Fiction or Polemic? Transcending the Ageing Body in Popular Women’s Fiction

Japan, postfeminism and the consumption of sexual(ised) schoolgirls in male-authored contemporary manga

“…For McRobbie, this hyper masculinised form of sexuality can be performed by the phallic girl ‘without relinquishing her own desirability to men, indeed for whom such seeming masculinity enhances her desirability since she shows herself to have a similar sexual appetite to her male counterparts’ (2009: 83–84). In addition, if we accept, as I do, Imelda Whelehan’s observation that the phallic girl could ‘only have emerged in an atmosphere hostile to feminism’, and that there is ‘nothing particularly liberating about such a persona’ (Whelehan, 2000: 15, 50), then it is hard to avoid viewing Sundome ’s schoolgirls as conforming to the negative, related stereotypes of the promiscuous female as both a toxic temptress and a dangerous femme fatale , even if the schoolgirls’ employment of their sexuality is admirable in serving to derail male characters from a celibacy which, if maintained, would ensure personal and political rewards within patriarchy. It is, therefore, highly difficult to resolutely proclaim the female figures of Sundome as either empowering or disempowering, commensurate with, as Sarah Gamble observed earlier in this article, the liberal humanist imperative of postfeminist discourse and the feminist politics of individual choice.…”

Re-positioning female heterosexuality within postfeminist and neoliberal culture

“…My own perspective, outlined in this article and drawing on the work of others (e.g. Barker and Duschinsky, 2012; Coy and Garner, 2012; Gill, 2012b; Tolman, 2006; Whelehan, 2000; Williamson, 2003), is pro-sex, but also has a strong focus on the extent to which contemporary sexualisation is sexist, or represents what Williamson (2003) has coined ‘retro sexism’. My research in this area has focused on different aspects of women’s sexuality, employed a range of methods and used different data sources but has nonetheless drawn similar conclusions.…”

Sex, Violence, and the Religious “Other”

“…One characteristic is the “new sexism discourse” that emerges out of legitimating male power and reasserting a “natural” gender order, though in a manner that offers a strategic disclaimer for their sexism, exposed, for example, through an excessive use of irony and sarcasm (Benwell 2003b, 20–21, 2004). Some have argued that the new lad magazines’ overt focus on women as sexual objects—despite the ironic mode—is a sign of a backlash against feminism, a kind of retro-sexism (Whelehan 2000). Gill (2007, 254), however, suggests that this is not a return to the old patriarchy, but points to a postfeminist register, incorporating feminist notions alongside pre- or antifeminist ideas.…”