Angela McRobbie’s contribution to contemporary feminist cultural studies cannot be understated. Since her early research on girls and young women’s cultural practices McRobbie has exposed masculine biases embedded in subcultural studies. This hopeful defiance continued within her pioneering analysis of young women’s magazines. In Feminism and Youth Culture: From Jackie to Just 17 (1991), McRobbie constructed a progressive cultural shift that reflected gains in new sexual freedoms and power for young women. Popular culture could offer a hopeful space for the negotiation of new assertive and radical femininities; as more politicized young women entered the cultural industries, further shifts could disrupt the grip that hegemonic genders and sexualities have on women’s lives. Unfortunately this work omitted an in-depth engagement with a production/ critical culture industry perspective that could consider how global capitalism, neo-liberalism, and post-feminism act to constrain the radical potential of the cultural industries. Instead of a diversity of sexualities, femininities, and feminisms, British popular culture got Bridget Jones’ Diary, Katie Price and What Not to Wear along with its racialized and classed hetero-gendered baggage. Despite valiant attempts in feminist media studies to excavate radical potential, pleasure and agency from these disciplinary moments in ‘women’s popular culture’ McRobbie has finally admitted that something has gone very wrong. In ‘The Aftermath of Feminism’ she rebels against her over-optimistic past to incorporate new Butler-inspired theoretical terrain and revisit feminist psychoanalysis in her “survey [of] changes in film, television, popular culture and the world of women’s magazines” (6). Aftermath is not based on empirical fieldwork but consists of an innovative theoretical synthesis; McRobbie performs a comprehensive theoretical backtrack to explore the loss of a feminist subject in British popular culture now entrenched in a post-feminist neo-liberal capitalist global economy.

Consisting of six chapters, McRobbie articulates several interconnected arguments in her exploration of contemporary operations of gender, power and popular culture. She argues for the existence of a ‘double entanglement’ in the sophisticated disarticulation of feminism within British society. Feminism has not been rejected but has been co-opted into institutional life, converted into an individualistic discourse that effectively substitutes feminism, and re-establishes traditional ideas about young women in order to minimise the possibility of a new women’s movement. This new regime of gender power requires the consent and participation of young women in the rejection of feminism. Young women are offered sexual and social recognition in spheres of employment, education, consumer culture, and civil society, as long as young women successfully ‘choose’ to embody acceptable hetero-femininities which require an active revulsion of feminism. Popular culture offers crucial sites for the disarticulation of feminism to act as “spaces of attention” (6) or outlets in which resurgent patriarchal power can effectively exert control over young women’s lives and reassert dominance in a subtly displaced manner. For instance, processes of self-discipline in the fashion-beauty complex can be epitomized by make-over television programmes like What Not to Wear and Ten Years Younger in the re-establishment of social hierarchies of class, ‘race’ and gender which sees women competing and critiquing each other with an ever increasing degree of vilification.

McRobbie’s arguments are obviously indebted to some excellent critical scholars of post-feminist popular culture – including Joanne Hollows, Jackie Stacey, and Rosalind Gill – and the strengths of the book lie in McRobbie’s translation of social and psychoanalytic theory – Butler, Bourdieu, and Rabine – to a cultural studies audience. Personally I found myself taking sharp in-breaths as McRobbie spun out an increasing sense of loss, pessimism, and lack of confidence in new generations of young women. As a scholar of queer feminist (sub)cultural resistance in contemporary Britain, the lack of empirical attention to the voices and experiences of young women who explicitly identify with feminism, collective radical politics and non-heterosexual lifestyles – evident in riot grrrl and Ladyfest – highlighted the partiality of Aftermath. McRobbie dismisses the potential of subcultures that are constantly threatened by corporate co-optation: “in a sense subcultures, with the promise for young people of escape and possibilities of dissolving a self in favour of collectivity and communality, have also become things of the past” (121). McRobbie closes down the possibilities for young women’s agency and resistance in the articulation of queer and feminist cultural practices and remains fixated on a negative impression of young British women. In terms of scholarship on queer and feminist cultural negotiations the work of Susan Driver (2007) and Mary Celeste Kearney (2006) offer other productive ways of thinking about how girls and young women can actively resist and rework dominant cultural meanings to produce other ways of becoming intelligible subjects that disrupt heterosexist logics.

Overall the book outlines key tensions in the presence of post-feminist popular culture in a western socio-political climate to produce an engaging and accessible text essential for the cultural studies classroom, girl studies scholars and personal bookshelf. Once again McRobbie has emerged as a confident feminist scholar of gender and culture, unafraid of making theoretical U-turns and taking risks.

Julia Downes, University of Leeds