The turn to postfeminism has created a sense of paradoxical existence for women not least because what can be defined as postfeminism breaks up into different, and contradictory, strands (Projansky 2001) which include both a complete rejection and an altered continuation of feminism. This has produced a number of articles and books (McRobbie 2009), and some of the articles collected in Brunsdon and Spigel 2008, to name but a few) that engage rather suspiciously with the postfeminist turn, and Negra’s What a Girl Wants? continues in this line.

Negra is keen to point out that her concern is focused on a particular strand of postfeminist culture, one that she sees as more prevalent than others and that emphasizes an “expressive personal lifestyle” which is connected to particular consumption choices (4). In particular she focuses on the intersection of several US American representations that mark this particular postfeminist culture. She identifies four narrative concerns: first, one that relates to the return to family values, connected to a social fantasy of the hometown; second, one that looks at the management and crisis in experience of time for women; third, one that instigates the cultural ambivalence surrounding working women; and last, a narrative concern that revolves around issues of control and style.

These narrative concerns are primarily identified through textual analysis of media aimed at women, such as the chick flick and women’s magazines. Other media are also taken into consideration, including news stories, television drama series, and self-help and other books. It is the breadth of analysis, and the apparent recurring visibility of these narrative concerns, that add up to a compelling argument.

In the first chapter on the cultural retreatism of women, Negra compares fictional narratives with the representations of real-life stories such as that of Jennifer Wilbanks who escaped her impending marriage by staging her own kidnap. Negra highlights how Wilbanks was vilified as a consequence of her deviance from the postfeminist script which suggests that women’s desires are directed into the opposite direction, namely to the home and the hometown. Connected to this, Negra argues, is that women bear the burden of defining specific locales as hometowns: it is through their behaviour, as hometown girls who retreat and belong, that towns can be mystified as hometowns, even if their reality is decidedly different (38). Importantly, women in this context are conceptualised in sexual terms and are perceived to behave with propriety if they remain geographically monogamous rather than show signs of ‘geographical promiscuity’ (45).

Whilst this suggests a conservative movement that imagines woman again connected to house and hearth, Negra points out that these narratives also include a critique of the continued dominance of masculine values in the workplace, suggesting that retreatism might actually constitute a counter-revolution (24-25). This is exactly one of the contradictions inherent in postfeminist representations, and Negra goes on to highlight how these also permeate other narrative trajectories, although she seems to reject their more subversive potentials. Thus, in relation to the management of time, Negra writes:

The focus on these narrative concerns allows us to re-evaluate key tropes of postfeminist culture and emphasizes others which have previously been little mentioned (such as the deep connection between imaginings of the hometown, woman and the American South as representative for the whole of the USA). However, by focusing on narrative, Negra is not always able to capture the full complexity of textual representations, particularly when they are audiovisual. Aspects of the audiovisual text (such as colour palettes, framing and performance), which are central to the text’s polysemy, are overlooked. This means that some of the presented interpretations remain open to objection, undermining the convictions that the breadth of material establishes. Thus, Negra’s analyses, though insightful in the connections that she draws, often seem to close down the texts too much in order to highlight conservative politics, rather than investigating those elements that more fully contribute to the establishment of postfeminist paradoxes in which women find spaces of empowerment at the same time as they are returned to more traditional modes of existence.

Elke Weissmann, Edge Hill University