Postfeminist Whiteness

Front matter

WHITENESS

PROBLEMATISING MELANCHOLIC BURDEN IN CONTEMPORARY HOLLYWOOD

KENDRA MARSTON

Introduction

I

The World Is Her Oyster: Negotiating Contemporary White Womanhood in Hollywood’s Tourist Spaces

‘Hoist the Colours!’ Framing Feminism through Charismatic White Leadership in the Fantasy Blockbuster

Neoliberalism, Female Agency and Conspicuous Consumption as Tragic Flaw in Woody Allen’s Blue Jasmine

Paranoid Attachments to Suburban Dreams: Pathological Femininity in Gone Girl and The Girl on the Train

Aristocratic Whiteness, Body Trauma and the Market Logic of Melancholia in Black Swan

Sofia Coppola’s Melancholic Aesthetic: Vanishing Femininity in an Object-oriented World

Conclusion: Melancholic White Femininity, Cultural Resonance and the Shifting Politics of Representation

Bibliography Filmography Index

III Iqi

198 210 215

Figures

Kirsten Dunst as Ophelia in Melancholia

The role of Delia Shiraz is to provide advice to Liz in Eat Pray Love

The Virgin Mary presides over Frances as she learns valuable life lessons in Under the Tuscan Sun

Katherine re-enacts her favourite Fellini scene in Under the Tuscan Sun

Alice faces the expectant gaze of the conformist crowd in Alice in Wonderland

Captain Jack Sparrow is a rock star pirate in Pirates of the Caribbean Alice is a saintly Joan of Arc figure in Alice in Wonderland Daenerys Targaryen is hailed as a ‘mhysa’ in Game of Thrones Jasmine reluctantly spends the day with Ginger, Chili and Eddie in Blue Jasmine

Jasmine discusses her tendency to look the other way while lunching with wealthy friends in Blue Jasmine

Jasmine’s homelessness doubles as a ‘casting out’ of the postfeminist sensibility in Blue Jasmine

Megan’s suburban melancholia in The Girl on the Train

The commercialisation of ‘can-do’ femininity in Gone Girl

Amy evokes the heroines of Thelma & Louise in Gone Girl

Amy raises Greta’s suspicions in Gone Girl

Nina’s bid for perfection culminates in severe bodily injury in Black Swan

Erica’s obsessive artwork in Black Swan

Portman’s performance in Black Swan is a staged escape from childlike roles

Lux Lisbon’s knowing wink in The Virgin Suicides

159 168

FIGURES Vil 6.2 Marie Antoinette as ‘Queen of Debt’ 174 6.3 Charlotte is unable to alleviate her melancholy through travel in Lost in Translation 178 6.4 Coppola’s melancholic aesthetic is evoked through images of ‘natural’ and timeless white femininity in The Virgin Suicides 185

Acknowledgements

First, I wish to acknowledge my gratitude to the School of Communication and Arts at the University of Queensland for their faith in this project and financial support in the form of an Australian Postgraduate Award (funded by the Australian Federal Government). I must also extend my deepest gratitude to my PhD advisors Associate Professor Jane Stadler and Associate Professor Fiona Nicoll for their unwavering encouragement and always thorough and thought-provoking feedback on this book. Their broad knowledge base, passion for their subjects, and always considered and caring approach to supervision were assets on my research journey. A big thank you is also due to Professor Diane Negra and Professor Yvonne Tasker for taking the time out of their undoubtedly busy schedules to read this work and provide invaluable insights on the project. Gillian Leslie, Richard Strachan and Rebecca Mackenzie at Edinburgh University Press ensured that the book publication process ran smoothly and were always prompt and friendly in their communications.

Relocating to Brisbane from my hometown in Wellington, New Zealand, to research this project was a bit of a daunting endeavour. I therefore wish to acknowledge those friends and colleagues who welcomed me to the city and helped make my time there an enjoyable experience. Special thanks must go to Jessica Rothwell, Jessica Hughes, Prateek, Lauren Clayton, David Baker, Wilson Koh and Emily Zong for accompanying me on various outings and helping me to explore Brisbane’s highlights. Lastly, I want to thank my family — Mum, Dad, Juliet, Claude, and Gus for their support, encouragement and willingness to let me live at home in times of post-PhD financial hardship.

Chapter 1 of this book was first published as the article “The world is her oyster: negotiating contemporary white womanhood in Hollywood’s tourist spaces’ by Kendra Marston from Cinema Journal, Volume 55, No. 4, Fall 2016, pp. 3-27 (Copyright © 2016 by the University of Texas Press). Part

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS iX of Chapter 5 was previously published in 2015 as “The tragic ballerina’s shadow self: troubling the political economy of melancholy in Black Swan’ in Quarterly Review of Film and Video 32:8, 695-711. Portions of Chapter 2 first appeared in the article ‘English ladies to liberators? How Pirates of the Caribbean and Alice in Wonderland mobilise aristocratic white femininity’, published in Jump Cut 54 (2012) <https://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/ jc54.2012/ MarstonWhWomenRace/index.html> I am grateful to be granted the right to reproduce this material here.

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University Press

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Introduction

E 2011, the second film in Lars von Trier’s ‘depression trilogy’, Melancholia, was released to critical acclaim at the Cannes Film Festival in France. Exhibiting a romantic aesthetic notably distinct from the Danish director’s previous foray into the world of existential trauma and isolation — the dark and bleakly violent Antichrist (2009) — Melancholia paints a sublimely poetic image of the earth’s destruction. Set to the operatic strains of Richard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, the film’s prelude evokes the world’s demise through a series of tableaux capturing irregularities in the normative human experience of space-time as well as the destruction of gravity’s laws. Majestic views of the cosmos illustrating the planet Melancholia’s impending encroachment upon the earth’s atmosphere are interspersed with images documenting the effects of this celestial event on earthly life. A dark horse collapses in a moonlit field, birds die and drift downward from the sky, and a lone bridal figure struggles to move through the atmospheric density as gnarled tree roots rise from the soil and impede her journey forward. This bride, the film’s melancholic protagonist Justine (Kirsten Dunst), literally experiences the weight of the world against her and yet her calm acquiescence to the earth’s annihilation is subsequently illuminated by the film as a resultant feature of her existential crisis. Justine’s belief that the world is ‘evil’ and that ‘no one will miss it’ operates as a counterpoint to that of her sister Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg), who exhibits increasing levels of anxiety and distress at the imminent cessation of her earthly existence.

Justine’s prophetic awareness as to Melancholia’s ultimate path also contrasts with her brother-in-law John’s steadfast investment in humanity’s ability to chart nature’s course. John (Kiefer Sutherland), unable to cope with the false conclusions of a scientific inquiry which has determined that Melancholia will bypass Earth as it has done Venus and Mercury, chooses to commit suicide in the stables rather than confront the ultimate powerlessness lA,

Figure I.1 Kirsten Dunst as Ophelia in Melancholia.

of humanity. Human powerlessness is encapsulated in the promotional poster for the film, in which Justine is imagined in a pose that evokes painter John Everett Millais’ depiction of William Shakespeare’s tragic heroine Ophelia. Wearing her bridal gown and clutching a bouquet of flowers, Justine appears as a figure caught between life and death, her body half-submerged amongst the foliage of a lily pond as her veil forms a ghostly halo trailing in the watery depths.

The loss of world that the audience witnesses in this film is, however, the loss of a particular type of world built upon wealth, privilege and social prestige. Justine’s melancholia becomes most evident throughout the proceedings of her lavish wedding, during which she expresses irritation at her mother’s hostility towards the occasion and with her boss’s repeated insistence that she come up with a tagline for his company’s new advertising campaign. Justine has promised Claire that she will endeavour to be happy throughout the event, yet she appears to hold little regard for wedding ritual as she arrives two hours late to the reception and has to be coaxed from her room prior to the cakecutting ceremony. Justine’s depression eventually deepens to the point where she can no longer sustain the social performances required of her, culminating in her erratic decision to flee the reception in a golf cart, have outdoor sex with a young male guest and urinate on the lawn. Justine’s rejection of the codes of bourgeois whiteness is reflected through what Marta Figlerowicz refers to as the film’s ‘tragi-comic’ treatment of the interactions amongst the wedding guests, noting that ‘the more operatically characters express frustration at Justine’s inappropriateness, the more wanton a figure each of the bride’s detractors cuts against their always grander setting’ (2012: 23). Referring to the curious actions of Justine’s French wedding planner (Udo Kier), who emphatically declares his refusal to look at the woman who ruined his wedding and covers his face upon passing her, Figlerowicz hypothesises that the insignificance of the party’s quarrels correlates to ‘the insignificance of the cultural models it tries to follow’ (23). Robert Sinnerbrink, too, points to the emptiness of the wedding guests’ pursuits in noting that the image of splayed models that Justine is obliged to create a tagline for bears a striking resemblance to Renaissance artist Pieter Bruegel’s 1567 work “The Land of Cockaigne’, ‘an allegory of moral vacuity in a land of plenty’ (2014: 115). Sinnerbrink argues that while Justine has a ‘refined aesthetic sensibility’, she is unable to cope with the destructive world of commerce that her boss Jack (Stellan Skarsgard) personifies, and reads the strained interactions between the pair as a sign that ‘commerce really owns and controls art’ (117).

A treatise on the moral decay of the Western world is thus narrated through a melancholic white female’s depressive episode — her disillusionment with marriage, consumer capitalism and familial ties permeates the mood of a film hailed by some film reviewers as an artistic masterpiece of contemporary cinema.! Thomas Elsaesser notes that von Trier, like David Lynch and Michelangelo Antonioni, is a director who utilises the cultural association between femininity and heightened empathy in order to stage ‘acts of protest and refusal’ in his heroines. The protagonist’s experience of depression or melancholia may indicate her refusal to abandon a lost object or the desire to return to an imaginary sense of plenitude, but also a reluctance to adhere to social norms such as marriage, with Elsaesser stating that such films can be psychoanalytically or politically interpreted (2015). Melancholia may impress critics for its experimental formalism that is able to capture Justine’s experience of the interminability of time, or for its intertextual artistic literacy, or for the startling lead performance of Hollywood actress Kirsten Dunst. But the film is also, I argue, part of a broader cultural moment in popular cinematic representation where young women of melancholic disposition are utilised as vehicles through which to explore the excesses of late capitalism and the failures of neoliberal postfeminism. These failures are framed in several films through narratives of ‘white burden’, in which white women are situated as victims of governmental forms and associated corporate structures that have promised members of socially empowered groups happiness and fulfilment yet have inevitably failed to deliver. Whiteness may be critiqued in relation to patriarchal power structures, but what is markedly less common in these films is a critique of how such power structures disadvantage those who are neither white or of a privileged socio-economic class.

In the films to be analysed within this book, which encompass such diverse fare as travel romance Eat Pray Love (Ryan Murphy, 2010), fantasy film Alice in Wonderland (Tim Burton, 2010) and the psychological thriller Black Swan (Darren Aronofsky, 2010), women who are both white and of a privileged class status are very much centralised within their fictional onscreen worlds. The continued privileging of white characters and performers within Hollywood cinema is, of course, nothing new and was the subject of virulent media debate in relation to the lack of diversity amongst the nominees at the eighty-eighth Academy Awards.’ Yet in utilising melancholia as a tool through which to distance female protagonists from white patriarchal power structures, these films are able to engage in commentaries that position the heroines’ race privilege and affluence as disabling sicknesses of the contemporary political and cultural moment. A primary concern of these texts centres upon the female protagonist’s feelings of disempowerment and her ultimate search for alternative forms of agency, and so the types of commentary that these films engage in could be construed as feminist and certainly as at least critical of postfeminist and neoliberal discourses. Whiteness is framed as a ‘burden’, yet it is primarily a burden that forms a barrier to female emancipation as opposed to a hierarchical, hegemonic system that works on a political, economic and social level to hierarchise and oppress. To be free of this burden and associative melancholia, the heroine desires to detach herself from the social obligation to invest in popular postfeminist and neoliberal philosophies, which Yvonne Tasker and Diane Negra state are ‘white and middle-class by default’ in their elision of socio-economic inequalities that may impact on a woman’s freedom to choose (2007: 2). The necessity of relinquishing this attachment may come with the heroine’s corresponding endeavour to renegotiate her relationship to her own privileged race and class identity, with many of these films ultimately participating in forms of what Sarah Projansky and Kent A. Ono term ‘strategic whiteness’ (1999: 153).

Whiteness, the authors argue, has had to undergo various modifications in response to social movements and social change throughout US history to renegotiate its centrality, power and authority (152). Such modifications can occur in these texts through narratives in which the rediscovery of feminism occurs because of the adjustment to the heroine’s raced and classed ideological beliefs in ways that are certainly not radical, yet speak to social dissatisfaction with facets of late capitalism and neoliberal rhetoric. Yet these modifications also occur in texts where the heroine finds that she is unable to renegotiate her relationship with white privilege, such as in Black Swan or the films of Sofia Coppola, and thus becomes a tragic victim of the contemporary political moment and of her social circumstances. These texts thus inscribe the declining mental health or even deaths of white women with artistic weight and cultural gravitas.

While the heroine’s experience of melancholia differs amongst the films to be analysed throughout this book, her characterisation and the rationale behind her precarious mental state bears marked similarities across these disparate generic forms. The white woman within these texts is typically idealised and the object of the crowd’s fascination within the film. She lives her life under an intensified social gaze, yet feels unfulfilled within her social milieu.

Justine’s despondency despite her wealth and successful advertising career in Melancholia is thus comparable to Elizabeth Gilbert’s unhappiness despite her elevated position in elite literary circles and affluent New York lifestyle in Eat Pray Love (2006), or Lux Lisbon’s existential despair regardless of the admiration she receives at school and within her suburban community in Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides (1999). In keeping with Angela McRobbie’s formulation that postfeminist philosophy requires adherence to stringent standards of heteronormative femininity in exchange for cultural visibility and upward mobility (2009: 57), the heroines abide by normative standards of white, feminine beauty and idealised cultural notions of romantic love, yet find themselves suffocated by these societal obligations. It is not insignificant that Justine’s Ophelia appears as a drowning bride, or that her melancholia reaches its apotheosis during her wedding reception. For Elizabeth Swann (Keira Knightley) and Alice Kingsleigh (Mia Wasikowska), the female protagonists in fantasy films Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl (Gore Verbinski, 2003) and Alice in Wonderland respectively, this moment comes during their engagement ceremonies. For Elizabeth Gilbert and Francis Mayes (Diane Lane) in Under the Tuscan Sun (Audrey Wells, 2003), the epiphany occurs at book launches held to celebrate their achievements, where they also come to realise they are stuck in loveless marriages. Furthermore, these protagonists are burdened by a materialistic culture that demands women spend excessively to maintain an appealing, fashionable appearance while also creating commercialised, disposable objects of the women themselves. As Tasker and Negra observe, ‘the construction of women as both subjects and consumers or perhaps as subjects only to the extent that we are willing and able to consume is one of the contradictions at the core of postfeminist culture’ (2007: 8). The heroines in the tourist romances experience a sense of newfound freedom in travel zones where conspicuous consumption and bodily discipline do not appear to be a priority for the local inhabitants. Marie Antoinette in Sofia Coppola’s 2006 reimagining of the historical figure spends excessively in reaction to her realisation that she is merely a pawn in the political agenda of others, and in fact holds no real power herself — an aspect of her rule that ultimately leads to her execution in the French Revolution.

The majority of these filmic heroines are notably of artistic or creative temperament, in keeping with melancholia’s longstanding historical association with those exhibiting a ‘creative energy’ (Radden 2000: 4). If these protagonists are not involved in the artistic industries in some way, then they are characterised as dreamers or fantasists longing to escape from their mundane bourgeois existence. Liz and Francis in the travel romances are creative writers, Nina in Black Swan is a dancer, Elizabeth and Alice in the fantasy films are precocious dreamers, while Charlotte in Lost in Translation (Sofia Coppola, 2003) is a philosopher and would-be photographer and the teenage girls in The Virgin Suicides like to write poetry. Melancholic experiences within these films are not necessarily comparable to Justine’s severe state of depression and catatonia, and in fact can encapsulate more mild forms of malaise and dissatisfaction with the status quo, to be overcome throughout the course of the narrative. This variant of melancholic white femininity is more likely to be observed in films belonging to genres that contain a utopian drive, such as the tourist romances and fantasy films analysed in Chapters 1 and 2. In these films, melancholia contains an affective potentiality that allows the heroine to rediscover lost or repressed elements of the self and simultaneously reconstruct her relationship to social systems in a manner that will ultimately advantage her. In Affective Mapping: Melancholia and the Politics of Modernism, Jonathan Flatley observes that there is a fundamental difference between a ‘depressing, depoliticised melancholia’ and a ‘non-depressing, politicising melancholia’ (2008: 8), a division that finds its parallel here in the disjuncture between the melancholic experience of heroines in popular, blockbuster fare and those in films aiming toward prestige or auteur status.

In the more popular texts, peripheral characters to the melancholic white woman exist as teachers aiding her on her journey toward self-discovery. Such peripheral characters importantly do not inhabit the same socio-economic position as the protagonist, and her relationship with them ultimately serves the heroine’s therapeutic interests as well as working to modify both her relationship to neoliberal postfeminism and the privileged race and class position that successful investment in such discourses typically requires. In the latter group of films, the question as to whether such co-dependent relationships can be mutually beneficial is often raised only to be discarded, with the individual ultimately encountering a sense of powerlessness as she attempts to renegotiate her relationship to systems that ultimately prove deterministic in sealing her tragic fate. If we take Woody Allen’s 2013 film Blue Jasmine as an example, destitute New York socialite Jasmine French (Cate Blanchett) is given the opportunity to relinquish her attachments to materialism and hierarchical class stratification through relocating to her sister’s San Francisco working-class milieu, yet she ultimately fails to seize the chance to alter her values and priorities. However, while Jasmine or indeed Justine’s experience of melancholia may appear fundamentally disempowering at the level of diegetic narrative, this is less true when we consider the extra-textual circulation of these films as part of the Hollywood industrial machine. The packaging and selling of tragic white femininity and a melancholic cinematic ‘mood’ is integral to the continued success of auteur Sofia Coppola’s brand, while Kirsten Dunst’s critically acclaimed performance as Justine, which won her the Cannes Film Festival award for Best Actress, has helped reinvigorate her career and market her as an actress equipped for ‘serious’ dramatic roles. Cate Blanchett and Natalie Portman both won Academy Awards for their performances in Blue

Jasmine and Black Swan respectively, with Portman’s self-reflexive turn as Nina aiding in shedding some of the more limiting aspects of her child star persona. These texts then, regardless of whether the heroine’s melancholic experience is empowering at the level of narrative, are always politicised. This is not only because these films engage in a commentary on neoliberal postfeminist philosophies that are inevitably political, but because melancholia, which I will argue is a mood associated with social privilege, can be strategically deployed as a means of enhancing celebrity capital.

POSTFEMINISM: THEORETICAL EXCLUSIONS AND CULTURAL EVOLUTIONS

This book aims to draw attention to a body of films that comprise both an evolution and a fracturing within postfeminist popular culture in the Anglo- American context, and to ascertain how melancholic whiteness works to negotiate ambivalence over the term ‘feminism’ as well as the centrality of privilege to postfeminist discourse. The relationship these filmic heroines harbour towards neoliberal postfeminism can be described as a kind of ‘cruel optimism’, which Lauren Berlant defines as the discovery that ‘something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing’ (2011: 1). The centre of this desire, Berlant explains, is ‘that moral-intimate-economic thing called the good life’, the attachment to which promises an enabling transformation of the self, and yet also works to inhibit the very same beneficial transformations for which people risk striving (2). This interrelationship can become sustaining and yet cruel in the sense that such optimism may also comprise less-thanpositive feelings of anxiety or dread. Berlant notes that people remain invested in ‘conventional good life fantasies’ consisting of ‘enduring reciprocity in couples, families, political institutions, markets and at work’ despite evidence of their fragility, instability and significant personal costs (2). Fantasies that Berlant perceives as being in a process of decay include political equality, durable intimacy and upward mobility (3) — fantasies that postfeminist discourse, in its interrelationship with neoliberal governmentality, typically seeks to promote.

While investments in postfeminism may always have been beset by accompanying anxiety and indeed melancholia as one gives up various attachments in striving to become the ideal neoliberal female subject, such investments have undergone a more intense fracturing over the last decade. This has occurred not only due to a resurgence in interest in feminist politics (evident within the celebrity sphere) or conflicts in US race relations, but also because of the shifting international image of the US due to unpopular interventions in the Middle East and the role of Wall Street financial institutions in the global economic downturn. Such events inevitably impact on the perceived viability and security of the American dream and the power of the individual to attain it. In Blue Jasmine after all, it is Jasmine’s husband’s fraudulent investment scheme, reminiscent of similarly unscrupulous dealings leading to the financial crisis of 2007-8, that forces the heroine to renegotiate her optimistic relationship to neoliberal postfeminism, and leads to a misplaced melancholia for an elite lifestyle that is no longer viable. The Hollywood celebrity — who has supposedly achieved wealth and success based on individual talent and specialness, and who therefore is the ultimate embodiment of the American dream — becomes a mediated vehicle through which such cultural anxieties are negotiated. These anxieties are not only narrated through the celebrity’s film roles, but also through mediated constructions of the star’s private life and perceptions of her choices in relation to labour and leisure.

Any study of postfeminism must acknowledge the methodological debates that have taken place over a term that has had a wide and varied application. Academic commentators have sought to utilise ‘postfeminism’ as both a theoretical position signifying an epistemological break with dominant patterns of second-wave feminist thought and as an object of study in media analysis. Critics aiming to provide an overview of how the term has been theorised and debated have noted its association with Girl Power popular philosophy, the conservative backlash thesis first offered by Susan Faludi in 1991, third-wave feminist thought that seeks to distance itself from ‘apolitical’ populist postfeminism and feminist theory influenced by poststructuralism.* My study is best situated in the tradition of academic work that aims to describe postfeminism as a cultural philosophy and object of enquiry identifiable through a range of popular consumable media forms including film, television, advertising and the novel. Initially most often analysed in relation to Anglo American ‘chick culture’, including the romantic comedy, chick-lit novel and female-centred television drama, the term postfeminism has been used to describe a dominant ‘cultural sensibility’ (Gill 2007), which champions conspicuous consumption, corporeal discipline and self-management, heteronormative romance and the illusion of ‘free choice’. Arguing for a more nuanced account of the relationship between feminism and postfeminism than Faludi’s backlash thesis allows, McRobbie hypothesises that postfeminist culture ‘draws on and invokes feminism as that which can be taken into account, to suggest that equality is achieved, in order to install a whole repertoire of new meanings which emphasise that it is no longer needed’ (2009: 12).

She utilises quintessential postfeminist texts such as Sex and the City (HBO: 1998-2004), Ally McBeal (Fox: 1997-2002) and especially Bridget Jones’s Diary (Sharon Maguire, 2001) to illustrate what she calls this ‘new gender regime’ (21). Self-discipline, Rosalind Gill elaborates, is an important hallmark of the postfeminist sensibility with ‘femininity defined as a bodily property rather than a social, structural or psychological one’ (2007: 149). This shift posits the female body as a primary source of power and yet as always unruly and in need of constant management, remodelling and consumer spending in order to meet narrowly defined standards of feminine beauty (Gill 2007: 149) — a cultural preoccupation that Gill sees as at work in the proliferation of makeover television and women’s magazines dedicated to the scrutiny of celebrity bodies (150). This pervasive aspect of postfeminist culture is critiqued in contemporary Hollywood narratives featuring melancholic white femininity in a number of ways, from Nina’s mental breakdown as resulting in part from an obsessive preoccupation with bodily discipline in Black Swan, to fantasy films in which heroines can shed restrictive costuming and run, play and fight in magical lands far from home.

Postfeminism, in its emphasis on free choice, competitive individualism and consumer citizenship, exhibits a prominent interrelationship with key features of neoliberal governmentality. Like postfeminism, neoliberalism is a term that has also been broadly utilised to various intents and purposes across academia, with Terry Flew in his article ‘Six theories of neoliberalism’ warning against an intellectually unsustainable use of the term as ‘an all-purpose denunciatory category or where it is simply invoked as the way things are’ (2014: 51). Flew, however, points out that certain definitions of neoliberalism are more welldefined than others, in particular that of neoliberalism as a post-Keynesian political ideology that gained ascendency in the US and UK through the governments of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher respectively, and is associated with the rise of financial capitalism and economic globalisation (56). As David Harvey describes it, neoliberalism is best explained as a theory of political economy which proposes that human wellbeing is best advanced through championing individual entrepreneurial freedoms within a framework characterised by free markets, trade, and private property rights (2005: 11). Individual freedoms are assumed to be guaranteed by the freedom of the market, yet Harvey notes that these freedoms inevitably ‘reflect the interests of private property owners, businesses, multinational corporations and financial capital’ (16) and as a result have been remarkably effective in restoring or creating ‘the power of an economic elite’ (28). Neoliberalism, however, is also assumed by many commentators to operate as a form of hegemony that affects citizens at the level of individual subjectivity and daily choice.

Wendy Brown, utilising Michel Foucault’s influential theories on governmentality and biopower as articulated in his 1978—9 Collège de France lectures, argues that ‘neoliberal political rationality’ has emerged as a mode of governance that ‘produces subjects, forms of citizenship and behaviour, and a new organisation of the social’ (2005: 37). Meanwhile, Rosalind Gill and Christina Scharff point out that the neoliberal subject is always gendered, drawing a strong parallel between ‘the autonomous, calculating, self-regulating subject of neoliberalism’ and the ‘active, freely choosing, self-reinventing subject of postfeminism’ (2011: 7). Such observations do not suggest that neoliberal

IO POSTFEMINIST WHITENESS techniques of government work in a totalising, unified manner or that there can be no forms of agency or resistance within the confines of such an influential ideology. As previously articulated, several of the Hollywood texts that I will go on to discuss are critical of these power structures, with some even attempting to propose renegotiated (albeit utopian) value systems that will be of benefit to the gendered neoliberal subject. What the observations of scholars such as Brown, Gill and McRobbie do suggest however, is that the pervasiveness and influence of neoliberal postfeminist ideologies at the level of government, corporate organisation and indeed within consumer culture inevitably place constraints upon identity formation and associated notions of choice. While the civil rights and second-wave feminist movements prioritised collective action as a key site of social evolution and political empowerment, neoliberal and postfeminist ideologies promote a competitive individualism. Neoliberal postfeminism’s disavowal of feminist politics and the meaning of female empowerment has not gone unchallenged in recent years, and has frequently been the subject of intense debate within the heavily mediated celebrity sphere. While the Hollywood films analysed within this book were all released before this recent resurgence of interest in feminist politics, they do demonstrate a more latent variety of cultural discontent that may have prefigured the emergence of celebrity feminism.

Furthermore, what a brief discussion of the circulation of celebrity feminism demonstrates is not only the means by which a selectively defined feminist politics can be promoted and disseminated through popular culture, but also the need to consider ‘how the popular operates as a site of struggle over the meanings of feminism’ (Hollows and Moseley 2006: 8). In recent years, stars including Reese Witherspoon, Emma Watson and Jennifer Lawrence have professed an interest in feminism and gender equality, while others such as Lena Dunham and Lorde have a feminist agenda firmly incorporated into their celebrity branding that differs markedly from sexualised girl power formulations. In 2014 for instance, Watson gave a highly publicised address to the United Nations as part of the #HeForShe initiative about the need for men to get involved in the fight for gender equality, while Witherspoon’s 2015 Academy Awards #AskHerMore campaign called for red carpet journalists to ask female nominees questions beyond which designer dress they chose to wear for the evening. Following a Sony email leak which revealed that both Jennifer Lawrence and Amy Adams received less money than Bradley Cooper and Jeremy Renner for their roles in American Hustle (David O. Russell, 2013), Lawrence wrote a much-applauded essay on Dunham’s feminist website Lenny entitled ‘Why do I make less than my male co-stars?’ (2016). Patricia Arquette, meanwhile, utilised the platform afforded by her Academy Award win for Best Supporting Actress in Boyhood (Richard Linklater, 2014) to campaign for gender wage equality. These feminist pronouncements, while raising important issues in relation to