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Relative Tensions

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Book cover Women in Neoliberal Postfeminist Television Drama

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Abstract

Postfeminism is not an ideological position or coherent theoretical framework that can be applied externally to the analysis of texts. Popular postfeminism is knowable only through its workings in the representation of gender in ‘postfeminist’ media texts. The introduction along with the rest of this book, therefore, seeks to identify and deconstruct a postfeminist sensibility within its source texts. It demonstrates that this postfeminist sensibility inflects representations of women from the Second World War and immediate post-war period. Because of television’s central role in the formation of cultural memory, it creates a lens through which women’s history and women’s historical identities are viewed in the present day. This postfeminist lens is thereby dehistoricised as an aspect of essential femininity and the politics of the present are cast onto the past.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    For an analysis of the depiction of the WLA in Foyle’s War, Backs to the Land and Land Girls , see Mahoney (2017).

  2. 2.

    For examples see Aldgate and Richards (2007); Summerfield (2009).

  3. 3.

    For examples see McRobbie (2009), Moseley and Read (2002), Moseley et al. (2017).

  4. 4.

    For clarity, when direct quotations are used, the author’s original spelling of postfeminism/post-feminism/post feminism will be retained. Otherwise, a standard spelling of postfeminism will be used throughout this book.

  5. 5.

    For a full discussion of the ways in which these series articulate postfeminism, see Moseley and Read (2002) and McRobbie (2004).

  6. 6.

    For further discussion of the implications of the relocation of postfeminism into the academy, see Whelehan (1995).

  7. 7.

    For an example of this, see Hoggard (2019).

  8. 8.

    For an overview of the use of ‘irony’ in advertising, see Abel (2012).

  9. 9.

    The concept of collective memory was first put forward by Hallbwachs (1992). See also Rothberg (2009).

  10. 10.

    For further discussion of this idea, see Hodgkin and Radstone (2003).

  11. 11.

    The Popular Memory Group was formed as a part of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham University (1979–1980) and, in reassessing Marxist historical scholarship, sought to ‘expand the idea of historical production well beyond the limits of academic history writing’ (Popular Memory Group 2011: 254).

  12. 12.

    A salient example is the backlash faced by those who choose not to wear a traditional red poppy for Remembrance Day in the UK, see Edwards 2018 for further discussion.

  13. 13.

    Historical distance is discussed in further detail in Chap. 4.

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  1. University of Liverpool, Liverpool, UK

    Cat Mahoney

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Mahoney, C. (2019). Relative Tensions. In: Women in Neoliberal Postfeminist Television Drama. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30449-2_1

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