Pop-Feminist Narratives

Emily Spiers explores the recent phenomenon of ‘pop-feminism’ and pop-feminist writing across North America, Britain, and Germany. Pop-feminism is characterized by its engagement with popular culture and consumerism; its preoccupation with sexuality and transgression in relation to female agency; and its thematization of intergenerational feminist discord, portrayed either as a damaging discursive construct or as a verifiable phenomenon requiring remediation. Central to this study is the question of theorizing the female subject in a postfeminist neoliberal climate and the role played by genre and narrative in the articulation of contemporary pop-feminist politics. The heightened visibility of mainstream feminist discourse and feminist activism in recent years—especially in North America, Britain, and Germany – means that the time is ripe for a coherent comparative scholarly study of pop-feminism as a transnational phenomenon. Pop-Feminist Narratives constitutes the first attempt to provide such an account of pop-feminism in a manner which takes into account the varied and complex narrative strategies employed in the telling of pop-feminist stories across multiple genres and platforms, including literary fiction, the popular ‘guide’ to feminism, film, music, and the digital.