Core Response #3-Tiana Williams

The declension approach to the history of feminism that allows for the positioning of  postfeminism as some vague answer to all of our "feminist problems," begins with an overall  misunderstanding of second-wave and third-wave feminism, and how the trajectory of each movement has brought us into this current landscape of postfeminism as a "neoliberal discursive formation" (Butler, 36). This misunderstanding allows for a certain level of shock to emerge when we witness occurrences such as the exposed footage of the NCAA's March Madness weight room disparities, that have been made into a sort of postfeminist spectacle—where the contemporary cultural consciousness regarding feminist issues are disrupted by such imagery, and then restored to its previous "postfeminist" spirit with a simple apology from the NCAA and the unveiling of a new weight room for the women’s basketball teams. Situating this particular uncovering of inequality in discussion with Butler's investigation into postfeminism by way of rapper Nicki Minaj as a figure that has the potential to "rupture postfeminism's discursive boundaries" (Butler, 36), I kept wondering to myself what does it mean to be 'empowered' within popular conversation? Moreover, how can the conflation of "girl power" and "flava" as a supposed space of diversity (as Sarah Banet-Weiser points out in their article) enfranchise the youth if there is an overall unclear understanding of the history and functions of feminism to begin with?  

As a young girl, I recall singing the theme song for the Flava dolls commercials with my sisters, naively viewing the dolls as "cool" and “different—so excited to the point where my sisters and I would point to the TV and plead with my Mom to get us one of the dolls for Christmas. The racial diversity that was presented in this doll line was not that much different than the Bratz dolls or even the MyScene dolls that had been released a couple years prior; however, the major difference between the three doll companies that attracted my sisters and I to the Flava Dolls in particular was the component that relied on a "hip, cool, urban, "postracial" style" (Banet-Weiser, 214). From the companies' slogan "What's Your Flava?" to the RnB sound that the theme song employed, the dolls appeared to be something we could relate to. Similarly, networks like Disney Channel and Nickelodeon heavily utilized "commodity-driven empowerment by targeting aspects of personal identity (such as gender and race) as a way to be inclusive" (BanetWeiser, 203) and attract our attention, a prime example of this strategy being the Disney Channel original movie, The Cheetah Girls. Along with the diverse cast and hit songs such as "Girl Power" and "Cinderella" that emphasized independence and self-determination, the film's urban setting and representation of young girls struggling with their individual and collective identity indeed takes "diversity into account" (as Banet-Weiser coins with inspiration from Angela McRobbie) and it does so by leveraging race but positioning it within ambiguity rather than specificity (as Banet-Weiser examines with Nickelodeon programming). In speaking of racial ambiguity, I'd like to note that I am specifically understanding/utilizing the phrase in relation to Blackness as a historically distinct racial marker; for instance, the ethnicities of characters Galleria and Chanel are completely disclosed within the film, and done so perhaps to situate the specifics of the stereotypes represented by their family structures on screen as well as each of their light brown complexions (Galleria is Afro-American and Italian, while Chanel is Puerto Rican, Colombian, and Dominican I think  they say in the film?? Sorry, it’s been a minute since I’ve watched it). The other two characters, Dorinda and Aqua, are never spoken about in terms of ethnicity in the film, although it is assumed that Dorinda is simply white and Aqua is black (specifically for Aqua, this assumption comes with visual stereotypes as well). The inclusivity and diversity strategy used with the cast of The Cheetah Girls brought my sisters and I back to the TV screen each time they dropped a movie or an album, but in terms of ‘empowering’ us to the point where we felt we could one day be "just like a Cheetah Girl," this wasn’t entirely the case, as questions of race and insecurities with complexion still arose in our minds, in which we realized we weren't really being included, represented, or empowered since none of the girls on the screen actually looked like us. While I personally do not urge a type of representation “where visibility in the media takes precedence over “real” politics” (Banet-Weiser, 208), I do think it is important to discuss how even with these “diverse” representations, the decision to predominantly portray Blackness as light complexioned curly haired young girls, speaks volumes to the falsehood of postracialism.   

In short, while the songs, the urban space and representation of struggles with identity in The Cheetah Girls glued my sisters and I to the TV in those particular moments, the postfeminist and postracial commodity strategy of the film was a disservice to us as we continued to grow and still experience an array of microaggressions and uncomfortable situations in reality, and then when we looked to Disney Channel or Nickelodeon for solace, our insecurities were confirmed as we we were unable to specifically locate ourselves within these representations and walk away from the viewing experiences with any sort of  "political certainty" (Banet-Weiser, 203). This struggle with representation that I’m sure many dark-skinned girls have had to endure, is a combination of “the displacement of feminism as a political movement" (McRobbie, 258) and the postracial assumptions that contemporary TV widely possesses.