The Girls of Zeta: Sororities, Ideal Femininity and the Makeover Paradigm in The House Bunny

Abstract

The reconstruction of femininity has become one of the dominant themes of popular culture in the twenty-first century, and nowhere is this more evident than in the prolificacy of makeover narratives in postfeminist media culture. Stéphanie Genz and Benjamin A. Brabon have located the emergence of the makeover paradigm as a ‘crucial feature of postfeminism whereby the “idiom of reinvention” can be applied to every aspect of our social world’.¹ Brenda Weber has noted the specifically gendered audience of makeover narratives, positioning them as a ‘mainstay of advice columns and entertainment literature targeted at women’.² While Weber emphasizes the marketing strategies that media cultures employ when extolling the makeover paradigm as an empowering force that affirms ‘the pleasures and possibilities of transformation, rejuvenation, and alteration for everyone’,³ Estella Tincknell illustrates the problematic relationship between female agency and reconstructions of femininity:

Perhaps it should not be surprising that the achievement of a limited social and political autonomy in the twenty-first century for (admittedly, mainly white, middle-class, Western) women has been paralleled by a renewed discursive emphasis on femininity as a pathological condition, this time recast as a relentless drive for physical perfectibility.⁴