The under-theorisation of the concept of generation within feminism has led to negative and unproductive disputes. In the heated generational exchanges of the 1990s, feminists were cast according to age into opposing sides: old or young, mothers or daughters, second wave or third wave. These categories are limiting and the conflict harmful for feminist politics. In order to avoid these pitfalls, a theoretical framework is developed that draws on the work of Karl Mannheim and post feminist cultural analyses to elucidate the significance of popular culture in marking a generation. This framework then enables an examination of the way feminist discourses are played out in popular culture and helps explain young women’s complex engagement with feminism. This thesis brings together interviews with young Australian women and an analysis of two television programmes that exhibit post feminist characteristics: Sex and the City and Desperate Housewives. It examines the ways in which young women critically engage with these texts and explores popular culture as an arena where feminist discourses are contested. The era is characterised as post feminist because of the entanglement of feminism with popular culture, but it is also marked by the intersection of equality feminism with a neoliberal emphasis on individualism. Within this context, second wave feminist discourses of equality have slipped into the rhetoric of choice, which has important implications for feminist theory. The pervasive sense of choice and opportunity circulated by these discourses obscures the structural limitations that continue to affect women’s lives and demand that women make the “right” choices, build a successful career, find a suitable long-term partner, and become a good mother. This thesis mobilises post feminism as a valuable analytical concept that can be used to characterise the current generation of young women, not simply because they have grown up after the height of second wave feminism, but because the prevailing discourses of this historical moment reflect both continuity with, and a challenge to, earlier feminist debates. The mainstreaming of many feminist ideas and their reflection in popular culture provides the conditions for new forms of feminism to emerge. / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/224226 |
| Date | January 2008 |
| Creators | Robinson, Penelope A., University of Western Sydney, College of Arts, School of Social Sciences |
| Source Sets | Australiasian Digital Theses Program |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
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