Description
Book SynopsisIn
Feel-Bad Postfeminism, Catherine McDermott provides crucial insight into what growing up during empowerment postfeminism feels like, and outlines the continuing postfeminist legacy of resilience in girlhood coming-of-age narratives.McDermott''s analysis of
Gone Girl (2012),
Girls (20122017) and
Appropriate Behaviour (2012) illuminates a major cultural turn in which the pleasures of postfeminist empowerment curdle into a profound sense of rage and resentment. By contrast, close examination of
The Hunger Games (20082010),
Girlhood (2014) and
Catch Me Daddy (2014) reveals that contemporary genres are increasingly constructing girls as uniquely capable of resiliently overcoming and adapting to unforgiving social conditions. She develops an affective vocabulary to better understand contemporary modes of defiant, transformative and relational resilience, as well as a framework through which to expand on further modes that are specific to th
Trade ReviewThis lively, readable book makes a vital contribution to contemporary literature about gender, media and culture. Building on a growing body of work on the affective dimensions of everyday life, Catherine McDermott asks how postfeminism
feels, charting a shift from the can-do, aspirational tropes of the 1990s and early 2000s to something more complex and ambivalent.
Feel-Bad Postfeminism deserves to be widely read! -- Rosalind Gill, City University of London, UK
Table of ContentsSeries Editors’ Introduction Introduction
Part I: Impasse 1. Feel-Bad Postfeminism in Gillian Flynn’s
Gone Girl 2. Postfeminist Impasse and Cruel Optimism in Lena Dunham’s
Girls 3. ‘Being without a cliché to hold onto can be a lonely experience’: Generic Isolation in
Appropriate Behaviour Part II: Resilience 4. Suffering, Resilience and Defiance in
The Hunger Games 5. Relationality and Transformation in
Girlhood 6. Feel-Bad Femininity in
Catch Me Daddy Conclusion References Index
