the Female Body GOVERNING

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lisa blackman
One issue then is the extent to which the contradictions and fractured
themes through which “new femininities” are articulated within
the pages of these magazines represent an “unfixing of femininity.”
This suggests that new ways of being female, which the cultural industries
may be helping to produce, are indicative of the choice apparently
underpinning consumer culture more generally. As a critical psychologist
concerned with the “psychological,” no easy or straightforward
inhabiting of any new cultural categories or identities exists and the
unease, linguistic or otherwise, which is part of how categories function,
create hesitancies rather than any simple identification on the part of
readers or subjects (cf. Riley 2000). McRobbie herself, although celebratory
in tone, also points to the ways in which most representations are
raced, sexed, and classed, excluding different sexualities as “Other”
while representations of Black female subjectivities are relegated to
a “Black genre,” and class is almost entirely absent. The postfeminist
woman may stand alone, single, happy, working on her self-confidence,
and achievements in her relationships and the workplace, while the
stories of her sisters who cannot or who are unable to achieve such
success stand as cautionary tales, marked out as pathological and seen
to lack the psychological and emotional capacities to effect their own
self-transformation.
I maintain that the gaps, contradictions, and silences in these new
fictions of femininity can also tell us something significant about the
dilemmas that face women in the twenty-first century (Blackman, 2004).
That these dilemmas are also still very much regulated and mediated
by particular racialized, sexed, classed, and gendered discourses also
raises further questions about how to understand media consumption
beyond an active/passive dichotomy. Rather than viewing the contradictions
within and between representations as part of a fractured address
opening up more choice, the issue of what dilemmas are created, for
whom, and how these are resolved and made intelligible is an important
part of understanding how popular discourse functions in relation
to identities and subjectivities. These issues, which are concerned as
much with the reproduction of inequalities and oppressions, as with
increasing choice, are often glossed over in much of the work in cultural
studies, which makes particular assumptions about identity, popular
discourse, and the emergence of new kinds of subjectivity. We celebrate
at our peril when there is little real understanding of the complex ways
in which different individuals live those injunctions, which have become
part of the landscape (psychological and political) of how we think
about social and psychological change and the role that the project of
media and cultural studies may play in understanding these issues.