For White Girls Only?: Postfeminism and the Politics of Inclusion

Abstract

Since its inception in the early 1980s, "postfeminism" has become a common appellation for the attitudes and behaviors of young women in the contemporary United States. The article assesses how postfeminism is connected to the discursive deployment of sexuality in the late modern era by examining the socio-historical context out of which postfeminism emerges, reviewing various definitions of postfeminism, and offering a conceptualization of postfeminism as a neoliberal discursive formation. After briefly analyzing the existing scholarship on postfeminism, particularly the ways in which this body of literature privileges a white middle-class, heterosexual subject, the article proposes an intersectional approach to postfeminism in order to more fully understand how postfeminist discourses reproduce inequalities of race, gender, and sexuality, and offers some preliminary thoughts about pop star Nicki Minaj's potential to symbolically rupture postfeminism's discursive boundaries.