Postfeminism in Context: Women, Australian Popular Culture, and the Unsettling of Postfeminism 9781138894655, 9781315179872, 9781351717656, 9781351717649, 9781351717632

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Postfeminism in Context

Postfeminism in Context studies the representation of women in Australian popular culture over the past three decades to locate postfeminism in a specific time and place. Margaret Henderson and Anthea Taylor argue that ‘postfeminism’, as a critical term, has been too often deployed in ways that fail to account for historical and cultural specificity. This book analyses Australian popular culture – chick lit novels; ‘dramedy’ television shows; women’s magazines; YouTube beauty vlogs; self-help manuals; and newspapers – to reveal the tensions, contradictions and ambiguities that have always been constitutive of postfeminism, including in Australia. Examining how these popular forms intervene in dominant conversations about contemporary Australian femininities, Postfeminism in Context maps the ways in which various aspects of Australia’s history and national identity have shaped its postfeminism. While Henderson and Taylor identify some of the limited postfeminist tropes and patterns of representation evident in comparable locales, they also find that Australian popular culture has responded to feminism in a much more hopeful way. Adding some much-needed cultural specificity to the ongoing debate around this loaded term, Postfeminism in Context is essential reading for those interested in Australian popular culture, feminism, and the gendered politics of representation. Margaret Henderson lectures in literary studies at the University of Queensland. She has published extensively on feminist culture and contemporary women’s writing, including a book-length study of Australian feminist cultural memory, Marking Feminist Times. Anthea Taylor is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney. She is author of three books in feminist literary and cultural studies, including Celebrity and the Feminist Blockbuster.

Feminism and Female Sexuality

Postfeminism in Context Women, Australian Popular Culture, and the Unsettling of Postfeminism Margaret Henderson and Anthea Taylor

Postfeminism in Context Women, Australian Popular Culture, and the Unsettling of Postfeminism

Margaret Henderson and Anthea Taylor

First published 2020 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 Margaret Henderson and Anthea Taylor The right of Margaret Henderson and Anthea Taylor to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Henderson, Margaret A., author. | Taylor, Anthea, 1972- author. Title: Postfeminism in context : women, Australian popular culture, and the unsettling of postfeminism / Margaret Henderson and Anthea Taylor. Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “Postfeminism in Context argues that ‘postfeminism’, as a critical term, has been too often deployed in ways which fail to account for historical and cultural specificity. Through an analysis across Australian popular culture across three decades – chick lit novels; ‘dramedy’ television shows; women’s magazines; YouTube vlogs; self-help manuals; and newspapers – we find, not the simple disavowal of feminism commonly seen to constitute postfeminist media culture, but a much more complicated, and in many ways more hopeful, picture. Rather than seeing popular culture’s attempts to make sense of feminism as inevitably limited or politically reactionary, as is common, our analysis foregrounds the tensions, contradictions and ambiguities that have always been constitutive of postfeminism. Building upon recent scholarship which questions the critical efficacy of postfeminism, we argue that in Australian media, rather than being seen as a thinly veiled form of antifeminism, postfeminism is best conceptualised as a form of popular feminism – marked by both constraints and possibilities. Inevitably, given its transnational nature, we do find some of the core postfeminist tropes, themes, and narratives circulating in Australian popular culture, but that is not all we find. Ultimately, we conclude that Australian postfeminism represents a transitional stage between second wave feminism and the full emergence of a new, as yet unnamed form of feminist politics, which can operate within (and possibly resist) consumer capitalism and neoliberalism. Providing a nuanced account of the varied ways in which feminism has been taken up in Australian media, Postfeminism in Context is essential reading for those interested gender, feminism, and the politics of representation” – Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2019028222 (print) | LCCN 2019028223 (ebook) | ISBN 9781138894655 (hardback) | ISBN 9781315179872 (ebook) | ISBN 9781351717656 (adobe pdf) | ISBN 9781351717649 (epub) | ISBN 9781351717632 (mobi) Subjects: LCSH: Feminism and mass media–Australia. | Feminism–Australia. | Popular culture–Australia. Classification: LCC P96.F462 A844 2019 (print) | LCC P96.F462 (ebook) | DDC 302.23082–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019028222 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019028223 ISBN: 978-1-138-89465-5 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-17987-2 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Wearset Ltd, Boldon, Tyne and Wear

Contents

Acknowledgementsvi

Introduction: postfeminism in and out of context

1

1 Chick lit: novels of postfeminist independence and aspiration

26

2 Television dramedies: refiguring gendered intimacy and postfeminist kinship on the small screen

57

3 Women’s magazines: dreamscapes of postfeminist abundance90 4 YouTube beauty vlogs: intimate publics and postfeminist confidence and care

123

5 Self-help books: calculating magic as postfeminist everyday philosophy

155

6 Political journalism: women leaders, constrained power, and the rhetoric of post-gender

187



Conclusion: Australian postfeminism as popular feminism

226

Index232

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to Alison Bartlett, Frances Bonner, Melissa Harper, Graeme Turner, and Alix Winter for reading drafts of this book. Your insights were crucial to making this project come to fruition. We are also grateful to Joanna McIntyre and Alexa Appel who each read a chapter and provided valuable commentary. Thanks also to Krystine Howes and her clients at Mahogany Hair Design, Brisbane, for their generous insights regarding women’s magazines and for supplying an excellent archive of glossies. Margaret would like to acknowledge the support given by the University of Queensland’s Institute for the Advanced Study in the Humanities Faculty Fellowship scheme, and research support from the School of Communication and Arts. Anthea would like to recognise the supportive research environment of the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney. We also wish to acknowledge the support of Alexandra McGregor, Gender Studies Commissioning Editor at Routledge, who supported this project from its initial stages, and Eleanor Catchpole-Simmons for seeing it through to production. Finally, Margaret and Anthea would like to thank each other for their patience, generosity, commitment, and that most necessary of qualities for co-authoring: humour.

Introduction Postfeminism in and out of context

In the contemporary Western academy, studies of postfeminism seem to be everywhere – from law and education to health, psychology, and organisational studies.1 Without doubt, though, it is within feminist media and cultural studies that postfeminism appears to have gathered most traction. However, thus far only brief attention has been given to postfeminism’s historical and cultural specificity, that is, how it plays out differently in particular contexts. In Postfeminism in Context: Women, Australian Popular Culture, and the Unsettling of Postfeminism, and to help address this elision, we focus on Australian popular cultural texts (fiction, television series, women’s magazines, new media, self-help literature, and newspapers) between 1996 and 2018 to delineate an Australian postfeminism. As we demonstrate throughout this book, Australian postfeminist culture is comprised of the representational spaces – what we term ‘semioscapes’ (to which we return) – in which feminism, neoliberalism, and the ‘everyday’ woman bump into each other, sometimes morph, and ­sometimes fracture, in postfeminism’s attempt to represent and answer existential and political questions for contemporary Australian women. We argue that Australian postfeminism, as befitting the compound nature of the term, does share some tropes with general postfeminist discourse, however, it is characterised more by its divergence. In particular, rather than articulating a feminist disavowal or an anti-feminism, or even a sense of feminism’s ‘pastness’ – key qualities commonly attributed to postfeminism – a far more positive relationship between feminism and ­ popular culture emerges. Indeed, we contend that Australian postfeminism articulates a popular feminism that simultaneously marks the impact of second wave feminism, and the beginnings of an as yet unnamed broadbased feminist politics.2 Australian postfeminism is, therefore, a transitional cultural formation that is cause for hope rather than despair. Although postfeminism is a highly contested signifier, within feminist media and cultural studies it has emerged as a key concept to understand the discursive production of contemporary women’s subjectivity through popular culture, especially in an Anglo-American context (Modleski 1991; Lotz 2001; Whelehan 2005; Gill 2007a, 2007b; Tasker & Negra 2007;

2  Introduction Genz 2009; Negra 2009; McRobbie 2009). In this context, postfeminism is frequently used to refer to the way in which feminism, particularly since the 1980s, appears to have been incorporated and simultaneously disavowed in popular discourse as a method of dealing with the changed status of women and managing broader social transformation (Rosenfelt & Stacey 1990; Brunsdon 1997; McRobbie 2009). In popular discourse, the term is often used to signal a presumption that gender equality has been achieved, with feminism thus figured as a victim of its own success. However, reminders of the ways in which Australian women are still limited by fairly traditional assumptions about gender and sexuality abound. In this context, the gains of feminism appear in a class- and raceblind ‘girls can do anything’ rhetoric, while a gendered division of unpaid labour remains, the gender pay gap is stubbornly persistent, and the ­Australian labour market remains relatively gender segregated by OECD standards. Here we ask: how does this tension play out in late twentiethand early twenty-first-century Australian popular culture? Postfeminism in Context offers a textual analysis of six major forms of contemporary popular culture from 1996–2018: chick lit, television dramedies (a hybrid of comedy and drama), women’s magazines – for young and older women, YouTube beauty ‘vlogs’ (video blogs), women’s selfhelp books, and newspapers. These forms, with the exception of newspapers, are limited to those targeting a largely female audience or readership, so this is a postfeminism produced for women’s consumption (as it is in other contexts). Remarkably, attention to Australian women and/in popular culture from the 1990s onwards has been limited. Considering the amount, influence, and variety of feminist analyses of the ­Australian popular cultural field from the beginnings of second wave feminism (Edgar & McPhee 1974; Grace & Stephen 1981; Blonski et al. 1987; Dermody & Jacka 1987; Morris 1988), the virtual absence of extended analyses in the more recent past is troubling. It seems as if the Australian academy is rehearsing the stereotypical postfeminist gesture that feminism is over; the question of gender in media and cultural studies has been decided once and for all. Or perhaps the increasingly globalised academic publishing industry has had little interest in specifically Australian popular culture, let alone studies centred on women (our study, of course, suggests a recent shift in this regard). Responding to this elision, Postfeminism in Context also provides the most detailed account of Australian women’s popular culture, and of the contemporary representation of Australian women across media platforms and genres over three decades of major social, political, and cultural change. As a heuristic device, rather than starting with what others have identified as the constitutive elements of postfeminism and then finding texts that adhere to this model – a predominant method with which to analyse postfeminist culture – the starting point of this study is to use the term ‘postfeminism’ as a historical descriptor.3 As Charlotte Brunsdon (1997,

Introduction  3 p. 85) notes, ‘It [postfeminism] is a useful term historically because it does allow us to point to certain representational and discursive changes in the period since the 1970s’. Postfeminism, therefore, describes the culture that emerges after second wave feminism, thus opening up the term to resignification and localisation, and giving second wave feminism its rightful place as a major cultural force. The primary texts drive our argument and hence do this resignifying work, allowing us to identify the differences between, as well as the similarities with, dominant accounts of postfeminism. Moving away from more pessimistic accounts of how feminism is made-to-mean in and through popular culture, we follow queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s (2002) recommendation for shifting from what she describes as a ‘paranoid reading’ – which begins by assuming that the text will be problematic – to a ‘reparative’ one, which is conversely open to ‘surprises’. Similarly, building upon this work, Rita Felski takes issue with the ‘protocols of professional pessimism’, wherein critics seeking to locate the pernicious agenda of texts are unable to acknowledge any alternative interpretive possibilities: Like an upscale detox facility, critique promises to flush out the noxious substances, and cultural toxins that hold us in their thrall. It demonstrates, again and again, that what might look like hopeful signs of social progress harbor more disturbing implications. (2015, pp. 128–129) What Paul Ricoeur (1970) has described as the ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ is, along with the reductive feminist pessimism it produces, to be avoided if we are to think through how feminism may have inflected the Australian cultural imaginary over the decades with which we are preoccupied. Rather than conceptualising postfeminism primarily as a way in which feminism is merely ‘taken into account’ so that it can be disavowed, as in Angela McRobbie’s (2009) formulation, we engage with our texts using what Rachel Wood and Benjamin Litherland (2018, p. 906) describe as ‘a paradigm of critical feminist hope’ that ‘allows feminist media scholars to recognize moments of possibility that can arise from the encounter of popular feminism and neoliberalism’. Any hope we offer, however, needs to be tempered by the recognition of the ongoing relative erasure and marginalisation of Australia’s dispossessed Indigenous people, migrants, and refugees, as well as queer women in our mainstream popular culture, and our readings draw attention to these elisions as well as where they are challenged (as in chick lit and in some women’s magazines). We are certainly not the first to highlight the lack of cultural specificity, or the limitations of conflating distinct national contexts, in analyses of texts dubbed ‘postfeminist’, and our work takes up the call issued by others in this regard. As Justine Ashby, underscoring the ways in which the United States regularly comes to stand in for the West, notes:

4  Introduction these debates are forged within the context of, and respond to, what are principally American concerns and we should not assume that they can simply be grafted onto the rather different contours of political and popular culture; the diversity of postfeminism in all its ephemeral forms means that there can be no ‘one-size-fits-all’ framework for thinking through its cultural and political currency. (2010, p. 158) Following Ashby’s lead, feminist scholars examining contexts as diverse as Spain (Loxham 2019), Nigeria (Dosekun 2015), and China (Guo forthcoming), consider how the term may be useful for analysing media forms in these specific sites, but challenge any simple transferability of this historically Anglo-American concept. Rosalind Gill, too, welcomes these more recent attempts to reassess the term, including by taking account of its historical and cultural specificities, challenging its whiteness and offering more intersectional approaches, highlighting its transnational nature, and further attending to class as well as ageing (2016, p. 612, 619–620). Following such calls to produce more nuanced accounts of postfeminism’s operations (Tasker & Negra 2007, pp. 13–14), this book – the first on how it plays out in the Australian context – ­underscores the need for further attention to the local while recognising the inevitable commonalities across cultural fields and national boundaries in a globalised world. To do so, we turn to the idea of the ‘semioscape’. Our use of this term extends Arjun Appadurai’s (1996) and Crispin Thurlow and Giorgia Aiello’s (2007) work on the various ’scapes characterising the cultural flows of globalisation. Appadurai (1996, pp. 33–35) lists five types: ethnoscapes (‘moving groups of people’), ideoscapes (political images relating to state power), technoscapes (‘the global configuration … of technology’), financescapes (the channels of global capital), and mediascapes (‘image-centred, narrative-based accounts of strips of reality’). Appadurai describes these ­ ’scapes as ‘the building blocks of what … I would like to call imagined worlds, that is, the multiple worlds that are constituted by the historically situated imaginations of persons and groups that are spread around the globe’ (1996, p. 33, original emphasis). Thurlow and Aiello supplement Appadurai’s schema with the notion of the ‘semioscape’, which ‘might help bring into focus the non-mediatized but globalizing circulation of symbols, sign systems and meaning-making practices’ (2007, p. 308). We modify semioscapes so that it refers to the historically situated sign-systems found in each form – whether literary or media – that produce a gendered, imagined cultural ‘landscape’ specific to that form, that is, the worldmaking in which each form engages. Chick lit, for instance, through the combination of its key thematics of the working woman, hedonism, and the fashion–beauty– media complex – an extension of McRobbie’s fashion–beauty complex (2009) – is characterised by a semioscape of aspiration and independence.

Introduction  5 The notion of semioscape enables us to methodologically and conceptually unify a diverse cultural field without ignoring differences amongst forms, as well as identifying similarities relating to the Australian context. Semioscapes is cognisant, and can recognise the contemporary global mobility, of signs, and specifically the transnational quality of postfeminism (Dosekun 2015), as well as their adaptability to local conditions. Simidele Dosekun argues that: to think transnationally about post-feminism is to consider how, as an entanglement of meanings, representations, sensibilities, practices, and commodities, post-feminism may discursively and materially cross borders … It also entails thinking about what does or can not necessarily travel, or perhaps need not. (2015, p. 965) Hers is an argument, with which we concur, that further problematises a universal and unitary postfeminism. Moreover, semioscape as a concept enables both visual and verbal codes to be addressed, a methodological flexibility required by the nature and diversity of cultural forms being analysed here. These semioscapes as imagined worlds matter in terms of how women might consider themselves and their place in the transformed space that is contemporary Australia – they are a set of answers (and questions addressed) to this context. Another context we address is the academic discourse of postfeminism (to which we devote the later part of this introduction). We agree with other scholars about the slipperiness of postfeminism as a critical and/or popular term: ‘There is no original or authentic postfeminism that holds the key to its definition. Nor is there a secure and unified origin from which this genuine postfeminism could be fashioned’ (Genz & Brabon 2009, p. 5). Although it is a ‘versatile cultural concept’ (Projansky 2001, p. 68), in academic work a hegemonic version of postfeminism undoubtedly has emerged, which has in turn set and limited the parameters of the field, limitations that our account unsettles. Many studies identify how the specific tropes and themes of postfeminism identified by key theorists, most notably McRobbie and Gill (whose important work in this area we also draw upon throughout), operate in various forms of media and locations. So McRobbie’s core arguments of a ‘faux feminism’ offered to young women that brings about feminism’s undoing (2009, p. 7), and postfeminism’s ‘double-entanglement’ structure, in which neoconservative and socially liberal ideas mix, and feminism is ‘transformed into a form of Gramscian common sense, while also fiercely repudiated, indeed almost hated’ (2009, p. 12), become the overarching interpretive framework of so-called postfeminist times and texts. In many other studies, Gill’s ‘elements of a [postfeminist] sensibility’ (2007a, p. 149) – including femininity as a ‘bodily property’; an ‘emphasis

6  Introduction upon self-surveillance, monitoring and discipline’; a pronounced ‘focus upon individualism, choice and empowerment;’ and a popular cultural environment in which feminist and anti-feminist ideas are entangled – are unreflexively sought out in whatever texts or cultural practices the feminist critic has chosen.4 Along these lines, Australian scholars who have engaged with postfeminism, predominantly through empirical work, have usually sought to identify how the constitutive elements of postfeminism analysed in American or British studies can be seen to operate identically in ­Australia (see Robinson 2011; Burkett & Hamilton 2012; Charles 2013; Nash 2013). As Raewyn Connell argues, such uncritical appropriation of theoretical frameworks developed elsewhere recurs in Australian scholarship: ‘We have repeatedly imported theoretical frameworks from the global North without thinking about their origins and specificity’ (2014, p. 224). Susan Sheridan’s description of how Australian feminism engages with international contexts is a more accurate and useful model for thinking through Australian postfeminism: Australian feminism, having always provided fertile ground for the transplantation of “international” (US and UK, and latterly French) feminisms, has certain Indigenous features, notable amongst them being its capacity to graft those others on to its own growth and at times to produce new species. (1988, p. 1) So far, in the case of postfeminism, there is little or no attention paid to how the Australian context and its specific feminist history may complicate (or perhaps extend) these dominant understandings of postfeminism. In effect, and regardless of Gill’s or McRobbie’s intentions and the undeniable value of their scholarship in this area, postfeminism is largely constructed as a generalised phenomenon or sensibility (Gill 2007a), marking an undifferentiated Western, largely Anglo-American, culture (Dosekun 2015). In her recent reassessment of the term ‘postfeminism’ and the critical work it has recently been made to do, Gill suggests that rather than being a distinct sensibility in media culture (as she had originally theorised it), postfeminism is now the ‘new normal’, a ‘taken-for-granted commonsense that operates as a kind of gendered neoliberalism’, which is ‘virtually hegemonic’ (2017, p. 609). Here, we are concerned with thinking through the extent to which such assertions of hegemony (that are now hegemonic) are relevant to the Australian context. Nevertheless, given the cultural flows of globalisation (Appadurai 1996) – particularly the ‘cross-cultural traffic’ in popular culture, and the high degree of ‘discursive harmony’ (Tasker & Negra 2007, pp. 13–14) between the United States and the United Kingdom (and indeed Australia, with its troubled history as a British colony); some shared dynamics of second wave feminism (Lotz 2001, p. 112); and the spread of neoliberalism globally (Harvey 2005) – in Australian popular

Introduction  7 culture we inevitably found some of the familiar tropes commonly seen to be constitutive of postfeminism. However, we also found a much more complicated and productive relationship to feminism than the repudiation with which postfeminism has critically come to be synonymous.

An Australian postfeminism? In historical terms, we argue that postfeminism becomes a recognisable phenomenon in Australia in the mid- to late-1990s, and reaches its zenith in the first two decades of the twenty-first century; as a consequence, we will cover texts produced in the period from 1996 to 2018. As the first generation of women to have benefited from the reforms of the second wave women’s movement in Australia reached their 20’s and 30’s, and in a time when the second wave had largely dissipated and/or been reduced to pop culture stereotypes, the 1990s marked a period where the tensions and contradictions of living after the second wave of feminism became apparent. We chose 1996 as a starting date for our study because of the complementary symbolism of two events that occurred in Australia that year: the publication of Kathy Bail’s essay collection, DIY Feminism, a response to the media event precipitated by the publication of Helen Garner’s The First Stone (1995), and the election of the socially conservative but economically neoliberal Liberal-National Party coalition government led by John Howard (Sharpe & Boucher 2007, pp. 24–25).5 Bail’s collection heralds a new and controversial form of (white, middle-class) Australian feminism, a putative version of third wave feminism – individualistic, ­lifestyle- and youth-oriented, and non-threatening. We contend, however, that DIY Feminism, in the sense of self-identifying as being after the second wave (1996, p. 4; Kaplan 1996, p. 35, dates this as the 1980s), also constitutes one of the earliest and most detailed versions of Australian postfeminism (Henderson 2006; Taylor 2008). We are well aware of the problems with the waves model of feminism – with its sense of linear progress and generationalism, neat temporal and ideological distinctions, and maternal tropes and metaphors (Roof 1997; Henry 2004; Taylor 2009; Nicholson 2010; Eichhorn 2013). However, we concur with Linda Nicholson (2010) who posits that: there is one use that the wave metaphor is suited for – to identify those moments in history when issues of gender mobilize large numbers of people in very public, noisy, and challenging ways, that is, when such issues are able to generate large scale social or political movements. We are not in that kind of period, which makes the description of feminist activism today as a ‘third wave’ even more questionable. As a consequence, we argue that there is a distinct historical form of women’s movement operative during the 1970s and into the early-mid-1980s –

8  Introduction commonly termed second wave feminism, or the modern women’s movement. Furthermore, although some critics use postfeminism and third wave feminism interchangeably, and while there are temporal and conceptual overlaps between them (Genz 2006; Rivers 2017) – as in our example of Bail’s collection – we distinguish between the two. Although also suffering from definitional instability, for our purposes third wave feminism6 is a political (and theoretical) movement dating from the early 1990s – a putative successor to second wave feminism (Heywood & Drake 1997, pp. 2–3; Budgeon 2013, p. 4).7 Third wave feminism is a type of feminist politics – often vaguely defined, but representing a generational shift and a response to weaknesses in the second wave. In contrast, postfeminism is a cultural and historical phenomenon defined as being temporally located after second wave feminism. Our focus is on the ways in which Australian popular culture integrates, as legacy, as aftermath, the modern women’s movement – the ‘post’ in postfeminism is definitive here. As such, third wave feminism is outside our analytical scope. Rather, what we are identifying is a popular feminism informed by the modern women’s movement. Paralleling DIY Feminism, the election of the conservative Howard Government symbolises the resurgence of social conservatism that partly masks the government’s extension of the neoliberal agenda (Swarts 2000, p. 103), and which has played out in particularly troublesome ways around Indigenous Australians and asylum seekers. We use David Harvey’s definition of neoliberalism: Neoliberalism is in the first instance a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade. The role of the state is to create and preserve an institutional framework appropriate to such practices. (2005, p. 2) Harvey dates the emergence of neoliberalism in the West from the early 1970s as a response to the crisis in capital accumulation. Michael Pusey (2003) argues that Australia’s neoliberal turn becomes pronounced in the 1980s, although the ALP (Australian Labor Party) government moderated its impact. The Howard Government (1996–2007), however, implemented a much more ambitious neoliberal agenda. Mark Western et al. extends Harvey’s definition by emphasising the centrality and permeation of the market to neoliberalism. That is, neoliberalism is ‘concerned with providing the institutional conditions for markets to operate even in arenas where they did not do so previously’, which they insightfully argue is actually a form of ‘state-sponsored nation building’ (Western et al. 2007, p. 404), transforming health, education, work, trade, welfare, the financial sector, the state’s role as agent of social justice, environmental protection, and so on.8

Introduction  9 As Michel Feher observes, however, neoliberalism also has a subjective dimension, requiring a person to conceive of the self as human capital, so that every existential project or form of conduct is governed by the quest to appreciate (or at least, avoid depreciating) this capital (2009, p. 21). In neoliberalism, the social and the subjective domains coalesce. It is therefore a discursive and political climate in which feminist demands are constrained and/or no longer seen as necessary, thereby absolving the state of responsibility for addressing women’s inequality (Summers 2003). Instead, women, with a nod to feminism’s desire for their independence, are expected to be ‘the autonomous, choosing free self’ – indeed, ‘the individual as entrepreneur of the self’ that Nikolas Rose identifies as required by neoliberalism’s ‘enterprise culture’ (1996, pp. 150–151, 158), and is what we see played out in our beauty vlogs and self-help books, for instance. Yet, as Jemima Repo warns, given its distancing from any statebased response to gendered inequalities and emphasis on self-responsibilisation, ‘No regulatory context is perhaps more pertinent – or threatening – for feminist struggles today than that of neoliberalism’ (in Varney 2016, p. 28). Historically, however, Australia has been seen as an innovator in terms of ‘women’s policy machinery’, with leftist Prime Minister Gough Whitlam appointing a women’s adviser (the first in the world), Elizabeth Reid, in 1973 to help ensure all policy and legislative submissions adequately accounted for their gender implications (Rimmer & Sawer 2016, p. 745). Such ‘femocrats’ – or ‘inside agitators’, as they have been dubbed (­Eisenstein 1996) – are said to have played a pivotal role in the advancement of women in Australia, and also speak to, and of, a specific national variety of feminism (Watson 1990). As Hester Eisenstein notes, ‘Australian feminists appear to me to operate on the basis of a socialist-feminist praxis linked to the politics of the welfare state’, leading to an overwhelming focus on women’s economic rights (1996, p. 88). From the 1990s, though, in terms of these active feminist interventions into the state, progress is said to have stalled and women’s policy sidelined (Rimmer & Sawer 2016, p. 745). Under the Howard Government, the rhetoric shifted and the idea that gender no longer needed to be factored into any legislative or policy initiatives came to be publicly articulated, including by the Prime Minister. In 1997, the Office of the Status of Women was downgraded, and its head, Pru Goward, remarked: ‘we are finally seeing the left-wing domination of the women’s movement weakened … People are sick of the thought-police’ (in Dux & Simic 2008, p. 18). In such an environment, as Monica Dux and Zora Simic argue, the femocrat ‘had all but died’ (2008, p. 18) – although at a state level, her fortunes varied, depending on the government of the time. The reason for this retreat from what Marilyn Lake (1999, p. 253) calls ‘a state feminism’ was explained by Prime Minister John Howard: Australia had ‘entered the postfeminist phase of the debate’ (‘The

10  Introduction Mother’s Club’, 2002). We take this up further in our final chapter, though we argue that it was more a case that we had entered the neoliberal phase of the state’s dealing with women’s inequality. Postfeminism is commonly seen as an orchestrated attempt to manage, or indeed mitigate, the wider social and political transformations that feminism seeks to effect; that is, as a way to tame feminism, to accept aspects of it that accord with patriarchal capitalism (women as workers, women as conspicuous consumers, women as sexual subjects, and so on), while denying any need for structural reform or collective action. The Do-ItYourself impetus found in Bail’s collection (1996) as well as in much 1990s advertising – what Anna Cronin (2003) calls its ‘compulsory individualism’ – represents one point where postfeminism and neoliberalism come to most obviously intersect. Postfeminism, as Gill argues, can resonate powerfully with neoliberalism: ‘the autonomous, calculating, self-­ regulating subject of neoliberalism bears a strong resemblance to the active, free-choosing, self-inventing subject of post-feminism’ (2007a, p. 164). Postfeminism, therefore, is neoliberalism gendered in feminine terms (Taylor 2012, p. 15), enabling the latter to be articulated via feministinspired discourses of autonomy, freedom, and choice for women, and in the appealing ‘soft power’ that is popular culture. Furthermore, as a number of accounts argue (Harris 2004; Scharff 2012; Budgeon 2013; Fraser 2013), women (and girls) form some of the most contested and hence valuable terrain for the neoliberal project: to remake women is to make a core part of neoliberalism happen. Neoliberalism, therefore, is the second temporal marker of our study because, if second wave feminism predates postfeminism, neoliberalism is contemporaneous with it. Accordingly, in this study we will extend recent feminist work on postfeminism and neoliberalism (Gill 2007a, 2007b, 2017; Taylor 2012; McRobbie 2015) to explore their mutually constitutive as well as antagonistic nature, and we therefore place our analysis within the larger historical framework of neoliberalism in Australia. Given that both postfeminism and neoliberalism are transnational phenomena, whose articulation depends on general elements meshing with local conditions, how does postfeminism coexist with neoliberalism, Australian-style? In effect, we therefore wish to position postfeminism (and its cultural narratives) as part of mainstream Australian political culture rather than ‘something for the girls’. Unfortunately, the many studies of Australian neoliberalism rarely consider gender or gender relations as a specific vector of analysis, and there are no substantial readings of neoliberalism’s figuration in Australian media and popular culture. But when gender analysis does occur the full and surprising effects of neoliberalism are revealed, as in Barbara Pocock’s (2003, 2006) identification of the care deficit afflicting many Australian families related to time pressures on working women and hence the outsourcing of care work (also done by women); Elisabeth Wynhausen’s

Introduction  11 j­ournalistic account of supposedly unskilled women workers in Dirt Cheap: Life at the Wrong End of the Job Market (2005); or the ways in which men’s work is becoming more like women’s work – casualised, parttime, and in the service industries (Broomhill & Sharp 2006). Australian neoliberalism, as an imported programme rolled out from the early 1980s onwards,9 has fundamentally transformed Australia. Pusey (2003, p. 6) describes it as ‘a seismic shift in the distribution of income, power and resources’ leading to a hollowing out of Middle Australia. For Connell (2002, p. 5), it is an undoing of the post-Second World War Keynesian settlement between government, business, and labour; Western et al. characterise it as ‘the most profound transformation of Australian public policy since World War II and one that fundamentally reworked a framework in place since Federation’, with far-reaching consequence for how we live our lives (2007, pp. 402, 404). As Damien Cahill (2008) and Pusey (2003), amongst others, have found, however, neoliberalism’s hegemony is incomplete: it has not won over civil society. The Australian people, as Pusey identifies, are deeply concerned by rising inequality and expect the State to continue its role as agent of redistributive justice (2003, pp. 150, 156), a thematic also identified by Rebecca Huntley’s (2019) recent Quarterly Essay, ‘Australia Fair: Listening to the Nation’. Although we are having to live under the political and economic hegemony of neoliberalism, we remain attached to the Australian mythology of egalitarianism and fairness identified by Russel Ward (1958), or what Geoffrey Bolton calls ‘a strongly developed tradition of equity’ (1996, p. 290). Australian postfeminism, particularly its association with a more recent and specifically gendered form of egalitarianism that is second wave feminism, is the ideal space in which to observe the gendered and popular cultural playing out of imagined everyday neoliberalism, as well as its ambivalences and resistances. It is also an ironic space, given that the Australian mythology of egalitarianism and the ‘fair go’ for so long excluded, and in many ways continues to exclude, women.

Unsettling postfeminism As we have thus far made clear, there has been a ‘scholarly over-reliance’ on a particular understanding of postfeminism (Keller & Ryan 2018, p. 6), which inevitably forecloses other (feminist) ways of reading popular cultural texts. In addition to arguing for greater cultural and historical specificity, Postfeminism in Context therefore intervenes in ongoing critical discussions about the efficacy of ‘postfeminism’ itself as an analytical term (Radner 2010; Whelehan 2010; Lumby 2011; Horbury 2014; Keller & Ryan 2018), and suggests potential critical uses of the concept. What kind of work does/can this concept do, and indeed what might it be made to do if we problematise it, rather than take it as a critical given? Is it as generative as it once may have been for feminist media and cultural studies? And

12  Introduction how might further engagement with historical and cultural specificity unsettle dominant accounts of its logics? One of the earliest pieces to question the usefulness, critical relevance, and limitations of postfeminism for an analysis of popular culture is Imelda Whelehan’s 2010 article, ‘Remaking Feminism: Or Why Is Postfeminism So Boring?’ In it, Whelehan argues that: Because of the ubiquity of the postfeminist message in cultural productions, tackling postfeminism from a critical perspective can be nothing short of disheartening and sometimes frankly boring, as it becomes difficult not to level what seem to be the same kind of ‘old’ feminist criticisms at any number of cultural products. (2010, pp. 158–159) How useful, then, is it to simply mine popular culture, including its ­Australian versions, for signs of postfeminism’s ubiquity, and as further evidence of the ‘dangers’ of popular culture’s appropriation of feminism? Others – including in the Australian academy – have begun to turn a more critical gaze on the term, given that its invocation forecloses a consideration of how feminism continues to manifest in contradictory ways in popular culture. In this vein, Alison Horbury, in an instructive essay titled ‘Postfeminist Impasses in Popular Heroine Television’ (2014; see also Keller & Ryan 2018; McDermott 2018), convincingly argues that there is a ‘deadlock’ in feminist media scholarship. Dominant approaches to postfeminism tend to presume that the necessarily reactionary politics of its texts need to be demystified by the feminist critic, to allow for the viewer’s or reader’s liberation (Horbury 2014) – this, of course, is nothing new in media criticism, which has been rightly taken to task for its tendency to position women consumers as passive ‘dupes’ (Brunsdon 1997; Hollows 2000). In such accounts, postfeminism comes to be seen as ‘patriarchy in disguise, seducing young women into a “false” belief in feminism’s success (and thus redundancy)’ (Horbury 2014, p. 220). Sean Fuller and Catherine Driscoll, too, note that, indicative of its limitations, ‘postfeminism is still a term used to label both texts and opinions as complicit with what feminism should critique’ (2015, p. 254). That is, postfeminism, either overtly or more obliquely, invariably signals an opposition, rather than a temporal or causal relationship, to feminism. As Driscoll further (2018) argues, in its dominant critical usages, postfeminism underestimates the radical changes in (some) girls’ and women’s lives in the wake of modern feminism (something she suggests McRobbie especially downplays). As we will demonstrate, the ways in which feminism is articulated in the various forms upon which we focus is more variegated than much previous scholarship on postfeminism allows. We need to attend further to the different political operations of this highly loaded term, and not automatically dismiss it as a form of ‘unfeminism’ (Driscoll 2018, p. 2) or ‘an

Introduction  13 unfaithful reproduction of feminism’ (Genz & Brabon 2009, p. 6). While Gill (2007a) sagely argued that postfeminism is constituted by aspects of both feminism and anti-feminism, it seems, in the critical context at least, that the latter has eclipsed the former and popular texts have been primarily mined for signs of their opposition to feminism. That is, in many studies over the past two decades, there has been a move away from a consideration of the ‘potentially fruitful inconsistencies of postfeminist culture’ in earlier accounts (Rosenfelt & Stacey 1990, p. 564; see also Dow 1996; Projanksy 2001). The texts that we analyse, along with our individual previous work (Henderson 2006, 2013, 2016; Taylor 2008, 2012, 2016), clearly demonstrate not that the relationship between feminism and popular culture has just recently become more complicated, as others argue (Gill 2016; Banet-Weiser 2018; Keller & Ryan 2018), but that it has always been so. Furthermore, we argue that postfeminism as an analytical frame has obscured this complexity – in Australia as elsewhere. As Genz and Brabon (2009, p. 6) point out, contemporary critical accounts of postfeminism often tend to suture over the tensions and contradictions that earlier analyses saw as integral to it. Here, however, we are open to leaving these tensions stand, and to recognising them as part and parcel of the complicated ideological and discursive work of bringing feminism into mainstream cultural forms. In our analysis of texts produced across three decades, we also problematise the inevitability of feminism’s ‘undoing’ in and through popular culture. In this respect, we concur with Jonathan Dean who argues that McRobbie ‘attribute[s] a level of success to practices of feminist undoing that is surely unwarranted’. He continues: ‘McRobbie does herself a disservice by refusing to provide much – if any – space, for failure, ambiguity, or unevenness in these practices of feminist undoing’ (2010; see also Genz & Brabon 2009; Driscoll 2018). These spaces surely exist, and if our reading of Australian popular culture is anything to go by, they demand that we develop new interpretive frameworks, or at the very least those that permit more nuance, for thinking through the complexities of the feminism– popular culture (and neoliberal) nexus. What needs to be rethought, we argue, is the relationship between an apparently postfeminist representational environment and the ‘feminism’ from which it is variously seen to derive, disrupt, or, most commonly, disavow; that is, feminism needs to be ‘recentred’ in these debates about postfeminism (Keller & Ryan 2018, p. 5; see also Kanai 2019). But what makes critics designate a text ‘postfeminist’ rather than ‘feminist’, and what work does such attribution do in critical terms? Commonly, as already noted, it is the disavowal of feminism that provides the answer to this question, but rather than start from such a point, we want to turn our attention more to the question of the term’s very indebtedness to feminism. Postmodernism, a popular and academic discourse afflicted by similar definitional problems, is instructive here (see Brooks 1998). As the term itself

14  Introduction suggests, we wish to position postfeminism as temporally after but conceptually (and politically) dependent on second wave feminism: feminism is not past or finished but rather is an internal, integral, element of postfeminism (Genz 2006, 2009; Genz & Brabon 2009). We contend that postfeminism is a transitional moment between second wave feminism and some emerging, though as yet indistinct, form of early twenty-first-century Australian feminism, a bridge between two epochs operating in, and hence shaped by, the difficult times labelled as neoliberal. As Genz notes, ‘feminist concerns have entered the mainstream and they are articulated in politically contradictory ways’ (2006, p. 337, emphasis added), hence Rebecca Munford and Melanie Waters’ (2014) description of feminism as a spectral presence in postfeminism – a core element that we observe in Australian postfeminism. Beginning from the point of its very presence, or at least being open (as a reparative reading is) to the possibilities of finding something other than feminism’s repudiation, and to see such spectrality in positive terms, necessarily affects the kinds of readings/interpretations that are possible. We agree that, as Fuller and Driscoll argue, although ‘ “postfeminism” is widely used to explain the inadequacy of popular culture for representing feminism’ (2015, p. 254), it is more fruitfully seen in a much longer ‘popular feminist history’ as ‘just the current name for feminism’s long struggle to remain visibly relevant to changing conditions’ (261; see also Driscoll 2018). It is just such a struggle that we seek to map here. Although much of our study pre-dates feminism’s recently renewed visibility, it is clear we need to ‘better account for’ how seemingly ‘new’, or ‘emergent’, forms of popular feminism relate to postfeminism (Keller & Ryan 2018, p. 4). Recently, scholars have addressed how feminism’s apparent cultural currency (largely again in Anglo-American contexts) – especially in relation to celebrity and to hashtag activism (such as the #metoo movement) – may work to complicate the viability of postfeminism in a critical sense. For example, Gill revisits the concept in her 2016 article, and challenges the idea that ‘postfeminism lacks analytic purchase for engaging with a moment characterized by a resurgence of interest in feminism’ (621). Scholars such as Gill (2016), Nicola Rivers (2017), and Sarah Banet-Weiser (2018) argue that the term should not be jettisoned in such a climate (something with which we ultimately agree, with some caveats) and that postfeminism ‘is not displaced by popular feminism but rather bolstered by it’ (Banet-Weiser 2018, p. 20; see also Gill 2016, p. 612). Others such as Akane Kanai (2019) argue that postfeminism has adapted to these changing cultural conditions, wherein feminism is no longer disavowed or repudiated but instrumentalised in ways that nonetheless similarly result in the evacuation of its oppositional potential (see also Gill & Orgad 2015). For these critics, current forms of popular feminism are conceptualised as merely postfeminism in another guise.10 Furthermore, as both Gill (2016) and Banet-Weiser (2018) point out, this renewed

Introduction  15 feminist visibility has itself been accompanied by ‘revitalized forms of antifeminism and popular misogyny’ (Gill 2016, p. 612), making it difficult to uncritically celebrate these so-called new forms of mediated feminism. While we certainly do not underestimate the power of anti-feminist forces – as in the various misogynistic actions of the Trump regime in the United States – postfeminism is, we suggest (in the Australian context at least), in many ways a continuation of the feminist project, specifically in a popular cultural form. Moreover, this increased feminist activism and visibility seems further evidence for our claim that Australian postfeminism is a transitional stage where a new form of feminism is beginning to take shape, though neither along the lines of the fourth wave discussed by Rivers that, with its emphasis on choice, agency, empowerment, and digital media, sounds a lot like the third wave, nor Catherine Rottenberg’s (2018) pessimistic and distinctly American neoliberal feminism, embodied by certain high profile female winners of American advanced capitalism. Finally, it is important to note that we are not interested in whether specific texts can be constituted ‘postfeminist’, or otherwise, but in how what have been identified as postfeminist norms and tropes have come to circulate in and through a variety of Australian textual sites, including at the level of postfeminist affect (McDermott 2018, p. 53), in culturally specific ways, as well as how they are being disrupted. Attending to what Gill calls ‘the psychic life of postfeminism’ (2017; see also Elias et al. 2017; Gill & Orgad 2017; Kanai 2019) helps to come to terms with its ongoing affective pull, something we take up especially in our beauty vlogs and self-help chapters. Much of this previous scholarship on affect emphasises that postfeminism has turned to interiority as a disciplinary mechanism, exhorting women to merely think and act ‘positively’, perform self-care, and transform how they feel about the troublesome socio-political contexts in which they operate, rather than seek structural transformation or offer viable forms of feminist critique. However, our analyses somewhat complicate this position – particularly in outlining some of the generative capacities of self-help and beauty vlogging and women’s affective investments in them (as producers, consumers, and as both at once). Nevertheless, here we hope to respond, at least partially, to Gill’s call for further work that attends to the cultural forms in which postfeminism does its work as well as their complex affective dimensions (2017, p. 620).

Locating the semioscapes Through the various semioscapes identified, our six case studies combine to produce a wide-ranging account of postfeminist culture, one which attends to the social, personal, political, psychic, affective, and economic dimensions of postfeminism. Each chapter begins with an overview of the form under discussion, such as its particular generic characteristics and/or historical location. We then undertake a close analysis of representative

16  Introduction texts to demonstrate the narratives and tropes that construct a particular semioscape for each form that, taken collectively, comprise Australian postfeminist culture. Strategically, our case studies move from the most overtly fictional forms through to those making claims to the real; not surprisingly, we find that the former result in the most productive yoking of popular culture and modern feminism, while the latter are constituted more by ambivalence. As we underscore, the degree to which the texts analysed take a specifically Australian form considerably varies. We begin with one of the most paradigmatic genres of postfeminist culture, chick lit, but rather than feminist disavowal or a reactionary politics, in its semioscape of aspiration and independence we find a deep integration of feminist politics. Australian chick lit narrates the extension of freedom – economic, psychic, and sexual – and hedonism to women. It details what economic and socio-political changes have meant in fictional terms to Australian women, and particularly young adult women, what their aspirations are, and how women are central to economic and social transformation in Australia. Chick lit thus fictionalises (and fantasises) how second wave feminism could be lived in consumer capitalism – particularly through the workplace, and in terms of a hedonistic femininity. Chick lit, however, is not uncritical of these shifts, hence its satire of middle-class aspiration and its soft feminist parodic reflexivity. As such, and in alignment with other studies of postfeminist culture, chick lit shows the intransigent power of the fashion–beauty–media complex to making and disciplining contemporary femininities. There is also more racial diversity in and through this form than we find in any other, and thus more sense of a distinctly Australian adaptation of this popular literary genre. The analysis in Chapter 2 of Australian commercial television dramedies, Offspring and Winners and Losers, and their semioscape of postfeminist kinship, also suggests dramatic shifts in women’s lives since second wave feminism, specifically in terms of the affective bonds of family and friends. In this chapter, we explore the ways in which heterosexuality and maternal intimacies are de-centred as women’s most privileged forms of relationality. Moreover, the series under discussion refuse the typical postfeminist dilemma occasioned by ‘having it all’: the career, relationships, motherhood. This chapter argues that intimacy and gendered modes of sociality have been rewritten in response to feminist critiques of the traditional family. In these Australian iterations of postfeminist ‘heroine television’ (Horbury 2014), a successful career is neither antithetical to romantic fulfilment, nor to extended networks of care. These television dramedies therefore represent a restructuring of the family and intimacy that accommodates women’s liberation, but also – consistent with the kind of popular feminist critique found in most of our chapters – reveal what has not changed in terms of women’s emotional labour and the familial bonds it maintains.

Introduction  17 As in the case of chick lit, women’s glossy magazines, another of the paradigmatic postfeminist genres, are deeply permeated by second wave feminist values as they address consumer capitalism in specifically feminine and white terms. The four titles that we analyse in Chapter 3, Cosmopolitan, Cleo, Marie Claire, and The Australian Women’s Weekly, are similarly aspirational, by way of a semioscape of beautiful abundance ostensibly for all women in the contradictory context of nearly three decades of economic growth and increasing social and economic equality. Accordingly, the semioscape takes specific form as a dreamscape, a type of wish fulfilment that delineates aspirational lifestyles for particular stages in a woman’s life and in a context of national affluence. Therefore, titles for young women produce dreamscapes of abundant pleasure, the more upmarket Marie Claire inscribes the middle-class woman as a cosmopolitan and ethical subject, while The Australian Women’s Weekly constructs a scenario of domestic plenitude. These dreamscapes also reveal what has not changed for (white) Australian women: physical beauty and ageing remain major, possibly increased anxieties, thus paralleling the findings of numerous accounts of postfeminism. The recent demise of two of our titles, Cleo and Cosmopolitan, can be partly explained by the rise of alternative media platforms, typically webbased. The subject matter of Chapter 4 – the archetypal DIY postfeminist phenomenon of the YouTube beauty vlog – therefore can be seen as a twenty-first-century successor to young women’s glossy magazines. Drawing out the semioscape of confidence and care, in this chapter we consider the role that beauty vloggers increasingly play in providing advice and support to girls and young women, bringing into being young women’s ‘digital intimate publics’ that represent important spaces of community and belonging – despite also taking part in the production of normative femininities. Given that vlogs, though of course produced in specific cultural and geographic contexts, are readily consumable across national boundaries, it makes sense that this form is the one with the least specifically Australian contextual anchors. Although beauty vlogs are aimed at a younger demographic, this chapter articulates the concerns found in a number of our case studies. It continues to negotiate the tensions between the female self and commerce we observe in the self-help chapter; reiterates the anxieties surrounding physical appearance discussed in the magazines chapter; and documents the business of post-industrial femininities parodied in chick lit and the affective structures identified in the dramedy chapter. While beauty vloggers do appear to play out some of the more problematic aspects of postfeminist young women’s identities, feminism is neither disavowed nor forgotten as these micro-celebrities perform a contemporary version of sisterhood and care. Women’s self-help books are where the negotiation and impact of neoliberalism becomes highly explicit – not surprisingly as these can be read as guides to coping with consumer capitalism – and therefore the typical

18  Introduction ­individualistic and entrepreneurial subject of postfeminism becomes apparent in self-help’s semioscape of ‘calculating magic’. What we term as ‘calculating magic’ is a postfeminist philosophy of the everyday, a mode of ratiocination: the frameworks of thinking, feeling, and acting in the world proffered to contemporary Australian women and found across the various sub-genres of self-help, whether career or health advice, mothering or selfactualisation guides. Even in this more reactionary frame in which neoliberalism is given a specifically feminine form, this chapter argues there is a borrowing from, and transforming of, feminism, rather than a repudiation. Chapter 5 thereby reads self-help as encapsulating a shift from the second wave feminist practice of consciousness-raising to the calculating magic of self-help books. Self-help therefore addresses the unfinished business of second wave feminism – work, mothering, self-realisation, and embodiment – but in the very different context of neoliberal consumer capitalism. Finally, our study of the media representation and self-presentation of three Australian women political leaders occurs at the end of our book to serve as a point of difference from the preceding chapters. What we find in this chapter is a salutary reminder of the past (and present) blockages faced by women operating in realms where the addressee is not primarily female, the representational codes have to circulate in the ‘real’ world, the power on offer is political, and the protagonists are women who lived through (or at the very least benefited from) the second wave. The semioscape of constrained political power delineated through the figures of Pauline Hanson, Julia Gillard, and Julie Bishop, is the only example where a more reactionary form of postfeminism is articulated, specifically in terms of a pronounced ambivalence towards feminism. This ambivalence suggests that politics remains a masculine domain and that patriarchal national mythologies continue to shape political institutions and the conventions of reporting politics, and hence women are particularly constrained here. Significantly, the celebrity female politician who is the most typically postfeminist – in terms of style and glamour – Julie Bishop, was the most acceptable to the existing political system. She was the one Australian leader who correctly (or acceptably) embodied political power. Ironically, therefore, what should be a sign of women’s emancipation (i.e. participation in parliamentary politics) is actually a marker of the limited terms in which women can access political power. We conclude by outlining the contours of an Australian postfeminism, and offer some suggestions as to why our local postfeminism takes its particular shape. As we will suggest, national mythologies, economic factors, and recent feminist history are all factors in shaping how postfeminism has been translated in this context. Neither celebratory nor condemnatory, our analysis thus tells three related stories about: Australian women in/and contemporary popular culture; Australian women and neoliberalism; and the story of Australian feminism via its cultural residue and reformation

Introduction  19 into a contemporary popular feminism. Our six semioscapes simultaneously register great changes in Australian women’s lives, but also a reluctance by parts of Australian popular culture to make space for Indigenous women’s and migrant women’s narratives. As a result, a far more complicated, but in some respects more hopeful form of postfeminism emerges, as we see most powerfully delineated in our first chapter on chick lit. Chick lit – that most typically postfeminist of genres – makes evident the feminist potential of this popular, contemporary literary form.

Notes  1 Scholars in organisational studies (Lewis et al. 2017), health and psychology (Riley et al. 2018), and law (Gozdecka & Macduff 2018) have recently taken up this concept.   2 Our use of the term ‘popular feminism’ relates more to earlier work by Megan Le Masurier about the longer history of feminist ideas being translated for wider audiences (2007), as well as to our own studies (Henderson 2006, 2013; Taylor 2008, 2016), rather than recent work by Sarah Banet-Weiser (2018), which sees it as a more recent commodified, individualised feminism merely serving to bolster postfeminism (and neoliberalism).   3 Amongst others, Gill (2007a) has argued against such a conceptualisation, but we suggest it is a valuable way of moving beyond the dominant approaches.   4 Genz and Brabon also refuse this approach of merely ‘ticking off’ key elements of postfeminism in texts (2009, p. 8).   5 For a detailed analysis of this media event, see Taylor’s Mediating Australian Feminism (2008).   6 Heywood and Drake (1997, pp. 2–3) define third wave feminism ‘as a movement that contains elements of second wave critique of beauty culture, sexual abuse, and power structures while it also acknowledges and makes use of the pleasure, danger, and defining power of those structures’. For Budgeon (2013, p. 4), Third wave feminism is defined, first and foremost, by a deconstructive impulse that seeks to challenge the construction of these categories and to insist on starting from the perspective of multiple differences rather than from a position that advocates equivalence. See also Lotz 2007 for an exploration of the relationship between the third wave and postfeminism.   7 Rebecca Walker’s 1992 essay, ‘Becoming the third wave’, in Ms. Magazine is commonly given as a symbolic starting point for the third wave.  8 Although economic rationalism is a ‘peculiarly Australian’ version of neoliberalism (Wright 2003, p. vii), the two terms have much in common and are often used interchangeably. John Wright argues that [a]n economic rationalist and a neo-liberal will very often agree on what governments ought to do; in particular, they will agree that governments ought to reduce their own activities and leave as much as possible up to the free market. But when they come to explain why they think governments ought to do this, economic rationalists and neo-liberals might give rather different answers … The economic rationalist will emphasise efficiency, the neo-liberal, freedom. We should also note that this difference is also likely to only be one of emphasis. (2003, p. 18, original emphasis)

20  Introduction We use neoliberalism throughout to emphasise the doctrine’s ‘imported’ nature – that is, its Anglo-American origins (Pusey 2003, p. 9) – as well as to distance ourselves from two problematic assumptions inherent in the term ‘economic rationalism’, namely, its rationality and its supposed confinement to the economic realm.   9 Pusey, however, dates the first neoliberal initiatives from 1975 (2003, pp. 8–9). He provides an excellent timeline of Australian neoliberal reforms in appendix A of The Experience of Middle Australia: The Dark Side of Economic Reform. 10 For example, Banet-Weiser suggests: While postfeminism and popular feminism are oppositional on the surface, they are actually mutually sustaining. Indeed, the feminist visions that come into dominant view in the current moment are shaped by the same affective politics that shape postfeminism: entrepreneurial spirit, resilience, gumption. (2018, p. 20)

References Appadurai, A. 1996, Modernity at large: cultural dimensions of globalization, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN. Ashby, J. 2010, ‘Postfeminism in the British frame’, Cinema Journal, vol. 44, no. 2, pp. 127–132. Bail, K. (ed.) 1996, DIY feminism, Allen & Unwin, St Leonards. Banet-Weiser, S. 2018, Empowered: popular feminism and popular misogyny, Duke University Press, Durham, NC. Blonski, A., Creed, B., & Freiberg, F. 1987, Don’t shoot darling!: women’s independent film-making in Australia, Greenhouse Publications, Richmond. Bolton, G. 1996, The Oxford history of Australia, volume 5: The middle way, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Brooks, A. 1998, Postfeminisms: feminism, cultural theory and cultural forms, Routledge, London. Broomhill, R. & Sharp, R. 2006, ‘A new gender (dis)order? Neoliberal restructuring in Australia’, in G. Laxer & D. Soron (eds), Not for sale: decommodifying public life, Broadview Press, Peterborough, Ontario, pp. 127–140. Brunsdon, C. 1997, Screen tastes: soap opera to satellite dishes, Routledge, London. Budgeon, S. 2013, Third wave feminism and the politics of gender in late modernity, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke. Burkett, M. & Hamilton, K. 2012, ‘Postfeminist sexual agency: young women’s negotiations of sexual consent’, Sexualities, vol. 15, no. 7, pp. 815–833. Cahill, D. 2008, ‘Hegemony and the neoliberal historical bloc: the Australian experience’, in R. Howson & K. Smith (eds), Hegemony: studies in consensus and coercion, Routledge, New York, pp. 201–217. Charles, C. 2013, Elite girls schooling, social class and sexualised popular culture, Routledge, London. Connell, R. 2002, ‘Moloch mutates: global capitalism and the evolution of the Australian ruling class, 1977–2002’, Overland, no. 167, pp. 4–14. Connell, R. 2014, ‘Feminist scholarship and the public realm in postcolonial ­Australia’, Australian Feminist Studies, vol. 29, no. 80, pp. 215–230.

Introduction  21 Cronin, A. 2003, ‘Consumerism and “compulsory individuality”: women, will and potential’, in S. Ahmed, J. Kilby, C. Lury, M. McNeil, & B. Skeggs (eds), Transformations: thinking through feminism, Routledge, London, pp. 273–287. Dean, J. 2010, ‘Tormented femininities,’ Nora: Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research, vol. 18, no. 2, pp. 144–147. Dermody, S. & Jacka, E. 1987, The screening of Australia, Currency Press, Sydney. Dosekun, S. 2015, ‘For Western girls only? Post-feminism as transnational culture’, Feminist Media Studies, vol. 15, no. 6, pp. 960–975. Dow, B. 1996, Prime time feminism: television, media culture, and the women’s movement since 1970, University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, PA. Driscoll, C. 2018, ‘The girl: dynamics of anxiety and reassurance’, paper presented at the ‘Crossroads in Cultural Studies’ conference, University of Shanghai, 12–15 August. Driscoll, C. & Fuller, S. 2015, ‘HBO’s Girls: gender, generation, and quality television’, Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, vol. 29, no. 2, pp. 253–262. Dux, M. & Simic, Z. 2008, The great feminist denial, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne. Edgar, P. & McPhee, H. 1974, Media she, Heinemann, Melbourne. Eichhorn, K. 2013, The archival turn in feminism: outrage in order, Temple University Press, Philadelphia, PA. Eisenstein, H. 1996, Inside agitators: Australian femocrats and the state, Allen & Unwin, St Leonards. Elias, A., Gill, R., & Scharff, C. (eds) 2017, Aesthetic labour: rethinking beauty politics in neoliberalism, Palgrave Macmillan, London. Feher, M. 2009, ‘Self-appreciation, or, the aspirations of human capital’, Public Culture, vol. 21, no. 1, pp. 21–41. Felski, R. 2015, The limits of critique, Chicago University Press, Chicago, IL. Fraser, N. 2013, Fortunes of feminism: from state-managed capitalism to neoliberal crisis, Verso Books, London. Fuller, S. & Driscoll, C. 2015, ‘HBO’s Girls: gender, generation, and quality television’, Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, vol. 29, no. 2, pp. 253–262. Garner, H. 1995, The first stone: some questions about sex and power, Picador, Melbourne. Genz, S. 2006, ‘Third way/ve: the politics of postfeminism’, Feminist Theory, vol. 7, no. 3, pp. 333–353. Genz, S. 2009, Postfemininities in popular culture, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke. Genz, S. & Brabon B.A. 2009, Postfeminism: cultural texts and theories, ­Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh. Gill, R. 2007a, Gender and the media, Polity, Cambridge. Gill, R. 2007b, ‘Postfeminist media culture: elements of a sensibility,’ European Journal of Cultural Studies, vol. 10, no. 2, pp. 147–166. Gill, R. 2016, ‘Post-postfeminism? New feminist visibilities in postfeminist times’, Feminist Media Studies, vol. 16, no. 4, pp. 610–630. Gill, R. 2017, ‘The affective, cultural and psychic life of postfeminism: a postfeminist sensibility 10 years on’, European Journal of Cultural Studies, vol. 20, no. 6, pp. 606–626.

22  Introduction Gill, R. & Orgad, S. 2015, ‘The confidence cult(ure)’, Australian Feminist Studies, vol. 30, no. 86, pp. 324–344. Gozdecka, D. & Macduff, A. 2018, Feminism, postfeminism, and legal theory: beyond the gendered subject, Routledge, London. Grace, H. & Stephen, A. 1981, ‘Where do positive images come from? (and what does a woman want?)’, Scarlet Woman, no. 12, March, pp. 15–22. Guo, J. forthcoming, ‘Postfeminism in China: urban young women’s aesthetic labour on social media’, Doctoral thesis, Department of Gender and Cultural Studies, University of Sydney. Harris, A. 2004, Future girl: young women in the twenty-first century, Routledge, London. Harvey, D. 2005, A brief history of neoliberalism, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Henderson, M. 2006, Marking feminist times: remembering the longest revolution in Australia, Peter Lang, Bern. Henderson, M. 2013, ‘A celebratory feminist aesthetics in postfeminist times: screening the Australian women’s liberation in Paper giants – The birth of Cleo’, Australian Feminist Studies, vol. 28, no. 77, pp. 250–262. Henderson, M. 2016, ‘Retrovisioning chicko roles: Puberty blues as postfeminist television adaptation and the feminisation of the 1970s’, Continuum: Journal of Media Studies, vol. 30, no. 3, pp. 326–335. Henry, A. 2004, Not my mother’s sister: generational conflict and third wave feminism, University of Indiana Press, Bloomington, IN. Heywood, L. & Drake, J. 1997, ‘Introduction’, in L. Heywood & J. Drake (eds), Third wave agenda: being feminist, doing feminism, Minnesota University Press, Minneapolis, MN, pp. 1–22. Hollows, J. 2000, Feminism, femininity and popular culture, Manchester University Press, Manchester. Horbury, A. 2014, ‘Post-feminist impasses in popular heroine television’, Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, vol. 28, no. 2, pp. 213–225. Huntley, R. 2019, ‘Australia fair: listening to the nation’, Quarterly Essay, no. 73, Black Inc., Melbourne. Kanai, A. 2019, Gender and relatability in digital culture: managing affect, intimacy and value, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke. Kaplan, G. 1996, The meagre harvest: the Australian women’s movement 1950s– 1990s, Allen & Unwin, Sydney. Keller, J. & Ryan, M.E. 2018, ‘Introduction: Mapping emergent feminisms’, in J. Keller & M.E. Ryan (eds), Emergent feminisms: Complicating a postfeminist media culture, Routledge, London, pp. 1–22. Lake, M. 1999, Getting equal: the history of Australian feminism, Allen & Unwin, St Leonards. Le Masurier, M. 2007, ‘My other, my self: Cleo magazine and feminism in 1970s Australia,’ Australian Feminist Studies, vol. 22, no. 53, pp. 191–211. Lewis, P., Benshop, Y., & Simpson, R. 2017, Postfeminism and organisation, Routledge, London. Lotz, A.D. 2001, ‘Postfeminist television criticism: rehabilitating critical terms and identifying postfeminist attributes’, Feminist Media Studies, vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 105–121. Lotz, A.D 2007, ‘Theorising the intermezzo: the contributions of postfeminism and third wave feminism’, in S. Gillis, G. Howie, & R. Munford (eds), Third wave

Introduction  23 feminism: a critical exploration, 2nd edn, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, pp. 71–85. Lumby, C. 2011, ‘Past the post in feminist media studies’, Feminist Media Studies, vol. 11, no. 1, pp. 95–100. McDermott, C. 2018, ‘How to survive the postfeminist impasse: Grace Helbig’s affective aesthetics’, Girlhood Studies, vol. 11, no. 3, pp. 50–66. McRobbie, A. 2009, The aftermath of feminism: gender, culture and social change, Sage, London. McRobbie, A. 2015, ‘Notes on the perfect: competitive femininity in neoliberal times’, Australian Feminist Studies, vol. 30, no. 83, pp. 3–20. Modleski, T. 1991, Feminism without women: culture and criticism in a ‘postfeminist’ age, Routledge, New York. Morris, M. 1988, The pirate’s fiancee: feminism, reading, postmodernism, Verso, London. Munford, R. & Waters, M. 2014, Feminism and popular culture: investigating the postfeminist mystique, Rutgers University Press, New York. Nash, M. 2013, ‘Brides n’ bumps: a critical look at bridal pregnancy identities, maternity wedding dresses, and post-feminism’, Feminist Media Studies, vol. 13, no. 4, pp. 593–612. Negra, D. 2009, What a girl wants? fantasizing the reclamation of self in postfeminism, Routledge, London. Nicholson, L. 2010, ‘Feminism in “waves”: useful metaphor or not?’ New Politics, vol. 12, no. 40, viewed 20 April 2019, https://newpol.org/issue_post/feminismwaves-useful-metaphor-or-not/. Pocock, B. 2003, The work/life collision: what work is doing to Australians and what to do about it, The Federation Press, Annandale. Pocock, B. 2006, The labour market ate my babies: work, children and a sustainable future, The Federation Press, Annandale. Projansky, S. 2001, Watching rape: film and television in postfeminist culture, New York University Press, New York. Pusey, M. 2003, The experience of middle Australia: the dark side of economic reform, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Radner, H. 2010, Neofeminist cinema: girly films, chick flicks and consumer culture, Routledge, New York. Ricoeur, P. 1970, Freud and philosophy: an essay on interpretation, D. Savage (trans.), Yale University Press, New Haven, CT. Riley, S., Evans, A., & Robson, M. 2018, Postfeminism and health, Routledge, London. Rimmer, S.H. & Sawer M. 2016, ‘Neoliberalism and gender equality policy in Australia’, Australian Journal of Political Science, vol. 54, no. 1, pp. 742–758. Rivers, N. 2017, Postfeminism(s) and the arrival of fourth wave feminism: turning tides, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke. Robinson, P. 2011, ‘Mobilising postfeminism: young Australian women discuss Sex and the city and Desperate housewives’, Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, vol. 25, no. 1, pp. 111–124. Roof, J. 1997, ‘Generational difficulties; or the fear of a barren history’, in D. Looser & E.A. Kaplan (eds), Generations: academic feminists in dialogue, University Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN, pp. 69–87.

24  Introduction Rose, N. 1996, Inventing ourselves: psychology, power and personhood, ­Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Rosenfelt, D. & Stacey J. 1990, ‘Second thoughts on the second wave’, in K.V. Hansen & I.J. Philipson (eds), Women, class, and the feminist imagination: a socialist feminist reader, Temple University Press, Philadelphia, PA, pp. 549–567. Rottenberg, C. 2018, The rise of neoliberal feminism, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Scharff, C. 2012, Repudiating feminism: young women in a neoliberal world, Ashgate, Farnham. Sedgwick, E.K. 2002, Touching feeling: affect, pedagogy, performativity, Duke University Press, Durham, NC. Sharpe, M. & Boucher, G. 2007, ‘Neither liberal nor conservative: Australia’s postmodern conservatism’, Arena Magazine, August–September, pp. 23–27. Sheridan, S. 1988, ‘Introduction’, in S Sheridan (ed.), Grafts: feminist cultural criticism, Verso, London, pp. 1–10. Summers, A. 2003, The end of equality: work, babies, and women’s choices in 21st century Australia, Random House, Milsons Point. Swarts, J. 2000, Constructing neoliberalism: economic transformation in AngloAmerican democracies, University of Toronto Press, Toronto. Tasker Y. & Negra, D. 2007, ‘Introduction: Feminist politics and postfeminist culture’, in Y. Tasker & D. Negra (eds), Interrogating postfeminism: gender and the politics of popular culture, Duke University Press, Durham, NC, pp. 1–25. Taylor, A. 2008, Mediating Australian feminism: re-reading The First Stone media event, Peter Lang, Oxford. Taylor, A. 2009, ‘Dear daughter: popular feminism, the epistolary form and the limits of generational rhetoric’, Australian Literary Studies, vol. 24, no. 3–4, pp. 96–107. Taylor, A. 2012, Single women in popular culture: the limits of postfeminism, ­Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke. Taylor, A. 2016, Celebrity and the feminist blockbuster, Palgrave Macmillan, ­Basingstoke. ‘The mother’s club’ 2002, Sydney Morning Herald, 7 September, viewed 17 April 2019, www.smh.com.au/articles/2002/09/06/1031115937062.html. Thurlow, C. & Aiello, G. 2007, ‘National pride, global capital: a social semiotic analysis of transnational visual branding in the airline industry’, Visual Communication, vol. 6, no. 3, pp. 305–344. Varney, D. 2016, ‘ “Not now, not ever”: Julia Gillard and the performative power of affect’, in E. Diamond et al. (eds), Performance, feminism and affect in neoliberal times, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, pp. 25–38. Walker, R. 1992, ‘Becoming the third wave’, Ms. Magazine, vol. 11, no. 2, pp. 39–41. Ward, R.B. 1958, The Australian legend, Oxford University Press, Melbourne. Watson, S. (ed.) 1990, Playing the state: Australian feminist interventions, Allen & Unwin, Sydney. Western, M. et al. 2007, ‘Neoliberalism, inequality and politics: the changing face of Australia’, Australian Journal of Social Issues, vol. 42, no. 3, pp. 401–418. Whelehan, I. 2005, The feminist bestseller: from Sex and the single girl to Sex and the city, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke. Whelehan, I. 2010, ‘Remaking feminism: or why is postfeminism so boring?’, Nordic Journal of English Studies, vol. 9, no. 3, pp. 155–172.

Introduction  25 Wood, R. & Litherland, B. 2018, ‘Critical feminist hope: the encounter of neoliberalism and popular feminism in WEE 24: women’s evolution’, Feminist Media Studies, vol. 18, no. 5, pp. 905–922. Wright, J. 2003, The ethics of economic rationalism, UNSW Press, Sydney. Wynhausen, E. 2005, Dirt cheap: life at the wrong end of the job market, ­Macmillan, Sydney.

1 Chick lit Novels of postfeminist independence and aspiration

Our first semioscape of Australian postfeminism is that offered by chick lit for, as Sarah Gamble (2006) amongst others argues, chick lit is the postfeminist genre, ‘establishing the salient characteristics of postfeminism in the popular consciousness’ (p. 63). As such, chick lit has been central to influential theorists of postfeminism, such as Angela McRobbie (2007, 2009), Imelda Whelehan (2000, 2005), Rosalind Gill (2007a, 2007b), and Stéphanie Genz and Benjamin Brabon (2009). McRobbie, for instance, positions Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary (1996) as a foundational text of postfeminism. Moreover, chick lit has attracted much criticism from within and outside the academy, most notably for its consumerism (Ferriss & Young 2006, p. 11), whiteness (Mißler 2017; Hurt 2019), and reactionary gender politics (Whelehan 2000; Gill & Herdieckerhoff 2006; McRobbie 2007, 2009).1 Whelehan (2005, p. 186), for example, contends that ‘Chick lit provides a post-feminist narrative of heterosex and romance for those who feel they’re too savvy to be duped by the most conventional romance narrative’. Australian chick lit, however, does chick lit differently, and thereby articulates some key elements of a distinctive Australian postfeminism. In a dynamic we see repeated in most of our cultural forms, chick lit seductively but not uncritically integrates the legacy and aftermath of second wave feminism into a contemporary neoliberal context. With its blend of young liberated heroines and material affluence, we argue that the semioscape of Australian chick lit constructs a fantasy scenario of how feminism could be lived in neoliberal times, and specifically in a post-Fordist economy – an emergent mode of production based on niche production and consumption, the service industries, and the importance of aesthetic production (Harvey 1989; Lash & Urry 1994) – that attempts to negotiate women’s increased independence and contemporary aspirations. It is neither the ‘passing away’, nor the ‘pushing away’ of feminism that McRobbie (2009) observes in Bridget Jones’s Diary, and thus in postfeminism more broadly, but rather a continuation and updating of feminism in altered historical circumstances.

Chick lit  27 Regardless of chick lit’s neglect by Australian literary and cultural criticism more generally2 – a neglect arguably related to the genre’s seemingly ‘lightweight’ and feminine subject matter and female readership – its humorous narratives of female ‘cultural intermediaries’ (Bourdieu 2007; Featherstone 2007) negotiating employment and romance does serious ideological and cultural work.3 Chick lit perfectly captures Australia’s insertion into circuits of post-Fordist capitalism, and the special role occupied by women in these circuits. That is, while Australian chick lit performs the typical chick lit function of satirising postfeminist manners (Harzewski 2011, p. 4), its parody is directed more broadly than at chick lit’s usual target of feminine advice genres, such as women’s magazines (Smith 2008). Instead, Australian chick lit focuses on specifically feminine notions and narratives of contemporary Australian middle-class aspirations, supposed expressions of ‘the winners of contemporary [neoliberal] Australia’ (Scalmer 2008, p. 6). Given the importance of the post-Fordist economy to Australian chick lit, we begin with a brief discussion of Scott Lash and John Urry’s (1994) economy of signs and space, and outline the contours of local chick lit – when it emerges, who writes it and for whom, and introduce our selected novels on which our analysis is based. We then discuss each of the key elements structuring Australian chick lit’s semioscape of aspiration and independence: the freedom and inauthenticity of work; an ambivalence regarding middle classness; the conspicuous consumption and fetishism of chick lit’s female hedonism; and the industry required by and underpinning post-industrial femininities. Australian chick lit, in its consistent choice of heroines who work as sign producers in the culture industries, is one of the leading cultural genres that engages with the changing structure of the Australian economy and the associated production of post-industrial femininity (both in its narratives and its functioning as a cultural form). These increasingly important and/or new culture industries – women’s magazines, public relations, television, advertising, event management, interior design, fashion, and beauty – are all components of the fashion–beauty–media complex (our extension of McRobbie’s fashion–beauty complex [2009]) and consequently are core to postfeminist culture and theory. In effect, chick lit provides a fictionalised, gendered, and contextually specific supplement to Lash and Urry’s account of post-Fordism, which they term as ‘the economy of signs and space’. According to Lash and Urry, the nature of objects changes: ‘What is increasingly produced are not material objects, but signs’ – either informational or aesthetic (1994, p. 4). They further contend that this economy works through the accelerated and geographically increased flows of ‘money, productive capital, … commodities’, and human subjects (1994, p. 2), and, we would add, cultural forms such as chick lit. The production of immaterial, including symbolic, goods in Australia – whether these be signs or services – by a largely female ­

28  Chick lit ­ orkforce challenges traditional and masculine sectors of the economy w and marks Australia’s position in global, semi-borderless circuits of economic and cultural exchange.4 Crucially, Lash and Urry also reject the usual left-pessimism regarding post-Fordist capitalism, instead arguing: There is evidence that the same individuals, the same human beings who are increasingly subject to, and the subjects of, such space economies are simultaneously becoming increasingly reflexive with respect to them … taking on an increasingly critical and reflexive distance with reference to these institutions of the new information society. (1994, p. 4) Indeed, this is what we find with our heroines of Australian chick lit: socially mobile while ensconced in a specifically feminine space of contemporary capitalism (i.e. the fashion–beauty–media complex), but they use humour and parody to voice the critical reflexivity identified by Lash and Urry. In addition, Australian chick lit expresses this location in its local take on an initially Anglo-American (though now globalising) literary form. Like the global women’s magazines it satirises, such as Cosmopolitan or Vogue – with their multiple international editions synecdochical of the larger transnational dynamic of post-Fordist capitalism – Australian chick lit takes on generic features of chick lit but transposes them onto local conditions.5 As we demonstrate, Australian chick lit is distinguished from chick lit in other contexts by a cultural diversity of writers and heroines, a decentring of romance in favour of work and hedonism, and a feministinspired parodic critique of middle-class aspirations and postindustrial femininities, even as it rehearses their allure. In combination, these characteristics produce a more nuanced and politically progressive genre than is usually acknowledged, even by the defenders of chick lit. Through its Bildung (or process of self-formation) centred on female aspiration rather than romance, Australian chick lit symbolises two forms of aspiration that have characterised Australia, and specifically young women, from the 1980s onwards: second wave feminist narratives and ideologemes of aspirations for freedom and independence (whether economic, sexual, political, or subjective), and neoliberal narratives of material and financial aspiration and social mobility. These blended types of aspiration form the core of the heroine’s Bildung, and produce the double-voicedness, or a feminist parodic reflexivity, that characterises the genre. Australian chick lit’s engagement with the seemingly superficial reveals a critical consciousness of and in postfeminist culture.

The making of Australian chick lit Ironically, considering that expatriate writer Kathy Lette is one of the formative chick lit authors with her 1991 novel, The Llama Parlour, (and

Chick lit  29 paralleling Lette’s delayed identification with chick lit), Australian chick lit makes a belated appearance on the local publishing scene, dating from the early 2000s (Maggie Alderson’s Pants on Fire [2000] and Rebecca Sparrow’s The Girl Most Likely [2002] are two of the earliest examples), and becoming significant in the second decade of the twenty-first century. This belatedness, we suggest, contributes to Australian chick lit’s parodic take on the genre – it is well aware of the genre’s parameters and hence its limitations. The eight authors we discuss, for instance, publish 14 works from 2010–2015 (Lette’s expatriate status excludes her from the discussion). Being an implicitly commercial form, chick lit’s ongoing interest to publishers demonstrates a viable readership, while the range of authors – including a number of high-profile Australian women (actor Sophie Lee, media personality Wendy Harmer, PR guru Roxy Jacenko, and the ­ex-editor of Vogue Australia, Kirstie Clements) – suggests the genre’s attractiveness. This popularity, as well as chick lit’s fictional engagement with the lives of contemporary Australian women (even if at the level of fantasy and hyperbole), means that the category of Australian women’s writing needs to be redefined to include chick lit as an object of serious consideration. In addition, chick lit should be regarded as a distinctive part of the history of the Australian novel, rather than sidelined as just another version of the women’s novel – as Cecilia Konchar Farr (2009) argues occurs with American literature and chick lit. Australian chick lit, like Australian women’s self-help (discussed in Chapter 5), is a broad and expanding field. We base our discussion on a small subset of chick lit novels written by Australian-based authors and published between 1996 and 2016 – eight authors and their 22 works, listed in Table 1.1 below. We selected these works from a much larger group of Australian chick lit novels published over this time, attempting to find both the atypical chick lit novel, but also representative examples of Australian chick lit. First, to explore the feminist potential of the genre, we chose works that confound the typical charges laid against what we term the first wave of Anglo-American chick lit mentioned above: its whiteness, apolitical nature, middle-class world view, and anti-feminist politics.6 To give a more complete sense of style, and as evidence of an author’s popularity and hence representativeness, we then prioritised authors of multiple titles, where possible. In addition, we selected examples that typify ­Australian chick lit’s favoured terrain of the culture industries. With the exception of Anita Heiss, we have limited our novels to ones set mainly in Australia (we exempt Heiss from this requirement because of the significance of an Indigenous writer using non-Australian settings).7 We had no problem finding examples that troubled the above-mentioned criticisms of Anglo-American chick lit, and of the whiteness of postfeminist culture (Gill 2007b; McRobbie 2009; Butler 2013; Marston 2018). That Australian chick lit contains a noticeable number of confounding examples is one defining feature of the Antipodean version of the genre. Although

30  Chick lit Table 1.1  Novels analysed Author

Title

Randa Abdel-Fattah Amal Awad Maggie Alderson

No Sex in the City (2012) Courting Samira (2012) Pants on Fire (2000) Mad About the Boy (2002) Air Kisses (2008) Playing the Field (2010) The Younger Man (2012) The Wrong Girl (2014) Not Meeting Mr Right (2007) Avoiding Mr Right (2008) Manhattan Dreaming (2010) Paris Dreaming (2011) Tiddas (2014) Strictly Confidential: A Jazzy Lou Novel (2012) The Rumour Mill: A Jazzy Lou Novel (2013) The Spotlight: A Jazzy Lou Novel (2014) Gucci Mamas (2007) Versace Sisters (2009) Chanel Sweethearts (2010) Armani Angels (2011) Campaign Ruby (2010) Ruby Blues (2011)

Zoe Foster

Anita Heiss

Roxy Jacenko Cate Kendall

Jessica Rudd

Australian chick lit is overwhelmingly written by and about white women, it does feature the significant presence of an Aboriginal author, Heiss, with five chick lit novels (Not meeting Mr Right (2007), Avoiding Mr Right (2008), Manhattan dreaming (2010), Paris dreaming (2011), and Tiddas (2014), and two Muslim authors, the Turkish-Australian Randa Abdel-Fattah and the Palestinian-Australian Amal Awad. In all three, the tensions between postfeminist culture and ethnicity are central to the heroine’s Bildung. In addition, Roxy Jacenko’s heroine of her three novels, Jazzy Lou, is Jewish and claims a working-class background. These seem evidence of the mobile subjects and culture of post-Fordism, a related recognition of Australia as a multicultural nation – or at least, one where ethnicity matters to subjectivity, as well as a nation with an Indigenous population who are part of urban Australia. Given that the predominant setting for chick lit, including in Australia, is the culture industries, we discuss Zoe Foster’s four novels, Air Kisses, Playing the Field, The Younger Man, and The Wrong Girl; Cate Kendall’s Gucci Mamas, Versace Sisters, Chanel Sweethearts, and Armani Angels; and Maggie Alderson’s Pants on Fire and Mad About the Boy – all located in this space.8 Another distinctive feature of Australian chick lit is that it ventures into parliamentary and electoral politics, as in the two novels by Jessica Rudd (daughter of ex-Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, and therefore

Chick lit  31 one of chick lit’s higher profile authors): Campaign Ruby and Ruby Blues.9 We chose these two quite different domains – one typifying chick lit and posited as linked to consumption and the reproduction of conventional and oppressive notions of femininity; the other being an idiosyncratic setting for chick lit, with party politics being a masculine realm (as Chapter 6 explores) but also an important space of feminist and progressive politics – to see how the chick lit scenarios play out in specifically ­Australian versions of these two sites. Because of the primary importance of work to the Australian version of chick lit, and hence to its making of a different version of postfeminism, our delineation of the semioscape begins with the signs and space of chick lit’s workers.

The novel of postfeminist working women Stephanie Harzewski is correct to characterise chick lit as an updating of the working-girl novel (2011, pp. 124, 126). Australian chick lit captures the freedom and mobility (economic, subjective, and physical) made possible by paid employment – enabling our heroines access to fetish objects such as luxury shoes – but their work as cultural intermediaries in the fashion–beauty–media complex also voices a critique of the inauthenticity of feminine occupations in post-Fordist capitalism, and, by extension, post-industrial femininity (to which we return). Indeed, contrary to Juliette Wells’ claim that chick lit is predominantly about romance rather than work – ‘the world of work in chick lit is thus essentially window dressing’, she observes (2006, p. 55) – we argue that work (as in our dramedies) is central to these novels and hence to women’s aspirations, even if at times disguised or temporarily diverted by the romance plot. Just as social realist writers like K.S. Prichard and Jean Devanny focused on the working lives of Australian women in the early part of the twentieth century and aimed to appeal to a broad readership, so too does chick lit. The shift in the class position and types of employment in chick lit, however, are signs of major historical change for the Australian working woman, marking a victory of second wave feminism but also women’s more ambiguous position within the economy of signs and space. ­Australian chick lit thereby covers, in fictional terms, similar terrain to McRobbie’s (2016) account of British female creative workers in postFordism, though far less pessimistically. McRobbie finds precarious middle-class work as the destination for socially mobile young women (2016, p. 10), a thematic that Suzanne Ferriss (2015, p. 183) argues is played out in Anglo-American chick lit. In contrast, and as befitting a fantasy of how second wave feminism could/should have played out in this country with its less deregulated labour market, the legacy of second wave feminism’s use of the state to address women’s inequality (Kaplan 1996; Lake 1999), and almost three decades of uninterrupted economic growth, Australian chick lit offers freedom and affluence.

32  Chick lit Many of the novels begin with a relationship break-up and conclude with the heroine finding the right man; however, romance’s purpose is largely structural: a plot with which to organise the novel’s real concerns of work and consumerist pleasure, bearing out Harzewski’s contention that chick lit ‘offers a sexual theory of late capitalism’ (2011, p. 11). Chick lit updates the romance plot to include and foreground work so as to better reflect the changed realities of young women’s lives. In this sense, it is clearly post-second wave, and echoes McRobbie’s finding that now, for both working-class and middle-class young women, ‘the idea of “romance” has been deflected away from the sphere of love and intimacy and instead projected into the idea of a fulfilling career … They want to find work about which they can feel passionate’ (2018, p. 91). Jane Arthurs’ (2003, p. 85) reading of romance in the television version of Sex and the City is equally applicable to our novels: ‘The traditional romance narrative is there but as a residual sensibility’. Frequently being employed by the fashion–beauty–media complex, the types of work our heroines perform are of a particular kind – the glam, ideal jobs to which young women should aspire as signs of postfeminist social mobility and success (McRobbie 2016, pp. 89–90). Jacenko’s Jazzy Lou is a public relations consultant, Abdel-Fattah’s Esma works in human resources, Alderson’s heroine of Pants on Fire, Georgia, and Awad’s Samira are women’s magazine journalists, while Antonia, heroine of Mad About the Boy, is an interior designer/antiques seller. Foster’s Air Kisses features Hannah, a women’s magazine beauty editor, The Wrong Girl has Lily, a TV producer, and The Younger Man’s Abby runs a Promotional Girl agency. Rudd’s Ruby is employed as a PR-media advisor to a politician, and Heiss’s novels feature Aboriginal women working in television and as arts bureaucrats. These are socially mobile, middle-class, often tertiary educated, white-collar worker-heroines and, specifically, they are sign producers, makers of images and taste directed at female audiences, offering inside knowledge of the fashion–beauty–media complex, and its method of producing aspirational post-industrial femininity. Heiss’s and Rudd’s heroines, although working in the arts bureaucracies (a feminised branch of the bureaucracy) and the political machine, respectively, reveal the similarities with the fashion–beauty–media complex – they are both about the manipulation of popular taste. The production of signs, typically of femininity, is women’s work in chick lit, and bears out McRobbie’s contention that women’s increasing prevalence in the culture industries makes ‘the gender of post-Fordism … female’ (2016, p. 88). Rather than uncritical fictionalisations of their respective workplaces, virtually every novel, in keeping with their working-girl novel heritage, functions as a feminist exposé of their industries, even while the glamour of work is foregrounded. These exposés typically revolve not around poor working conditions or worker exploitation – problems from another era and political paradigm – but rather the banality, even inauthenticity, of the

Chick lit  33 industry, which is a major contributor to an ambivalence characterising chick lit. Similar to McRobbie’s findings, chick lit’s critique reveals the meanings attached to work for postfeminist women: it is about self-­ realisation, first and foremost, or what McRobbie terms ‘passionate work’ (2016). Foster’s Air Kisses begins each chapter with a beauty tip as an epigraph, the recontextualisation revealing the absurdity of the intertext: ‘Multi-task: use a pearly lip gloss not only on lips, but on brow and cheekbones as a highlighter. Use hair serum on your collarbone and shins to get a sheen. And use bronzer on your décolletage, eyelids and cheeks’, the magazine advises (2008, p. 209). Complementing this is a narrative that details the absurdity of being a magazine beauty editor, a result of the unrealistic promises made by the beauty industry and women’s magazines. A working day for Hannah is as follows: I was used to, say, a natural skincare launch at 8.30 am … followed by a 12.30 lunch with a PR to talk about their tanning range, then a 2.30 two-hour board room meeting with Karen and Marly, and, to finish, a 6 p.m cocktail function in a hotel lobby with every hairdresser in the metropolitan district. (2008, p. 112) Here, and throughout the novel, Foster stresses the inextricable links between beauty, magazines, and commerce that amplify the absurdity of work in the fashion–beauty–media complex. Similarly, across all of Jacenko’s novels, the PR queen, Jazzy Lou, provides a ruthless dissection of public relations, celebrity, fashion, and media, offering the reader detailed case studies of just how products are really launched, reputations made and remade, and how the circuits of fame fuel the industry of popular taste. Rudd’s heroine, Ruby, in the different realm of political parties (though never named, the party resembles the progressive, centre left Australian Labor Party), is increasingly cynical about the machinations of the party machine and electoral success, until closing the second novel with a mild affirmation of faith in the political system. Likewise, Kendall’s international flight attendant in Versace Sisters, Bella, seems set to reject her job’s apparently glamorous lifestyle: on her last flight she does not purchase any discount Versace in Los Angeles. And Samira, in Courting Samira, leaves Bridal Bazaar magazine – a title that unsettles Western stereotypes of Muslim arranged marriages – to take up a photography cadetship. While successful, these aspirational women are Lash and Urry’s reflexive subjects rather than cultural dupes. Heiss’s and Abdel-Fattah’s novels offer a significant contrast to the inauthentic jobs of our Anglo-Celt heroines, with characters engaged in ­politically committed work – in the cultural sector for Heiss, or in community work for Abdel-Fattah – another feature that confounds Western stereotypes. Lauren O’Mahony (2018, p. 54) describes Heiss’s project as

34  Chick lit c­ onsciousness-raising for white readers; similarly, Imogen Mathew argues that ‘Heiss’s chick lit functions as an instructional text, exposing readers to new perspectives on contemporary Aboriginal culture and identity’ (2016, p. 335). In effect, Heiss writes a counter-advice manual for her white readers. As part of this pedagogical project, her heroines, like the author herself (Mathew 2016, p. 342), are literally curators of contemporary Aboriginal culture, and hence are makers of a different set of signs of Aboriginal identity to those pathologised representations produced by the white Australian media. Thus, the detailed descriptions of their working lives – arranging exhibitions, writing arts policy, organising artist visits, lobbying white bureaucrats, meeting with overseas Indigenous artists – make explicit, normalise, and mainstream the networks of Aboriginal cultural production. Similarly, No Sex in the City’s Esma – with her Master’s degree, and her group of friends including Ruby, a Greek Orthodox lawyer, Nirvana, an Indian-Australian midwife, and Lily, a Jewish radical lawyer – confounds another set of pathologised representations reserved for non-Anglo women as passive victims of oppressive religious traditions (a position we see the xenophobic politician Pauline Hanson articulating in our final chapter). Instead, both authors represent work as meaningful and vital; their heroines’ critical consciousness is reserved for white co-workers’ ignorance. Regardless of the fashion–beauty–media complex’s apparent superficiality, being a worker or career woman is not the problem, and although the girl usually ends up with the guy, like the television series we examine next, Australian chick lit shows little interest in narratives of maternal or married retreatism so familiar to postfeminist media culture (Negra 2009). While a heroine may want to slow down the pace of work – Jazzy Lou, for example, tries to sell her agency in The Rumour Mill (Jacenko 2013), or find a husband (Abdel-Fattah 2012 and Awad 2012) – the space of work is the space of self-realisation and freedom. This is evident in the amount of textual space devoted to the workplace compared to the domestic and the romantic, the dominant work-based temporality of the novels and, most importantly, the heroine’s sense of aliveness at work, as the following passage from The Wrong Girl makes clear: As Lily sat down in her chair, she looked at the spreadsheet on her screen, and a shiver of excitement whizzed through her body. Sometimes, with so much stress and so many morons taking precedence much of the time, she forgot how much she loved her job. Jesus, she was getting her jollies from Excel; she really needed some action. But as Lily read over what she’d created, she couldn’t help the small hum of delight from creeping back in. (Foster 2014, p. 128) Similarly, Esma’s volunteering at the Refugee Centre makes her reflect that ‘I drive home exhilarated, humbled and overwhelmed by a sense that it’s

Chick lit  35 here, at the centre, that I am really starting to find my own identity and place in the world’ (Abdel-Fattah 2012, p. 57). So, although the novels are punctuated by the romantic rituals of flirting and dating, these occur within, and are secondary to in most novels, a detailed evocation of the heroines’ working lives. At times one feels as if reading someone’s diary of, or how-to guide for, the contemporary workplace – pragmatic career advice compared to the calculating magic that characterises Australian women’s self-help books (see Chapter 5). For instance, Heiss’s novels, although in many ways the most conventional in terms of the romance plot, continually revolve around the strategies the heroines use to further Aboriginal culture through their work as bureaucrats. Female agency is literalised by this detailed evocation of working life. The fantasy of how second wave feminism could have played out continues in the nature of the workplace. These are typically highly feminised spaces: women are often in senior positions; men are peripheral, and when they do occur novels tend to feature alternative masculinities such as artists and gay men. Work represents competency, connection, independence, and a sense of possibility – a form that we suspect can only be imagined in a largely female workplace. Unlike the bitchy boss we see in, for example, The Devil Wears Prada (Weisberger 2003), the female boss is someone powerful and worthy of emulation; if the heroine becomes a boss she is at pains to point out how she treats her employees decently, as does Abby in Foster’s The Younger Man: Every so often she had a girl (beautiful women attracted fuckwits like silk shirts soaked up olive oil) who was clearly in love with an abusive, be it physical or emotional, boyfriend, and Abby always felt compelled to make sure her girls were okay, and to offer some help. (2012, p. 25) Furthermore, the workplace is a site of community for characters – found also in the television dramedy, Offspring, discussed in the following chapter. At the first meeting of the Parliamentary ‘Girls’ Club’, in Rudd’s Ruby Blues, the Prime Minister’s female Chief of Staff declares: we’re all victims of the same stretching machine. We’re being torn, whether we’re MPs or Senators, party leaders or backbenchers, cartoonists or press secs. We mightn’t agree with each other’s politics but we need to help each other out because we’re the only ones who understand what that’s like. (2011, p. 32) Most importantly, these working women act on and in the world; their working lives are about making things happen. In Campaign Ruby, the heroine has to rapidly organise a strategy to make an overly glamorous

36  Chick lit candidate more electable: ‘My gut took over. “She needs an image overhaul, she needs the local party to unite behind her and she needs to give newspapers here something good to say about her” ’ (Rudd 2010, p. 237). She executes the strategy perfectly. Laura, the curator of Aboriginal art, organises an exhibition in New York almost single-handedly. No Sex in the City’s Esma volunteers at the Sydney Refugee Centre. These evocations of the agency associated with work differ so radically from the entrepreneurial, positive-thinking ‘self’ found in our self-help books. Harzewski astutely observes that chick lit blends elements of the adventure story and the romance (2011, p. 25); in nearly all examples we examine, the adventure story is firmly located in the spaces and narratives of work. Correspondingly, these heroines (with a couple of exceptions) are neither the anxious incompetents like Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones, nor top girl perfectionists identified by McRobbie (2007); rather, they take work seriously, and either know or learn the importance of faking it at work. Hannah, the inexperienced beauty editor of Gloss magazine, manages to give a perfect presentation to potential advertisers: I allowed myself a moment to loll about in my victory, small and insignificant as it was in the scheme of my job, beauty and even magazines in general. It felt good to know that, for once, I was not only competent but impressive. (Foster 2008, p. 204) Similarly, Samira receives a promotion at the magazine and a photography cadetship: ‘I’d won it, fair and square’ she reflects (Awad 2012, p. 340). Rather than chick lit’s celebration of incompetency, as both Whelehan (2005, p. 208) and Gill and Herdieckerhoff (2006, p. 496) contend, ­Australian chick lit shows women as adapted to and successful in the contemporary workplace – at least in their largely feminised occupations. More importantly, chick lit offers a complex critique of work for women in the fashion–beauty–media complex, and beyond – a realm of inauthenticity but also agency and self-realisation, and, as we soon see, a means to alternative sources of pleasure.

Chick lit class Australian chick lit shares its antecedent Jane Austen’s focus on the nexus of money, gender, and class, however, chick lit’s rendition signals the radically different historical context of Australian postfeminism. Rather than the female vulnerability of Austen’s heroines, feminism’s legacy of emphasising paid work and career for young women decentres the ­problematic of negotiating the marriage market but inaugurates another problematic – of mobility and affluence. Similar to the other elements of the chick lit semioscape, the signification of class in our novels points to

Chick lit  37 women’s contradictory position in the post-Fordist economy, namely, their seemingly pleasurable and attainable role and aspirations. Local chick lit continues and modifies the weirdness of Australia’s version of class in which egalitarianism, one of our national mythologies (Ward 1958; Turner 1993; Elder 2007), is actually detached from a class-based identity and analysis. As Catriona Elder explains, ‘Positing egalitarianism as a central characteristic of Australian-ness obscures class inequality, while paradoxically making class central to stories of being Australian’ (2007, p. 46). Unlike Anglo-American chick lit novels (or at least, critical readings of them), in which the middle classness of the heroine and culture is assumed, noted, or elided with consumerism as a largely unproblematic signifier of postfeminist or neoliberal culture (Whelehan 2005; Mabry 2006; Scanlon 2013), for Australian chick lit, the symbolic meanings attached to the middle and working classes suggest the conflicts facing an aspirational female subject who has a residual attachment to myths of Australian egalitarianism. A number of the novels offer the fantasy destination not only as a stylish bourgeois consumer, but also a satire of the middle classes, and posit that working-class values are superior and can survive. This is Australian postfeminist women attempting to negotiate an increasingly unequal class system, by trying to have it both ways. Chick lit acknowledges social stratification by its attempts to mask the loss of egalitarianism in the very terms that articulate that loss (i.e. luxury goods). A number of critics observe chick lit’s focus on the expensive nature of postfeminist femininity and the easy availability of credit, with heroines being constantly in debt (Harzewski 2011, p. 122; Wilson 2012, p. 217). For example, in her reading of Sophie Kinsella’s Shopaholic series, Jessica Lyn Van Slooten notes that: ‘Becky’s recurring patterns of Moneyfolly and compulsive shopping speak to a larger problem; despite her ability to emerge from immense debt, Becky inevitably falls into the abyss again and again’ (2006, p. 236). Our heroines, however, appear less financially strapped and more financially competent, and thereby contribute to a broader national economic narrative of unimpeded and unproblematic economic growth, and the acceptability of consumer and household debt as part of this. Rather than Ferriss’s (2015) chick lit precariat, Australian chick lit is marked by an ease regarding money that keeps invisible the role consumer credit plays in funding a postfeminist lifestyle, and thereby makes the aspirational narrative more attractive. When Jazzy Lou buys a new Range Rover she explains that: When I put down my order I paid the deposit in cash. This is my tradition when buying a car. In a weird way it adds to the buzz, handing over an envelope as thick as a brick, stuffed with notes. I earned it, why not get a power kick from spending it. (Jacenko 2014, p. 59)

38  Chick lit As a consequence, Australian chick lit avoids what Diane Negra and Yvonne Tasker term the recessionary culture of post-Global Financial Crisis popular culture: ‘Recessionary culture maintains these [postfeminist] celebratory discourses of course but, we argue, they are underwritten or more precisely contextualised by a perception that equality is a luxury that can no longer be afforded’ (2014, p. 4). This difference, we contend, arises from the Australian context of over 25 years of economic growth, including the mining boom, and the federal Labor government’s approach (during Kevin Rudd’s leadership) to managing the Global Financial Crisis via the stimulus package rather than austerity measures, for example (Taylor & Uren 2010). Australian chick lit is a novel for times when equality and luxury can both be afforded or imagined to be so. Jacenko’s Jazzy Lou series, Kendall’s designer label novels, and Maggie Alderson’s Pants on Fire and Mad About the Boy are the most explicit regarding class and money, and hence indicate the ways in which chick lit maintains the contradictory and specifically Australian fantasies of aspiration and egalitarianism through the moral coding of the middle and working classes. Indeed, they do evince a form of nostalgia that Heike Mißler observes as specific to chick lit, and which acts as a criticism of the present (2017, pp. 174, 178). The overarching narrative in the Jazzy Lou novels is that of a working-class girl who overcomes being sacked from her first PR job, sets up her own PR agency, and ends up a wealthy and powerful PR mogul: a classic narrative of post-Fordist capitalist and postfeminist aspiration. Jacenko, however, provides a weird and hence significant moment regarding class. Jazzy Lou is at pains to dis-identify with Sydney’s eastern suburbs rich girls who dominate the PR and media industries, instead basing her success on her working-class Jewish origins: ‘I trod like a lemming the well-worn track laid down by my parents. The path, that is, of plain old hard work’ (2012, pp. 6–7). We contend that Jazzy Lou identifies with a working-class identity because of its moral superiority compared to the superficiality of her hard-won middle-class milieu.10 This moral coding and hierarchy feature in a number of the other novels, as in Heiss’s Tiddas when the heroines return to their working-class childhood home of Mudgee, and through the depiction of Zoe Foster’s shop assistant heroine in Playing the Field, and the rural working people of Kendall’s Chanel Sweethearts. In contrast to the triumph of middle-class values that Jennifer Scanlon (2013) observes in American post-GFC chick lit, Australian chick lit signals the losses incurred by individual aspiration and seemingly unfettered social mobility and consumerism, and a continuing attachment to egalitarianism. Although, as our chapter on female political leaders reveals, Australian egalitarianism can have retrograde implications for women as well. In the case of Jazzy Lou, because of her imagined working-class origins, money and its transformation into markers of bourgeois taste and visible success dominate her life. She continually refers to how much it costs for

Chick lit  39 her lifestyle (see, for example, the third novel, The Spotlight, when she moves into a five star hotel while the house is being renovated for the second time in a year), how much the business is earning, how much its earnings have grown, what the particular budgets are for various projects, and what staff cost and expend: I’ve been accused in the past of being a cut-throat boss with zero compassion (well, that’s how one ex-employee described me in a recent lawsuit). Yet Anya, my longest-serving Bee, is proof that if you keep your nose to the grindstone, working for me does pay off. Anya has just bought a $1 million house in Double Bay, where she stores her convertible Mercedes in the undercover car park. Her wardrobe is even bigger and brassier than mine (remember, I also have a toddler with expensive taste in clothes). (Jacenko 2014, p. 20) Jazzy, as a working-class creator of illusions, is one of the few characters in chick lit to acknowledge the financial cost of producing them. She emphasises the role of freebies in the industry (like the ‘haul’ videos by beauty vloggers), and criticises the celebrities who do not want to pay the cost of the image: keeping borrowed designer clothes and jewellery, hoarding complimentary luxury products, and other acts of borderline theft. Thus, Jazzy Lou is the accountant of contemporary capitalism: her method blends working-class thrift with consumer capitalist excess. ‘I feel like Santa freaking Claus sometimes, fulfilling the wish lists of journalists struggling to live upper-class lifestyles on working-class salaries’, as she doles out the luxury freebies (Jacenko 2014, p. 19). Regardless of her increasing wealth, Jazzy’s moral accounting system remains consistent in expressing her imagined working-class origins, though in lifestyle terms she would never willingly return to them. She is the conflicted aspirational postfeminist subject – unconsciously or consciously counting the costs of social mobility. Kendall’s four novels should be seen as an extended politico-moral commentary on women and class in early twenty-first-century Australia. Like Jacenko’s, each novel revolves around a character who has moved from a working-class childhood to be an apparently successful bourgeois woman: single, married, some with children, all enthusiastic participants in post-Fordist capitalism. They face some sort of personal crisis, however: relationship breakdown, family drama, or career blockage, and the solution is linked to a coming to terms with their working-class past and the institution of a new set of more authentic (read socially conscious) values. Indeed, political activism, or at least social justice activism, haunts Kendall’s works – environmental politics in Chanel Sweethearts, the plight of the homeless in Armani Angels, and existential authenticity versus consumerism in Versace Sisters and Gucci Mamas. Throughout the novels contemporary

40  Chick lit bourgeois culture is continually satirised: it is excessive, competitive, shallow, and absurd; it creates morally vacuous women and men. In one particularly incisive passage in Gucci Mamas, two of the chicks are at Crown Casino for a Child Victims of Landmines Lunch: Mim and Tiffany needed a chance to check their reflections and swap crowd observations. It was clear that this was the year of the boot – and everyone who was anyone was boasting a pair under the ubiquitous wrap dress. High boots, low boots or ankle boots – boot-mania had obviously struck. (Kendall 2007, p. 119) The neoliberal makeover and attempted takeover of social justice movements and NGOs into charities (Weiss 2001; Middleton 2006) is perfectly captured by Kendall’s grotesque irony. Kendall, like Jacenko, reflects upon the rituals and the value system of the newly affluent middle-class women in Australia, and they are found wanting. Its representatives in her novels – all workers in the image industries – are analogously hollowed out into signifiers of style and taste. We read the narrative closure of each novel, in which there is a coming to terms with the working-class past and/or the institution of an anti-bourgeois value system, as a symbolic recognition of the losses incurred by the dominance of middle-class aspiration, and a related marginalisation and/or fantasy of the working class in the post-Fordist capitalist imaginary. Kendall’s heroines attempt a form of restitution for a reconfigured and less egalitarian Australia, Jacenko records the debits, and, as we next discuss, Alderson attempts to resolve class conflict. Significantly, in the case of all three authors, and as McRobbie (2016), amongst others, observes, women are the major beneficiaries of this social mobility, and therefore have the conflicted position of being a symptom of the system’s emptiness as well as its moral conscience. In this role as moral conscience, Alderson’s Pants on Fire and Mad About the Boy use the perspective of an English heroine and queer sexuality to delineate and resolve the class-based geographies of Sydney in a vision of post-Fordist social harmony. Both novels are set in the affluent inner eastern suburbs of Sydney, centred on Paddington with its mix of bohemian and bourgeois culture workers. In Pants on Fire the heroine works for a women’s magazine; in Mad about the Boy she is an interior designer turned antique shop proprietor. In their work and social circles, they are observers of the various class fractions or ‘tribes’, as Alderson puts it, which inhabit inner city Sydney. Alderson’s pluralistic vision of class in Australia offers a more optimistic vision of aspiration than either Jacenko’s or Kendall’s. In one of the final scenes in Pants on Fire, the heroine ends up in bed with straight men and women, and gay men. It is not quite an orgy, but it does represent how Alderson perceives Sydney to

Chick lit  41 be – mixed and porous in terms of class and sexuality – an alternative to class-stratified and repressed England. This tableau is slightly revised in Mad About the Boy. In this novel, the heroine falls in love with a younger working-class man who works at her local gym, after her aristocrat husband leaves her for a man. If the husband can leave his sexual identity behind (this occurs in Australia rather than England), she too can shift her class-based identity. Similar to Jacenko and Kendall, the boyfriend is represented as authentic and unaffected, unlike the duplicitous types in the heroine’s middle-class world. Although Alderson emphasises class-based misunderstandings and difficulties between the lovers, the novel has a scene towards the end where all the tribes come together at a party and mix happily. This is Alderson’s cosmopolitan desire for Sydney and its early twenty-first-century reconfigurations of class and sexuality: a plural, fluid, tolerant terrain, where differences can be accepted (but most people are white), and where working-class characters find space and represent moral solidity in chick lit’s semioscape. Thus, in Alderson’s novels and throughout Australian chick lit, while resolutely and comfortingly aspirational in class and financial terms, its parodic reflexivity gestures to the costs for the heroines as they become middle-class subjects in the economy of signs and space. The heroines appear economically free and self-choosing but must be its moral conscience; they look to the working class for alternative values even as it disappears into postindustrial aspirations and precarity. As the next section demonstrates, however, the benefits of this mobility outweigh the costs.

The novel of female hedonism A continuing concern of women’s writing and feminist literary studies has been the need to better represent women’s pleasures and desires, an issue linked to the broader one of women’s right to self-define their sexuality. Women’s pleasures, therefore, have often been defined in terms of the sexual and bodily and, as such, liberatory potentials of literary erotica or porn for women writers and readers have been advocated (as in Angela Carter and Pat Califia). We argue, however, that something quite different occurs in the semioscape of Australian chick lit. Just as the pleasures of work limit the romance plot, the pleasures of consumerism overshadow, if not replace, sexual pleasures, as reflected in the chick lit totems of shoes, make-up, and handbags. Australian chick lit’s response to the need to better represent women’s desires, therefore, is a highly significant shift. Forget erotica or porn for women, chick lit’s parodic consumerist ­hedonism makes it the contemporary novel of women’s desires. Rather than signifying chick lit’s vacuousness or its (and, by extension, postfeminism’s) incorporation by consumer capitalism – its ‘revelry in consumerism’ (Harzewski 2011, p. 51; see also Wells 2006) – Australian chick lit’s excessively desiring heroine is indicative of women’s new found (economic)

42  Chick lit power and its limitations, and signals Australia’s integration into the global economy of luxury. Stéphanie Genz observes that postfeminist feminine subjectivities are the most recent iteration of ‘the New Woman’ identity that has recurred throughout the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries and are ‘a particularly ambivalent and contradictory embodiment’ (2010, p. 98). In contrast to the critics who have argued that the ‘singleton’ – as first articulated in Bridget Jones’s Diary – typifies the postfeminist new woman (as in ­Harzewski 2011 and Taylor 2012), we argue that the new woman found in Australian chick lit is a hedonist: a pleasure-seeking female, who, in her parodic excessiveness, is a humorous and self-reflexive fetishist. We refer here to fetishism in a cultural or social sense more so than Freud’s pathological understanding – in the sense of using a substitute semi-magical object for pleasure that masks and acknowledges a form of loss. In the pages of chick lit, whenever there is a need for pleasure or trouble, the heroine reaches for or refers to this object. When Ruby loses her job in Campaign Ruby, for example, she puts on her brand new pair of Louboutin shoes (2010, p. 7). When Hannah, heroine of Air Kisses, sees her ­ex-boyfriend with his new girlfriend she reaches for her ‘new season Bobbi Brown palette and touched up my under-eye concealer, my blush, slicked on some gloss and applied some liner around my eyes’ (Foster 2008, p. 57). The continual referencing of this particular object (in narratives cluttered with objects), its specific nature, and the secondary importance of heterosexual romance suggest that it functions as a fetish (a quality Whelehan also observes [2005, p. 209]), making Australian chick lit the terrain of the supposedly uncommon but historically significant phenomenon of the female fetishist – another articulation of chick lit’s parodic reflexivity.11 In Heiss’s work the fetish is the handsome male body, for Kendall it is designer clothes, for Foster it is make-up, for Alderson it is the gay male friend, for Abdel-Fattah and Awad it is a virgin husband, for Jacenko it is the Hermès Birkin bag, and for Rudd it is designer shoes. We argue that the trauma that produces fetishism in the Freudian schema (Freud 1927) – the sight of the castrated mother – can be interpreted in less literal terms as the recognition and disavowal of the limits of women’s power in the contemporary social domain, and of the second wave feminist project. At some level, our heroines are comically playing out these limitations: the fetish allows her to acknowledge and forget the ‘mother’s’ and her own castration. The fetish thus signifies, and is compensation for, the limits of liberation – more typically voiced as ‘empowerment’ in consumer capitalism. Therefore, it is unsurprising that the fetish object is either a luxury item (equating with wealth, taste, and conventional competitive femininity) and/or a phallic object (a substitute for, and a material reminder of, where the real power still resides). The fetish object both hides and reveals the limits of women’s political and social power.

Chick lit  43 In novels where the fetish is a phallic rather than a luxury object (those by Heiss, Alderson, Abdel-Fattah, Awad – significantly, nearly all nonWestern women), it must jostle for space amongst the narratives and settings of luxury consumption, pointing to the way in which ethnicity, as well as gender, can inflect the chick lit Bildung (Butler & Desai 2008; Abdullah & Awan 2017).12 Indeed, in these phallic-oriented texts, the particular nature of the fetish – the gay male friend, the hunky hetero male body, and the virginal husband – suggests the reduced importance of the romance plot to Australian chick lit, and of the hero as a typical device for satisfying the heroine’s desires. Hegemonic masculinity is troubled by these substitute phallic objects that are hollowed out signs of masculinity. Moreover, the hetero male hero is but one other pleasure that the heroine may or may not choose in a world of feminine delights. Teresa Ebert argues that in chick lit, ‘Money is still the “thing,” but it is no longer securely attached to the male’ (2009, p. 113), as our discussion of work hinted. We extend her point to contend that pleasure, too, is no longer so firmly associated with him. Therefore, although heterosexual desire does feature, compared to the novels’ conspicuous consumption, it comes second. In these narratives of consumerist excess, the real action is in the workplace, restaurants, bars, and shops. As the non-phallic fetish objects suggest, the pleasures constructing the world of Australian chick lit are of a specific type and typify the broader genre and postfeminist culture, being usually linked to luxury objects and conspicuous consumption rather than a more general consumerism. Thorstein Veblen defines conspicuous consumption as ‘expenditure in excess of what is required for physical comfort’ (2002, p. 57), hence our contention that Australian chick lit continues the genre’s gendered theory of early twenty-first-century conspicuous consumption (Van Slooten 2006). Veblen’s interest was in the practices of the late nineteenth-century bourgeoisie, which he traced back to Feudal Europe and the nobility’s need to demonstrate ‘pecuniary strength’ in consumption and leisure, including the ability to keep wives. Status is signified by living or spending wastefully on expensive goods. This process continues in industrial society, whereby the wife is key to signifying the male’s status, as she performs vicarious consumption for her husband through fashion, beauty, and idleness (Veblen 2002, p. 47). Chick lit, however, captures a historically novel situation: in the economy of signs and space, women are not only signs of men’s status. Being in paid employment and relatively independent, women instead become agents of conspicuous consumption (Van Slooten 2006; Lazar 2009; Ommundsen 2011), as in chick lit’s ‘exaggerated shopping behaviours’ (Smith 2008, p. 44), full participants in pecuniary emulation and the honorific value that Veblen attaches to luxury goods. Their leisure practices, as we show, partake of a similar, wasteful dynamic. Veblen, to an extent, helps explain the chick lit heroine’s rather easy ascension to hedonist: this is an extension of her previous position. Women are now formally

44  Chick lit emancipated, however, the underlying dynamic of conspicuous consumption has only intensified during post-Fordism and its reliance on the manipulation of signs and ‘aesthetic reflexivity’ (Lash & Urry 1994, p. 57). As the latest iteration of the new woman, it is through her pay cheque, rather than idleness, that she must now wastefully accumulate her own signs and spaces of status. Conspicuous consumption, in chick lit and in postfeminism, is part of an individual’s (Gill 2007b, 2008), and, we argue, Australia’s imagined class makeover – marking their shared integration into a global economy of luxury goods and signs of luxury that heralds a new identity. Consider: what other genre of novel could feature brand names in each of its author’s titles, and then have the brand function successfully as a key trope, as Kendall manages to do (i.e. Gucci Mamas, Versace Sisters, Chanel Sweethearts, and Armani Angels)? Consequently, the real story in Australian chick lit is not only the pleasures of consuming, but the openness and aspiration to luxury consumption that we will see in later chapters, as in the pages of Marie Claire and in the politician Julie Bishop’s self-fashioning. Chick lit takes the historically new subject – the independent middle-class female in full-time employment – and as seductive agit-prop, enables her to consume as well as produce the luxury dreamscapes symbolising and structuring contemporary capitalism. So Foxy, a fashion blogger, requests the following as payment from Jazzy Lou in The Spotlight: ‘As expected, when Foxy sent over her wish list, it would have made Kim Kardashian’s gift registry look modest: a Smeg fridge in peppermint green, a limited-edition Shepard Fairey print, and a $6000 gold and marble Versace coffee table’ (Jacenko 2014, p. 70). Observe Jacenko’s careful noting of the status signifiers of brands, prices, and materials. Pleasures here are intrinsically excessive. The repetitive rhythms of pleasurable spaces and consumption reiterate the fetishistic quality of consumption. The narrative of learning to find the right guy is overlaid, interrupted, and decentred by the repeated trips to the clothes boutique, the bar and café, the night club, the day spa, the hairdresser, and so on – the aspirational Bildung of the chick lit woman. Every novel covers the same rituals and this same urban-based geography of pleasure; every novel, regardless of protagonist or ethnicity, speaks the same brand-based language of international luxury. Ellie, going out for coffee in Gucci Mamas is wearing ‘Seven jeans … the white Guess T-shirt … Gucci frameless sunglasses’ (Kendall 2007, p. 186), while No Sex in the City’s Esma comments, ‘I got the boots in Italy and I love them like they’re a part of my family’. Chick lit, as we noted in the case of work, is not so much about change enabled by the romantic quest, but about reproducing a particular lifestyle: the female hedonist who repeatedly constructs the self through an ensemble of high end goods, services, and signifiers (Van Slooten 2006, pp. 228–229). Fetishistic indulgence here is a marker of women’s liberation and a reward for it, and simultaneously compensation

Chick lit  45 for a limited form of women’s liberation: for the heroines’ and the reader’s participation in workplaces that are not sisterly, do not feature an ethical boss, contribute to the gender pay gap, and/or feature the nonglamorous jobs of the services sector. Our heroines, likeable, seemingly ‘ordinary’ young Australian women – similar to our beauty vloggers in Chapter 4, with nothing noticeably exceptional about them – manage to participate in these circuits of luxury consumption, thus demonstrating the spread of Veblen’s pecuniary emulation and the Australian narrative of material aspiration and affluence, which appealingly sutures feminism with neoliberalism. We interpret these qualities of the heroine as functioning similarly to chick lit’s satire of the middle classes, being analogous to Australia’s attempt to maintain (via women) the residual myth of egalitarianism that is still so central to the nation’s psyche, despite neoliberalism’s deleterious impact (and egalitarianism’s chequered history with Australian women). This is an instance of the fetishist’s disavowal: ‘I know it’s (egalitarianism) gone but it’s not’. In her guise as the relatively novel subject type of the Australian female hedonist, the chick lit heroine amalgamates the neoliberal present and future with a living connection to this imagined more economically egalitarian and feminist past. Moreover, the heroine’s energetic luxe consumerism makes her an ideal symbol of an aspirational Australian future, in which old class and gender loyalties, pleasures, and values are disconnected and restructured in the global circuits of luxury, as spectacularly demonstrated in Jacenko’s first novel, Strictly Confidential. Jazzy Lou is about to have sex with a client but decides to take a phone call from work instead: ‘Even though the Converse account would surely walk out the door, even though my fling with Ben was over before it had begun, I’d do the same all over again. Because dismissing someone’s profit margin just ain’t funny’ (2012, p. 156). Jazzy Lou’s reasoning perfectly encapsulates the two alternative centres of being for young women we find in chick lit: work and consumerist pleasure. In our final element of the chick lit semioscape, we demonstrate how the industry of, and required by, postindustrial femininities, is founded upon both.

The postfeminist industry of postindustrial femininities One of the major criticisms made of chick lit is its reproduction of conventional stereotypes of femininity: its heroines are white, heterosexual, middle class, able-bodied, slender, and conventionally attractive (Butler & Desai 2008, p. 2; Mißler 2017, p. 153), even if, as in the case of Bridget Jones’s Diary, they show the Sisyphean nature of achieving the ideal. Regardless of a degree of ethnic and class diversity in terms of heroines, as well as female characters from a range of backgrounds, Australian chick lit produces a surprisingly coherent version of young adult femininities that aligns with the dominant version found in chick lit and in

46  Chick lit ­ ostfeminism – physically attractive, heterosexual, and middle class. This p coherence suggests that while Australian chick lit has fundamentally updated romance narratives with work and alternative sources of pleasure, and consciously addresses social mores and change, it also foregrounds just what has not changed in ideas and ideals of femininity, even if the methods of attaining it in post-Fordist capitalism have. The chick lit totems of the handbag, the shoes, and make-up suggest the key qualities of chick lit femininity: it is a femininity that is constructed through signifiers and commodities. Contra Gill’s observation of ‘the resurgence of ideas of natural sexual difference as part of the postfeminist sensibility’ (2007b, p. 158), it is an explicitly prosthetic rather than an essentialist femininity. And its definition revolves around beauty and corporeality that can be purchased, hence the magical power attributed to the objects – masking and making an ideal femininity that has never been. Second, the ambivalence we observed regarding work and middle classness is repeated in the emotional structure of chick lit’s femininity, and arises from a similar source, namely, the fashion–beauty–media complex and the work it elicits from women. This ambivalence is similarly expressed by parody: ‘We know it’s fake, but then again …’. This emphasis on the industries that produce and sell femininity, and the industry required to be young and feminine, is shown through the seamless integration of the codes of femininity into the lives and pleasures of the heroines. These women are, suitably enough, makers as well as consumers of these signs, and hence producers of ‘canons of taste’ – to use Veblen’s term (2002, p. 65). At a make-up product launch, Hannah reflects: But me, I was fresh off the beauty boat, and I was light years away from cynical. The moment I walked into a boardroom/café/elaborately decorated garden tent, I unwittingly fell to my knees before the religion of face wash. Or eyeliner or teeth whitener, depending on what was being offered in between mini fruit-salads and scrambled egg concoctions fit only for people who think capers count as actual food. (Foster 2008, p. 81) As this example shows, the heroine’s work reiterates that femininity is staged in the specific terms of an industrial-strength and industry-backed production (Elias et al. 2017). The reproduction of femininity is then repeated at the heroine’s personal level, where the grooming required before work or socialising is presented ritualistically. Gucci Mamas devotes over a page to the grooming ritual of Mercedes: this includes a couple of dress and shoe changes, before sorting out her hair and makeup: ‘After twenty minutes with the [hair] straightener her overall look was now far less Donatella Versace and much more Gwyneth Paltrow’ (Kendall 2007, p. 65). Interestingly, the same rituals and values feature

Chick lit  47 throughout our sample, whether in Heiss’s Indigenous chick lit, Awad’s Palestinian-Australian version, Rudd’s English heroine visiting Australia, or Jacenko’s Jewish-Sydney cast. All our heroines are interpellated by it; all attempt to conform to its practices and standards, thereby suggesting the cross-cultural nature and globalising reach of the fashion–beauty–media complex (see also Tate 2017; Yang 2017). Physical beauty, and therefore corporeality, is intrinsic to chick lit femininity, in Australia as elsewhere. As is reiterated in our chapter on beauty vloggers, to be a woman is to desire to be physically beautiful, and thus the self that is relentlessly worked on and disciplined is corporeal and literally superficial (though our vloggers’ branching out into other forms of self-care contains an implicit critique of this focus). Unlike Bridget Jones who, in addition to endless dieting, also works on her personality and intellect, chick lit heroines – with the exception of Heiss’s novels – appear to have little interest in high culture – how Australian!13 Luxury consumption is the culture work they engage in, which also links to the body and appearances. In effect, regardless of decades of feminist work critiquing the stereotypes and deleterious effects of conventional femininity, a beautiful appearance remains central to the chick lit imaginary, even as it occasionally acknowledges anorexic models and photoshop. Alderson’s magazine editor in Pants on Fire vents angrily: ‘I said STOP!’ Maxine thumped her fist on the desk. ‘Zoe. How many times have I told you? I will not have anorexics on the cover of my magazine. This girl is sick – and so are you’ (2000, p. 156). And as a consequence of the geographical and cross-cultural spread of the Western fashion–beauty–media complex, as seen in non-Western chick lit (Ommundsen 2011; Ponzanesi 2014), this image-based and consumerist femininity has increased its reach and appeal, adding the industries and ideologies of conventional femininities as components of Lash and Urry’s economy of signs and space. Despite this focus on normative gender performances, a consistent ambivalence about conventional femininity in these novels is expressed in their parodic tone and approach. Parody articulates the excessive quality of contemporary femininity and highlights its prosthetic nature. What other literary genre could voice the ridiculousness of feminine rituals such as when Ruby attempts to wax her armpits and ends up gluing her arm to her chest (Rudd 2011, pp. 199–202), or when Sera realises she has worn the wrong style of shoe to a party: ‘How could she have misread the footwear zeitgeist so badly? How was it possible that both Mallory and Chantrea had picked up on the espadrille trend while she … was so obviously out-of-step with the look of the moment?’ (Kendall 2009, p. 39). Similar to their work in the inauthentic culture industries, the heroines know what they are doing is frequently absurd – a costly and exhausting manipulation of signs and products, yet they have to continue in this regime, like their fetishistic consumerism. We surmise this compulsion exists for the following reasons. First, a seamless integration of femininity

48  Chick lit into pleasure and luxury goods – designer clothes with their honorific value – makes postindustrial femininity feel good and valuable. Second, there is no alternative present. In the pages of chick lit any way of being outside that of the fashion–beauty–media complex is largely invisible and thereby unthinkable: it is, as McRobbie puts it, ‘a feminine totality’ (2009, p. 66). And our heroines, at some level, realise that even though they are producers as well as consumers in the economy of signs, their agency is limited. Whelehan observes that chick lit’s contradictory drives regarding female independence and heterosexual romance make it ‘an anxious genre’ (2005, p. 188); we argue that another source of this anxiety is the ever-increasing demands required to attain conventional feminine attractiveness. The inflationary economy of luxury consumption mirrors (as well as feeds into) this dynamic. The underlying drive to consume as wastefully as possible identified by Veblen, and an intensified importance of images to the economy of signs, lead to an excessive femininity. And it is no accident that many of the fetish objects (make-up, high heels) were targets of second wave feminist critique. The postfeminist woman’s parodic veneration of the object signals postfeminism’s conflicted relationship with second wave feminism and post-Fordist capitalism, as well as its veiled acknowledgement of femininity’s essential fakeness. For Awad’s and Abdel-Fattah’s heroines, the conflict between ethnicity and Western femininities is an additional tension. McRobbie terms this new excessive femininity a ‘post-feminist masquerade’ that ‘openly acknowledges and celebrates the fictive status of femininity while at the same time establishing new ways of enforcing sexual difference’ (2009, p. 64), which are as equally constraining as essentialist notions of gender. The emotional structure of Australian chick lit femininities similarly has a bifurcated quality, oscillating between a knowingness and a humorous playfulness, and is where much of the feminist critique of post-industrial femininity is located. This bifurcation is core to the chick lit sensibility as it represents the chick’s temporal and ideological location. Our heroines display a knowingness regarding heterosexual mores, ideologies of femininity, and sexual politics. They are clearly influenced by second wave feminism. Abby, the boss of the promotional girls’ agency, for instance, ‘never sent them on shitty jobs. Furthermore, she was vigilant about their safety and intensely protective’ (Foster 2012, p. 15, original emphasis). This knowingness is one of the key markers of their postfeminist historical location as it encapsulates the lessons these women have learned from second wave feminism. As a consequence, their relation to the world is fundamentally altered, and an arguably new, if conflicted, female subjectivity occurs in the novel form. Part of this new subjectivity, as we see across Australian and postfeminist media culture in general (Winch 2013; Kanai 2017), and another lesson seemingly learned from second wave feminism, is the value of

Chick lit  49 women’s friendships. Just as work reduces the importance of the romance plot, so too does the emphasis placed on friends. Accordingly, chick lit could be read as the novel of postfeminist sisterhood, for, as A. Rochelle Mabry notes, friends, or what she terms, ‘the urban family’, function in chick lit as an alternative to the nuclear family. And, ‘More importantly, the bonds of the urban family are often as strong, if not stronger, than those of the romantic relationship’ (Mabry 2006, p. 202). Like the TV dramedies in the next chapter, every novel examined either centres on one heroine and her best female friend or friends, or takes an ensemble approach, focusing on a group of female friends (such as Heiss’s Tiddas or Abdel-Fattah’s No Sex in the City). They are fellow hedonists negotiating the travails of postfemininity: sharing fashion disasters, beauty tips, advice on men, workplace troubles, and the pleasures of excessive eating and drinking. Postfeminist sisterly support typically uses a laconic form of humour to satirise these dramas, and hence to satirise contemporary femininities, which also occurs with our vloggers. While humour is a characteristic of all chick lit, distinguishing it from other types of women’s popular fiction (Mißler 2017, p. 116), the laconic quality gives it a specifically ­Australian aspect. Moreover, combined with a strong emphasis on excessive drinking and the mishaps and hangovers that inevitably result, the heroine of Australian chick lit at times seems to be another version of the female larrikin (see Bellanta 2012) we observe in the young women’s magazines discussed in Chapter 3. The emotional rather than political framing of sisterhood and the lighthearted approach to the various crises and support offered are two other markers of femininities after feminism. The emotional structures of chick lit femininities therefore suggest the impact of feminist ideology as well as the limitations of the contemporary neoliberal context. The heroines’ knowingness points to their self-reflexive and critical performance of femininity: they do it to advance in the system, they do it for seemingly pleasurable reasons, and they take as much agency as possible – like our vloggers, they are not unconscious victims of femininity. The recurring sense in which aspiring to be conventionally feminine cannot be taken entirely seriously perfectly matches the heroines’ employment in the culture industries: they are manipulating the signs and symbols of contemporary femininities, keeping their selves on the surface level. While this ‘superficial’ representation of postfeminist mentalities accords with the constraints of chick lit as popular fiction, it equally reveals femininity as a potentially malleable but also a surprisingly static commoditybased masquerade. The hedonistic female fetishist is thus novel (attesting to major social change), but also partly stuck.

Conclusion If one wishes to see a fantasmatic rendering of how feminism could have played out for young women in contemporary Australia, chick lit’s

50  Chick lit s­emioscape of independence and aspiration is ideal, and its use by nonAnglo-Celt women to represent their historically and geographically located fictions of self indicates the potential of the form to write back at constraining tropes of non-Western femininities (Newns 2018, pp. 296– 297), and the deep attractions of freedom and mobility. Indeed, of the various forms we examine, chick lit is the one that most closely articulates an Australian context, even as it draws upon the transnational chick lit tropes of work, pleasure, consumerism, and beauty. Its aspirational Bildung perfectly narrativises a specifically feminine economy of signs and space characterising affluent neoliberal Australia, the continuing impact and dissemination of second wave feminism here, as well as the pleasures of, and ambivalence regarding, women’s location in this space. As such, Australian chick lit tells a different story about postfeminism to the hegemonic version, one that is cause for some optimism rather than despair or dismissal. On the level of individual texts, the signifiers attached to the core elements of work, class, hedonism, and femininities coalesce into a young woman’s narrative of partial but appealing economic and personal autonomy – an updating of the romance novel that ironically decentres romance. Chick lit, rather than being a dupe to consumerism, instead exhibits a feminist parodic reflexivity – a satirical and parodic awareness of the fashion–beauty–media complex and its role as base, superstructure, and metonym of women’s location in the economy of signs and space. The figure of the hedonistic female fetishist is a marker of women’s social power, and of the power of contemporary capitalism – the fetish as seductive compensation for the limits to her (and feminism’s) power. In a distinctive reversal of the characteristic trope of postfeminism, Australian chick lit has had a feminist makeover to acknowledge both the freedoms and constraints of women’s lives, while the 1970s novel of women’s experiences has had a chick lit makeover to acknowledge aspirations and pleasures attached to the economy of signs and space. Australian chick lit, like most of the magazines and some of the beauty vloggers we examine in later chapters, in its address to young women from all ethnicities to be guilt-free luxury consumers, also captures a broader aspirational narrative connected to Australia’s part in globalising and deregulated post-Fordist capitalism, and this narrative’s role in an attempted remaking of the Australian middle class and working class. The deregulation of the Australian economy that occurred from the 1980s on was also accompanied by a cultural and social narrative of material and financial aspiration that Sean Scalmer (2008), amongst others, argues takes shape in the 1990s.14 Reward culture, the priority of the consumer rather than protestant restraint, and a mélange of old and new cultural (read class) loyalties (Gabriel 2003; Dyrenfurth 2007; Burgmann 2008) are major parts of this aspirational narrative, and thus luxury goods conspicuously consumed become legitimate – a sign of an active and successful

Chick lit  51 participant in a post-industrialising and globalising Australia. And young women, as signs of feminist energy, freedom, hope, and a new form of national egalitarianism – this time, in a gendered form – are ideal to fictionally embody simultaneously these two powerful national narratives of the last few decades. In the next chapter, which focuses on television dramedy’s semioscape of postfeminist kinship, a similarly atypical set of postfeminist narratives emerges.

Notes  1 See John Ezard (2001) for coverage of novelists such as Beryl Bainbridge’s attack on the genre, and Heike Mißler (2017) for an account of the controversies surrounding chick lit.   2 Margaret Rowntree and Imogen Mathew are exceptions.  3 Pierre Bourdieu describes cultural intermediaries as ‘the vendors of symbolic goods and services, the directors and executives of firms in tourism and journalism, publishing and the cinema, fashion and advertising, decoration and property development’ (2007, pp. 310–311). Expanding upon Bourdieu, Mike Featherstone defines ‘cultural intermediaries’ as those workers located between academia and the media who ‘are engaged in providing symbolic goods and services’ (2007, p. 44), and who are therefore symptomatic of post-Fordist capitalism.  4 The Australian Industry Report 2016 notes that the Services sectors are the largest employers and contributors to the Australian economy, ‘representing just over 60 per cent of GDP’ (Cully 2016, p. 35). See also the Australian Bureau of Statistics (2017) where the last decade’s decline in manufacturing and mining, and the rise in the services sectors are identified. The Workplace Gender Equality Agency reports the high proportion of women in the services sectors (and hence the continuing gender segregation of the Australian labour market) (2016, p. 5).   5 Eva Chen (2012) also notes this dynamic in her analysis of Chinese, Hungarian, and Indian chick lit.   6 Suzanne Ferriss and Mallory Young note that the genre is diversifying beyond these confines in the US (2006, pp. 5–7), while critics such as Wenche Ommundsen and Sandra Ponzanesi analyse non-Western versions of chick lit, and Feminist Theory has recently published a special issue, ‘Chick-lit in a time of African cosmopolitanism’ (Frenkel & Gupta 2019).   7 A significant number of Australian chick lit novels feature a heroine working in the United States or Europe as part of the global fashion–beauty–media complex, such as Sophie Lee’s Alice in La La Land (2008) and Maggie ­Alderson’s Handbags and Gladrags (2004), as did Lette’s The Llama Parlour. These international settings are further evidence of the genre’s mobility – its transnational nature.  8 Cate Kendall is the nom de plume of Michelle Hamer, journalist, and Lisa Blundell, advertising copywriter. Their background as cultural intermediaries is common for chick lit authors, including ones in this chapter.  9 Two Austrian chick lit novels, Die Wahl (Pluhar 2003) and Jessica, 30 (Streeruwitz 2004) engage with Austrian politics, with Die Wahl featuring a female political politician as its heroine. See Fiddler’s (2011) analysis. 10 Jacenko’s penchant for blurring real life with her fiction is ironically demonstrated by the jailing of her stockbroker husband, Oliver Curtis, for insider trading.

52  Chick lit 11 Freud’s fetishists were all male, and it was inconceivable within the Freudian paradigm that women or girls would have castration anxiety linked to the loss of the maternal penis. Early accounts that explored female fetishism are Sarah Kofman (1980), Naomi Schor (1985), Emily Apter (1991), and Elizabeth Grosz (1993). 12 This difference bears out Ommundsen’s insight that non-Western chick lit negotiates the interaction between the heroines’ ‘alternative modernities’ and Western consumer culture (2011, p. 108). For these non-Western women, desiring the virgin husband or the handsome male body is more of an issue than for white middle-class postfeminist women. 13 One of Bridget’s New Year’s resolutions is ‘Not go out every night but stay in and read books and listen to classical music’ (Fielding 1996, p. 3). 14 We contend that this rhetoric emerged earlier, in the 1980s as the ALP government deregulated the economy. Evidence for this is in Treasurer Paul Keating’s socio-economic rhetoric of dynamism that accompanied these policies (Morris 1992).

References Abdel-Fattah, R. 2012, No sex in the city, Pan Macmillan, Sydney. Abdullah, M. & Awan, S. 2017, ‘Islamic postfeminism and Muslim chick-lit: coexistence of conflicting discourses’, Pakistan Journal of Women’s Studies: Alam-eNiswan, vol. 24, no. 2, pp. 93–105. Alderson, M. 2000, Pants on fire, Penguin, Camberwell. Alderson, M. 2002, Mad about the boy, Penguin, Camberwell. Alderson, M. 2004, Handbags and gladrags, Penguin, Camberwell. Apter, E. 1991, Feminizing the fetish: psychoanalysis and narrative obsession in turn-of-the-century France, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY. Arthurs, J. 2003, ‘Sex and the city and consumer culture: remediating postfeminist drama’, Feminist Media Studies, vol. 3, no. 1, pp. 83–98. Australian Bureau of Statistics 2017, Australian industry, 2015–16, ABS Catalogue No. 8155.0, Australian Bureau of Statistics, Canberra. Awad, A. 2012, Courting Samira, Amal Awad, [s.l.]. Bellanta, M. 2012, Larrikins: a history, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia. Bourdieu, P. 2007, Distinction: a social critique of the judgement of taste, trans. R. Nice, Routledge, New York. Burgmann, V. 2008, ‘Aspirational authoritarianism: Howard governments v. new social movements’, Social Alternatives, vol. 27, no. 1, pp. 10–16. Butler, J. 2013, ‘For white girls only? Postfeminism and the politics of inclusion’, Feminist Formations, vol. 25, no. 1, pp. 35–58. Butler, P. & Desai, J. 2008, ‘Manolos, marriage, and mantras: chick-lit criticism and transnational feminism’, Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism, vol. 8, no. 2, pp. 1–31. Chen, E. 2012, ‘Shanghai(ed) babies: geopolitics, biopolitics, and the global chick lit’, Feminist Media Studies, vol. 12, no. 2, pp. 214–228. Cully, M. 2016, Australian industry report 2016, Office of the Chief Economist, Department of Industry, Innovation and Science, Canberra. Dyrenfurth, N. 2007, ‘John Howard’s hegemony of values: the politics of “mateship” in the Howard decade’, Australian Journal of Political Science, vol. 42, no. 2, pp. 211–230.

Chick lit  53 Ebert, T.L. 2009, The task of cultural critique, University of Illinois Press, Urbana, IL. Elder, C. 2007, Being Australian: narratives of national identity, Allen & Unwin, Crows Nest. Elias, A., Gill, R., & Scharff, C. (eds) 2017, Aesthetic labour: rethinking beauty politics in neoliberalism, Palgrave Macmillan, London. Ezard, J. 2001, ‘Bainbridge tilts at “chick lit” cult’, Guardian, 24 August, viewed 29 April 2019, www.theguardian.com/uk/2001/aug/24/books.generalfiction. Farr, C.K. 2009, ‘It was chick lit all along: the gendering of a genre’, in L.J. Goren (ed.), You’ve come a long way, baby: women, politics, and popular culture, University Press of Kentucky, Lexington, pp. 201–214. Featherstone, M. 2007, Consumer culture and postmodernism, Sage, London. Ferriss, S. 2015, ‘Working girls: the precariat of chick lit’, in E. Levine (ed.), Cupcakes, pinterest, and ladyporn: feminized popular culture in the early twenty-first century, University of Illinois Press, Urbana, IL, pp. 177–195. Ferriss, S. & Young, M. (eds) 2006, Chick lit: the new women’s fiction, Routledge, New York. Fiddler, A. 2011, ‘Of political intentions and trivial conventions: Erika Pluhar’s Die Wahl (2003) and Marlene Streeruwitz’s Jessica, 30. (2004)’, German Life and Letters, vol. 64, no. 1, pp. 133–144. Fielding, H. 1996, Bridget Jones’s diary: a novel, Picador, London. Foster, Z. 2008, Air kisses, Penguin, Camberwell. Foster, Z. 2010, Playing the field, Penguin, Camberwell. Foster, Z. 2012, The younger man, Penguin, Camberwell. Foster, Z. 2014, The wrong girl, Penguin, Camberwell. Frenkel, R. & Gupta, P. (eds) 2019, ‘Chick-lit in a time of African cosmopolitanism,’ special issue of Feminist Theory, vol. 20, no. 2. Freud, S. 1927, ‘Fetishism’, in The complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud, J. Strachey (ed. & trans.), Hogarth, London, vol. XXI, pp. 149–157. Gabriel, M. 2003, ‘Aspirationalism: the search for respect in an unequal society’, Journal of Australian Studies, vol. 27, no. 80, pp. 147–156. Gamble, S. 2006, ‘Growing up single: the postfeminist novel’, Studies in the Literary Imagination, vol. 39, no. 2, pp. 61–78. Genz, S. 2010, ‘Singled out: postfeminism’s “new woman” and the dilemma of having it all’, Journal of Popular Culture, vol. 43, no. 1, pp. 97–119. Genz, S. & Brabon, B.A. 2009, Postfeminism: cultural texts and theories, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh. Gill, R. 2007a, Gender and the media, Polity, Cambridge. Gill, R. 2007b, ‘Postfeminist media culture: elements of a sensibility’, European Journal of Cultural Studies, vol. 10, no. 2, pp. 147–166. Gill, R. 2008, ‘Culture and subjectivity in neoliberal and postfeminist times’, Subjectivity, vol. 25, no. 1, pp. 432–445. Gill, R. & Herdieckerhoff, E. 2006, ‘Rewriting the romance: new femininities in chick lit’, Feminist Media Studies, vol. 6, no. 4, pp. 487–504. Grosz, E. 1993, ‘Lesbian fetishism?’, in E. Apter & W. Pietz (eds), Fetishism as cultural discourse, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY, pp. 101–115. Harvey, D. 1989, The condition of postmodernity: an enquiry into the origins of cultural change, Blackwell, Oxford. Harzewski, S. 2011, Chick lit and postfeminism, University of Virginia Press, Charlottesville, VA.

54  Chick lit Heiss, A. 2007, Not meeting Mr Right, Random House, Sydney. Heiss, A. 2008, Avoiding Mr Right, Random House, Sydney. Heiss, A. 2010, Manhattan dreaming, Random House, Sydney. Heiss, A. 2011, Paris dreaming, Random House, Sydney. Heiss, A. 2014, Tiddas, Simon & Schuster, Sydney. Hurt, E. 2019, ‘Introduction’, in E. Hurt (ed.), Theorizing ethnicity and nationality in the chick lit genre, Routledge, New York, pp. 1–24. Jacenko, R. 2012, Strictly confidential: a Jazzy Lou novel, Allen & Unwin, Sydney. Jacenko, R. 2013, The rumour mill: a Jazzy Lou novel, Allen & Unwin, Sydney. Jacenko, R. 2014, The spotlight: a Jazzy Lou novel, Allen & Unwin, Sydney. Kanai, A. 2017, ‘The best friend, the boyfriend, other girls, hot guys, and creeps: the relational production of self on tumblr’, Feminist Media Studies, vol. 17, no. 6, pp. 911–925. Kaplan, G. 1996, The meagre harvest: the Australian women’s movement 1950s– 1990s Allen & Unwin, Sydney. Kendall, C. 2007, Gucci mamas, Random House, Sydney. Kendall, C. 2009, Versace sisters, Random House, Sydney. Kendall, C. 2010, Chanel sweethearts, Random House, Sydney. Kendall, C. 2011, Armani angels, Random House, Sydney. Kofman, S. 1980, The enigma of woman: woman in Freud’s writings, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY. Lake, M. 1999, Getting equal: the history of Australian feminism, Allen & Unwin, St Leonards. Lash, S. & Urry, J. 1994, Economies of signs and space, Sage, London. Lazar, M.M. 2009, ‘Entitled to consume: postfeminist femininity and a culture of post-critique’, Discourse and Communication, vol. 3, no. 4, pp. 371–400. Lee, S. 2008, Alice in la la land, Random House, Sydney. Lette, K. 1991, The llama parlour, Pan Macmillan, Chippendale. Mabry, A.R. 2006, ‘About a girl: female subjectivity and sexuality in contemporary “chick” culture’, in S. Ferriss & M. Young (eds), Chick lit: the new women’s fiction, Routledge, New York, pp. 191–206. Marston, K. 2018, Postfeminist whiteness: problematising melancholic burden in contemporary Hollywood, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh. Mathew, I. 2016, ‘Educating the reader in Anita Heiss’s chick lit’, Contemporary Women’s Writing, vol. 10, no. 3, pp. 334–353. McRobbie, A. 2007, ‘Top girls? Young women and the post-feminist sexual contract’, Cultural Studies, vol. 21, nos. 4–5, pp. 718–737. McRobbie, A. 2009, The aftermath of feminism: gender, culture and social change, Sage, Los Angeles, CA. McRobbie, A. 2016, Be creative: making a living in the new culture industries, Polity, Cambridge. Middleton, J. 2006, ‘Friends of the poor or of neo-liberalism?’, Socialist Review, no. 310, October, viewed 30 January 2019, http://socialistreview.org.uk/310/ friends-poor-or-neo-liberalism. Mißler, H. 2017, The cultural politics of chick lit: popular fiction, postfeminism, and representation, Routledge, New York. Morris, M. 1992, Ecstasy and economics: American essays for John Forbes, Empress, Sydney.

Chick lit  55 Negra, D. 2009, What a girl wants? Fantasizing the reclamation of self in postfeminism, Routledge, London. Negra, D. & Tasker, Y. (eds) 2014, Gendering the recession media and culture in an age of austerity, Duke University Press, Durham, NC. Newns, L. 2018, ‘Renegotiating romantic genres: textual resistance and Muslim chick lit’, Journal of Commonwealth Literature, vol. 53, no. 2, pp. 284–300. O’Mahony, L. 2018, ‘ “More than sex, shopping, and shoes”: cosmopolitan Indigeneity and cultural politics in Anita Heiss’s Koori lit’, in E. Hurt (ed.), Theorizing ethnicity and nationality in the chick lit genre, Routledge, New York, pp. 41–68. Ommundsen, W. 2011, ‘Sex and the global city: chick lit with a difference’, Contemporary Women’s Writing, vol. 5, no. 2, pp. 107–124. Pluhar, E. 2003, Die Wahl, Hoffmann und Campe, Hamburg. Ponzanesi, S. 2014, The postcolonial cultural industry: icons, markets, mythologies, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke. Rowntree, M. 2015, ‘Feminine sexualities in the chick genre: women’s readings and preferred readings’, Feminist Media Studies, vol. 15, no. 3, pp. 508–521. Rudd, J. 2010, Campaign Ruby, Text Publishing, Melbourne. Rudd, J. 2011, Ruby blues, Text Publishing, Melbourne. Scalmer, S. 2008, ‘Searching for the aspirationals’, Overland, no. 180, pp. 5–9. Scanlon, J. 2013, ‘What’s an acquisitive girl to do? Chick lit and the great recession’, Women’s Studies, vol. 42, no. 8, pp. 904–922. Schor, N. 1985, ‘Female fetishism: the case of George Sand’, Poetics Today, vol. 6, no. 1/2, pp. 301–310. Smith, C.J. 2008, Cosmopolitan culture and consumerism in chick lit, Routledge, New York. Sparrow, R. 2002, The girl most likely: a novel, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia. Streeruwitz, M. 2004, Jessica, 30, Fischer, Frankfurt. Tate, S.A. 2017, ‘Skin: post-feminist bleaching culture and the political vulnerability of blackness’, in A. Elias, R. Gill, & C. Scharff (eds), Aesthetic labour: rethinking beauty politics in neoliberalism, Palgrave Macmillan, London, pp.  199–213. Taylor, A. 2012, Single women in popular culture: the limits of postfeminism, ­Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke. Taylor, L. & Uren, D. 2010, Shitstorm: inside Labor’s darkest days, Melbourne University Publishing, Carlton. Turner, G. 1993, National fictions: literature, film, and the construction of ­Australian narrative, Allen & Unwin, St Leonards. Van Slooten, J.L. 2006, ‘Fashionably indebted: conspicuous consumption, fashion, and romance in Sophie Kinsella’s Shopaholic trilogy’, in S. Ferriss & M. Young (eds), Chick lit: the new woman’s fiction, Routledge, New York, pp. 219–238. Veblen, T. 2002, The theory of the leisure class, IndyPublish, McLean. Ward, R. 1958, The Australian legend, Oxford University Press, Melbourne. Weisberger, L. 2003, The devil wears Prada, Doubleday, New York. Weiss, R.P. 2001, ‘Charitable choice as neoliberal social welfare strategy’, Social Justice, vol. 28, no. 1, pp. 35–53. Wells, J. 2006, ‘Mothers of chick lit? Women writers, readers, and literary history’, in S. Ferriss & M. Young (eds), Chick lit: the new women’s fiction, Routledge, New York, pp. 47–70.

56  Chick lit Whelehan, I. 2000, Overloaded: popular culture and the future of feminism, The Women’s Press, London. Whelehan, I. 2005, The feminist bestseller: from Sex and the single girl to Sex and the city, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke. Wilson, C.A. 2012, ‘Becky Bloomwood at the V&A: culture, materialism, and the chick lit novel’, Journal of Popular Culture, vol. 45, no. 1, pp. 214–225. Winch, A. 2013, Girlfriends and postfeminist sisterhood, Palgrave Macmillan, ­Basingstoke. Workplace Gender Equality Agency 2016, Gender segregation in Australia’s workforce, August, Australian government. Yang, J. 2017, ‘Holistic labour: gender, body and the beauty and wellness industry in China’, in A. Elias, R. Gill, & C. Scharff (eds), Aesthetic labour: rethinking beauty politics in neoliberalism, Palgrave Macmillan, London, pp. 117–131.

2 Television dramedies Refiguring gendered intimacy and postfeminist kinship on the small screen

In this chapter we turn to another contemporary cultural form that, like chick lit, has featured heavily in much recent scholarship seeking to identify some of the core thematics and tropes of postfeminism: ‘popular heroine television’ (Horbury 2014). Perhaps this is no surprise, for in the 1990s American television in particular was characterised by the emergence of seemingly new, agentic, sexually and financially empowered women, epitomised by the foursome from the wildly successful HBO series Sex and the City and the famously mini-skirted lawyer and eponymous heroine of Ally McBeal. Alongside British literary and film heroine Bridget Jones, these women are routinely invoked in critical studies of postfeminism, their attempts to negotiate the tensions between professional success and a seemingly deep-seated desire for (hetero)sexual intimacy seen to mark a distinctive televisual postfeminism (Kim 2001; Arthurs 2003; Lotz 2006; Genz 2009; McRobbie 2009; Negra 2009; Taylor 2012; Winch 2013). As Rosalind Gill (2016, p. 619) remarks, the repeated invocation of these texts in the early to mid-2000s by feminist media scholars suggested that ‘a “postfeminist canon” seemed to be emerging’. Such heroines and the series in which they feature, although celebrating female homosociality and refigured forms of sisterhood and solidarity, are often dismissed as embodying a limited type of feminism, more aligned with individualist rhetoric of choice and agency – commonly exercised via consumption.1 Given that, in a micro-political sense, the field of intimate and affective relations is where normative assumptions around gender are played out, reinforced, and at times contested, television ‘dramedies’ (part drama, part comedy) provide an especially rich site for feminist analysis. As throughout Postfeminism in Context, what we find here is less the explicit disavowal of feminism seen to constitute other postfeminist television series than its careful integration into these depictions of familial and non-familial intimacies, as well as a critique of persistent gendered assumptions that may delimit the kinds of femininities Australian women are able to embody (one element of what we have called the unfinished business of second wave feminism). In contrast to arguments (mentioned above) that presume it is inevitably compromised, feminism – especially in terms of the

58  Television dramedies ­Australian women’s liberation movement’s critique of marriage, domesticity, family, and the celebration of women’s autonomy (see Lake 1999) – has found its way onto the Australian small screen, and the semioscape we identify as integral to the dramedy genre relates to what we are describing as postfeminist kinship (something further explored in Chapter 4). The core aspects of this semioscape of postfeminist kinship include a reconfiguration of family; a challenge to couple culture and to a privileging of motherhood; a critique of gendered emotional labour; new spaces of intimacy; a refusal of the key postfeminist trope, ‘having it all’; and a celebration of a broader range of women’s intimate bonds. Although Anita Brady et al. (2016) argue that it is primarily through new forms of television delivery (such as series streamed via Netflix) that the normative organisation of familial life and kinship structures are being troubled, our analysis here reveals that such claims about the possibilities for reimagining intimacy, at least in the Australian context, are also applicable to freeto-air television narratives. One of the key generic manifestations of postfeminist or ‘chick lit television’ (Hunting 2012) has been the dramedy. Accordingly, we analyse in detail two of the most successful, long-running Australian network television programmes of this ilk, aired around the same time – Offspring (Network 10, 2010–2017) and Winners and Losers (Network 7, 2011– 2016) – because, despite their longevity and popularity with local audiences, neither of them has been subject to critical attention, and together they elucidate much about (post)feminism, gendered subjectivities, and intimacy on the Australian small screen.2 Though they depict contemporary Australian womanhood in a variety of ways, in each section we use one heroine to focus our analysis: Offspring’s Nina Proudman (who is its homodiegetic narrator) and Winners and Losers’ Jenny Gross (whose ‘retraditionalised’ obsessive focus on romance mythologies the series problematises). In particular, here we demonstrate that, although ‘The ideological force of couple culture is such that its privileged status is rarely recognized or questioned’ (Budgeon 2008, p. 302; see also Kean 2015), and coupledom is seen to be re-embraced within postfeminist media culture (McRobbie 2009; Negra 2009; Taylor 2012), other forms of intimate relations are seen to be as, if not more, important than heterosexual bonds (even if heterosexuality itself still appears, at least for major characters, largely uncontested). Similarly, while others have argued that motherhood has been valorised, as well as having become more highly regulated, in postfeminist media culture – part of the ‘new momism’ (Douglas & Michaels 2005) or the ‘new mediated maternalism’ (McRobbie 2013) – these texts also decentre its positioning as women’s key affective bond. Both Offspring and Winners and Losers, therefore, seek to disrupt the privileging of romantic and maternal connections over all others: the former through a promotion of familial intimacy, albeit in an extended form, the latter through

Television dramedies  59 ­ ositioning female friendship as the most important form of relationality p in women’s lives and rendering a traditional suburban ‘Aussie’ nuclear family anachronistic. While sexual and romantic intimacies, along with children, are narratively important, both programmes seek to critique the wider culture of mono-normativity (Kean 2015) and maternalism constitutive of postfeminist imaginaries in other contexts, including through respectively (re)coding family as friends and friends as family. Moreover, in opposition to the individualism of both postfeminism and neoliberalism, these two popular series underscore the criticality of community and belonging. First, it is important to place this analysis in the context of debates around the ‘transformation of intimacy’.

Intimacy transformed? Detraditionalisation, individualisation, and self-reflexivity According to critical narratives about detraditionalisation and the ‘transformation of intimacy’ thesis (Giddens 1991), traditional certainties relating to the organisation of social and intimate life (such as the nuclear family) in the West are purportedly under strain, including in terms of gender (Beck & Beck-Gernsheim 1995, 2002). This writing, as Angela McRobbie tells us, ‘appears to speak directly to the post-feminist generation’ (2009, p. 18). Integral to this supposed transformation is an increased flexibility in how people (especially young women) organise their intimate arrangements, where ‘standardized models’ (Gross 2005, p. 290) are said to no longer hold sway and biological kinship is becoming decentred in favour of the idea of friends as ‘chosen’ families (Allan 2008). Moreover, the idea that tradition and familial expectations no longer provide a useful or viable handbook for how life should be lived has been accompanied by the suggestion that highly agentic citizens all manufacture their own biographies, with individuals reflexively crafting themselves, ‘becoming the author of his or her own life’ (Beck & Beck-Gernsheim 2002, p. 23). This intense focus on the individual as unfettered-agent, of course, is aligned with the interwoven discourses of neoliberalism and postfeminism mapped throughout this volume. While sociologists Anthony Giddens and Ulrich Beck have been appropriately criticised for their limited engagement with gender, others have viewed these ‘post traditional’ ideas as integral to, and in some respects responsible for, postfeminism itself (Genz & Brabon 2009, p. 1). Perhaps unsurprisingly, feminist critics have significantly complicated these assumptions about both intimacy and gender having been radically transformed, underscoring that claims regarding unimpeded agency in particular have been significantly overstated (Jamieson 1999; Adkins 2002; Budgeon 2006; McRobbie 2009). As Sasha Roseneil (2009, p. 85) argues, feminists are ‘highly sceptical about the extent to which individualisation has been accomplished, intimacy transformed’ and draw attention to

60  Television dramedies ‘ongoing gender inequalities in practices of care and love, and to the continuities of mutual interdependence within families, even as they break up and re-form’. Lisa Adkins (2002), too, has emphasised that while gender may, to some extent and for some subjects, have been unmoored from its traditional anchors, this has been accompanied by the concomitant process of ‘retraditionalisation’, where women’s independence and desire for autonomy come to uneasily coexist with traditional assumptions around ‘ “proper” femininity’ (Budgeon 2011, p. 61) – assumptions which problematically work to flatten difference and homogenise diverse groups of women. Nevertheless, there have been clear shifts in how family is now constituted, with arrangements commonly exceeding ‘traditional, normative heterorelational practice’, including in Australia (Roseneil & Budgeon 2004, p. 142). Such shifts, themselves informed by feminism and queer reconceptualisations of intimate life (Berlant & Warner 1998), are evident in the kinds of intimacies and female subjectivities being depicted on Australian television screens, especially via the dramedy.

Feminism, postfeminism, and the dramedy Television is and always has been ‘bound up with the very serious cultural politics of our time’ (Wood & Taylor 2008, p. 149), and this includes the ways in which intimate life may (and indeed may not) have shifted as a result of the broader societal transformations precipitated by Australian second wave feminism (themselves differentially experienced across various modalities such as race, class, gender, and sexuality). As noted, the relationship between television, feminism, and postfeminism has long been a preoccupation in feminist media studies. In this regard, Susan Douglas argues that television plays ‘a central, crucial role in the weekly and monthly engineering of consent around an acceptance of postfeminism as the only possible subjective stand and political position for women to inhabit in the early twenty-first century’ (in Springer 2007, p. 250, emphasis added). For Douglas, women are only representable via postfeminism and its constitutive tropes, and audience ‘consent’ to such understandings is seemingly guaranteed. Here, Douglas overstates the homogeneity, and indeed the hegemony, of postfeminist ways of framing feminine subjectivity. Conversely, we see Australian television as staging a dialogue – about intimacy especially – that is clearly informed by feminist re-imaginings of the social as well as broader structural and political transformations in Australia. In this respect, our findings are more similar to those of Bonnie Dow in her 1996 landmark study, Prime Time Television, where she argues that there is evidence of programmes that ‘resist postfeminism quite vigorously in some ways’ (p. 101) – including through their representation of non-normative affective bonds. As a hybridised televisual form, the dramedy is said to have originated in the mid-1990s. Dramedy, Julia Havas and Maria Sulimma (2018, p. 3)

Television dramedies  61 note, ‘blends generic modes of soap opera, drama, and comedy to engage with individualized or “micro” identity politics around gender, sexuality, and community’. Given it is ‘rarely interested in “capital Politics” ’ and ‘instead trades on the politics of the “everyday” ’ (Havas & Sulimma 2018, p. 5), dramedy seems an appropriate genre in and through which to reflect upon shifts in intimate life informed by feminism (as well as to problematise the way these everyday politics often remain marred by a recalcitrant gender binary). As Rebecca Feasey (2012, p. 73) argues in her work on motherhood and television, dramedies ‘exploit the contemporary family unit for both dramatic and comedic effect. Indeed, many of these shows seem committed to the presentation of alternative, non-nuclear and nonpatriarchal family units, be it stepfamilies, single parents, surrogate parenting or homosexual partnerships’. As a genre, its constitutive comic aspects are key to rendering alternative ways of structuring intimate life visible, ‘addressing them in such a way that they seem less threatening, more acceptable’ (Mintz 1999, p. 237). Furthermore, as Feasey (2012, p. 72) notes, the contemporary dramedy appears significantly indebted to earlier forms of television which valorise sisterhood and female bonding: what Andrea Press (1991, p. 46) called ‘postfeminist, “postfamily” television’. However, what we find in these dramedies, is not that the traditional family has been entirely replaced by friendships, but – following Deborah Chambers (2012) – that a kind of ‘hybridised familialism’ is now operative. On Australian television family is refigured, and indeed augmented with other forms of affective bonds, in a way that acknowledges feminist-inspired shifts in gendered subjectivities (Chambers 2012). Therefore, for the remainder of this chapter we demonstrate how two extremely popular Australian dramedies – Offspring and Winners and Losers – exemplify the semioscape of postfeminist kinship.

Family as friends: Offspring (2010–2017) Offspring premiered on 15 August 2010 on Network 10, one of ­Australia’s commercial television networks. In 2016 its sixth season premiered after a two-year hiatus, and its seventh began screening in June 2017. Each season consists of between ten and 13 episodes, and over this period Australian audiences became deeply invested in its characters and plotlines. Created and written by Debra Oswald, its success and resonance with audiences has been attributed to its ‘incredibly strong female perspective’ (Perfect 2014). Its key protagonist, Nina Proudman (played by Asher Keddie), is its narrator, and throughout the series depicts her rich fantasy life, where she reimagines aspects of her hectic life to be otherwise.3 Like the earlier drama, The Secret Life of Us (2001–2006), it features an ensemble cast but instead of the ‘urban family’ trope, so often constitutive of ‘chick TV’ narratives (Hunting 2012), it revolves around an

62  Television dramedies actual family: the Proudmans (albeit much more widely conceived than the patriarchal nuclear variety). The ‘offspring’ invoked in its title relates both to Nina and the rest of the Proudman children, and to Nina’s professional role as an obstetrician. Offspring, especially via its key protagonist’s career in obstetrics, centralises the reproductive body, while also underscoring that it is not the sole locus of intimacy or family. Given Nina’s occupation, there are plenty of moments via which biological motherhood comes to be celebrated, though it is the affective labour of familial intimacy in a much wider sense that drives the series. Offspring simultaneously challenges the idea that blood or biological ties have less affective pull than in previous eras and argues that ‘family’ necessarily and positively exceeds such bonds. The Australian spaces of postfeminist kinship are significant in both our series; Offspring’s characters occupy the ‘borderlands between the city and the suburb – the inner city’ (Brooks 1998, p. 88), while Winners and Losers moves between cityscapes and suburban homes. In Offspring, bohemian matriarch Geraldine owns the family home in Fitzroy (three kilometres from Melbourne’s CBD), which is – along with the hospital at which Nina works, St Vincent’s – the locus of much action.4 Importantly, though one of the family’s adopted members, Cherie, midwife and later mother to Nina’s half-brother, is an Indigenous woman, Offspring’s diegetic world is largely governed by an unmarked whiteness and middle classness (something we also saw in the dreamscapes marking our women’s magazines), and in this respect is consistent with other limited forms of Anglo-American postfeminist representation (Butler 2013). Before engaging further with these familial dynamics and spaces, we consider Nina’s ongoing role as homodiegetic narrator, a position that is central to the series’ commentary on gender, intimacy, and postfeminist kinship. Nina Proudman: fantasy and homodiegetic narration Throughout its seven seasons the narrative is refracted through the psyche of Nina, who acts as its homodiegetic narrator, and in whom fans have been shown to deeply invest (Middlemost 2019). As Ashli Dykes (2011, p. 50) observes of Sex and the City’s Carrie Bradshaw, ‘the use of voiceover makes public what we often keep private, particularly in regard to female sexuality and desire’. In Offspring, the voiceover is commonly used by Nina to articulate the familial pressures that mark her everyday life, as well as uncertainties around how to perform heterosexuality and normative femininity appropriately within both personal and professional contexts. Offspring can also be seen to bear an intertextual debt to Ally McBeal, both technically and thematically (though it retains the focus on Nina’s psychic life while this aspect only featured in the latter’s earliest seasons). Like the 1990s US legal dramedy, Offspring offers a combination of ‘first person narration, characters’ conversations with themselves and imaginary people, and fantasy sequences to create rich character d ­ evelopment that

Television dramedies  63 exposes perspectives and information unavailable through conventional narrative structures’ (Lotz 2006, p. 90). But Nina is not, as we will demonstrate, simply a glocalised version of either Bradshaw or McBeal, especially given these anxieties relate largely to familial rather than heterosexual intimacies. In many respects, Nina represents a very different kind of (postfeminist) heroine, and certainly a different kind of worker, single woman, single mother, and finally coupled mother to those depicted on Anglo-American film and television screens produced over the same timeframe. Crucially, the focus on family in Offspring displaces mononormative couple culture. While romance and sexual intimacies are important, as they are to all dramedies, Nina’s singleness, in between bouts of workplace romance, is not figured as problematic and it is managing her immediate family (as opposed to romantic interests) alongside her work that is the source of so much tension and existential angst. This is remarkable given the intensified regulation and pathologisation of single women in other sites of postfeminist popular culture, including on Australian reality television shows such as The Bachelor (Taylor 2012) and, more recently, Married at First Sight. As Laura Brodnik (2017) argues, rather than the male partners she has at different points, the series represents Nina’s ‘true loves’ in equal measure: ‘One has been her family (this includes all the hospital staff who became her family by default) and the other is her career’. Although Nina’s love life is important (with fans affectively investing in potential partners, Chris or Patrick), it is subsumed by the often interconnected familial and workplace dramas in which she becomes heavily implicated. Much like the chick lit novels in the previous chapter, romance is significant but, thematically, is displaced by affective connections in a much wider sense. From its pilot episode, thirty-something Nina is depicted negotiating the tensions of modern feminine subjectivity – especially a pervasive sense of insecurity and anxiety said to beset all postfeminist heroines (McRobbie 2009). In this vein, the pilot commences with Nina doing laps in a local swimming pool; as she hits the wall when attempting to perform a tumble turn, she internally chastises herself: ‘Oh god you’re an embarrassment’ (1: 01).5 The next scene, however, shifts to her professional life, as she confidently delivers a baby, something, as she notes, she ‘is good at’. In these opening few minutes, and through such a juxtaposition, the series sets up the dynamic that has governed it ever since. Professionally, when not babbling incoherently to a potential love interest in the hospital (as is common), her extreme competence dominates, something that can certainly not be said of Bridget Jones, whose professional disasters provide the books – and their filmic adaptations – with much comic relief (Fielding 1996; Maguire 2001). As Nina says in a voiceover in the Season One finale, fantasising herself at work, wearing a halo: ‘My personal life may be a train wreck but at work I’m useful and confident’ (1: 13). But, in many ways, although she frequently laments her own anxieties and lack of

64  Television dramedies emotional competency (‘I’m very bad at this’ as she professes her love to Patrick, 2: 13), it is not Nina who is incompetent in her personal life but all those around her – particularly her immediate family. Nina’s fantasy life involves both catastrophic and utopian visions of professional, personal, and sexual fulfilment. Many of her fantasies, commonly depicted as dream sequences, are of an intimate life free from tension, especially where family is concerned. Indicative of the multiple layers of the text, she variously fantasises being in a romantic comedy ­­(3: 04) about ‘having it all’ (a highly gendered trope which the series ultimately rejects); imagines herself giving a TED talk about successfully managing competing domains of life (5: 13); and in season five she envisions herself in a sitcom, ‘The Proudmans’ – announcing ‘good morning, extended functional family’ – where, in stark contrast to the reality, all her family and friends are happy and content (5: 10). While she will only reluctantly tell her family that she feels overwhelmed by their demands, in her narration and fantasy life it is common for her to visualise, and imagine a space beyond, this sense of burden. In this respect, it is via her position as homodiegetic narrator that the series’ critique of gendered affective labour is performed. Accordingly, as with Carrie Bradshaw, rendering visible women’s innermost thoughts, fears, and dreams ‘becomes a feminist act’ (Dykes 2011, p. 56). From the series’ beginnings, the family’s often unreasonable demands upon Nina provide much of the narrative tension and (melo)drama. While detraditionalisation and the individualisation thesis presumes that ‘family is spiralling into disintegration’ (Chambers 2012, p. 39), Offspring upends this narrative to underscore the importance of familial networks. Parents Geraldine and Darcy, though divorced, maintain an unconventional intimacy, including at times being on the verge of reuniting. Daughter Billie, though the eldest, exhibits many insecurities around being the least successful Proudman daughter, a divorce, and an inability to have children, while son Jimmy is a man-child who (living in Geraldine’s inner-city home) becomes the full-time carer of his two children when his partner, Zara (also a nurse on Nina’s ward), returns to medical school.6 There are also many smaller, non-normative, units that make up the larger extended Proudman clan and the family is consistently expanding.7 In some respect, families in Offspring are not a choice; as Billie remarks to Nina: ‘Every kid in our family under 10 was conceived accidentally’ (7: 06).8 However, characters also reflect upon the performative nature of family-building, and the ways in which the family accepts, and actively recruits, new members: ‘This family’s like a bath plug, they suck you in …’ (Kim, 5: 10), a point reiterated by Nina (7: 01).9 As the series makes clear, Nina is not anxious because she is liberated or because she is single, or too independent, as others have argued of postfeminist television heroines (Chambers 2006; McRobbie 2009), but because she is – despite the supposed unmooring of the self from

Television dramedies  65 t­raditional familial bonds – unliberated from her immediate family. Season Two’s first episode begins with Nina on a fellowship in Baltimore, celebrating personal and professional life without the Proudmans: ‘number of panic attacks during that time: 0’ (2: 01), after which she is called back to Australia because of her father’s heart attack. As this suggests, each season begins with Nina feeling happy and content, until a family bombshell, usually involving one or more family members, disrupts it. This key plot device is central to both the humour and the melodrama that characterises the series. As she notes in a voiceover at the start of the third season, ‘You’re tempting fate, it’s an unfair amount of happiness for one person’ (3: 01), and she imagines a bomb dropping on her in bed. Such a metaphorical bomb is later literalised in the form of the revelation, immediately after her apartment catches fire, that she is not Darcy’s biological child. This revelation, unsurprisingly, leads – in addition to much emotional turmoil for Nina – to a clear narrative argument that biology is not what makes family, and her biological father, socially awkward GP Philip Noonan, becomes part of their extended familial network. As Carol Smart points out, families can offer a form of ‘ontological security’ or be suffocating (2007, p. 45); in Offspring, especially for Nina, they appear to be both at once. Family is certainly not romanticised and is instead represented as the product of much (gendered) labour. In this respect, conceptualising such ties as ‘family practices’ (Morgan 2011) provides a valuable way to account for this ongoing affective work in which Nina is involved. Like gender itself, family is something one does, not something one is (Chambers 2001). Such performative practices, however, are shaped by material and cultural factors. As Graham Allan (2008, p. 10) notes, ‘families construct their practices within the material constraints they face (income levels, housing standards, occupational demands, and such like) but also in the context of their cultural understandings of appropriate family and kinship behavior’. While Allan does not engage with gender, clearly these practices are also inextricable from assumptions about normative ways of doing femininity and masculinity. As Smart (2007, p. 28) notes, rather than over-stating the individual’s autonomy, intimacy and personal life need to be recognised as ‘always already part of the social’, including in terms of gender. Furthermore, while hospitals and those employed there are involved in care work, Offspring exaggerates this through having key familial intimacies conducted and sustained therein.10 In this sense, it appears consistent with the kind of ‘new woman’ postfeminist narratives explored by Amanda Lotz (2006), and which are marked by a collapsing of the boundaries between the public/private spheres. In the case of Nina, her professional and personal lives are largely inseparable, not simply as family members call her at, or drop in to, the hospital where she works with their various crises, but because over the course of seven seasons, Nina’s

66  Television dramedies sexual and romantic life predominantly features men with whom she works.11 While Melissa Gregg (2011, p. 2) is concerned with the ways in which technologies permeate workers’ home lives, what she calls ‘presence bleed’, Offspring maps the opposite flow – of intimacy into the space of employment. At work, Nina’s mobile phone rings persistently, invariably heralding some new form of familial dilemma.12 Perhaps in a recognition that workplaces too are affective realms, and that intimacy is always already public (Berlant 1998), in Offspring it is performed across formerly demarcated public/private spheres. As Cherie remarks to registrar Eloise, ‘We don’t do work/family separation, none of us’ (4: 03). However, there seems to be an extreme, if implausible, flexibility in Nina’s work life; only with such flexibility can Nina carry out her familial, and clearly gendered, care-giver role – something which the series gently critiques. Gendered affective labour and the maintenance of familial bonds Nina throughout performs much affective labour, both in professional and personal contexts. As Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2009, p. 134) argue, despite women’s ‘massive entry into the wage labor force … affective labor is required of women disproportionately on and off the job’. While she tells her father ‘I’m not responsible for solving this family’s many and varied problems’ (2: 09), this is precisely her role within the diegesis. Although the middle child, she is the one responsible for ensuring the Proudman family remains stable – a difficult, arduous, and relentless task; she undertakes significant gendered labour which itself is entirely normalised and taken for granted, though remarked upon by those outside the Proudman family bubble, such as medical resident and short-term love interest Fraser: ‘Nina, I know that you spend most of your life looking after things for everyone else …’ (2: 05) and partner Patrick: ‘She cares for this family in a way that is pretty extraordinary’ (4: 11). The labour she invests to sustain the family is not domestic but affective; families still rely upon women for their maintenance and stability but in this different sense. The other family members do not rely upon friends instead of relatives – as is commonly posited in scholarship on the transformation of intimacy (Roseneil & Budgeon 2004) – but rather turn to Nina, to resolve tensions, mediate disputes, bring the clan together, and to unquestioningly subordinate her own emotional needs to those of the group. That said, despite her role as chaos mediator, Nina’s intimate bonds with her family are crucial to her, a source of great comfort and strength, and she cares deeply for all those around her. And in times of crisis, such as when Patrick dies unexpectedly towards the end of Nina’s pregnancy, the family does rally around her, providing vital affective and material support. (It is not insignificant, however, that this corresponds with her entrance into motherhood.)

Television dramedies  67 The show reflects, often critically, upon the ways in which otherwise independent women remain bound, despite scholarly narratives about declining familial bonds and responsibilities, to traditional gendered assumptions around care. In a challenge to the idea of detraditionalisation, persistent ‘feminine discourses of nurturing’ ensure that ‘the responsibility placed on women to cement domestic ties among kin and the wider community’ is maintained (Chambers 2006, p. 73). Offspring makes explicit the extensive emotional labour (Hochschild 1984) that women – whether as daughters, sisters, or mothers – are still largely expected to selflessly perform. In comically rendering visible Nina’s ongoing role in caring for members of her immediate family, and the relentless chaos that it brings to her own life, the series effectively critiques the ongoing normalisation of this labour as inherently feminine.13 It adds to this critique through the characterisation of Nina’s mother, Geraldine, who adopts a non-traditional maternal role, and brother, Jimmy, who is primary carer for his two small children. (Her mother is an unconventional libertarian, a clear product of the Australian feminist second wave, especially in terms of sexual agency and ageing.) While the series does critique this labour, it also underscores its benefits. Nina’s family are her friends; she seems not to have a friendship network outside the extended kinship group, and, more pertinently for this femalecentred style of television series, she does not have a stable core of female friends upon which she can rely: her extended family fulfils this role. Liz Spencer and Ray Pahl (2006) deploy the term ‘suffusion’ to signal the ways in which certain familial relationships can be seen to have the characteristics of friendships and, relatedly, that friendships can be seen to have qualities of kinship (see also Allan 2008). Undoubtedly, Nina’s closest friends are her siblings – especially older sister Billie; as Nina tells her, ‘I love you like no one else’ (6: 05). The tropes and discourses around romantic love are persistently deployed to make sense of their, at times fraught, sisterly bond: ‘No one can break my heart the way you can’ (6: 09, Billie to Nina). While partners change, and despite periods of tension, jealousy, competition, and even temporary estrangement, Billie is positioned as Nina’s constant (in the same way the ‘girls’ are in Winners and Losers). That their connection is seen to approximate the kind of relationality usually associated with romantic intimacy represents another way in which the series troubles the privileging of heteronormative bonds over all others. One episode, wherein Patrick and Nina have clashed over these intense familial demands, ends with a fantasy scene of them all in bed with them: ‘Even when my family aren’t here, they’re sort of in my head. They’re my best friends’ (4: 10). As Chambers notes, in a move from the idea that family ties are simply based on obligation or duty, ‘The term “friend” is being used increasingly to convey family relationships in which the association is seen as positive and cherished’ (2012, p. 183). Such comments are apposite to the familial intimacies depicted throughout the series, including when Nina herself becomes a mother.

68  Television dramedies Decentring matrimony and maternity As in Winners and Losers, and unlike many texts characterised as postfeminist, romantic relationships are by no means uncritically celebrated in Offspring; most are tumultuous, the source of much melodrama throughout, and are found wanting. Many characters are divorced or divorce during the series (Geraldine and Darcy, Nina and Andrew, Billie and Mick) or separate and reconnect (Zara and Jimmie, Cherie and Clegg, Nina and Patrick). Perhaps unlike other postfeminist heroines, for whom a matrimonial subjectivity is crucial (Negra 2009), co-habitation without marriage is endorsed as a viable life choice for Nina. When partner Patrick suggests marriage, she remarks, ‘I don’t want to get married, my life is bound to yours in the most profound way already [by having a child]. I want you to know that I choose you. I choose you’ (4: 09).14 Making such a ‘choice’, performing an intimacy that is not sanctioned by the state, remains a nonnormative one: marriage is still overwhelmingly seen as one of the ‘central choices that all citizens will make, and indeed that makes all citizens’ (Taylor 2012, p. 20, original emphasis). This mutually agreed upon decision not to marry mounts an important challenge to the heteronormative assumption that committed relationships do and should inevitably lead, teleologically, towards marriage. Relatedly, despite supposed anxieties around pregnancy, childbirth, and childrearing said to beset contemporary women, Nina does not exhibit any disappointment about not having children, and not having had them by 35 is not positioned as abnormal. In contrast to numerous televisual depictions of the postfeminist woman, there is no trope of the biological clock, or any articulation of a fear of childlessness (Negra 2009; Leonard 2010; Taylor 2012). Nevertheless, by depicting Billie’s disappointment over not being able to fall pregnant, including the trauma of miscarriages and unsuccessful IVF attempts, the series does address this fear.15 Nina does, however, become unexpectedly pregnant in Season Three, and following Patrick’s unexpected death shortly before the birth of their daughter, Zoe, becomes a single mother. While single mothers have commonly been associated with ‘deviance’ (Sidel 2006), Nina – like Frances James from Winners and Losers – illustrates a complexification of the single-mother-as-socialproblem narrative. Nina and Frances, obstetrician and lawyer respectively, have the financial capital to support themselves and their daughters, acting as the ideal neoliberal citizens who take responsibility for their circumstances.16 They each have privatised childcare, one in the form of a paid nanny, the other through a mother and brother who are expected, in many senses, to subordinate their needs to collectivist childcare. In terms of the ‘hierarchy of single motherhood’ (Brady et al. 2016, p. 88), women like Nina (and Frances) are patently at its peak. Nina escapes the regulating, judgemental gazes that frame other kinds of, implicitly welfare-dependent, mothers

Television dramedies  69 without (male) partners (Tyler 2008). Her single mother status, too, is coded as ‘acceptable’ because it was (like Frances’s, whose partner suffered a debilitating stroke) beyond her control (Valdivia 1998, p. 283). Comparatively, the ‘bad’ single mother is located as responsible for her lamentable predicament and accordingly found morally wanting (Valdivia 1998). In such a framework, ‘good’ single mothers are those who are not a drain on the increasingly stretched welfare state; those who take responsibility for themselves and their offspring; and those who are white and, preferably, heterosexual, and, of course, middle class. Significantly, Nina’s motherhood does not see the postfeminist retreatist trope activated; even in her fantasy life this is not an option she pursues. That is, Offspring does not seek to reposition Nina in ‘adjustment narratives in which working women must downsize the importance of work in their lives’ (Negra 2009, p. 86). Importantly, there is no sense that she remains a worker for financial reasons, or that she only does so because she is bereft of her child’s father. That Nina, whose career affords her much fulfilment and pleasure, will return to work after six months is unquestioned (while Frances lasts barely a few weeks as a stay at home mother, a choice which is also diegetically normalised). Indeed, apart from the first episode of Season Five, barely any maternal domesticity or mother work is actually depicted (and certainly none of the maternal guilt common to the postfeminist small screen). Although the ‘good mother’ of television is said to ‘adhere to the ideology of intensive mothering whereby she takes sole care and responsibility for her children’s emotional development and intellectual growth’ (Feasey 2012, p. 2; see also McRobbie 2013), Zoe’s childrearing depends on a much wider network than such an idealised representation would allow – especially during the first six months, in which Billie, in another reconfiguration of familial arrangements, functions effectively as a co-parent. Contra many postfeminist familial narratives, biological motherhood, as an identity and mode of being and care-giving, is not valorised over all other aspects of women’s subjectivity. Both Offspring and Winners and Losers, like American shows such as Grey’s Anatomy, and more recently Big Little Lies, reveal ‘the cracks and fissures in the dominant social beliefs about motherhood as uniquely nurturing, satisfying, and all-consuming’ (Hunter 2012, p. 327; see also Wallworth 2018). In a challenge to the postfeminist phenomenon dubbed the ‘mommy wars’ (Douglas & Michaels 2005), and the opposition between working and stay at home mothers upon which it is predicated, Offspring largely refrains from judgement. But it does presume that work and child-rearing is dependent upon an extended familial network rather than any state-supported initiatives or policies (the lack of which continue to be the source of debate in Australia as elsewhere), with Geraldine’s inner-city house functioning essentially as a free crèche. That said, this labour is rendered visible by Geraldine: ‘I quit – I am no longer running this childcare service, I am just sick and tired of

70  Television dramedies being this family’s childcare stop gap. It’s elder abuse’ (6: 03). Though this scene is overplayed for comic effect, it does underscore the ways in which the neoliberal privatisation of childcare requires greater family support for those who have children and work, and draws attention to the failings of the Australian state in that regard. In the final season, Nina’s hyperactive fantasy world becomes preoccupied with mothering as she takes on the role of acting Head of Obstetrics. The series begins with her dreaming about being in a television series on ‘exceptional women’; in stark contrast, she wakes at her desk, with a post-it note stuck to her forehead, stressed and frazzled: ‘I’ve got too many balls in the air’ (7: 03), she confesses. Although there are moments when Nina clearly struggles in this season, and explicitly comes to consider whether her professional life can be prioritised while a mother, it is the way the series ultimately responds to these tensions that is most remarkable, and disruptive of dominant postfeminist logics. As the season progressed and Nina became more certain of her ambitions, and her capacity to actualise them, the series simply refused to situate motherhood and ambition as antithetical, or to invoke the ‘new traditionalism’ said to characterise earlier forms of postfeminist television (Probyn 1990). After Nina makes excuses as to why she will not be applying for the position in which she has been acting, Cherie asks: ‘Are you putting a glass ceiling above your own head?’ (7: 06), an explicitly feminist phrase also uttered earlier in the episode by Billie. Here, there is seen to be no impediment to Nina’s future career success except Nina herself; the presumption is that she is failing to, in Sheryl Sandberg’s (2013) term, ‘lean in’ (which itself is indicative of the global circulation of these dominant postfeminist ways of making sense of tensions experienced by women in the contemporary workplace). While ‘leaning in’ has appropriately been seen as an inherently conservative response to ongoing inequalities in the workplace (Taylor 2016; Rottenberg 2018), Nina’s self-actualisation, prioritising herself and her own needs – a marked departure from earlier seasons – is important in feminist terms. Moreover, the introduction of Nina’s second pregnancy, precisely at her apparent ‘click’ moment around her desire for deeper professional fulfilment, represents a further narrative device through which to complicate, or even refuse to acknowledge, the difficulties of reconciling maternal intimacies with intense professional ambition and its fulfilment. There is no ‘having it all’ dilemma that needs to be resolved via a retreat into domesticity as motherhood is not seen to compromise Nina professionally. At the end of the finale, Nina is offered a position at rival hospital The Ainsworth, where, after declaring her ambition, a senior research role has been created for her – itself, of course, a postfeminist fantasy only available to the most privileged of women.17 Although the series perhaps obscures the obstacles that could impede such a ‘choice’ to embrace professional ambition, and while some would

Television dramedies  71 dismiss it as postfeminist on such grounds, Offspring’s refusal to have motherhood hamper Nina’s career progression performs an important intervention, in terms of the kinds of femininities that are intelligible in Australian public discourse. The way in which this character navigates this terrain suggests a glitch in the hegemony of postfeminist ways of framing competing demands upon women (Vavrus 2007; Genz 2009; Negra 2009; Taylor 2012; Winch 2013). This finale, consistent with its diegetic world, refuses to prioritise mothering over other forms of being and caring, and instead positions it as one amongst many modes of intimacy; this is an integral part of the refigured postfeminist kinship semioscape we identify here. Overall, Offspring reaffirms the value of familial networks, though vastly expanded, and lays bare the extensive gendered labour underpinning them, while also decentralising the role of marriage and maternity as the most privileged of bonds. In this respect, it bears its indebtedness to feminism, and rather than performing its disavowal, intervenes in continuing Australian debates around women’s ongoing affective labour, and demands upon women as carers and workers. For the remainder of this chapter, we shift the focus from family as friends to friends as family, and also further engage with how the traditional, patriarchal nuclear family, as in Offspring, is seen as anachronistic in the semioscape of postfeminist kinship.

Friends as family: Winners and Losers (2011–2016) Launched in March 2011 on the Seven network (another Australian free to air commercial television station), Winners and Losers centres on four female friends who were each considered ‘losers’ in high school and depicts their lives as they become ‘winners’ – quite literally, as in the pilot episode they win the AU$8 million lottery. A kind of ‘revenge’ narrative, as those who had occupied subordinate positions in their high school community turn the tables on those who had bullied them, Winners and Losers has been described by its creator Bevan Lee as a ‘charmedy’, constituted by a mixture of drama, comedy, and charm (in Jackson 2011). Pre-publicity sought to brand the series as a glocalised version of Sex and the City: ‘Whereas [Packed to the] Rafters highlights the power of family, Winners & Losers – like US hit Sex and the City – celebrates the power of friendship’ (Devlyn & Vickery 2010; see also ‘Winners & Losers, Tuesday April 12’ [2011]). Others, however, criticised its use of stereotypes and stock female characters; as the series progressed, Bridget McManus (2011) remarked in the Sydney Morning Herald: ‘it is unfortunately starting to resemble a poor girl’s Sex and the City’. Winners and Losers ran for five seasons, each consisting of between 22 and 26 episodes – except for its final series which, due to falling ratings, only featured 13 episodes. Like Offspring, the series is somewhat technically innovative, routinely deploying representational devices such as split screens, temporal shifting (beginning an

72  Television dramedies episode, then rewinding 24 hours, or representing a day but in segments as different characters experience the same events), and sporadic fantasy sequences (as in the pilot when Frances imagines physically attacking the school’s ‘mean girl’). However, it does not deploy intradiegetic narration to aid in either characterisation or plot development in the way Offspring does. Winners and Losers exemplifies a trend in Western popular television from the mid-1990s onwards, with ‘home life now often being defined as a chosen kinship network made up of friends (and sometimes co-workers) rather than biological family’ (Sandell 1998, p. 144; see also Heath 2004). Like the earlier Australian programme The Secret Life of Us, and Friends in the United States, it ‘thus captures and romanticizes the formation of alternative kinship networks made up of friends and neighbors’ (Sandell 1998, p. 144). While Nina seemingly transforms family into a network of friends, it is the opposite dynamic that is mapped in Winners and Losers. That said, in contrast to the inner-city dwelling, bohemian, dysfunctional Proudmans and their extended clan, the series also depicts a traditional, working-class Australian nuclear family, the Grosses, and we will shortly discuss the diegetic role of this family. Throughout, the series has a strong ethos of sisterhood, especially given that the central characters’ affective bonds were forged in the misery of an adolescence spent in an all girls’ secondary school. They are seen to experience varying degrees of personal and professional success, and much like in Sex and the City, the four characters enable multiple variants of the postfeminist woman to be depicted. As Lotz (2006, p. 74) notes, this is a ‘textual strategy that allows a diverse female audience various points of identification’. However, with its ensemble cast, Winners and Losers (like Offspring) offers little ethnic or racial diversity, as only one of the foursome, Sophie Wong, is Chinese Australian while the rest of the characters inhabit an unmarked whiteness (Moreton-Robinson 2000; Arrow et al. 2017), again underscoring the limits of the Australian postfeminist imaginary.18 Through its four central characters, in their late twenties at its commencement though the programme concludes when they are in their midthirties, the series maps various relationships, including (in some cases) marriage and motherhood. However, it also renders visible the desire to remain childfree, different forms of maternal care, marital ambivalence, and singleness.19 That is, biological ties, as in Offspring, coexist alongside chosen bonds, neither privileged over the other, though familial ties (apart from the Grosses’) are exposed as seriously flawed. As in Offspring, families are both inherited and created, and there are various non-normative forms of intimate bonds depicted. For example, the series represents surrogacy, step-parenting, same-sex marriage, and fostering and adoption, as Sam (Jenny’s half-sister) becomes the primary carer for orphan Cory, while Frances’s half-sister, Jasmine, is left in her care by their mother. As

Television dramedies  73 ­ hambers (2012) notes, indicative of the ‘hybridised familialism’ we see as C integral to postfeminist kinship, alternative familial models have long been a key feature of Australian soap operas, such as Neighbours and Home and Away, for the past few decades, and both these series are consistent with that representational trend. Before engaging further with the series, it is necessary to introduce its four central protagonists. From losers to winners The pilot episode begins with the four women individually contemplating whether to attend their ten-year high school reunion, for which they have received a Facebook invite from resident ‘mean girl’, Tiffany Turner. We learn that the four spent much of their high school years – a traumatic experience of liminality that is later seen as the source of their enduring bond – ‘hiding in the toilets’ (1.01). The fictional Renwood High, a suburban Melbourne girls’ public high school, is seen to have been a concentrated site of gender policing, particularly around the adolescent body. The series depicts, and critiques, the long-lasting effects of the ‘normative cruelties’ inflicted upon them by other girls seeking to establish their own sense of belonging and sociality at the expense of others, who are subject to intense forms of judgement and especially bodily surveillance (Winch 2013). To combat this gendered bullying, to contest the ‘meanness’ seen to be inherent in ‘doing girl’ (Ringrose & Renold 2010, p. 585), and to offer a much less toxic form of female sociality, the girls take refuge in each other throughout these difficult years, however, all but Bec and Jenny (who both continue to live in their childhood suburb) have lost touch. In the few first moments of the pilot, each character is introduced in the present, going about their daily lives, scenes which reveal much about them and the kinds of post-school gender identities they inhabit. First, Bec Gilbert is shown cooking breakfast for her fiancée Matt, and working at her own beauty salon. Bec initially appears the most conventional, until a one-night stand during a brief separation from Matt sees her fall pregnant to Sophie’s boyfriend Doug, opening a space for the exploration of an alternative familial arrangement in which her son, Harrison, is seen to have four parents (something with which Sophie struggles). Sophie Wong is depicted partying and having a series of one-night stands, as well as in a professional setting: as a personal trainer, a position she took up after dropping out of her medical residency (to which she returns after the lottery win). Sophie was Dux of her school but was also considered overweight, making her the subject of many cruel jibes from her high school cohort. However, indicative of the postfeminist makeover paradigm (Gill 2007), Sophie has dramatically transformed since high school, and is now conventionally attractive and thin. In other ways Sophie is positioned as a failure; in the series’ mobilisation of a racial stereotype, she does not live up to her Chinese father’s high expectations, especially when charged with

74  Television dramedies cocaine possession (1: 02). She also explicitly rejects marriage (she breaks off two engagements) and children (she has an abortion, which is dealt with sympathetically), and in the series’ finale remains the only contentedly single character. Conversely, Jenny Gross (a name that not so subtly invokes the kinds of insults levelled at her at school), whom we first see being brought a cup of tea in bed by her mother as she sleeps with a cuddly toy, has altered little in the ten years since high school ended. Dubbed ‘Gross Out’ throughout her school years – both due to her name and a body that is implicitly seen as excessive – at 27, Jenny initially works at a call centre and continues to struggle with insecurities. As we will demonstrate, and indicative of postfeminist ‘girling’ (Negra 2009), she is throughout infantilised, and is deeply invested in hetero-patriarchal romance mythologies, in which she locates all hopes for personal fulfilment and happiness. Material gains mean little to her, and, contra detraditionalisation, her Catholic views continue to shape her life choices; for example, she donates the majority of her lottery win to a hospital ward after suggesting she would do so while praying for her mother’s recovery from breast cancer, and is a virgin when the series commences. Finally, Frances James is initially depicted as a dishevelled lawyer, waking up at her desk after an all-night session working on a brief. This characterisation clearly positions her as the workaholic of the group, who implicitly invests too much time in her professional life to the detriment of her personal one – a familiar trope in postfeminist ‘chick television’. Educationally and professionally, Frances is the ideal post-second wave feminist subject: she is a Harvard law graduate, partner in a law firm, who (like Sophie) has relocated from her childhood home to her own inner-city apartment. She is clearly characterised as the series’ overt feminist (perhaps reminiscent of Miranda in Sex and the City), including through the invocation of a key second wave feminist phrase: ‘Do I need to give you the “a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle” speech?’ (Frances to Sophie, 4: 21).20 After they ultimately decide to attend, the school reunion finds them retreating to the familiar space of the toilet, with Frances lamenting that – despite the intervening ten years – they are still the losers they were in high school. Leaving the reunion to spend the night partying together instead, they stumble past a newsagent the next morning and purchase a winning lottery ticket. They are figured as not merely winners in monetary terms – though, despite the popular fantasy of winning the lottery, the series suggests that money does not buy happiness – but through their accumulation of other forms of capital, including their enduring friendships (Lambert 2013). The lottery win is used to underscore the importance of women’s friendship over any material gains, as well as to normalise the importance of meaningful work, in terms of identity, to the contemporary postfeminist subject.21 What the girls have ‘won’, the series makes clear, is this rejuvenated sisterly bond.

Television dramedies  75 Screening sisterhood: girlfriendship and intimacy As Chambers observes, ‘conventional intimate dyads are gradually being supplanted by a new set of social dynamics characterised by group friendships’ (2006, p. 71, original emphasis) – which is certainly the case for women in various forms of postfeminist media culture (Winch 2013). Given its narrative focus on these women friends, with each representing a different embodiment of femininity, comparisons with HBO’s Sex and the City, as in those press accounts above, may seem inevitable; the series even gives an intertextual nod to the Manhattan foursome: ‘I feel like I’ve just walked into an episode of Sex and the City’, says Jenny’s partner Gabe (4: 20). However, the focus on a female friendship foursome is arguably where the comparisons end. In contrast to other postfeminist television dramedies (Negra 2004; Mabry 2006; Taylor 2012), their lives are not glamorised, and apart from a few shopping sprees immediately following the lottery win and celebrations once the money is deposited in their accounts, their friendships are not tied to practices of conspicuous consumption. In defiance of neoliberal logics, affective success – as in fostering and maintaining strong affective connections – is more highly valued than success in economic terms. Moreover, as in our chick lit narratives, these women’s friendships are not simply the backdrop to their efforts to become ‘unsingle’ but crucial modes of intimacy in and of themselves. Despite their not insignificant differences, once reunited at the scene of adolescent trauma, the ‘girls’ (as they, consistent with the infantilism of single women in other sites of postfeminist media culture, refer to their group) are more or less inseparable. Much of the action involves them eating out and/or drinking, or attending Gross family events, and providing each other with moral and emotional support, engaging in what Alison Winch (2013) calls ‘girlfriend reflexivity’ (including after traumatic experiences of gendered violence, stalking, illness, separation, and sexual harassment), and such talk is essential to their sociality. While Winch sees the communal monitoring and revision of women’s life narratives as integral to bringing them into being as ‘successful postfeminist subjects’ (2013, p. 66), the Winners and Loser’s girlfriends do not appear to judge and regulate each other’s femininities as per what she dubs the ‘girlfriend gaze’. And in a challenge to the atomised individual of neoliberalism, the collectivity offered in many women-centred series, including in Australia, makes clear their indebtedness to feminist ways of reframing intimacy. As Dow (2017) has argued, ‘Feminism is about women together, not alone’. It is the representation of solidarity, ‘strong female communities’, and a thematic emphasis on the importance of women in each other’s lives, she suggests, that make series such as Sex and the City and Girls so ‘compelling’ (see also Gerhard 2005; Lotz 2006). Although romance is a key generic element in the dramedy, the

76  Television dramedies overarching narrative premise – consistent with the postfeminist kinship semioscape – is that, despite the fluctuations of relationships and transience of partners lost through death, infidelity, or incompatibility, the girls’ friendship is sustained. Through the relationship between the four women, the series – as Offspring does through family – decentralises conjugal coupledom and the heteronormative imaginary (Roseneil & Budgeon 2004; Roseneil 2006; Budgeon 2006, 2008). For example, key rituals and rites of passage foreground their intimate bonds over others. Even when Bec gives birth at home, there is no masculine presence (Doug and Matt are both fishing, a recreational activity coded masculine); instead, only the ‘girls’ are there to share in this gendered milestone. Their homosocial relationship is repeatedly seen as the one constant in their turbulent lives: ‘One thing will never change, how grateful we are to have each other’ (Bec to the girls, 3: 26) and ‘No matter what else changes, our friendships won’t’ (Frances to the girls, 4: 12). Towards the end of Season Four Frances and Sophie fall out: ‘Sophie and I are over … nothing lasts forever’ (4: 23); consistent with the figuration of women’s intimacy via tropes of romance – what Winch calls ‘womance’ (2013) – the language used approximates that of a breakup (similar to Billie and Nina’s estrangement). Here, friendships are shown to be – albeit temporarily – precarious, but they reunite a few episodes later and reaffirm their deep commitment to one another (4: 25). In the series’ finale, when asked by a journalist to reflect upon her life prior to the lottery win, Frances says: ‘I was not good at emotions, very focused on work, anything to avoid human interaction’ (5: 13) – all traditionally masculine stereotypes. She credits, not her child or husband, but reconnecting with ‘the girls’ with ‘changing everything’. Although romantic and sexual relationships may, as per Giddens (1991), be figured as contingent, these friendships are attributed a form of consistency and certainty (Pahl 2000), and the successful feminine self is seen as one who foregrounds these homosocial intimacies. Intimacy in the city and in the suburbs The spaces in which this intimacy is maintained are also significant in feminist terms, and suggest much about how Australian women’s subjectivities have shifted in the wake of second wave feminism. In terms of domestic spaces, half of the foursome (Bec and Jenny) remain, for the most part, in suburban Renwood (though they are by no means relegated to such spaces – they, too, move in and through the city like their urban counterparts). They are, perhaps unsurprisingly, the two women who are the more conservative of the group. Bec is engaged, later married (and subsequently widowed), and lives in a suburban two-bedroom cottage, while Jenny lives at home and is cared for by her parents (or more aptly, her mother) – even after the lottery win. Though the relationship ultimately fails, she and her fiancé,

Television dramedies  77 Cal, even purchase the house next door to her parents in Renwood. Conversely, Frances lives in a sparse, immaculate inner-city high-rise apartment; and Sophie’s is a loft-style apartment also in the inner city (we frequently see cityscapes immediately prior to any scenes in their homes, while in the suburbs only the house is featured). Whether their domestic spaces are suburban or inner city, these women are no longer confined to the gendered space of the (suburban) home in the way their Australian mothers, or perhaps grandmothers, may have been. Many scholars have analysed the recurrent motif of women’s escape from suburbia in Australian literature, however a ‘narrative of female flight is a relatively recent phenomenon, influenced by the second wave feminism of the 1970s and 1980s’ (Burns 2011; see also Henderson 1998). Following Betty Friedan (1963) and Australia’s own Germaine Greer (1970), domesticity and suburbia were coded as a form of imprisonment from which women needed to escape in order to achieve self-fulfilment – a history of which these characters seem aware. As Frances tells the girls, ‘Do you know what I liked most about living in the suburbs? The leaving’ (5: 13). Conversely for Jenny the suburban home (and the nuclear family residing therein) represents a site of certainty and stability unavailable elsewhere, hence she remains there until the penultimate series. Like Frances, however, Sophie mobilises the escapist narrative familiar to invocations of a city/suburb hierarchy, which identifies the latter with stasis and indeed regression – especially for women: ‘I can’t move to Renwood, I won’t go backwards … Just because the baby [Bec and Doug’s] is coming doesn’t mean I’m ready for instant suburbia. I spent my entire childhood trying to get out of Renwood. It’s like my life started when I left there’ (2: 02). The televisual Australian postfeminist woman, in this series and in Offspring, refuses to be domesticated. For Sophie, who is also overtly anti-marriage, in a familiar feminist trajectory ‘the outer-suburbs are residual spaces of patriarchal ideology’ (Henderson 1998, p. 73), and a number of plotlines serve to complicate ideas around ‘retreatism’; what Diane Negra (2009, p. 5) calls ‘one of postfeminism’s master narratives’. A patent example of this anti-retreatist position is depicted in Season Four, as Jenny’s sister Bridget begins to feel discontented with her life in the suburbs. As she tells her boss, Frances, ‘Coming into the city every day, seeing the cases you work on … I’m changing – before, all I wanted was a family in the suburbs and now it’s like it’s not enough … It’s like there’s a light that came on in me and I don’t want to turn it off’ (4: 14). Bridget’s ‘light bulb’ moment, reminiscent of second wave feminist consciousness-raising and its critique of the domestic sphere as the source of women’s malaise and discontentment, occurred when she left the suburban family home and entered the public sphere as a worker. As we argue below, the stay-at-home mother embodied by Jenny’s mother, Trish, is not seen as a viable, long-term subjectivity for any of the series’ younger Australian protagonists.

78  Television dramedies The pre-feminist Aussie family in a postfeminist context Jenny’s suburban family features heavily and is central to her (re)traditional views; as in its sister series, Packed to the Rafters (by the same creator and screened on the same network), it represents a very traditional nuclear family, complete with stay at home mother (for the majority of the series at least) who cares – materially and affectively – for her grown-up children and their partners. Compared with the bohemian, inner city, middle-class Proudmans, the suburban, white, working-class Grosses appear to be from a pre-feminist time, with their nuclear family relatively untouched by the feminist reconfiguration of gendered subjectivities. The Grosses’ unrenovated weatherboard home offers a version of 1960s kitsch (complete with a wooden spoon board in the shape of Australia on which Trish’s collection of spoons hangs), and Jenny’s bedroom appears as it did when she was a girl, suspended in time. In some respects, the suburb is implicitly seen as responsible for Jenny’s arrested development, which can be seen as a familiar feminist critique of it as stifling women and their ambitions/emancipation. While the relationship between the four women is at the core of the series, this family seems to anchor it and they feature in every episode, with much of the action (and intimacy) taking place in their suburban family home. Comically rendered in many respects, like the Kerrigans of the popular 1997 Australian film, The Castle, the Gross family – especially the parents (who celebrate their 35th anniversary in Season One) – are characterised by what Henderson (2013, p. 254) describes in another context as an ‘unaffected Australian ordinariness’. With pronounced ­Australian accents, and later, in Season Three, disparagingly described by one character, Coco, as ‘bogans’ – a classed term similar to the United Kingdom’s ‘chav’ or the United States’ ‘red neck’22 – the Grosses are John Howard’s ‘battlers’, a trope used to signal Australia’s working class and their economic struggles. Jenny pays off their mortgage with her lottery win, but their financial difficulties are still the source of narrative focus (for instance, Mr Gross is made redundant by Frances’s management consultancy, 2: 04). The idealised depiction of Trish Gross is juxtaposed with a series of neglectful or domineering mothers: Lily, Frances’s mother; Cory’s mother, Hayley; and Bec’s mother, Carolyn. Rather than the disillusioned housewife struggling in isolation with a problem that has no name (Friedan 1963), and in stark contrast to Offspring’s matriarch, Geraldine, Trish contentedly acts as care-giver, emotionally and in terms of domestic labour (though her breast cancer diagnosis ultimately underscores, and makes impossible, this extensive labour), finding echoes in The Australian Women’s Weekly’s dreamscape of domestic plenitude discussed in the next chapter. While this family, and especially the parents’ marriage, is perhaps idealised, Season Three’s introduction of a daughter, Sam, of whom father

Television dramedies  79 Brian was unaware, works to trouble the idyllic suburban life represented earlier in the series. Ultimately, the Grosses represent a form of Australian suburban family that in many ways is positioned as anachronistic, including via the representation of Jenny’s myriad failed attempts to approximate it. Moreover, Jenny’s retraditionalised perspective is seen to contrast markedly to that of the other women, and she embodies a nostalgically informed world view which itself is problematised throughout the series. Marriage is explicitly critiqued a number of times (through both explicit disavowal by characters and marital discontentment, affairs, or divorce), but it is through Jenny’s over-investment in it that marriage most clearly comes under strain. Jenny Gross and the critique of retraditionalisation Perhaps quite unsubtly, the character who is seen to embody the most traditional view of (gendered) intimacy, and especially marriage, is Jenny Gross, whose ‘retro’ views are written on her body; she is commonly clothed in 1950s pin-up style (tight-fitting bodices with full skirts, bright red hair also styled according to this aesthetic, and her horn-rimmed glasses further invoke it). For Jenny, though her friendships and work as a teacher are important to her, it is romantic love that offers the promise of belonging and acceptance that eluded her in adolescence. Of all characters, in either show, it is Jenny who most exemplifies the anxious postfeminist subject described by McRobbie (2009) in her analysis of Fielding’s Bridget Jones. Unlike the series’ other uncoupled women, Jenny is deeply dissatisfied with her singleness, and expresses a fear that, in terms of a romantic relationship, she’ll be ‘the last one standing’ (2: 19); this is the fear that McRobbie (2009) argues plagues postfeminist young women, and her series of failed relationships, including engagements, are perhaps indicative of the contingency mapped by sociologists like Beck and Giddens. The (postfeminist) fear that that she will end up man-less is made explicit: ‘Who else is going to love me like that?’ (3: 12), Jenny asks. Jenny and Callum, who had earlier broken up after she cheated on him, become (re)engaged (2: 22), simply because she is so affectively invested in the ‘marital economy’ (Geller 2001) and can imagine no other viable mode of being. Juxtaposed with her more cynical – or perhaps just more realistic – girlfriends, especially Sophie and Frances (though the latter eventually chooses to marry), Jenny is the series’ resident defender of romantic mythologies, and consistently invokes the trope of ‘the One’ or the soulmate, and repeatedly consults fortune teller ‘Mystic Marg’ about the fatedness of her romances. As she tells Frances, ‘The One is out there somewhere’ (3: 22). Jenny’s singleness is not pathologised, as is common in postfeminist media texts (Leonard 2010; Taylor 2012; Lahad 2017); instead, it is her investment, and seemingly unrelenting faith, in the heterosexual imaginary that is seen as excessive. As Arthurs (2003, p. 85) remarks of Sex and the City’s

80  Television dramedies Charlotte York, and as we can see in both the Australian chick lit narratives and women’s magazines examined here, ‘The traditional romance narrative is still there but as a residual sensibility, a slightly old-fashioned version of femininity that doesn’t work in practice’. For Jenny, romance and its ultimate public affirmation – the wedding – represents a form of salvation, certainly not a unique trope in postfeminist popular culture, a way in which she can finally experience a sense of acceptance and belonging (which she does not feel despite her upbringing in a supportive nuclear family). She believes in the ‘utopian promise of love, joy, happiness, well-being, belonging, and community’ (Ingraham 1999, p. 132) that is integral to the heterosexual imaginary. The series underscores the limitations of so heavily investing in bridal fantasies, and offers a number of moments where there is a disconnect between this mythology and how intimacies are practically staged and maintained. Jenny’s deep affective investment in this fantasy is so intense that she almost goes through with her wedding to Cal, despite feeling that something is amiss (especially after he gambles their wedding funds). As she later confesses, she wanted the bridal identity so much that she almost ‘let the wedding bells drown out the alarms’ (3: 13).23 While materially unnecessary for her, she continues to invest in marriage as a symbolic anchor (McRobbie 2009). Such ‘neo-traditionalism’ has been seen as integral to postfeminist femininity, especially on the small screen (Hamad 2018, p. 4), but in Winners and Losers it is not uncritically celebrated. That is, while postfeminism is said to enable women to embrace traditional aspects of heterosexuality, such as romance and white weddings (McRobbie 2009; Negra 2009), the series renders Jenny’s view anachronistic and naïve, with the overt ambivalence of Sophie and Frances towards marriage, and marital discontentment experienced by other characters, also functioning to call into question this nostalgic world view.24 In the final series, after her wedding to Gabe, Jenny struggles as marriage does not provide the succour she had long imagined, and she wrestles especially with her husband’s career success which far outstrips her own.25 Instead, perhaps in a feminisation of the mateship so central to Australian national mythologies, throughout the series it is the women’s friendships that offer the affective scaffolding vital to negotiating the tensions of postfeminist subjecthood.

Conclusion While Winners and Losers appears, in some respects, to trouble the hierarchy of intimacy that privileges sexual and familial ties over other forms of connection, Offspring relocates family to the heart of sociality even if the way in which family is ‘done’, as well as what actually constitutes family, may have altered. The labour involved in maintaining a stable unit remains, however, deeply gendered, but we have argued that the series

Television dramedies  81 c­ ritiques such positioning. The semioscape of postfeminist kinship we see in these programmes aligns with the following comment about intimacy in the twenty-first century: ‘it makes little sense to claim that people nowadays have abandoned traditional “families of fate” for “families of choice” based on friends, since the truth, perhaps unsurprisingly, is more complex’ (Spencer & Pahl 2006, p. 154). As we have argued, both series reveal what Chambers has termed ‘hybridised familialism’ (2012), offering affective bonds and networks of sociability that are still very much reliant upon discourses of family (albeit widely conceived) to give them meaning. As their narrative arcs, various plots, and characters suggest, despite the DIY ethos co-constitutive of postfeminism and neoliberalism, contemporary Australian women can’t do it themselves, and without state support (especially in terms of child-rearing), ‘family’ in the widest sense of the term has become more not less crucial to women’s being in the world. As with Australian chick lit, women’s magazines, and self-help manuals, these series, though perhaps gently and often with humour, point to some of the unfinished business of second wave feminism, including the gendering of care, rather than revelling in its ‘pastness’ (Tasker & Negra 2007). They also underscore how naturalised the Australian women’s movement’s critique of marriage and nuclear families, and – in the discourse of egalitarianism – women’s right to a ‘fair go’, in the workplace and in the home, has become (although our final chapter, as well as the class privilege of the characters in our dramedies, complicate this somewhat). Our analysis has shown, like Jorie Lagerwey et al. (2016) in their recent study of American and British television series such as Homeland and The Fall, that ‘some established protocols of postfeminist representation are subsiding’. As they continue, rather than reinscribing familiar retreatist tropes, New female-centered TV may be just as obsessed with ‘work-life balance’ as earlier series, but it tends to inflect this dynamic in new and noteworthy ways. Female characters’ home lives in the newer series are constantly being drawn into their work lives and vice versa. This dynamic can be seen to mark Offspring in particular, though the hospital in Winners and Losers (where Sophie, Sam, Carla and Doug work) as well as Frances’s law firm are also indicative of the collapse of public/ private boundaries and the material refiguration of the very ‘architectures of intimacy’ (Filmer 2018). We have also argued that while coupledom is certainly narratively important and drives a number of plots, in the semioscape of postfeminist kinship, relationships between women (i.e. sisterhood, whether literal or symbolic) are (re)valued and prioritised over romantic intimacies, suggesting interpretive frameworks for women’s rich affective lives that trouble the valorisation of couple culture. As in Australian chick lit novels, this

82  Television dramedies represents a significant contrast to American quintessentially postfeminist dramedies, such as Ally McBeal, in which all forms of relationality come to be subsumed by the romance narrative and its attendant mononormativity. While ‘patriarchal pessimists’ lament the supposed loss of a lack of stability and diversified forms of community, we agree with much feminist work which suggests that a focus on forms of intimacy beyond ‘conjugal couples and families’, and especially on friendships, will help to further destabilise the heterosexual imaginary (Roseneil 2006, p. 338). That said, although LGBT characters do feature in each series, and as in our other genres, it is heterosexuality that continues to be normalised. As we have argued, Offspring and Winners and Losers, through depicting many different forms of intimacy, as well as critiquing re-traditionalised perspectives, reflect upon a political and representational environment clearly informed by feminism. Therefore, rather than performing feminism’s disavowal, as is commonly argued of twenty-first-century televisual texts, especially those dubbed ‘postfeminist’, both these series persistently ‘bring up [questions] about how to function in a world that has only partially achieved feminist goals’ (Hunting 2012, p. 195). In this sense, they productively intervene in ongoing debates around gender, feminism, and intimacy in twenty-first-century Australia. In the next chapter, focusing on Australian women’s magazines, we also find that, although largely addressed to white, heterosexual, middle-class women, a form of popular feminism is operative, and works to shape the ‘dreamscapes’ of these texts in important ways.

Notes   1 More recently, feminist television scholars have expended much energy on how postfeminism has been updated for millennial subjects, especially via Lena Dunham’s Girls, populated by heroines simultaneously characterised by a sense of entitlement and precarity (Nash & Whelehan 2017).   2 As Sue Turnbull argues, apart from policy- and industry-focused studies, ‘the number of academic books published on Australian television in general, and specific shows or genres in particular, is minimal’ (2010, p. 116). Remarkably, there have been no monographs on Australian televisual femininities (or indeed masculinities), and certainly none on the relationship between feminism, or even women, and television.  3 For an analysis of how Keddie as celebrity was persistently conflated with Nina, and how this impacted magazine coverage of its star, see Middlemost (forthcoming).   4 As the Channel Ten website notes in a section devoted to the series’ interiors: Geraldine’s house is the heart of the show; it’s the family home, where the Proudmans grew up. The Offspring team has used this location for seven seasons; the richly layered and textured home is the perfect backdrop for the Proudman family. (‘Offspring’s Interiors: Geraldine’s House’, 13 July 2017, viewed 30 April 2019, https://tenplay.com.au/channel-ten/offspring/ offspring-interiors/offspring-interiors-geraldines-house):

Television dramedies  83   5 Seasons and episodes in these two series are represented in this form: Season no.: Episode no. (1: 01).   6 Billie is Nina’s elder, less professionally successful, sister; she struggles in her career and in her relationships. As she notes: ‘Growing up I had this younger sister who was exceptional, at everything, anything I did, Nina could do better’ (Billie to Jimmy, 3: 02). She herself says to Nina, ‘being around you always makes me feel like a failure’ (4: 12). Nevertheless, they remain deeply involved in each other’s lives.  7 Nina learns she is the product of an extra-marital affair; Darcy fathers a child to her workmate, Cherie; Zara, one of the other nurses she works with, becomes unexpectedly pregnant (twice) to Nina’s brother, Jimmy; a halfbrother, Will, emerges in Season Six; Billie becomes a kind of surrogate mother for Brodie, who herself later has a child, for which Billie helps care; Martin Clegg is the sperm donor for Kim and her partner Renee, a role which Will comes to take on in Season Seven, for she and Jess; and several children are born, all delivered by Nina, throughout the seven seasons (Ray, Cherie and Darcy’s; Stella, Kim and Clegg’s child; Alfie and Paddy, Zara and Jimmy’s).  8 Extratextually, this aspect of the dramedy was also the subject of meta-­ commentary, as Eddie Perfect (who plays Mick, Billie’s husband), noted in an article he wrote for the Guardian (2014): ‘Offspring really pushed the idea that we create our own families, that we’re accountable in shaping our own communities.’  9 Although the Proudmans are certainly not idealised, other families that are represented are much more troublesome and found comparatively wanting (Mick’s mum is spiteful and non-supportive; Cherie’s father is a homophobic religious zealot; Patrick’s father is detached, dismissive, and patronising; Harry’s father is domineering, moody, and bullying). The representation of all of these inadequate families serves to underscore the desirability of the Proudman family connection, dysfunctional though it may often seem. 10 The interwoven nature of work and intimacy (especially familial forms) is also underscored through Billie’s job; for the first few seasons, she is a real estate agent at her father’s agency. 11 For example, Season Three maps many awkward post-break-up moments at the hospital between Nina and Patrick (3: 07), prompting Patrick to move to the Ainsworth. 12 As ‘a technology of propinquity’, the mobile phone – enacting ‘new erosions between public and private, work and leisure’ – ensures that intimacy ‘is no longer a “private” activity but a pivotal component of public sphere performativity’ (Hjorth & Lim 2012, p. 477). 13 There are other points in the series where the gendering of emotions as feminine is invoked. As Nina tells their couples’ counsellor, reinscribing a traditional gendered dynamic: ‘I have to talk, he has to shutdown’ (4. 10), and until his death Patrick is coded as moody and brooding, like a Byronic hero. 14 Significantly, it is the men, not the women, who broach the subject of marriage and the women who do not feel the need to have state validation of their romantic relationships. For example, Zara rejects Jimmy’s proposal, though they eventually do get married – in the hospital – as Zara gives birth to their second son, Paddy (5: 05). That said, they later separate after unsuccessfully attempting to negotiate a polyamorous relationship. 15 However, Billie does adopt maternal roles, including helping runaway teen single mother Brodie with her son and functioning as a substitute mother for Brodie herself, again detaching maternal care from the biological.

84  Television dramedies 16 Similarly, in Winners and Losers, Season Four, the resolutely child-free Frances is unexpectedly pregnant but decides to keep the baby. Once George is born, Frances finds herself bored at home and she returns very shortly after the birth, a choice that it is entirely normalised (and which, indicative of her class privilege, is also dependent upon her ability to hire a full-time nanny). As she remarks when she returns to work, ‘Mama’s home … it’s so good to be more than just a feeder … I may never leave this place [her office] again’ (4: 16) and after her nanny resigns, ‘If I don’t find someone, I’ll have to stay at home, and I can’t do that’ (4: 17). Like Nina, Frances, of course, is the most permissible kind of single mother imaginable. 17 It should also be noted, though, that this scenario would have been un-­ representable if not for the presence of her uber supportive partner, Harry (not insignificantly a professional ‘crisis manager’), who clearly embodies a type of recoded Australian masculinity (also evidenced by Jimmy): ‘You know, just because you’re doing one doesn’t mean you can’t do the other … We’d be doing it together’ (7: 06). 18 Klocker’s 2014 study of ‘inter-ethnic intimacy’ on Australian television offered ‘strong evidence that Australian media representations do not yet reflect the changing ethnic composition of Australian households and families’ (p. 48). Her concluding comments are relevant to the series we analyse: Australian television screens are, for all intents and purposes, still plagued by whiteness – but not because of a lack of ethnically diverse bodies onscreen. Rather, their whiteness rests upon the ongoing centring of white characters and storylines, and the discounting of other possibilities – even amongst visible inter-ethnic pairs. (2014, p. 49) 19 Winners and Losers engages with a range of social, political, and health issues such as mental illness, miscarriage, domestic violence, stalking, alcoholism and drug addiction, infidelity and divorce, bullying, euthanasia and suicide, abortion, trolling, homophobic violence, gambling addiction, revenge porn, and grief (though, despite one of the core characters being Asian-Australian, there is no engagement with racism). Violence against women is a recurrent thematic preoccupation, perhaps indicative of the raised awareness of it through ­Australia’s White Ribbon initiative (JB and Shannon are both stalkers, of Sophie and Frances respectively; Sam has broken off her engagement to Brett after he hit her; Sophie is stabbed while in Kenya; and Tiffany is also a victim of domestic violence). 20 Indicative of her explicit critique of marriage and its privileging throughout, Frances notes of those attending the reunion: ‘It doesn’t matter how many letters I have after my name, it’s the Mrs in front of it that counts’ (1: 01). 21 Despite their lottery win, there seems to be no question of them exiting the labour market – except for Jenny who leaves her call centre position to contemplate wants she wants to do with her life. Employment is figured as an integral part of women’s identities, arguably marking its indebtedness to second wave feminism. Frances sells half the management consultancy to partner Zac, after feeling disillusioned with the politics and ethics of advising companies to ‘downsize’. She discovers her life’s purpose after representing Jonathan (Frances’s assistant) and Will (Jenny’s first boyfriend who eventually comes out) after an incident of homophobic violence, and becomes a criminal lawyer. Of practising law, ‘fighting for people, helping make a difference, nothing like it’ (Frances, 5: 06), taking on many pro-bono cases that ‘help the underdog’ (5: 07). Sophie returns to her medical training, while Jenny returns to university to retrain as a primary school teacher as a direct response to the

Television dramedies  85 bullying she received (and indeed she returns to Renwood High for her teacher training and deals with a case of bullying reminiscent of her own, 2: 13). Perhaps with the exception of small business owner/beautician Bec, also the only one who did not pursue higher education, each sees their (middle-class) career – as doctor, lawyer, teacher – as integral to a meaningful life. 22 See Rossiter (2013) for an analysis of the cultural specificities and the affective differences of the ‘bogan’ from these other forms. 23 She even has a wedding book, kept since childhood, in which she has placed images and texts relating to her fantasy wedding day. 24 It is also significant that it is Jenny, who – after the failure of one of her engagements – becomes a victim of revenge porn, prompting the series’ engagement with debates around sexualisation: ‘I thought I was being sexy and empowered. Turns out I’m just another slut on the internet’ (3: 20). As punishment for this transgression, she loses her teaching job after the pictures come to circulate amongst students, suggesting that neither the 1950s housewife nor the postfeminist sexualised subject work for Jenny. 25 Nevertheless, after a brief separation, in the final episode we see a future vision (in the form of a photograph) of Jenny and Gabe, blissful in San Francisco with twin daughters. Frances appears with her husband and daughter, in judges’ robes in front of a court, and Sophie appears by herself at her medical clinic in Kenya.

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3 Women’s magazines Dreamscapes of postfeminist abundance

For some of the major feminist theorists of postfeminism, such as Angela McRobbie (1999, 2009), Imelda Whelehan (2000), Rosalind Gill (2009), and Diane Negra (2009), women’s magazines have a similar status to chick lit, being exemplars of postfeminist culture, purveyors of the typical elements such as luxury consumerism, sexualisation as empowerment, and an ambivalence towards feminism. Anna Gough-Yates explains that the new glossies of the 1980s and 1990s such as Marie-Claire and Elle address the actual postfeminist woman who, as we saw in the case of chick lit, is the contemporary version of the early twentieth-century’s New Woman: ‘mainly white, young and middle-class – [for whom] opportunities did arise for an improved quality of life … Pitching themselves to a “New Woman” who could please herself, be self-sufficient and autonomous’, she contends, ‘the glossies were constituent in the fabrication of a “post-feminist” emancipation’ (Gough-Yates 2003, p. 38). Despite a continuing decline in readership for Australian women’s magazines (Bonner 2014b, p. 499), and the recent closures of iconic titles Dolly (2014 – now only an online version), Cleo (March 2016), and Cosmopolitan (December 2018), the critical importance of the form to making postfeminist culture necessitates that we examine them.1 In addition, magazines have an ability to address diverse age groups of women, and to articulate specifically ­Australian femininities. Their replacement – websites and social media (at least for younger women) – is the subject of the following chapter. Regardless of the form’s importance to postfeminist culture, the relationship between Australian women’s magazines and postfeminism has received little critical attention.2 This chapter addresses this lack and argues that the prevalent semioscape of Australian women’s magazines – specifically, women’s generalist lifestyle magazines – is one of material and emotional abundance, taking specific shape as dreamscapes. And although Australian women’s magazines contain some of the common narratives and tropes that trouble influential theorists of postfeminism, such as celebrification, sexualisation, and an obsession with physical beauty, we contend that the form is not fatally compromised. While we would not argue that these are vanguard feminist texts, the Australian magazines’ use

Women’s magazines  91 of typical postfeminist tropes does not coalesce into a reactionary politics; instead, they voice a popular feminism that is testimony to second wave feminism’s success. The publications’ sense of plenty parallels a generosity regarding contemporary women’s lives: work is taken for granted, not having children is uncontroversial, the domestic is not a space of conservative retreatism, and a strong presence of a feminist voice and issues in these publications is cause for optimism. Moreover, their fantasy scenarios of pleasurable abundance should be taken seriously as signs of historical progress for women, as well as a restaging of, and offering potential solutions to, pressures and contradictions facing contemporary, albeit primarily white, Australian women. Before detailing our three specific dreamscapes, we briefly discuss some of the key critiques of postfeminist women’s magazines, outline our methodology, and elaborate on the key element of the semioscape – the dreamscape. We then discuss the dreamscape of young women’s endless, but circumscribed hedonism characterising Cosmopolitan and Cleo, the ethical luxury cosmopolitanism of Marie Claire’s dreamscape, and the domestic plenitude constructed by The Australian Women’s Weekly (hereafter referred to as The Weekly). As suggested in our brief opening summary, accounts of postfeminism and women’s magazines are generally either critical or see the form as a mediation of broader structural shifts in the economy, politics, culture, or the social (Winship 1991). The recurrent theme is that the seemingly emancipated pleasures and freedoms on offer are actually quite limited, being: highly commercial – woman as willing and compulsory consumer; heterosexual – woman as free to fuck … men; racially exclusive – for white women only; or individualistic – it’s all about you. Women’s magazines therefore negotiate and transform feminist ideas and sensibilities to express or address underlying pressures – whether those of women’s changing social roles, or of the magazine industry itself. For instance, Gill argues that the sex advice given by the UK magazine Glamour ‘is an attempt to make an articulation … or a suture … between feminist and anti-feminist ideas, in a manner that is distinctly postfeminist’ (2009, p. 362). She refers here to feminist-sounding ideas such as ‘choice’ and ‘empowerment’ being used to privilege men’s sexual needs over women’s, leading her to conclude that ‘It is as if what were formerly presented as men’s desires have been internalised and must now be understood as authentically women’s own’ (Gill 2009, p. 363). We, too, observe this technique, but show there is more than just this colonisation of women’s desires occurring. The increasingly explicit sexuality found in women’s magazines is a major factor in critical accounts, being seen as indicative of postfeminism’s reliance on codes and practices of hyper-heterosexuality (Whelehan 2000), or in discussions of ‘new sexualities’ which refers to the contemporary representation of ‘girls as crudely lustful young women’ (McRobbie 1999, p. 50). In marked contrast to her pioneering work on young women’s

92  Women’s magazines magazines (1991), McRobbie is critical of attempts to see the highly sexualised and commercialised elements of postfeminist women’s and girls’ magazines as feminist (2009, p. 5). ‘There can be no comfortable reconciliation’, she concludes, ‘between feminism as a political discourse and the cultures of commercial femininity which define the terrain of the magazine form’ (1999, p. 60). Thus, after nearly five decades of feminist analysis and two decades of postfeminist culture, women’s magazines continue to be, for many feminist critics, highly problematic. We contend, however, that there is more of a ‘comfortable reconciliation’ between feminism and magazine femininities in an Australian context than the above comments suggest. Although the women’s magazine market is increasingly fragmented into niche publications (Bonner 2014a, p. 205), we perform a textual analysis of the category of women’s generalist, lifestyle magazines published in Australia to examine a broad set of narratives and images of Australian women from various age groups. As Frances Bonner (2014a, p. 202) observes, ‘at each stage in the progress from a child to a mature woman an appropriate title is available to give advice, principally on matters of consumption’.3 Using this category enables comparisons to be made across a number of titles and with the dominant accounts of postfeminism that discuss this sub-genre. Our focus also redresses a lack of analysis of older women in postfeminist culture, even as their presence increases (Jermyn 2016). Although many contemporary Australian titles are franchises of global editions (Vogue Australia, Harper’s Bazaar, amongst others), they do contain significant local inflections. In addition, Australia has its own homegrown, popular, and long-running women’s magazines: most notably The Weekly and, until recently, Cleo, publications that can be seen to contain a specifically Australian voice or character (Sheridan et al. 2002, p. 4; see also Le Masurier 2007).4 To cover a range of implied mainstream readerships across the putative life cycle of Australian women, and to enable a historical survey, we have chosen four Australian monthly titles published from January 1996 to December 2016. We selected Cleo and Cosmopolitan because they are magazines targeted at the typical postfeminist subjects – ‘conventional’ young women (from 18 to early 30s) – as well as to determine whether Cleo’s Australian origins produce any differences.5 We chose our next magazine, Marie Claire, because it is addressed to women aged 25 to 39, takes an explicitly feminist stance, and is a ‘glocalised’ rendering of a popular international brand. Finally, we included The Weekly for its more domestically oriented and older readership (25 to 54 years claims the industry body, Magazine Networks, however, the age brackets cited for all our titles are far more elastic). The Weekly also features because of its iconic status in the field of Australian women’s magazines and because, unlike its obvious competitors, New Idea and Woman’s Day, it rejects becoming a celebrity gossip magazine (Bonner 2014b, p. 500).6 We examined a random sample of six issues of each title per year to track changes

Women’s magazines  93 within each title and the field more broadly. Because of their reliance on seasonal fashion collections and the rituals of summer holidays, women’s magazines are similarly organised along seasonal lines and routinised, hence our choice of a randomised sample of months to gain a broader sense of what is being covered by the magazines outside of these periods. Our analysis accepts the commercial element of magazines as a determinant frame that all messages, tropes, and registers must be read within; that is, the commercial element is the limit of the magazine’s world. Its role is to sell commodities by offering pleasure; anything that exceeds this is a bonus, a condition that may be neglected in some accounts of women’s magazines and which contributes to an enduring critical pessimism. Despite this resolutely commercial purpose, and as our analysis shows, we see the genre as holding potential for a popular feminism – a quality identified by Megan Le Masurier (2007, 2009); indeed, that feminist discourse can find space in such a semioscape is cause for hope. We note that magazines contain a range of modes of readerly address and, like any text, contain the potential for multiple readings. For Joke Hermes, ‘The attraction of the genre … lies in its addressing of any of a wide range of “selves” ’ (1995, p. 65), with individual readers bringing multiple interpretive repertoires to their reading practice (1995, p. 146). In addition, Myra Macdonald (and our own work) observes a contradictory set of messages on offer in women’s magazines (1995), thus negating the possibility of one ideal reading. Most importantly, we want to be guided by Hermes’s contention that women’s magazines and their readers deserve respect from feminist scholars: ‘everyday media use is a highly complex phenomenon, made up of routines and constraints, of wishes and fantasies’ (1995, p. 152). The same goes for the production and the producers of these magazines, we would add.

Semioscape as dreamscape We argue that the textual form of women’s magazines, what we term a ‘dreamscape’, is central to its semioscape of abundance. Indeed, a consideration of the specific form of magazine textuality seems missing or downplayed in scholarly accounts of women’s magazines, and hence is another factor that produces critical pessimism. We use dreamscape in both a Freudian and more informal sense. Women’s magazines are primarily spaces of feminine pleasure, as suggested by readers’ comments that magazine reading is a reward or guilty pleasure (Ytre-Arne 2011, p. 219). These pleasures are manifested in a discrete textual tableaux constructed by its three elements of text, visuals, and advertising, where fantasies (and accordingly anxieties) are freely played out, and where the anxieties of the external or real world are disguised or veiled. As Janice Winship (1991, p. 148) notes, drawing on Dick Hebdige’s work, ‘As a mix of the prosaic and the utopian and as small treats women buy themselves, are they not a

94  Women’s magazines screen on to which so much inchoate yearning and desire are projected?’ In this sense, magazines are the assumed dreams of women readers and, as Sigmund Freud noted of dreams (1999, p. 97), are a space of wish fulfilment. We say assumed because, regardless of the increasing sophistication and impact of audience lifestyle research techniques used by women’s magazines from the 1980s onwards, the fact that certain titles fail to attract readership and close down (Grazie, Cleo, HQ, amongst others) suggests that the psychographics now used are not failsafe.7 Our reading of magazines as dreamscapes extends and complicates Roland Barthes’ (1985) reading of the fashion system constructed in magazines, in which objects are translated into the language of magazines. Our titles are textual wish fulfilment, articulating dreams via the language of the glossies. As dreams, these are open to interpretation. As a dreamscape the magazine is also an assemblage: a particular and characteristic way of arranging contents and reading practices. The dreamscape adequately captures the peculiar logic or grammar of women’s magazines, and goes some way to explaining their contradictory, indeed, schizoid nature that cannot be explained only by the attempt to address multiple readerships (Moeran 2006, pp. 727–728): how an intelligent article on domestic violence, for instance, is placed on the opposite page to an advertisement for perfume in which the woman’s face appears badly bruised (‘Women of the World Fight Back!’ and an advertisement for Gucci eau de parfum, in Marie Claire December 2012, pp. 66–67). The magazine as dreamscape uses the same processes Freud identified in the dream-work: condensation, displacement, considerations of representability – the transformation of thoughts into images, and secondary revision (Laplanche & Pontalis 1973, p. 125). The dreamscape enables the magazine to maintain coherence in the face of juxtaposition, excess, or dissonance – indeed, it uses these elements to express and/or enable the assumed latent wish(es) of readers (and producers and advertisers). A particular reading practice is elicited and privileged by this dreamscape form: women’s magazines attempt to construct a reader who suspends disbelief so that the sometimes excessive or incongruous images and articles can be processed – its codes of largely visual excess announce to the reader a particular textual space. Similarly, Brian Moeran (2017, p. 3) argues that fashion magazines attempt to enchant the reader into desiring the commodities on display. Likewise, the dreamscape solicits a reader who can easily move in and out of this space – as enacted in the practice of flicking through magazines or reading one article while waiting in the doctor’s surgery (what Winship [1991, p. 142] refers to as the ‘dip in and dip out’ style of magazine consumption). And, like our dreams when we sleep, how much of a magazine is ever remembered, at least consciously? Rather, as Brita Ytre-Arne notes, reading the magazine can be a brief break from everyday responsibilities (2011, p. 219) – a type of daydream. Moreover, Freud’s distinction between the manifest and latent content of dreams also

Women’s magazines  95 suggests the possibility of a critical interpretive practice – one that we adopt. We argue that the material and emotional abundance that characterises every title’s dreamscape is a class and racial fantasy. As we show, each dreamscape is a condensation and displacement of the pressures primarily confronting contemporary white Australian women, for, as we discuss below, the world of these magazines is unrelentingly, unself-consciously, and hence invisibly, white (Moreton-Robinson 2000). The multitude of things on offer and the aspirations they represent articulate changes in women’s lives – the ability to work and be educated, to choose not to marry and not to be a mother – but also the uneven benefits of second wave feminism and of the deregulated Australian economy (see Yeatman 1990; Lake 1999; Pusey 2003), providing a fantasy of women’s equal access to national wealth. As we saw in Australian chick lit, this abundance of things and beauty is the appealing window dressing for that same system, and simultaneously figures the terms for women’s participation in the public and private spheres. The whiteness of the dreamscape promises a consumption-based social integration in an increasingly multicultural Australia for non-Anglo-European women, while the almost complete absence of Indigenous women is an unconscious articulation of their continuing material and symbolic dispossession.8 Thus, and as we saw in chick lit, postfeminist culture materialises the myth of white Australian egalitarianism into an abundance of things for women. We first examine two archetypal postfeminist magazines, Cleo and Cosmopolitan, to see how this abundance is figured for mainstream young women, the paradigmatic postfeminist subjects in many accounts.

Cleo and Cosmopolitan: endless possibilities, endless pleasure Of the four titles analysed here, Cleo and Cosmopolitan display some of the most notable changes across 20 years, suggesting the competitive pressures they face from online platforms and celebrity magazines, as well as the crucial significance, economically and ideologically, of young women to postfeminist culture.9 Being the direct inheritors and beneficiaries of the second wave legacy, young women are often positioned as the ideal subjects of postfeminist culture, as in Sarah Projansky’s analysis of the girl in popular culture (2014), or as the source of the characteristically postfeminist denunciation of feminism, as in McRobbie’s later work (2009, p. 16). We argue that the hedonistic dreamscape characterising Cleo and Cosmopolitan continues the limited range of freedoms and pleasures traditionally addressed to young women in these types of publication – namely, shopping, beauty, and heterosexual desire. The quality of abundance, however, suggests a greater degree of freedom – most notably, economic and sexual – for young women. Moreover, these typical postfeminist texts are at ease

96  Women’s magazines with feminism, indeed proclaim it, and so popular feminism finds space amidst the tableaux of pleasures. As Le Masurier has comprehensively demonstrated (2007, 2009, 2011), Cleo occupies an important place in Australian popular culture and Australian feminism, especially given its role in translating women’s and sexual liberation for a wide audience. It commenced publication in 1972 under the editorship of Ita Buttrose, at the start of the Whitlam government’s brief era of social liberalisation, and at the height of the women’s movement and Australian cultural nationalism.10 Cleo aimed to compete against the US women’s magazine, Cosmopolitan, a title targeting young liberated women, to attempt to be the voice of the new young Australian woman, a woman imagined as sexually as well as politically liberated – or at least potentially so (Le Masurier 2007, p. 191). As part of bringing such a woman into being, Cleo was an important source of enlightened information about sexuality and other feminist issues such as rape, birth control, and workplace discrimination. Le Masurier (2011, p. 216) observes that from its beginnings Cleo was a major example of Australian popular feminism, and indeed, its final editorial in March 2016 proclaimed that ‘Over her forty-four years of publication, Cleo continued to champion the huge ideals of feminism and equality right up to this, her very last issue’ (p. 9). Cosmopolitan, while originating earlier (1965) and in the United States (before becoming a global franchise), shares with Cleo a similar historical moment of emergence and intention. With Helen Gurley Brown (author of the 1962 feminist blockbuster Sex and the Single Girl) at its helm, herself situated as the ultimate, empowered ‘cosmo girl’, Cosmopolitan wanted to be the voice of the newly liberated young woman and, in doing so, exemplify a new, and hence non-domestic, type of women’s magazine to that exemplified by The Weekly. Cosmopolitan represented a, then novel, lifestyle for young women, one that was sophisticated, independent, and with (hetero)sexuality at its core, thereby making it another important form of popular feminism (Scanlon 2009; Hunt 2012; Taylor 2016). At the start of our survey period (1996) there do seem to be minor differences between the two titles. Cosmopolitan appears to be less brash in tone than Cleo, more sophisticated in the femininities on offer as evidenced by the tailored fashions in stories and advertising, and the lengthier feature articles, thus perhaps addressing a slightly older readership, and not as closely attuned to local femininities as its Australian competitor. In contrast, Cleo, via its Australian ‘cheekiness’, offers a very mild form of female larrikinism (see Bellanta 2012). By the late 1990s, however, Cleo and Cosmopolitan are nearly indistinguishable – whether in terms of content, layout, advertising, or editorial approach – suggesting a consolidation of the ideal of young Western womanhood and the importance of her associated readerships to advertisers. Thus, in the remainder of this section we will refer to them as Cosmo-Cleo, our now conjoined twin

Women’s magazines  97 sisters for conventional young Australian women: the hybridised name reflecting the increasingly global lifestyle represented in their pages, though with a local inflection in the vernacular, photographic settings, and social rituals of femininity they emphasise. The dreamscape offered by Cosmo-Cleo is consistent across the two decades, being one of abundant pleasures and endless possibilities for young women – attesting to sociocultural change. Young women do have more options, but are also subject to a certain conservatism regarding the parameters of postfeminist femininities. When one ‘reads’ Cosmo-Cleo, one enters a world defined by glamorous socialising, boyfriends, celebrities, shopping, clothes, make-up, and, not surprisingly, obsessive attention to personal grooming. Issue after issue, whether in the regular columns, feature articles or the staging of fashion shoots, not only repetitively returns to these thematics but intermingles them. The table of contents for Cleo November 2004 exemplifies and helps clarify these magazines’ contents: five of the 13 cover stories provide sex or relationship advice; a minimum of three articles address personal grooming; at least eight articles are fashion advice. Moreover, the thematic parameters of Cosmo-Cleo frequently merge, exemplified in this 2004 issue: fashion meshes with boyfriend advice in ‘Swimwear so hot you’ll melt his drumstick’ (p. 10); fashion merges with celebrity: ‘Like this? You’ll love these: The Young Starlet [Look]’ (p. 10); and shopping blends with personal grooming: ‘Babe on a budget’ (p. 10). Such a technique creates an integrated world, where the elements of the Cosmo-Cleo lifestyle are interchangeable, overlap, and hence are difficult to differentiate. Thus, the core elements of consumption, sex, and eventually celebrity bleed into every element of the magazine and the CosmoCleo life, as our excerpt from Cleo’s November 2004 Table of Contents illustrates (see Table 3.1 over page). To really understand the dreamscape, however, we also require a sense of the visual contents. Unfortunately, we were unable to obtain permission to reproduce the page layouts in any of our titles, so verbal description will have to suffice. In each title we discuss (with the sole exception of The Weekly) the elements of the dream are transformed into images rather than into spoken or written speech (Freud 1999, pp. 254, 258). Such a technique is a major contributor to women’s magazines’, and particularly Cosmo-Cleo’s, quality of unreadability, which in turn also contributes to the merging of thematics. The layout of Cosmo-Cleo is therefore crucial to the dreamscape constructed. First, the image dominates and overwhelms the verbal. While there is plenty of text per page, the text is refigured into an image so that reading the words is made more difficult. This occurs by the boxing of text, the use of shading, mixed typefaces, and the fragmented layout of sections of text. Second, each page frequently features multiple images arranged as a ­pastiche or collage. Furthermore, many of the images feature numerous

98  Women’s magazines Table 3.1  From table of contents, Cleo November 2004 Section: every month Cleo Boredom Breakers Cleo Cool right now Shopping guide; competitions info; privacy notice C-mail Cleo ‘Scope Section: Celeb Reporter It Girl of the month: Ashlee Simpson Latest celeb obsession: floral dresses We’re addicted to: The Simple Life Home looks we love: Sorbet Home Lust-haves: Egyptian Chic or shriek! The wedge Section: features Flirt buddy or f%#* buddy? Can a rebound relationship ever work? ‘I escaped Sudan and became a model’ When your mum has a mental illness The dark side of Hollywood The Insider’s guide Hypnotise him sexy When your guy goes to war ‘I lost a breast at age 27’ Diary of a swimsuit shoot

c­ommodities, so the photographs accompanying a story on the latest fashion accessories features 10 or 20 handbags, 30 pairs of shoes, or 8 different types of sunglasses. The titles’ dreamscape is thereby intensely visual but equally one of abundance. One enters a world of visual rivers of beautiful things, and, given the techniques just noted, one is likely to respond on an emotional or sensuous rather than cognitive level. One can flick through, drop in and drop out of, the array of goods. A visual abundance of beautiful things is reinforced by a visual abundance of beautiful young, white bodies as part of the staging or backdrops to feature articles and advertisements. While featuring primarily female bodies, pages also include young men’s bodies, with both titles being marked by their overt objectification of men, whether in Cleo’s pioneering male centrefold, Cosmopolitan’s Bachelor of the Year competition, photo spreads of semi-naked sportsmen, or in advertisements for women’s clothing. This prevalence of male flesh signals one aspect of the type of feminism on offer: one that centres on sexual freedom, an inversion of the gaze based on a simple understanding of equality (‘men do it to us, so we’ll do it to men’). It also signals the hyperbolic heteronormativity that is masked as young women’s sexual desires, a phenomenon noted by both

Women’s magazines  99 McRobbie (1999) and Gill (2009). Just in case the young woman missed the point of the sex advice columns, the visuals make clear that the male body is the correct object of desire. We guess this is necessary given the plethora of gorgeous commodities available to a reader as yet unencumbered by the responsibilities of heterosexual marriage and motherhood. While the Cosmo-Cleo dreamscape offers an abundance of beautiful things and bodies, a corresponding abundance of definitions of pleasure and beauty is absent. In their version of Australian egalitarianism, which elides racial and class inequalities, Cosmo-Cleo are guides to how anyone can become the Cosmo-Cleo girl – these are training manuals in magazine form. As essentially pedagogical texts, such magazines seek to instruct young women how to ‘do’ femininity correctly (Butler 1990). Judith Williamson argues that, ‘Whatever the drive that keeps thousands of women – including myself – buying women’s magazines like Cosmopolitan every month, it has more to do with instruction than entertainment’ (cited in Gill 2007a, p. 199). As the table of contents illustrates, and as constitutive of this genre, the majority of content concerns technologies and techniques of ideal femininity, whether referring to fashion, health, relationships, friendships, or work (Winship 1987; Macdonald 1995; Gill 2007a). The visuals outline the successful outcome of this quest: abundant beauty, things, and pleasure. And yet it is a curtailed dreamscape, for a constrained and rather traditional version of femininity underpins this plenty: straight, white, middle-class, and conventionally attractive. So although the magazines consistently feature articles regarding lesbianism, the L-word is never spoken, a feature also noted by Gill (2009), Kolehmainen (2010), and Kate Farhall (2018). Instead, lesbianism is displaced into porno terms such as ‘bicurious’ or ‘girl on girl action’, which Farhall (2018, p. 213) describes as ‘lesbian desire becom[ing] co-opted by heterosexuality’.11 Such a circumscribed, idealised femininity is not unique to the Australian context, however; Marisol del-Teso-Craviotto (2006) McRobbie (2009), and Jess Butler (2013) observe a similar circumscription in their studies of postfeminism. The success of locally produced Frankie (see note 5) as an alternative young women’s lifestyle magazine – outselling Cosmopolitan at the time of its demise – suggests that perhaps this model of femininity is increasingly unappealing. Freud’s observation that dreams arise from the contradictions and conflicts in our waking lives is borne out in the circumscribed hedonism of Cosmo-Cleo. First, a schizoid approach to femininity suggests their deeply conflicted nature. For example, Cosmopolitan’s January 1999 edition features Alix Johnson’s article ‘Look like a babe (when you feel like a blob)’ (pp. 128–131), followed by Georgia Cassimatis’s ‘14+, pregnant, post-anorexic: how three women beat their weight obsession’ (p. 132).12 Cleo’s special ‘marriage equality’ issue of August 2015 features an article that is pro-marriage equality (pp. 42–44), then a few pages later there is an article

100  Women’s magazines on ‘same-sex sexual harassment’ (pp. 51–53). In the June 2002 issue of Cosmopolitan there is a lengthy sealed section on lesbian sex tips, ‘Girl + Girl Sex Confessions’ (pp. 99–113), followed by pages of photographs of bare-chested men. Both magazines announce the introduction of policies regarding the photoshopping of images and using a diverse range of models, yet the magazines appear largely unchanged. Moreover, in their consistent featuring of feminist articles regarding sexual harassment at work, paid maternity leave, and domestic violence, as well as less useful articles concerning career advice, we see another side of the endless possibilities of the Cosmo-Cleo girl.13 A soft feminist politics is a consistent presence in this world, and hence a popular feminism is simply part of the magazines’ commonsense. These articles – brief outbreaks of the real – are informative rather than sensationalised or cheekily humorous. The contradictions and tensions identified above are perhaps unsurprising in this set of texts; women’s magazines are, after all, ‘ideological juggling acts’ (Winship 1987), attempting to address women’s relative freedom but within commercial and hence unthreatening terms. Abundant pleasures, however, do not negate or make invisible popular feminism; rather, they coexist. We conclude by noting the one distinctive change characterising both titles as they move into the twenty-first century. The hedonistic dreamscape remains intact, however the ideal subject of Cosmo-Cleo becomes rendered in increasingly excessive terms, taking on the shape of the ‘blokette’. By blokette we mean a specifically Australian version of what McRobbie terms as ‘new sexualities’ in girls’ and women’s magazines: ‘those images and texts which break decisively with the conventions of feminine behaviour’ (1999, p. 50; Dobson 2015). Evidence for this is the increasing interest in porn – whether in terms of articles on sex toys and the porn industry itself, or in the graphic and coarse depiction of sex and body parts (such as ‘King Dong: My Life with a Massive Penis’ [Knoll 2010] and ‘Ball-Sports: The Ultimate Guide to Man-Handling’ [2012]).14 A complementary blokey discourse emerges, as in referring to friends as ‘mates’ and using vulgarisms. For instance, Cosmopolitan’s Table of Contents for January 1999 features article titles that could have stepped straight off the pages of FHM or Zoo lad mags: ‘The Big Bang! How to Be a Show-Off in Bed’ and ‘His Penis Was the Size of a Prawn: And Other Horny Horror Stories’. The Cosmo-Cleo pornographic imagination and blokette discourse bring together the two ‘central post-feminist paradigms of young womanhood’ identified by Amy Shields Dobson – the ultra-sexy and the transgressively masculinised (2012, p. 254). While we agree with McRobbie’s description of new sexualities as being an ironic and decidedly non-romantic form of femininity (1999, p. 53), we also interpret the intensified excess of Cosmo-Cleo in the following terms. First, it suggests the competition faced by young women’s magazines from online content and celebrity gossip magazines; excess is a point of difference

Women’s magazines  101 but also corresponds with the register of the more celebrity-focused texts. Second, it signals and continues the spectacularisation of the liberated young woman – in postfeminism the young woman is brought into hypervisibility by the media, amongst others, for commercial and ideological reasons (Projansky 2014). Like the vloggers in the next chapter, she embodies the assumed success of second wave feminism – economically independent with no enforced domesticity, making her an ideal worker and consumer, and hence she confirms our belief in historical progress. And her spectacularisation works as a form of discipline, specifically, in its heterosexy porno codes. Less optimistically, however, this excessiveness – a young woman’s last gasp of freedom – can be read as a hystericised form of the postfeminist melancholia as per McRobbie’s analysis (2009). McRobbie attributes this affect to the continuing constraints of normative femininity and to the fate of the conventional young woman once she leaves the Cosmo-Cleo dreamscape: marriage, motherhood, the serious career (with its potential conflicts surrounding motherhood, domestic responsibilities, and career advancement). The blokette is both rebellious and conformist, at once in denial and cognisant of her potential fate as a mature woman. Moreover, the blokette suggests that masculine traits and values are taken as the model for emancipation and for a pleasure-based consumption, pointing to the difficulty of finding a non-commercial feminine language of pleasure and liberation. And finally, given these titles’ historical association with mildly transgressive models of femininity, it is unsurprising that they are attracted to contemporary codes of transgression such as coarseness. These transgressions are far easier to articulate in a women’s magazine than a rejection of heterosexuality or hyper-consumption.

Marie Claire: the real cosmopolitan woman Like Cosmopolitan, Marie Claire is now a global magazine brand, originating in France in 1937, before expanding into the publication of international editions in the latter part of the twentieth century: an exemplary case of transnational media flows that characterise our various genres of Australian postfeminist culture. Marie Claire’s Australian edition began in 1995 under Jackie Frank’s editorship.15 In the Australian twentieth anniversary edition (September 2015), Frank recalls that Marie Claire meant to her ‘returning home to edit a magazine that brought the world to Australian women … [W]e have been striving to inspire, entertain, move and provoke women for the past twenty years’ (p. 28, emphasis added). From its inaugural edition, Marie Claire aligned itself with a progressive and feminist politics: its group website asserts a commitment to ‘humanistic values’, and ‘The Group defends the cause of women, militates for their emancipation, supports their struggles, and denounces the crimes committed against them’.16 This vocabulary and explicit political intention are enough to distinguish Marie Claire

102  Women’s magazines from most women’s magazines. By the time it is launched in Australia, its blend of ‘style with substance [its humanist feminism]’ – as the masthead proclaims – makes it the magazine for progressive middle-class Australian women. In the anniversary edition (September 2015), Frank declares that ‘It has been an absolute privilege to be able to steer the voice that has championed women for two decades’ (p. 28). We argue that Marie Claire represents one destination after the phase of hedonistic (young) womanhood constructed by Cleo and Cosmopolitan, being a textualisation of the ‘mature’ postfeminist Australian woman in the space of post-Fordist capitalism, therefore representing a slightly older version of our chick lit heroines. The dreamscape and its ideal femininity are made possible by the legacies of second wave feminism, a connection acknowledged rather than denied by Marie Claire (to which we return). And as befitting a magazine whose origins are modern Imperial France, Marie Claire’s dreamscape centres on feminine, ethical cosmopolitanism – a contemporary capitalist form of exoticism. One enters a space defined by the cosmopolitan pillars of mobility and geographical diversity (­Szerszynski & Urry 2002, p. 467; Kendall et al. 2009, pp. 110–111), and an abundance of luxury and style, in which the now relatively privileged other engages with ethnic otherness in aesthetic and ethical terms. And the reader, as a cosmopolitan woman, is comfortable – at home – in this space (Kendall et al. 2009, pp. 111–112). That the implied addressee is going ‘somewhere else’ is announced in the eight or so pages of full colour glossy advertisements for various ­European luxury commodities that open the magazine – the nature of the commodities are not as important as the proper names: Gucci, Prada, Guerlain, Lancôme, Longchamps. As we saw in chick lit, this is the language, indeed shorthand, of style and taste, and therefore is a specifically feminine form of Bourdieu’s cultural capital (2007, p. 12). This language of high-end taste, largely absent from advertisements in our other magazines, is an interpellator and classifier of the implied reader (Bourdieu 2007, p. 6). If you can recognise these signifiers, then proceed to the Table of Contents. And here one encounters something more than just the Euroexotica of the opening pages. As Table 3.2 indicates, there are stories on equal pay, serial killers, female porn directors, an Indian matrilineal society, the latest Australian fashion designers, refugees, luxury holidays, and Christmas recipes. In this array we see the elements of a cosmopolitan femininity: travel, career, luxury consumption, a global social conscience, an international perspective, and style, with most of these containing elements of European or non-Western exoticism. Another opening marker of distinction for Marie Claire is its method of figuring the dreamscape. In contrast to the overwhelming visuality of Cosmo-Cleo that results in its ‘unreadability’, Marie Claire relies more on written text to construct the dreamscape. Feature articles are a significant part of each issue’s content (around 40 to 50 per cent). In addition, layout

Women’s magazines  103 Table 3.2  Table of contents, Marie Claire, December 2015 Cover stories Party Perfect: Your summer wardrobe sorted for every occasion Investigation: We look at how the spread of the internet has led to a shocking rise in cyber abuse directed at women Celebrity exclusive: Angelina Jolie Pitt opens up on her marriage with Brad Sex report: Thanks to more female directors, the adult film industry is undergoing a feminist revolution Interview: With her fight for equal pay, Jennifer Lawrence is a woman on a mission Your ultimate Xmas gift guide: From budget buys to blow-out opulence The new make-up rules 5 Party Styles: The hottest hair looks for the festive season Features Reportage: From legalizing same-sex marriage to the tragedy of the Syrian war, we look at the events that shaped 2015 Fashion report: How the Australians behind Ralph & Russo went from a single sewing machine to couture behemoth US Report: Is paying a stranger for a hug the new therapy craze or just a bit crazy? World report: How one couple put their fortune on the line to save thousands of refugees from drowning at sea Frankly Speaking with Rachel Zoe: The American stylist to the stars shares her views on fashion, feuding and family Crime report: ‘The day I found out my father was a serial killer’ World Wrap: The heroine teacher of the Sandy Hook massacre relives the horror, and the Indian village where women rule the roost @Play: Music, movies and more … Life stories: She sold half a billion books and bedded Marlon Brando, but Jackie Collins’s life was also marred by adversity Remaining Sections: Fashion, Beauty, Wellness, @Work, Promotions, Lifestyle: Treasure Island: The owners of a tiny patch of paradise off the Tasmanian coast are sharing their luxury getaway; Eat, Drink, and Be Merry: Set a simple scene this festive season and celebrate good food in relaxed Australian style

increases the impact and readability of the verbal: features are grouped together and are set out in an uncluttered style, without being interrupted by graphics. As a result, one can ‘read’ the magazine, if desired, or immerse oneself in the pages of beautiful clothes and other commodities. Such a layout suggests a relative degree of intellectualism – there is substance here, even if we choose just to look at the pictures. Style, and a specifically restrained type at that, is the dominant element in the dreamscape and its overarching world view: as those opening advertisements announce, this is an abundantly beautiful world. Our cosmopolitan femininity is founded on a style for living, where everyday activities of femininity – often seen as drudgery – are transformed into an aesthetic practice and space to announce an understated good taste. So, rather than

104  Women’s magazines the postfeminist trope of the struggling woman, attempting, with difficulty, to ‘have it all’ (Genz 2010, p. 120), we have the postfeminist woman of style, and hence accomplishment. Thus, Marie Claire’s recipe pages, most famously overseen by Donna Hay (the best-selling Australian cookbook author), are upmarket but simple recipes with carefully staged accompanying photographs: the meal as art. Home decorating becomes intellectualised and aestheticised into interior design, with the homes of the famous and tasteful used as our guide, a process Negra terms ‘domestic aggrandizement’ (2009, p. 118). What to wear is equated with designer labels of clothes and accessories; make-up and shampoo are also high-end brands, frequently bearing exotic and/or European names (‘MonoDerma’, ‘Klorane’, ‘Clinique’). And note the dearth of articles on sex or relationship advice: Marie Claire assumes this has been sorted. As a consequence, and consistent with postfeminism as it manifests elsewhere, Marie Claire’s style requires high-end consumption, or at least, this desire – the second element in her dreamscape. This is a world based not so much on the scale of consumption found in Cosmo-Cleo, but on the type of consumption: luxury meaning exoticism. The modifier ‘luxury’ makes this consumption both more desirable and more acceptable. The litany of European and American luxury brands (Tommy Hilfiger, Coach, Bally) that fill Marie Claire’s pages seems to obscure and hence transcend the commodity to which they are attached, and their exclusivity and exoticism makes them more akin to an art work. They take the consumer ‘elsewhere’ – geographically and socially. To purchase these (or to desire to purchase them) is a mark of aesthetic and hence social distinction (Bourdieu 2007, p. 280). Although Cleo and Cosmopolitan made holidays part of the CosmoCleo girl’s world – often at the Australian beachside – Marie Claire has moved on, and, as a consequence, international travel is the realm for leisure: a key marker of her cosmopolitan, and high disposable income, perspective. International and luxury travel is taken for granted (the shopping trip to Dubai, or ski-ing in Vail, for example), and is another form of encountering the exotic, adding to her cultural capital.17 Rather than signifying aspirationalism, it is more accurate to see the Marie Claire dreamscape as textualising the various types of mobility required for feminine cosmopolitanism: physical, cultural, intellectual, and psychic (Skrbis & Woodward 2013, p. 15). This dreamscape is about going and being elsewhere, as physical travel replicates, expresses, and reinforces the social and cultural mobility underpinning post-Fordism. In addition, a desire for exotic landscapes forms an important source of Marie Claire’s various realms of style, consumption, and especially fashion. That one little detail imported from elsewhere found in its various photo spreads – the piece of jewellery that completes the outfit, the type of hemp used in the outdoor chair – is another marker of distinction, functioning as a signifier of authentic cultural knowledge.

Women’s magazines  105 Marie Claire, however, is not all about abundant consumption, and indeed confounds Gough-Yates’s assertion that women’s magazines should never mention the world of work (2003, p. 96). While not a major part of its contents, work does feature regularly and is represented as career; indeed, it publishes a special ‘Women at Work’ issue in February 2013 and organises a ‘Success at Work’ summit in late 2014 (reported in the January 2015 issue). Marie Claire treats the world of work seriously and women as workers seriously: work is a source of discrimination and harassment for women (see Marinos 1999). Regardless, women are represented as leaders in their fields and as deserving to lead (see advice on women and leadership in the January 2015 issue). Given the importance of women and work to the Australian women’s movement, we should not be surprised to see such a commitment expressed in Marie Claire’s pages. Furthermore, there is an implicit sense that work makes feminine cosmopolitanism possible, a causality suggested in the regular articles on designer workwear. Unlike the glamorous fashion or media industry careers idealised by Cosmo-Cleo and that characterise chick lit, Marie Claire includes a broader and more realistic range of women’s occupations in the ‘Exceptional woman’ type story. Thus the special ‘Women at Work’ issue (February 2013) features ten middle-class career women, including Peta Credlin (then Prime Minister Abbott’s Chief of Staff), lawyers, financial planners, food exporters, and a philanthropy fund administrator. Most significantly, and as we observed in the previous chapter, work is seen as simply part of being a woman. Equally significant is that motherhood, families, and intimate relationships are of only very minor interest, and the readers are rarely addressed in such terms. Marie Claire’s cosmopolitan woman is autonomous. One of Marie Claire’s most distinctive and crucial features is its consistent interest in an internationalist version of feminist politics: an articulation of its ethical cosmopolitanism that reinscribes the whiteness of its ideal subject. Every issue contains at least one feature article on the treatment of women (and often children) in developed or developing nations, thus Marie Claire’s feminism blends a global social justice perspective with its founding feminist humanism and cosmopolitan world view. The feature articles in the January 1998 issue indicate the contours of Marie Claire’s cosmopolitan feminism, with articles on Islam’s female army, a rape victim being jailed in Pakistan, women ‘ecowarriors’, and a biography of Marilyn Monroe. December 2007 includes a story on female Kurdish guerrillas and one on Australian foreign aid guidelines that prohibit birth control. The magazine also combines this internationalism with a local perspective; the October 2008 issue contains articles on women being overly critical of each other, a Columbian female political activist, the local ‘Fitted for Work’ campaign, the international designers with an environmental conscience, and a biography of Coco Chanel. There has also been a consistent interest in women’s reproductive freedoms locally and internationally

106  Women’s magazines (Corbett 2001; Haworth 2002; Dabscheck 2005), and domestic violence (Goodwin 2000; Renkert 2001; Bobrow & Hawkins 2002; Robinson & Dabscheck 2005). While genuine and well-intentioned, Marie Claire’s cosmopolitan feminism has attracted criticism, specifically for its representational politics (Vrana 2007–2008). Gill argues, for instance, that the writing, photography and mise-en-scène [sic] of the reportage pieces constitute, in my view, what we might call a National Geographic-style racism – in which the women under discussion are treated as exotic, uncomplicated, close to nature, inherently pure and moral, and so on. (2007a, p. 201) In the numerous examples we analysed, we observed similar representational practices, though we contend that the problematic nature of Marie Claire’s global feminism is also related to the adjacency of this material to the glamorous contents, as well as to the Marie Claire stylised and stylish world view: its contents, whether fashion, lifestyle, or politics are framed in a consistent way. Women’s oppression around the world, therefore, becomes almost a white woman’s traveller’s tale – the substance to the magazine’s style. Marie Claire’s ethical cosmopolitanism thereby problematically relies on an aestheticisation and hence exoticisation of the nonWestern other, and a Eurocentric feminist universalism. This exoticism and aestheticism partly explains how these articles, serious, uncompromising, and often disturbing, manage to be a central part of a dreamscape. They align with Marie Claire’s aesthetic and ethical impulses so that European style and luxury commodities are joined by fragments of the literal dark side of the empire – a reparative gesture by white postcolonials whose efficacy remains an open question. With parallels to chick lit’s parodic critique of the fashion–beauty–media complex, the articles appear to answer back to the lifestyle and commodities represented, to add some moral dimension to the beautiful view afforded to white women, but still in beautiful terms – for there are very few articles on ethical consumption or the exploitation of women garment workers. Another explanation for the integral role of social conscience to the magazine is to return to the function of the dreamscape, namely, wish fulfilment. Marie Claire addresses the politico-ethical drive in white middle-class Australian women, women who grew up with and benefited from feminism, and who therefore have a strong sense of a distinct and collective female identity, the injustices resulting from being female, and some degree of political analysis of gender and inequality. The magazine articulates privilege, but also a typically feminist sense of acknowledging privilege and those who miss out (and who make this privilege possible). It thus articulates a form of glamour and luxury that supposedly is not

Women’s magazines  107 frivolous or incompatible with more politically engaged or intellectual content, or with a feminine form of Australian egalitarianism. Marie Claire’s cosmopolitan woman can seemingly be an ethical citizen of the world: she is constantly reminded by these feature articles of the dispossessed women of advanced capitalism, although an explicit link between her exotic consumption, assumed affluence, and their dispossession is left unremarked. As with Cosmo-Cleo, the restrained surfaces of the dreamscape are, however, troubled by some deep anxieties. First, the ongoing coverage of violence against women and workplace discrimination and harassment potentially disrupts any cosmopolitan triumphalism. Rather, these articles and those stories of women in developing countries serve as reminders of the privileged nature of, and potential reaction to, white women’s emancipation. More importantly, the dreamscape’s valorisation of beauty brings into being its deeper anxiety: ageing, and in this respect, it is consistent with postfeminism as it manifests in other contexts (Negra 2009; Jermyn & Holmes 2015; Whelehan & Gwynne 2015; Jermyn 2016). As Sadie Wearing remarks in her study of a Hollywood film and a British makeover television programme (2007, p. 284), ‘The older female body is expressly figured in both as a problem, which, in generically characteristic ways, these texts explore, investigate, and subject to the processes of renewal.’ The anxiety surrounding the ageing female body found in our magazines, with the exception of Cosmo-Cleo, is manifested in the special issues devoted to anti-ageing (one per year); the frequent beauty, fashion, and wellness articles to address ageing’s effects; and the abundance of antiageing products.18 Biological as well as social pressures make the dreamscape fragile, and the cosmopolitan woman’s status is still reliant on conventional definitions of femininity. Ironically, the valorisation of beauty ensnares her, and more high-end consumption is offered as the solution. Although a franchise, indeed outpost, of a global chain – a ‘glocalised’ version of this well-known brand – Marie Claire is not a rootless cosmopolitan and acknowledges the Australian context in a number of ways. It directly and indirectly references Australia’s history of Indigenous dispossession and contemporary multi-cultural nature. This is acknowledged directly in articles on Australian racial prejudice, and in displaced terms via the exoticism of the magazine’s contents.19 Marie Claire champions Australian fashion designers, artists and writers, and has a strong interest in Australian politics and activism. Furthermore, arguably its concern for social justice, sense of egalitarianism even with its elitist consumption, and collectivist identification with the category of women are derived from Australian social democratic and feminist traditions as well as from a French humanism. As in chick lit’s semioscape of aspiration and indulgence, Marie Claire’s universal beautiful commodity-based dream is seemingly available to all.

108  Women’s magazines

The Australian Women’s Weekly: domestic plenitude So far there has been an assumed teleology in the ordering of our dreamscapes: a narrative moving from youthful unrespectable excess to mature sophisticated restraint, from popular culture to high culture, and from ordinary middle-class to upper-class femininity. The Weekly’s broad and older readership, its identity as a cultural institution, and its ability to destabilise these preceding narratives make it the ideal last title for discussion. From its inception in 1933, The Weekly desired to be an innovative publication in a proto-feminist way.20 Deborah Thomas, one of The Weekly’s influential editors, reminds us that ‘When Frank Packer started The Australian Women’s Weekly he set out to create a magazine that presented everyday issues for women as “news” ’ (Thomas & Clements 2014, p. vi). The inclusion of such content in a women’s magazine was revolutionary for the time. ‘On the front page of the first issue’, for example, ‘it carried a report, under the heading “EQUAL SOCIAL RIGHTS FOR SEXES” ’ on the Women Voters’ Federation conference (O’Brien 1982, p. 21). In addition, Susan Sheridan et al. argue that The Weekly gave itself a role as a national cultural institution … and, more significantly, it gave [white] Australian women a redefinition of Australianness that included them in it, unlike the very masculine Australian legend that was revived in the 1950s. (2002, p. 4) Although The Weekly has attracted much scholarly attention throughout its history, how it engages with a postfeminist context remains unaddressed. Unlike our previous magazines’ relatively minor emphasis on the domestic in favour of the autonomous working female consumer, The Weekly continues its historical focus on a pragmatic domestic femininity, and in its contemporary manifestation thereby offers readers a dreamscape of domestic plenitude – an Australian version of the postfeminist re-embrace of domesticity (Hollows 2006; Genz 2009). That said, we argue The Weekly confounds this narrative as well. This plenitude involves two senses: first, in the overarching role that the domestic plays in the magazine’s textual spaces; and second, in that the domestic space offers so much: wishes can be met, problems ameliorated, and the self can be fulfilled. Domestic plenitude, therefore, promises contentment arising from many women’s reality, where, because of the conservatism of Australian gender roles, the domestic is still primarily a space for women’s unpaid labour and making of the self, but also for working women who do not have time to be domestic enough.21 This dreamscape does not, however, simply reflect a social conservatism regarding women’s ‘proper’ place. Rather, domestic plenitude in The Weekly’s terms marks historical change in Australian women’s lives rather

Women’s magazines  109 than stagnation. Specifically, domestic plenitude reveals the historical and political pressures on ordinary (i.e. white working-class and lower-middleclass) women’s domesticity whether they are in paid employment or not – including time and income pressures, the pressures of aspirational style, and female-headed households. The postfeminist Weekly is an attempt to both integrate social (primarily feminist) change, and to conserve elements of traditional white Australian femininity and national identity: specifically, egalitarianism – now extended to women – and a valorisation of ‘the ordinary’. Ironically, given that housewife/homemaker magazines have often been considered bastions of conservative notions of femininity, the postfeminist iteration of The Weekly constructs a particularly Australian domesticity that avoids the excesses of the two key motifs that structure postfeminist accounts of domesticity: domestic goddess mythologies and the narrative of ‘retreatism’, in which ‘the professional, urban woman … returns to her [idealized] hometown’ (Negra 2009, p. 15). (In The Weekly, this would be a retreat towards the ‘old’ – read Anglo-Celt, pre-women’s movement – Australia.) In The Weekly’s terms, the domestic is gently modernised into a form of domestic feminism, rather than being retro-ised, hyperbolised, or ossified. Thus, it provides an alternative to the consumerist and transnational aspirational dreamscapes offered by Cosmo-Cleo and MarieClaire. The Weekly is also evidence of a strongly Australian version of ‘the new domestic femininities’ that Joanne Hollows (2006, p. 105) argues emerge in the postfeminist historical space, in which the old binaries of the feminist and the housewife, the career woman and the homemaker, and the public and the private spheres, are no longer stable (Genz 2009, pp. 53–54). The core elements of domestic plenitude are the traditional content of The Weekly throughout its history (Sheridan et al. 2002, p. 1): marriage, motherhood, family, and the home; however, these become more liberally defined, though still focused on heterosexual white women. As in our dramedies, de facto relationships are now legitimate, as are women who work, or women without children. These core elements inform the narrative and interpretive frames used by The Weekly: most stories are constructed within their parameters, and they are the recipe for plenitude. The Weekly, like the other titles discussed here, regularly features the ‘exceptional woman’ type story or the celebrity story.22 Its difference is that the exceptional woman’s identity as a wife or mother is given prominence (the journalist, Jana Wendt is one such example, see Sheather 2005), or the celebrity’s family background is foregrounded (as in the actor, Rebecca Gibney’s childhood with an alcoholic father; see ‘Shadows of the Past’ [2003]), or the retired champion athlete’s serious romance is now the focal point for The Weekly’s interest (the champion Olympic swimmer, Susie O’Neil’s courtship story, [see George 1998]). High achieving and/or unconventional women are simultaneously recognised for their achievement

110  Women’s magazines and reframed, that is, ­literally domesticated. In this process, their ‘specialness’ and unattainable lifestyle are translated into ‘ordinary’ women’s reality and are therefore made accessible and comprehensible to them. This extraordinary/ordinary dialectic (Dyer 1979; Turner 2004) is, of course, constitutive of celebrity, but has especial valence in the Australian context with its egalitarian and masculinist mythologies. Women celebrities, in particular, face intensified scrutiny in the postfeminist era, playing a ‘role in testing dominant social norms’ and re-establishing conventional definitions of gender (Holmes & Negra 2011, p. 3). In The Weekly’s contemporary blend of relatively traditional models of female subjectivity, feminine egalitarianism, and a slightly increased celebrity focus, these women are refeminised, made just like ordinary white women, and equally importantly, reinforce domesticity as a site of contentment, of plenitude. What we term the ‘white Australian celebrity comeback story’ reveals the critical importance of marriage, motherhood, and the home in constructing a normative model of a woman’s life course whose goal, or at least touchstone, is domestic contentment, regardless of what career or life path one chooses. Given its explicitly Australian focus, The Weekly’s preferred model of celebrity is the Australian ex-celebrity, as in the soapie star from the 1980s (say, Rowena Wallace) or the Young Talent Time singer (think Tina Arena). The Weekly loves to cover their post-fame lives, as they either accede to conventional womanhood (having a baby or marriage) or battle and overcome personal crises (divorce, stillbirth, illness, career collapse, weight gain). Sometimes their destination is a tentative career comeback. Regardless of its outcome, at its core the celebrity comeback story celebrates the white female Aussie battler – no matter how famous – and the domestic milestones in a conventional woman’s life (even if these go wrong, at least the celebrity had a go at being ‘normal’). So for Dannii Minogue: ‘Nobody imagined that Dannii would be so revolutionised by pregnancy and motherhood’ (Iley 2011). For ex-soapie star Peta Toppano: In the past, her photo shoots would have been done on film sets or in one of the luxurious mansions she shared with her then husband. This time, it’s held in her red-brick, two-bedroom flat, not far from the house where her parents lived for more than 20 years. The block itself is modest, but Peta has turned her flat into a colourful, cosy home, decorating the walls with old playbills, photographs and a portrait of herself painted for the Archibald Prize. (Baker 2011) For our celebrities and readers, the domestic functions as reward or comfort, or as just being enough after the adventures of contemporary white Australian womanhood. The Weekly’s continuing role of offering domestic advice contributes to a quality of sisterliness, a quality we also see in our beauty vloggers. While

Women’s magazines  111 all our magazines can be read as particular forms of ‘how to’ guides, The Weekly is distinctive in that it is explicit about its pedagogic role, and its scope is formidable: virtually every aspect of the domestic is covered, from cleaning and cooking to craft, budgeting, child rearing, and wardrobe advice.23 The Weekly is a voice of help and support, as articulated in one editor’s claim that ‘One of the mantras of The Weekly is to provide inspiration and hope to our readers’ (Foyster 2009, p. 10). Unlike the sheer impracticality or otherworldliness of Cosmo-Cleo’s and Marie Claire’s dreamscapes, The Weekly’s aspirations are of an entirely different order. Domestic plenitude relies on a relentless practicality: one acts rather than simply consumes in this dreamscape! This emphasis works to ensure that the domestic as a project can succeed, that a capable homemaker will produce and hence receive plenitude. Its advice suggests that ends can be met, children can be raised successfully, male partners understood, meals will work, weight can be lost, and hence contentment can be found. ‘Transform your hair’, ‘map your face’, and ‘How to answer your children’s trickiest questions’ encourages The Weekly in just one month’s issue (December 2006). In keeping with its egalitarianism, it does not position domestic skills as retro-cool art forms, subjects of mastery, or sensual expressions of the self – all components of the domestic goddess phenomenon (Negra 2009, pp. 118, 130; see also Genz 2008). Rather, The Weekly takes a pragmatic approach. Its pedagogy proffers accessible and valuable skills that are part of contemporary ordinary life. The Weekly’s encyclopaedic scope validates an ‘ordinary’ domesticity (ordinary in terms of its class identity), and that the little things – often target of middle-class ridicule – matter. The dreamscape thus also validates a way of life increasingly under threat by technology, labour market-induced time pressures, and bourgeois aspirational consumption as exemplified in chick lit. The class-specific practicality of The Weekly’s dreamscape is reflected in its figuration. The magazine’s visual register is comparatively text heavy and uncluttered in layout, which increases its readability – it is, after all, a manual. The photographs are less highly stylised than Marie-Claire’s or Cosmo-Cleo’s, and the pages as a whole do not attempt to resemble an art gallery, making it a welcoming space. The commodities on offer – whether in the advertisements and product reviews – are incredibly diverse and numerous, contributing to the sense of plenitude. However, these commodities are unstylish, unstylised, and inexpensive: sauce mixes, anti-itch preparations for children, Target lingerie, women’s vitamin supplements, and mid-range cosmetics, for instance. The dreamscape also testifies to changes in white Australian domestic femininity, and hence class identity. The Weekly’s increasingly stylish presentation parallels the increasing importance of style and the personal makeover to its dreamscape. Indicative of these changes, from about 2000 onwards (under Deborah Thomas’s editorship) The Weekly itself experiences a makeover. Its layout moves closer to the upmarket glossies, while

112  Women’s magazines the coverage of celebrity gossip and scandal reduces, the domestic advice goes slightly upmarket, feature articles improve in quality, and the visuals are also more sophisticated. What is occurring is that the working-class and lower-middle-class form of domesticity traditionally represented by The Weekly is remodelled into a more contemporary middle-class, and aspirational, lifestyle: a stylish as well as practical domesticity, and hence a modernised domestic femininity. At the same time that homemakers are being addressed in more sophisticated terms, however, they are also subjected to the imperatives of postfeminist makeover culture, which Gill (2007b, p. 156) explains thus: This requires people (predominantly women) to believe, first, that they or their life is lacking or flawed in some way; second, that it is amendable to reinvention or transformation by following the advice of relationship, design or lifestyle experts and practicing appropriately modified consumption habits. We want to emphasise not so much that this paradigm ‘reinvigorates class antagonisms’ as in Gill’s account (2007b, p. 157). Rather, as we saw in chick lit, it is an assertion of an upper-middle-class hegemony via aspirations towards particular ways of being – even as, if not because of, the achievement of solid middle-class economic wealth is increasingly difficult (what Michael Pusey [2003] identifies as the hollowing out of the Australian middle class). And such a makeover paradigm is credible and seductive in a nation like Australia that prides itself on a relatively high degree of social mobility. Domestic plenitude now includes numerous options for the self to be remade, although along relatively modest and pragmatic lines.24 Regardless of the transnational makeover imperative, The Weekly continues its tradition of being a publication for and about Australian women – its current masthead on the spine is ‘The Voice of Australian Women’. The Weekly’s direct acknowledgement, indeed celebration, of Australian culture and history in its articles, photography, and columns reveals its nationalism: it supports Australian popular and high culture25 and champion women athletes,26 publishes quality Australian women writers (such as Marele Day, Gabrielle Lord, and Maggie Alderson), has plenty of time for Germaine Greer,27 and occasionally celebrates Indigenous women.28 The Weekly’s characteristic blend of the traditional and modern is clear when it continues to love the British Royal Family (Seward 1998), but also publishes articles highly critical of the mandatory detention of asylum seekers (Leser 2002; Weaver 2016) and the treatment of women workers (Buttrose 2000).29 Its progressive stance on contemporary social issues thereby demonstrates the traditional Australian sense of care for the underprivileged and the underdog. Moreover, The Weekly still retains a focus on ‘ordinary’ women – this is The Weekly’s version of Australian egalitarianism, although women are

Women’s magazines  113 now hailed as worthy of being made over into a more glamorous self on a fairly sensible budget, the limit of the dreamscape’s version of ‘luxury’ consumption. Thus, the look of the magazine may alter but the contents remain the same: in October 2005 the new look is announced, though craft, recipes, health, money, gardening, renovations, family, and mothering stories continue. However, as Sheridan et al. make clear, historically The Weekly offered a ‘culturally specific construction of the housewife as consumer. By presenting itself as an ideal universally applicable to all women, it obscured the differences between them’ (2002, p. 6). Regardless of the occasional story on Indigenous or non-Anglo-Celt women, such elisions have arguably continued for these groups who were and are alienated from the specifically white Australian ‘ideals of femininity and domestic life promoted in The Weekly’ (Sheridan et al. 2002, p. 6). So, while the category of Australian woman may now include women who work, who do not have children, or are not married, like all our titles, its racialised core and imaginary remain unchanged. The Weekly’s dreamscape of domestic plenitude is not so much about offering escape; it is instead an attempt to manage the tensions surrounding contemporary Australian domesticity for both full-time homemaker and working woman, as symbolised in its key framing device of domesticating the extraordinary woman. The recurrent stories or content of The Weekly is that Australian women now achieve in every field, however they are domestic beings as well, if not primarily so. Thus, the magazine appeals to women whose identities and/or lives are not centred on paid employment, or who are conflicted by work and domestic or family responsibilities. The Weekly affirms their role and offers hope that the conflict can be overcome. Second, as a dreamscape The Weekly offers an optimistic vision of the home for women, even as statistics on domestic violence, child abuse, and increasing economic inequality suggest otherwise. In article after article, whether about a female politician, an athlete, an actor, a CEO, an activist, a failed celebrity, or a lesbian, the home is positioned as a place of stability, care, and traditional Australianness – a locus of comforting ‘ordinariness’ in a competitive and demanding world. Even if one feels left behind by the neoliberalising outside world, the home allows a sense of contentment, a familiar identity, and a means to make a valuable (and valued) self. And finally, The Weekly’s greatest marker of difference from our other titles is its attitude to consumerism. Amongst its plethora of relatively inexpensive commodities for cooking, babies, family health, home renovations, and budget fashion, The Weekly’s relentless practicality (how to make the domestic work by hands, heart, and brain) and egalitarianism – signified by its transubstantiation of the extraordinary into the ordinary woman – valorise human relationships and the non-material: love, care, human connection, persevering, and getting by. In attempting to look both forward and back, domestic plenitude offers women some sense of

114  Women’s magazines worth, stability, and hope in a time of rapid social change, widening inequality, cosmopolitan aspirationalism, consumerist femininity, and economic insecurity.

Conclusion By positioning them as dreamscapes, as textualised forms of wish fulfilment, we have been able to draw out the potential of postfeminist women’s magazines. As we have demonstrated, the semioscape of abundance suggests the pleasures on offer to, and conflicts faced by, contemporary Australian women. In addition, we argue that there is cause for optimism concerning Australian women’s magazines in postfeminist times. Although the abundance on display continues the traditional and pejorative association of women with consumerism, we read such abundance not as a sign of women’s putative frivolity, but rather as a marker of contemporary women’s relative emancipation. Hedonistic and luxury consumption as imagined in these magazines signals increased economic and subjective freedom for Australian women. To desire excessively, to spend, to waste, are marks of freedom so long allowed only to men. It is far too easy to dismiss or criticise such dreams rather than seeing them as textualising an historically monumental shift. As Freud identified, however, dreams arise out of the conflicts of our waking lives, therefore our titles, being dreamscapes, will exhibit some strange if not contradictory features (much like postfeminism itself). The way in which the various dreamscapes are partially but continually interrupted by those stories from ‘the real’ (as in the anorexic model, the victim of domestic violence, the gender pay gap, the career woman who is primarily a mum), testify to the contradictions facing Australian women and inherent to such a model of prosthetic femininities. The various dreamscapes articulate some of the class and age-specific compensations available to Australian women with which to deal with these contradictions: young women’s sexual hedonism of Cosmo-Cleo, Marie Claire’s mature woman’s quest for exotic distinction and cosmopolitan social justice, and the domestic pragmatics and fulfilment of The Weekly for a broad and older readership. Regardless of the degree to which the Australian context is acknowledged, all the magazines are relentlessly about and for white women. While they like to appear up to date or in advance of social trends, and have shifted to address changes in white women’s lives, the world of Australian women’s magazines remains largely oblivious to Australia’s multicultural or postcolonial nature. We surmise that such a repression suggests two related things. First, hegemonic middle-class whiteness announces itself as the ideal for non-Western women, whether in the emerging middle classes or the working classes that produce so many of Australia’s consumer commodities and services. For Australian Indigenous women, their

Women’s magazines  115 highly restricted participation in these worlds of beauty and things is both a repression and an accurate reflection of their ongoing dispossession. And second, the fashion industry (and its close sister, the manufacturer of consumer goods) relies on the exploitation of non-white women’s labour – both locally (as piece workers, for instance) and internationally – as McRobbie notes in the UK context (1999, p. 60). Their effacement in the dreamscape is the women’s magazines’ version of secondary revision. For highly commercial genres – as McRobbie puts it, ‘Their business is, in effect, the nature of womanhood’ (1999, p. 48) – they show an ability to be more feminist than many other commercial genres, and complicate feminism’s traditional antagonism to women’s magazines (Friedan 1963; Greer 1970; Ferguson 1983), and its problem with the genre’s postfeminist iteration. Most surprising is the way in which feminist tenets are taken for granted but also explicitly articulated by every title: women are equal to men, women should be able to do anything they wish with their lives, and women are still subject to systemic discrimination, and it will take activism to change this. In this regard, although McRobbie argues that postfeminist culture takes feminism for granted in order to disavow it, every title explicitly claims itself to be feminist and a champion of women’s causes. Moreover, there is no sense of the irrelevancy or pastness of feminism: all magazines are far more political and socially aware than expected and have run campaigns and uncompromising articles on feminist issues throughout the 20 years: anti-domestic violence, sexual violence, paid maternity leave, sexual harassment, and equal pay. The semioscape of magazines is therefore evidence of the potential of popular feminism. Indeed, we happily claim them as mainstream feminist publications, well aware of their limitations, but optimistic about their potential. Like Shelley Budgeon and Dawn Currie (1995, p. 184), therefore, ‘we view these texts as actively constructing a discourse which draws upon, and in so doing transforms, public understandings of feminism’. In the next chapter, we turn to the obvious successor to women’s lifestyle magazines: the digital ‘glossies’ of the beauty vlogs and their semioscape of postfeminist confidence, care, and self-empowerment, and the particular intimate publics that they bring into being.

Notes   1 Women’s magazines are still popular, attracting between 269,000 (Cosmopolitan) to over 1.5 million readers (The Australian Women’s Weekly), per print issue (source: Roy Morgan, September 2018), with much larger readerships for their cross platform editions. For example, Marie Claire’s readership increases from 379,000 readers of the May 2017 print issue to 464,000 readers for its cross platform version (Source: emma readership survey: www.emma.com.au/ reports).   2 There have been some excellent general analyses of certain Australian women’s magazines such as those by Bonner and McKay (2000), Le Masurier (2007,

116  Women’s magazines 2009, 2011), Sha and Kirkman (2009), Schneider and Davis (2010), and Campo (2010).  3 This generalist criterion thereby excludes specialist women’s titles such as Women’s Health and Fitness Australia or gossip/celebrity magazines like Who. The date range also excludes relatively idiosyncratic titles such as HQ magazine, a publication that did attempt briefly to be a very different sort of women’s magazine that did not include beauty or fashion articles. Its short publication span (1990–2003) and a shift towards a male as well as female readership exclude it from our discussion.  4 Sadly, Cleo ceased publication in March 2016. In her final editorial, Lucy E. Cousins declares that ‘Australia is home to incredible women from all walks of life, and we all want to be heard because we all have important things to say’ (2016, p. 7).   5 We note with interest the success of the alternative Frankie magazine (started in 2004). However, our focus on mainstream publications, as well as the centrality of young women’s glossies typified by Cosmopolitan to postfeminist culture and theory precludes Frankie’s inclusion.   6 We do acknowledge Hermes’ finding of the lack of correlation between a reader’s lifestyle and chosen magazines (1995, p. 144).   7 Gough-Yates (2003), citing Sean Nixon (1996), explains the impact of psychographic research on market research thus: Lifestyle research represented consumers as more diverse and changeable than ever before, and produced more individualistic images of them. Moreover, lifestyle research emphasised the differences between consumer groups in cultural, as well as economic and motivational terms. (p. 2)

For McRobbie (1999, p. 60), the impact on magazines is that: ‘readers’ exist as much as concepts and strategies as they do as active consumers … Instead of being at the far end of the chain which begins with production, the practices of consumption are built into the ‘front end’ processes of production.

  8 Such an interpellation becomes important in a context of accelerated immigration from non-Western countries from the Howard government onwards, and the increased political demands from, and visibility of, Indigenous people – including Indigenous women.   9 The academic interest in young women and postfeminism has boomed in recent years, ranging from Sue Jackson and Tiina Vares’s (2013) work on the sexualisation of young girls, Jessica K. Taft’s (2004) analysis of Girl Power, to Shauna Pomerantz and Rebecca Raby’s (2017) critique of the overachieving ‘smart girl’. We now have a formal disciplinary field of girl studies, perhaps taking up the space once occupied by women’s studies in the academy. Even in the academy, one should stay young. 10 Gough Whitlam was Australia’s Prime Minister from 1972–1975, and implemented a left-wing agenda that included free tertiary education. He appointed an advisor on women’s issues, Elizabeth Reid, and a Women’s Affairs Unit in the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet was established in 1974. 11 The titles of these examples are indicative of this non-lesbian tendency: Patricia Flokis (2004), ‘I’m not bi, I just pash other women’ and Hannah Gadsby (2016), ‘Sex tips for ladies who like ladies’. 12 Note that articles frequently have two different titles: one in the Table of Contents and one where it appears in the magazine. Alix Johnson’s article is also titled ‘8 beauty promises’; Georgia Cassimatis’s article is also titled, ‘I must, I must’.

Women’s magazines  117 13 See, for example, ‘He said what at work?’ (2015) regarding sexual harassment; Johnson (2002); Gawthorne (2009); and ‘Get paid like a man’ (1999). 14 See Felicity Percival (2004) on sex toys and Lizza Gebilagin (2015) on women making porn. 15 The Australian-born Frank follows a similar transnational path in her career, having worked for Harper’s Bazaar, Elle, Mademoiselle, and the US and UK editions of Marie Claire, before setting up the Australian edition. She is the daughter of Jewish post-Second World War migrant, and Melbourne protocelebrity hairdresser, socialite, ex-social columnist, and philanthropist, Lillian Frank. We suspect that this family background influences Frank’s social conscience as expressed in Marie Claire. 16 www.marieclairegroup.com/pageEN_Humanistic+commitment.html, viewed 7 July 2016. 17 ‘48 hours in Dubai’ (2016), Marie Claire, December, pp. 264–266; Martin (2016). 18 July 1999, August 2002, June 2012, and May 2013 are anti-ageing special issues; February 2005 features ‘Your look younger for longer: your stop-theclock shopping guide’; April 2006 includes the ‘Celebrity report: when will your looks peak?’. 19 As listed above, examples include October 2009, January 2015, and January 2016. These are articles that take a political view of multiculturalism, that is, they look at Australian racism rather than celebrating pluralistic tolerance. 20 The Weekly became a monthly publication from January 1983. 21 Joanne Hollows (2006, p. 106) makes a similar observation regarding the attraction of Nigella Lawson’s How to Be a Domestic Goddess, namely, that it offers a domestic fantasy for time-poor working women. 22 Unlike our other titles that show a noticeable increase in celebrity content, The Weekly is more uneven, with the particular editor seeming to be a major factor in how much celebrity material is included. Deborah Thomas, for example, reduces celebrity content and increases feature articles. 23 For instance, ‘Paula Duncan inspired us!’ (1997); Deborah Hutton (1998); ‘Food in a flash’ (1998); Larry Writer (2007); and Sharon Krum (2009). 24 See Vanessa Gordon (2006), ‘ “New year, new you” special: tone up your body, mind, relationship and home’. 25 Wendy Hughes (May 2001) on the impact of Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch; Sharon Krum (2005) on Rachel Griffiths; Margaret Pomeranz’s film reviews; Juliet Rieden (2013) on Magda Szubanski. 26 Celia Barnes (1998) on Hayley Lewis’s return to swimming; Annette Allison (1997) on Lisa Currie-Kenny’s desire to have another baby. 27 Stories on Greer include Suellen Dainty (2000); Greer’s lengthy essay (2001) on the impact of The Female Eunuch; and Susan Chenery (2006). 28 Indigenous actor Deborah Mailman features in at least three stories: Williams (2004); ‘Paradise found’ (2010); Corbett (2012). 29 Ita Buttrose fiercely critiques the lack of paid maternity leave.

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Women’s magazines  121 McRobbie, A. 2009, The aftermath of feminism: gender, culture and social change, Sage, London. Moeran, B. 2006, ‘More than just a fashion magazine’, Current Sociology, vol. 54, no. 5, pp. 725–744. Moeran, B. 2017, ‘Fashion magazines and fashion as a system of magic’, AT: Anthropology today, vol. 33, no. 2, pp. 3–9. Moreton-Robinson, A. 2000, Talkin’ up to the white woman: Aboriginal women and feminism, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia. Negra, D. 2009, What a girl wants? Fantasizing the reclamation of self in postfeminism, Routledge, London. ‘ “New year, new you” special: tone up your body, mind, relationship and home’, 2009, Australian Women’s Weekly, January, p. 10. Nixon, S. 1996, Hard looks, masculinities, spectatorship and contemporary consumption, St Martin’s Press, New York. O’Brien, D. 1982, The Weekly: a lively and nostalgic celebration of Australia through 50 years of its most popular magazine, Penguin, Ringwood. ‘Paradise found’, 2010, Australian Women’s Weekly, November, pp. 123–128. ‘Paula Duncan inspired us!’, 1997, Australian Women’s Weekly, August, pp. 120–121. Percival, F. 2004, ‘Girls who like toys: new sex gadgets to try’, Cleo, February, pp. 136–139. Pomerantz, S. & Raby, R. 2017, Smart girls: success, school, and the myth of postfeminism, University of California Press, Berkeley, CA. Projansky, S. 2014, Spectacular girls: media fascination and celebrity culture, New York University Press, New York. Pusey, M. 2003, The experience of middle Australia: the dark side of economic reform, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Renkert, E. 2001, ‘Has a colleague ever come to work with a black eye? Worn a jumper in summer, had unexplained absences?’, Marie Claire, December, pp. 97–100. Rieden, J. 2013, ‘Magda Szubanski: “At last I’ve got nothing to hide” ’, Australian Women’s Weekly, March, pp. 104–110. Robinson, F. & Dabscheck, L. 2005, ‘Start talking to stop the violence’, Marie Claire, March, pp. 62–70. Roy Morgan 2018, Australian magazine readership, 12 months to September 2018, viewed 12 December 2018, http://roymorgan.com.au/industries/media/ readership/magazine-readership. Scanlon, J. 2009, Bad girls go everywhere: the life of Helen Gurley Brown, Oxford University Press, New York. Schneider, T. & Davis, T. 2010, ‘Fostering a hunger for health: food and the self in The Australian Women’s Weekly’, Health Sociology Review, vol. 19, no. 3, pp. 285–303. Seward, S. 1998, ‘Taking tea with Charles’, Australian Women’s Weekly, November, pp. 24–26. Sha, J. & Kirkman, M. 2009, ‘Shaping pregnancy’, Australian Feminist Studies, vol. 24, no. 61, pp. 359–371. ‘Shadows of the Past’, 2003, Australian Women’s Weekly, July, pp. 18–23. Sheather, M. 2005, ‘Jana’s story’, Australian Women’s Weekly, November, pp. 38–44.

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4 YouTube beauty vlogs Intimate publics and postfeminist confidence and care

In this chapter, building upon our earlier examination of postfeminist kinship, and the refigured modes of intimacy it entails, we turn our attention to a youth-oriented and transnational form of participatory postfeminist media culture, beauty ‘vlogs’ (video logs), illuminating a semioscape of confidence and care (of both self and other). In the context of ‘convergence culture’ (Jenkins 2006), young women’s opportunities for public selfrepresentation have expanded considerably. New media platforms, such as YouTube, have enabled women to author themselves in innovative and often lucrative ways, for potentially global audiences. One of the most common forms of content to be uploaded to YouTube by and for young women – including those based in Australia – is the beauty tutorial. Such beauty vlogs are ‘big business for media companies such as YouTube, where the search for “beauty” is among the top search categories’ (BanetWeiser 2017, p. 272). With millions of followers, beauty vloggers are often able to successfully monetise their public personas or ‘self-brands’, attaining (to varying degrees) ‘influencer’ status (Abidin 2018) and corporate sponsorship and investment from prominent beauty brands. They are not simply about looking like a successful young woman but being one as well (the degree to which they are successful, as well as what constitutes success, is something we discuss). As suggested in our analysis of Cleo and Cosmopolitan, young women are commonly seen to be identified with, and to be deeply affected by, postfeminism.1 The beauty vlogger, as an entrepreneur committed to performing and fostering a desire for normative beauty standards, and as a subject ‘responsive to the regime of personal responsibility’ (McRobbie 2009, p. 19), is perhaps the quintessential young neoliberal postfeminist. However, as we argue here, that is not all she is, especially given this increasingly common trajectory of augmenting content videos (i.e. the beauty tutorial or review of particular products) with advice vlogs once a sizeable fan base has been achieved. While feminist debates around beauty practices have been well-rehearsed (Wolf 1990; Hollows 2000; Scott 2006), we are more interested here in the hybridised confessional-advice vlogs produced by and addressed to girls and women in their teens to

124  YouTube beauty vlogs early-mid-twenties. The Australian vloggers we analyse in depth here – Lauren Curtis and Danielle Mansutti – provide (as well as themselves seek) advice, not just on make-up application, but on bullying, friendship, sexuality, health and nutrition, depression and anxiety, and the normative gender expectations fuelled by social media itself. In some ways, adopting ‘big sister’ style personas (Berryman & Kavka 2018), they offer a form of online self-help for the generation of women attempting to negotiate the thoroughly imbricated demands of neoliberalism and postfeminism. Such YouTube vlogs, whether mobilising positive or negative affect (or both at once), provide crucial insights into ‘how postfeminism feels’ (McDermott 2018, p. 53, emphasis added). Therefore, while Sarah BanetWeiser (2017) – preoccupied more with their reinscription of hegemonic beauty ideals – has identified beauty vloggers as ‘aesthetic entrepreneurs’, here we demonstrate how their movement from beauty tutorials to advice vlogs renders them what we call ‘affective entrepreneurs’, recommending not just beauty regimes but viable ways of approaching the ‘problem’ of the self. Indicative of the contradictions of postfeminism, these vloggers, to varying degrees, advocate self-empowerment through greater self-­ confidence, while also underscoring the roadblocks (internal and external) to such actualisation; hence our designation of this semioscape as one of (self)confidence and (self)care. In terms of care, itself a gendered form of affective labour (as we saw in the case of Offspring’s Nina Proudman), they provide a form of ‘virtual extended sisterhood’ (Leppert 2015, p. 217) and support for their followers that cannot be discounted (Ouellette & Arcy 2015) – especially as, given the affirmative subscriber comments, it seems to have pronounced resonance. This is not to suggest that our approach is celebratory, particularly as we are aware there are risks in a form of ‘intimate world-building that doubles as commercial platformbuilding’ (Dobson et al. 2018, p. 22), but as throughout this book, rather than dismissing such popular forms as further indicative of the limits of postfeminism, we seek to explore their feminist potentialities or at least their generative tensions.

Postfeminist automediality: ‘authenticity’ and self-disclosure online We focus here on the postfeminist stories that these young vloggers (are able to) tell about their lives, relationships, and work, and how these stories and selves are shaped not just by the discursive context of their production but by the YouTube form – its technological affordances, its implication in commercialised culture, and its mode of address – and by reception, where audiences value (and expect) a sense of ‘authenticity’ and consistency in the selves being constructed and the private lives which are depicted as part of this process (Rak 2015; Smith & Watson 2015; Marwick 2016; Maguire 2017; Poletti 2017; Faleatua 2018). Indeed, for

YouTube beauty vlogs  125 girls and young women in particular, such ‘visibility and self-disclosure are encouraged as the path to success and empowerment’ (Dobson 2008, p. 126). Of course, these stories are also essential to the work of maintaining a desirable brand in which audiences and corporations can invest (affectively in the case of the former and literally in the case of the latter). As automedial sites (Smith & Watson 2015, p. 168) – new media technologies that work to help shape, rather than simply reflect, selfhood – they are important both in terms of young women’s public self-construction and in terms of the communities that are brought into being through the technological affordances of the YouTube platform (Raun 2018). We are interested in thinking through the reasons for the popularity of these largely confessional figures and how their advice and their own modes of being may be resonating with those coming to terms with the uncertainties, and insecurities, of femininity in a neoliberal postfeminist context (while themselves contributing to such a regulatory climate). We are also interested in these vloggers’ high-level of self-reflexivity around their selfrepresentational practices, and the ethics thereof, especially when they highlight social media’s effects on young women (as Mansutti’s vlogs in particular routinely do). The autobiographical aspects are significant, too, as they provide the grounds of their claims to authority (much like the self-help authors of the next chapter) – and their celebrity. Their life advice is based on their personal experiences of being Australian young women; their authority is predicated on their ‘ordinariness’ (manufactured though it may be) and its successful narration/performance. Against the idea of beauty vloggers as simply the new postfeminist disciplinarians, exhorting women to ‘perfect’ femininity and internalise self-hatred for failing to achieve it (McRobbie 2015; Banet-Weiser 2017; Lazar 2017), these young women draw attention to the tensions between ideal and embodied/lived femininity – while beauty tutorials may depict the former, advice vlogs attend to the latter (though sometimes they merge as in the ‘Get ready with me’ vlogs). They recognise young women’s ongoing anxieties around their ‘to-be-looked-atness’ (Mulvey 1975; see also Berger 1972); even while their channels may in fact reinscribe such cultures of surveillance, regulation, and judgement, they do not lack awareness or reflexivity about these contradictions.

Micro-celebrity, vlogging, and digital intimacy The beauty vlogger is what Teresa Senft (2008) has identified as a ‘microcelebrity’, commonly now produced and maintained via social media platforms, where the self is constructed as a brand for public consumption. Such celebrities are reliant upon their followers, whom they consider ‘fans’, and they ‘use strategic intimacy’ to help increase this audience base (Marwick 2016, p. 333; see also Marwick & boyd 2011). In the case of beauty vloggers, they have established themselves as experts in make-up

126  YouTube beauty vlogs application techniques, and they are valued for passing on these skills and techniques to apprentice viewers. In this respect, their celebrity can be seen to have been, in Chris Rojek’s (2001) terms, ‘achieved’, but it is the extension of ‘expertise’ into realms beyond the aesthetic that most interests us here. Nonetheless, the fact they are believed to have earned their celebrity, via the public performance of their specific skills, ‘plays an important role when [audiences are] evaluating their legitimacy’ (Garcia-Rapp 2017). Indeed, their perceived ability to speak authoritatively on non-beauty specific topics is tied to this legitimacy. As is common with figures of renown, their celebrity affords them some ‘discursive power’ (Marshall 1997) to intervene in other, unrelated, terrain such as mental health advice. As we will show, frequently lauded by followers for their honesty and inspiration, audiences clearly affectively invest in these micro-celebrities. As Graeme Turner et al. (2000, p. 15) emphasise, celebrities become ‘folded into our ways of making sense of the world’, and these vloggers appear to be no exception – especially for their young women followers. As a specific form of micro-celebrity, beauty vloggers deploy particular techniques to establish and maintain the intimacy and ‘authenticity’ that is integral to their success (i.e. gaining and retaining both followers and corporate support and investment), and indeed – as shown here – to establishing themselves as trustworthy advice-givers. Although we recognise that the work of fostering such intimacy is crucial to selling themselves as commodities, and thus is part of their ongoing celebrification (Berryman & Kavka 2017), it is also the case that such intimacy can play an important role in drawing attention to social and political issues relevant to young women (Lange 2007; Lovelock 2017; Raun 2018). They may appear to be postfeminism’s ‘can do girls’ (Harris 2004), but they – and their audiences – are also anxious subjects in need of a form of sisterly care and community. Rather than simply decrying the commodified nature of such modes of digital intimacy and sociality, we ask what are they making possible for girls and young women (both as producers and as consumers), and how might they be responding to the tensions of contemporary lived femininities in a postfeminist environment? What cultural and indeed affective needs may such vloggers be fulfilling for audiences who are by no means passive consumers? And, in line with Rosalind Gill and Shani Orgad’s (2015, 2017) Foucauldian-informed work on ‘confidence’ as a technology of self, within what discursive limits? Responding to calls for further consideration of the ‘psychic life of postfeminism’ (Gill & Orgad 2015; Gill 2017; Gill & Kanai 2018), we outline how the vlogs function as spaces of both positive and negative affect, exhorting young women – consistent with the semioscape of confidence and care – to love and empower themselves while at times being unable to do so in an (online) environment that is often toxic for them. In contrast to previous scholarship, including the disciplinary ‘girlfriend gaze’ theorised by Alison Winch (2013), we

YouTube beauty vlogs  127 c­ onceptualise these vlogs as more than just a postfeminist way to regulate women’s bodies and/or psyches. Instead, bringing into being what Lauren Berlant (2008) dubs an ‘intimate public’ – ‘a porous, affective scene of identification among strangers that promises a certain experience of belonging and provides a complex of consolation, confirmation, discipline, and discussion about how to live as an “x” ’ (2008, p. viii) – these vloggers use their attention capital as microcelebrities to provide crucial forms of sociality and sisterhood, and ways to negotiate a representational and political environment that is particularly fraught for young women. Rather than merely seeing vlogs and vloggers as indicative of postfeminism’s sophisticated adaptations (and, relatedly, neutralisations) of feminism in changing cultural conditions (Gill 2016; Gill & Orgad 2017; Banet-Weiser 2018; Kanai 2019), we are interested in what they make possible for audiences, and indeed for the vloggers themselves. Digital intimate publics in particular can ‘trouble or call into question the dominant hierarchies of social life’ by rendering visible relations and identities previously ‘concealed from public spaces’, including those of girls and young women (Dobson et al. 2018, p. 18). Furthermore, while it has been suggested that ‘post-feminist neoliberalism … fosters a new sense of isolation among women’ (Braidotti 2006, p. 45), we see these vloggers as significantly contesting such atomisation. As in our television chapter, intimacy and affective bonds between women are central to the vlogosphere’s semioscape of confidence and care.

Postfeminist ‘travels’: beauty vlogs and transnationalism As briefly noted, more than any other form dealt with here, and indicative of what Arjun Appadurai (1996) dubs ‘technoscapes’, digital media cultures ‘criss-cross’ national boundaries and territories, with users commonly speaking to audiences in very different locales, enabling postfeminism itself to ‘travel’ (Dosekun 2015). Given ‘YouTube is one of the largest databases of global shared experiences’ (Kennedy 2016), vlogging is a form where national boundaries are inevitably porous, and audiences span well beyond Australia (as subscriber comments make clear). They are further indicative of the transnational flow of postfeminist and neoliberal logics (Dosekun 2015), as many of their representational techniques, as well as their discursive frames, are also evident in vlogs from other contexts. In contrast to vloggers who foreground a ‘performative Australian-ness’, such as Asian Australian comic vlogger Natalie Tran (Tomkins 2019, forthcoming), the beauty vloggers we examine do not commonly foreground their national identity or their ‘Australian-ness’, and, consistent with this view of a transnational postfeminism, instead situate themselves more within a globalised collective of women. The femininities they embody suggest, therefore, less a distinct Australian cultural sensibility and more of a transnational way of making femininity intelligible and consumable. They are also indicative of

128  YouTube beauty vlogs the actual mobility of women, as both Danielle Mansutti and Wengie (an extremely popular Asian Australian vlogger) geographically relocated after their micro-celebrity afforded them both wider audiences and new employment opportunities in the United Kingdom and United States respectively. But, given that ‘the resources to become an entrepreneurial subject are unevenly distributed’ (Elias et al. 2017, p. 23; see also ­Banet-Weiser 2017, p. 272), in the beauty vlogosphere we see the elision of marginalised subjectivities, such as Indigenous women, and the whiteness of the most popular vloggers is stark (with Wengie being a welcome exception).2 In this chapter, we offer a detailed analysis of two of Australia’s more popular beauty vloggers, Lauren Curtis and Danielle Mansutti, from 2013 to 2018. Both of these women have YouTube channels with millions of subscribers, are now in their mid-late twenties after beginning their vlogging careers as teenagers, and follow the familiar trajectory for YouTube micro-celebrities: achieving their fame through their expertise in beauty practices, imparted to audiences in the form of beauty ‘tutorials’, then to varying degrees – after having accumulated a high degree of followers and a self-brand that clearly resonates – moving into personalised vlogs that address questions around women’s self-esteem, empowerment, and anxiety. As we will demonstrate, this is in some ways consistent with the wider ‘confidence cult(ure)’ (Gill & Elias 2014; Gill & Orgad 2015, 2017; Banet-Weiser 2017; Kanai 2019) which sees feminism not disavowed but repackaged into a neoliberal rhetoric of self-love and acceptance that followers endorse and reinscribe – though not without question, either by the vloggers themselves or their audiences. We have also chosen these vloggers as one, Curtis, embodies more of the positive affect said to be central to this confidence culture (and indeed to YouTube more generally), while the other, Mansutti, offers vlogs marked more by the negative affect central to establishing intimacy, achieving ‘relatability’, and, most importantly, offering online support to subscribers (Berryman & Kavka 2018).

YouTube, young women, and vlogging Consistent with its mantra ‘Broadcast yourself’, YouTube, launched in 2005, is often lauded as a democratised space in/through which ‘ordinary’ citizens can create and circulate various forms of media content. As Jean Burgess and Joshua Green argue (2009, p. 6), YouTube possesses ‘a double function’: it is ‘both a “top-down” platform for the distribution of popular culture and a “bottom-up” platform for vernacular creativity’. In this chapter, we are most concerned with its functioning in the latter sense, shifting our focus to the content of, as well as communities or publics enacted by, video blogging. Vlogging, the portmanteau term deployed to signal content videos reminiscent of the online diary form or blog, is seen to represent YouTube participatory culture, not just through ‘ordinary’ Australians creating content, but through the way its affordances work to

YouTube beauty vlogs  129 exhort the viewer to respond. In this sense, vlogging has been seen as ‘fundamental to YouTube’s sense of community … it is a form whose persistent direct address to the viewer inherently invites feedback’, revealing ‘the dialogic opportunities of YouTube’ (Burgess & Green 2009, pp. 94–95). We will return shortly to the kind of publics that are able to come into being through such a platform. These vloggers and the material they produce also need to be seen in the broader historical context of girls and young women making media (Kearney 2006, 2011; Piepmeier 2009; Keller 2015), as well as ‘homecamming’, where young girls used webcams in their domestic spaces to document their quotidian lives in a way that has been interpreted as empowering (Senft 2008; see also Harris 2004; Dobson 2008, 2015a). Despite technology having been historically gendered masculine, young women’s uptake has been immense (Kearney 2006; Banet-Weiser 2017), particularly in terms of social media platforms. As Banet-Weiser notes, ‘One way that gendered asymmetries have been restructured by girls themselves is through the production of content on digital media’ (2018, p. 271). These vloggers evidence how convergence culture is enabling women to become producers of media (and of self) in new, and at times quite innovative, ways. However, what is different from these earlier popular forms is the constitutive participatory nature of the YouTube environment (Jenkins 2006; Burgess & Green 2009). That said, it is vital not to overstate the so-called democratisation of media or the progressive potentialities of such forms (Hindman 2009; Turner 2010). Such a gesture elides the ways in which intensified judgement and regulation of women pervades the postfeminist representational environment, and that which constitutes ‘value’ in the online attention economy remains deeply gendered. Increased visibility has concomitantly resulted in the increased surveillance and disciplining of girls and young women (Andrejevic 2004; Banet-Weiser 2012; Dobson 2015a). However, while such platforms can undoubtedly ‘be a hostile space for girls and young women’ (Maguire 2015, p. 72), it is also important to be conscious that ‘these dominant tendencies are not written into digital media, nor are they totalizing’ (Ouellette & Arcy 2015, p. 72; see also Mendes et al. 2019). To continue our exploration of these issues, and further elucidate the beauty vlogosphere’s postfeminist semioscape of confidence and care, we begin with an analysis of Lauren Curtis’s YouTube channel.

Lauren Curtis, authenticity, and intimacy: ‘I want each and every one of you to love every version of yourself, with or without make-up’ At the time of writing Lauren Curtis has almost 3.6 million YouTube subscribers, while many more have viewed either her content videos (make-up tutorials) or vlogs (which she commenced in August 2011, at age 18). Like

130  YouTube beauty vlogs most vloggers, her online presence is multi-modal, with linked Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter accounts as well as a personalised website. Common to the YouTube platform, her channel consists of beauty tutorials, ‘haul’ videos,3 ‘day in the life’ style vlogs, filmed international trips (paid for by beauty companies)4 and, increasingly, more confessional and advice pieces (often one and the same). Humorous, seemingly ‘genuine’, and down to earth, Curtis – or ‘Loz’, as she encourages followers to call her, in line with the Australian tendency of shortening names – commonly refers to her shyness, experiences of bullying, and difficulties with maintaining a healthy self-esteem. Indeed, this transition narrative, from bullied, insecure teen to confident, successful beauty guru, is an important part of her ‘public private persona’ (Marshall 2010) and arguably helps account for her extensive following. In terms of aesthetics, however, Curtis is the sun-kissed (even if from a bottle), blonde-haired, blue-eyed ‘Aussie’ girl. White, thin, conventionally attractive, heterosexual, she is the kind of subject who is eminently ‘ “brandable” in the current media economy of visibility’ (Banet-Weiser 2012, p. 79). Curtis, as has been noted of other beauty vloggers, ‘embodies “niceness”, a sort of adorable girl-next-door banality’ (Banet-Weiser 2017, p. 276). Rather than offering the kinds of performative ‘sexiness’ that often characterises postfeminist culture (Dobson 2015a), and as a point of brand differentiation, she repeatedly draws attention to her modesty (that she does not like to show cleavage or wear revealing clothes, and prefers to relax at home rather than party). Furthermore, in line with what Rachel Berryman and Misha Kavka (2017) refer to as the ‘intimacy pact’, Curtis continuously invokes her love for her audience and recognition that her professional success is thoroughly dependent upon their support – in viewing and circulating her content, in following her product recommendations, and in publicly engaging with her. Curtis, like all beauty vloggers, given the interactivity upon which the form relies, commonly encourages viewers to express their appreciation (or indeed dislike) of specific videos. As Caron Raby et al. note (2018, p. 506), ‘vloggers on YouTube are immersed in a social platform that encourages, and depends on, user interaction’, both with the vloggers and other subscribers, thus creating a sense of online community. As Curtis remarks, in a gesture common to vloggers, ‘You guys are my second family’ (Curtis 2014a), and while confessing that her job is very ‘emotionally draining’ she adds that she ‘loves what she does’ and is ‘so incredibly grateful … and humble’. This is a common refrain from beauty vloggers, where such labour ‘is expressed in earnest terms as just doing something one loves to do’ and thereby is not recognised as ‘work’ (Banet-Weiser 2017, p. 276; see also Duffy 2017). Conversely, in some vlogs she highlights the many limitations of her job, reveals it is not the glamorous life it may appear, and discourages others from that path. Nevertheless, the attribution of ‘family’ suggests much in terms of the affect and intimacy being staged in and through these vlogs.

YouTube beauty vlogs  131 Curtis’s channel reveals the inherent paradox of these beauty vloggers, and indeed of postfeminism itself. In her tutorials, as in the chick lit novels we examined, there is an emphasis on the labour involved in making and remaking the feminine self (rather than femininity as innate), externally written on the body in specific ways, while the vlogs shift the focus to interiority and self-acceptance. As all her vlogs make clear, while underscoring the pleasures of make-up, Curtis is preoccupied with both outer and ‘inner’ beauty. These advice vlogs suggest that in addition to bodies, ‘subjectivity and interiority are now also subject to requirements for (self) transformation’ (Elias et al. 2017, p. 6). Like others in this realm, Curtis seems to care for her subscribers (itself a precondition for a successful branded feminine self) and wishes to give them tools to help them succeed – not just aesthetically but professionally and personally (all of which can, of course, be intertwined). Indeed, as Akane Kanai and others have emphasised, ‘digital cultures fostered the capacity to build relations with unknown publics through affective labor’, building forms of intimacy upon which the self-as-brand relies for success and ongoing commercial viability (2017, p. 296). For Curtis, there appears to be no tension between this focus on both outer and inner selves. Curtis – like many others – offers multiple ‘CHATTY GRWM (Get ready with me)’ videos, in which she increasingly blurs the boundaries between tutorials and vlogging, shifting to the confessional mode while she applies her make-up. In such vlogs, she engages in revelatory practices that are central to sustaining intimacy with followers/girlfriends (see ‘CHAT WITH ME/GRWM: Life Updates & Embarrassing Stories!’ [Curtis 2015b] and ‘CHAT WITH ME: Current Favourites, Why I’ve “Changed” & Personal Stories!’ [Curtis 2016a]). As Stéphanie Genz (2015, p. 548) makes clear, such ‘authenticity labour’ is integral to the neoliberal reflexive self which is seen to characterise ‘post traditional’ society and which (as briefly mentioned) itself opens the discloser up to new forms of surveillance and regulation (Andrejevic 2004; Harris 2004; Banet-Weiser 2012). Moreover, the exposure of applying make-up itself, usually a ‘private’ act, is also seen to be crucial to this establishment of intimacy (Affuso 2017). The spaces of intimacy, too, do important work in fostering the sense of accessibility and authenticity upon which micro-celebrity relies (Burgess & Green 2009; Tolson 2010; Marwick 2016; Berryman & Kavka 2017; Garcia-Rapp 2017). For instance, as is common for vloggers, Curtis films from within the domestic space of her home, in her bedroom, lounge-room or the public–private space of her car, spaces in which only ‘our intimates’ are typically welcome (Affuso 2017). In the introductory video that features on her channel she explicitly refers to her shift from beauty vlogger to lifestyle expert: ‘Hi everyone, what began as an intro to beauty grew into a space for sharing everything’. This trajectory is not unique to Curtis; an audience is secured primarily on the grounds of beauty pedagogy yet sustained by this shift to a more

132  YouTube beauty vlogs automedial form, via which the micro-celebrity constitutes her very relatability. The confessional is one of the central authenticating strategies deployed by beauty vloggers, and indeed celebrity in a much wider sense, and draws upon ‘the now well established genre of private exposé of a celebrity-being-ordinary’ (Genz 2015, p. 552; see also Redmond 2008; Nunn & Biressi 2010; Kennedy 2016). Female celebrities, more so than their male counterparts, have been active in the production of a private self for public consumption, suggesting that ‘the public display[s] of once-­ private feelings are intrinsically gendered activities’ (Genz 2015, p. 553). As part of such publicly staged moments of self-disclosure, which themselves are important both to self-branding and to postfeminism (BanetWeiser 2012, p. 60), in the ‘Fifty Facts about Me Tag’ (2013b), Curtis announces that she will be letting her audience into her life more, helping to ‘establish [her] branded persona as truth’ (Berryman & Kavka 2017, p. 316, original emphasis). This shift in content, capitalising on audience desire for insights into her private life, solidifies her status as a YouTube micro-celebrity: as someone in whom audiences can affectively invest, and with whom, via new media, they can actively engage (Marwick & boyd 2011).5 In terms of interaction with audiences, Curtis – like other ­Australian vloggers such as Brittney Lee Saunders, Chloe Morello, Shani Grimmond, and Danielle Mansutti – also livestreams question and answer sessions, with questions generally posted by followers on Facebook or Twitter, furthering a sense of openness, transparency, and accessibility, as well as the requisite responsiveness to the fan base (e.g. ‘Q&A: My Breakup, My Income, My Body’, 2014a). Indicative of the participatory, dialogic nature of the form, the Q&A format allows the audience to help shape the content of her channel and her self-presentation. While not offering advice in the same overt sense of some other vlog genres, Curtis’s regular ‘day in the life’ vlogs are also instructive, as they provide ways of living, being and consuming that subscribers can (should?) emulate.6 (In comparison, travel vlogs are more aspirational, seen as the reward for the public performances of an empowered, authentic, self whose ‘brand’ value has been recognised by beauty companies.) In weekly ‘follow me around’ vlogs, Curtis films herself doing mundane tasks: grocery shopping, eating breakfast, cooking, having a picnic with her boyfriend, going to the bank, playing with her dog, going to the gym, driving, and the like. ‘Everyday mundane practices’, Genz (2015, p. 552) argues, ‘are turned into items of consumption, underlining the importance of individual identity as a lucrative self-project and entertainment for others’.7 Letting audiences into aspects of her domestic life, including what she might cook or the music she likes, then, is part of the autobiographical self-construction central to this sense of authenticity and ordinariness that makes her advice seem legitimate. Furthermore, ‘Whilst these texts may seem apolitical in their focus on the personal and emotional contours of the vloggers’ lives, they are engaged profoundly in the cultural politics of

YouTube beauty vlogs  133 everyday life’ (Lovelock 2017, p. 89). Through these insights into their daily lives, as well as the explicit advice vlogs, these vloggers perform the self-confidence they exhort their followers to also adopt. This is young women’s (self)empowerment as lived, albeit mediated via the screen. Through more overtly confessional vlogs such as ‘Surviving High School – yuck!’ (2014c), Curtis seeks to provide audiences – many of whom would be teenage – with the tools to negotiate the fraught gendered experiences of high school (like those that continue to be the source of trauma for the ‘girls’ in Winners and Losers); these confessionals are primarily pedagogical. The expertise of such women is that they have passed through adolescence gendered feminine and therefore have some wisdom to impart to their younger sisters.8 As she introduces this vlog, ‘I didn’t have the best high school experience but I came out on top, so I wanted to share my pearls of wisdom with you all’ (2014c). Curtis presumes, as is common in postfeminist rhetorics, a universalised experience of girlhood and invokes the authority of (gendered) experience, mobilising discourses of self-acceptance, self-love, resilience, and ultimately empowerment (Gill & Orgad 2015, 2017). She seeks to demonstrate to followers that she is just an ‘ordinary’ girl, with experiences that would be familiar to her subscribers. Consistent with the ugly-duckling-turned-swan narrative of female adolescent development, she even includes ‘daggy’ before photographs from high school in the left-hand corner of the vlog – the contrast between the current beauty vlogger and her past self is visually stark, indicating that change is indeed possible. As part of bringing such intimate publics into being, vloggers ‘adopt particular techniques in order to amplify the affective relatability or generality of posts’, one of which is ‘the ability to synthesize the personal and the generic for an imagined girlfriend audience’ so that the viewer has the sense she is ‘just like’ the vlogger (Kanai 2017, p. 298). Curtis, like Mansutti, is adept at doing just that. One subscriber remarks that Lauren is her ‘favourite Youtuber’ because she ‘always keeps it real, doesn’t think she’s better than everyone else … she’s always someone I will look up to’ (AJ, in response to Curtis 2018). In sum, she is a down-to-earth ‘Aussie’ girl, who is not – in popular Australian parlance – ‘up herself’. And the public sharing of moments of failure and vulnerability is also seen to render vloggers more authentic and genuine (Nunn & Biressi 2010; see Curtis 2016b), and consequently worthy of emulation. Like other beauty vloggers turned lifestyle-coaches, Curtis is self-­ reflexive about the grounds of her authority. For example, in ‘BOY TALK: Overcoming Insecurities & Breakups, Finding “The One” ’ (2015a), she films herself in her pyjamas (as if she and the audience are having a ‘sleepover’, as one viewer remarks) without make-up, signifying a more ‘raw’ emotional state. One subscriber, explicitly invoking her sisterly positioning, posted: ‘I love when you give advice and wear pjs it makes me feel like you’re my big sister’ (KM). However, she warns her audience – with

134  YouTube beauty vlogs what she calls a ‘mini disclaimer’ – that she is by no means a relationship expert. Far from undermining the legitimacy of her advice, this denial of any ‘real’ expertise further shores up her ‘ordinariness’ (Jerslev 2016, p. 5242). Indeed, she reveals that she has had very little history with men, so her expertise – as she freely admits – is simply predicated upon her own limited personal experience which others may find valuable. Her number one tip, she tells subscribers, is that break-ups ‘happen for a reason’ and you will find ‘100% unconditional love’ in the future; this kind of new age style rhetoric is common throughout Curtis’s vlogs. As she says, and like the ‘calculating magic’ of self-help discussed in the subsequent chapter, she is a ‘huge believer in: ask, believe, receive’ (Curtis 2015a). Mobilising the trope of ‘the One’, and in contrast to its destabilisation in our dramedies, Curtis also perpetuates heteronormative romance narratives and the celebration of the dyadic imaginary. Moreover, such vlogs imply that part of the neoliberal postfeminist regime of taking responsibility for oneself includes managing, and achieving, one’s own romance goals (and arguably compulsory heterosexuality) with self-confidence. She follows this up with advice on how to manage insecurities – because ‘we [women] are so hard on ourselves’ (Curtis 2015a), and this limiting attitude needs to shift. As these audience comments make clear, Curtis’s focus is on how the individual can successfully manage her affective responses to difficult life situations, but such advice ‘really hits home’ (JJ), with many noting that they are in the process of negotiating break-ups and benefited enormously from her vlog: ‘your [sic] so inspirational, this helped me and im [sic] sure it helped alot [sic] of other people too please do more videos like this one xx’ (AD). As in this instance, many subscribers request that she film more such videos, thereby helping to shape her content – and her publicly performed self – in significant ways. Audiences clearly value Curtis on therapeutic not just aesthetic grounds. After narrating her own break-up, one subscriber, echoing the sentiments of many, notes: ‘Thank you for helping us girls out when we need it the most’ (MB). Like all highly successful beauty vloggers, Curtis is positioned, and indeed positions herself, as a role model, especially for adolescents. For example, as early as 2013 she was offering hybridised advice–confessional style vlogs, such as ‘Advice on BOYS, BULLYING & SELF CONFIDENCE!’ (2013a). This vlog was a question and answer session based on subscriber Facebook responses to a status she posted asking followers what kinds of advice they needed – the new media equivalent of an ‘agony aunt’ (or in this case older sister) magazine column. In answering subscribers’ questions, she offers commentary on how to deal with online hate; critiques the sexualisation of tweens; and provides suggestions on how to handle high school bullying. In alignment with the ‘performative insecurity’ that is ‘a mandatory element of femininity’ (Gill & Kanai 2018, p. 322), there is a recurrent narrative about Curtis not always having had self-confidence, being shy and insecure in high school, and this vlog is no

YouTube beauty vlogs  135 exception, as she again models this transition to the ‘high self-esteem’ she now has. Like our dramedy heroines, she has successfully transitioned from a ‘loser’ to a ‘winner’. As Gill and Orgad (2017, p. 27) note, ‘The trajectory is always linear: from low to high self-esteem, from poor to high levels of confidence and resilience’. Her aspirational narrative suggests that it is possible, for all women regardless of ‘identities, ages, backgrounds and contexts’, to personally overcome these gendered insecurities (Gill & Orgad 2017, p. 27), something we also identify as central to the next vlogger we examine (Danielle Mansutti).9 For example, Curtis (2013a) tells followers to identify their insecurities as the first step to successfully overcoming them: ‘Start from the very core of the problem and work your way outward from them’. Again, viewers respond effusively: ‘You have such great advice, and you are an inspiring role model’ (PT) and Lauren ‘gets everything that most of us teenage girls feel insidee x’ (‘a’). Selfacceptance is the remedy, and these beauty instructors commonly and unironically offer the refrain: ‘You are beautiful as you are’ (Curtis 2018). Given that positivity has been seen as a key trope of social media, important to the micro-celebrity’s success (Berryman & Kavka 2018, p. 86), in a recent post purporting to reveal ‘the truth about social media’, Curtis (2018) notes: ‘I want people to feel empowered, or happy, or inspired, or any kind of positive feeling’. Indicative of vloggers’ roles as emotion managers, Curtis is effectively tutoring audiences in ‘having the correct set of affective dispositions’ (Elias et al. 2017, p. 26), but she also emphasises the difficulties of maintaining such positive affect in a climate of gendered judgement and regulation. In this respect, she offers a critique of the online attention economy in which she is deeply implicated, but the advice she offers is for the individual to realise that social media is manufactured and to not take (gendered) criticisms on board. As Kanai notes, difference is flattened out and ‘The [viewer] is positioned as implicitly belonging in a collective of girlfriends who “get” the joys, dissatisfactions, and annoyances of doing youthful femininity in an environment of intensive regulation’ (2019, p. 162). In this vein, her followers respond enthusiastically: ‘I struggle so much with the mental effects of social media so this really spoke to me!’ (SB) and ‘You should go around to schools and do talks about this issue, you are so loved by many people and it would really help young girls. Your [sic] such an inspiration!!’ (LB). With one even calling her ‘super brave’ (AB) for making such a video, many subscribers note that they appreciate her honesty in underscoring the labour associated with social media, and how it works to create the impression of gendered perfection which results in followers like themselves feeling inadequate. For example, she reveals the strategies used by women YouTubers to accentuate their positive aspects, taking photos in certain light and deploying certain poses. In true postfeminist and neoliberal fashion, however, the solution is not to engage in a systemic critique but to simply ignore this judgement and be more self-confident and become less susceptible to such

136  YouTube beauty vlogs regulatory gazes (see also Brittney Lee Saunders’ ‘How to stop caring what other people think of you’ [2018]). There appears, nevertheless, to be a challenge to online gendered judgements that is met by an appreciative audience of girls and young women. Like those on other beauty vloggers’ channels, subscribers commonly thank Curtis for her valuable ideas, express love and admiration, and praise her relatability – for so aptly capturing how they themselves feel and making them feel connected to a broader public of likeminded girls and women.10 However, we cannot presume women viewers (for they are predominantly women) are unquestioningly adopting the strategies advocated by these beauty vloggers-turned-life-coaches. Upon closer inspection, such communities are revealed not to passively imbibe these vloggers’ maxims about either beauty or life but to actively engage with them, including to highlight their ethical and political limitations. In this respect, tellingly, one particular post of Curtis’s reveals what happens when this advice, and the authority upon which it is predicated, is seen to be problematic by audiences. In the post ‘The Best Advice I’ve Ever Given’ (2017), Curtis offers subscribers an insight into what she frames as her own life ‘philosophies’: ‘Hey guys! This video summarises the philosophies that I live my life by … and why! They’ve changed my life in so many ways; maybe they’ll even change yours:) xxx’. The gist of this particular vlog is that women need to stop considering themselves victims; assuming an agency that many young women – especially in a climate of austerity and precarious employment – simply would not possess, she advises that ‘if you hate your job, leave’. She continues: ‘Everything happens for a reason’, and that negative experiences are always valuable. This post was criticised for downplaying women’s experiences of victimisation and subordination, and the idea that the individual just needs to change her attitude in order to feel better or to overcome depression: the ultimate form of neoliberal postfeminist logic. As Sophie Bishop (2018, p. 92) argues, such apparent transgressions by vloggers can ‘cause a significant backlash’ from regular followers. Along these lines, in addition to suggestions she delete the vlog completely, subscriber criticisms include: ‘You know someone has never faced real troubles in life when they spout things like this. So naïve’ (QK) and ‘Lauren you do makeup tutorials for a living, you clearly are comfortable in your financial situation and I doubt there is anything you have gone through that would deem you qualified to speak like this and give “advice”. Stick to what you know’ (EA). Curtis subsequently edited the post to take account of this criticism: EDIT: I am in NO way trying to discredit those who are suffering tremendously (whether it be illness, living in a war-torn country, etc) and I’m truly sorry I didn’t make that clearer in this video … I also NEVER, ever want to criticise or belittle those who ARE victims – whether it be of abuse, mental illness or bullying (to name a few).

YouTube beauty vlogs  137 Here Curtis redrafts her post, and thus her public self, in response to audience indignation and opprobrium; this reaction and updating of self is integral to the ongoing labour of YouTube visibility, and also makes clear that her subscribers are not simply internalising her advice but critically engaging with it and are willing to challenge her authority. As Maguire notes, in such a participatory environment, the ‘audience has the capacity to shape, speak to, and change her self-representations as they interact with these texts’ (2017, p. 85). These women can, and do, refuse Curtis’s postfeminist affective rhetoric of positivity, critique her privilege, and deem her ‘solutions’ naïve and unproductive. Nevertheless, the majority of commenters thanked her profusely for her ‘inspirational’ words, evidencing the pervasiveness of this kind of ‘take control of your own destiny’ rhetoric, presuming a self that is unhindered by gender, race, class or economic limitations (an aspirational narrative involving the transcendence of racial and class boundaries is similarly mobilised by Wengie).11 Another vlogger who has likewise successfully transitioned from offering just beauty content to focusing on the affective and psychic realm is Danielle Mansutti, whose channel offers more in the way of ‘negative affect’ than Curtis’s (known – like Wengie – for her upbeat, some might say ‘Pollyanna’, attitude).

Danielle Mansutti: mental health vlogs, social media, and the possibilities of negative affect Danielle Mansutti has nearly 1.6 million subscribers and, like Curtis, has transitioned from just make-up advice to all manner of ‘lifestyle’ topics – from more superficial concerns, to issues around mental health, including anxiety and social media bullying. Indeed, Mansutti has recently changed (following her relocation to England) her description on YouTube to underscore the latter. With the characteristic intimate greeting, she now introduces herself: ‘Hey lovely! I’m Danielle Mansutti, a makeup/beauty, lifestyle, vlog & mental health YouTuber currently living in Brighton, England!’. On the extremely popular ‘Me and My Mental Health’ section of her channel, Mansutti notes: ‘This is the more personal side of my channel, where I open up about depression & bullying, offer advice and let you know who I truly am’.12 The latter point is a familiar sentiment in these vlogs, where vloggers note that they hope to use their platform, and their own self-disclosure, to reach and help what are perceived to be vulnerable young women struggling with similar anxieties. Of course, as noted above, philanthropic and political engagement is now an important part of celebrity culture (Littler 2008; Hearn 2012; Rojek 2013). Not unproblematically, targeting girls and young women as those seen most in need of expert intervention is common on YouTube, through more traditional celebrities as well as those we consider here (Taylor 2016). However, the centrality of anxiety and panic to beauty vloggers’ brands is not a distinctly

138  YouTube beauty vlogs Australian phenomenon, as much recent work on the British vlogger Zoella has demonstrated (Berryman & Kavka 2018; Bishop 2018). Mansutti’s vlogs on this section of her channel, particularly her own confessional account of depression, accord with Berryman and Kavka’s (2018) recent work on the productivity of negative affect in vlogging. As they argue, despite the assumption that the online attention economy demands positivity, negative affect and its public performance – via these filmed expressions of anxiety, emotional vulnerability, and distress – can further the sense of an intimate bond between vlogger and subscriber ­(Berryman & Kavka 2018, p. 87). Though such self-exposure does clearly work to facilitate the online intimacy vital to micro-celebrity, and is thus beneficial to their brand: The growing prevalence of such vlogs is testament to the value of YouTube both as a repository of anecdotal resources in the age of emotional precarity and as a potential community for those seeking support in dealing with their mental well-being. (Berryman & Kavka 2018, p. 87) Audiences also work to support vloggers after they post material characterised by negative affect, as well as themselves sharing their own stories (as the myriad comments in response to such revelatory vlogs indicate). Mansutti – in the confessional mode that marks many vlogs – narrates her own struggles with depression, anxiety, and self-esteem issues. On 22 May 2017, for example, she uploaded a ‘Depression and Suicide’ vlog, in which – while lying on her bed, in full make-up – she reveals she has suffered from depression and anxiety from a young age.13 She tells followers, rather optimistically and problematically, ‘all you need to do is punch that depression in the face … not give it the power to take over who we are’ (Mansutti 2017a). Like Zoella, she implores audiences to respond to ‘panic and anxiety by simply willing it away, assuming such transformative power is available to all social actors’, rather than just to white, heterosexual, middle-class subjects like herself (Bishop 2018, p. 98). However, despite this individualising rhetoric, she also argues that depression needs to feature more in public discourse, be socially normalised, and medically treated like any other illness. As throughout, and contra both postfeminist and neoliberal logics, she refuses to position the individual as responsible for any anxieties or insecurities she may be experiencing, noting ‘industries thrive on us feeling bad about ourselves’ (a somewhat ironic statement given her beauty tutorials also produce such affect). Confessing to having been taken to ‘dark’ and ‘damaging places’ as a result of her depression, implicitly referring to suicide, Mansutti seeks to combat the sense of isolation that often marks periods of depression (2017a). She reassures audiences that she speaks with authority about the

YouTube beauty vlogs  139 dangers of suicidal thoughts because she has lived it, and perhaps more importantly, survived. As we have shown with Curtis, such ‘revelationbased intimacy’ is central to fostering online sociality (Kanai 2017, p. 298), while also itself being crucial to the maintenance of an affectively resonant celebrity. These vloggers are, in effect, a form of ‘ordinary experts’ (Tolson 2010, pp. 283–285), and copious audience responses reveal that their advice is seen as legitimate and appreciated, not least because of this (albeit performed) sense of ordinariness. Moreover, the prevalence of ‘postfeminist disorders’ such as depression and anxiety amongst girls and young women can be read, in McRobbie’s terms, as forms of ‘illegible rage’ (2009; Elias et al. 2017, p. 26). However, Mansutti does not always ‘parcel’ her distress and pain ‘into a consumable, funny, lighthearted package’, as Kanai (2017, pp. 304–305) has argued of the Tumblr bloggers she studied, but foregrounds it. Like Kanai, Gill and Orgad suggest that self-confidence permits no space for feeling bad; in such a context, ‘other affects are systematically disallowed and viciously policed – particularly insecurity’ (2017, p. 33). Conversely, Mansutti encourages her audience to render these more negative affects visible, in the way that she herself does through this channel. Another vlog, ‘We need to talk about depression’ (2016c), features Mansutti, again in the intimate space of her bed, noting that because she has such a large platform, she needs to take the opportunity to ‘openly discuss’ depression further. In the psychoanalytic logic of the ‘talking cure’ familiar to reality television (Shattuc 1997), she urges those suffering to avail themselves of the participatory, confessional capacities of the form, to ‘just talk about it, even if it’s just writing a comment below’. However, it is common to dismiss such vloggers as engaging in a strategic form of self-branding, underpinned by ‘entrepreneurial intent’ (Bishop 2018, p. 95) that benefits only themselves (and the beauty companies and products with which they are associated). Such criticisms are commonly made of celebrities who engage in philanthropic (or what Rojek [2013] dubs ‘celanthropic’) work – that it is merely a cynical branding exercise. In contrast, we argue this is a very limited way of responding to the cultural and affective work vloggers are doing. Vloggers are similar to reality TV lifestyle experts, who have increasingly adopted roles formerly undertaken by those more closely associated with the State (Lewis 2008). In such a context, ‘coaches, motivational speakers, corporate sponsors, and [micro] celebrities take over the dispersed governmental work once performed by social workers, educators and other professionals’ (Ouellette & Hay 2008, p. 474), and via which individuals are seen to be ‘governed at a distance’ (Rose 1996). But the support, recognition, and the intimate publics they help produce should not just be discounted as a form of governmentality. As Amy Dobson notes in her analysis of pain memes, and as Michael Lovelock (2017) and Tobias Raun (2018) have similarly argued in their analyses of coming out and trans vlogs respectively, ‘young people may go

140  YouTube beauty vlogs online for support from peer audiences because speaking to healthcare practitioners is experienced as fruitless at best and abusive at worst’ (Dobson 2015b, p. 177; see also boyd 2014). In ‘Living with Social Anxiety’ (2016b), which received over 3,000 subscriber comments, Mansutti again encourages those who feel they cannot discuss such issues elsewhere to form a ‘community’ in the comments section and ‘help each other out’.14 Here, she explicitly calls upon her audience to form a digital intimate public, providing each other with empathy and online support. Such vlogs, then, help create ‘networked communities that foster care of the self’ (Ouellette & Arcy 2015, p. 103). As in earlier vlogs, she emphasises that her advice is in no way professional, just her ‘personal story’ about how she has managed social anxiety, and – rather than simply changing their attitudes (though she does this at points too) – she encourages viewers to seek professional help as she has done. While Mansutti may appear outwardly to be successful she is at pains to establish that her inner life (like those of her subscribers) is much more complicated than her make-up tutorials imply, and she routinely draws clear distinctions between these performances and the ‘real’ Dani accessible via vlogs. In her automedial advice vlogs, Mansutti constructs herself as a highly insecure, unconfident woman, seeking to demonstrate that she suffers in the way many women do – despite her beauty vlogger celebrity. In ‘I’m Not Good Enough’ (2016a), which is explicitly framed as ‘sharing advice’, she confesses to having life-long ‘self-esteem issues’. She remarks: ‘Just because I post photos of myself doesn’t mean that I’m super confident … the biggest journey I am going on in my 20s is learning to love myself’. Throughout such vlogs, Mansutti underscores that it is social media and especially her profession that results in her subjection to an intensified, regulatory (largely female) gaze – itself a mark of postfeminism (Banet-Weiser 2012; Winch 2013). Social media lives, she emphasises, are not ‘reality’, but heavily curated, and merely work to ensure audiences feel bad about themselves. This is a familiar, if ironic, refrain in the beauty vlogosphere (as the previous section on Curtis has shown).15 Rather than simply unequivocally celebrating her job as a beauty vlogger, as is common (Banet-Weiser 2017), she notes ‘I am scrutinised so hard on everything that I do online’ and that this kind of labour, without the face-to-face sociality of a regular workplace, is isolating and anxiety-provoking. She tells her audience that she ‘plays a little bit of character online’, performing as ‘so much more bubbly and lively’ to ‘come across as really happy and carefree and everything’ (Mansutti 2016a). Indicative of the ‘limitless positivity’ (Bishop 2018, p. 102) said to be required of women vloggers, she underscores how being a YouTuber is, like other forms of micro-­ celebrity, a ‘performative practice’ (Marwick & boyd 2011) – including in terms of embodying positive affect: ‘If I’m not really happy that day, I just put on a smile for work’. Conversely, in advice vlogs (as opposed to beauty tutorials), she disavows this performative aspect and positions

YouTube beauty vlogs  141 herself as genuine and authentic, using this vlog’s lack of a ‘script’ as further evidence of its purportedly unmediated nature. As Berryman and Kavka argue, if forced positivity is fake, then unforced negativity must be ‘real’. The validation for engaging in negative affective labour is thus the increased credibility that accompanies self-exposure, to the extent that the more negative the personal material exposed, the more ‘real’ it is taken to be. (2018, p. 90) As she notes in the paratext of ‘I’m Not Good Enough’ (Mansutti 2016a), in the form of a short, written blurb located beneath it: ‘Today’s video is an important video focusing upon self-worth, insecurities, low self-esteem and negativity. I hope this helps at least one of you. Please remember that you’re amazing. x’. As evidence of its resonance, viewer commentary (over 1,770 posts) in response to this vlog is overwhelmingly supportive, with many noting how ‘relatable’ she is and how much this particular video has helped them in terms of their own self-esteem issues. She also suggests that her project represents an ethical use of the audience she has secured; that is, as a micro-celebrity with a platform for reaching so many, she tells us it is her duty to help her (women) viewers reconceptualise themselves and their bodies: I am so blessed to have an audience of 1.4 million of you, I just feel that if there’s any way I can make your day better or make you see yourself in a different way … then I couldn’t ask for anything more. (Mansutti 2016a) This ethical stance is seen to be important in terms of how audiences perceive beauty vloggers, and whether they will continue to receive audience support; they cannot be merely product ambassadors. As Florencia GarciaRapp notes, for the audiences who consume them, ‘participating in order to help and inspire others is seen as a legitimate reason to create videos, while looking to become famous or rich are examples of unacceptable motivations’ (2017, p. 7). In this respect, by branding herself as compassionate and caring, Mansutti (like Curtis) appears to be in it for the ‘right’ reasons not simply commercial reward or fame, ensuring she remains at once ‘true to herself’ and ‘just like us’ (Garcia-Rapp 2017). Nevertheless, while we could dismiss these personal revelations or experiences as merely being ‘shared in exchange for quantifiable signifiers of popularity … which in turn can be translated into celebrity status and monetary gain’ (Lovelock 2017, p. 90), such negative affect vlogs – due to their often confronting and ‘raw’ content – are not likely to result in monetisation (Berryman & Kavka 2018, pp. 93–94).16 Their value, as we will suggest, lies elsewhere.

142  YouTube beauty vlogs Confidence culture and (post)feminism As we have noted, such vlogs in some ways exemplify the ‘confidence cult(ure)’ of postfeminist neoliberalism; for Gill and Orgad, the ‘cult(ure) of confidence … lets patriarchal culture entirely off the hook – ­apportioning blame to women’ (2015, p. 340). As part of a wider culture of self-help, Gill and Orgad emphasise, such discourses have a much longer history, but in the contemporary climate ‘what makes it distinctive is its gendered address to girls and women, and its apparent embrace of feminist language and goals’ (2015, p. 325). While Gill and Orgad (2017, p. 26) argue that confidence culture ‘turns on its head the notion that the personal is political, and turns away from political critique and any questioning of the culture that might produce self-doubt or lack of confidence in women’, Mansutti does not locate women’s insecurities in themselves (as is common in self-help) but sees them as the product of a wider pernicious, gendered culture of surveillance. Although generally no collectivist solutions are directly offered, women are not seen to be responsible for their anxieties. Consistent with Gill and Orgad’s (2015, p. 340) analysis, Mansutti at times sees gendered insecurities as surmountable, something that ‘could and should be “overcome” with the right techniques or self-regulation practices or a suitably “adjusted” (mind)set’. Yet a recurrent theme in her mental health vlogs is that this is much easier said than done, and her own ongoing struggles in this regard are narrated as evidence of the persistent judgement of women’s bodies in the online environment. However, we must be mindful that Mansutti – as a beauty vlogging star – directly participates in and benefits from the postfeminist ‘injurious culture of body perfection and women’s perfectionism’ (Gill & Orgad, 2015, pp. 340–341), and women’s desire to aesthetically always be otherwise. This is the tension that marks all these beauty-turned-advice channels, and upon which Mansutti herself persistently reflects. At the heart of Mansutti’s rhetoric of self-acceptance and self-love is a critique of the judgement and regulation of women’s bodies, that, at the very least, and similar to our self-help books, is indebted to feminist interpretive frameworks. In a number of vlogs (2016a, 2017b, 2017c), Mansutti confesses to having had extremely ‘unhealthy’ moments regarding her body, and her audience commonly reciprocate, revealing their personal ‘struggles’ in the comment sections. As she tells audiences, in a rhetoric consistent with that of popular feminist authors such as Naomi Wolf (1990), ‘We have grown up surrounded by these ideal Westernised bodies, and if we don’t fit that standard, we believe there is something wrong with us … we teach ourselves to feel inadequate and that’s not right’ (2017a). Importantly, she does not advocate consumption – of beauty products or other commodities – as the way to move beyond such feelings of inadequacy, as other vloggers such as Zoella have done (Bishop 2018). For

YouTube beauty vlogs  143 Mansutti, aesthetic labour does not produce self-confidence and therefore she does not explicitly propose this as a way for her audience to manage such negative affect. She does, however, advocate a change in attitude. In another vlog, ‘Hating Your Body and Unhealthy Relationship with Food’, she addresses her intended audience: This video is for anyone who has ever looked at themselves in the mirror and hated what they saw, for anyone who has ever spent hours comparing themselves to girls on Instagram or in magazines … I want to teach you how to love your body. It’s the most amazing mechanism in the world. It just wants to feel the love from you that it deserves. (2017b) Such ‘love your body’ (LYB) discourses have been cast as fundamentally ambivalent, especially as they appear to reinscribe the female body as pathologised: ‘LYB discourses rely upon and reinforce the cultural intelligibility of the female body as inherently “difficult to love” ’ (Gill & Elias 2014, p. 184). Naturalising and normalising this bodily hatred, positioning it as a universalised feminine experience, serves simply to buttress the kinds of gendered assumptions advertisers, such as Dove, purport to be contesting (Gill & Elias 2014; see also Banet-Weiser 2017). For Gill and Elias (2014, p. 185), such LYB discourses simply represent a new form of regulating women, not just physically but also psychically. As we conclude, however, responses to these vlogs complicate such framing. The emphasis in Mansutti’s mental health vlogs, as the above examples make clear, is on ‘self-love not self-hate, self-assurance not insecurity, building the self, not self-harm, positive image not self-criticism etc’ (Gill & Orgad 2015, p. 341). While Gill and Orgad dismiss the feminist potentialities of such discourses, we are more circumspect, given that such advice appears to be reverberating with audiences; they offer, we would suggest, more than just an ‘instrumentalised’ and/or reactionary form of feminism that works to merely buttress postfeminism in a more complicated way than disavowal (Kanai 2019; see also Gill 2017; Gill & Orgad 2017; Banet-Weiser 2018). For example, in a recent vlog about doctoring photos of herself using the ‘Facetune’ application (Mansutti 2018), which begins with a deep sigh to signal some difficulty in raising the forthcoming material,17 Mansutti critically reflects upon the effects of her self-representational practices on her audience, especially as young girls often write to her about their imperfect bodies after consuming her heavily edited photographs: ‘We [beauty vloggers] are contributing to this problem, and I am being such a hypocrite. How on earth can I put up a photo about body acceptance and self-love if that photo is edited? … I’m so done with sending out a false image of who I am’ (Mansutti 2018). She thus frames ‘authenticity’ as a moral duty, and remarks that she hopes to ‘start a movement’ against airbrushing and photo-shopping,

144  YouTube beauty vlogs given the damage it is causing to her young women subscribers. Again, the response from audiences is effusive, celebrating her generosity, openness, and self-reflexivity; one tells her it is one of the ‘rawest and realist videos you’ve ever made and I’m proud of you’ (SS) – numerous followers express such pride at her public refusal to no longer ‘mask’ her real self and to take a stand about these formerly invisible practices of apparent misrepresentation. Guaranteeing subscribers that she will no longer use such apps, because of how they make young women feel about themselves, Mansutti encourages others with power in this attention economy to do the same: ‘I want to apologise to you for what I’ve done … it would be great if other influencers would join me on this’. Here, the ‘problem’ is not insecure audiences who just need to accept themselves and develop self-confidence, but the beauty vloggers who are thoroughly implicated in, and whose practices work to foster, the judgement and regulation of women’s bodies. This may not appear to be what some would consider feminist work in a traditional sense, but there is no doubt that this is a noteworthy political gesture, calling into question the impetus towards bodily perfection for women, and how a collective of women (i.e. beauty vloggers) can take action to transform attitudes and gendered behaviours. Intimate publics, such as those brought into being in and through these vlogs, can be conceptualised as ‘juxtapolitical’, signalling a form of sociality which: thrives in proximity to the political, occasionally crossing over in political alliance, even more occasionally doing some politics, but most often than not, acting as a critical chorus that sees the expression of emotional response and conceptual recalibration as achievement enough. (Berlant in Douglas & Poletti 2016, p. 200; see also Dobson 2015b; McDermott 2018; Kanai 2019) Crucially, as Kate Douglas and Anna Poletti (2016, p. 201) underscore, though she is concerned with why these feelings and their public articulation do not translate into social and political change, Berlant does not devalue such affective work in favour of political organising (as more tangible political work with ‘real’ outcomes). As Berlant notes: One of the main jobs of the minoritized arts that circulate through mass culture [in which we can now place vlogs] is to tell identifying consumers that ‘you are not alone (in your struggles, desires, pleasures)’: this is something we know but never tire of hearing confirmed, because aloneness is one of the affective experiences of being collectively, structurally unprivileged. (2008, pp. ix–x)

YouTube beauty vlogs  145 Young women’s experiences are not individualised in these vlogs, but – in addition to being ‘powerful forces for the discussion of the life experiences of young people’ – something that unites these anxious postfeminist subjects, even if not necessarily resulting in ‘substantive cultural change’ (Douglas & Poletti 2016, p. 201). Indicative of its power, Mansutti’s critique of the judgement and selfsurveillance of her body (2017b) appears to resonate with women subscribers, who overwhelmingly dub her ‘inspirational’ in the comments section: ‘Your words are so empowering. You go Dani!!!’ (AM), for instance. Another follower draws attention to her implicitly feminist work: ‘Ah this is just what I needed to hear; made me cry; thankyou for sharing how you’ve felt and doing all you can to make a difference. Women supporting women’ (AC). Many others also note that they watched with tears in their eyes, and reciprocate by sharing their own deeply held bodily anxieties. Similarly, in response to another vlog (2017c), a young girl posts: ‘I’m 12 and every time I go on social media I feel pressured to be perfect and to have looks and body and it makes me feel so down but I just watched this video and it was so relatable and special! all your videos help me live through everyday! thank you for everything xxx’ (TM). The majority of this intimate public appear grateful to know that they are not alone, indicating such vlogs are fulfilling an important affective function that should not, we argue, be discounted – despite its emergence from a beauty channel. As Ouellette and Arcy (2015, p. 111) note, drawing upon Sara Ahmed, ‘we need to be careful about collapsing all forms of self-care under the banner of neoliberalism [or indeed postfeminism]’, and recognise the affective and political potential of such vlogs.

Conclusion As we have shown, these vloggers help to bring into being intimate publics, and act as sites for the public performance of both positive and negative affect, offering feminist-informed critiques of gendered judgements that speak to large audiences of girls and young women. Central to this transnational semioscape of confidence and care is a form of postfeminist kinship (like in the dramedy chapter), much needed in a neoliberal environment in which the individual is supposed to ‘do it herself’. While they may seek to sell make-up, they also use this platform in another way: to make explicit and help to manage the anxieties, tensions, and often pain that constitute contemporary girls’ and women’s subjectivities. We are not suggesting this is unproblematic, especially given the positioning of anxiety as something all young women must now face and manage in the same way (Gill & Orgad 2015), but we cannot ignore that ‘the emotion work of advice-giving and the communication of support constitute important arenas of political activity’ (Renstchler 2014, p. 77). These vloggers provide a space for, and themselves model, the sharing of experiences and

146  YouTube beauty vlogs strategies (at times consistent with postfeminism and neoliberalism, at others not), performed by the individual but recommended to the collective. Although, of course, engaged in acts of self-representation that are profoundly shaped by the platform, they are best conceptualised as ‘suffering actors’, working to publicly make sense – both for themselves and for those who become enfolded into these intimate publics – of their contradictory positioning within neoliberal and postfeminist logics, and are arguably interested ‘less in changing the world than in not being defeated by it’ (Berlant in Harris & Dobson 2015, p. 9; see also Dobson & Kanai 2018; McDermott 2018). Such vlogs, though not conventional political forms, do evidence young women’s ‘struggles for coherence, social acceptance and survival’, which need to be better understood as agentic, and we would add feminist, acts (Harris & Dobson 2015, p. 9, emphasis added; see also Dobson 2015b). However, this is not a simple attempt to recuperate these vlogs as resistant rather than normative, the problems of which have been outlined by other critics (Garcia-Rapp 2018; McDermott 2018), but to emphasise that we need to further attend to the affective and psychic life of popular culture, as well as to the kind of feminisms that may be mobilised therein (Gill & Kanai 2018; Kanai 2019), something we also take up in the next chapter on self-help literature. In feminist terms, the supportive networks we have identified as constituting the beauty vlogging semioscape are significant, especially in offering affective bonds to, at times quite isolated, women (in Australian rural settings as well as regional towns, for instance). These networks also offer a kind of solidarity, particularly around the ongoing judgement and regulation of women’s bodies, with many increasingly using their vlogs to provide tools for girls and young women to negotiate this, often toxic, environment by means other than withdrawal. As we have posited, despite their reinscription of ‘confidence culture’ rhetoric, it is not productive to completely dismiss these vloggers’ affective ties and advice, and to criticise them for not offering manifestos to collectively dismantle the patriarchy is misplaced. But we can further think through the needs these young women are fulfilling and the kinds of femininities they, and their audiences/fans, are being expected to embody in contemporary Australia – and, given the transnational nature of postfeminism, beyond. If this feminism of self-love, confidence, and acceptance – even when it is perhaps contradicted by the beauty pedagogies in which it is implicated – is the kind that is resonating with young women, we need to engage with why this might be the case, including via more empirical work. Finally, despite much scholarship that presumes postfeminism successfully captures unwitting female audiences (a deeply gendered position critiqued by cultural studies long ago), they are no more ‘duped’ by these vloggers than they are by other forms of popular culture – something which applies as much to its creators. As Mary Celeste Kearney (2015, p. 272; see also

YouTube beauty vlogs  147 White 2015) argues, ‘Surely there is more to these … girl-made media than their creators’ passive absorption of postfeminist rhetoric’. The next chapter, building upon the ideas canvassed here, focuses on the ways in which feminism has come to inform self-help discourse, itself a space for thinking through how macro political shifts may play out at the micro level of individual women’s lives, and how a spectral form of feminism is being invoked to help make sense of, and negotiate the ongoing tensions in, contemporary Australian women’s lives.

Notes   1 Although it is beyond the scope of this chapter to further take up how girls are framed in scholarship on postfeminism, it is worth noting that in myriad studies, girls and young women are considered to be particularly problematic within postfeminist (and indeed neoliberal) discursive frameworks. For example, Girlness – particularly adolescent girlness – epitomizes postfeminism. If the postfeminist woman is always in process, always using the freedom and equality handed to her by feminism in pursuit of having it all … but never quite managing to reach full adulthood, to fully have it all, one could say that the postfeminist woman is quintessentially adolescent … no matter what her age. (Projansky 2007, p. 45) For a critique of such critical positioning, see Kearney (2015) and Driscoll (2018).   2 While our central preoccupation here is not labour, it is crucial, as Brooke Erin Duffy (2017, p. 48) reminds us, to not just dismiss vloggers as dupes of capitalism – or, we would add, patriarchy – unwittingly providing ‘free’ labour, ‘just for the fun of it’, or in the service of pernicious beauty industries. Rather, as she found, young women ‘approach social media creation with strategy, purpose, and aspirations of career success’ and ‘the production of social media content’ provides an opportunity through which young can women ‘manage one’s employment prospects in the face of radical uncertainty’ (Duffy 2017, pp. 48, 54, original emphasis). This is not to normalise or be uncritical of such precarity, but to highlight young women’s creative responses to it. Although contracts with corporations or sponsorship deals, or the creation of their own beauty and/or fashion lines, are not available to all (Banet-Weiser 2017, p. 272), the vloggers we look at have achieved success and transformed their labour into a viable career, reliant, of course, on a consistent self-brand.   3 As Gill notes (2007, p. 182) of women’s magazines, ‘Beauty editors routinely receive huge boxes of free gifts from the cosmetic companies eager for their new product to get a write up; fashion editors “borrow” clothes from designers, fashion houses and clothes stores to photograph or describe …’. This role, as previously remarked in our chapters on chick lit and women’s magazines, has now in many ways been taken up by beauty vloggers, especially through what are referred to as ‘haul’ vlogs where vloggers review products that have been sent to them.   4 They commonly offer travel vlogs, where trips are usually sponsored by a cosmetics company, such as Benefit, and there is commonly a group of beauty vloggers. These filmed holidays to luxury destinations such as the Maldives, in addition to providing further insight into vloggers’ lives, work to create the

148  YouTube beauty vlogs sense of the desirability and viability of beauty vlogging as an occupation for young women. Their lives are considerably glamourised and their online labour is shown to significantly pay off; of course as many scholars have pointed out (Duffy 2017; Banet-Weiser 2017), this is not the case for all vloggers.   5 As Turner (2004) argues, such a shift is itself constitutive of celebrity.   6 The many ‘follow me’ style vlogs – where she speaks directly into a hand-held camera, or perhaps phone, with the audiences effectively accompanying her on her various errands – purport to offer an unmediated access (itself, of course, impossible) to the ‘real’ Curtis (see ‘Snoop in My Bag, Closets and Fridge’, 2014b), and thus are integral to this sense of intimacy (Smith & Watson 2015). That is, they are central to establishing the authenticity upon which this form relies for its success. In a piece titled ‘WeeklyVlog: Whaaat Did I Just Eat?!’, Curtis (2016c) tells viewers: ‘I’m really enjoying vlogging cos I feel like it allows you guys to get to know me better, which is super important to me! Let me know what you thought!:) xxx’.   7 Such vlogs often dually function as promotional videos, as she sometimes lists the brands of clothes she is wearing or the various products she is consuming.   8 See Berryman and Kavka (2017) for an analysis of the ‘big sister’ positioning of beauty vloggers.   9 Viewers, however, are aware of the contradiction of such advice coming from a beauty influencer: ‘I like your videos but this is a little hypocritical – you’re saying you shouldnt [sic] wear too much make up but your whole job revolves around beauty, make up and looking a certain way’ (HS, in response to ‘Advice on Boys, Bullying and Self Confidence!’). 10 In this respect, though of course very different texts, their responses are reminiscent of those sent to authors of ‘feminist blockbusters’, such as Betty Friedan and Germaine Greer, who are routinely credited with articulating what women readers themselves simply could not (Taylor 2016). 11 Enormously popular Asian-Australian beauty/lifestyle vlogger Wengie (nearly 13.4 million followers), who mounts a significant challenge to the whiteness of the beauty vlogosphere, reassures her followers that it is possible to ‘come from nothing and create a really good life for yourself … You shouldn’t be limited by any circumstances you were born in’ (2015). She emphasises the agency, self-motivation, and creativity of the refugee subject, one who is unhindered by race or class and who uses their adversity to become a successful, upwardly mobile entrepreneur. 12 This section was available during 2017 and 2018 while we were undertaking this research, however it appears to have been removed. Individual vlogs that made up this section are still available on YouTube. 13 Her first vlog along these lines, ‘Bullying and Depression: My Story’, was uploaded in December 2014, focusing on the bullying she had experienced at school and on Facebook (including groups such as ‘Dani’s an ugly whore’ and ‘Dani’s a fat slut’ where photos would be uploaded without her consent and she would be ridiculed). She suggests that Tumblr was her ‘saviour’, where she blogged about these issues and took control of her representation (2014). 14 This vlog is very similar to one offered by the UK’s most subscribed beauty vlogger, Zoella, entitled ‘Dealing with Panic Attacks and Anxiety’ (7 November 2012). 15 She notes that ‘social media is the edited existence of our being, so it isn’t “us” ’ (Mansutti 2017c). 16 As Berryman and Kavka note (2018, p. 93), At odds with the YouTube Partner Policy updated in late August 2016, these vlogs run the risk of being judged ‘not advertiser friendly’ should they

YouTube beauty vlogs  149 involve profanities or discuss ‘sensitive subjects’ (YouTube, n.d.), in turn preventing vloggers registered with the Partner Program from generating revenue through the adverts placed before, during and around these videos. 17 As Berryman and Kavka further note, ‘YouTubers proclaim that their uneasiness at discussing such personal information will be “worth it” if the message of their videos resonates with their viewers’ (2018, p. 89).

References Abidin, C. 2018, Internet celebrity: understanding fame online, Emerald Publishing, Bingley. Affuso, E. 2017, ‘The labour of transformation: spaces of feminine imperfection in YouTube videos’, Flow, 27 November, viewed 20 April 2019, www.flowjournal. org/2017/11/the-labor-of-transformation/. Andrejevic, M. 2004, Reality TV: the work of being watched, Rowman & Littlefield, New York. Appadurai, A. 1996, Modernity at large: cultural dimensions of globalization, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN. Banet-Weiser, S. 2012, Authentic™: The politics of ambivalence in a brand culture, Duke University Press, Durham, NC. Banet-Weiser, S. 2017, ‘ “I’m beautiful the way I Am”: empowerment, beauty, and aesthetic labour’, in A. Elias, R. Gill, & C. Scharff (eds), Aesthetic labour: rethinking beauty politics in neoliberalism, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, pp. 265–282. Banet-Weiser, S. 2018, Empowered: popular feminism and popular misogyny, Duke University Press, Durham, NC. Berger, J. 1972, Ways of seeing, Penguin, London. Berlant, L. 2008, The female complaint: the unfinished business of sentimentality in American culture, Duke University Press, Durham, NC. Berryman, R. & Kavka, M. 2017, ‘ “I guess a lot of people see me as a big sister or a friend”: the role of intimacy in the celebrification of beauty vloggers’, Journal of Gender Studies, vol. 26, no. 3, pp. 307–320. Berryman, R. & Kavka, M. 2018, ‘Crying on YouTube: vlogs, self-exposure and the productivity of negative affect’, Convergence, vol. 24, no. 1, pp. 85–98. Bishop, S. 2018, ‘#YouTuber Anxiety: anxiety as emotional labour and masquerade in beauty vlogs’, in S. Driver & N. Coulter (eds), Youth mediations and affective relations, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke. boyd, d. 2014, It’s complicated: the social lives of networked teens, Yale University Press, New Haven, CT. Braidotti, R. 2006, Transpositions, Polity, Cambridge. Burgess, J. & Green, J. 2009, YouTube: online video and participatory culture, Polity, Cambridge. Curtis, L. 2013a, ‘Advice on boys, bullying and self confidence!’, vlog, 1 February, YouTube, viewed 15 September 2017, www.youtube.com/watch?v=GIe_nVlzPAo. Curtis, L. 2013b, ‘Fifty facts about me tag’, vlog, 21 May, YouTube, viewed 20 September 2017, www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCkvcoHkO3E. Curtis, L. 2014a, ‘Q&A, my break up, my income, my Body’, vlog, 6 October 2014, YouTube, viewed 15 September 2017, www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_ iORlx5-xQ.

150  YouTube beauty vlogs Curtis, L. 2014b, ‘Snoop in my bag, closets and fridge’, vlog, 28 July, YouTube, viewed 3 May 2019, www.youtube.com/watch?v=uFO2r7E7kNc. Curtis, L. 2014c, ‘Surviving high school – yuck!’, vlog, 24 June, YouTube, viewed 15 September 2017, www.youtube.com/watch?v=ya-O3b1IVZY. Curtis, L. 2014d, ‘Q&A: my breakup, my income, my body’, vlog, YouTube, 6 October, viewed 16 September 2017, www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_ iORlx5-xQ. Curtis, L. 2015a, ‘Boy talk: overcoming insecurities & breakups, finding “the one” ’, 26 October, vlog, YouTube, viewed 17 September 2017, www.youtube. com/watch?v=2fXaAKR14bY. Curtis, L. 2015b, ‘Chat with me/GRWM: life updates and embarrassing stories!’, vlog, 5 September, YouTube, viewed 17 September 2017, www.youtube.com/ watch?v=aIMg21bF_2g. Curtis, L. 2016a, ‘Chat with me: current favourites, why I’ve “changed” and personal stories!’, vlog, 1 April, YouTube, viewed 17 September 2017, www. youtube.com/watch?v=PPWDgWpT-7w. Curtis, L. 2016b, ‘Storytime: my dating fails’, vlog, 25 July, YouTube, viewed 16 September 2017, www.youtube.com/watch?v=9JOQl0a3R_Y. Curtis, L. 2016c ‘Weekly vlog: whaaat did I just eat?!’, vlog, 28 April, YouTube, viewed 3 May 2019, www.youtube.com/watch?v=cAPzhnJWFYk. Curtis, L. 2017, ‘The best advice I’ve ever given’, vlog, 25 May, YouTube, viewed 16 September 2017, www.youtube.com/watch?v=N2HCCAROkpY. Curtis, L. 2018, ‘The truth about social media’, vlog, 9 April, YouTube, viewed, 6 June 2018, www.youtube.com/watch?v=mP89KaH-Z0. Dobson, A.S. 2008, ‘Femininities as commodities: cam girl culture’, in A. Harris (ed.), Next wave cultures: feminism, subcultures, activism, Routledge, New York, pp. 123–148. Dobson, A.S. 2015a, Postfeminist digital cultures: femininity, social media and self-representation, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke. Dobson, A.S. 2015b, ‘Girls’ “Pain memes” on YouTube: the production of pain and femininity on a digital network’, in S. Baker, B. Robards, & B. Buttigieg (eds), Youth cultures and subcultures: Australian perspectives, Routledge, London, pp. 173–182. Dobson, A.S. & Kanai, A. 2018, ‘From “can-do” girls to insecure and angry: affective dissonances in young women’s post-recessional media’, Feminist Media Studies, https://10.1080/14680777.2018.1546206. Dobson, A.S., Carah, N., & Robards, B. 2018, ‘Digital intimate publics and social media: towards theorising public lives on private platforms’, in A.S. Dobson, N. Carah, & B. Robards (eds), Digital intimate publics and social media, ­Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, pp. 3–27. Dosekun, S. 2015, ‘For Western girls only? Post-feminism as transnational culture’ Feminist Media Studies, vol. 15, no. 6, pp. 960–975. Douglas, K. & Poletti, A. 2016, Life narratives and youth culture representation, agency and participation, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke. Driscoll, C. 2018, ‘The girl: dynamics of anxiety and reassurance’, unpublished paper, presented at the ‘Crossroads in Cultural Studies’ conference, University of Shanghai, August 12–15. Duffy, B. 2017, (Not) getting paid to do what you love: gender, social media, and aspirational work, Yale University Press, New Haven, CT.

YouTube beauty vlogs  151 Elias, A., Gill, R., & Scharff, C. 2017, ‘Aesthetic labour: beauty politics in neoliberalism’, in A. Elias, R. Gill, & C. Scharff (eds), Aesthetic labour: rethinking beauty politics in neoliberalism, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, pp. 3–49. Faleatua, R. 2018, ‘Insta brand me: playing with notions of authenticity’, Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, vol. 32, no. 6, pp. 721–732. Garcia-Rapp, F. 2017, ‘ “Come join and let’s BOND”: authenticity and legitimacy building on YouTube’s beauty community’, Journal of Media Practice, vol. 18, no. 2–3, pp. 120–137. Garcia-Rapp, F. 2018, ‘Trivial and normative? Online fieldwork within YouTube’s beauty community’, Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, doi.org/10.1177/​ 0891241618806974. Genz, S. 2015, ‘My job is me: postfeminist celebrity culture and the gendering of authenticity’, Feminist Media Studies, vol. 15, no. 4, pp. 545–561. Gill, R. 2007, Gender and the media, Polity, London. Gill, R. 2016, ‘Post-postfeminism? New feminist visibilities in postfeminist times’, Feminist Media Studies, vol. 16, no. 4, pp. 610–630. Gill, R. 2017, ‘The affective, cultural and psychic life of postfeminism: a postfeminist sensibility 10 years on’, European Journal of Cultural Studies, vol. 20, no. 6, pp. 606–626. Gill, R. & Elias, A. 2014, ‘ “Awaken your incredible”: love your body discourses and postfeminist contradictions’, International Journal of Media and Cultural Studies, vol. 10, no. 2, pp. 179–188. Gill, R. & Kanai, A. 2018, ‘Mediating neoliberal capitalism: affect, subjectivity and inequality’, Journal of Communication, vol. 68, pp. 318–326. Gill, R. & Orgad, S. 2015, ‘The confidence cult(ure)’, Australian Feminist Studies, vol. 30, no. 86, pp. 324–344. Gill, R. & Orgad, S. 2017, ‘Confidence culture and the remaking of feminism’, New Formations, no. 91, pp. 16–34. Harris, A. 2004, Future girl: young women in the twenty-first century, Routledge, London. Harris, A. & Dobson, A.S. 2015, ‘Theorizing agency in post-girlpower times’, Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, vol. 13, no. 2, pp. 145–156. Hearn, A. 2012, ‘Brand me “activist” ’, in S. Banet-Weiser & R. Mukherjee (eds), Commodity activism: cultural resistance in neoliberal times, New York University Press, New York, pp. 23–38. Hindman, M. 2009, The myth of digital democracy, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ. Hollows, J. 2000, Feminism, femininity and popular culture, Manchester University Press, Manchester. Jenkins, H. 2006, Convergence culture: where old and new media collide, New York University Press, New York. Jerslev, A. 2016, ‘In the time of the microcelebrity: celebrification and the YouTuber Zoella’, International Journal of Communication, vol. 10, pp. 5233–5251. Kanai, A. 2017, ‘Girlfriendship and sameness: affective belonging in a digital intimate public’, Journal of Gender Studies, vol. 26, no. 3, pp. 293–306. Kanai, A. 2019, Gender and relatability in digital culture: managing affect, intimacy and value, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke. Kearney, M. 2006, Girls make media, Routledge, New York.

152  YouTube beauty vlogs Kearney, M. C. (ed.) 2011, Mediated girlhoods: new explorations of girls’ media culture, Peter Lang, New York. Kearney, M.C. 2015, ‘Sparkle: luminosity and post-girl power media, Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, vol. 29, no. 2, pp. 263–273. Keller, J. 2015, Girls’ feminist blogging in a postfeminist age, Routledge, New York. Kennedy, U. 2016, ‘Exploring YouTube as a transformative tool in the “The power of MAKEUP!” movement’, M/C Journal, viewed 20 April 2019, http:// journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/view/1127. Lange, P. 2007, ‘Publicly private and privately public: social networking on YouTube’, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, vol. 13, no. 1, pp. 361–380. Lazar, M. 2017, ‘ “Seriously girly fun!”: recontextualising aesthetic labour as fun and play in cosmetics advertising’, in A. Elias, R. Gill, & C. Scharff (eds), Aesthetic labour: rethinking beauty, politics in neoliberalism, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, pp. 51–66. Leppert, A. 2015, ‘Keeping up with the Kardashians: fame-work, and the production of entrepreneurial sisterhood’, in E. Levine (ed.), Cupcakes, pinterest, and ladyporn: feminized popular culture in the early 21st century, University of Illinois Press, Champaign, IL, pp. 215–231. Lewis, T. 2008, Smart living: lifestyle media and popular expertise, Peter Lang, New York. Littler, J. 2008, ‘ “I feel your pain”: cosmopolitan charity and the public fashioning of the celebrity soul’, Social Semiotics, vol. 18. no. 2, pp. 237–251. Lovelock, M. 2017, ‘ “Is every YouTuber going to make a coming out video eventually?” YouTube celebrity video bloggers and lesbian and gay identity’, Celebrity Studies, vol. 8, no. 1, pp. 87–103. Maguire, E. 2015, ‘Self-branding, hotness, and girlhood in the video blogs of Jenna Marbles’, Biography, vol. 38, no. 1, pp. 72–86. Maguire, E. 2017, Girls, autobiography, media: gender and self mediation in digital economies, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke. Mansutti, D. 2014, ‘Bullying and depression: my story’, vlog, 11 December, YouTube, viewed 7 November 2017, www.youtube.com/watch?v=sxshomf8YDg. Mansutti, D. 2016a, ‘I’m not good enough’, vlog, 17 March, YouTube, viewed, 9 November 2017, www.youtube.com/watch?v=AM1nVm95l6Q. Mansutti, D. 2016b, ‘Living with social anxiety’, vlog, 23 June, YouTube, viewed,8 November 2017, www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ezo-T32KHT8. Mansutti, D. 2016c, ‘We need to talk about depression’, vlog, 6 October, YouTube, viewed 7 November 2017, www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7cxVI_B_WU. Mansutti, D. 2017a, ‘Depression and Suicide’, vlog, 22 May 2017, YouTube, viewed, 9 November 2018, www.youtube.com/watch?v=eE1Wab2PrOk. Mansutti, D. 2017b, ‘Hating your body and unhealthy relationship with food’, vlog, 15 February, YouTube, viewed 9 November, www.youtube.com/ watch?v=ZF0OIBXndwo. Mansutti, D. 2017c, ‘Why can’t I have that? Social media & comparing yourself’, vlog, 24 April, YouTube, viewed 9 November 2017, www.youtube.com/ watch?v=eVRj0byfI2U. Mansutti, D. 2018, ‘An honest chat about social media & facetune’, vlog, 14 June, YouTube, viewed1 July 2018, www.youtube.com/watch?v=cf41sCwuXDg.

YouTube beauty vlogs  153 Marshall, P. D. 1997, Celebrity and power, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN. Marshall, P.D. 2010, ‘The promotion and presentation of the self: celebrity as marker of presentational media’, Celebrity Studies, vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 35–48. Marwick, A. 2013, Status update: celebrity, publicity, and branding in the social media age, Yale University Press, New Haven, CT. Marwick, A. 2016, ‘You may know me from YouTube (micro-)celebrity in social media, in P.D. Marshall & S. Redmond (eds), A companion to celebrity, Wiley Blackwell, London, pp. 333–350. Marwick, A. & boyd, d. 2011, ‘To see and be seen: celebrity practice on Twitter’, Convergence, vol. 17, no. 2, pp. 139–158. McDermott, C. 2018, ‘How to survive the postfeminist impasse: Grace Helbig’s affective aesthetics’, Girlhood Studies, vol. 11, no. 3, pp. 50–66. McRobbie, A. 2009, The aftermath of feminism: gender, culture and social change, Sage, London. McRobbie, A. 2015, ‘Notes on the perfect: competitive femininity in neoliberal times’, Australian Feminist Studies, vol. 30, no. 83, pp. 3–20. Mendes, K., Ringrose, J., & Keller, J. 2019 Digital feminist activism: girls and women fight back against rape culture, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Mulvey, L. 1975, ‘Visual pleasure and narrative cinema’, Screen, vol. 16, no. 3, pp. 6–18. Nunn, H. & Biressi, A. 2010, ‘ “A trust betrayed”: celebrity and the work of emotion’, Celebrity Studies, vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 49–64. Ouellette, L. & Arcy, J. 2015, ‘ “Live through this”: feminist care of the self 2.0’, Frame, vol. 28, no. 2, pp. 95–114. Ouellette, L. & Hay, J. 2008, ‘Makeover television, governmentality and the good citizen’, Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, vol. 22, no. 4, pp. 471–484. Piepmeier, A. 2009, Girl zines: making media, doing feminism, New York University Press, New York. Poletti, A. 2017, ‘What’s next? Mediation’, a/b: Auto/Biography Studies, vol. 32, no. 2, pp. 263–266. Projansky, S. 2007, ‘Mass magazine cover girls: some reflections on postfeminist girls and postfeminism’s daughters’, in Y. Tasker & D. Negra (eds), Interrogating postfeminism: gender and the politics of popular culture, Duke University Press, Durham, NC, pp. 40–72. Raby, R., Caron, C., Théwissen-LeBlanc, S., Prioletta, J. & Mitchell, C. 2018, ‘Vlogging on YouTube: the online, political engagement of young Canadians advocating for social change’, Journal of Youth Studies, vol. 21, no. 4, pp. 495–512. Rak, J. 2015, ‘Life writing versus automedia: the Sims 3 game as a life lab’, Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly, vol. 38, no. 2, pp. 155–180. Raun, T. 2018, ‘Capitalizing intimacy: new subcultural forms of microcelebrity strategies and affective labour on YouTube’, Convergence, vol. 24, no. 1, pp. 99–113. Redmond, S. 2008, ‘Pieces of me: celebrity confessional carnality’, Social Semiotics, vol. 18, no. 2, pp. 149–161. Renstchler, C. 2014, ‘Rape culture and the feminist politics of social media’, Girlhood Studies, vol. 7, no. 1, pp. 65–82. Rojek, C. 2001, Celebrity, Reaktion, London.

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5 Self-help books Calculating magic as postfeminist everyday philosophy

In the previous chapter we observed the semioscape of confidence and care: young women’s expertise in, and methods of, care for the self and for others in an online platform. This chapter continues our interest in the affective and psychic dimensions of postfeminism as advocated by Ana Elias et al. (2017, p. 5), however, we turn to the print form of women’s self-help books, and a more diverse (in terms of age) readership. We argue that the semioscape of Australian women’s self-help books takes the form of an everyday philosophy for the ideal postfeminist woman: a way of thinking, feeling, and acting that we term ‘calculating magic’. This philosophy hybridises the calculating mentality characterising neoliberalism (Brown 2009, p. 43) and a non-scientific mode of belief and ‘knowledge’. This hybrid term suggests not so much a double-entanglement of feminist and anti-feminist ideas (as in Angela McRobbie’s influential formulation of postfeminism [2009, p. 13]), but rather, the ideologico-historical location of contemporary women’s self-help. It is caught between second wave feminism and neoliberal times and precepts. While Australian chick lit uses tropes of aspiration and independence to stage a feministic remake of the economy of signs and space, self-help books act as a prime site for the feminisation of neoliberalism – the process by which neoliberalism is ‘made over’ in terms attractive to a female audience (as also observed by Gill 2007b; Taylor 2012, amongst others). Simultaneously, however, self-help continues, in attenuated form, the legacy of second wave feminism. The category of self-help and advice books refers to the range of subgenres purporting to offer guidance to readers, spanning self-actualisation texts, health and fitness, parenting advice, domestic etiquette, personal finances, and career help. Indeed, this range suggests the expansion and increasing appeal of the genre, which dates from the 1980s in the United States (Ebben 1995, p. 111) – the decade of Reaganism and its intensification of neoliberalism. Alongside the proliferation of self-help books, according to Kylie Murphy Murdoch, ‘in the 1980s it was the sub-genres of self-help that were gendered’ (2001, p. 161), with many titles being published specifically for women. In the twenty-first century, women are now major producers of self-help advice, the main readership (Miller &

156  Self-help books McHoul 1998, p. 145), and the implied subjects of so many of these books.1 As a consequence, self-help is a focus in analyses of postfeminist culture (McRobbie 2004; Gill 2007b; Taylor 2012; Adamson & Salmenniemi 2017). In these accounts, self-help’s typical mode of privatising, individuating, and disciplining the female self along heteronormative and/or neoliberal lines exemplifies the postfeminist trope of the makeover (Gill 2007b), thereby making it a core and problematic postfeminist genre. To better understand its popularity and its feminist potential, we take a slightly different approach, one suggested by Eva Illouz’s study of self-help culture, in which she advocates exploring how the discourse of self-help ‘accomplishes certain things that “work” in people’s everyday lives’ (2008, p. 21). This approach allows us to position women readers as agentic rather than passive subjects, an identity confirmed by studies that show self-help readers to be critical and strategic readers (Grodin 1995, p. 126; Nehring 2016, p. 161). To see how self-help ‘helps [women] do things’ (Illouz 2008, p. 20), and to identify its affective mechanics and rhetorics, we analyse selected texts from four sub-genres. Our focus is on self-help books written by women based in Australia, using Australian publishers, and directed at an implied female audience.2 We first provide a brief overview of the structure and development of the field of Australian women’s self-help texts, a broad but invaluable contextual focus largely absent from accounts of postfeminist self-help, and one that demonstrates self-help’s in between location. We then analyse the way in which the semioscape of calculating magic is figured in examples from four key sub-genres of ­Australian self-help literature: self-actualisation guides, health and fitness books, mothering guides, and career advice. Our chapter contends that postfeminist self-help is a modification of, and replacement for, the second wave feminist practice of consciousnessraising. Extending Cynthia D. Schrager’s observation that self-help appropriates feminist elements (1993, p. 188), we argue that women’s self-help is dependent on second wave feminist insights – that women are full, complex, and agentic subjects; that women’s lives and issues matter; and that there is a specifically female audience who must be addressed. Furthermore, self-help revisits unresolved feminist issues, such as work, motherhood, and relationships. These issues, however, are increasingly articulated by neoliberal languages and frameworks – the calculating magic of the semioscape – rather than the collective and political analysis of consciousness-raising. Self-help, however, does not so much co-opt feminism for purely commercial purposes, as Arlie Russell Hochschild (1994) argues of 1970s and 1980s self-help, an argument that returns now in terms of feminism’s putative instrumentalisation in popular culture (Kanai 2017). Nor is self-help antagonistic to feminism, as many accounts of postfeminism suggest (for instance, Faludi 1991; Gill 2007a; McRobbie 2009). Rather, postfeminist self-help is a palimpsestic form, its feminist substrate now being partly overlaid with neoliberal ideology or discourses amenable to

Self-help books  157 neoliberalism, such as the therapeutic and the aesthetic.3 This superimposition occurs for reasons of historical context (discussed below) and conventions of genre. The very textual features that made self-help attractive to second wave feminist self-help classics such as Our Bodies Our Selves (1971) and Fat Is a Feminist Issue (1979) – its teleological and optimistic narrative structure of personal transformation, valorisation of the agentic reader, use of alternative knowledges, and respect for emotions – also make it ideal for personalising and textualising aspects of the neoliberal project for women readers.4 Self-help books continually echo feminism – an echo only growing louder given feminism’s new visibility or ‘luminosity’ (McRobbie 2009; Gill 2016) – but are constrained by their form, and by the related broader historical context in which collectivist and redistributive politics and ideational frameworks are marginal. At the same time that ‘therapeutic culture’ extends its reach and power (Illouz 2008, p. 217), the neoliberal project of the self is valorised throughout Western culture. As in most of our chapters, we therefore reveal much more complicated discursive terrain than feminism’s disavowal or, in more recent accounts, its containment through instrumentalisation. Similar to Rebecca Munford and Melanie Waters’ analysis of popular culture (2014), self-help preserves feminism, rather than marking its pastness, even if in a spectral form.

From consciousness-raising to self-help Anthony Giddens (1991) places self-help books in the broad context of late modernity and its process of individualisation (briefly discussed here in Chapter 2). Giddens (using the example of a self-help book) characterises the late modern self ‘as a reflexive project, for which the individual is responsible … We are, not what we are, but what we make of ourselves’ (1991, p. 75).5 Such a self is brought into being by the post-traditional order: ‘In conditions of high modernity,’ he explains, ‘we all not only follow lifestyles, but in an important sense are forced to do so – we have no choice but to choose’ (1991, p. 81). For Giddens, self-help books express and help us to negotiate the lifestyle choices defining the late modern self, and thus as women become full participants in modernity, they too have to negotiate increased choices, a negotiation we discussed as central to television dramedy. Thus, Giddens’ account suggests that selfhelp is an unavoidable contemporary textual form rather than a specifically neoliberal, and hence intrinsically compromised, genre. This potential of self-help is evident in accounts that have explored the relationship between post-Second World War self-help books and the women’s movement. Steven Starker and Anthea Taylor, for instance, both note the importance of Helen Gurley Brown’s Sex and the Single Girl as a proto-feminist self-help book (Starker 1989, p. 90), while Wendy Simonds (1992, p. 5) argues that ‘the current wave of [women’s] self-help books’

158  Self-help books begins with Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique in 1963. As mentioned above, second wave feminism went on to use self-help for collective and political purposes, and, given the huge popularity of women’s self-help books and the decline of consciousness-raising, some critics now argue that feminism needs to reoccupy the space of self-help books (Schrager 1993, p. 189; Murdoch 2001, p. 160), as it clearly has much potential as a form of popular feminism. A closer examination of the components that comprise Australian women’s self-help texts provides insights into the way in which the genre operates in the Antipodes.6 First, our analysis of the genre’s contents identifies the particular authorial subject and implied reader. Like other versions of women’s therapeutic culture (Swan 2017, p. 279) and the ideal postfeminist subject (Tasker & Negra 2007), authors and readers are overwhelmingly white – or at least racially unmarked, heterosexual (often married or divorced), nominally middle class or aspiring to a middle-class lifestyle, and often having children. Regardless of the esoteric nature of some of the philosophies and techniques, self-help is about conventional Australian women. Second, the genre has expanded significantly, though it has attracted scarce scholarly attention.7 The number of women’s self-help books published has increased, particularly at the start of the twenty-first century. Paralleling this is an increased range of books, expanding beyond domestic guides and etiquette books to include finance, careers, relationships, sexuality, fitness, and philosophy. Moreover, each sub-genre shows an increase in titles: the category of women’s financial guides, for instance, increases from zero texts in the 1970s, two in the 1980s, to fifteen in the 2000s, and seven so far in the 2010s. And although boundaries between sub-genres are porous, self-actualisation texts appear to dominate the field: from 1996 to 2017 it has 70 works compared to health and fitness at 50; followed by parenting advice, relationship guides, and inspirational memoirs with similar numbers (the low 30s).8 This increase in the range and volume of women’s self-help books, and the predominance of self-actualisation texts, should be framed by three historically overlapping and partially complementary contexts. The augmentation of women’s self-help suggests a post-women’s movement era marked by the full participation of women in society, their attainment of subject status, and the resultant roles required of women. In addition, ­Australian women’s self-help seems evidence of the ‘therapeutic culture’ that, as Frank Furedi (2004) and Illouz (2008) argue, has permeated everyday life, public institutions, and the corporate sector in the West. Therapeutic culture ‘posits the self in distinctly fragile and feeble form and insists that the management of life requires the continuous intervention of therapeutic expertise’ (Furedi 2004, p. 21). In Australia, as in other advanced capitalist nations, individualistic, therapeutic, and hence apolitical solutions to, and understandings of, the contemporary female self at all

Self-help books  159 stages and in all aspects of life are dominant, paralleled by an increased postfeminist visibility of women and girls as valuable (to capitalism) subjects. At the same time, the self-help industry is now a ‘hybrid transnational phenomenon’ (Nehring 2016, p. 157), with self-help books being an informal and inexpensive form of therapeutic expertise. Micki McGee’s concept of the ‘belabored self’ (2005) as product of contemporary capitalism is also applicable to these Australian texts. McGee links American self-help books to changes in late capitalism, particularly the entry of women into the workforce (see also Salecl 2009, p. 161) and in terms of labour market requirements, two contextual factors that ­Australia shares. For McGee, self-help books are coping guides for insecure working lives, providing advice for self-improvement to keep the individual marketable, and offering the hope of an authentic self (2005, p. 16). As a consequence, the notion of the ‘self-made man’ is replaced by ‘the belabored self’ (including women): ‘overworked both as the subject and as the object of its own effort at self-improvement’ (2005, p. 16, emphasis added). The belaboured self is belaboured on two levels: in the workplace, namely, in the way in which workers must relentlessly self-improve to remain relevant, and, on a more personal level, with the requirement that now women as well as men must ‘focus on inventing an autonomous or self-sufficient self’ (2005, p. 16). We argue that this second level of the belaboured self also aligns with the neoliberal reduction in the Australian welfare state and the public sector and its turn to self-responsibilisation, expressed in palatable-sounding policies such as ‘mutual obligation’ (Castles 2001, p. 542) and building community and individual ‘resilience’ (Bottrell 2013). And, given their traditional and ongoing role as care-givers (something Offspring considers), the belaboured self has especial valence for women. McGee’s insights are borne out in the proliferation and contents of Australian self-help texts: like women’s magazine titles, all stages and ­ activities of a woman’s life are subject to the regimes of self-help. In effect, women’s supposed formal equality and liberation have paradoxically increased the ways women are seen as lacking – we become the vulnerable self of therapy culture (Furedi 2004, p. 21). We are free to work or be sexual beings, but that means we require work on the self to make this happen effectively. In this typically postfeminist dynamic, we have been ‘deregulated’ by the twin forces of feminism and consumer capitalism only to find we need to be self-regulated, indeed, policed, by neoliberal processes of subjectification in the appealing form of self-help and its ‘neoliberal romance of upward mobility’ (Blum 2018, p. 1099). Australian women, therefore, are subjects of, but also subject to, the broader regimes of late modernity and advanced capitalism (Rimke 2000, p. 62; Hazleden 2003, pp. 424–425). Murdoch is correct when she links the popularity of self-help books for women to the fact that feminism ‘has never promised to produce happiness. Self-help does’ (2001, p. 166). And happiness has

160  Self-help books never been more valued by our culture (Ahmed 2010; Binkley 2014). We turn now to the most prolific form of self-help – self-actualisation guides – to observe how the everyday philosophy of calculating magic is constructed.

Self-actualisation: calculating magic as everyday philosophy The sub-genre of self-actualisation – that is, guides to self-realisation and personal fulfilment – contains a range of approaches, the major ones being New Age spirituality, including feminist versions (as in Evolving Women [Wesson 2015]); a plethora of New Thought movement derivatives (Attitude Goddess [Gay 2008]), which is the dominant form; the ‘tough, nononsense’ and non-spiritual school of self-help, exemplified by Whip Your Life into Shape (Dubberly 2006); as well as books that borrow from some of these. Indeed, if there is one definitive feature of self-actualisation titles, it is an ideational eclecticism – a feature linked to its ‘curatorial function: to mine, collate, and reorganise the archive of textual counsel’ (Blum 2018, p. 1100). The clear dominance of self-actualisation in Australian women’s self-help can be interpreted both optimistically and pessimistically. Women’s desire for self-actualisation (and female authors willing and confident enough to write such works) suggests a desire for some philosophical basis to life, some quest for a fuller subjectivity, and hence a sense of agency and potentiality of the female self. Less optimistically, its methods of thinking and feeling as a coping mechanism also signals women’s existential pain under patriarchal late capitalism, resulting from what Hochschild, in her study of American self-help, terms ‘a stalled gender revolution’ (1994, p. 19). We discuss Julie Gibson’s compilation You Can … Live the Life of Your Dreams (2012) as representative of the New Thought movement version of self-actualisation. Given the popularity of self-actualisation, its broad implied readership of mature women, and its influence on the other sub-genres, we undertake a relatively detailed close reading of Gibson. Self-actualisation is the sub-genre that most explicitly functions as a type of women’s everyday philosophy, offering a set of principles of thinking, feeling, and being able to achieve realisation in, and transformation of, everyday life. As such, it is the sub-genre that most clearly demonstrates calculating magic at work, with its everyday philosophy articulating the ideal postfeminist subject in neoliberal times. This is a female subject somehow managing to blend elements of a soft feminist and pro-femininity ideology with a degree of entrepreneurial panache and economic reasoning. Moreover, we contend that the calculating magic found in self-actualisation is an Australian variant of the ‘magical thinking’ that surrounds ‘issues of economic security and mobility’ identified by Diane Negra and Yvonne Tasker in American recessionary postfeminist culture, one that both ‘acknowledges and evades’ questions of equality (2014, pp. 3, 10).

Self-help books  161 The format, techniques and rhetoric, authorial sources, and advice of You Can … Live the Life of Your Dreams is paradigmatic of self-­ actualisation’s everyday philosophy, and reveals the powerful influence of contemporary versions of the nineteenth-century New Thought movement. It is based on a belief in the power of thoughts and feelings to determine actions and outcomes, that is, to create reality, hence its core element of the power of positive thinking. Late twentieth-century American superstars of self-help such as Wayne C. Dyer and Anthony Robbins make positive thinking core to their work, adding elements of Eastern mysticism, physics, and spirituality for intellectual ballast.9 Gibson’s title is a simple restatement of New Thought movement philosophy and its goal of transformation. A glance at the editor’s website shows that there is a small industry at work to help attain one’s dream, with MP3s, weekend ‘events’, e-books, weight loss advice, and workbooks all a testament to the author’s knowledge, energy, and effectiveness. Gibson, like our other authors, is highly adept at marketing and working across other platforms and hence embodies the entrepreneurial spirit that infuses our self-help texts, and the enterprising self of neoliberalism theorised by Nikolas Rose (1992, p. 150), and in dominant accounts of postfeminism (McRobbie 2009, p. 75). Gibson assembles a team of female experts (bar one) – ‘expert’ being a key term for self-actualisation books and evidence of its technocratic orientation – to each write a chapter on a particular topic. These topics indicate the issues that the postfeminist subject must address to attain one’s dream life: mindset, language, appearance, career and business, money, health and fitness, sexuality, relationships, and happiness and personal growth. That is, it is a total project of the self, and an example of the perfectionism that McRobbie sees as marking the postfeminist woman (and masking her ‘illegible rage’ against the stultification of late capitalist patriarchy [2009, p. 105], a displaced anger that we saw expressed by younger women in the preceding chapter). These are interspersed with inspirational stories: a type of theory being put into practice and form of motivation. As the range of chapters suggests, matters of the spirit meet the conventionally feminine issues of physical appearance and more worldly matters of money and work. The phrasing of the chapter titles reveals the particular ideology at work in Gibson’s everyday philosophy. For example, ‘Your money – creating wealth’ equates money with building wealth rather than subsistence or security, ‘Your look – be dressed to impress’ places physical appearance as part of accumulating personal capital, while the pairing of ‘Your career and business – do what you love’ seems to reverse this instrumentalisation of the inner and outer self. Moreover, work is phrased as career and business. The entrepreneurial subject and an associated calculating attitude are evident in the transformational project. The experts’ backgrounds are equally significant; evidence of the types of expertise and knowledges constructed and disseminated in women’s

162  Self-help books self-help and where the magical elements of self-actualisation start to take shape. Each author’s biography shares a similar pattern of being successful at life, and then reaching a personal crisis (divorce, serious illness) that leads to a massive life change resulting in them ‘living the dream’: beachfront homes, new partners, and thriving businesses – some distance from the feminist telos of liberation from patriarchal oppression. As a consequence, they want to share their knowledge, a sisterly generosity also displayed by our vloggers. Jennifer Burrows, author of the chapter, ‘Your Language – The Power of Words’, for instance, is: Director of Value for Life Pty Ltd; Pitch Consultant and leading edge Presentation Skills Coach; Executive Coach and Mentor; Author; Motivational Speaker; Master Practitioner of Neuro-Linguistic Programming; Practitioner of Time Line TherapyTM; Certified Master Practitioner of Matrix Therapies and Hypnotherapy; Certified NeuroLinguistic Programming Performance Coach; Accredited Consultant and Trainer – Extended Disc®. (2012, p. 249) The language used is instructive. First, it is commercial: trademarks, pitch consultant, executive coach. Second, it is technocratic and quasi-medical science: matrix therapies, hypnotherapies, neuro-linguistic programming. Third, it is the language of accreditation and the academy: the repetition of ‘certified’ and ‘master practitioner’. Finally, there is the sporting association with various types of ‘coach’, ‘performance’, and ‘trainer’. These distinct registers are brought together in an eclectic type of terminology that is at once authoritative but also mystifying. What exactly is a ‘Master Practitioner of Neuro-Linguistic Programming’, and what might a performance coach in that field actually do? Laura Favaro (2017, p. 285) terms such expertise as ‘psycommerce’ – an amalgam of ‘gendered psychotherapies with commodity logic’. Burrows’ resumé here is similar to the other contributors, regardless of their area of expertise: a similar set of ‘qualifications’ is found. Self-actualisation is underpinned by a material and immaterial infrastructure, or a ‘glocalised therapeutic assemblage’ (Tiaynen-Qadir & Salmenniemi 2017, p. 382) of commodified theories, techniques, knowledges, classes, and products that construct a philosophy of everyday life – its calculating magic – in terms amenable to neoliberal capitalism, namely, that life is a business. This is a prime example of what Illouz terms ‘emotional capitalism’: a process in which emotional and economic discourses mutually shape one another (2008, p. 60). In a blend of various registers that makes such an ideological position more attractive, Burrows begins her biographical entry with ‘Jennifer Burrows believes in getting the maximum value from every moment of life’ (2012, p. 248). Therefore, sport – masked by the palatable role of the coach – contributes to the notions of competition

Self-help books  163 and the performance principle. The pseudo-medical and technocratic discourse makes the commercial imperative sound inarguable and appealingly related to one’s health. And these ‘psycommercial’ experts (Favaro 2017, p. 285), with their various consultancies and directorships, embody the commercial framing and teleology of the postfeminist woman’s life. The journey (a favourite metaphor in self-help books) and its goal are implicitly associated with individual business success – a selling off of the old self, just as the nation state has sold off various publicly owned assets (the telecommunications provider Telstra and QANTAS airlines, amongst many others). Self-help’s core approach to one’s life and to self-actualisation is highly technocratic, and demonstrates the gulf between 1970s consciousness-raising and the practices of self-help. For You Can … Live the Life of Your Dreams, a ten-week programme is offered: one aspect of life is dealt with per week (sexuality, for instance, is week eight). The programme is reinforced by checklists, questions to the reader, short chapters, action points, self-assessment exercises, and goal-setting. Simonds describes these characteristic devices as ‘the break-down technique’ that carefully guides the reader (1992, pp. 137–138), while Scott Cherry (2008, p. 345) argues that these activities make the reader act, and are therefore evidence of selftransformation. In every chapter, and similar to the other sub-genres we discuss, the reader is exhorted to complete various self-reflection and diagnostic activities, such as creating short narratives, diagnosing life balance using the wheel-of-life diagram, and so on. The level of detail required for each activity is further evidence of the technocratic element in calculating magic. In her conclusion, Gibson, for example, recommends that you ‘Review your dreams and goals – daily, weekly, monthly, every 90 days, yearly, 3-yearly, 5-yearly’ (2012, p. 242). Repetition and fine-grained focus on specific areas of the self are characteristic – a model borrowed from corporate and sports training, making the time of self-actualisation compartmentalised, repetitive, incremental, and hence instrumental. Using these techniques allows the reader to write a personal mission statement and a personal vision statement, as personal transformation and philosophy meet the corporate world. This technocratic approach is humanised, or more accurately, feminised, however, by the book’s emotionalism. It carefully constructs intimacy between author and reader, as a quasi-feminist sister-to-sister mode of address, found throughout our postfeminist genres, and which we consider a specifically postfeminist form of affect. Rather than Hochschild’s cool modern women constructed in 1980s self-help (1994, p. 11), we have warm Australian postfeminists at the turn of the century: a version of the ‘relational entrepreneurial femininity’ Elaine Swan (2017) observes in her study of women’s executive coaching websites. Gibson begins with her autobiography in the form of ‘A letter to you’ (2012, p. 7), with the epistolary form setting up the text as a personal and intimate space, one where

164  Self-help books the reader is made to feel special. This relationship is continued by the constant reiteration of ‘you’ and ‘yours’, and the use of emotive adjectives such as ‘amazing’ and ‘ultimate’. The reader is no ordinary soul, but one on the verge of becoming extraordinary (hence the common trope of readers as ‘goddesses’ in this sub-genre), with the help of these intermediaries.10 Regardless of which aspect of the self is being worked upon, the core principle is that of the power of positive thinking: a replacement for feminist political analysis (as we saw in the previous chapter, one of our vloggers, Lauren Curtis, also advocates this method).11 The reader is guided on how to change negative thoughts about some aspect of themselves – their body or financial situation, for example – to positive thoughts. These altered mindsets are not just about increasing self-esteem; they are the method necessary to alter the reader’s reality. Thoughts create reality, and a reader has choices about how she thinks. As a consequence, she can change her life. Gibson’s explanation of this principle is also a succinct statement of positive thinking as fundamental to calculating magic: People are like magnets. We attract into our lives whatever we give out and focus on. Whatever we concentrate on, our subconscious mind helps us to manifest. Even while we are sleeping, our minds are working on how to make our goals a reality. The fact is what we focus on we attract and get more of. If you focus on struggling to pay the mortgage, rent, or bills then that is what you will get – more bills, more struggle. If you focus on abundance then this is what you will attract into your life. (2012, pp. 28–29) By the careful disciplining or calculation of one’s ideas and feelings, a form of magic occurs. The repetition of first-person pronouns here underlines the individual and voluntaristic nature of this process. Accordingly, selfresponsibility and choice are continually emphasised throughout. There are no historical or social limits to what can be achieved; indeed, the reader is encouraged to ‘dream big’, leave the past behind, and practise forgiveness and gratitude for painful experiences. In an echo of the optimistic and voluntaristic DIY feminist self discussed in our Introduction, the self being transformed is a self without limits, that is, without any context, the reverse of a collective, historically determined, and socially constructed feminist subject. Such an everyday philosophy is ideal for postfeminist and neoliberal times. Contributor after contributor recalls an autobiographical narrative of women’s frustrations and pains – relationship breakdowns, career dead ends, and financial troubles – all feminist issues. The solution is a celebration of an intrinsically special female self, one who has the potential to alter the constraints of her life by taking a risk and dutifully applying new knowledges to the self in order to move out of her ‘comfort zone’ (rather

Self-help books  165 than her gendered role) towards various goals – a personal entrepreneurial teleology. Any feminist structural analysis of her frustrations and pain is absent. This conceptual deficiency is not, however, the postfeminist disavowal of feminism discussed by Gill (2007b) and others. Rather, it points to the power of neoliberal schemata, and how the real world destructuration of the social plays out on a cognitive-conceptual level, where structures are invisibilised even as a feminist residue of personal radical change makes the telos possible. In the place of structure and analysis is a way of thinking–feeling that is calculating magic, with its appealing, feminine elements of joy, (quasi)spirituality, and passion, and the hope and agency they offer to women in neoliberal times. As the next section shows, however, calculating magic can also take a more specific focus, namely, women’s bodies, so that anatomy is no longer destiny.

Health and fitness books: working out corporeal femininities From the mid-1990s onwards, feminist theory gave increased attention to the role of the female body and, specifically, corporeality as the basis for a new direction in feminist thought (Braidotti 1994; Grosz 1994; Gatens 1995; Grosz & Probyn 1995). A corporeal feminism meant a rejection of the Cartesian mind/body split, the traditional association of woman with body and man with mind, and the essentialist/social constructionist binary of gender identity, presenting a way forward for a feminist understanding of female subjectivity. However, Amber Wiest et al. outline changes in ideas of health and fitness at roughly the same time occasioned by the impact of ‘neoliberal logic’, as in ‘the commercial co-optation of “healthiness,” the responsibilization of health, and the marginalization of collective interests’ (2015, p. 22). As a consequence, the semioscape of calculating magic takes shape in health and fitness books for women from the early 2000s onwards, reconfiguring the meaning of the female body – a working through (in the psychoanalytic sense) of corporeal feminism by a ‘working out’ of the embodied female self using calculating magic. In the terms of this rapidly growing form of self-help book, the female body is revalued from being inert object of the male gaze to subject of the everyday philosophy of corporeal femininities. Physical transformation and health and fitness are key to personal transformation, and even redemption. Simultaneously, a philosophy of the female body is a philosophy of being a functional, aesthetic, and actualised woman in contemporary Australia. This philosophical basis to women’s health and fitness has so far been largely absent from analyses of postfeminist embodiment (Evans & Riley 2013; Tsaousi 2015; Toffoletti et al. 2018, for example), even as this philosophy is a distinctive and alluring feature. We concentrate here on Jessica Sepel’s (2015) The Healthy Life: A Complete Plan for Glowing Skin, A Healthy Gut, Weight Loss, Better Sleep and Less Stress and Hayley Roper’s (2013) Lighten Up: A Female’s

166  Self-help books Modern Day Guide to Physical Transformation because of their differing emphases yet shared features. Sepel, a qualified nutritionist, concentrates on food and diet while Roper, a sports model and trainer, focuses on fitness. Like the other sub-genres of self-help, there is a minority strand of mainstream, no-nonsense diet and exercise books; however, we wish to identify the features of an emergent women’s health and fitness culture demonstrated by these two books.12 This sub-genre is the one most closely related to two of the most important second wave feminist self-help books –​ the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective’s Our Bodies, Ourselves (1971) and Susie Orbach’s Fat Is a Feminist Issue (1979) – though in a significant omission, neither discusses fitness in detail, a topic outside the purview of much feminist activism at that time.13 Sepel and Roper show a similar drive to reclaim understandings and knowledges of the female body and health for women so that they may more fully experience and enjoy their physical being. What we find, however, within the powerful message of living life physically to reclaim the self – one that has especial valence in Australia given our traditional love of sport (and women’s traditional second-class treatment by sporting institutions) – is an uneasy mix of commodified expertise, technocratic instrumentalisation, and a quasi-spiritualisation of the female body. The body in corporeal femininities is not so much a sex object, as it is in second wave feminist critiques, but instead a body to be self-disciplined and thereby instrumentalised into an aesthetic and functional object who, as a consequence, feels better about herself: a process made palatable by its philosophical basis. Women’s health and fitness books thereby suggest another emanation of the pressures surrounding female embodiment identified throughout analyses of postfeminist culture (Whelehan 2000; Lazar 2009; Genz 2010; Elias et al. 2017), and some of the mechanisms by which they take hold. The freedoms and pleasures of physical well-being and activity, and the feminist valorisation of the female body become partially articulated and hence constrained by elements complementary to neoliberal discourse. As a consequence, proclaiming a corporeal femininity means investing in remaking the body: the embodied woman is now a selfproduced commodity. These pressures on female bodies are evident in Sepel’s introduction (2015, pp. 6–8) which, following the formula of self-help books, takes the form of confessional autobiography, and also draws upon the feminist valorisation of the authority of personal experience. Similar to our vloggers, Sepel recalls her teenage years when she became an obsessive fad dieter, which she links to her perfectionism, and explains how her sense of worth and happiness were related to her ability to lose weight. Sepel is the typical pathological young female subject discussed in McRobbie’s account of postfeminist perfectionism (2015): intelligent, seemingly empowered, but paradoxically crippled by low self-esteem and therefore disciplined (more accurately, tortured) by an emphasis on appearance, norms of feminine

Self-help books  167 desirability, and a general sense of perfectionism, a punitive nexus also experienced by our beauty vloggers. Her solution to this psychic impasse is, therefore, highly significant. Sepel turns to an amalgam of nutritional science, willpower, and personal philosophy to attain a healthy life. With echoes of the positive thinking in You Can … Live the Life of Your Dreams, she explains: I have taken control of my life and my thoughts. I now take a more gentle approach to nutrition, health and well-being. It’s as simple as this: I listen to my body and I give it exactly what it needs. (2015, p. 7) She adds: ‘I learnt that I am good enough, just as I am. Thanks to this shift, I am now able to say I love my body’ and that her body is ‘beautiful’ just the way it is (2015, p. 7). Her approach to the body is couched in the feminine and emotive terms of ‘gentle’, ‘love’, ‘beautiful’; similarly, her relationship to her body is emotional and nurturing: of acceptance and listening. The mind, however, remains separate from, and controls, the body – a return to pre-corporeal feminist times. This emotionalised, even maternal, self–body relationship is replicated in the relationship between Sepel and her readers, and also parallels the postfeminist sisterhood we saw constructed by beauty vloggers, based on a collective but relatively apolitical sense of the travails of young womanhood. See, for example, the book’s dedication: ‘To the JSHealth community. Thank you for being by my side, understanding me, supporting me and being so passionate about healthy living. We are in this journey together. I am so proud of you’ (2015). Apart from the intimacy expressed, the ‘JSHealth community’ is key to understanding Sepel’s framework. Community seems a somewhat hyperbolic term to use. And regardless of the soft language of caring and belonging, a branding and ownership exercise is occurring: this is Jessica Sepel’s health community, evidence of the contemporary commercialisation of health and fitness (Maguire 2008, p. 5). We soon return to this uneasy nexus of femininity and commerce. A similarly uneasy combination occurs in Sepel’s prescription for a healthy life: a mix of detailed nutritional science and the soft, semi/quasi spiritual feminine philosophy characterising many of our self-help texts, and which is health and fitness’s version of calculating magic. Sepel offers ‘a complete plan’ to the healthy life comprising these two elements. ‘Plan’ is the operative word here. Regardless of her claimed rejection of perfectionism, she offers a pedagogy of rigorous self-policing enacted through nutrition. First, the reader fills in a questionnaire to ascertain where they are located, not so much in terms of health and body image, but rather, existentially. Questions include ‘At what point in your life did you feel your best?’ and ‘Do you feel incredibly alive and present in your life?’

168  Self-help books (2015, p. 10). This questionnaire becomes a benchmark of the reader’s progress. Sepel includes a ‘Commitment Contract’ with vows such as ‘I promise to embark on this health journey with optimism. I am dedicated to making health a priority – the number one priority – in my life’ (2015, p. 11). She later includes a food diary (2015, p. 116), a self-love planner! (2015, p. 119), and a ‘7-day slim-down meal plan’ (2015, p. 120). These self-monitoring devices are complemented by lengthy nutritional information in which the natural is a primary value. As in the case of self-­ actualisation books, attaining Sepel’s healthy life is a serious, organised, and complicated quest. Her philosophy of the healthy life, however, moderates this scientism and self-discipline. She draws upon the usual elements of contemporary women’s self-actualisation: the power of the mind; techniques of meditation and visualisation of dreams; finding your passion; following your heart and intuition; using mantras; acknowledging a spiritual dimension to the self; and a soft feminist politics. She declares that ‘I want to empower women to support each other, not tear each other down’ (2015, p. 314), another articulation of postfeminist sisterhood that we observe within and across genres. Sepel’s good nutrition plan is holistic and transformative. Body and soul are mutually informing; consequently, the plan requires the ‘soul’ to be explored, understood, and reformed using the abovementioned techniques. In return, the plan enables a transformation in lifestyle that affects both body and soul. Good health, therefore, is more than bodily: it has a strongly moral and semi-spiritual dimension, a revelation of the authentic self. As she ends her welcome, she is now ‘free from everything that was holding me back. (2015, p. 8). This feminine philosophy masks the entrepreneurialism and commercialism of the endeavour. Sepel’s experiences and knowledge not only result in a book, but also in a cottage industry, including a health blog, and work as a nutritionist and wellness coach. We do not want to discount the often practical and reasonable advice Sepel offers her readers; we are more interested in the conflicted nature of the text’s semioscape, in which soft feminism (its use of sisterhood to liberate us from low self-esteem and poor body image), a feminine philosophy of the everyday, nutritional science, self-improvement, and twenty-first-century commerce intermingle in what Sepel terms her ‘health brand’ (2015, p. 314). Sepel’s corporeal version of calculating magic genuinely wants to free us from the oppression represented by diet books and glossy images of female perfection; however, the terms of her philosophy subject the female body to another form of control. The recent reclamation of the female body as a strong and fit body, as seen in phenomena such as #fitspo (Riley & Evans 2018), women’s running groups, and the uptake of weight training by women, appears to mark progress for conceptions and practices of female embodiment: we are no longer victims of our bodies. Our reading of Roper’s Lighten Up: A

Self-help books  169 Female’s Modern Day Guide to Physical Transformation (2013) shows something more problematic. While Hayley focuses on exercise rather than food, her text shares a number of characteristics with Sepel’s. As the title suggests, this is not only a book about diet and exercise. It also promises transformation of the self – an exercise-based version of Gill’s makeover trope (2007b). Roper offers the body as capable of complete change; accordingly, she takes a holistic approach. In postfeminist health and fitness guides for women, for example, you do not just limit your goals to weight loss or improved muscular strength. Instead, the body and the mind must both be involved, and this combination requires an informing philosophy. Lighten Up therefore constructs a philosophy of the self that is fundamental to improved diet and exercise, and which in turn allows women to reclaim their bodies. This philosophy is apparent from the opening pages, where Roper declares that: [this book] will take you on a physical and spiritual journey with the end result being so much more than just a slimmer and healthier version of your former self. You will finish this book with not only the tools to change your body, but also the tools to change your life. (2013) Accordingly, the first two chapters of the book are ‘The Inner Voice’ and ‘Tune Into Your Soul’, replicating Sepel’s mind–body split. In these, Roper instructs us how to listen to our inner voice as a path to spiritual and then physical enlightenment: the inner voice is ‘our soul or spirit. It is the real you’ (2013, p. 9). Doing so means we are more in alignment with the universe, and therefore less likely to indulge in negative behaviour, such as poor eating or being unmotivated. In what is something of a postfeminist moral code, she restates the core elements of self-actualisation philosophy: think positive thoughts, do daily good deeds, live in the present, practice visualisation, and so forth. This dictate suggests that women have a moral, even spiritual, rather than hedonistic relationship to the body. The goal of her philosophy is more than health or fitness, it is ‘to have women bursting with energy, happiness and positivity’ (2013, p. 4). This reworked female body exemplifies the neoliberal ‘new vitalism’ theorised by Rose (2009, pp. 49, 63, 70), whereby the individual is responsible for self-care, and also a specifically female version of this vitalism, which Tasker and Negra argue actually masks a social death – of once-sustaining institutions such as welfare and public health (2007, p. 9). The exercise and diet section – in which a fairly typical set of exercise routines and eating guidelines is described – is something of a let-down after the metaphysics of the preceding chapters. Like Sepel, ‘natural’ foods are valorised, and exercise equates with toning exercises and fat-burning cardiovascular work rather than muscle-building regimes so as to achieve a

170  Self-help books conventionally feminine figure – the bodily ideal of contemporary women’s health and fitness (Markula & Kennedy 2011, p. 4). The magical elements of self-actualisation also play their part. For instance, Roper notes the importance of visualising the body you want to achieve: ‘Focus on the area you want to change … and imagine it decreasing in size or changing in shape’ (2013, p. 58). Although this sounds enticing, it is also a good example of McGee’s belaboured self: it is now a reasonable requirement that intense and constant mental as well as physical work is performed upon the female body in order to achieve the supposed goal of realisation. Like Sepel, Roper displays a strong entrepreneurial and commercial imperative that is softened by the self-actualisation philosophy, emotionalism, and pro-woman stance. The opening sentences in her introduction literalise these intermingled discourses: As a result of my passion for healthy living and my inner drive to help others, I started my own business called ‘Love My Body’ … Love My Body empowers women to look and feel their best through mentoring, providing dietary guidelines, the right forms of exercise and constant support. (2013, p. 4) In the commercial enterprise that is ‘Love My Body’, we have the feministic ‘empowers women’, ‘mentoring,’ and ‘support’ meeting the ethical ‘drive to help others’. ‘Love My Body’, an appealing, emotive, and common affirmation found in women’s health and fitness books and culture, is co-opted as a brand, a commercial practice. Moreover, as Rosalind Gill and Ana Elias argue regarding the ‘love my body’ discourse in general, and as we saw in our beauty vlogger chapter, ‘love my body’ is actually based on, and profits from, women feeling bad about their bodies (2014, p. 184). The calculating magic imbuing and producing corporeal femininities suggests the body as a prime site for constructing female subjectivity in postfeminist times – a working out of corporeal feminism into substantially altered terms. In a version of the dualisms that characterise women’s self-help (DeFrancisco & O’Connor 1995, p. 109), the Cartesian split returns, as mind and body are separate but connected in the contemporary project of bodily transformation, with the mind in control. A healthy body is a necessity to function effectively and authentically as a woman. And both texts emphasise the body’s plasticity – a blended feminist and neoliberal fantasy of possibility, and the complex physical, mental, and emotional labour required by this telos. These disciplinary techniques of the embodied female address women’s desires for bodily pleasure and empowerment, yet also articulate with the growing health and fitness industry that commodifies women’s bodies as effectively as the fashion–beauty– media complex (Maguire 2008, pp. 5, 41). In our examples, a feminine

Self-help books  171 philosophy, spiritual overtones, and a residual feminist ethos of empowerment and reclaiming the pleasures of the body (and sport) make attractive and feminise the commercial and instrumental imperatives of preparing ‘fit’ subjects (i.e. self-disciplined, reliable, productive, and with an attention to physical presentation) for the services- and signs-based economy heavily reliant on female labour. For, as Jennifer Smith Maguire argues, ‘Fitness is a measure of aptitude for life in consumer culture and a service economy’ (2008, p. 190), and these books offer women a way to attain this. In the next section we look at another type of fitness required by the advanced capitalist economy – a broader type of fitness that is now required by mothering.

Mothering guides: aestheticising the domestic The range of advice offered to mothers by Australian self-help books is vast, suggesting the choices available to mothers and the complexification of, and professional expertise surrounding, contemporary motherhood, and hence its location in a vast disciplinary network. There are guides to balancing work with mothering, improving pelvic floor muscles, dealing with postnatal depression, child rearing New Age-style, and breastfeeding. In this section, we focus on general advice guides to mothers, that is, books that cover a number of topics as a complete manual for motherhood. In particular, we engage with guides that reveal a shift in conceptualisations of how mothering might be done. Mothers and the maternal have been a key focus in analyses of postfeminism, exemplifying the twin, if potentially contradictory, movement of mothering towards retraditionalisation (as in Negra’s ‘maternal retreatism’ [2009]), or its postmodern updating, such as Jo Littler’s (2013) reading of the sexualised, glamorous, and hyper-consuming ‘yummy mummy’ figure. We discuss Jodie HedleyWard’s You Sexy Mother: A Life Changing Approach to Motherhood (2008) as representative of an emergent group of self-help texts that use calculating magic to remake mothering in highly aesthetic terms (aesthetic here meaning a foregrounding of notions of beauty and the beautiful).14 It thereby is evidence of ‘aesthetic labour as a new(ly) added, previously unrecognised dimension of contemporary maternal labour that has emerged under neoliberalism’ (De Benedictis & Orgad 2017, p. 102). As her arresting title suggests, Hedley-Ward offers a transformational approach (‘life changing’), one that rests on identifying the mother as ‘sexy’ – thus seemingly part of the sexualised mother figure denoted by the yummy mummy (Allen & Osgood 2009; Littler 2013). As we show, however, the sexy mother symbolises not so much a resexualisation of the mother, but, more importantly, an aestheticisation of stay-at-home mothering, or what Negra describes as ‘postfeminist domesticity and new discourses of “homemaker chic” ’ (2009, p. 152). With parallels to the embodied women of the previous section, the stay-at-home mother is transformed along stylish and

172  Self-help books moral lines by investing her desires in the home into ‘the program of postfeminist lifestyling’ (Negra 2009, p. 142). Making the domestic realm beautiful is the central advice and compensation offered to full-time mothers, and a method by which to discover an ‘authentic’ self. Through calculating magic, the domestic realm via the maternal role is reconfigured from second wave feminist understandings of it as a space of repetitive unpaid labour, isolation, and frustration (Oakley 1974; French 1977) into a space of personal fulfilment and invisible children, thereby reinscribing patriarchal values. A traditional identity for women returns but is recast in new, specifically neoliberal, almost fantasmatic terms – sexiness, aesthetics, autonomy, and self-realisation rather than sacrifice. The result is the alluring figure of the mother whose children (possibly not alluring) are largely offstage. As seen in all sub-genres of self-help, the figure of the author – their education and life experiences – is a crucial textual strategy of contemporary self-help books and an echo of feminism. In You Sexy Mother, this is highly indicative of the middle-class quality of contemporary selfhelp books, even as they gesture towards working-class women’s anxieties and aspirations. Hedley-Ward begins her book by recounting her epiphany regarding motherhood: It began following a vivid dream one night, after which I woke up and decided that I was no longer going to be defined by ‘tired mum’ syndrome. I was not going to allow myself the luxury of wallowing in tiredness and playing the harassed, worn-out mum card again. What if I was to approach each day with a sense of grace and playfulness? What if the next time someone asked me how I was feeling, I was to reply ‘exuberant’, ‘enlightened’ or, God forbid, ‘sexy’? (2008, p. 9) From that moment she realises she ‘had choices and was about to waste no time in exercising them’ (2008, p. 9). As we saw in earlier examples, willpower and choice here are paramount to becoming a sexy, postfeminist mother. Hedley-Ward decides she has to renounce her pre-motherhood identity of tertiary-educated marketing professional with a successful international career (her words), and instead embrace motherhood – by changing her attitude: I started to really consider my roles as mother, homemaker, wife … connecting with the wisdom of generations of women who have walked this path before me I began to redefine my various roles in a way that was empowering. With new insights came power. Why hadn’t I realized that I wasn’t simply cooking but providing nourishment to hungry bodies and minds? … I knew I had to create a new image of myself rather than reverting to the old me. (2008, p. 10)

Self-help books  173 So although Hedley-Ward does not explicitly refer to cognitive behavioural therapy or positive thought – mainstays of contemporary self-help (Binkley 2011, p. 376) – she is providing her own version of these schemata. Changing the language and interpretive frameworks of the self changes the reality of being a mother. Moreover, this version of calculating magic aligns with neoliberalism’s focus on self-responsibilisation (Rose 1996, p. 59) also observed in our vloggers, which leaves unspoken the issues giving rise to the need for transformation, such as the difficulties of raising children or the drudgery of domestic labour, and giving up work to do so. As the above passage highlights, domestic chores and self-image are key to becoming a sexy mother; the actual business of mothering, as in raising children, is an extremely minor presence, possibly aiding the aestheticisation process. Mothering is therefore about creating (an emotional) separation from children, a re-imaging of the self, and an immersion in the domestic as a space of feminine expertise. This is, however, a different version of maternal retreatism from that discussed by Negra (2009) or the luxury consumption of Littler’s ‘yummy mummies’ (2013). Hedley-Ward provides a detailed guide to achieve this new image using the typical technocratic devices of self-help: the visual diary, a ‘Ten-Day Turnaround Plan’, and making a commitment (a ‘declaration’) to change the self. These rely on both practical techniques and large amounts of emotional discipline, which are undertaken solely by the mother. While there is a chapter recommending that mothers form support networks, the actual project of becoming this new type of mother is an individual job. Rather than the mother being the relational self as in Nancy Chodorow’s (1978) classic second wave feminist formulation, she is now an autonomous, possibly isolated agent of domestic (unpaid) aesthetic labour, thereby moving the mother role more fully into the logics of neoliberal capitalism and its exploitation of the most vulnerable workers. Mothering thus takes its place in the postmodern culture of images and surfaces and its concomitant ‘hyperaestheticization of everyday [postfeminist] life’ (Tasker & Negra 2007, p. 7). What You Sexy Mother is really offering is a way for working (and often highly educated) women to adapt to motherhood, making the transition palatable by its calculating magic of simple, emotive philosophy, techniques with which to aestheticise everyday domesticity, and the promise of discovering the authentic self. ‘For people like me’, she explains, who have stifled their feminine side in a bid to achieve worldly status and rewards, the journey back to femininity and all things womanly in the traditional sense can be most liberating. Far from feeling downtrodden and resentful, once I took over the role of master of my home and leader of my family’s emotional well-being I felt liberated beyond

174  Self-help books belief. I felt truly in touch with the essence of who I was and why I was here, and relieved that I didn’t have to prove myself in a corporate way any longer. (Hedley-Ward 2008, pp. 20–21) Hedley-Ward makes this classic statement of female essentialism and domestic retreatism – seen by many as a key marker of postfeminist culture (Probyn 1990; Faludi 1991; Kingston 2004; Vavrus 2007) – appealing by its use of the typical language of self-actualisation: an amalgam of emotionalism, hyperbole, and New Age spiritualism. Chapter titles and their summaries make this strategy apparent. The first chapter promises that you will find ‘The Real, Most Wonderful You’: Learn how to give yourself the love and respect you deserve and watch as you blossom into an exciting, vibrant expression of the new you – one that is stronger and infinitely more beautiful now that you have added ‘mother’ to your resume. (2008, p. 7) Similarly, Chapter 5 is titled ‘Dream Big and Rediscover the Magic in Life’, and advocates that ‘Motherhood is a wonderful time of creation, and pursuing your own dreams and passions should be part of this’ (HedleyWard 2008, p. 8). In these terms, domesticity is a space of magical potential, heightened emotion, and relentless positivity for the mother, and we suggest that this tonality articulates in inverted form the real issues for the would-be sexy mother: the dullness of paid employment and of its substitute, the working woman’s relocation to the domestic and the maternal. The first step in Hedley-Ward’s plan is to literally refashion the self into one that is no longer the career woman or an extension of her children. Rather, she exhorts readers that ‘You deserve a life that feels soft and wonderful, like your favourite pair of pyjamas or a well-worn pair of jeans’ (2008, p. 25). Indeed, changing one’s clothes into something chic is a key part of this strategy, but the interior self must also be refashioned. The sexy mother is one who finds her creative passions, inspires others, and can even turn these pursuits into a profitable endeavour. The home, too, must be refashioned so that it is ‘authentic’, meaning ‘a sanctuary for you and your family from which you can all go out into the world feeling great’ (2008, p. 7). Again, this is the mother’s task, and it has a moral imperative: ‘Decide today that this is the home you deserve and honour yourself by setting about creating it’ (2008, p. 7). Hedley-Ward’s practical suggestions to achieve authenticity – decluttering, painting a room – are given therapeutic value as well, expressing the mother’s sense of control and being in touch with her true self. Like our potentially fit and healthy women, the mother needs to refashion and simplify her habits via similarly technocratic self-policing means.

Self-help books  175 The sexy mother is a disciplined one: she must learn to be organised, to make plans, and to take control of finances, material possessions, and ‘commitments in your life’ (2008, p. 173). She must also learn to be pragmatic and calculating about her relationships, with Hedley-Ward offering what Alison Winch terms as ‘calculated guidance in the maintenance of social networks’ (2013, p. 56): ‘Seek out those relationships that will take your life to the next level – ones that offer unconditional love, support and understanding’ (Hedley-Ward 2008, p. 8, emphasis added). This behavioural and spatial control enables a sense of empowerment: the ability to go on and be that creative, ‘amazing’ (2008, p. 10) mother. Yet as Hedley-Ward’s prescriptions suggest, mothering and the domestic can reach their potential only by techniques equally at home in the neoliberal workplace. Finally, just how sexy is the sexy mother idealised by the text? Curiously, the mother’s sexuality and sexual desire are barely mentioned, except in the displaced terms of looking good as improving self-esteem, and the suggestion of regular date nights. Sexiness, then, is redefined as an empowered and authentic self; similarly, passion is about finding one’s true mission rather than taking sexual form. It is highly indicative of the tensions inherent in stay-at-home mothering that this sexy mother is all about self-oriented, rather than heterosexual or consumerist, erotics. You Sexy Mother gives some salutary advice, legitimising a sense of autonomy and emphasising the self-worth of mothers, without proffering luxury consumption as part of the deal. It does, however, also encumber mothers with the burden of life as a highly charged project undertaken alone – a teleological quest to find the authentic (i.e. creative) self, which Sara De Benedictis and Shani Orgad argue increases and masks maternal labour (2017, p. 114). The self and the home as aesthetic objects are demanding tasks and, unlike The Weekly’s dreamscape of domestic plenitude, there is little sense of any practical constraints. In effect, You Sexy Mother provides its own attractive textualised haven for stay-at-home mothers, but in very different terms from those of The Weekly. Hedley-Ward’s maternal home is a space of autonomy, thereby reversing the usual understanding of the domestic as entrapment and motherhood as being other-directed. It thus exemplifies the postfeminist complication of the conventional oppositions structuring domesticity (Genz 2008, p. 52). Women’s traditional association with physical beauty is now extended to include the domestic as site of beauty, while the near invisibility of children in the text mirrors the erasure of the tensions surrounding working women with children (such as childcare, guilt, career progression), and the unpaid labour that mothers perform. The calculating magic of our final sub-genre, career guides, reveals the anxieties of the woman in paid employment, and the unpaid labour she must undertake to remain an employable and coping worker in the contemporary workplace.

176  Self-help books

Career guides: healing the alienated woman worker Considering the vexations of the workplace hinted at by Hedley-Ward and the centrality of working women to postfeminist culture – whether in cultural representations (Press & Strathman 1993; McRobbie 2007; Genz 2009; Adamson 2017), or in women’s experiences as workers in an era when being able to pursue paid employment and a career is simply assumed (Gill et al. 2017) – what types of advice do contemporary women’s career guides offer? Does career self-help challenge the deep ambivalence found in postfeminist cultural narratives of working women (Negra 2009, p. 87) and/or rectify these texts’ ‘inattentive[ness] to the material conditions and pressures of actual work’ (Leonard 2007, p. 104)? Do they bring into being the neoliberal feminist subject who, as Catherine Rottenberg argues in her reading of Sheryl Sandberg’s 2013 blockbuster career guide, Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead, ‘convert[s] continued gender inequality from a structural problem into an individual affair’ (2014, p. 420; see also Negra 2014; Taylor 2016)? Surprisingly, career guides are one of the relatively minor sub-genres of self-help – though we should remember that career is often discussed in other sub-genres, usually in terms of ‘finding your passion’, and there is an entire industry devoted to executive coaching (Swan 2017) and leadership training.15 We discuss a text that exemplifies the way in which capitalist values intermingle with softer, feminine, and therapeutic discourses so that the understanding of work and the workplace are fundamentally altered from that of second wave feminism, while still echoing it. Kristine MartinMcDonald’s Energise Your Career: A Guide to How Any Woman Can Have the Success She Wants (2015) blends supposed insights from psychology with marketing – itself a highly indicative combination – to position the woman worker as lacking and in need of healing. The topics covered and her use of the term ‘career’ suggest that Martin-McDonald addresses the white collar woman worker experiencing workplace difficulties (such as bullying) or career stagnation. Moreover, similar to the absent child in Hedley-Ward’s mothering guide, Martin-McDonald keeps the workplace offstage, absolving it of any responsibility for the worker’s situation, and instead uses psychological and emotional management as methods of overcoming alienation. Feminist or leftist institutional and structural analyses of women and work are therefore also offstage. Instead, in the calculating magic of the career guide, work and the woman worker become dematerialised, psychologised, and spiritualised. Considering Martin-McDonald’s profession as a nursing academic, her use of more conventional, apparently scientific methods and an emphasis on healing are not surprising: she advocates ‘positive psychology and feminine practices’ (2015, p. 4). Like Sandberg’s Lean In, Martin-McDonald’s Energise Your Career’s diagnosis of the problem for women in the workplace is that women lack confidence – a deficiency that, according to

Self-help books  177 ­ artin-McDonald, is biological and social in origin (2015, p. 23). This M simultaneous acknowledgement and repudiation of feminist understandings of gender identity is replayed throughout the book, with this dual understanding producing two methods of self-help: the first part, ‘You in the World’, is devoted to improving women’s sense of self-worth. By building women’s confidence and resilience, they can better navigate the workplace and feel deserving of career success. In this respect, it is a perfect example of what Rosalind Gill and Shani Orgad term ‘confidence culture’ – ‘a gendered technology of self’ that is directed at women, and which requires much ‘selfwork’ to overcome feminine shortcomings in work, body image, and so on (2015, pp. 326, 333), similar to what we observed in our beauty vlog chapter. Energise Your Career thereby advocates the typical calculating magic methods of self-reflection, keeping a journal, identifying goals, living by a new moral code (specifically, practising gratitude and generosity), and features self-help’s characteristic bricolage of aphorisms and anecdotes, practical insights, and inflated emotionalism. Echoing all of our authors, a reader must learn to value and honour herself and aim for joy and abundance because she deserves to live the life of her dreams. In addition, the self must be renovated into a far more intense, energised emotional landscape – a psychological variant of Rose’s neoliberal ‘vitalism’ we observed in the women’s health and fitness guides. Moreover, regardless of the section title, the world here is that of the psyche, not the social, and the condition of the psyche is key to worldly, or ‘career’, success. The second part, ‘You as a Career Woman’, addresses the workplace, shifting register to the languages of marketing and the corporate. Rather than critiquing the deregulated neoliberal workplace – one shown to disadvantage women (Pocock 2003; Van Gellecum et al. 2008) – MartinMcDonald advocates the entrepreneurialism of personal branding as key to career advancement. Personal branding is something constructed through physical image, skills, social media, and behaviours, and ‘will follow you throughout your career as it lets people know who you are and what you stand for’ (2015, p. 134). Moreover, we suggest it epitomises neoliberal notions of work: the self as commodity and image. As Alice E. Marwick explains, ‘The personal brand extends to individuals the philosophy and tactics of contemporary “promotional culture”, in which information, economics, and persuasion are inextricably linked’ (2013, p. 165). In effect, branding is a mark of distinction – distinguishing you from the other workers – and mark of value – what you, as human capital, add to the workplace. Martin-McDonald is at pains to distance personal branding from negative connotations of narcissism or egotism, instead redefining the practice more appealingly as a response to two existential questions: ‘Who am I?’ and ‘What do I want to achieve in my lifetime?’ (2015, pp. 116–115). Answers to these should inform self-branding. Regardless of her rebranding of branding, the actual how-to of personal branding that Martin-McDonald discusses focuses on techniques of image

178  Self-help books construction and self-presentation, producing a consistent and appealing self to the world. In this way, it demonstrates the paradox of self-branding outlined by Marwick: the conjoining of authenticity and intensified selfregulation (2013, p. 199), and, we add, the triumph of surface over depth to supposedly express depth. Moreover, Martin-McDonald’s version of self-branding is founded upon an updated and even more commodified version of women’s traditional requirement to always look good and be valued for their appearance. Her advice bears out Elias et al.’s insight that ‘Neoliberalism makes us all “aesthetic entrepreneurs” – not simply those who are models or working in fashion or design’ (2017, p. 5, original emphasis). In Martin-McDonald’s schema, self-image (rather than education, experience, social networks or work ethic) is the most valuable attribute of the career woman. Martin-McDonald includes two other chapters on career advice: one on leadership and one on workplace bullying. The first emphasises how women’s personality traits (most notably, empathy, communication skills, and a collective ethos) make them ideal leaders in the contemporary workplace. Again, she attempts to motivate women to think of themselves as leaders – leaders of themselves and then of their workplace. Rather than representing a disadvantage, she argues, women’s innate femininity actually makes them well-suited to the world of work (2015, pp. 149–151) – although Australian statistics on women’s representation at senior levels do not reflect this. So again, the female psyche and positivity obscure, even replace, the actual workplace and its continuing systemic discrimination against women. The chapter on bullying is the sole instance in which the workplace is framed in institutional rather than emotional, psychological, or optimistic terms (2015, pp. 160–162). Martin-McDonald’s prescription, therefore, makes female psychology and attitude central to a woman’s career outcomes and hence her own responsibility. Women are presented as lacking until now, but with self-monitoring, emotional resolve, and belief – a variant of positive thinking – this insufficiency can be overcome and transformed into leadership ability. The impersonal and social elements of work (including qualifications, pay and conditions, promotions, social capital, and institutional structures) are absent, and the only negative element present is not sexual harassment but bullying – with its infantile and non-gender specific connotations.16 Energise Your Career’s calculating magic constructs an optimistic and individualised account of career advice and hence the workplace, using conventionally feminine terms and techniques of the emotional, the therapeutic, and physical appearance. In a sleight of hand ideal for neoliberal times, Energise Your Career, like the confidence culture of which it is part, ‘relies upon both an expression and a repudiation of injury’ (Gill & Orgad 2015, p. 336) – in this case, that afflicting working women. As was the case with the advice given to mothers, alienation is a result of women’s psychic lack, rather than being an economic and institutional condition.

Self-help books  179

Conclusion: an Australian postfeminist self-help? Although a vast and diverse field, the semioscape examined here reveals some recurrent features of contemporary Australian women’s self-help that delineate the ideal Australian postfeminist subject, postfeminism’s relationship to feminism and to neoliberalism, and the attractions of the genre. What work do these ideas do? In the affective mechanics and rhetorics of calculating magic, the postfeminist subject constructed and interpellated is a valuable being – a subject worthy of an everyday philosophy. She deserves realisation and happiness; she has enormous potential; she contains an authentic self; and is aspirational and agentic rather than static. In these highly desirable qualities, we see the legacy of second wave feminism: women are full and complex subjects, seeking change and fulfilment, and able to change. At the same time, however, the postfeminist subject is also lacking, trapped, and/or alienated, and therefore in need of not just advice, but transformation. The term ‘transformation’ is highly significant. First, it can be read as an index of her unsatisfactory position in neoliberal Australia and after nearly 50 years of feminism. Second, it connotes something far more encompassing and deep-seated than the makeover imperative that Gill (2007b) examines, suggesting a significant historical shift – from (collective/political) revolution and liberation to personal transformation. These books all promise total solutions, but solutions limited to the self. Postfeminist self-help continues in altered form the revolutionary impetus of women’s liberation, while also articulating the major social and individual transformations caused and called for by neoliberalism in Australia, including the continuing pain or discontent of many women’s lives, addressed overwhelmingly in ‘practical’ and supposedly apolitical terms (health, career, mothering, fulfilment). In terms of self-help literature, what is the nature of advice given to the postfeminist woman, and how is it constructed textually? Primarily, she is exhorted to take control of her life via her choices using the attractive terms and techniques of calculating magic, which align with neoliberal requirements for the postfeminist subject. This control is exerted by selfreflection, changes in attitudes and thought patterns, and a range of detailed techniques of self-discipline that exude technocratic power. She may use quasi-knowledges of late capitalism; regardless, her programme of change will be moral (practise forgiveness and gratitude) and emotional (follow your passions). Thus, we see an uneasy mix of feminist-derived insights (take control, the emotions matter, women are deeply ethical beings, the importance of female role models) with neoliberal elements (exerting choice, personal aspirations, technocratic approaches to the self, the cult of expertise, and entrepreneurship as path to freedom). Calculating magic, though operating as philosophy, is actually the Australian postfeminist woman’s micro-economic theory: what to invest in, how to

180  Self-help books increase individual gross domestic product, and how to engage with broader economic structures. Moreover, we should not underestimate the attractions of an optimistic future, a sense of energy and agency, and the respect offered by self-help books. Their everyday philosophy enables women to think of their potential and agency in the conflicted times of neoliberalism – for the postfeminist woman has no past worth returning to. She was never the ideal subject of pre-neoliberal Australia, as the second wave women’s movement makes evident, and so she may just be able to benefit by taking a punt on the forms of magic these books offer, just as high-profile late capitalist male entrepreneurs seem to have magic at their disposal, and the capitalist economy similarly operates along mysterious and mystifying lines. While seemingly telling a less optimistic story of Australian postfeminist culture, the palimpsestic form of women’s self-help gives cause for hope. These books show the enduring legacy of second wave feminism’s quest for women’s liberation. Self-help’s ideational and ideological frames are absolutely dependent on the women’s movement: it is something of a ghost story of feminism; its spectral presence is everywhere. This legacy is, however, mediated and reconfigured by the languages of neoliberalism, as our semioscape of calculating magic reveals. Postfeminist self-help is therefore not antagonistic to feminism. Indeed, it relies on and accommodates feminism, but finds itself deeply determined by, and entangled in, a broader and more powerful historical context. Consciousness-raising gives way to a self-help that aids women through thinking, feeling, and acting, to cope with and conform to late modernity. It is not inevitable, however, that only the neoliberal codes are the ones acted upon by the reader, and time will inevitably add another layer to the genre. In the final chapter we see a set of coping strategies for women political leaders, the masculinist Australian polity, and political journalism to deal with postfeminist times.

Notes   1 See also Youyou Zhou’s 2017 analysis of Goodreads data.  2 The implied female readership is suggested by the titles of books (e.g. A Woman’s Guide to …), cover illustrations, modes of addressing the reader (‘okay girl, go for it!’), and/or topics covered (such as motherhood and female sexuality). The four sub-genres we examine – self-actualisation, health and fitness, mothering advice, and career help – imply a particular age-related, racially unmarked, and amorphously middle-class demographic – to which we return. Health and fitness and mothering advice, for instance, targets 18 to 45 year olds (or young to mature women), while the guides to career and self-actualisation aim at a slightly older readership of mature to middle-aged women. Note that each sub-genre, however, also contains texts that address other readerships, such as health and fitness guides for elderly women, suggesting the expansion and broad appeal of self-help.   3 Munford and Waters (2014, p. 30) similarly observe postfeminism’s palimpsestic relationship with feminism.

Self-help books  181   4 Illouz observes that ‘feminism was one of the major political and cultural formations to adopt the therapeutic discourse, as early as the 1920s and most forcefully in the 1970s’ (2008, p. 167).  5 He chooses Janette Rainwater (1989), Self-Therapy: A Guide to Becoming Your Own Therapist, HarperCollins, London.   6 We examined the National Library of Australia’s (NLA) holdings. The Copyright Act 1968 states that Australian publishers should provide a deposit copy of every book published to the NLA, whether print or electronic, industry or self-published. The NLA’s holdings, therefore, are a reasonable indicator of Australian publishing.  7 Tom O’Regan’s 2007 work on personal financial advice, and Catherine R. Delin and Peter S. Delin’s 1994 analysis of Australian readers of self-help books are two exceptions.   8 These figures are based on research that was conducted in February 2016.   9 See Steve Salerno (2005) for a journalistic exposé of the US self-help industry. 10 See Lea Gay’s Attitude Goddess: Every Woman’s Guide to Having it All! (2008), Danette Hibberd’s How to Find the Goddess in You (2008), or Melissa Scott’s compilation, The Enlightened Goddess: Life Changing Secrets of Soulful Women (2009), amongst others. 11 See Sam Binkley (2011) or Barbara Ehrenreich (2009) for detailed accounts of the contemporary power of positive thinking. 12 Two examples are Ita Buttrose and Lee Campbell’s Get in Shape (2007) or Fiona Thomas Hargreaves’s Fit and Fabulous for Life after Babies (2009). 13 Although in America, Title IX – a major breakthrough for women in sport – was passed into law in 1972. 14 Other examples include Kerry Townsend (2009), Mother’s Essential Toolkit; Christie Nicholas (2011), The Mum Who Roared: A Complete A-Z Guide to Loving Your Mind, Body and Attitude; Eunice Hunter (2012), Have Fun and Make Money: An Easy Guide to Social Selling for Mums Who Want to Work from Home; and Dijanna Mulhearn (2014), Wardrobe 101 for Mums: Fashion Formulas for Modern Mothers. 15 We should note, however, that there is a plethora of career advice authored by state and federal governments taking non-book form, though this is usually aimed at younger women and girls. 16 Gill et al.’s (2017) study of the permeation of postfeminist thought in the workplace makes similar findings: gender inequality is presented as an individualised issue rather than a structural one.

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184  Self-help books Hunter, E. 2012, Have fun and make money: an easy guide to social selling for mums who want to work from home, Global Publishing Group, Mt Evelyn. Illouz, E. 2008, Saving the modern soul: therapy, emotions, and the culture of selfhelp, University of California Press, Berkeley, CA. Kanai, A. 2017, ‘Beyond repudiation: the affective instrumentalisation of feminism in girlfriendly spaces’, Australian Feminist Studies, vol. 32, no. 93, pp. 240–258. Kingston, A. 2004, The meaning of wife, Piatkus, London. Lazar, M.M. 2009, ‘Entitled to consume: postfeminist femininity and a culture of post-critique’, Discourse and Communication, vol. 3, no. 4, pp. 371–400. Leonard, S. 2007, ‘ “I hate my job. I hate everybody here!”: adultery, boredom, and the “working girl” in twenty-first-century American cinema’, in Y. Tasker & D. Negra (eds), Interrogating postfeminism: gender and the politics of popular culture, Duke University Press, Durham, NC, pp. 100–131. Littler, J. 2013, ‘The rise of the “yummy mummy”: popular conservatism and the neoliberal maternal in contemporary British culture’, Communication, Culture & Critique, vol. 6, no. 2, pp. 227–243. Maguire, J.S. 2008, Fit for consumption: sociology and the business of fitness, Routledge, London. Markula P. & Kennedy, E. 2011, ‘Introduction: beyond binaries: contemporary approaches to women and exercise’, in E. Kennedy & P. Markula (eds), Women and exercise: the body, health, and consumerism, Routledge, New York, pp. 1–25. Martin-McDonald, K. 2015, Energise your career: a guide to how any woman can have the success she wants, Global Publishing Group, Mt Evelyn. Marwick, A.E. 2013, Status update: celebrity, publicity, and branding in the social media age, Yale University Press, New Haven, CT. McGee, M. 2005, Self-help inc.: makeover culture in American life, Oxford University Press, New York. McRobbie, A. 2004, ‘Post-feminism and popular culture’, Feminist Media Studies, vol. 4, no. 3, pp. 255–264. McRobbie, A. 2007, ‘TOP GIRLS? Young women and the post-feminist sexual contract’, Cultural Studies, vol. 21, no. 4–5, pp. 718–737. McRobbie, A. 2009, The aftermath of feminism: gender, culture and social change, Sage, London. McRobbie, A. 2015, ‘Notes on the perfect: competitive femininity in neoliberal times’, Australian Feminist Studies, vol. 3, no. 83, pp. 3–20. Miller, T. & McHoul, A. 1998, ‘Helping the self’, Social Text, vol. 57, Winter, pp. 127–155. Mulhearn, D. 2014, Wardrobe 101 for mums: fashion formulas for modern mothers, Thames & Hudson Australia, Fishermans Bend. Munford, R. & Waters, M. 2014, Feminism and popular culture: investigating the postfeminist mystique, Rutgers University Press, New York. Murdoch, K.M. 2001, ‘What does John Gray have to say to feminism?’, Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, vol. 15, no. 2, pp. 159–167. Negra, D. 2009, What a girl wants? Fantasizing the reclamation of self in postfeminism, Routledge, London. Negra, D. 2014, Claiming feminism: commentary, autobiography and advice literature for women in the recession’, Journal of Gender Studies, vol. 23, no. 3, pp. 275–286.

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6 Political journalism Women leaders, constrained power, and the rhetoric of post-gender

In this final chapter, we have made a strategic decision to engage with a form that claims to represent ‘fact’ and ‘reality’: news discourse. In this respect, our case studies have progressed from the most overtly fictional forms to the least, with news being perceived as the most non-fictional (though, of course, it also actively constructs the reality to which it lays claim). Here we attend to the ways in which postfeminist rhetorics have been/are being mobilised to make sense of, and often to contest, Australian women’s contributions to political life and access to power. To do so, we focus on the print news coverage of three women politicians, from different parts of the political spectrum, in different leadership roles: Pauline Hanson, leader of her own political party, Pauline Hanson’s One Nation, and current senator; Julia Gillard, Australia’s first woman Prime Minister; and Julie Bishop, recently retired Deputy Leader of the Liberal Party and Foreign Minister. As in previous chapters, we find some of the familiar postfeminist logics mapped elsewhere, yet specific Australian histories and mythologies, and the tropes upon which they rely, result in a way of figuring gender, power, and class that is distinctive to this locale. We also find in the field of political journalism (perhaps unsurprisingly given that both journalism and politics are largely still masculinist spaces) a much more pessimistic story than in our other genres, making clear that postfeminism plays out differently, not just in different geographical and cultural contexts, but in different media forms. There is, we reveal, a persistent uneasiness about women and power in Australia, and women in leadership roles continue to pose a representational ‘problem’ for journalists who persistently reinscribe limited gendered tropes and metaphors in their reporting; such coverage constitutes what we call a semioscape of constrained power. Importantly, of all the forms we examined in this book, it is the field of news discourse that proffers much less creative, more ambivalent, and often contradictory responses to feminism, and we see the mobilisation of limited gendered frames and narratives to publicly make sense of their power and to, in the process, discipline them (Trimble 2017). In addition to the nature of the form, this relates to culturally specific factors, such as persistent white

188  Political journalism national fictions predicated upon masculinist concepts and tropes – mateship, the bushman, the Aussie ‘battler’ and the ‘digger’ – which have profoundly informed the Australian nation: ‘The difficulty of being a woman leader’, Jack Holland and Katherine Wright (2017, p. 594) suggest, ‘is particularly acute in A ­ ustralia, due to the interweaving of gender expectations with foundational and exclusionary national identity narratives’. It is the exclusivist nature of these core mythologies, alongside the ‘double bind’ faced by women leaders in other contexts, they argue, that sees women leaders occupy a ‘doubly oxymoronic role’ in relation to the Australian state.1 In media coverage and more broadly, they are rendered problematic both as women leaders, figures coded as aberrant here as elsewhere, and women leaders in an imagined ‘Australia’, itself predicated on the exclusion of women (Holland & Wright 2017, p. 594). In many ways, therefore, these enduring national mythologies work to ensure that, when it comes to women in positions of political power, postfeminism plays out in ways that are specific to Australian news discourse. In terms of their gendered discursive construction in the press, what constituted ‘legitimate’ – or rather ‘illegitimate’ – femininity was not consistent across the three figures. For Hanson, it was her embodiment of a working-class femininity, and especially sexuality, that was persistently ridiculed; for Gillard, it was her active role in a leadership coup that called her authority into question throughout her tenure and her failure to simply ignore the intense misogyny directed towards her. At the same time as gender is presumed irrelevant and no hindrance to women’s political ambitions, both Hanson and Gillard were seen to be doing their femininity – whether through their bodies or through their deeds – wrong. For Bishop, however, her Thatcher-style reconciliation of a normative femininity with a strong, measured public persona, alongside her patent unworking classness, ensured that she was seen as a much less problematic figure than Hanson or Gillard. This tension, between a rhetoric of gender’s irrelevancy and a heightened public engagement with it, we posit, is especially prevalent in recent Australian political discourse, revealing much about postfeminism’s culturally specific dynamics. Like other critics, we argue that the public performance of gender is especially complicated for political women (Johnson 2015; Trimble 2017), and has become even more so in the context of postfeminist presumptions of gender’s (and feminism’s) irrelevancy. A number of contradictory, yet interrelated, elements coalesce in this semioscape of constrained political power: the (unsuccessful) elision of gender; ambivalence towards feminism and, relatedly, reanimated sexism; and the intensified regulation of femininity. Such gendered news coverage, we suggest, works to undermine enduring postfeminist claims that gender matters little (if at all), and that sexism in Australia has been eliminated. Within postfeminist frameworks, ‘feminism is seen as having done the political work needed to eradicate gender asymmetry’ (Banet-Weiser 2018, p. 19). In this respect, being

Political journalism  189 ­ostfeminist is synonymous with being ‘post-gender’ (and indeed post-­ p sexism). As we demonstrate, each of these women – like postfeminism itself – has had an ambivalent relation to Australian feminism, ranging from and indeed shifting between complete dismissal and repudiation, to strategic identification to achieve political goals. Although Angela ­McRobbie has argued that postfeminist culture entails ‘repudiation rather than ambivalence’ (2004, p. 257) towards feminism, it is significant that we see more of the latter emerging, both by journalists and by the politicians themselves. Indeed, we argue that a performative ambivalence towards feminism, though not always sustainable, is a requirement for women leaders, part of the condition of their very public visibility. Such ambivalence, of course, is nothing new; many studies have found ambivalence both in how women engage with feminism (Skeggs 1997; Scharff 2012) and in how mainstream media has variously incorporated, adapted or revised it: indeed this is how many define postfeminism itself (Rosenfelt & Stacey 1990; Dow 1996). But, in Australian news discourse at least, it is the figure of the political woman who both prompts and herself embodies this equivocation. Here we find a familiar series of gendered tropes being deployed around these women leaders, ideological strategies that work – in different yet related ways – to undermine their authority.2 In this respect, contradictory tropes at play include: woman-as-seductress or wily sex symbol (Hanson); vulnerable woman in need of protection (Hanson); manipulative, scheming woman or, in Gillard’s case, ‘Lady Macbeth’; unwitting pawn of ‘faceless men’ (both Hanson and Gillard); and celebrity fashionista and hyper-­ feminine ‘glamour girl’ (Bishop). Such sexist coverage is implicitly seen as permissible in a ‘postfeminist’ context as the fundamentals of feminism are presumed incontestable, with inequality and sexism firmly relegated to the past – especially given Australia’s presumed ‘egalitarianism’ (Stevenson 2013; see also Gill 2007, 2011). As there is a huge corpus of Australian media coverage of these figures, this chapter is organised around a series of heavily reported cultural ‘flashpoints’ during their public careers, each of which allow us to foreground the gendered politics of representation. In particular, the way women political actors – perhaps more so than other forms of celebrity – ‘position themselves in relation to femininity and feminism’ is ‘closely scrutinised’ in the press (Lee-Koo & Maley 2017, p. 329). In each section, accordingly, we begin with how these leaders have been gendered in news discourse, the kinds of femininity they are seen to embody, and then move on to newspaper reporting of their varied attempts to frame their relation to feminism in certain ways. With Hanson, our focus is on coverage of the 1998 Queensland state and federal election campaigns (after her political party had been established), most of which works to frame her electoral appeal in terms of sexuality; and more recently when she was re-elected to the Australian senate on an anti-immigration platform that involved attacks

190  Political journalism on Muslim Australians. For Australia’s first woman Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, we focus on the leadership coup in 2010, which led to her political ascension, and how she publicly negotiated her gendered persona after taking office, and her ‘sexism and misogyny speech’ in 2012 – internationally lauded but locally seen by some as a cynical political gesture. Finally, we examine the media coverage of former Foreign Minister Julie Bishop’s repeated public defences of femininity in 2014 and her National Press Club address in October the same year, during which she disavowed feminism in favour of a neoliberal celebration of the individual. Analysing the 2008 presidential election campaign in the United States, Kristina Sheeler and Karrin Anderson argue that it marked an important transition for postfeminist rhetoric, as ‘strategies that previously were confined to entertainment and pop cultural spheres emerged forcefully to shape political dialogue’ (2013, p. 5). Here, beginning with Hanson in the 1990s, we suggest that in Australia – similar to the British media coverage of ‘Blair’s babes’ (Ashby 2005) – we can see the emergence of such a shift from the late 1990s, a shift that we note is concurrent with the increased celebritisation of politics and the intensified focus on personal over public subjectivities in political reportage (Street 2004; Turner 2004; Van Zoonen 2006; Wheeler 2013). Moreover, in starting with Hanson, who became publicly visible at the beginning of the temporal frame we are designating postfeminist, we are able to show that rather than ‘gendered mediation’ – defined as how ‘products and processes of news-making reflect [and indeed help constitute] gender norms, binaries, and power relations’ (Trimble 2017, pp. 9–10) – becoming less important, it is being amplified, despite (or perhaps because of) feminism’s apparent newfound ‘luminosity’ (McRobbie 2015; Gill 2016).

Disciplining political women in a ‘post-gender’ context In the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, women have increasingly taken on positions of political power. At the time of writing, there are women state leaders in a number of countries including the United Kingdom, New Zealand, and Germany. That said, despite the successes of Australian ‘femocrats’ in the 1970s and 1980s (and indeed the fact that Australia was one of the first countries to grant women suffrage), here, as in other Western nations, women politicians remain in the minority. For example, as at 2016, women represented only 29 per cent of elected members in the current House of Representatives, and a slightly better 39 per cent in the Senate, figures which are comparable to New Zealand and Canada (Hough 2016). Moreover, there are concerted efforts at the discursive level to render such women problematic, to police the boundaries of femininity itself, and to further establish the incongruence of women as political actors (despite the postfeminist assumption that there are no structural barriers impeding their political progress). Relatedly, and as our Australian examples also indicate, ambition in women continues to be publicly constructed as atypical (Hall & Donaghue

Political journalism  191 2013), operating as a means to curtail the actualisation of women’s power. Here we consider the various ways in which these three women were discursively constructed ‘feminine’ and ‘unfeminine’, and how this functioned as a disciplinary mechanism (Butler 1990; Appleby 2015; Trimble 2017). Gendered narratives circulated in and through the press necessarily have material effects, which is why rendering them visible is such important feminist work. As Judith Butler (1990, 2004) has argued, certain ways of performing gender come to be seen as legitimate, as inhabitable, and there can be significant material consequences for those who transgress such norms. While women have long been subject to such regulatory regimes, postfeminism, including in its Australian articulation, in many respects seeks to shore up rigid and clearly delineated gender binaries (Gill 2007) rather than effect their destabilisation. These regulatory norms are especially evident around the figure of the woman political leader, who is often discursively positioned as an ‘unintelligible being’ (Appleby 2015, p. 285; see also Johnson 2015; Holland & Wright 2017; Varney 2017), an aberration in a sphere that continues to be overwhelmingly coded masculine. Women may be political actors, and access power, but only within specific limits (hence our semioscape of constrained power). Our analysis of these three Australian politicians reveals the ‘possible models of femininity that can be deployed by women political actors’ (LeeKoo & Maley 2017, p. 330; see also Johnson 2015; Trimble 2017; Lonie 2019; Sorrentino et al. 2019), and indeed how such models came to be contested as well as revised over time by the women themselves – not least in strategic acts of persona-building. In the public lives of these three women, gender (like feminism) occupies a complicated position, and all of them at various points refuse to publicly acknowledge its significance in their careers or representations. For such figures, this sense of what we are calling ‘post-gender’ does not relate to a destabilisation of binary logic or gender queerness or to the post human, but is similar to ‘post-race’ discourses (mobilised most vigorously in the United States) which presume that race no longer matters, that there are no longer any structural impediments to becoming a full, self-determining neoliberal citizen (Squires 2014, p. 6). Here, we show how these ‘post-gender’ assumptions, like those around post-race, are integral to a neoliberal imaginary, including here in Australia, but we also demonstrate how intensified gendered scrutiny of women political actors undercuts this post-gender rhetoric.3 Before commencing our analysis of Australian newspapers, it is important to place this work in a wider political, cultural, and historical context that has been dubbed – including by a Prime Minister – ‘postfeminist’.

Political context: ‘the postfeminist phase of the debate’ From 1996 to 2007, John Howard’s conservative Liberal-National Coalition was in power federally, having replaced the Labor Prime Minister

192  Political journalism Paul Keating, keen proponent of reconciliation and Australia’s relationship with Asia. Distancing himself from Keating’s cosmopolitanism, and seeking to re-emphasise Australia’s historical ties to Britain (Johnson 2007), Howard ‘tapped into long-held concerns about geographical isolation and more recent anxieties opened up by the uncertain fluidity of globalization’ (Brookes 2017, p. 56). Howard and his government desired a nostalgic return to a simpler Australia, where its citizens could be – as he famously remarked during the 1996 election campaign – ‘relaxed and comfortable’ (see Brett 2005). For Howard, Australia was coded a ‘classless society’, with no structural impediments limiting the potential for ­Australian citizens, including women, to succeed (Brett 2005, p. 33). Over the course of his leadership, Howard successfully appropriated egalitarian (and, of course, deeply gendered and exclusionary) rhetoric around ‘mateship’, ‘a fair go’ and the ‘battler’ (Dyrenfurth 2007, p. 211). Moreover, Howard persistently mounted a critique of ‘political correctness’ (see Rolfe 1999) and the Left’s alleged stranglehold on university curricula and the promulgation of what he called a ‘black armband view of history’.4 As part of this project, he also proclaimed the feminist struggle over. In 2002, in an interview in the Sydney Morning Herald, Howard first explicitly characterised Australia as a postfeminist nation (‘The Mother’s Club’, 2002): I find that for the under-30s women … the feminist battle has been won. That is not an issue. Of course, a woman has a right to a career. Of course, women are as good as men. Of course, they are entitled to the same promotion and they can do it [the job] as well. For Howard, who publicly invoked the term a number of times during his leadership, ‘postfeminism’ signals the way in which women no longer feel encumbered by feminism and can now freely ‘choose’ to embrace marriage and motherhood. His definition, therefore, is consistent with the idea of postfeminism as a reclamation of the pleasures that feminism had prohibited, as well as a retreatist vision that reprioritises women’s roles in the domestic sphere (McRobbie 2009; Negra 2009); a form of what Elspeth Probyn (1990) has analysed as the ‘new traditionalism’, which sees traditional gender roles recoded as individualised ‘choice’. As Howard told the Sunday Telegraph, in a later article unambiguously entitled ‘Feminism dead’ (Akerman 2006), ‘Fortunately, I think today’s younger women are more in the post-feminist period, where they don’t sort of measure their independence and freedom by the number of years they remain full-time in the workforce without having children’ (in Akerman 2006). If we accept the position that ‘postfeminist culture presents the view that women’s equal worth and equal rights have been established beyond doubt’ (Hall & Donaghue 2013, p. 250), coupled with the centrality of ‘choice’ discourses and the revalorisation of matrimonial and maternal subjectivities for

Political journalism  193 women (Negra 2009; Taylor 2012), then Howard’s comments clearly align with such a notion. The first figure we analyse in terms of these prevalent postfeminist tropes and discourses is the populist Pauline Hanson.

Pauline Hanson: postfeminism’s vulnerable seductress Pauline Hanson was first elected to the Australian House of Representatives in 1996 as the Member for Oxley, a Queensland electorate 40 ­kilometres west of Brisbane, centred on the ex-mining town of Ipswich. After winning her seat as an independent (having been dis-endorsed by the Liberal Party), she registered her own political party, Pauline Hanson’s One Nation in 1997, with a platform based on nationalistic, protectionist discourses – articulated in the anti-immigration sentiment that Australia was being ‘swamped by Asians’ (Hanson 1996). This xenophobic position has clear echoes of Australia’s White Australia policy, coupled with a newer concern about the economic effects of globalisation and immigration, especially on rural Australia and its men (Curthoys & Johnson 1998). As Jennifer Rutherford remarks, ‘horror of difference was profoundly integral to the One Nation imaginary’ (2001, p. 186; see also Hage 2000). Part of a global revival of the far right in the late twentieth century (Deutchman & Ellison 2004), and which has continued unabated into the current one (symbolised most obviously by the election of Donald Trump in the United States), Hanson’s One Nation party was, as one journalist remarked in the Age, ‘at heart still a symbol of deep disillusionment with the Australian political system’ (Alcorn 1998). Seen as an anti-establishment figure, not unproblematically compared to Princess Diana and Sarah Palin, and positioning herself in opposition to the political elite (as populists commonly do [Moffitt, 2016, p. 58]), she has been described as an ‘anti-politician’ (Duruz & Johnson, 2002, p. 145; Ustinoff 2005; Mason 2010) – a working-class every woman: ‘I come here not as a polished politician but as a woman who has had her fair share of life’s knocks’ (in Probyn 1999, p. 168). She attempted to position herself as the (maternal) defender of ‘maligned masculine embodiments of nationhood’ (Mason 2010, p. 190), restoring order to the ostensibly imperilled gender binary (which her status as a woman leader paradoxically worked to compromise). She also, as Fiona Probyn notes, ‘embodies the figure of the femininised battler who makes good’ (1999, p. 167): the ultimate ‘PFW (postfeminist woman)’ (Genz 2009) who has pulled herself up by her bootstraps and succeeded on her own merits, rather than acknowledging any debt to the women’s movement. Her initial federal parliamentary term lasted just two years, but after making several unsuccessful bids to return to politics she was finally elected to the Australian senate in 2016 (see Broinowski 2017).5 As an opinionated, ambitious woman exercising her agency in the public sphere, Hanson is the product of active feminist intervention into

194  Political journalism the Australian state and attempts to legitimise women as political actors and leaders. As Kylie Murphy writes, ‘She is a woman propelled to her position by changes feminism has wrought in society’ (2002, p. 204). In 1997, when she formed her political party, she was one of only two women political leaders (with the Democrats’ Cheryl Kernot being the other). Hanson emerged at the moment that we suggest marks postfeminism’s pronounced arrival on the Australian political and cultural landscape: 1996. As noted in our introduction, this was the period of ‘DIY Feminism’, as Kathy Bail’s (1996) edited popular book of the same name suggested. In Australia, ‘DIY feminism’ was effectively ‘girl power’ glocalised; for Bail, in an all-too-familiar postfeminist narrative, organised feminism – due to what she perceived to be its overwhelming success – was redundant. As Marea Mitchell (2000, p. 72) argues, Bail’s approach advocated ‘doing it for yourself alone, rather than for others’, with postfeminist individualism being privileged over feminist collectivism. However, as press coverage illuminates, the woman embodying power, even on an individual level, has posed representational difficulties in Australia. Postfeminism, political celebrity, and sexualisation Australian media coverage of Hanson, from 1996 to the present, has been extensive, and many critics have argued that she is a phenomenon largely created by journalists (Trioli 1997; Bartlett 1998; Ellison & Deutchman 1999; Franklin 2001a, 2001b); that, as one remarked, they turned a ‘ “misfit into a megastar” ’ (in Leser 1996). In newspapers, her policies, like those of Margaret Thatcher, have been overwhelmingly ‘framed in highly personal and overtly gendered terms’ (Walsh 2015, p. 1028). Gender has been seen to be responsible for her pronounced media visibility: ‘Paul Hanson would never have developed into the media event that became known as Pauline Hanson’ (Ellison & Deutchman 1999, p. 47, original emphasis). As an independent right-wing woman politician, Hanson confounded the Australian news media, which relied upon a series of familiar (gendered) tropes for making sense of this anxiety-provoking figure. As Louise Milligan notes, ‘despite the inherent weaknesses in Pauline Hanson’s policies and the ignorant, xenophobic nature of her ideology, journalists have still felt the need to undermine her on sexual and sexist levels’ (1999, p. 14; see also Van Acker 2003; Ustinoff 2005). The ‘fish and chip shop lady’ moniker (she owned and operated such a small business before entering parliament) was clearly invoked with a middle-class sneer, itself substantiating Hanson’s repeated claims of journalism’s elitism (Kingston 2001). Moreover, although media coverage at times dismissed her (like Gillard) as the puppet of a number of men around her – such as John Pascarelli, David Ettridge, David Oldfield (journalists referred to the latter as ‘her svengali’ [Este 1998; Morris 1998]), and, more recently, James Ashby – as an empowered woman in a

Political journalism  195 l­eadership position in a right-wing political organisation, Hanson poses a particular ‘problem’ for feminism: ‘She is feminism’s Frankenstein: built of feminist parts but ultimately all wrong’ (Murphy 2002, p. 21), also an apt description for some aspects of postfeminism itself. Her subsequent very public disagreements with various members of her own party suggest that she is also a problem for an ultra-right political party.6 Although the stories that Hanson seeks to tell about the Australian nation are consistent with the key exclusionary national mythologies outlined earlier, this did not make her relation to power any less problematic. Indeed, as is common for women celebrity politicians, the media ‘used her physical appearance and amateurish public performances to continually parody her’ (Ustinoff 2005, p. 104), with her lack of educational and cultural capital especially being overplayed. For many journalists, it seemed it was not her politics but her embodiment of a femininity that could be coded working class that rendered her most objectionable (Perera 1999; Murphy 2002). That is, Hanson may have enjoyed being ‘feminine’, as she told journalists (McCabe 1998a, 1998b), but she was seen – unlike the ‘classy’ Bishop – to be doing it incorrectly. As media academic Catherine Lumby (1998) remarked in the Age, ‘her clothing is garish, her make-up draws attention to itself and she talks with all the natural charm of someone delivering a prepared speech at a Rotary function’ (see also Alderson 2001; Summers 20017). Hanson here is dismissed as having ‘bad’ taste, and thereby is used to shore up the ‘proper’ or legitimate femininity embodied (or in the case of male commentators, endorsed) by those who publicly mock her; this, of course, is not a unique strategy when it comes to women and class (Skeggs 1997). Without doubt, class is deeply imbricated in these critiques of Hanson’s failure to embody the ‘right’ kind of femininity, something which is policed by women journalists (including feminists like Lumby and Summers) as much as by others.8 During the 1998 Queensland state and federal election campaigns, journalists were preoccupied with attempting to account for Hanson’s appeal; rather than her politics, her sexuality and apparent vulnerability (Duruz & Johnson 2002, p. 145; see also Perera 1999) were seen to be the reason for her resonance with the electorate. In one example, the Daily Telegraph featured a photograph of Hanson alighting from a plane, the wind blowing her skirt up and exposing her thighs, which appeared with the caption: ‘Forget Policy, I’ve got great legs’ (McCabe 1998a). As Ustinoff argues, this article, and myriad others like it, ‘openly negated Hanson as a serious political force’ (2005, p. 97). As Helen McCabe continued, Hanson was described as having ‘uncovered a secret [campaign] weapon – her legs’.9 The Sydney Morning Herald’s political journalist, Margot Kingston, similarly reported: ‘Ms Hanson dressed for the occasion yesterday, playing on her sex appeal among over-45-year-old rural men, by wearing a black pleated mini skirt’ (1998). With her political appeal ridiculed and reduced to ‘sexiness’, Hanson failed to achieve, as Linda Trimble puts it, ‘mediated

196  Political journalism legitimacy’. For women politicians, such sexualisation ‘in the news acts as a form of discipline because it undermines their agency and legitimacy as political actors’ (Trimble 2017, p. 139). Given that postfeminism presumes that sexism has been eradicated, such coverage also evidences its reanimation via irony and satire (Gill 2011), which works nonetheless to constrain women’s political power. Coverage of Hanson is reminiscent of that of the ‘postfeminist Sarah Palin’ in the United States, who was – as Sheeler and Anderson argue – ‘pornified’ and discursively constructed as a ‘MILF’ (an offensive slang acronym for ‘mother I’d like to fuck’). As they note, ‘Framing women’s political agency in terms of sexual influence is a familiar strategy’ (2013, p. 138). It is also a strategy that has intensified due to postfeminism and the celebritisation of politics with which it has been coterminous, and which has been commonly mobilised to undermine women’s political authority (as with the ‘Blair’s babes’ coverage in Britain). Like Palin, Hanson is discursively constituted as a kind of femme fatale, dangerously seducing unwitting male voters: ‘How sex won Pauline more than her 15 minutes of fame’ (Stevenson 1998) and ‘The Sum of the Parts that make Pauline – Sex appeal’ (Hickman 1998).10 In the Australian, David Marr (1997) wrote: ‘Men respect her for showing courage they know they lack. It’s sexy – and so is she’. Indicative of the unease yet provoked by women in power, such coverage draws attention to the profound difference of a woman’s body in a political sphere, and nation, that remains overwhelmingly masculinist (Murphy 2002; Holland & Wright 2017). Continuing such press coverage, and indicative of the destabilisation of the boundaries between broadsheets and so-called tabloid newspapers over this period (Lumby 1999), in the Australian Shelley Gare (1998) writes that iconic women must have ‘a haze of sexuality’ coupled with a ‘quiver of vulnerability’; with Hanson, she continues, ‘we got both’. Likewise, in ‘Hanson’s Sexual Power’ (1998), published in the Herald Sun, Helen Elliott offers this contradictory discursive construction of Hanson: as simultaneously vulnerable and extremely self-assured, offering a combination of a nostalgic form of femininity coupled with a new postfeminist form of confidence: ‘She is always female in the most traditional sense. Her clothes emphasise her vulnerability, as does her hesitant speech and lack of confidence in this playground. She is crying out for a protector’ (Elliott 1998). Hanson is, then, the ‘vulnerable empowered woman’ of postfeminism, simultaneously empowered and at risk (Dubriwny 2012), with the latter being seen to render her more palatable to her core constituency – disaffected male rural voters (Rutherford 2001). However, using her sexuality, as well as her strategic adherence to aspects of traditional femininity, as an explanatory framework for her appeal with voters considerably simplifies the apparent pull of her white nationalist politics, as well as the politics themselves. As such reporting suggests, it is easier to identify anti-feminist sentiments or ‘questionable gender perspectives’ in media

Political journalism  197 coverage of Hanson ‘than in Hanson herself’ (Curthoys & Johnson 1998, p. 107). Nevertheless, Hanson’s relationship to feminism has been especially fraught, entailing both explicit public disavowal and, more recently, strategic deployment of ostensibly feminist rhetoric for more reactionary political ends. Hanson’s ‘feminism’, then and now Hanson, like Bishop, has publicly disavowed feminism a number of times, including in a profile by David Leser (1996) in the Sydney Morning Herald’s Good Weekend magazine (likewise in a 2017 interview on A Current Affair).11 Such refusal to express an affiliation with feminism is also a key aspect of her conservative populist ‘brand’, but the disavowal of feminist politics (though often less overt) is also seen to be a core element of postfeminism itself (Gill 2007; Tasker & Negra 2007; Banet-Weiser 2018). In addition, Hanson has made a number of patently antifeminist statements, such as when she accused women of making ‘frivolous’ domestic violence allegations (Moody 2016). Of paid parental measures being debated in parliament, she remarked that women would become pregnant simply to access them: ‘I’ve gone through a bloody tough life myself as a single mother and held down a part-time job. I had no assistance, no help from anyone. But we have such a welfare handout mentality’ (in Karp 2017). As a neoliberal, entrepreneurial actor, Hanson’s personal success is deployed to justify her politically reactionary stance against the welfare state; it also exemplifies the ‘rugged individualism’ said to be ‘endemic’ to postfeminism (Sheeler & Anderson 2013, p. 108). Such comments are consistent with those she made in the 1990s around the ‘single mother industry’ (in Curthoys & Johnson 1998, p. 104). Hanson’s self-representation as a self-sufficient single mother (she even dubbed herself ‘mother of the nation’) was used as the grounds on which she could critique others. Moreover, as part of their active cultivation of the ‘angry white male’ vote (Sawer 1999) – ‘I think the most downtrodden person in this country is the white Anglo-Saxon male’, she said (in Leser 1996) – One Nation also sought to appeal to non-custodial fathers, who they targeted in their proposed policy initiative of abolishing the Family Law Court. Like postfeminism’s, Hanson’s relation to feminism is complicated: she does not reinscribe a ‘family values’ style discourse, does not advocate women’s retreat into the private sphere, is pro-choice, defends affordable, quality childcare, and she herself embodies an independent, successful, agentic femininity (Curthoys & Johnson 1998, p. 105; Rutherford 2001).12 But Hanson’s relationship with feminism has become even more complicated as revealed by our next flashpoint: the 2017 burqa ‘stunt’. In 2016, still preoccupied with Othering immigrants, Hanson’s focus shifted from Asians to Muslims, with one of her policies being the introduction of a Royal Commission ‘to determine if Islam is a religion or

198  Political journalism ­olitical ideology’ (in Ludlow 2016). The political climate in which p Hanson made her comeback is markedly different from when she first came to public prominence, particularly in terms of the geopolitical realities of post-September 11 and Australia’s involvement in the ‘War on Terror’, as well as feminism’s new-found visibility. In a recent incident Hanson appropriated a form of feminist rhetoric for reactionary political purposes, and thereby drew these new contexts together (in the same way as Sarah Palin had done; see Sheeler & Anderson 2013). In 2017, Hanson, in one of her most offensive public stunts, arrived in the Australian Senate chamber wearing a burqa. Initially, she attempted to couch the stunt in a rhetoric of national security but to the Canberra press gallery she outlined the ‘feminist’ underpinnings of this gesture: I feel for these women. I wore that burqa for half an hour and I couldn’t wait to get it off … And yet we expect women to wear it in our climate, covered up. Why? Because they’re being forced to, by men? (In Elton-Pym 2017) As McRobbie (2009, p. 26) underscores, such framing is entirely consistent with postfeminism: ‘In a post-feminist frame, the only logic of affiliation with women living in other, non-Western cultures, is to see them as victims’. In this respect, postfeminism and racism are co-constitutive. In media interviews following the incident, Hanson continued this attempt to (re)claim the heavily criticised act as a feminist one, arguing that she was merely seeking to liberate her ‘oppressed’ Muslim sisters, a task she charges feminists with neglecting (Remeikis 2017). Thus Hanson, in the mode of colonial saviour, is coming to the rescue of downtrodden Muslim women. Like Christina Scharff’s (2011, pp. 128–129) interviewees, Hanson mobilises the ‘trope of the “oppressed Muslim woman” ’ to buttress the assumption that feminism is unnecessary in Western contexts while also suggesting that she is supportive of gender equality. Ngaire Donaghue suggests that in Australia the ‘solvedness’ of feminist issues implied by the term ‘postfeminism’ is ‘rhetorically scaffolded … by contrasting the apparent freedoms of Australian women with images of oppressed women in developing nations’ (2015, p. 163). Hanson’s burqa stunt is further evidence of such postfeminist framing. In addition, Hanson’s focus on feminists who have purportedly failed to take action on this issue invokes the ‘straw feminist’, who ‘is an apologist for Islam, so obsessed with anti-racism and multiculturalism that she is unable to save her Muslim sisters’ (Dux & Simic in Hussein 2016, p. 38). For Hanson, in what is undoubtedly a form of ‘orientalist feminism’ (Ho 2010), such women, whom she clearly and problematically discursively ‘Others’, are those who continue to experience oppression and discrimination on the basis of their gender – not ‘free’ women like herself (Scharff 2011, p. 130). In her rendering, (white) Australian women are

Political journalism  199 ­ ostfeminist, in the sense of having immensely benefited from, and been p liberated by, the second wave, while Muslim women remain oppressed and in need of feminist salvation. For some conservative commentators, this framing was entirely appropriate; conservative columnist and television presenter Andrew Bolt (2017b) in the Herald Sun newspaper utters what he professes to be ‘feminist truth’: that the burqa is ‘an abomination’. Similarly, former conservative Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s Chief of Staff (and current Sky News host), Peta Credlin, writing in the Daily Telegraph in Sydney, problematically appropriates feminist rhetoric in support of Hanson: ‘The burqa is about control and subjugation of women; it is not about religion’ (2017). This position, however, did not go uncontested; the title of Jill Poulsen’s (2017) article in the Herald Sun is indicative here: ‘Hanson and her ilk are not interested in women’s issues’ (see also Kurti 2017). For many, Hanson’s mobilisation of what she presumed to be feminist modes of interpretation was seen as a strategic political gesture, which itself unsurprisingly backfired and brought much public opprobrium. This more recent coverage tends to address her politics, rather than dismiss her on classed and sexist grounds, suggesting a discursive shift in how the media now respond to this troublesome figure. Nevertheless, over the course of her 20-odd years in the mediasphere, Hanson’s power has been constrained primarily on the same gendered grounds as other women leaders. Although coverage of her is certainly problematic from a feminist perspective, Hanson has experienced less of the overt misogyny and widespread vitriol experienced by Australia’s first woman Prime Minister, suggesting that the closer women come to power, the more we must be disciplined.

Julia Gillard: the ‘accidental feminist’13 In this section, we turn to Australia’s first female Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, and analyse newspaper coverage of two key moments in her public career: her role in toppling a sitting Prime Minister (Kevin Rudd), and her so-called misogyny speech. These flashpoints elucidate much about the gendered nature of public discourse, and how the woman politician – indeed like other forms of female celebrity – is judged, scrutinised, and regulated in deeply troublesome ways (Negra & Holmes 2011). They also severely compromise assumptions, including those made by Gillard herself, about the irrelevancy of gender in twenty-first-century Australia. For Ana Stevenson, who argues that this coverage is indicative of the pervasiveness of postfeminism in Australian public discourse, ‘the [relentless] focus upon Gillard’s gender existed alongside the assumption that sexism and misogyny remain characteristics of the “unenlightened” past’ (2013, p. 54) – a point to which we will return. Julia Gillard, from the Australian Labor Party’s left faction, became the country’s first female Prime Minister in June 2010; she issued a challenge

200  Political journalism to the sitting leader, Kevin Rudd, who had taken power at the 2007 election in a landslide victory. Gillard and her supporters took issue with Rudd’s autocratic style and, following a spate of dire opinion polls, decided to take action against him; she won the leadership ballot and thus the Prime Ministership. In an attempt to shore up her legitimacy, Gillard called an election in August 2010, however, the ALP failed to win a majority and was forced to form a minority government with the aid of three independents. Importantly, out of all the women in this chapter, only Gillard has publicly claimed an affiliation with feminism. That said, her decision to articulate an overtly feminist position came – in the form of a 15-minute parliamentary speech which ‘called out’ the Opposition Leader’s sexism – rather late in her public life. While Gillard may have sought to downplay her gender and its impact upon her political career – a strategic form of ‘non-feminism’ – that gender significantly mediated the way she was discursively constituted in news coverage is undeniable (Hall & Donaghue 2013; Lake 2013; Stevenson 2013; Summers 2013; Walshe 2013; Goldsworthy 2014; Trimble 2016, 2017). This is especially clear in the way her lack of a husband, and indeed a child (with one senator even denouncing her as ‘deliberately barren’), was seen to render her an ‘illegitimate’ leader (Taylor 2015): ‘Furnishing a gender nonconforming woman with the power to act on a political stage is one step too far, at least in Australia’ (Jones 2014, p. 205). She was not, as she herself remarked, ‘a man in a suit’ (in Johnson 2015, p. 303). Furthermore, as Denise Varney (2017, p. 25) argues, Gillard was made the ‘primary public scapegoat’ for all the failures of Australian neoliberalism (redundancies in the manufacturing sector; reduced social services; economic decline), an important factor which also impacted this gendered coverage. There was also a significant class element in these critiques of Gillard, whose accent (a kind of Australian drawl) was seen, like Hanson’s, to firmly code her as working class (Madigan 2010; Frenkel 2011). Making explicit this (negative) positioning of Gillard as working class, an article in the Australian was entitled ‘All hail the Queen of the bogans’ (Maiden 2010). This class denigration of both Gillard and Hanson represents another attempt to undermine their authority and to publicly discipline them (a disciplining that the upper-class Bishop has avoided) – so much for Australian egalitarianism. In Australian media coverage Gillard’s role in the leadership coup was seen to be profoundly at odds with her gender (Taylor 2015). On this point, Blair Williams – comparing Malcolm Turnbull’s overthrowing of sitting Liberal prime minister Tony Abbott with Gillard’s – has argued that the media representation of the latter’s leadership challenge is illustrative of ‘how the media weaponise gender in their portrayal of women politicians as deviant when they exhibit what are deemed to be traditionally “masculine” traits’ (2017, p. 550). In terms of the gendered nature of the media coverage following the challenge, Gillard remarks that, despite the fact that

Political journalism  201 other political leaders have similarly challenged their predecessors, ‘the word “backstabber” or the dramatic image of having knifed a colleague have not been routinely employed against them’ (2014, p. 107). Indicative of this were veteran political journalist Laurie Oakes’ (2010) comments in the Courier Mail: ‘the ambitious Gillard did not hesitate to take up the knife and plant it in Rudd’s back’. Women journalists, too, reinscribed this trope; as Michelle Grattan (2010) remarked in the Sydney Morning Herald: Nice girls don’t carry knives. So Julia Gillard, who has arrived in the prime ministership with the image of the clean, fair player, knows she has to be persuasive in explaining how she came to plunge one into Kevin’s neck.14 The Lady Macbeth trope was a recurrent one (Hartcher 2012), and her ascension to power, and her (albeit precarious) leadership, was seen ‘as a deeply transgressive performance of femininity’ (Johnson 2015, p. 304). Throughout her tenure, the public criticism of Gillard was fierce; as Varney notes, ‘an avowedly anti-feminist media placed itself in the service of the neoliberal backlash against the carbon and other taxes that she introduced’ (2017, p. 31, original emphasis). As part of the failure to recognise the legitimacy of her leadership, Gillard, as many critics have demonstrated, faced some of the most vile, outrageously sexist insults during her time in public office. Although, of course, misogyny is not merely an Australian phenomenon, and impacts political women especially – witness Hillary Clinton’s treatment in the media (Bordo 2017) – in ­Australia it is clearly tied to those masculinist national mythologies discussed earlier (Holland & Wright 2017; Taylor 2019). In a remarkable sign of self-control (and perhaps astute self-branding), Gillard chose to publicly ignore what Anne Summers (2013) dubs the ‘misogyny factor’ until her October 2012 speech. For some, this tells us much about the operations of postfeminist logic. In a postfeminist discursive framework, ‘Being offended by sexism is positioned as a “choice”, and a woman can enhance her capital by showing herself to be unaffected by sexism’ (­Donaghue 2015, p. 164). Gillard’s ‘choice’ to not make an issue of the sexism she was experiencing – that is, until the misogyny speech – renders her, for Donaghue, ‘a post-feminist Prime Minister’ (2015, p. 164). Women politicians need to carefully negotiate their public talk about gender (Sorrentino et al. 2019), even more so in a postfeminist discursive environment. In this respect, key to Gillard’s self-construction, and to her refusal of the ‘deviancy’ commonly attached to women politicians (Ross & Sreberny-Mohammadi 1997, p. 104), is the idea of ‘getting on with it’ (Goldsworthy 2014), evidence that ‘Gillard was well aware that her gender could be used against her’, something she sought to manage by simply refusing to acknowledge that it mattered at all (Johnson 2015, p. 300). As Jasmin Sorrentino and Martha Augoustinos (2012, p. 385) argue, ‘Gillard

202  Political journalism worked to strategically mitigate her gender as merely inconsequential to her role as Prime Minister’. She refused to foreground her gender, or her remarkable achievement, performing a rhetorical move common to female politicians – especially conservative women like Margaret Thatcher (Nunn 2002): ‘I never conceptualise my prime ministership around being the first woman to be doing this job’ (in Goldsworthy 2014, p. 64). Consistent with postfeminism, she also sought to frame her personal success as evidence of women’s transformed status in Australian society, thereby downplaying the need for any further structural changes (Hall & Donaghue 2013, p. 641). In this vein, a Sydney Morning Herald article quotes her distancing herself from any overtly feminist goals: ‘Gillard says she “didn’t set out to crash my head on any glass ceilings” ’ (Murphy 2010). Significantly, since leaving office (and arguably able to exercise more control over her public persona) she has conceded that this refusal to acknowledge the role of gender in terms of how she was being represented, and how she was able to represent herself, was misguided (Gillard 2014). Her feminism, too, has since become much less ambivalent (Taylor, forthcoming). While feminist identification by celebrities seems entirely normalised (and indeed is now expected for women as part of building a viable brand), it continues to have negative consequences for political women (see Lonie 2019). In recognition of this, Gillard repeatedly worked to actively distance herself from feminism (Hall & Donaghue 2013, p. 641), itself by no means a unique strategy for women leaders. For example, a journalist in the Australian emphasises that Gillard ‘avoided being the feminist poster girl’ because of the push back other prominent feminist Labor women had encountered: ‘Gillard was again careful to distance herself from any feminist symbolism by arguing her pursuit of power has been about fairness and hard work, not smashing the glass ceiling’ (Karvelas 2010).15 Here, Gillard’s tactics of self-representation are laid bare, and found to have been successful. Furthermore, as well as potentially alienating voters (Hall & Donaghue 2013, p. 641), the ‘blokey’ culture of the ALP – ‘a party still essentially run by and for mates, usually defined on male terms’ (Cox 2013) – may also have been a factor in this reluctance to publicly identify as a feminist or indeed to draw attention to her gender. Such efforts, of course, were ultimately unsuccessful, and Gillard was unable to ignore the ways in which gendered assumptions shaped the way she was being discursively constructed, including by her political opponents. The ‘misogyny speech’, the next flashpoint examined here, marked ‘a turning point in Gillard’s own performance as a recognizable gendered [and feminist] being’ (Appleby 2015, p. 153). Gillard’s ‘misogyny speech’: from postfeminist to feminist PM? On 9 October 2012, Gillard used a parliamentary speech to finally take the conservative Opposition Leader Tony Abbott to task for the many

Political journalism  203 offensive criticisms he had directed towards her throughout her period of leadership. Speaking for around 15 minutes, Gillard was passionate, obviously angry, yet composed; she was a woman who had clearly had enough, and whose working conditions were now intolerable (Summers 2013). It was Abbott’s hypocrisy that seemed to most provoke her ire: I say to the Leader of the Opposition I will not be lectured about sexism and misogyny by this man. I will not. And the Government will not be lectured about sexism and misogyny by this man. Not now, not ever. […] I was offended when the Leader of the Opposition went outside in the front of Parliament and stood next to a sign that said “Ditch the witch.” I was offended when the Leader of the Opposition stood next to a sign that described me as a man’s bitch. I was offended by those things. Misogyny, sexism, every day from this Leader of the Opposition. (Gillard 2012) Here, as Varney (2017, p. 27) argues, drawing upon the work of Judith Butler, Gillard makes explicit the extent of the ‘injurious force’ of Abbott’s utterances, giving her speech an intense affective power. Most important for our purposes is the claiming of a clearly feminist subject position. As Kate Chapple (2014, p. 7) argues, through the speech ‘Gillard had unleashed her feminist voice, a voice that was hitherto unknown to the Australian electorate’. Gillard’s speech effectively punctured postfeminist assumptions about feminism’s unmitigated success and the successful relegation of overt sexism to the past (Donaghue 2015), exposing the ‘sexism which is so deeply embedded in the Australian body politic’ (Pini in Rourke 2012) and which works to place significant limits on women’s power. For a woman in the public sphere, let alone the Prime Minister, to publicly contest the sexism and misogyny that continues to pervade Australian public life was remarkable, and most certainly newsworthy. Though international media coverage was extensive, and largely supportive (Barnett 2012; Lester 2012; Morrissey 2012) – propelling Gillard ‘to the status of global feminist icon’ (Wright & Holland 2014, p. 455) – local news media was more hostile and sceptical of the political motivation behind Gillard’s publicly performed feminism.16 Journalistic responses to the speech saw a number of problematic gendered assumptions being invoked, including that Gillard was overly emotional and hysterical (Wright & Holland 2014, p. 463), or – as one journalist characterised the speech – ‘shrill and strident’ (Shanahan 2012). In line with the idea that her feminist ire was politically manufactured, her speech was also seen as ‘inauthentic’ (Devine 2012), as she ‘feigned outrage’ and ‘pretended to be upset’ (Campbell 2012). In sharp contrast to the public response to the speech, another journalist later labelled it ‘fake feminism’ (Albrechtsen 2013).

204  Political journalism As many feminist scholars – along with Gillard (2014) herself – have emphasised (Sorrentino & Augoustinos 2012; Donaghue 2015; Johnson 2015; Trimble 2016, 2017; Worth et al. 2016), the pejorative phrase ‘playing the gender card’ circulated widely in press coverage, a gesture which sought to undermine the affective power of Gillard’s ‘political rage and passion’ (Varney 2017, p. 35). Newspaper article titles are indicative here: ‘Gillard reveals true nature in playing the gender card’ (Sheehan 2012) and ‘Gender card is a loser for Gillard’ (Devine 2012). For feminist critics, and indeed the wider Australian public, the speech represented ‘a resistant feminist performance’ (Varney 2017, p. 35), yet in the context of its media reception it was refigured as a cynical, and indeed instrumentalist (Wright & Holland 2014, p. 462), gesture. For journalists, conservative and progressive alike, Gillard’s public feminist identification – her ‘gender opportunism’ (Maley 2013) – at that particular temporal juncture was entirely at odds with many of her own policy initiatives, including those that disadvantaged single mothers (Maley 2013), and attempted to mask her government’s deficiencies: ‘Gender card hides failures’ (Pearson 2012) and ‘Julia Gillard is no feminist hero’ (Pilger 2012;17 see also Sheehan 2012; Taylor 2012).18 Similarly, in the Australian newspaper, Dennis Shanahan (2012) framed the speech as an ‘attempt to destroy Abbott instead of concentrating on governing’, with the Opposition leader being positioned as a ‘good Aussie bloke’ under siege (Holland & Wright 2017). Such reactions, given they seek to forestall a more productive feminist dialogue, are testament to the disruptive potentialities of such a performance. Further, given that her speech was made as she spoke against a motion to remove the Speaker of the House, Peter Slipper, due to allegations that he had sent offensive, sexualised text messages (including those that were degrading to women) to his male staff member, James Ashby, one journalist in the Sydney Morning Herald argued ‘she [Gillard] showed she was prepared to defend even the denigration of women if it would help her keep power’ (Hartcher 2012; see also Albrechtsen 2013). These journalists, however, expressed no concerns about the similar ‘denigration’ (also via heavily sexualised insults) of Gillard herself (Trimble 2016; see also Summers 2013). Another journalist accused Gillard of ‘betraying’ feminism through her political support of Slipper (Grattan 2012). Such readings, of course, worked to help undermine and call into question the legitimacy of Gillard’s impassioned critique of sexism and misogyny, a gesture that potentially ‘damages these arguments for future use’ (Donaghue 2015, p. 172; see also Trimble 2016, 2017).19 In the dominant interpretive frames used by journalists, rather than Abbott’s misogyny being figured as an issue, ‘speaking about sexism, failing to ignore it, failing to rise above it – this is the behaviour that is constructed as abnormal and problematic’ (Worth et al. 2016, p. 61, original emphasis). This is a failure to adhere to the pervasive national (and postfeminist) narrative that gender, along with other modalities of

Political journalism  205 ­ ifference, is inconsequential. Conservative commentator Miranda Devine d (2012) made this explicit in her column after the speech: ‘Playing the gender card is the pathetic last refuge of incompetents … It offends the Australian notion of the fair go.’ In this respect, Gillard’s speech contested the notion that Australia, like others in the West, is a country with little need for feminism or organised feminist activism; responses to the speech (such as Devine’s) reveal a deep investment in this narrative. That is, it was seen as incongruous in a context where gender is (wrongly) thought to barely register. As Varney argues, the speech served to ‘expose the hollowness’ of these ‘mythical Australian values’ (2017, p. 28; see also Trimble 2016), such as egalitarianism, myths Gillard herself had previously worked hard to reinscribe (Hall & Donaghue 2013). Gillard, therefore, embodied a threat to dominant ways of framing the Australian nation, and accordingly had to be rebuked. It was Gillard’s contestation of sexism, not the sexism itself, that was seen as an act of ‘extreme political violence’ (Trimble 2016, p. 297). Gillard’s speech was also framed as a sign of weakness: ‘I never heard Thatcher scream out in the House of Commons that her critics were sexist misogynists. She would have thought that sounded weak’ (Advertiser, 15 October 2012). One article cited Julie Bishop, who suggested that Australian women had high expectations of Gillard as the first female prime minister, and that – by claiming she was a victim of sexism – she had effectively ‘let [them] down’ (in Wright 2012). Similarly, Janet Albrechtsen (2013) wrote in the Australian, ‘the gender-card-waving PM rates poorly as a feminist role model’ because, she implies, she didn’t exhibit neoliberalism’s and postfeminism’s, ‘compulsory individualism’ (Cronin 2000); that is, she failed to do-it-herself. The ‘gender card’ metaphor, and its assumption that women politicians bring attention to their gender as a tactical choice, ‘suggests that the voters might not notice that the candidate is a woman unless she proactively calls attention to the fact’ (Falk 2013, p. 198). That is, in this purportedly postfeminist political environment, gender plays no part in politics or its reporting unless women choose for it to be a factor; this, as we have shown, is patently not the case. Assertions of politicians ‘playing the gender card’, therefore, are rooted in postfeminist assumptions about gender’s contemporary irrelevance and presume that it is only ever strategically deployed for political purposes. Finally, it is significant that in subsequent media interviews, perhaps in response to this negative press coverage, Gillard worked to downplay these gendered attacks, acknowledging sexism but ‘simultaneously restricting it to a small, extremist minority’ (Sorrentino et al. 2019, pp. 13–14); rather than being at the heart of the Australian nation, sexism and misogyny were refigured as an aberration. Although she has publicly rewritten this narrative (Gillard 2014) since herself being deposed by Rudd in 2013, after the speech, and for the remainder of her tenure, her belated feminist voice was largely silenced, and the postfeminist order was thereby restored.20

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Julie Bishop: Australian politics’ (and postfeminism’s) glamour girl In this concluding section, we focus on a high-profile leader at the conservative end of the Australian political spectrum, the Liberal Party’s Julie Bishop. She was first elected to the Australian Parliament in 1998, as the member for the West Australian electorate of Curtin, and she has served as a Minister in the Howard, Abbott, and Turnbull governments. Until recently, she was the Australian Minister for Foreign Affairs – the first woman to be appointed to this highly significant international role – and Deputy Leader of the Liberal Party from 2007. As Foreign Minister, and like Hillary Clinton as US Secretary of State, Bishop took on a role usually reserved for men; Bishop herself, though, worked to feminise this role: ‘I see myself as Australia’s relationship manager’, she told a journalist (Sams 2014). Overall, while Bishop refuses to acknowledge her gender, and especially how it may have hindered her (or other women) in the Australian political sphere, she consistently performs an overt celebration of femininity. She embodies what has been described as the ‘Iron Butterfly’ model of conservative femininity, which is non-disruptive of the gendered social order and does not openly challenge the masculinist status quo hierarchy. It is a model that sees women succeeding within the current system ‘on merit’ and refuses to advocate for structural reform to rebalance male privilege. (Lee-Koo & Maley 2017, p. 320) The ‘iron butterfly’ model, we suggest, is the Thatcherite ‘iron lady’ adapted for the Australian postfeminist context, encompassing a ‘gentler’ leadership style (consistent with the ‘soft power’ of diplomacy) as well as a more stylised, fashionable version of femininity. Media coverage of Bishop often focuses on her seemingly immaculate appearance and fashion sense; she successfully embodies normative femininity: she is slim and fit, appears much younger than her 63 years, is stylish, heterosexual, white, and conventionally attractive. Though physically she may be seen to ‘do’ her gender correctly (Butler 1990), her life choices are so not conventional: she is unmarried and childfree. Unlike Gillard, however, these behaviours have not been coded as aberrant or figured as a problem, either to her party or to the nation. Arguably, any fear or cultural anxiety that such transgressions may have evoked are mitigated by her investment in, and overt display of, more traditional signifiers of femininity; it is also, we will argue, because of class. In 2014, Bishop’s comments contesting the devaluation of femininity were widely reported:

Political journalism  207 I don’t think we should apologise for our femininity … I don’t think we should apologise for our interest in fashion. I have always loved fashion and beautiful clothes and magazines and all of that, that doesn’t mean I can’t have a serious career and hold deeply complex, serious conversations about world events with people. To suggest you can’t do both is insulting. (In Baker 2016; see also Quaggin 2016) Bishop reassures readers (and, more importantly, voters) that she can be an independent, empowered political actor while simultaneously embodying a femininity that is not disruptive to the patriarchal status quo; this is, we would suggest, a conventional form of postfeminism-in-action. While such defences from Bishop are common, it is a very specific kind of glamorised femininity that she seeks to defend – one that is based on various forms of capital (economic, symbolic, cultural, corporeal) for its successful enactment. Bishop’s repeated claims about femininity are entirely consistent with those of feminist critics who take issue with the positioning of feminine cultures and consumption practices as devalued, trivialised and frivolous (Heywood & Drake 1997; Hollows 2000; Baumgardner & Richards, 2002; Scott 2006). While, critically, the relationship between these two loaded signifiers has been exposed to be especially fraught, Bishop rhetorically appears to combine third wave feminism with postfeminism, adopting the celebration of consumption, fashion, femininity and their pleasures as per the former, while presuming that women, like herself, are now unimpeded agents in the public sphere, as per the latter.21 Within such a representational economy, ‘Fashion is a signifier of the postfeminist and essentialized norm: women love to shop and to covet designer labels’ (Winch 2013, p. 124). But, in Bishop’s case, they also ‘love to’ broker foreign trade deals, sanction dictatorships, and administer international aid programmes. It is such reconcilability that both she and journalists underscore; one title sums it up: ‘Julie Bishop: a leader of style and substance’ (Sams 2014). In this way, she is the ideal addressee of one of our women’s magazines, Marie Claire, whose slogan consists of these two signifiers. Within postfeminist culture, as our previous chapters have underscored, ‘beauty, fashion and adornment remain highly prized as part of the arsenal of the high-achieving woman, so that postfeminism equates with excessive consumption, while at the same time expressing sentiments of empowerment and female capability’ (Whelehan 2010, p. 156). In alignment with such logic, and while ‘excessive attention to fashion trends can suggest a frivolous attitude that may tarnish the image of a politician’ (Campus 2013, p. 83), in media coverage of Bishop it is used as evidence of an agentic, self-assured femininity that remains uncompromised by her participation in the ‘masculine’ world of politics. While Mary Douglas Vavrus (2002, p. 2) argues that postfeminism ‘encourages women’s private, consumer lifestyles rather than cultivating a desire for public life and political

208  Political journalism activism’, this (self)representation of Bishop dismisses any tension between them. These journalists appear to accept Bishop’s formulation – that is, her refusal to position femininity and politics antithetically – but this reporting is not without its limitations. For example, one article notes, ‘We look back on some of Bishop’s best outfits, proving you can dress like a feminine fashionista while being a total boss at the same time’ (Quaggin 2016). The remainder of the piece consists, not of policy achievements, but of photographs of Bishop in some of her more noteworthy designer dresses. Such stories are reserved for women politicians, and further evidence that ‘clothing is a clear indicator of media confusion about how to cover women in public life’ (Campus 2013, p. 87). Moreover, such ‘red carpet’ stories indicate the extent to which the political sphere has become thoroughly entangled with celebrity culture – especially for women. Dubbing her the ‘Minister of Fashion’ (Salemme 2014), one newspaper article also underscores her consumption of luxury items: ‘Like her expensive taste in clothing, Ms Bishop favours Giorgio Armani and Chanel cosmetics’ (see also Konstantinides 2017). Reminiscent of Sex and the City’s resident shoe fetishist Carrie Bradshaw, she also confesses: ‘Yes, I’m a shoe lover, I admit. Absolutely, absolutely. Give a girl the right shoes and she can take on the world … Shoes are part of your self-expression, they can give you confidence. I think they’re so important’ (in Salemme 2014). Representing as it does a yoking of a celebratory attitude towards consumption with a feminist-informed vision of women as high-level actors on the global stage, such self-positioning appears consistent with the kind of neoliberal postfeminism mapped by critics in other contexts (McRobbie 2015; Banet-Weiser 2018; Rottenberg 2018). Bishop is the idealised subject brought into being in the women’s magazines we examined in Chapter 3, and who young Australian women can aspire to become. Additionally, though postfeminist culture has long been known for its celebration of a youthful, idealised feminine subject (Wearing 2007; Negra 2009; Jermyn & Holmes 2015; Whelehan & Gywnne 2015), Deborah Jermyn notes that recently there has been a pronounced discursive shift, where ‘older women seem increasingly positioned as credible fashion consumers and arbiters’ (2016, p. 575). These local representations of Bishop are consistent with this apparent shift. As mentioned earlier, it is not just femininity that is key to these representations of Bishop as a desirable figure but also class. In terms of class dynamics, these representations shore up not just her political legitimacy in a wider sense, as Katrina Lee-Koo and Maria Maley argue (2017, p. 327), but her status as a legitimate representative of her party. The Australian Liberal Party, like the Conservatives in the United Kingdom or the Republicans in the United States, promotes a free market logic and critique of over-regulation and taxation, but also has broadened its voter base to the ‘aspirational’ voters who equate support for the party – at least at the ballot box – with the trajectory of upward class mobility. Such celebration

Political journalism  209 and normalisation of a desire for upward mobility are written into the enduring national myth of egalitarianism (Elder 2007, p. 58), as well as neoliberalism, both of which presume that gender does not inhibit Australian women, that all Australians are entitled to a ‘fair go’ (a fiction that continues to do deeply ideological work, in both progressive terms as Chapter 1 shows, and more retrograde forms, as we see here). Bishop suggests that all Australian women can access the privileges garnered by second wave feminism – education, professionalisation, independence, success, wealth – without destabilising normative femininity in any significant respect; again, classic postfeminism. In addition, her interest in expensive, luxury designer items positions her as part of an upper-class elite, and, like chick lit, offers an aspirational narrative for post-second wave Australian women and girls, thereby shifting the focus from the masculine working-class Aussie ‘battler’ (with whom Hanson was preoccupied) to the young woman on the move, literally through her positioning on the global stage, and symbolically in class terms. One journalist framed this concerted embrace of femininity as one of the key differences between Bishop and her Labor party counterparts, who – indicative of class-based distinctions – reportedly ‘view her Armani suits, trademark polish, mannered debating style and mildly flirtatious manner with suspicion’ (Snow 2013). Moreover, as myriad media profiles foregrounding her designer wardrobe underscore – itself also consistent with ‘postfeminist consumerist enchantment’ (Negra 2009, p. 118) – Bishop clearly displays ‘signifiers of wealth … that speak to the kind of class privilege that enables “successful ageing” ’ (Jermyn 2016, p. 579). Thus, while some women are permitted visibility as ageing bodies, this cannot be easily detached from class dynamics. Bishop’s very public ageing, as well as her status as ‘unwife’ (Kingston 2004) and ‘unmother’, is permissible because of her class location and the ways in which it is, quite literally, written on her designer-clad body. We conclude with our final flashpoint: Bishop’s October 2014 speech to the National Press Club. Disavowing feminism: National Press Club speech In her ‘Women in Media’ speech to the National Press Club on 29 October 2014, Bishop explicitly addressed her relationship to feminism. This speech, and particularly her patent antipathy towards feminism, was the subject of extensive media coverage. Bishop’s feminist disidentification is an important ideological gesture, consistent with the Liberal individualistic ethos as well as with postfeminism, and has become integral to her selfbrand; as a celebrity, she is not alone in this publicly staged renunciation (Taylor 2016). Her speech precipitated debate about whether an expressed affiliation with feminism was even necessary when Bishop herself appeared to be living a feminist politics, while some journalists pondered ‘What’s made Julie Bishop so afraid of feminism?’ (Price 2014).

210  Political journalism As far as Bishop is concerned, though avoiding the historical amnesia seen to govern postfeminism (Munford & Waters 2014, p. 30), the ­Australian women’s movement has done its work: ‘[Feminist] is not a term that I find particularly useful these days. I recognise the role it has played. I certainly recognise the women’s movement and the barriers they faced and the challenges they had to overcome’ (in Medhora 2014). Clearly, distancing herself by using the pronoun ‘they’ (as opposed to the more sisterly ‘we’), Bishop presumes that such ‘challenges’ are no more, and feminism’s ‘pastness’ – as is common in postfeminist rhetoric (Tasker & Negra 2007; McRobbie 2009) – seems assured. With the use of such individualistic rhetoric, ‘the notion of collective struggle becomes almost meaningless in this context where structural constraints are undone through the process of responsible, autonomous individualization’ (Scharff 2011, p. 126). Bishop qualifies her position in relation to a feminist identity: I’m not saying I’m not a feminist, I don’t reject the term, I’m just saying it’s not a way I describe myself. First and foremost I’m a parliamentarian, a minister. I don’t find the need to self-describe in that way. (In Medhora 2014) Significantly, Bishop also claims that her lack of an explicit identification as a feminist is the result of her privilege, leaving open the possibility that it may be a more appropriate or viable gesture for other women not similarly placed: ‘I’m not saying there is no glass ceiling. But you’re not going to get me saying that my career has been stymied because of a glass ceiling. That would be inappropriate for somebody in my position to suggest’ (in Medhora 2014). Overwhelmingly, journalists did not contest this narrative about the irrelevance of gender, simply noting Bishop’s refusal, unlike Gillard, to ‘blame gender for any obstacles in her career’ (Medhora 2014; see also Callick 2013; Ireland 2014).22 Moreover, her refusal to concede that gender has played a role in her public life, a postfeminist assumption upon which her feminist disavowal is predicated, seeks to foreclose an understanding of feminism as an unfinished political project (Fraser 2013). As she makes clear, in true neoliberal style, if women are unsuccessful, it is their own fault: ‘I’m not going to blame the fact that I’m a woman for it not working. I might look at whether I was competent enough or I worked hard enough … but I’m not going to see life through the prism of gender’ (in Medhora 2014; see also Shanahan 2012; Sams 2014). Here, structural inequalities are downplayed and the individual is coded as being capable of overcoming any social and political constraints, and the vocabulary deployed by Bishop is indicative of the ostensible ‘unlimited individuality and freedom’ consistent with the individualisation thesis (Scharff 2011, p. 212; see also Rottenberg 2018). For Lee-Koo and Maley (2017, p. 329), such a position is integral to the ‘iron butterfly’ model of femininity:

Political journalism  211 ‘Bishop refuses to identify bias in the political system, and instead lays responsibility for gender inequality at the feet of women. In this way the Iron Butterfly is non-disruptive of the system and its accompanying male privilege’. As per both postfeminism and neoliberalism, no structural remedies are required, and certainly no overtly feminist solutions. Only a year after she delivered the speech, however, Bishop’s relation to feminism shifted, and it is worth briefly considering how her recent repurposing of discourses around gender difference was reported. In October 2017, not insignificantly the month after the less socially conservative Liberal Malcolm Turnbull usurped Abbott as Prime Minister, her comments at an Australian Women’s Weekly event about the difficulty of being the only woman in Cabinet (under the Abbott Government) were widely reported. In the Sydney Morning Herald Judith Ireland (2017) observed: Ms Bishop spoke of her frustration at suggesting ideas, only to have them ignored and then copied by other (male) members of cabinet … Ms Bishop put her experiences down to ‘unconscious bias’ on the part of her male colleagues. ‘It’s almost a deafness that we still see in ­Australian society’. Such a critique of her male colleagues’ behaviour, and the symbolic silencing of women parliamentarians, is clearly a feminist one. Perhaps this shift and willingness to publicly discuss the gendered behaviours that have marred the Cabinet process, and politics more broadly, is the product of an increased cultural visibility of (a certain form of) feminism over the past few years (Gill 2016; Taylor 2016). In this press coverage, and in stark contrast to Gillard in 2012, she becomes repositioned as a valiant feminist warrior, cited on the differences in men’s and women’s leadership styles; (re)branding herself this way has a new kind of cultural currency (Hamad & Taylor 2015). For some, though, it was seen to be a strategic political gesture to differentiate herself from the more conservative branch of the Liberal Party, which includes former Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s supporters, to help support leadership ambitions (Bolt 2017a). As with Gillard’s misogyny speech, the articulation of feminist sentiments comes to be publicly dismissed as a strategic political gesture. As we were finalising this chapter, Bishop was a casualty in a leadership coup that saw Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull replaced by the ‘family values’ focused, Evangelical Christian Scott Morrison. After unsuccessfully putting herself forward in a leadership ballot, she announced on 28 August 2018 that she would not be seeking a position in Morrison’s cabinet, and media coverage focused extensively on her appearance: Bishop fronted a press conference in the courtyard of Parliament House wearing (reminiscent of Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz) a pair of sparkly red high heels, with matching painted fingernails. As in previous coverage of Bishop,

212  Political journalism which saw empowerment and femininity as entirely reconcilable, women journalists praised her ‘awesome power heels’, with this sartorial gesture being figured as one of (feminist) resistance and defiance (Sullivan 2018).23 Some journalists queried whether Bishop would now pronounce an affiliation with feminism, given that gender was clearly a factor in her failure to win the leadership ballot (Baird 2018). Shortly after her resignation, Bishop spoke at another Australian Women’s Weekly event (‘Women of the Future’) and called into question the Liberal Party’s poor record on women’s representation: ‘It is not acceptable for us in 2018 to have less than 25 per cent of our parliamentarians as female’ (in Truman 2018). As yet she has not explicitly revised her public stance in relation to feminism, but now that she is no longer a high-level government minister, her position, and the kind of public persona she constructs, may indeed shift (as Gillard’s has since leaving politics).

Conclusion As we have made clear, when it comes to women and institutional power and how it is publicly conceptualised, there is a much less optimistic story to tell about Australian postfeminist culture than in our other chapters; women are permitted access to power, but only within very real material and discursive limits. In this way, in our semioscape of constrained power, we see some similarities between Australian political leaders and those elsewhere, such as Hillary Clinton whose appalling media treatment has been well documented and critiqued (Bordo 2017). We concur with Sheeler and Anderson that ‘even as legal barriers to women’s participation in electoral politics have been dismantled, their cultural, discursive, and rhetorical constituents remain’ (2013, p. 3). Regardless of feminism’s increased visibility over the past few years, the more recent examples here (Gillard and Bishop) suggest not that troublesome gendered news reporting has become less prevalent since Hanson’s appearance on the political stage in 1996 but that it has become more pronounced. That is, despite the post-gender rhetoric, political representation has still not managed to shift its codes of representation. This chapter, like previous ones, has made clear that Australian news coverage at once draws upon and complicates a number of key tropes and discourses mobilised elsewhere in relation to neoliberal postfeminism. We have shown that these three political figures, Pauline Hanson, Julia Gillard, and Julie Bishop, each have had an ambivalent relation to feminism, and indeed to femininity, and it is in such a space that we can see the intersections of postfeminism and gendered discourses around women’s leadership. While myriad studies have demonstrated how women politicians are discursively constituted in ways which serve to undermine or call into question their ability to lead or occupy key sites of political power, we have located our analysis of Hanson, Gillard, and Bishop in

Political journalism  213 Australia’s specific political and cultural histories. Following Holland and Wright’s (2017) recent work, we have conjectured that each of these women, to varying degrees, faced a unique form of ‘double delegitimisation’, based on their status as both women politicians and political leaders in a context founded on ‘exclusive and exclusionary male narratives[s] of the national identity’ (p. 593). Enduring Australian nationalist mythologies can be seen to inform these gendered discursive constructions in particular ways. Further to this, we have shown that despite post-class assumptions, class significantly inflected the way these women have been figured in public discourse. In this respect, we have attempted to foreground how postfeminism, nationalism, classism, ageing, and heterosexism ‘work together to reproduce social inequality and relations of power’ (Butler 2014, pp. 53–54). In terms of our findings, this chapter is the most atypical, suggesting much about the need for further institutional and cultural shifts, both in terms of Australian parliamentary politics itself and in terms of how women’s relation to power is discursively constructed (including by women themselves). The previous chapters show that cultural forms produced by and for women outstrip the capacity of ‘the real’ to actually engage with a changed gender regime. The news coverage we have examined also reveals a deeply conflicted position regarding feminism: these female politicians were damned if they declared they were feminists, and damned if they did not. Indeed, feminism itself has become another way of disciplining women politicians. Further, the flashpoints analysed here mobilise a number of familiar postfeminist tropes, especially around sexism’s, and thus feminism’s, ‘pastness’, and such narratives themselves come to be disrupted, including by the political women at their centre (Gillard’s misogyny speech and Bishop’s critique of the patently masculinist culture of parliamentary politics, for instance). In Australia, as elsewhere, there is now a greater public awareness of gender politics, and in 2018 the question of women’s political representation is the subject of almost daily news coverage. These case studies have demonstrated the limited discursive frames being mobilised to report on women in power, suggesting – not simply that political institutions need to be further transformed – but that the language for publicly making sense of such powerful women also needs to be fundamentally overhauled, especially as such representations potentially have very real effects (such as whether women will pursue a career in politics at all).24 It is in this space, we argue, that the unfinished business of Australian feminism comes most clearly into focus. Contra egalitarianism – itself a discourse, consistent with postfeminism, used to suggest feminism’s redundancy – women as political actors are far from being given a ‘fair go’. In the book’s conclusion, drawing together our insights from each case study, we offer some suppositions as to why postfeminism appears to be playing out in some markedly different ways in Australia.

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Notes   1 As many critics have argued, women in politics are subject to a ‘double bind’ (Jamieson 1995), where they must negotiate the expectation that they remain stereotypically feminine while consistently proving that they (in spite of this) are capable of successfully acting in the masculinist world of politics.  2 The problematic way women politicians have been represented in the ­Australian media has been taken up extensively by a number of critics (Baird 2004; Muir 2005; Taylor 2015), as it has in other contexts (Norris 1997; Vavrus 2002; Van Zoonen 2006; Campus 2013), especially given the focus on their appearance and intimate bonds.   3 It is worth mentioning that Australia’s news landscape is undoubtedly shaped by the concentration of media ownership, with two companies controlling the overwhelming majority of newspapers: News Limited (including national broadsheet, the Australian, the Daily Telegraph, the Herald Sun and the Courier Mail) and Fairfax (including the Age, the Sydney Morning Herald, the Financial Review, the Sun Herald and the Canberra Times). Given such concentration, there is a degree of consistency and homogeneity in terms of how Australian women politicians are reported, especially depending upon their political affiliation (e.g. as we shall see, News Limited coverage of Gillard was overwhelmingly negative).   4 Howard (‘PM Calls for End to History Wars’, 2009) explains this: ‘The black armband view of our past reflects a belief that most Australian history since 1788 has been little more than a disgraceful story of imperialism, exploitation, racism, sexism and other forms of discrimination’.   5 Hanson was convicted of electoral fraud in 2003, but served only 78 days of her sentence (Mackenzie 2003). She maintained her celebrity status, appearing on Dancing with the Stars in mid-2004 and Who Wants to Be a Millionaire in 2005, and the Australian adaptation of Donald Trump’s The Celebrity Apprentice in 2011.   6 See Kingston’s 2001 book for the collapse of Hanson’s relationship with One Nation power brokers. More recently, these include James Ashby, who – as we discuss in the Gillard section – had been a staffer to the Speaker of the House, Peter Slipper.  7 One of Australia’s more prominent celebrity feminists, Anne Summers, problematically wrote: Hanson’s frock said it all. The zebra stripes implying wildness and unpredictability combined with the sexual allure of the tropical hibiscus epitomised Pauline’s political potency. The packaging, too, was pretty much perfect. The neckline plunged, but not too far. The skirt was decorously long, but frivolous with its spiralling ruffles. She was unencumbered by a Thatcherite handbag, the sandals matched and let’s face it she has the body to wear such an outfit. (2001)   8 Similarly, as Melissa Gregg remarks, in the case of Gillard ‘it was female journalists who were primarily raising questions regarding Gillard’s appearance, clothing, and accent’ (2011, p. 73). For an analysis of how Hanson was handled by Sixty Minutes journalist Tracey Curro, during the infamous ‘please explain interview’ (when Hanson asked what ‘xenophobic’ meant), see Meaghan Morris’s 2000 article.   9 In the Herald Sun adaptation of this story, McCabe (1998b) quotes one of the Who Weekly judges of the worst dressed celebrities (Hanson came in at number two) without editorialising: ‘This is someone who has absolutely no

Political journalism  215 idea how to dress for her figure, her coloring, or her age’. Hanson, this comment implies, as a woman, lacks appropriate cultural competencies (something for which we later see Bishop celebrated). 10 Of course, this persistent reference to her by first name (as with Gillard) can be seen as part of a wider culture of disrespect towards women political leaders in Australia (Summers 2013, p. 111). 11 Some scholars have attempted to recuperate Hanson as a feminist figure, arguing that her life choices and her active engagement in the political sphere work to position her as such even if she does not explicitly identify as feminist (Ellison & Deutchman 1999; Deutchman & Ellison 2004). 12 As a profile in the Age observes, ‘Twice-divorced Hanson is not a “family values” conservative’ (Alcorn 1998). 13 Kennedy (2014) refers to Gillard this way in her review of My Story. 14 Trimble’s comprehensive study, however, underscores how journalists deprived Gillard (like Hanson) of agency, positioning her as the subordinate ‘puppet’ of the ALP’s ‘faceless men’ (2017, p. 57). 15 For example, Labor State Premiers Carmen Lawrence (Western Australia) and Joan Kirner (Victoria) were widely denigrated in press coverage (Baird 2004). 16 Many feminist commentators have remarked upon differences between the international and the local reception of Gillard’s speech (Summers 2013; ­Stevenson 2013; Goldsworthy 2014; Wright & Holland 2014; Donaghue 2015). 17 Pilger suggests: Promoted by glass-ceiling feminists with scant interest in the actual politics and actions of their hero, Gillard is the embodiment of the Australian Labor party machine – a number-crunching machine long bereft of principle that has attacked and betrayed Australia’s most vulnerable people, especially women. (2012) 18 Well-known Australian feminist academic and founder of the Australian Women’s Electoral Lobby, Eva Cox (2013), also took issue with Gillard’s failures in terms of policies benefiting women. 19 That said, it also helped to bring into being various forms of feminist counter publics, especially online, and thereby is central to a form of feminist visibility which is ongoing in Australia (as elsewhere). For example, the ‘Destroy the Joint’ Facebook group was formed in response to radio shock-jock Alan Jones’s offensive comments about Gillard and continues to make a range of feminist issues visible via this platform (see McLean & Maalsen 2017). 20 In her final press conference as PM, she revisited the question of gender, noting rather non-committally: ‘It doesn’t explain everything, it doesn’t explain nothing, it explains some things’ (Gillard 2013; see Sorrentino et al. 2019). 21 While some critics, such as Munford and Gillis (2004), work to underscore the similarities between the two, others such as Shelley Budgeon (2013) emphasise their points of divergence. 22 Her attitude to misogyny was seen to significantly differentiate her from Gillard; as Callick (2013) remarked, ‘if anyone expects Bishop to take up where former PM Julia Gillard left off, railing against sexism and misogyny, they will be disappointed’. 23 On 30 November 2018, Bishop donated these shoes to the Museum of ­Australian Democracy, dubbing them a symbol of women’s empowerment. 24 For an analysis on how media coverage impacts young women’s engagement with politics, see Lonie (2019).

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224  Political journalism Tasker, Y. & Negra, D. 2007, ‘Introduction: feminist politics and postfeminist culture’, in Y. Tasker & D. Negra (eds), Interrogating postfeminism: gender and the politics of popular culture, Duke University Press, Durham, NC, pp. 1–25. Taylor, A. 2012, Single women in popular culture: the limits of postfeminism, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke. Taylor, A. 2015, ‘Behind every great woman? Celebrity, political leadership and the privileging of marriage’, in S. Cobb & N. Ewen (eds), First comes love: couples, celebrity kinship and cultural politics, Bloomsbury, London, pp. 169–187. Taylor, A. 2016, Celebrity and the feminist blockbuster, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke. Taylor, A. 2019, ‘Steve is twice the Aussie you’ll ever be: Germaine Greer, the Crocodile Hunter’s death, and nationalistic misogyny’, European Journal of Cultural Studies, doi.org/10.1177/1367549418821840. Taylor, A. forthcoming, Femoir, Bloomsbury Academic, London. Taylor, L. 2012, ‘PM’s speech did stir hearts, but remember the context’, Sydney Morning Herald, 13 October, viewed 25 April 2019, www.smh.com.au/politics/ federal/pms-speech-did-stir-hearts-but-remember-the-context-20121012-27i1h.html. ‘The mother’s club’, 2002, the Sydney Morning Herald, 7 September, viewed 25 April 2019, www.smh.com.au/articles/2002/09/06/1031115937062.html. Trimble, L. 2016, ‘Julia Gillard and the gender wars’, Gender and Politics, vol. 12, pp. 296–316. Trimble, L. 2017, Ms Prime Minister: gender, media and leadership, Toronto University Press, Toronto. Trioli, V. 1997, ‘So much talk, so little listening’, Age, 15 May, viewed 4 May 2019, Factiva. Truman, I. 2018, ‘Julie Bishop slams the liberal party’s treatment of women’, Marie Claire, 6 September, viewed 25 April 2019, www.marieclaire.com.au/ julie-bishop-slams-liberal-party. Turner, G. 2004, Understanding celebrity, Sage, London. Ustinoff, J. 2005, ‘The many faces of political Eve: representations of Queensland women parliamentarians in the media’, Queensland Review, vol. 12, no. 2, pp. 97–106. Van Acker, E. 2003, ‘Media representations of women politicians in Australia and New Zealand: high expectations, hostility or stardom’, Policy, Organisation & Society, vol. 22, no. 1, pp. 116–136. Van Zoonen, L. 2006, ‘The personal, the political and the popular: a woman’s guide to celebrity politics’, European Journal of Cultural Studies, vol. 9, no. 3, pp. 287–301. Varney, D. 2017, ‘ “Not now, not ever”: Julia Gillard and the performative power of affect’, in E. Diamond, D. Varney, & C. Amich (eds), Performance, feminism and affect in neoliberal times, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, pp. 25–38. Vavrus, M. D. 2002, Postfeminist news: political women in media culture, State University of New York Press, New York. Walsh, C. 2015, ‘Media capital or media deficit? Representations of women in leadership roles in old and new media’, Feminist Media Studies, vol. 15, no. 6, pp. 1025–1034. Walshe, K. 2013, The stalking of Julia Gillard: how the media and team Rudd brought down the prime minister, Allen & Unwin, St Leonards.

Political journalism  225 Wearing, S. 2007, ‘Subjects of rejuvenation: aging in postfeminist culture’, in Y Tasker & D Negra (eds), Interrogating postfeminism: gender and the politics of popular culture, Duke University Press, Durham, NC, pp. 277–310. Wheeler, M. 2013, Celebrity politics, Polity, London. Whelehan, I. 2010, ‘Remaking feminism: or why is postfeminism so boring?’, Nordic Journal of English Studies, vol. 9, no. 3, pp. 155–172. Whelehan, I. & Gywnne, J. (eds) 2015, Ageing, popular culture and contemporary feminism: harleys and hormones, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke. Williams, B. 2017, ‘A gendered media analysis of the prime ministerial ascension of Gillard and Turnbull: he’s “taken back the reins” and “she’s a backstabbing murderer”’, Australian Journal of Political Science, vol. 52, no. 4, pp. 550–564. Winch, A. 2013, Girlfriends and postfeminist sisterhood, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke. Worth, A., Hastie, B., & Augoustinos, M. 2016, ‘ “Playing the gender card”: media representations of Julia Gillard’s sexism and misogyny speech’, Feminism and Psychology, vol. 26, no. 1, pp. 52–72. Wright, J. 2012, ‘Time PM stopped playing the gender card: Abbott’, Sydney Morning Herald, 10 October, accessed via: www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/ time-pm-stopped-playing-the-gender-card-abbott-20121010-27c5u.html. Wright, K. & Holland, J. 2014, ‘Leadership and the media: gendered framings of Julia Gillard’s “sexism and misogyny” speech’, Australian Journal of Political Science, vol. 49, no. 3, pp. 455–468.

Conclusion Australian postfeminism as popular feminism

When we began our research for Postfeminism in Context, we did not necessarily expect to find such a different approach to postfeminism expressed in Australian popular culture. Our texts, however, have unsettled the critical hegemony around this term, which sees a handful of theorists and their approaches mapped onto cultural analyses, with little consideration for the applicability or viability of an acontextual postfeminism. Such a method, we have argued, can limit our ability to theorise the varied and complex ways in which feminism is articulated in and through popular texts in culturally specific ways. Over the 20 or so years we have examined, we find Australian popular culture has a much more complicated and productive engagement with feminism than previous, and now semi-canonical, understandings of postfeminism allow. Nevertheless, given the nature of transnationalism and global political and cultural flows, including in terms of genre itself, not surprisingly we have found some notable similarities between Australian texts and Anglo-American texts – in particular, that postfeminism in some aspects functions as a gendered form of neoliberalism. Our readings resist a universalised postfeminist theory, offering instead a more hopeful and nuanced picture in terms of how popular culture has responded to feminism. Rather than an innate suspicion towards popular culture – another quality limiting accounts of postfeminism – we have allowed other possibilities to be seen. There are, of course, many tensions and contradictions in the gendered representations we have examined, but in general there is little ‘classic’ postfeminist disavowal of feminism, and little evidence of an anti-feminist reaction. Instead, a clear and positive recognition of changes in women’s lives occasioned by the women’s movement is apparent, as well as an acknowledgement of the unfinished business of modern feminism, most notably: the tensions between work and care demands, the constraints of conventional ideologies of femininities, the need for freedom as well as intimacy, and the structural and discursive obstacles to personal fulfilment. As popular culture attempts to process and work through second wave feminism’s legacy, it also points to the necessity of further feminist work – including in terms of the cultural politics of the mainstream imaginary.

Conclusion  227 Unlike other scholars who, in recent accounts of postfeminism, see such incorporation of feminism by popular culture as a form of instrumentalisation (Gill & Orgad 2015; Gill 2017; Banet-Weiser 2018; Kanai 2019) that ultimately undermines feminism in the same way disavowal does, a less troubling relationship emerges in our analyses. As we have made clear throughout, Australian postfeminism for us is both after and informed by second wave feminism. The semioscapes we have identified clearly demonstrate that the representational landscape in Australia, across a number of forms and texts, has been irrevocably altered by second wave feminism: another form of unsettling. These texts, by and large, are comfortable with, if not celebrate, women’s relative emancipation – whether bodily, sexual, economic, affective, or intellectual. Our first case study, chick lit’s semioscape of aspiration and independence, reveals how work for women is taken for granted, and female pleasure is guilt-free and valid, two thematics that mark virtually every form examined. The semioscape of postfeminist kinship characterising television dramedy demonstrates an expanded range of definitions of the family and a reduced importance of heterosexual relations to women’s self-definition and life course – another two features that are shared across genres. Women’s magazines and their semioscape of abundance also propagate an extended range of femininities and life choices for women. The semioscape of confidence and care that we find in our beauty vloggers evinces a reworked but powerful form of mediated sisterhood and feminine expertise that helps young women to cope with the disciplinary apparatus of the fashion–beauty–media complex. And while self-help’s semioscape of calculating magic tells a similarly problematic story, this time of coping as a woman in neoliberal Australia, the sense of self-worth and agency we identified signals an energised and energetic female subject who (like the vloggers) should not be readily dismissed as being a bearer of neoliberal false consciousness. However, our final semioscape of constrained power is a sobering reminder of how certain domains – namely, the mediated form of institutional political power – want to hang onto an older Australia via prescriptive versions of a feminine, non-feminist, correctness. On another less positive note, although some of our texts have engaged explicitly with race and how it intersects with gender (particularly in Chapter 1), we have identified a flattening of cultural and ethnic difference which is troubling in light of Australia’s history of colonialism and dispossession of Indigenous people, and post-Second World War migration. If women of colour do feature in narratives, as is the case with chick lit, a Western postfeminism is very much the ideal. Unfortunately, Australian postfeminism does appear to bear out Gisela Kaplan’s (1996), among others’, contention that white women were the main beneficiaries of second wave feminism. Another concern is the ongoing anxieties nearly every semioscape displays regarding the importance of physical appearance

228  Conclusion (and its related issue of ageing) to women’s self-worth and identity. And there is no denying the impact of neoliberalism as an ideologico-historical context, especially in genres such as self-help, and in the permeation of certain tenets of neoliberalism throughout: the related notions of the entrepreneurial self, the project of the self, and the management required of the self at all levels of being. Even so, it is reductive to see postfeminism as just a form or ‘helpmate’ of neoliberalism; rather, postfeminism is located at the nexus of the aftermath of second wave feminism and the neoliberal turn, and particular elements of both are complementary (just as second wave feminism emerged at a juncture in late capitalism that was beneficial to both). So, for instance, the agentic self of feminism is echoed by the entrepreneurial self of neoliberalism; the sexually liberated woman of feminism finds parallels in the hedonistic consumer of neoliberalism. Regardless, it is incorrect to see such echoes and overlaps as unambiguous evidence of neoliberalism’s dominance and/or its incorporation of feminist demands and gains. To do so is to delegitimise the feminist project – making it a dupe of capitalism – and to ignore the expanded range of freedoms available to predominantly white Australian women (and the aspirations to these freedoms by those women who are still yet to benefit). Moreover, to read postfeminism as only indicative of the limits of gendered neoliberalism is to underrate readers and audiences. Much recent scholarship that seeks to mine ostensibly ‘postfeminist’ texts for signs of their antifeminism fails to take account of sophisticated audience responses to them (Horbury 2014) and undermines the legitimacy of reader or audience pleasure. That is, reinforcing the ‘cultural dupe’-style position long critiqued by cultural studies, the emphasis on the seemingly regressive politics of such texts (which themselves are also polysemic and thus open to disruption) and their effects on women audiences, presumes that readers and viewers need to have such texts demystified by the feminist critic in the know (Brunsdon 2000). It also presumes that readers cannot think critically while simultaneously experiencing the pleasures of the text. We find that being open to wider interpretive possibilities than current invocations of postfeminism allow confirms that popular culture is made-to-mean in a variety of ways, by diverse audiences who use their own ‘mattering maps’ (Grossberg 1992) to make use of these popular narratives. And part of this is treating women’s desires for cultural pleasure with respect rather than with automatic suspicion. Through the aggregation of these varied case studies, we contend that Australian postfeminism, by and large, can be seen as a transitional stage between second wave feminism and the full emergence of a new, as yet unnamed form of feminist politics, which can operate within (and hopefully resist) consumer capitalism and neoliberalism. When this new feminism more fully emerges, postfeminism will no longer relate to the contemporary, but instead will become a concept that describes the recent past. Popular culture has always been central to attempts to expand the

Conclusion  229 reach of feminism and to make it intelligible to as wide an audience as possible, and Australian media has been no exception (Henderson 2006; Taylor 2008). Texts that have been deemed ‘postfeminist’ are merely part of this much longer process of cultural translation (Fuller & Driscoll 2015). While critics have recently considered popular feminism as just another, more crafty, articulation of postfeminism (Gill 2016; BanetWeiser 2018), in light of our findings in the Australian context we would suggest that postfeminism is but a form of feminism in the popular (see Genz & Brabon 2009; Fuller & Driscoll 2015). This need not lead to its uncritical celebration, of course, nor a neglect of the ways in which the State and corporations do attempt to manage and profit from feminism. But it does resist a simplistic pessimism and an ignorance of feminist change, instead emphasising feminism’s presence and role in popular culture, and popular culture’s imbrication with everyday life, institutional power, and political demands made by women. We ignore, or downplay, the potential of popular culture in making a new feminist activist movement at our peril. But why might Australian postfeminist culture take this unsettling, nonreactionary form compared to other contexts? We surmise that a combination of national cultural characteristics, the history of Australian second wave feminism, and the ways in which neoliberalism has played out in this country are factors. First, Australia does not have such a powerful Christian conservative right as the United States (though it is starting to emerge), which has campaigned vociferously for years against feminism and women’s rights. So, for example, the postfeminist trope of maternal retreatism that Diane Negra (2009) identifies in US popular culture, gains little traction here. Second, Australia’s uptake of neoliberalism, while farreaching, was also to an extent ameliorated, even disguised (in imagined, if not in actual policy terms) by a continuing Australian ethos of fairness and egalitarianism embedded in the welfare state, and a long period of affluence. In such a context, women’s postfeminist demands for equality and fair treatment, and the legitimacy of these demands, do not align with neoliberalism’s ruthless individualism. Moreover, Australia avoided post-GFC austerity measures. We suspect that economic prosperity – even if unequally shared – has some role in a lack of mean-spiritedness, a sense of potential, exhibited across the semioscapes. Complementing this is the success of the Australian women’s movement in widespread attitudinal changes (that partly relied on the enduring Australian mythology of egalitarianism) and the rollout of policies and programmes benefiting women in the mid-1970s onwards via the femocrat strategy. It is now taken for granted that many women will be educated, have a career, lead full and pleasurable lives, and be cultural producers, and that there are still barriers to their equal participation and achievement. Consider, for instance, the 2019 Australian Federal election, in which ‘women’s issues’ were arguably foregrounded more than ever before. And note that postfeminist culture is

230  Conclusion often made by women, and feminism’s legacy is in their cultural production. We end with a few final thoughts regarding the concept of postfeminism itself. If what we have found is that Australian postfeminism unsettles dominant ways of conceptualising the intersections of feminism and popular culture, what of the critical efficacy of the term itself? Should it continue to be used, but with more nuance and regard to cultural and historical contexts, or is there a better way of thinking through the complexities of the representational field when it comes to gender? Ultimately, we concur with Rosalind Gill that postfeminism ‘should not be the only term in our critical lexicon, but it does still have something to offer’ (2016, p. 612; see also Keller & Ryan 2018). The critical practice we have employed here suggests that it can be strategically useful, especially if we open the term up to resignification to allow for cultural, historical and political specificity; if we are less preoccupied with designating texts and practices themselves ‘postfeminist’; and if we turn our focus to the kinds of feminisms that are being ‘summoned’ and the ways in which they might (or might not) speak to diverse audiences (Whelehan 2010, p. 128; McDermott 2018; Kanai 2019). We have also argued that it is vital to attend to what Gill (2017) has described as ‘the psychic life of postfeminism’, further coming to terms with its affective pull. Indeed, our attention to its affective aspects has enabled a more generous reading of postfeminist culture. And finally, the relationship between feminism and popular culture has long been a complex one, and here we hope to have offered some sense of both the limitations and the possibilities of using a concept like postfeminism to help understand a popular cultural field that, without doubt, bears a significant indebtedness to Australian second wave feminism. Australian postfeminism is, therefore, a potential crucible for a new and as yet unnamed feminist politics that can continue the task of political, cultural, and social unsettling.

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Conclusion  231 Gill, R. & Orgad, S. 2015, ‘The confidence cult(ure)’, Australian Feminist Studies, vol. 30, no. 86, pp. 324–344. Grossberg, L. 1992, ‘Is there a fan in the house? The affective sensibility of fandom’, in L. Lewis (ed.), The adoring audience: fan culture and popular media, Routledge, New York, pp. 50–68. Henderson, M. 2006, Marking feminist times: remembering the longest revolution in Australia, Peter Lang, Bern. Horbury, A. 2014, ‘Post-feminist impasses in popular heroine television’, Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, vol. 28, no. 2, pp. 213–225. Kanai, A. 2019, Gender and relatability in digital culture: managing affect, intimacy and value, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke. Kaplan, G. 1996, The meagre harvest: the Australian women’s movement 1950s– 1990s, Allen & Unwin, Sydney. Keller, J. & Ryan, M.E. 2018, ‘Introduction: mapping emergent feminisms’, in J. Keller & M.E. Ryan (eds), Emergent feminisms: complicating a postfeminist media culture, Routledge, London, pp. 1–22. McDermott, C. 2018, ‘How to survive the postfeminist impasse: Grace Helbig’s affective aesthetics’, Girlhood Studies, vol. 11, no. 3, pp. 50–66. Negra, D. 2009, What a girl wants? Fantasizing the reclamation of self in postfeminism, Routledge, London. Taylor, A. 2008, Mediating Australian feminism: re-reading The first stone media event, Peter Lang, Oxford. Whelehan, I. 2010, ‘Remaking feminism: or why is postfeminism so boring?’, Nordic Journal of English Studies, vol. 9, no. 3, pp. 155–172.

Index

Abdel-Fattah, R. 30, 32–5, 42–3, 48–9 advertising 10, 27, 51n3, 93, 96 advice: in chick lit 34–5; self-help 155–6, 158, 161, 171–2, 175–6, 178–9; in vlogs 17, 123–6, 130–7, 140, 143, 146; in women’s magazines 91–2, 97, 99, 100, 104–5, 110–12 aestheticisation 102–4, 106, 165–6, 171–8 affect 144, 156, 203–4; negative 37–41, 143; see also postfeminism affect affective bonds 16, 57–8, 60–6, 72, 75, 80–1 affective labour 62, 64–6, 131, 139, 141, 144; see also emotional labour affluence 17, 26, 31, 36, 45, 229 Air Kisses 30, 32–6, 38, 42, 46, 48 Alderson, M. 29–30, 32, 38, 40–2, 47 Appadurai, A. 4, 6, 127 aspirationalism 17, 132, 135, 137, 179, 208–9; see also chick lit; women’s magazines authenticity 5; and chick lit 39, 41; and self-help 159, 168, 170–5, 178–9; and vlogs 124–33, 141–3, 148n6; see also inauthenticity austerity 38, 136, 229 Australian, The 196, 200, 202, 204–5, 214n3 Australian governments: Australian Labor Party 38, 96, 203–4, 52n14; Liberal-National Party 7–9, 116n8, 206, 211 Australian Labor Party (ALP) 8, 33, 38, 199–200, 202, 209 Australian Women’s Weekly 17, 78, 91, 108–14, 211–12 automediality 124–5, 132, 140

Avoiding Mr Right 29–30, 32–55, 38, 42–3, 47, 49 Awad, A. 30, 32, 34, 36, 42–3, 47–8 Bail, K. 7–8, 10, 194 Banet-Weiser, S. 14, 124, 129, 130, 147n2, 188 beauty 17, 207; and chick lit 32–3, 43, 46–7; and self-help 171, 175; and vlogs 123–5, 128, 130–1, 136–7; and women’s magazines 90, 95, 99, 107, 115; see also fashion-beauty-media complex beauty vlogs/vloggers 17; and automediality 124–5; and digital intimacy 125–7; transnationalism 127–8; and YouTube 128–9; see also Curtis, L. and Mansutti, D belaboured self 159, 170 Berlant, L. 60, 66, 127, 144, 146 Bishop, J. 18, 44, 187–90, 195, 200, 205–12 Blair, T. 190, 196 blokette 100–1 Bonner, F. 90, 92, 115n2 Bourdieu, P. 47, 51n3, 102, 104 brands 44, 104, 167–8, 170, 197; and self-branding 123–8, 130–2, 138–9, 141, 177–8, 201–2; see also Bishop, J Bridget Jones’s Diary 26, 42, 47, 52n13, 57, 63 Brown, H. 96 Butler, Jess 29, 62, 99, 213 Butler, Judith 99, 191, 203, 206 calculating magic 18, 155–6, 160, 162–8, 170–3, 175–80 Campaign Ruby 30, 32–3, 35–6, 38, 42, 47

Index  233 care of self 15, 47, 124, 140, 145, 169 care of others 10, 226, 227; and dramedy 60, 64–9, 71–4; and selfhelp 155; and vlogs 123–7, 131; and women’s magazines 112–13; see also sisterhood careers 16, 189, 191; and chick lit 32, 34–6, 39; and dramedies 62–3, 69–71, 80; and self-help 158, 161, 172, 176–8; and women’s magazines 101, 105, 109–10, 114; and vlogs 128 celebrity, celebrification 14, 18; and vlogs 137, 139–40; and politicians 189, 195, 199, 208–9; and microcelebrity 126, 128, 131–2, 135, 138, 140–1; and women’s magazine 90, 97, 109–10, 112–13, 125–6 Chanel sweethearts 30, 33, 38–42, 44, 46–7, 51n8 chick lit: Anglo-American 29, 31, 37, 62, 63, 226; bildung 28, 30, 43–4, 50; emergence of 28–9; and nonWestern 47, 50, 52n12 choice: and lifestyle 68–70, 157, 206; and self-help 164, 172, 179; postfeminist discourses of 6, 57, 192, 201, 227 cities see urban settings class: and Australia 2, 27, 36–41, 44, 102; inequality 37, 78, 99, 229; middle classes 27–32, 40–6, 78, 99, 105–8, 111–14; and postfeminism 4, 31, 52n12, 52n13; and working classes 37–41, 50, 114, 188, 193–5, 200–9 Cleo 17, 90–2, 94–102, 104–5, 107, 116n4, 123 community 59, 80, 82, 159, 167; and on-line 17, 126, 129–30, 138, 140 confidence culture 128, 142, 146, 177–8 consumerism 16–18, 209, 228; and chick lit 26, 32, 37–9, 41–3, 45–8, 50; and self-help 171, 175; and women’s magazines 90–1, 101, 104, 108, 113–15 conspicuous consumption 10, 27, 43, 44, 50, 75 corporeality 46–7, 165 Cosmopolitan 17, 28, 90–2, 95–102, 104–7, 114 cosmopolitanism 51n6, 91, 102, 104–6, 192

couples 58, 63, 76, 81–2 Courier Mail 201, 214n3 Courting Samira 30, 32–3, 34, 36, 42–3, 47–8 cultural intermediaries 27, 31, 51n3, 51n8 Curtis, L. 124, 128–37 Daily Telegraph 195, 199, 214n3 depression 124, 136–9, 171 detraditionalisation 59, 64, 67, 74 Dobson, A. 100, 124–5, 127, 129–30, 139–40, 144, 146 domesticity 101, 104, 108–14, 117n21 Dosekun, S. 4–6, 127 dramedy 35, 58, 60–1, 75; Offspring 61–71; Winners and losers 71–80 dreamscape 17, 44, 62, 78, 82, 90–115 Driscoll, C. 12–14, 147n1, 229 economic growth 17, 31, 37, 38; see also affluence economic rationalism 20n8 egalitarianism 11, 37–40, 95–9, 107–13, 200–9, 229 Elder, C. 37, 209 emotional labour 16, 58, 67, 124, 170 Energise your career: a guide to how any woman can have the success she wants 176–8 entrepreneurialism 8–9, 139, 160–5, 170, 197, 228 everyday philosophy see calculating magic experience, power of 50, 73–5, 125–7, 130–6, 140–5, 164–8; see also authenticity ‘fair go’, the see egalitarianism familialism 61, 73, 81; see also family family: traditional 16, 59–61, 71–2, 78–81, 108–13, 174; and nontraditional 59, 61–70, 73, 81, 130 fashion 33, 43, 93–9, 106, 189, 206–8; see also fashion-beauty-media complex fashion-beauty complex see fashionbeauty-media complex fashion-beauty-media complex 16, 27–8, 31–6, 46–50, 102–7, 113–15; see also fashion femininities: conventional 17, 47; corporeal 165; non western 50;

234  Index femininities continued postindustrial 16, 17, 27, 28, 45–9, 109 feminism: Australian 6–9, 14–18, 67, 96, 189, 213; and consciousnessraising 18, 34, 77, 156–8, 163, 180; DIY 7–8, 17, 164, 194; emergent 14, 228–30; instrumentalisation of 14, 143, 156–7, 161, 166, 227; neoliberal 15, 176; and self-help 156–8, 166; as spectral 14, 147, 157, 180; third wave 7, 8, 15, 19n6, 19n7, 207 fetish see fetishism fetishism 27, 31, 42–5, 47–50, 52n11, 208 fitness see also wellness 155–6, 158, 161, 165–71, 180n2 Foster, Z. 30, 32–6, 38, 42, 46, 48 Frankie 99, 116n5 Freud, S. 42, 52n11, 93–4, 97, 99, 114 Friedan, B. 77–8, 115, 148n10, 158 friends see friendship friendship 49, 59, 61, 66–7, 71–6, 79–82; see also sisterhood Genz, S. 14, 42, 104, 109, 131–2 Genz, S., and Brabon, B. 5, 12–13, 59 Gill, R.: efficacy of postfeminism as a term 4, 14, 230; feminist visibility 14–15, 157, 190; neoliberalism 10, 155; makeover culture 44, 73, 112, 169, 179; postfeminist canon 57; postfeminist sensibility 5; psychic life of postfeminism 15, 126, 230; women’s magazines 90–1, 99, 106 Gillard, J. 18, 187–90, 199–205 girl power 166n9, 194 girls 17, 72–6, 100, 123–7, 133–7, 141–5; as postfeminist ideal 10, 129, 147n1, 159; sexualisation of 91, 116n9 Global Financial Crisis 38, 229 glocalisation 63, 71, 92, 107, 162, 194 Goddess 164; domestic 109, 111, 117n21; see also homemaker Greer, G. 77, 112, 148n10 Guardian, the 222 Gucci mamas 30, 33, 38–42, 44, 46–7, 51n8 Hanson, P. 18, 34, 187–90, 193–9 Harris, A. 10, 126, 129, 131, 146 Health 99, 113, 124–6, 155–8, 161–3,

165–71; mental health 137–43; see also fitness The healthy life: a complete plan for glowing skin, a healthy gut, weight loss, better sleep and less stress 165–8 Hedley-Ward, J. 171–5 hedonism 4, 16, 27–8, 41–5, 50, 91, 99, 114 Heiss, A. 29–30, 32–5, 38, 42–3, 47, 49 Henderson, M. 7, 13, 19n2, 20, 77–8, 229 Herald Sun 196, 199, 214n3, 214n9 heteronormativity 67–8, 76, 98, 134, 156 heterosexuality 42–8, 62–9, 79–82, 91–5, 134, 175 Holmes, S. 107, 110, 119, 208 homemaker 78, 85n24, 109, 111, 113, 172 housewife see homemaker Howard, J. 7–9, 78, 116n8, 191–3, 214n4 humour 28, 49, 65, 81 inauthenticity 27, 31–3, 36, 47 Indigenous women 29–34, 47, 62, 95, 112–13, 128 individualism 6–10, 18–19, 57–64, 192–7, 205, 229; and individualisation 59, 138, 145, 157, 178, 210 intimacy 16, 32, 226; and detraditionalisation 59–61, 79–80; and the family 61–7; and friends 71, 76; and spatiality 76–9; digital intimacy 125–7, 148n6; and self-love 129, 137; digital intimacy and negative affect 138–41; and self-help 163, 167 intimate publics 17, 115, 123–7, 133, 139, 144–6 Jacenko, R. 29–30, 34, 37, 42, 44 Jermyn, D. 92, 107, 208–9 Kanai, A. 13–15, 143–4, 146, 156, 227, 230 Keating, P. 52n14, 192 Kendall, C. 30, 33, 38–42, 44, 46–7, 51n8 Kinship 57–62, 65–73, 76, 81, 123, 145

Index  235 larrikin 49, 96 Lean in 70, 176; see also Sandberg, S. Lifestyle 7; and chick lit 33, 37, 39, 44; and self-help 157–8, 168; and vlogs 131, 133, 137, 139; and women’s magazines 96–9, 106–12 Lighten up: a female’s modern day guide to physical transformation 165–6, 168–70 ‘Love Your Body’ 143 Luxury 38, 42–50, 90–1, 102–6, 113–14, 173–5; items 31, 37, 39, 48, 208–9; see also conspicuous consumption Mansutti, D. 124, 128, 132–5, 137–45 Mad about the boy 29–30, 32, 38, 40–2, 47 Manhattan dreaming 29–30, 32–5, 38, 42–3, 47, 49 Marie Claire 17, 44, 90–2, 94, 101–2, 104–14, 115n1 marriage 33–6, 58, 68, 71–7, 109–10, 192 Martin-McDonald, K. 176–8 Marwick, A. 124–5, 131–2, 140 masculinity 35, 43, 65, 84n17, 82n2 maternalism 58–9, 83, 167, 171–5, 192–3, 229 McRobbie, A.: disavowal of feminism 3, 5, 26, 95, 115, 189; fashionbeauty complex 4, 27; maternalism 58–9, 69; neoliberalism 10, 208; postfeminist femininity 48, 63, 79, 101, 123, 139; perfectionism 36, 125, 161, 166; pessimism 12–13; sexualisation of girls 91, 100; women workers 31–3, 176 Media see social media migrants, migration 3, 19, 189, 193, 197, 227 misogyny 15, 188–90, 199, 201–5, 211, 213; see also sexism mononormativity 63 mothers see mothering mothering: and television 58, 61–72, 77–8; and magazines 95, 99, 101, 105, 109–13; and self-help 156, 171–5, 179, 180n2; and politicians 192, 196–7, 204, 209 narrators 58, 62, 64 nationalism 96, 112, 193, 196, 213

Negra, D. 34, 68–9, 77, 109, 171–3, 229 neoliberalism: Australian 7–11, 26–8, 50, 179, 200–1, 227–9; and gender 6–10, 18, 156, 172–9, 210, 226; feminist 13–15, 45, 155–6, 176, 179–80, 228; postfeminist 10, 59, 81, 123–7, 134–8, 142–6; vitalism 169, 177 The New Woman 42, 44, 65, 90 No sex in the city 30, 34, 36, 44, 49 Not meeting Mr Right 29–30, 32–5, 38, 42–3, 47, 49 Offspring 16, 35, 58, 61–71, 80–2 ordinariness 45, 78, 108–13, 125–8, 132–4, 139 Pants on fire 29–30, 32, 38, 40–2, 47 Paris dreaming 29–30, 32–5, 38, 42–3, 47, 49 pecuniary emulation 43, 45; see also conspicuous consumption perfectionism 36, 135, 142, 144, 161, 166–8 Playing the field 30 pleasure 17, 227–8; chick lit 32, 36, 41–6, 48–50; dramedies 69; political journalism 207; self-help 166, 170–1, 192; vlogs 131, 144; women’s magazines 91, 93–7, 99–101, 114 political leadership 187–92, 195, 200–1, 203, 206, 211–12 politicians see Bishop, J; Gillard, J; Hanson, P; Howard, J; and Keating, P popular culture, Australian 1–3, 8, 13, 18–19, 96, 226, 228–30 popular feminism 1–8, 14–19, 91–6, 100, 115, 226–30 positive thinking 36, 161, 164, 167, 178; see also positivity positivity 135, 137–8, 140–1, 169, 174, 178 postfeminism: academic accounts of 1–15; affect 15, 101, 155, 163, 179, 230; Anglo-American 1, 4, 6, 14, 62–3, 226; efficacy of term 11, 230; and ‘Having it all’ 16, 58, 64, 70, 147n1 postfordism 26–32, 37–40, 44–50, 51n3, 102, 104 post-gender 187, 189–91, 212 postindustrial 4, 51; femininities 17, 31–2

236  Index postraditionalism 157; families 59, 131 pregnancy 66, 68, 70, 73, 110, 197 recessionary culture 38, 160 relationships see marriage; romantic love reparative reading 3, 14 retraditionalisation 58, 60, 79–80, 171; see also retreatism retreatism 69, 77, 81, 174; domestic 34, 70, 91, 109, 192, 197; maternal 34, 171, 173, 229 romance: narratives 31–6, 41–6, 49–50, 80–2, 134, 159 romantic love 26–8, 31–2, 42–50, 58, 74–80, 109 Roper, H. 165–6, 168–70 Rose, N. 9, 139, 159, 163, 177 Rottenberg, C. 15, 70, 176, 208 Ruby blues 30, 32–3, 35–6, 38, 42, 47 Rudd, J. 30, 32–3, 35–6, 38, 42, 47 Rumour mill: a Jazzy Lou novel, The 29–30, 34, 37, 42, 44 Sandberg, S. 70, 176 self-actualisation see self-help; see also calculating magic self-help 1, 9, 17–18; career advice 156, 178, 18n15; health and fitness 155–8, 161, 165–71, 174–5, 180n2; industry 159, 161, 168, 170, 176; mothering guides 156, 171–5; self-actualisation 70, 155–8, 160–3, 168–70, 174; see also therapy culture self-love 128, 133, 142–3, 146, 168 self-reflexivity 59, 125, 144; postfeminist 42, 49–50, 59; parodic feminist 16, 28, 41–2, 50 semioscapes 1, 4–5, 15, 19, 227, 229 Sepel, J. 165–8 service industries 11, 26 Sex and the city 57, 62, 71–2, 74–5, 79, 208 sexism 188–90, 196, 199–01, 203–5, 213, 214n4, 215n22 sexuality 2, 40–1, 60–1, 91, 96, 124, 158, 161, 163, 175, 180n2, 188–90, 195–6 Sheridan, S. 6, 108, 113 sisterhood 49, 61, 72–6, 124–7, 167–8, 227; see also beauty vlogs social media 90, 124–9, 135–7, 140–5, 177

social mobility 28, 32, 38–40, 112 Spotlight: a Jazzy Lou novel, The 29–30, 34, 37, 42, 44 Strictly confidential: a Jazzy Lou novel 29–30, 34, 37, 42, 44 suburbia 59, 62, 76–9 Sydney Morning Herald 71, 192–7, 201–2, 204, 211 Tasker, Y and Negra, D. 4, 6, 38, 81, 160, 169, 173 Taylor, A. 10, 68, 137, 156–7, 200, 229 Thatcher, M. 188, 194, 202, 205–6, 214n7 therapeutic value see therapy culture therapy culture 157–9, 162, 174 Tiddas 29–30, 32–5, 38, 42–3, 47, 49 Transnationalism: and chick lit 50; and postfeminism 4–5, 10, 101, 226; and postfordism 28; and self-help 159; and vlogs 123, 127–8, 145–6; and women’s magazines 109, 112 Trump, D. 15, 193, 214n5 Turner, G. 126, 129, 148n5 urban settings 30, 37, 44, 76 Versace Sisters 30, 33, 38–42, 44, 46–7, 51n8 vlogs 2, 9, 15, 17, 115, 123–49 wellness 103, 107, 168 Whelehan, I. 12, 36–7, 42, 48, 90–1, 230 Whitlam, G. 9, 96, 116n10 Winch, A. 48, 73, 75–6, 126, 140, 175, 207 Winners and losers 16, 58, 61–2, 67–9, 71–82, 113 women: and ageing 17, 67, 107, 207–9, 213, 228; and beauty 17, 47, 49–50; Indigenous women 3, 19, 95, 112, 114, 128; lesbian 3, 99–100, 113; migrant 3, 19; working women 10–11, 31–6; young women 5, 12, 16–17; chick lit 28, 31–2, 36, 45, 49–51; dramedies 59, 79; vlogs 125–9, 137–9, 144–5; women’s magazines 91–7; see also girls Women’s magazines: layout of 96–7, 102–13, 175; and plenitude 17, 91, 108–13, 175; readers of 90–7, 105,

Index  237 108, 110–11, 114; as wish fulfillment 17, 94, 106, 114; see also Australian Women’s Weekly; Cleo; Cosmopolitan; Frankie; Marie Claire work 10–11; in chick lit 31–4, 40, 51; in dramedies 66, 71–2; segregation 51n4; in self-help 159, 173, 179–8; in vlogs 139; in women’s magazines 105–6, 112, 115; see also careers Wrong girl, The 30, 32–6, 38, 42, 46, 48

You can . . . live the life of your dreams 160–1, 163, 167 Younger man, The 30, 32–6, 38, 42, 46, 48 You sexy mother: a life changing approach to motherhood 171–3, 175 YouTube 1–2, 17; see also beauty vlogs/vloggers ‘Yummy Mummies’ 171–5