Historicizing Post-Discourses

Tanya Ann Kennedy

Description

Historicizing Post-Discourses explores how postfeminism and postracialism intersect in dominant narratives of triumphalism, white male crisis, neoliberal and colonial feminism, and multiculturalism to perpetuate systemic injustice in America. By examining various locations within popular culture, including television shows such as Mad Men and The Wire; books such as The Help and Lean In; as well as Hollywood films, fan forums, political blogs, and presidential speeches, Tanya Ann Kennedy demonstrates the dominance of postfeminism and postracialism in US culture. In addition, she shows how post-discourses create affective communities through their engineering of the history of both race and gender justice.
Acknowledgments
Introduction

1. Framing the Past: The Help and Mad Men as Posthistory

2. Of Girls and Men: Working the Historical Capital of Racist Patriarchy

3. “Plastic Woman”: The New Gender Essentialism

4. Do You See What I See?: Postfeminism and Colorblind Diversity

Conclusion: Juneteenth 2015

Notes
Works Cited
Index

Sujets

• Popular culture

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 02 février 2017
• Nombre de lectures: 2
• EAN13: 9781438464794
• Langue: English

Extrait

Historicizing Post-Discourses
SUNY series in Feminist Criticism and Theory

Michelle A. Massé
Historicizing Post-Discourses
Postfeminism and Postracialism in United States Culture
Tanya Ann Kennedy
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2017 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
www.sunypress.edu
Production, Cathleen Collins
Marketing, Kate R. Seburyamo
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Kennedy, Tanya Ann, author.
Title: Historicizing post-discourses : postfeminism and postracialism in United States culture / by Tanya Ann Kennedy.
Description: Albany, NY : State University of New York Press, [2017] | Series: SUNY series in feminist criticism and theory | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016031457 (print) | LCCN 2016058095 (ebook) | ISBN 9781438464770 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781438464794 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Post-racialism—United States. | United States—Race relations. | Feminism—United States. | Feminist theory—United States.
Classification: LCC E184.A1 K36 2017 (print) | LCC E184.A1 (ebook) | DDC 305.420973—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016031457
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter 1 Framing the Past: The Help and Mad Men as Posthistory
Chapter 2 Of Girls and Men: Working the Historical Capital of Racist Patriarchy
Chapter 3 “Plastic Woman”: The New Gender Essentialism
Chapter 4 Do You See What I See?: Postfeminism and Colorblind Diversity
Conclusion: Juneteenth 2015
Notes
Works Cited
Index
Acknowledgments
This book was written over several years with the generous emotional support of friends and family. It could not have been written without a sabbatical from the University of Maine, Farmington, and the first readers who wrote in support of my tenure application and sabbatical, Susan Lurie, Sarah Projansky, Allison Hepler, and Jennifer Tuttle. At SUNY Press, editors Beth Boulokos, Cathleen Collins, and editorial assistant Rafael Chaiken provided careful and supportive attention to the details of preparing the book for publication. It was a pleasure working with them. I would also like to thank Tonner Hann for help with the film stills.
One of the great benefits of writing the book has been sharing this experience with the members of my online writing group, especially the Rosemarys who unfailingly urged on this tortoise to the finish line. I relied on the supportive fellowship of Marchond, Chris, Karen, Nathan, and Laura more than they can ever know. Finally, I want to thank my mother and Karla for doing the hard work of caring for my grandparents who died while I was writing this book. It matters so much to my ability to finish a project like this that Burlie, and Verner, and Marlene always encouraged me to go out and do my own thing.
In gratitude to Herman Davis (1937–2013) for a kindness not forgotten.
Parts of chapter 2 originally appeared in Social Class on British and American Screens: Essays on Cinema and Television © 2016 Edited by Nicole Cloarec, David Haigron and Delphine Letort by permission of McFarland Company, Inc., Box 611, Jefferson NC 28640. www.mcfarlandpub.com .
Introduction
“Why would any woman today label herself a feminist?” This is the question that Susan Bolotin’s male colleague asks her in 1982. The question spurs Bolotin to go on a “personal odyssey” and informally interview young women about feminism. It also becomes the opening anecdote for her article, “Voices from the Post-feminist Generation,” the widely cited example of the first use of “postfeminist.” 1 Thirty years later, her colleague’s question still motivates discussion, but his original question was a rhetorical one: it was not an invitation for Bolotin to explain sexism. Her colleague assumes that feminism is a “label,” one that has gone “out of style” with the women of today. In short, her colleague was engaging in postfeminist discourse, implicitly acknowledging that women of a previous generation might have had good reason to be feminists, speaking of feminism as a brand to be worn or discarded, treating its advocates as out of touch and living in the past, and divorcing feminism from political ideology.
These assumptions are the rhetorical elements of a postfeminist discourse that has proliferated in the media-saturated environment of the twenty-first century. But postfeminism is just one of several “post” discourses that emerged across a number of different areas in media, literature, politics, and academic scholarship at the end of the twentieth century. Another closely related “post” to emerge in the 1980s is postracialism and, like postfeminism, it is a media-driven idea that since the election of President Obama has become increasingly used and increasingly interrogated.
Some of the pre-Obama constructions of postracialism are as instructive as Bolotin’s piece. The Oxford English Dictionary’s first record of the term “post-racial” is a 1971 New York Times article on the “post-racial South” and a new interstate compact, the Southern Growth Policies Board, politicians and scholars at Duke University were organizing. The reporter writes that the politicians and professors who met at an organizational session “believe their region of 60 million citizens has entered an era in which race relations are soon to be replaced as a major concern by population increase, industrial development and economic fluctuations” (26). While the Times reporter argues that the “optimism might be premature,” he also follows the logic of the organizers, who equate population and economic growth with the end of racial injustice. Here, the postracial is directly linked with the end of legal racial segregation in the South; the “racial” is both geographically and historically displaced from the central concerns of the social majority in the United States. The story is one of geographical recovery, reaffirming national unity through regional gentrification and economic investment.
Throughout much of the late twentieth century, however, the phrase “postracial” is not used, instead, the terms “post–civil rights” and “colorblind” are used to refer to the historical era following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. Scholars have argued that postracialism gives a twenty-first–century name to the commonsense ideology of colorblindness that entered the social and political mainstream during the Carter and Reagan administrations. 2
An example that establishes the rhetorical history of postracialism comes from George Will in the 1985 Washington Post article “A Black Politician in the Post–Civil Rights Era.” In this article, Will uses the language of colorblindness: “Most black leaders of the old civil rights groups now deny the principle that once animated those groups. It is the principle that race should be irrelevant to civic life and is inherently unacceptable as a basis for state action.” Will situates his argument within an anti–affirmative action assumption of a colorblind America, accusing black leaders of cowardice: “Blacks especially, but all other Americans, too, suffer from the shortage of black leaders, especially elected leaders who will say this: the principal impediment to the improvement of blacks’ lives is not racism; and changes in the behavior of individuals can do more than changes in government policy.”
In a move typical of white postracialism, Will quotes Glenn C. Loury, “a black professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School” to authorize his own assertions: “[Loury] … writes in The Public Interest that we live in the ‘post–civil rights’ era. The principal challenge is the ‘internal problems which lower-class blacks now face.’ The problems are internal in the sense that they ‘involve at their core the values, attitudes and behaviors of individual blacks.’ ” According to post–civil rights rhetoric, whites have moved into a colorblind era, whereas people of color have failed to make this historical transition.
When Will uses the supposed sentiments of civil rights leaders to criticize black politicians of the 1980s, he takes part in the conservative appropriation of civil rights discourse, noted particularly in the selective quoting of King to argue for race-neutral policies that dismantle civil rights legislation. It is not surprising that George Will and Ronald Reagan popularized the idea of the colorblind society in the 1980s. Reagan often made racist use of King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, to support his rollback of civil rights legislation and rejection of any new programs for racial equity. For example, Denise M. Bostdorff and Steven R. Goldzwig quote his 1986 radio address in which Reagan argues, “we’re committed to a society in which all men and women have equal opportunities