Spectacular Femininity: the unattainable standards of postfeminism | Coffee break research at LSE

Postfeminism is an upbeat, celebratory cultural address to women, and promise, that they are past or post- the need for feminism, that they are already individually empowered and can ‘have it all’, ‘do it all’. Drawing on her book, Fashioning Postfeminism: Spectacular Femininity and Transnational Culture, Simidele Dosekun will tell the stories of women she interviewed in Lagos, Nigeria, who practise a spectacularly feminine style and what their lives and attitudes tell us about postfeminism in Africa. She discovers that the postfeminist emphasis on happy affects and choice and ‘can do’ leave little imaginative and emotional space for complaint, critique or resistance. Its encouragement to women to work on themselves, to work on their attitudes and their confidence, to ‘lean in’, obscures the material conditions that it requires.

Simidele Dosekun is Assistant Professor in the Department of Media and Communications at LSE.

🔸 Simidele Dosekun, Fashioning Postfeminism: Spectacular Femininity and Transnational Culture (June 2020), https://www.amazon.co.uk/Fashioning-P...

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