Postfeminism as a critical tool for gender and language study

Abstract

This article introduces the concept of postfeminism and highlights its value for research in language and gender studies. After discussing theoretical, historical and backlash perspectives, we advance an understanding of postfeminism as a sensibilitya patterned-yet-contradictory phenomenon intimately connected to neoliberalism. We consider elements widely theorised as constituting the postfeminist sensibility, alongside concerns shared by those who take postfeminism as their object of critical inquiry, in addition to an analytic category for cultural critique. The article then illustrates how the postfeminist sensibility may operate empirically, in the context of the doing and undoing of gender equality policies in workplaces. The article responds to calls for the field of language and gender to reinvigorate its political impetus, and to engage with feminist scholarship on postfeminism, particularly as recently developed in media and cultural studies.

Globalisation, Geopolitics, and Gender in Professional Communication

“…In line with neoliberal, postfeminist arguments on individual choice, these discursive strategies not only locate gendered experiences at an individual rather than structural level (Litosseliti, Gill, and Garcia Favaro 2019) and hence reduce the space for discussing and addressing systemic injustice and its relationship to discrimination and sexism in IT, but they also co-construct the gender order and perpetuate the seeming neutrality of the field, disappearing rather than making visible the fact that the field of IT itself is gendered, and women are excluded in complex ways. The contradictory accounts of these issues detailed in my findings may be explained by the fact that these women are not only aware of the gender order, but actively contest it too, and while not wanting to engage in the reification of stereotypes and hierarchical gender relations, they are confronted with these processes on a regular basis.…”

Language, gender, and sexuality

“…In the example of my work with Gill and Favaro (Litosseliti et al 2019), we reaffirm the importance of a renewed political voice and motivation for the LGS field, while responding to calls for new forms of feminist linguistic analysis in a postfeminist landscape (Mills 2012) that is, analysis that helps us understand the various shifting postfeminist representations of feminism and femininity (Lazar 2014) vis-a-vis 'the global neo-liberal discourse of postfeminism' (Lazar 2007: 154). In particular, we highlight the analytic value of the concept of postfeminism as a sensibility for the LGS field, where it remains under-explored, in contrast with cultural, media and gender studies, where it has become central to feminist scholarship (Gill 2007(Gill , 2016McRobbie 2009;Tasker and Negra 2007).…”

«Ez da mattetzen erakutsi». Azpeitia, hitanoa eta generoen arteko arrakala

“…Esaterako, Piller eta Pavlenko-ren (2004: 492) arabera, postestrukturalismo feministatik egiten diren hurbilketek kapital sinboliko forma gisa ulertzen dute hizkuntza: «Language use, in turn, is considered a situated process of participation in multiple and overlapping communities of practice, which may entail the negotiation of ways of being a person in that context». Beste ikerketa berriago batzuek soziokonstruktibismoaren, postmodernitatearen eta soziolinguistika feministaren esparrura ekarri dute hizkuntzaren eta generoaren arteko auzia (Holmes, 2007), edo postfeminismoa proposatzen dute horretarako tresna kritiko gisa (Litosseliti, Gill eta Garcia Favaro, 2019).…”