Beyond the Backlash:<i>Sex and the City</i>and Three Feminist Struggles

Southard, Belinda A. Stillion

doi:10.1080/01463370802026943

Cited by 25 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 42 publications

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“…In this regard, the postfemininst mentality conveniently justifies modern women's indulgence in China's burgeoning consumer culture but also legitimizes gendered consumption of woman-centered products and services--wedding packages as a case in point. As feminist scholars have eloquently argued, postfeminism, as a supposedly liberating label, is tainted with the ideological turpitude of concealing gender inequality (Arthurs, 2003;Goldman, Heath, & Smith, 1991;Hains, 2009;Luo, 2012a;Stillion-Southard, 2008;Vavrus, 2000). Indeed, the seemingly empowered postfeminist female subject indexes a trivialization of women's political lives and a truncated development of their collective critical consciousness on the one hand.…”

Section: Consumerist Agency Postfeminist Mentality and The Rise Of mentioning

confidence: 99%

Packaged Glamour : Constructing the Modern Bride in China’s Bridal Media

Luo

2012

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This essay examines the images of the bride constructed by China's burgeoning bridal media that sell lavish wedding products and services. Through the lens of semiotics, the author focuses on analyzing bridal magazines widely circulated in China's consumer culture. The analysis shows that China's evolving wedding industry adapts the trite, oppressive trope of "romantic" Western wedding rituals into a bricolage of global fashions, lifestyles, beauty regimens, and marriage tips for the Chinese bride. Conveniently tapping into the rhetoric of neoliberal consumerist agency and postfeminism, the wedding industry repackages patriarchal domination over the bride-to-be in the process of generating profits and disseminating the ideal of consumer one-upmanship. The author further argues that the modern Chinese bride, seemingly empowered within the opulent consumption at her wedding, neither escapes from the gender scripts of Chinese society nor celebrates a significant enhancement of her status in her marital relationship. In this regard, the bridal industry normalizes heterosexual matrimony and reinscribes women's subordinate position in marriage and love.

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Section: Consumerist Agency Postfeminist Mentality and The Rise Of mentioning

confidence: 99%

Packaged Glamour : Constructing the Modern Bride in China’s Bridal Media

Luo

2012

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“…Unlike the feminist movement of the 1960s and 1970s, there is little movement in postfeminism. A key theme of this chapter is the postfeminist focus on self-transformation rather than structural transformation, the core assumption being that any kind of collective action is unnecessary and repellent and-as demonstrated in the previous section-shows weakness (Stillion Southard, 2008). Postfeminism offers a defanged feminism, offering lifestyle and an assertive can-do attitude in place of the hard political and intellectual work that feminists have done.…”

Section: Anti-activismmentioning

confidence: 97%