit by capitalists

58. • While the author makes the book a
comfortable read, she draws from feminisms
and may at times assume prior knowledge
• Prompts self-examination as a member of a
post-colonial society attuned to American pop
culture and a participant/survivor in the
capitalist mode of production
• Push for the development angle –
conscientious, enlightened consumerism, if it
not politically progressive

59. References
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Hilary Radner. Neo-Feminist Cinema: Girly Films, Chick Flicks, and Consumer Culture
Alison Jagger. Feminist Politics and Human Nature.
“Who’s a Stealth Feminist” in StealthFeminist.com http://stealthfeminist.com/who/
“Alison Jaggar” in Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alison_Jaggar
“Bell Hooks” in Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_hooks
“Kinds of Feminism” in the University of Alabama in Huntsville
http://www.uah.edu/woolf/feminism_kinds.htm
“Feminism’s Fourth Wave” in UTNE Reader
http://www.utne.com/community/feminisms-fourth-wave.aspx#ixzz2mMlL99pr
“What is Feminism? Introduction to Feminism” in iFeminists.net
http://www.ifeminists.net/introduction/
“Feminism” in Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminism
“First-Wave Feminism” in Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-wave_feminism
“Second-Wave Feminism” in Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secondwave_feminism
“Third-Wave Feminism” in Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirdwave_feminism
“Feminist Ideologies and Movements” in Wikipedia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminist_movements_and_ideologies