‘Feminism? That’s So Seventies’: Girls and Young Women Discuss Femininity and Feminism in America’s Next Top Model

Abstract

In this chapter, I examine the particular configuration of feminist and postfeminist consciousness characterizing the way many young women think and speak today. Gill (2006) has recently discussed what she terms the ‘postfeminist’ sensibility, a sensibility that incorporates feminist ideals, but also their rejection. McRobbie similarly discusses this paradox, wherein feminism is both assumed by the general population, and actively refuted and rejected as a belief system (McRobbie, 2009a, p. 1). In the postfeminist sensibility, feminism is rejected by those who should ‘know better’, and thereby the rejection itself is made ‘naughty’ — which, in effect, sexualizes it or makes it pleasurable; and this leads to a certain fetishization of ‘anti-feminist’ symbols of femininity such as an objectified sexualization of women’s bodies, a militantly ‘feminine’ appearance, etc. There is a contradiction in the way that what are seen as the ideals of second-wave feminism — women’s empowerment, autonomy, and ability to choose work, sexual and emotional lifestyles — are at the same time taken for granted, criticized, lauded and coldly rejected (McRobbie, 2007, 2009a, 2009b).