1. Twilight and Postfeminism
“[T]he battle for gender equality has been won; feminism is thus unnecessary, superfluous, and/or a total buzz kill.”
(Petersen, 343)
The Twilight phenomenon has taken place against the backdrop of what many feminist scholars have termed “postfeminism.” As Yvonne Tasker and Diane Negra explain, postfeminism “broadly encompasses a set of assumptions, widely disseminated within popular media forms, having to do with the ‘pastness’ of feminism, whether the supposed pastness is merely noted, mourned, or celebrated” (2007, p. 1). This ideological attitude of “pastness” suggests, despite ample evidence to the contrary, that the battle for gender equality has been won; feminism is thus unnecessary, superfluous, and/or a total buzz kill. Postfeminist rhetoric and texts commodify the language and attributes of feminism, co- opting catchphrases like “Girl power!” as advertising slogans as they frame the “freedom to choose” as the freedom to choose one’s lipgloss color. (Petersen, 343)

2. “Postfeminist rhetoric and texts commodify the language and attributes of feminism, co-opting catchphrases like ‘Girl power!’ as advertising slogans as they frame the ‘freedom to choose’ as the freedom to choose one’s lipgloss color.” (Petersen, 343)

3. http://www. criticalmediaproject
“This is a print ad for Summer’s Eve, which sells a range of feminine hygiene products. The tagline for the ad is “No one’s ever told you to ‘grow a pair.’”  The phrase "grow a pair" refers literally to the testicles or balls, but more generally references the attributes and values associated with masculinity. When used derisively, it is an insult directed towards men who are behaving in an effeminate manner. The tagline suggests that women are empowered, because they are born with the innate courage that men must be socialized to learn. Summer’s Eve then suggests that women should take care of their ‘courageous’ vaginas with the advertised cleansing wipes.”

4. Is Twilight a postfeminist text?
Bella’s very lack of distinguishing characteristics facilitates reader identification; through this identification, the reader is effectively encouraged to feel Bella’s overwhelming desire to sacrifice all for a man. In this way, Twilight offers what Elena Levine terms a “post-feminism fantasy,” “bend[ing] the notion of feminist empowerment so that it becomes feminine devotion” (Petersen, 345)

5. Comparisons to another famous human girl with a vampire boyfriend are inevitable, but Bella Swan is no Buffy Summers. “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” was at heart one of those mythic hero’s journeys so beloved by Joseph Campbell-quoting screenwriters, albeit transfigured into something sharp and funny by making the hero a contemporary teenage girl. Buffy wrestled with a series of romantic dilemmas — in particular a penchant for hunky vampires — but her story always belonged to her. Fulfilling her responsibilities as a slayer, loyalty to her friends and family, doing the right thing and cobbling together some semblance of a healthy life were all ultimately as important, if not more important, to her than getting the guy. If Harry Potter has a vampire-loving, adolescent female counterpart, it’s Buffy Summers. – Laura Miller

6. Otherwise directionless and unsure of herself, Bella’s only distinguishing trait is her clumsiness, about which she makes frequent self-deprecating jokes. But Bella is not really the point of the Twilight series; she’s more of a place holder than a character. She is purposely made as featureless and ordinary as possible in order to render her a vacant, flexible skin into which the reader can insert herself and thereby vicariously enjoy Edward’s chilly charms.

7. “Bella, I couldn’t live with myself if I ever hurt you
“Bella, I couldn’t live with myself if I ever hurt you. You don’t know how it’s tortured me … you are the most important thing to me now. The most important thing to me ever.”
“I could see it in your eyes, that you honestly believed that I didn’t want you anymore. The most absurd, ridiculous concept — as if there were any way that I could exist without needing you!”
“For this one night, could we try to forget everything besides just you and me?” He pleaded, unleashing the full force of his eyes on me. “It seems like I can never get enough time like that. I need to be with you. Just you.”
Need I add that such statements rarely issue from the lips of mortal men, except perhaps when they’re looking for sex? Edward, however, doesn’t even insist on that — in fact, he refuses to consummate his love for Bella because he’s afraid he might accidentally harm her. “If I was too hasty,” he says, “if for one second I wasn’t paying enough attention, I could reach out, meaning to touch your face, and crush your skull by mistake. You don’t realize how incredibly breakable you are. I can never, never afford to lose any kind of control when I’m with you.” As a result, their time together is spent in protracted courtship: make-out sessions and sweet nothings galore, every shy girl’s dream. – Laura Miller

8. Don’t let the Y.A. label fool you: Author Stephenie Meyer, a mother herself, has said she didn’t have a specific demographic in mind when she started writing. And, as it turns out, a large percentage of devoted fans of Meyer’s four novels and two films (the second, The Twilight Saga: New Moon, opens on Friday) are smart, sophisticated, well-read mothers. Perhaps because the love story at the crux of the saga is unconventionally adolescent.
“Bella [Twilight’s female lead] is a responsible caretaker—she cooks, she cleans, she takes care of her family. Those are maternal traits that a lot of moms can relate to,” says Kirsten Starkweather, media director of TwilightMoms.com, a fan site with 34,000 registered members. And while Edward, Bella’s bloodsucking soul mate, has the moony eyes of a 17-year-old, he’s actually over 100. “His impeccable manners, his sense of morality, his way of speaking, they’re all old-fashioned,” says Starkweather. “More like a man in a nineteenth-century novel than a modern teenage boy.”
But preternaturally wise protagonists take you only so far. The real appeal of this story is that Bella and Edward’s relationship is pure, unadulterated puppy love: innocent and intense, overflowing with sexual tension and promise, and all taken life-or-death seriously. “The books made me feel like a teenager again,” says Eve Waltermaurer, a professor of sociology at suny–New Paltz. “It’s been a long time since I got to feel that complete adolescent abandonment over a boy.” -
Karin Baker, a mother of two kids under 10 who works at a music-licensing company, found the books empowering in the same way teenage girls do. “I’ve always felt plain and ordinary. And after seeing the way Edward saw Bella and felt about her, regardless of how she felt about herself, it kind of gave me more confidence in myself and my relationship.

9. Response to hookup culture?
Cultural critic Caitlin Flanagan (2010) argues that the resonance of “super reactionary love stories,” whether Twilight, High School Musical, or the bestselling songs of Taylor Swift, is this generation of women’s way of demanding more. Having spent the last decade “being hectored—via the post-porn, Internet-driven world—toward a self-concept centering on the expectation that the very most they could or should expect from a boy is a hookup,” girls and young women are rejecting the “low” romantic expectations set by their parents’ generation (Flanagan 2010). In their place: “boyfriend stories” reminiscent of their grandparents’ texts, inflected with the very cultural mores against which many of these girls’ parents were rebelling.
Respondents’ attraction to the traditional and “true love” aspects of Twilight highlight a yearning for traditional courtship and delay of sexual activity, even on the part of feminists. For these women, the gradual destigmatizeation of sexual activity and promiscuity (and the concurrent rise of “hook-up culture”) has had an unfortunate side-effect: the end of romance. (Petersen, 346)

10. The Pleasures of Girl Reading
Here, the pleasures of Twilight are strongly linked with the pleasures inherent to teenage girldom, including reading, first love, and the obsession and absorption accompanying both practices. Ultimately, these pleasures have less to do with the specifics of Twilight than with feelings of envelopment, dedication, and intense emotion that many women associated with their pre-adult lives. (349)
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11. Ambivalence
"Even the most timorous teenage girl couldn't conceive of Bella as intimidating; it's hard to imagine a person more insecure, or a situation better set up to magnify her insecurities. Bella's vampire and werewolf friends are all fantastically strong and fierce as well as nearly indestructible, and she spends the better part of every novel alternately cowering in their protective arms or groveling before their magnificence. 'How well I knew that I wasn't good enough for him' is a typical musing on her part. Despite Edward's many protestations and demonstrations of his utter devotion, she persists in believing that he doesn't mean it, and will soon tire of her. In a way, the two are ideally suited to each other: Her insipidity is the counterpart to his flawlessness. Neither of them has much personality to speak of." —Salon
Notwithstanding the various pleasures in the fantasy scenario and “girl reading,” the single best way to characterize feminist readers’ response to Twilight is ambivalence. Having voiced immense pleasure in the narrative, these readers were nonetheless deeply troubled by it—incensed and repulsed by several elements of the text that were readily labeled by readers as culturally regressive, non-feminist, and affirmative of patriarchal values. Objections generally centered on two issues critical to feminism today: girl-power (more specifically, the complete lack thereof) and the overarching conservative, pro-life agenda. (349)

12. Bella’s agency
“Our relationship couldn’t continue to balance, as it did, on the point of a knife. We would fall off one edge or the other, depending entirely upon HIS decision, or HIS instincts. My decision was made, made before I’d ever consciously chosen, and I was committed to seeing it through. Because there was nothing more terrifying to me, more excruciating, than the thought of turning away from him. It was an impossibility.” (Twilight, 248) “There was no way around it; I couldn’t resist him in anything.” (Twilight, 284) “His eyes were melting all my fury. It was impossible to fight with him when he cheated like that.” (Twilight, 485) “His mouth was on mine then, and I couldn’t fight him. Not because he was so many thousand times stronger than me, but because my will crumbled into dust the second our lips met.” (New Moon, 512)

13. About three things I was absolutely certain
About three things I was absolutely certain. First, Edwart was most likely my soul mate, maybe. Second, there was a vampire part of him--which I assumed was wildly out of his control--that wanted me dead. And third, I unconditionally, irrevocably, impenetrably, heterogeneously, gynecologically, and disreputably wished he had kissed me.
Twilight taps into a time when passion is as much about fantasy as reality, before drunken college hookups, before booty calls, before scheduling sex into a marriage. Twilight reinvents sex for women who might have placed it at the bottom of a to-do list. 

14. Petersen’s conclusion:
Ultimately, feminists, whether at home in academia, mainstream media, or the domestic sphere, disparage and lampoon the pleasures of Twilight, or any other fantasy, at our peril. Because feminists, including this one, do love Twilight. And while I am not a likely candidate to “turn to the right,” I do know many other women who, already wary of the label of feminist, are only further alienated through an attack on the cultural texts, artifacts, and practices, whether marriage, motherhood, or Twilight fandom, which grant them satisfaction. This is not to say that we should simply adopt the definition of feminism proffered by Meyer and other postfeminist texts. Instead, we might use texts such as Twilight to create dialogue with women drawn to such a definition, working to fortify, rather than fracture, feminism’s overarching projects. (352)

15. Collins and Carmody, “Deadly Love”
“Dating violence is strongly associated with dominant forms of masculinity and femininity” (355).
The central characters manifest behaviors that are consistent with traditional gender roles, with Edward and Jacob presenting as aggressive, territorial, and demanding, and Bella pre- sented as subservient and weak. Considering the popularity of the books and the marketing of their stories to a predominantly teenage audience, these messages are counterintuitive to the promotion of healthy, equitable, nonviolent relationships. This is especially true with regard to sexual vio- lence since the representation of a sexually violent relationship seems to be in direct contradiction to advocating abstinence. (362)
“Consent, care, and personal autonomy are all missing for women in this series. Yet it is always the woman’s fault. Every time I hear a young woman say that she wants to be like Bella Swann, or that she wants to have an Edward, I cringe. Because I would hope that they want a relationship free of harm.
It should not be considered “romantic that a man you barely know watches you sleep. It should not be considered “heartwarming” that in order to get her man back, Bella has to risk her life.”
“These are not the role models we need. We need women who stick up for themselves, women who find good partners, whether they be men or women. We certainly don’t need all fifteen criteria popping up in young adult fiction. Not in a world where domestic violence survivors are asked why they didn’t just run, or how they could “let” it happen to them.
“Abuse is never romantic. Don’t let it seem that way. Give the young women in your lives books they can look up to, and books they can live by. Books that will teach them how to love, not how to submit.”
Why Teens Shouldn’t Read Twilight
Published by Elsa S. Henry on September 24, 2012 

16. The series has been said to be attractive to teenage girls because it portrays a ‘‘traditional, romantic relationship’’ and positively frames the issue of abstinence (Stone, 2009). Christian publications have heralded the book series, noting that the characters restrain from engaging in sexual intercourse until they are married (Smith, 2008) and portray themes of immense self-control in the face of temp- tation. Others, however, have criticized the series for modeling unhealthy, inequitable romantic rela- tionships. In a 2009 article published by MSNBC, the relationship between the two main characters, Bella and Edward, was labeled ‘‘controlling’’ (Young, 2009). Others have argued that the books con- tain ‘‘a dark undercurrent of sexual assault and abuse’’ (Editorial, 2009), identifying unhealthy rela- tionship behaviors that are synonymous with stalking, self-harm, and suicide (McCulloch, 2009). Clearly, critics disagree about the presentation of adolescent relationships in the Twilight series. The study presented here examined the book series with special attention to behaviors that are commonly associated with dating and intimate partner violence. (356)

17. Given the widespread popularity of the series and the fact that the target audience is predominantly teenage girls (Young, 2009), it is of particular concern that the dominant romantic relationship is presented with behaviors that are characteristic of relationship violence. The presentation of these behaviors in popular fiction clearly does not cause dating violence. However, it is troubling when one of the most popular book series in recent history repeatedly normalizes, minimizes, and romanticizes these behaviors. It reinforces cultural norms that condone men’s use of force to obtain a variety of goals. (363)