Postfeminism

In the readings from Gill and Projasnky in “Postfeminist Context” they analyze the initial achievements of feminism, the backlash, and several aspects that lead to postfeminism. What I found was rather interesting is this idea of Postfeminism. I was surprised to find out that we are in this stage, because “post” as pointed out by Projasnky means “after.” This terminology suggests that feminism is over and that we have reached equality, to someone who might hear it on the street. Projansky elaborates that, “the concept of postfeminism perpetuates feminism in the very process of insisting that it is now over” (p.66).  This does not seem to be necessarily true, this I think is because of the broad range the definition of feminism now has.  Feminism was transformed to include aspects of class, race, and equal rights/depictions in several aspects of our social world. In both of these readings, we find that in media this is not true. In Gills chapter concerning postfeminism, we find that there is an obsession with body image of women in our culture. It is also still predominantly white women with body types that only a few percent of the population can actually achieve. It is a source of our self-identity, that if we don’t have a sexy body, then we are unappealing. This reminded me of the Dove campaign called, “Campaign for real beauty” This movement started in 2004 and focuses on starting a debate about what is a “real” body in the media and challenge stereotypical norms. The success for this movement has lead to another creation called “The movement for self-esteem” which tries to reduce women’s anxiety about their body image. Dove found that only 4% of women in the world consider themselves beautiful. I found this to be a startling claim seeing that they only interviewed 1,200 women from around the world. Still, to have such a small percent from a large group consider themselves to be beautiful is still alarming. From the Gill and Projansky reading paired with multiple campaigns by Dove, feminism is occurring. It may not be as overt as in the 1960’s but feminism is still calling upon social change.