Core Response #5 - Sebastian

    A few days ago, I mentioned to a friend that I needed to write a blog post about post-feminism for this class. She jokingly responded, “You should write about post-feminism and Star Wars: The Clone Wars.” So, here we go; let’s talk about The Clone Wars (kind of). In fairness, I’ve seen probably less than half-a-dozen episodes of the show, so I’m not sure I’m really qualified to write about it at any great length. That said, however unintentionally, my friend’s suggestion did get me thinking about what a television show like The Clone Wars might have to offer in relation to the discourse surrounding post-feminism. 

    At the most basic level, all three of this week’s readings seemed to present post-feminism as a neoliberal betrayal of the feminist movement, especially as embodied by second-wave feminism. In “Post-Feminism and Popular Culture,” Angela McRobbie writes, “[P]ost-feminism positively draws on and invokes feminism as that which can be taken into account, to suggest that equality is achieved, in order to install a whole repertoire of new meanings which emphasise that it is no longer needed” (255). This seems to be one of the key issues with which all three readings grapple. Post-feminism presents itself in almost utopian terms, positing a world where gender inequity is no more, thereby making the husk that remains of feminism marketable as essentially an affect. As Sarah Banet-Weiser notes in “What’s Your Flava? Race and Postfeminism in Media Culture,” companies like Nickelodeon tap into “commodity-driven empowerment by targeting aspects of personal identity (such as gender and race) as a way to be inclusive” (203). Yet, to the best of their ability, these companies attempt to erase the actual specificities of lived experiences related to gender and race because to represent these specificities would potentially be unprofitable. A militant feminism that actively denounces continued manifestations of patriarchy (and patriarchy’s intertwinement with capitalism, white supremacy, colonialism, etc.) isn’t about to make Nickelodeon money. But the “feel good” and uncombative nature of post-feminism is.

    What I find striking about this week’s readings is the way post-feminism’s apparent utopianism becomes a central and contentious issue, especially in so far as it also implicates sex-positive feminists. Jess Butler’s “For White Girls Only? Postfeminism and the Politics of Inclusion” discusses at great length the different sides of the 1980s sex wars. On the one hand, the “protection argument” posits that “since women are constructed as objects for male pleasure from the start, the call for women’s sexual freedom renders their objectification invisible and further naturalizes their oppression” (38-39). On the other hand, the “sex-positive argument” suggests that “focusing on victimization and oppression… only furthers the perception of women as sexual objects” and ignores the ways in which “objectification works to constrain women’s sexual agency, exploration, and adventure” (39). While Butler doesn’t claim that sex-positive feminists are innately post-feminist, she does seem to have some reservations about the “positivity” of the sex-positive perspective. When writing more broadly about third-wave feminism, Butler notes that this movement was “meant to provide women with a comfortable, inclusive – and… fundamentally neoliberal – space where they can cultivate individual feminist identities without all the strident negativity of ‘old-school’ feminist activism” (42). Given how easily the shallow positivity of post-feminism can be used to serve the interests of capitalist hegemony, this concern seems far from unwarranted.

    Nevertheless, Butler’s comment made me wonder about the potential for television to be truly utopian when it comes to race and gender without falling into the commodifiable and disingenuous traps of the post-feminist and post-racial approach. In other words, is it at all possible for television to imagine a utopian world where gender and racial equality exist without going down the Nickelodeon route and essentially denying the real-world existence of vastly inequitable structures and systems for the sake of corporate interests? Which is where The Clone Wars reenters the conversation. Now, to be clear, The Clone Wars is not that show. Nor is the more recent Star Wars foray into television, The Mandalorian. While the Star Wars franchise’s depiction of race and gender could probably fill multiple volumes, suffice it to say that both The Clone Wars and The Mandalorian import many of the aforementioned inequitable structures and systems into their own world. Sometimes they seem to be aware of this and offer some form of critique or commentary, but just as often these systems and structures go relatively unquestioned. 

    Yet I can’t help but wonder about the potential of the narrative and world-building forms that manifest in Star Wars. On a conceptual level, the franchise’s universe has no real connection to our world or its political and social structures; it exists “a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.” As already noted, that doesn’t mean those structures don’t still get imported into that universe. Star Wars is, after all, still made by humans who exist in (and often benefit from) those very structures. But, theoretically, could the expansiveness of the Star Wars universe and its distance from our own universe give storytellers (and, indeed, fans) the opportunity to explore radically utopian futures without becoming post-feminist and post-racial? For instance, could it allow us to imagine the comfortable, inclusive, and sex-positive spaces that Butler associates with third-wave feminist thought without the attendant neoliberalism that she also identifies? And would those spaces be worth exploring in that context, or would they always be inherently naïve (and maybe even irresponsible) regarding the lived realities of the here and the now? 

    The more I think about it, the more I worry that this latter concern might be insurmountable. For one thing, my supposition imagines that a franchise like Star Wars isn’t controlled by corporate interests, but it obviously is. Still, I find it difficult not to be intrigued by the potential of this mode of storytelling. And I wonder if there are places where this is already being enacted. Perhaps in its better entries, Star Wars is already embodying some of this potential. I suspect that there are other properties that are less dominated by corporate interests where this mode of storytelling has been able to flourish even more. Likewise, I wonder about which forms of media best facilitate this mode of storytelling. I know members of my cohort who have spoken both about the potential and limitations of tabletop role-playing games. While I have never played them, I wonder if they even more so allow fans to shape and control these utopian imaginings.