Transnational Engagements: Postfeminist Articulations and Critique

It has now become common practice in sociolinguistic and discourse studies on gender to keep a concerted focus on the ‘local’, in order to avoid the pitfalls of making sweeping universal claims. The notion of... [ view full abstract ]

It has now become common practice in sociolinguistic and discourse studies on gender to keep a concerted focus on the ‘local’, in order to avoid the pitfalls of making sweeping universal claims. The notion of “communities of practice”, for instance, has gained much analytical purchase in gender and language studies by emphasizing on local linguistic practices. However, for understanding broader patterns of globally mobile discourses, attention on local dynamics alone is insufficient. Taking as my focus the widespread neoliberal discourse of postfeminism in global media circuits, I suggest the usefulness of adopting a bifocal analytical gaze, which while locally situated, casts its eye simultaneously on discursive patterns globally. This bifocal lens undergirds a transnational engagement of the discourse.

Based on postfeminist advertising data gathered in Singapore (used as a vantage point), I discuss three kinds of transnational engagement, which have theoretical and analytical implications for the study of postfeminist media discourse. Firstly, although postfeminism – a “sensibility” (Gill 2007) which celebrates women’s empowerment and autonomy, while securing (hetero)normative femininity – originated, largely, from the UK and USA in 1980s, in its current form, it can hardly be said to be a ‘western only’ discourse or a western discourse simply imposed on to non-western contexts. Rather, put into circulation by international media corporations, the flows are transnational – from the west to the east, and also from the east to the east. The transnational flows have implications for the discursive hybridity of postfeminism (for example, a mixing of a New York ‘bad grrrl’ attitude alongside a Japanese kawaii femininity). In fact, any dichotomous ‘local-versus-global’ distinction collapses, with the ‘local’ inserted into, and constitutive of, the ‘global’ transnational discourse that is postfeminism. Relatedly, a second kind of transnational engagement offers target audiences identification with a cosmopolitan gender identity. This is based on such articulations that range from signifying whiteness as ‘modern’ and ‘universal’ to the accommodation of national and racial diversity, as well as the use of racially ambiguous pan-Asian models to index cosmopolitanism. The third kind of transnational engagement points to the effects of critical inertia partly brought about by the global discourse of postfeminism, which fosters an attitude of dis-engagement from the relevancies of local gender politics. In concluding, I refer to possibilities of discursively intervening through locally situated performances of critique that engage or ‘speak’ back to these widespread global discourses.