| Summary: | This thesis is a discursive and historical analysis of the concept and usage of 'postfeminism' in contemporary feminist debates. The importance of the vocabulary used to frame these debates is demonstrated through a survey of popular feminist discourses in the 1920s, and the circulation of the term 'postfeminism' in 1980s and 1990s mainstream and feminist media, academic journals, and bestselling books. Foremost among these contexts are mainstream newspaper and magazine articles in which postfeminism is used as a descriptive term applied to trends in fashion, television and film. Through an investigation of the texts and contexts in which post feminism is used, associations to generational disparity, antifeminism, the 'death of feminism,' commercialism, and other 'post-' discourses such as postmodernism, will be illustrated. In the process, it will be demonstrated that feminism, as it is represented through discourses of postfeminism, resides in an area of cultural criticism which straddles the spheres of the academic and the popular.
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