Gender, Feminism, and Heroism in Joss Whedon and John ...

meanings and goals of both terms (Anderson & Stewart, 2005; Borda, 2009; Bronstein,
2005; Shugart, Waggoner, & Hallstein, 2001). In reality, third wave feminism owes a
great debt to the second wave. After all, the battles fought by second wave women are
responsible for even the possibility of women in the high-paying jobs depicted in the
previously mentioned television shows, not to mention that some of the women writing
these critiques undoubtedly would never have entered academia without their feminist
foremothers fighting for educational opportunities. Furthermore, third wavers still share
some of the same goals from the second wave, such as equal pay for equal work and
reproductive freedom (Heywood & Drake, 1997; Owen, et al., 2007). In spite of what
should be obvious connections to the second wave, the same media forces that once
bolstered negative stereotypes of second wave feminists put forth the idea that this new
wave of feminism works against the previous one (Bronstein, 2001), an idea that was
perpetuated by some women who were especially critical of the second wave for the
reasons listed above.
Popular discourses of post-feminism inform the above construction. The term
“post-feminism” first appeared in the conservative climate of the 1980s and implies a
time when feminist activism is over (Shugart, et al., 2001). While post-feminism has
been defined differently by different scholars, Angela McRobbie (2004) and later
Rosalind Gill (2007) have described it as a sensibility that takes previous feminist
victories for granted while choosing to ignore the still prevalent systems that made those
victories necessary in the first place, thus appreciating but rejecting feminist ideologies.
Self-absorption and shifts in media constructs toward obsession with the body as a site of
26