로맨스와 섹슈얼리티 사이: 젠더 관계의 변화와 포스트페미니즘 문화현상

Abstract

This paper explores the political and cultural meanings of postfeminism,which has emerged as a distinct cultural phenomenon since the early 1990s in America, through a reading of the popular TV drama Sex and the City. In order to understand this phenomenon I examine three major contextual factors: 1) the deconstruction of the category of woman through poststructuralist, postcolonial and queer critiques; 2) the opposition of femininity and feminism in contemporary mass culture; and 3) the emergence of women's consumer rights and new aesthetic consumption patterns in the new liberal economic system. Through this analysis I define postfeminism as a feminist negotiation with late-modern consumer capitalism, countering the dominant view that postfeminism is an abolition and eradication of feminism. Sex and the City is an exemplary popular text through which we can examine postfeminist cultural phenomena. This text delineates the sexual experiments of four young postfeminist women who have acquired independent economic power; they negotiate traditional ideals of romance freed from the ideological constraints of monogamic marriage and transgress the heterosexual norm. Sex and the City certainly remains heterosexual, yet its narrative orientation borders on the queer. Above all, the four women's friendship and their frank sex talk surreptitiously embodies queer relations. Despite these radical aspects, this text seems to fail in imploding the new regime of femininity that disciplines women's body. The power of consumption that women have acquired gives them the freedom to choose men as commodities in accordance with their taste. However, this power also functions to subjugate them to the world of commodities in which they too have to market their bodies. In order to overcome this paradoxical situation, I suggest that their right to consume has to move on to issues of universal rights of consumption.