Another show that I find to be really interesting in the context of feminism/post feminism is Buffy: The Vampire Slayer. While I think the whole show is really interesting in its various portrayals of female empowerment (Buffy as the most powerful, but being a singular female whose strength can't for most of the show also be within other girls, Willow as gaining a lot of strength in a form of synthesis from being around another female) which are sometimes pretty problematic (Buffy/Spike, anyone?), I think that in terms of the consumerist, post-feminist issues brought up by the articles, the final episode of the show is really interesting. In it, Buffy/Willow find a way to turn every potential slayer in the world into a real slayer, giving them all the mystical strength that before had only existed in one (or at most two) girls at any given time. This, in many ways, seems like it could be an endorsement of one of the modes of postfeminism brought up by Negra - the equality model. It doesn't quite fit, though, because not every female is a potential slayer, so it doesn't quite make feminism un-useful to the girls (especially since evil is running rampant). Certainly it doesn't fall into the same category as Sex in the City in terms of its presentation of consumerism, but I think it's an interesting counterpoint in the sense that it deals explicitly with issues of female empowerment and the issues of femininity in the current "post-feminist" landscape.

Now please excuse a slight diatribe on the issue of why both my above post and many academic articles about media tend to bother me.

I've always been intrigued by the approaches taken to media criticism in relation to contemporary culture. Angela McRobbie seems to fairly soundly criticize from a textual standpoint the positive image of feminism supposedly shown in television shows such as Sex in the City (as is argued by Diane Negra). Negra, however, is not really arguing that the show is unabashedly feminist or trangressive or subversive - rather, she specifically says in the conclusion that "some of the series' limits need to be linked to a lwoered sense of expectation for what constitutes subversive or trangressive media content in an era of great suspicion about feminism." These two things hint at my fairly fundamental problem with a lot of this criticism - it seems to care significantly more about how images of the female are represented rather than how they are received. Certainly, representation is important in that it delimits and largely structures what interpretations are feasible, but it does not operate in a deterministic model. McRobbie's article even seems to grant this point by arguing at various points that a particular interpretation exists, but is flawed because of (x).

And I feel like that is fairly fundamentally at odds with what seems to generally be the goal of many stances/movements/people, which is to work towards a shift in the way people act/view/believe. These nearly entirely textual models of analysis seem to largely dismiss the way that viewers wind up interpreting images from a particular show. Certainly pointing out who is actually able to watch these shows and the tours/etc that result is part of it, but I think the emphasis is somewhat misplaced - in short, I feel like many times feminist/anti-classist/anti-racist/etc readings are more concerned with the representation of the struggle than with the way that representation is reacted to. Yes, I know that it's one of the only things that can be talked about without extensive ethnographic research/heavy speculation, but it still tends to irk me a bit - especially when I know that my friends are largely split on Sex in the City, as half read it ironically and half don't. And while this may seem like an incidental point, McRobbie seems to really clearly point out that she sees fan/alternative readings as problematic because of their relationship to pleasure is (in her mind) not unruly or chaotic or deeply ambivalent (a point I find strange for various reasons, not the least of which is that she assumes that a cultural studies approach cannot be constantly problematized).