Supplemental Post #3- Rojeen

This week’s readings feel tangential to the theme from a few weeks ago on representation in television. In Butler’s piece, she offers a genealogy of feminism, going through the first, second, and third waves to elucidate the innerworkings of postfeminism. Butler writes, “And, just as it does for white women, postfeminism requires its nonwhite participants to reject political activism in favor of capitalist consumption and cultural visibility.” This sentence resonated with how I feel about inclusive representation in TV and on the big screen because representation is often limited for certain people or women of color who capitalize off hegemonic narratives that are exploitative (or even groundbreaking by disrupting certain tropes), yet ultimately contribute to neoliberalism. Is it really progressive if people or women of color are represented on TV if they push the cultural and capitalist commodity of feminism? I too fall for commodity feminism, purchasing garb that symbolizes my political stance while also understanding I contribute to capitalism by doing so. And while feminism/postfeminism often feels progressive in its dispelling of gender norms, Butler writes, “the women of color featured in the above representations clearly embody and enact postfeminism: they embrace femininity and the consumption of feminine goods; they espouse a vocabulary of independence, choice, empowerment, and sexual freedom; and they construct themselves (or are constructed by others) as heterosexual subjects.” The requirements of postfeminist discourse and manifestations on TV are to maintain the status quo by selling the feminist ideal without actually challenging the entangled systems of oppression.