1. Between Gazes Camelia Elias

2. postfeminism in cultural studies  encompasses the intersection of feminism with postmodernism, poststructuralism, and post-colonialism  represents pluralism and difference  marks a shift within feminism from debates around equality to focus on debates around difference  challenges hegemonic feminism and its focus on:  oppression,  patriarchy  sexuality  identity  difference

3. concerns  What is the relationship between women’s knowledge and women’s experience?  Can only the oppressed generate knowledge?  To what extent can we equate a certain type of experience with ‘truth’ and with valid knowledge?  What are the consequences of identifying ‘contradictory identities’ and ‘contradictory social locations’ for feminist theorizing? (Sandra Harding: “Reinventing Ourselves as Others: More New agents of History and Knowledge”, 1993)

4. form and Butler  the performativity of gender is a process of coercion  the anticipation of enforced gender roles conjures its object  and by this means power is installed  to be an ‘I’ is to have a sex

5. women’s positionality  “the position women find themselves in can be actively utilized … as a place from where meaning is constructed, rather than simply the place where meaning can be discovered (the meaning of femaleness)” (Linda Alcoff “Cultural Feminism versus Post- Structuralism: The Identity Crisis in Feminist Theory”. Signs, 13(3)

6. postfeminist films  attempt to retain the category of ‘woman’, while investigating what empowers or disempowers it.  meaning as constructed in context is stronger and more significant than the meaning which is derived from fixed identity  interest in uncovering what it means to be a woman than focus on whether or not one is one

7. Down with Love  themes  the battle between sexes  women’s place in society  men’s knowledge of what women want  reversals  melancholia  men’s feminization  women’s power

8. form and context  intertextuality  parody  "imitation with a critical difference, not always at the expense of the parodied text." Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody, 1984  pastiche  imitation as hodge- podge  celebration of past forms  irony

9. form and context  classic comic dialogue  postmodern metanarrative  artificiality: word play, puns  feminism vs postfeminism