Most attempts to define culture as used in the cultural evolution literature treat culture as a single phenomenon that can be given a single nondisjunctive definition. In this article I argue that, really, cultural evolutionists employ a variety of distinct but closely related concepts of culture. I show how the main prominent attempts to define a culture concept fail to properly capture all the uses of “culture” employed in cultural evolutionary work. I offer a description of some of the most important culture concepts used by cultural evolutionists.
The HBO series Girls, created by and starring filmmaker Lena Dunham, has been praised for revealing the uncertainties and contradictions produced by the apparent independence of many contemporary young women. It has also been condemned for focusing on girls who use that independence for self-indulgent complaint and celebrate their own objectification. Both feminist and not-so-feminist responses to its promotion, and to the subsequent success of the series, have debated its generationalized gender politics and its narratives about socioeconomic privilege and insecurity. Debating whether Girls has something new and vital to say about girls has thus taken up now longstanding refrains about 'postfeminism' and 'girl power'. This essay considers this controversy, evidently anticipated by the series' producers and argues that understanding Girls requires situating it within HBO's stable of 'quality' but controversial original programming, within which Girls' provocative version of feminist girlhood serves as part of its 'quality' manipulation of popular conventions for narrative television.The debate about good and bad feminism makes me want to take a nap for a year. (@lenadunham, 18 December 2013) A great deal has been written about postfeminism with reference to popular media images of girlhood. Since the concept came to prominence in the 1980s, it has been used to debate the political value of images of successful girls and young women. Despite how regularly it is used, however, this term still seems to confound precise definition. New publications on the topic routinely turn first of all to the work of definition and caveat. While the inconsistency and uncertainty surrounding postfeminism might ground an argument for setting the concept aside as just too unclear to be useful, the idea keeps returning precisely because of this lack of clarity. We want to suggest here that postfeminism is one word for a productive irritation that helps keep feminist discourse alive in contemporary popular culture. In this paper, we take a cue from Brown's argument that any political phenomenon remains alive, refusing to recede into the past, precisely to the extent that its meaning is open and ambiguous, to the extent that it remains interpreted and contested by the present, and to the extent that it disturbs settled meanings in the present. (2001, 152) This paper argues that, just as both the success and controversy of Lena Dunham's television series Girls, produced for HBO in 2012 -2014 (with a fourth season scheduled for 2015), are interdependent in general, the series' explicit address to feminism and its evasion of a range of contemporary feminist expectations are equally crucial to how this series compels continuing conversations about feminism. It thus might be the ambiguity of postfeminism as a concept that most justifies its usefulness for talking about this series.
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