The Slut That Wasn’t: Virginity, (Post)Feminism and Representation in Easy A

Abstract

Drawing on the work of Angela McRobbie, Rosalind Gill and Christina Scharff identify a form of double address within postfeminist culture, suggesting that ‘what is distinctive about postfeminist culture is the way in which a selectively defined feminism is both “taken into account” and repudiated’, and that this constitutes a ‘double entanglement [which] facilitates both a doing and an undoing of feminism’.¹ As ‘postfeminism’ is a complex and fraught term, weighted with contradictory and confusing meanings and definitions, for the purposes of this chapter, I employ the construction (post)feminism as an indicator of such cultures of ‘bothness’ which situate themselves as a part of and apart from feminism. The (post)feminist cultural text takes a selective approach not only to feminism as a political position and cultural history but also to related cultural narratives, such as understandings of sexuality, and politically fraught generic forms such as the romantic comedy or rom-com. Such texts demonstrate a selective approach to feminist sensibilities, selecting certain aspects of normative models of gender and sexuality to interrogate, while validating others. In this chapter, I discuss one recent example of such texts, Easy A (2010), which provides a useful example of the ways in which cultural texts operate along these (post)feminist lines, offering neither a clearly defined progressive response nor a straightforwardly conservative reaction to ideas around sexuality and empowerment.