F

rom the late 1990s, my

attention, as a feminist
sociologist, was repeatedly
drawn to media images
intended to provoke some
imagined group of (always
humourless) feminists. These images
appeared, in celebratory fashion, to
reverse the clock to some earlier pre-
feminist moment, albeit in a tongue-
in-cheek way. The prevailing use of
irony aimed to exonerate the culprits
from the crime of offending what was
caricatured as a kind of extreme, and
usually man-hating, feminism (while
implicitly acknowledging that other,
more acceptable, forms of feminism
had entered the realms of common
sense).
The famous Hello Boys
Wonderbra billboard advertisement
was the most obvious example of this
shift. The rhetoric of this image
indulged the deviant pleasure of being
politically incorrect with force and
energy. The old feminism was
addressed implicitly, as women who
sought to limit the pleasures of the
rest of us. Thank goodness, the
image suggested, we can now, once
again, enjoy looking at the bodies of
beautiful women with impunity. With
its use of postmodern irony, the image
sought to produce a generational
divide: the younger female viewer is
not made angry, unlike her older
counterpart. She appreciates the
multiple layers of meaning and, most
importantly, she gets the joke.
Since then, this new kind of
sophisticated anti-feminism has
become a recurring feature across the
landscape of both popular and
political culture. It upholds the
principles of gender equality, while
denigrating the figure of the feminist.
We see this approach in various
guises: the gentle upbraiding of the
feminist figures in Bridget Joness Diary;
the rise of lap-dancing clubs; the
sexist jokes of Ricky Gervais, Russell
Brand and Jonathan Ross; the
ubiquitous hen parties; the
proliferation of lads mags; the
sexualisation of young girls; and the
retro-styled garden barbeque staged
during the Obamas visit to the UK.
At its most extreme, there is the
spectacular and unapologetic hate
speech of Silvio Berlusconi, who also
claims to have supported the career
ambitions of young glamorous
women (while showering older women
who challenge him with torrents of
verbal abuse). These are all examples
of something socially significant
under the surface of contemporary
cultural life.
I see this phenomenon as a form of
symbolic power which can be
understood as post-feminist. There is
a double entanglement, across the

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public policy research SeptemberNovember 2011 179
Beyond post-
feminism
Outlining the terms of a new sexual contract,
Angela McRobbie traces the trajectory of feminism and
sophisticated anti-feminism across the last two
decades of political and cultural change.
socio-political universe, as feminism is
taken into account in order that it can
be understood as having passed away.
What once may have had some role
to play on the historical stage is no
longer needed: feminism is associated
with the past and with old and
unglamorous women (like Germaine
Greer in the UK or Alice Schwartzer
in Germany). This encourages a dis-
identification with feminism on the
part of young women. Indeed, it is a
mark of the cultural intelligence of
young women who renounce or
disavow the need for a new sexual
politics to this extent, young women
have been expected to become both
quiet and quiescent. This makes the
feminist backlash referred to by
Susan Faludi (2006) even more
complex. Post-feminism registers, time
and again, the seeming gains and
successes of the second wave of the
womens movement, implying that
things have changed, so feminism is
now irrelevant.
It is important to ponder how and
why this has happened. Sociologists
Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello
(2007) have shown how contemporary
capitalism has replenished itself by
taking on board many of the
criticisms levelled at it by the left,
especially those associated with the
student movements of the late 1960s
and early 1970s. Their argument
could be extended to include some of
the critiques provided by second-wave
feminism. The writers associated with
the Italian neo-Marxist Operaismo
school (such as Hardt and Negri) offer
a different perspective, suggesting that
the left in their case, the workers
movement won victories on the
factory floor, forcing capitalism to
make a range of concessions. This
included permitting workers a degree
of autonomy and even self-expression
within what had been the unremitting
grind of labour discipline.
Similarly, it could be argued that
through sheer force of struggle, the
womens movement made some
inroads in addressing the scale of
gender inequalities which existed
across society from the late 1970s.
The novelty in each of these
influential arguments, by Chiapello
and Boltanski and also by Hardt and
Negri, is that some grounds are found
for countering the often relentless
varieties of left pessimism. However,
what weakens them is their
anachronistic inattention to gender,
sexuality, the body, and the distinctive
spheres of power which circulate
primarily outside the field of work
and the factory floor.
Instead, I would recast the debate
about the current status of women in
terms of what Foucault famously calls
day-to-day governmentality, rather
than simply focusing on the
metastructures of capital and labour. I
would argue that the recontouring of
debate about contemporary young
womanhood (as having benefited from
the struggle for gender equality) marks
out the horizon of a more profound
hegemonic process. Under this
formulation, the granting of some
degree of freedom or liberation for
(western) women actually becomes an
expression of a new form of capture
or control. This is not a question of
one step forward and three back
rather, it is the creation of a new stage
of entrapment made possible through
a spurious and superficial sense of
equality, as the philosopher Jean-Luc
Nancy has described.
public policy research SeptemberNovember 2011 180

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There is a double
entanglement, across the socio-
political universe, as feminism
is taken into account in order
that it can be understood as
having passed away
Political culture, popular
culture and young women
Remaking modern young
womanhood in this way, so as to
suggest that feminism has indeed been
taken into account, required the
active participation of media and
popular culture. However, such
sources of cultural power do not act
simply or mechanically. Instead, the
complex intersections and flows of
media and political discourses must be
examined. These spread and
sometimes intersect in unpredictable
ways, across the whole social fabric.
Looked at in this broadly
Foucauldian manner, we see patterns
of similar vocabularies and clusters of
expressions and ideas. Nikolas Rose
(1999) has subjected the whole
grammar of New Labour to close
examination, finding a new focus on
self-reliance, individualisation, self-
entrepreneurship, talent and
competition. This was most evident in
Charles Leadbeaters book, Living on
Thin Air (2000), which carried an
endorsement by Tony Blair himself.
The argument I proposed in The
Aftermath of Feminism was that young
women occupy a key position in the
passage to a new form of neoliberal
governmentality indeed, they
became exemplary subjects
(McRobbie 2008). One reason for this
is that within the realms of sex and
power, women (in their subordinate or
dependent status) have long been
deemed particularly malleable or even
docile subjects. There is nothing new
about casting the feminist, or indeed
the lesbian, as the archvillain whose
anger and hostility stems from some
personal inadequacy. What changed
in the new neoliberal era, embarked
upon by New Labour, was a joining
up of forces across the media and
political life. This had the effect of
intervening in the space where
feminism had previously done its
work, making young women in
particular the object of intense
attention.
In one example, in light of concern
about the rise of eating disorders, the
government sat down with editors of
magazines aimed at women as well as
the world-famous feminist Susie
Orbach to try to establish a code of
practice discouraging the use of size-
zero models in fashion and beauty
images. Few feminists would dispute the
value of such an event, but this kind of
gathering is quickly forgotten by the
editors and journalists themselves.
Goodwill and social concern is often
short-lived. A few months later, the
glossy magazines were once again
showing pictures of models with
skeletal legs. And the underlying issues,
rather than being interrogated with
depth and rigour, are sidelined so
long as government steps in every so
often at times of moral panic.
Under this new gender regime,
popular and political discourse is
repeatedly framed along the lines of
female individualisation. Rather than
stressing collectivity or the concerns of
women per se, this replaces feminism
with competition, ambition,
meritocracy, self-help, and the rise of
the alpha girl (much loved by the
Daily Mail). The young woman is
addressed as a potential subject of
great capacity. As Anita Harris
(2004) puts it, she is a can-do girl. In
a proliferation of faux-feminist
gestures, girls are celebrated and
supported for their potential and for
what they can do in the world.
Across the field of corporate culture,
initiatives to support the global girl
become a mark of compassion and
concern as well as ethical
responsibility.
Charging this attentive spotlight or
what Deleuze would call a luminosity,
which lights up and frames the images
of the highly successful girl
1
is a subtle
process of marketisation, whereby the
potential of young women comes to be

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public policy research SeptemberNovember 2011 181
public policy research SeptemberNovember 2011 182

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attached to a new form of consumer
citizenship. This governing strategy,
designed to give a bigger place to
consumer culture in the politics of
everyday life, recognised the power of
media and popular culture in forging a
world of cohesive values. But it was
also a neoliberal strategy of offloading
the work of government onto a market
that is given more leeway to shape the
needs of the population, in this case
young women. Then, when things go a
bit too far, government steps back in to
pull free-market forces back into line.
This can be seen in David Camerons
focus on the sexualisation of childhood
and the range of fashion and beauty
products targeted at small girls, often
under the age of five.
The new sexual contract
My focus of interest in The Aftermath of
Feminism was in what I termed a new
sexual contract. This was a
hegemonic process aiming at what
Stuart Hall would call a kind of
(gender) settlement regarding the
status and identity of young women.
They were to be encouraged to
achieve in school, at university and in
the world of work and in each of
these spheres they could rightly expect
norms of gender equality to prevail.
Government would (at that time at
least) provide support and incentives
to achieve and to aim for the financial
independence of the monthly salary.
This marked a shift away from
economic dependence on the male
breadwinner model, promising
women greater freedom while also
ideally removing from the state the
burden that followed marital
breakdown or divorce.
The young woman could also
expect, as a result of her
hardworking outlook and capacity, to
gain some tangible sexual freedoms
in the form of access to leisure
culture and to a sex life which need
not be tied to marriage and having
children. It was also to be marked by
a new climate in which the sexual
double standard was to be removed,
so that the young woman could
heartily enjoy sexuality with impunity
indeed, she could also now get
drunk and even behave badly, within
certain limits (witness Bridget Jones
tumbling out of a taxi into the street
after a long night in the wine bar).
So long as she did not become a
single mother reliant on welfare, she
could gain access to sexual pleasures
which in the past had always been
the privilege of men (hence the new
female market for soft pornography
and the growth of so-called porn
chic). This new sexual contract tied
women to enjoying the freedom to
consume, to earning her own wage
(triggering the enormous explosion of
the female fashion and beauty
corporations), while also offering her
the rather nebulous idea of
consumer citizenship.
What was omitted was
encouragement to a more active form
of political participation. During the
Blair years, political life was
increasingly linked with the pursuit of
a narrow professional career in
Westminster, best left to those few for
whom this was a life-choice. Grass
1 The philosopher Gilles Deleuze uses the term luminosity to reflect on what he perceives as an intensifica-
tion of Foucaults notion of visibilities.
It was a neoliberal strategy
of offloading the work of
government onto a market
that is given more leeway to
shape the needs of the
population
roots or community politics and
wider democratic participation in
public life and civic society was
downgraded in a context where self-
improvement and the need for
constant makeovers were considered
the best kind of extracurricular
activities for young women. Many
commentators and social scientists at
the time referred to the decline of
political engagement. My point is that
within the sphere of this new sexual
contract, the idea of a revived
womens movement was somehow
unthinkable: it was certainly not
something which the so-called Blair
babes could encourage, given the
distaste the prime minister was said to
have for the f word. This is what I
mean by the de-democratising effect
of feminism undone.
After post-feminism?
Coalition gender politics
There is a double-edge, and indeed a
danger, to the still-patriarchal status
quo invoking (not to say unleashing)
young womens capacities, giving rise
to a series of tensions or social
anxieties. It would be fair to say that
Tony Blair was haunted by the f
word, because various forms of
feminism were indeed within his orbit
(from his involvement in the Labour
party, perhaps even in his marriage).
One does not need to be a Derridean
to know that in endlessly conjuring up
a demon that must be extinguished (in
this case feminism), that demon
demonstrates something of its lingering
afterlife and its ghostly power.
Womens power to contest the
terms of political power is substantial
and for this reason it is constantly,
though often in a behind-the-scenes
way, subjected to interventions
designed to limit its potential.
Patriarchal power is stealthily handed
over to the self-punishing regime of
the fashion and beauty industry,
which has the added value of
promoting the idea that women self-
police and have become their own
toughest judges. When this apparatus
is combined with a cultural milieu
which disparages the feminist as a
man-hating harridan, the wind is
taken out of the sails of the young
woman who wishes somehow to vent
her anger. How is it possible in the
public sphere of political discourse to
speak out angrily as a woman
objecting to, for example, the kind of
sexual hate speech at which someone
like Berlusconi is so adept, without
seeming to be anti-men? When the
older feminist does so, well, that is
because she is of that generation.
In the Coalition government headed
by David Cameron we see something
slightly different. On the one hand, he
has a modern wife and his public
image suggests that he is a hands-on
father. But taken unawares, he betrays
his own total unfamiliarity with what
feminism has meant in political life, by
referring in the House of Commons to
Labour MP Angela Eagle derogatorily
as my dear. In this moment he
showed just how intact and unchanged
sexual hierarchies are within the
present government. Likewise
education secretary Michael Gove, in a
recent BBC Newsnight discussion about
the summer riots, found himself
repeatedly referring to his opponent,
Labour deputy leader Harriet
Harman, as Harriet or dear Harriet.
He did this so repeatedly that it
became visible to everyone watching as
an unmistakeable and old school
(Oxford Union) way of reducing a
substantial female politician to
(symbolically at least) the status of an
over-enthusiastic schoolgirl.
Other examples demonstrate just
how much ground is lost to women
when active feminism goes into
abeyance, as it has done so in recent
years, for all the reasons I have
described: the statements of Ken

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public policy research SeptemberNovember 2011 184

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Clarke on a supposed disparity
between different levels of
seriousness of rape, or the claim by
David Willets that the lack of social
mobility among young men in
contemporary Britain is partly
accounted for by so-called middle
class girls taking advantage of the
expansion of university places.
Without a strong and vocal
womens movement with all the
factions and internal disputes
characteristic of a popular movement
the clock does indeed turn
backwards. There is a rise in the de-
crime-ing of rape and sexual
violence; there are new permutations
of domestic violence, such as the rise
of so-called boyfriend violence, and
surprise, surprise there are
attempts to undo the terms and
conditions of womens reproductive
freedoms. At the same time, in the
climate of post-feminism, where
feminism has been taken into account,
there is an instrumentalism of sexual
politics by many western governments
in their pronouncements to less
progressive regimes. The message is
clear: that women in the west have
indeed won their freedom. They can
dress as they please, enjoy
pornography if that is their choice
and fall drunkenly out of taxis
without repercussions.
Angela McRobbie is professor of
communications at Goldsmiths, University of
London, and a leading feminist thinker and
author.
Boltanski L and Chiapello E (2007) The New Spirit of
Capitalism, Verso
Faludi S (2006) Backlash: The Undeclared War Against
American Women, New York: Broadway Publishers
Harris A (2004) Future Girl: Young Women in the Twenty
First Century, London: Routledge
Leadbeater C (2000) Living on thin air, London:
Penguin Books
McRobbie A (2008) The Aftermath of Feminism: Gender,
Culture and Social Change, London: Sage
Publications
Rose N (1999) Inventiveness in Politics, Economy
and Society, 28(3)