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Gay’s book can be read as a backlash to the lack of diversity in mainstream feminist representation today. Gay’s work is memorable for its self-deprecating humour, extensive knowledge and awareness of its place within the tradition of African-American popular texts, and her anecdotal discussion of her own tragic experiences alongside the politics of popular culture. The collection provides a wealth of considerations and critiques of modern film and television texts (such as Django Unchained and the Real Housewives series), and embraces intersectional representations of blackness and femininity. Having enjoyed a meteoric recent surge in popularity, scholar and cultural critic Roxane Gay has released a book of essays entitled Bad Feminist: Essays (2014). But unlike the 1990s wave of feminism, which heavily criticised mainstream representations of women in film and television, these new works of feminist literature not only accept these representations, but actively generate them. Films like Fatal Attraction (1987) or Basic Instinct (1992) exemplify the thesis of Faludi’s work, by recreating the femme fatale figure as a modern successful career woman whose fixation on men is a pathological and murderous compulsion, presumably caused by her failure to fulfil traditional gender roles of matrimony and motherhood.Ī similarly galvanising moment is occurring now in popular gender politics and contemporary cultural texts.
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The media, said Faludi, was responsible for stigmatising the identity of independent career women and accusing them of having ‘abandoned’ their families for themselves, implying they had supposedly wrought havoc on the heteronormative family unit by doing so. Last in this wave was Susan Faludi with her book Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women (1991), which asserted that the media of the 1990s was moving against many of the gains of 1970s second-wave feminism. Unlike Paglia, Wolf rejected popular culture and its representation of women, bemoaning the billion-dollar industry that devalued women into a false capitalist path of spiritual and emotional fulfilment through make-up and plastic surgery. Wolf was an Ivy League graduate who condemned the harmful practices that the beauty and cosmetic industry propagated against women. Then came Naomi Wolf and her polemic The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women (1990).
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She memorably claimed, ‘If civilization had been left in female hands, we’d still be living in grass huts’. Paglia’s infamous book Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990) took an ‘anti-feminist’ stance and argued that human nature was inherently morbid and violent. There was a moment in the early 1990s where a wave of new female writers entered the public feminist conversation.įirst, there was the unenviable ‘dissident feminist’ Camille Paglia, whose percussive and chattering style on American television pitched her against other well-known feminist voices like Susan Sontag and Germaine Greer.