Problematizing the Postfeminist Gaze: A Critical Exploration of Young Women’s Readings of Gendered Power Relations in Advertising

This article explores young women’s engagements with gendered power relations embedded in advertising. Drawing on four case studies, we demonstrate how their readings of gendered ads are informed by postfeminist discourse, which, for all its contradictions, presents gender inequality as a thing of the past. Specifically, we illustrate and theorize the problematic workings of a postfeminist gaze directed at both models in ads and young women as readers of ads, with judgements shaped by postfeminist ideals and blind spots concerning intersections of gender, class, and race. We contribute to macromarketing scholarship by (1) illustrating how, in the context of gendered ads and young American women, gendered power relations and a postfeminist sensibility are both produced by and productive of gendered readers; and (2) highlighting the insidious nature and limitations of this sensibility informing young women’s lived experiences, engagements with media culture, and position in society.

“I their forger”

Chapter 5 explores Donne’s lyric poetry in British Library, Additional Manuscript 10309, a seventeenth-century miscellany prepared in a single italic hand. We investigate the manuscript’s eight heavily revised Donne poems, read—and perhaps compiled, even adapted—by Margaret Bellasis. This chapter attends to manuscript features such as titles and verbal variants in these poems, focusing largely on the highly variant versions of “Breake of day” and “The Will.” The verse adapter seems to deploy a consistent pattern of revision that emphasizes sincere love and dilutes bitterness, while still delighting in Donne’s witty premises. These supposedly corrupt texts (very corrupt indeed by traditional editorial standards) provide evidence of a sensitive literary mind at work within Donne’s poems. Through its detailed analysis of verbal adaptations, this chapter contributes a vital study to continuing conversations about early modern women as readers and writers.

Chivalry, Reading, and Women's Culture in Early Modern Spain

The Iberian chivalric romance has long been thought of as an archaic, masculine genre and its popularity as an aberration in European literary history. Chivalry, Reading, and Women’s Culture in Early Modern Spain contests this view, arguing that the surprisingly egalitarian gender politics of Spain’s most famous romance of chivalry has guaranteed it a long afterlife. Amadís de Gaula had a notorious appeal for female audiences, and the early modern authors who borrowed from it varied in their reactions to its large cast of literate female characters. Don Quixote and other works that situate women as readers carry the influence of Amadís forward into the modern novel. When early modern authors read chivalric romance, they also read gender, harnessing the female characters of the source text to a variety of political and aesthetic purposes.

Mapping modernity: The feminine middlebrow and the belle époque

Part of the remit of French Cultural Studies is surely to study the ‘littérature de grande consommation’ largely ignored by more canonical critical approaches, especially in France, but vital to the shaping of ideas and values. This article explores the aesthetics and function of the middlebrow novel ( roman de mœurs, roman d’idées) at the belle époque, the period when technology and cross-class demand for entertaining and instructive fictions converged to produce a golden age of publishing. The main focus is on middle-class women as readers; contrary to modernist orthodoxy, I argue that the mainstream, formally conventional ‘middlebrow’ novel, at least in the hands of women authors, could perform a radicalising function, bringing ‘new woman’ plots into respectable drawing-rooms, offering pleasurably immersive stories that quietly confronted readers with the gap between Republican values and the reality of sexual inequality, and welcomed modernity as an age of potential for women.