Abstract
Reviewed by: Sarah Riley, Aberystwyth University, UK
In one of my favourite South Park episodes, adults fail to understand a new youth craze: Pokémon. Not Pokémon Go, just Pokémon; I know, this dates me. At the time, I was the Dad’s girlfriend to a seven-year-old Pokémon expert and I totally got the South Park adult response – I too did not understand it. But, I was also young enough to identify with the joke about adults that followed: If adults don’t understand what young people are into, they think it must be wrong. Cue hilarious South Park episode.
I was reminded of my experience of watching that South Park episode while reading Dobson’s Postfeminist digital cultures. Dobson too has a Janus perspective, giving the reader both the adult and young person’s perspective. In her analysis of postfeminist digital cultures in the Anglophone West, Dobson gives the reader reason to identify with the adult. After all, it makes sense to see over-sexualisation when young women perform sexualised acts online for public consumption or to be concerned about self-esteem when girls turn to camera and ask the internet world to judge their appearance.
But, Dobson invites us to think beyond these initial, often affective responses, suggesting instead a form of slow research comprised of careful, reflexive analysis. Her analysis focuses on how the wider socio-cultural context enables postfeminist digital practices to make sense and what is enabled for the young women who practice them. In so doing, she shows the complexity of contemporary femininity being negotiated in digital cultures. She also shows the limits of postfeminist sensibility, for example, in terms of who can participate or where the “can do girl” discourse that permeates postfeminist logic breaks down.
Dobson uses case studies, such as young women’s sexualised performances on MySpace or girls YouTube videos entitled “Am I pretty or ugly,” to explore female self-representations in social media. Dobson frames her analysis within a postfeminist sensibility that brings together a set of understandings about contemporary femininity, aspects of which may be more or less salient in different contexts (for further details see Gill (2007); Riley et al. (in submission)). Dobson highlights three aspects of postfeminism. First, an understanding that women’s empowerment is enabled through their sexuality and compliance with cultural ideals of beauty, while constructing this compliance as driven by individual choice and autonomous desire. Second, postfeminist sensibility is riven with contradictions, which makes participation difficult since it is impossible to know if you are “doing it right,” yet failure to get it right can lead to judgement and significant social stigma. Third, postfeminism reinforces the idea of women’s bodies as being legitimately open to view and judgement through the understanding that women are choosing to be looked at. The culmination of these aspects of postfeminism produces a “looked at ness” and a “message of … visibility as a source of, or means to, power and social and material value for girls and young women” (p. 159). This frames the core question of the book: “How does one present one’s self to an audience of both peers and a potentially wider public in the context of the complex pushes and pulls, pressures, and contradictions … of media, culture, femininity, and girlhood?” (p. 51).
Trying to answer this question through an examination of rapidly-changing digital cultures makes Dobson vulnerable to being outdated. She addresses this issue, acknowledging that MySpace, an important focus in her analysis, has passed its moment. Despite this, Dobson makes a convincing case for being relevant, arguing that while media platforms change in popularity and structure, the message of visibility and exposure remains constant. Thus, analysis of these digital spaces allows a useful commentary about culturally valued femininities, the limits of postfeminist femininities and developing digital media conventions.
The first chapters offer a rigorous exploration of thinking about media representations of women, gaze, postfeminism, “sexualisation of culture” debates, women’s participation in digital media, and contemporary constructions of femininity. This work brings together a range of relevant and interesting theories and empirical studies, offering a concise review of female-mediated representation including a historical review of feminist thinking in the area. Although an important overview, and essential reading for someone new to the field, it was in the analysis chapters, where the strengths of the book lay for me. Moving beyond reviewing what went before, Dobson’s analysis chapters provide a route map to where feminist analysis should be going.
In her chapter on “digital dreamgirls,” Dobson describes the way young women use a set of media conventions in MySpace such as posting images and short videos associated with soft porn (e.g. playboy bunny images), describing themselves with lists of contradictory and uncompromising personality traits, and posting images of themselves in sexualised poses. Dobson suggests considering these as sites for complex representational practices. For example, in imaging themselves as the girl in the playboy image, the girls constructing these MySpace sites are both active subjects and imagining themselves as objects to be viewed, producing the kind of oscillation between subject and object that seems to characterise participation within postfeminist cultures (Riley, Evans, & Mackiewicz, 2016).
Moving away from moral panic discourses, Dobson asks if these sexualised representations are one of the few sanctioned ways young women can express desire. Or that we could understand the need for young women to present themselves as loud and uncompromising in terms of them buying into feminist-informed cultural messages that reject traditional femininity associated with passivity and silence. And don’t contemporary self-help discourses, that construct women as both psychologically flawed and the source from which they can fix themselves, provide the conditions of possibility for these lists of contradictory psychological traits?
Dobson also highlights the way femininity is constructed as artifice on the MySpace sites she analyses. Such representations construct authenticity – an important aspect of postfeminist identities – not through a coherent, core female self, but through the ability to perform and play with femininity. Here, I was struck by the parallels between Dobson’s analysis and a colleague’s student who described postfeminist pop star Nicki Minaj as “so fake she’s real.” Producing authenticity through demonstrating an understanding of femininity as artifice shows the complexities of postfeminist cultures that young women negotiate, and Dobson takes her reader carefully through some of the implications. Reading this chapter, I see Paris Hilton in a new light – a postfeminist rebel without a cause – iconic to the young women Dobson describes because she is seen as authentically playing with her heterosexy image, indifferent to being disapproved of by parents, and the embodiment of ideal postfeminist femininity: slim, blond, white, hyperfeminine, wealthy and consumer oriented. Suddenly I see Paris Hilton through young women’s eyes – I understand she is cool.
Paris Hilton also embodies another aspect of postfeminist femininity: an outwardly confident, “can do” girl. The pressures of “can do girl” are explored in subsequent chapters, where Dobson analyses sites where postfeminist subjectivity is less successfully taken up. Here she focuses on YouTube videos “Am I pretty or ugly,” or those that narrate psychological distress stories that come under titles such as “my bullying story.” Dobson explores these videos in terms of the affective responses they evoke – the horror, shock, sadness. Responses that are evident in a range of media commentators, but also in Dobson herself.
In much the same way, Rachel O’Neil (2016) argued that academics are psychologically invested in the optimistic narrative of inclusive masculinity theory, Dobson argues that a cultural investment in notions of individualist, autonomous, confident, self-reliant women is seen in our distress/concern responses to videos such as “Am I pretty or ugly.” The girls in these videos are not “can do” postfeminists, but demonstrate an interconnectedness and dependence on the other for their sense of self. Thus, rather than seeing these videos as a “lack of self esteem or an excess of self focus” (p. 133) as Dobson describes the dominant response to such videos, Dobson argues we can see them as showing us both our investment in the “can do” individualist postfeminist narrative, and our resistance to what these young women are doing with these videos: making explicit the scopic economy in which young women live. Dobson argues that these videos make obvious the sexist standards to which women and girls live and in so doing challenge the individualist choice and empowerment discourses of postfeminism. But, there is further complexity in Dobson’s analysis. Although these videos challenge the rugged individualism celebrated within postfeminist sensibility, they simultaneously comply with other aspects of postfeminism. In particular, articulating narratives of pain normalise gender distress within postfeminism. Again, here we see the underlying effect of the self-help narrative that constructs women as inherently flawed.
Postfeminist digital cultures is a tour de force of contemporary feminist thinking. It shows the complexity of negotiating postfeminist sensibility and provides a route map for developing thoughtful, nuanced analysis that offers new ways of understanding young women’s participation in digital cultures that is both empathetic and critical. This route map involves recognising the logic of negative affective responses to aspects of youth culture, and then moving through these by considering the context that produces the logic behind youth practices and the capacities for action enabled by participating in these practices. The result is a genuinely original perspective. Dobson offers her analysis as an example of a call Adrienne Evans and I made for cultural analysts to examine our own reactions to cultural phenomena as part of our scholarship (Evans & Riley, 2014) and Postfeminist digital cultures provides an exceptional example of the utility of this approach.
Dobson offers a pathway out of moral panic discourses, but understanding does not necessarily mean celebrating. Throughout Dobson also highlights the limitations and risks of taking up postfeminist subjectivities. Several directions for further work are also suggested. In particular, the need for intersectional analyses of postfeminist subjectivities to create a focus on “who,” as well as “how,” young women can take up new sexual subjectivities. I also note the thread of self-help discourse running through Dobson’s analysis, and its role in holding up the architecture of postfeminism. This seems an important direction being developed by researchers interested in postfeminist sensibility.
I also think the limits of cultural studies analyses are highlighted in this book. With a focus solely on textual analysis, I missed what it was like for the girls and young women who made these texts. Dobson imagines some of the motivations. For example, she notes that the “Am I pretty or ugly” videos do not get taken down by the owners, leading to her surmising that the girls making these videos are not as damaged about them as media commentators suggest. But we do not get a sense of the affective component of digital culture participation. I was left, for example, wondering about the thrill of exposure and risk that the MySpace girls might feel filming themselves in their family-home bedrooms pulling the zip down of their shorts as if in a porn shoot. It seems to me that is not just symbolic rebellion, but affective and embodied. These point to a need for future research to bring textual and first person research together. But for now, Postfeminist digital cultures gives us a deep insight into the complexity of online participation. It offers a nuanced, thoughtful and sympathetic analysis of the girls and young women negotiating postfeminist sensibility, while remaining critical of the cultural conditions of possibility that frame their negotiations. It is a must read for scholars – established and developing – interested in postfeminism, contemporary female subjectivity and digital cultures, while any of the analysis chapters should elicit a great student seminar discussion.