This important and timely collection examines the troubling proliferation of anti-feminist language and concepts in contemporary media culture.
Edited by Michele White and Diane Negra, these curated essays offer a critical means of considering how contemporary media, politics, and digital culture function, especially in relation to how they simultaneously construct and displace feminist politics, women’s bodies, and the rights of women and other disenfranchised subjects. The collection explores the simplification and disparagement of feminist histories and ongoing feminist engagements, the consolidation of all feminisms into a static and rigid structure, and tactics that are designed to disparage women and feminists as a means of further displacing disenfranchised people’s identities and rights. The book also highlights how it is becoming more imperative to consider how anti-feminisms, including hostilities towards feminist activism and theories, are amplified in times of political and social unrest and used to instigate violence against women, people of color, and LGBTQIA+ individuals.
A must-read for students and scholars of media, culture and communication studies, gender studies, and critical race studies with an interest in feminist media studies.
Michele White, "An Introduction to and Critique of Anti-feminisms"
1. Yvonne Tasker, "Vernacular Feminism: Whiteness, Femininity, and Gendered Discourses of Independence in 1920s Popular Fictions"
2. Allison Page, "‘A Matter of Survival’: The National Welfare Rights Organization, Black Feminism, and a Critique of Work"
3. Jacqueline Pinkowitz, "Policing Integration, Punishing Sexual Freedom: Reactionary White Male Violence and the Politics of Rape in Civil Rights Exploitation Films"
4. L.S. Kim, "The Illegibility of Asian American Feminism On Screen"
5. Leigh Goldstein and Meenasarani Linde Murugan, "Something Else Besides a Feminist: Little Fires Everywhere and Hollywood Anti-feminism"
6. Suzanne Leonard, "White Feminism and White Tears as Bad Objects"
7. Mila Zuo, "Making Kin with Whiteness: Feminist Seductions of the Unwatchable"
8. Jessalynn Keller, "Beware the Dancing Communist: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Snap-lash, and the Politics of Embodied Joy"
9. Anna Everett, "Natural Hair Matters: On Autobiographical Black Girlfriend Selfie Culture and Social Media"
Biography
Michele White is a Professor of Internet and New Media Studies in the Department of Communication at Tulane University. She is author of The Body and the Screen: Theories of Internet Spectatorship (2006), Buy It Now: Lessons from eBay (2012), Producing Women: The Internet, Traditional Femininity, Queerness, and Creativity (2015), and Producing Masculinity: The Internet, Gender, and Sexuality (2019). She co-edited the Feminist Media Histories issue on Genealogies of Feminist Media Studies and has written extensively about online cultures, including persistent digital authorizations of misogyny and hate. She is currently completing a monograph, Touch Screen Theory: Digital Devices and Feelings.
Diane Negra is a Professor of Film Studies and Screen Culture at University College Dublin. A member of the Royal Irish Academy, she is the author, editor, or co-editor of twelve books including Interrogating Postfeminism: Gender and the Politics of Popular Culture (2007); What a Girl Wants? Fantasizing the Reclamation of Self in Postfeminism (2008), Gendering the Recession: Media and Culture in an Age of Austerity (2014), and Imagining "We" in the Age of "I": Romance and Social Bonding in Contemporary Culture (2021). She serves as Chair of the Irish Fulbright Commission.
"Amidst the increasing visibility of online and offline misogyny, misogynoir, and anti-feminism, we are so fortunate to have this volume to help us navigate these terrains of struggle and violence. White and Negra have gathered an impressive group of scholars who approach anti-feminism from a variety of angles, from whiteness to Black feminism to embodied joy. The book is well-organized, compelling, and a crucial contribution to feminist scholarship."
Sarah Banet-Weiser, Professor, Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania, and Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, University of Southern California, USA
