The Vulnerable Empowered Woman: Feminism, Postfeminism, and Women's Health (Critical Issues in Health and Medicine)

The feminist women’s health movement of the 1960s and 1970s is credited with creating significant changes in the healthcare industry and bringing women’s health issues to public attention. Decades later, women’s health issues are more visible than ever before, but that visibility is made possible by a process of depoliticization

The Vulnerable Empowered Woman  assesses the state of women’s healthcare today by analyzing popular media representations—television, print newspapers, websites, advertisements, blogs, and memoirs—in order to understand the ways in which breast cancer, postpartum depression, and cervical cancer are discussed in American public life. From narratives about prophylactic mastectomies to young girls receiving a vaccine for sexually transmitted disease, the representations of women’s health today form a single restrictive identity: the vulnerable empowered woman. This identity defuses feminist notions of collective empowerment and social change by drawing from both postfeminist and neoliberal ideologies. The woman is vulnerable because of her very femininity and is empowered not to change the world, but to choose from among a limited set of medical treatments.

The media’s depiction of the vulnerable empowered woman’s relationship with biomedicine promotes traditional gender roles and affirms women’s unquestioning reliance on medical science for empowerment. The book concludes with a call to repoliticize women’s health through narratives that can help us imagine women—and their relationship to medicine—differently.

The Vulnerable Empowered Woman assesses the state of women’s healthcare today by analyzing popular media representations—television, print newspapers, websites, advertisements, blogs, and memoirs—in order to understand the ways in which breast cancer, postpartum depression, and cervical cancer are discussed in American public life. Tasha N. Dubriwny’s analysis concludes with a call to re-politicize women’s health through narratives that can help us imagine women, and their relationship to medicine, differently.

TASHA N. DUBRIWNY is an assistant professor in the Women’s and Gender Studies Program and the Department of Communication at Texas A&M University.

Introduction: Public Discourse and the Representation of the Vulnerable Empowered Woman

1. Theorizing Postfeminist Health: Risk and the Postfeminist Subject

2. Genetic Risk: Prophylactic Mastectomies and the Pursuit of Cancer-Free Life

3. Postfeminist Risky Mothers and Postpartum Depression

4. The Postfeminist Concession: Young Women, Sex, and Paternalism

5. Feminist Women's Health Activism in the Twenty-first Century

Afterword: From Martin to Center

Notes

Bibliography

Index