Postfeminism #3.2

The postfeminists who want to go back to the way life was or imagined before feminism have ideologies that predate feminism and thus mirror a postmodernism that is pre-modernism. In "backlash," Maria Damon explains the idea that postfeminism does not mean an end of feminism when she says, "Perhaps a useful way to think of postfeminism is to assume that "post," as in "post-Romantic," "post-Enlightenment," "post-modern," "post-colonial," does not point to a complete rupture with the term that follows the hyphen so much as a genealogy that implies revision or strong family resemblance." However, she also claims that the term "third wave feminism" is more accurate a term than postfeminism, although I believe that the idea of successive waves is more of a chronological statement in a sense--yet, some do use the terms interchangeably.

Even if postfeminist does not reflect an ideological backlash against feminism, the fact is that general public does not identify or appreciate the traditional idea of feminism:

In 1998, a Time/CNN poll revealed that a mere 28% of the women surveyed believed feminism was relevant to them personally , and 43% actually held an unfavourable opinion of feminism, compared to 29% less than a decade ago ( "Public Opinion Turns Against Feminism." Issues and Controversies. 25 May 2001: Facts On File News Services. 7 Mar. 2002 http://www.2facts.com/ICOF/Search/ib501250).

Not only do women distance from themselves from the concept of feminism, as Susan J. Douglas points out, many women actually blame feminism for their problems because "it has made millions of women unhappy, unfeminine, childless, lonely, and bitter, prompting them to fill their closets with combat boots and really bad India print skirts." (Manufacturing Postfeminism, http://www.alternet.org/story/13118/) In teaching, in fact, I have found this to be an opinion held by my female students and they find postfeminism as a term to be appealing, without knowing what it meant, and in fact it would end up being a backdoor for them to better understand the role of feminism in getting them to where they were (just being able to go to college, for example).

Douglas also claims that postfeminism is a term propogated by the right and reflects a culturally conservative shift since the 1980s. I am not sure if the term itself can be blamed, however, the negative perception and backlash against feminism might be the result of the conservative turn in America, and might open the door for theories which extend/challenge feminism (especially that postfeminism that idealizes the period pre-feminism.) However, this doesn't explain the usefulness of postfeminism as a concept, especially in terms of explaining the field of composition studies that reflects or should reflect or challenge feminism.

I promised to get to a discussion of composition studies and postfeminism--I really need to move this definition of postfeminism into this promised discussion, but it will have be something I will do later!