Beyond the Valley of Postfeminism [Core Response]

I have a strong suspicion that we are coming up on something post-postfeminist, if I may indulge in the academic parlor game of adding prefixes to everything. 

Sarah Banet-Weiser's spoke to me immediately, because its central concerns around consumerist repackaging of feminism and the branding of women into "safe" by highly-stereotypical boxes, has been apparent across my academic career.  In fact, I want to push Banet-Weiser's timeline back slightly farther than she does, because Kristin Lieb's Gender, Branding, and the Modern Music Industry demonstrates a very similar phenomenon in the 1980s as an outgrowth of MTV.  Of course Madonna is the go-to post/feminist who wielded the television music video to commodity rebellion, her body, and "choice," but Lieb discusses how the music industry brands women of color and non-American women as, in the industry's terms, "exotic."  Consider, parallel to how Banet-Weiser discusses Dora, Shakira: aethnicly foreign, abstractly empowering, and truthfully shaking her hips for the male gaze:

Other examples of this postfeminist, postracial "exotic" branding abound from the mid-1980s through the 2000s.  Stepping away from TV, but to perhaps prove the rule, is Whitney Houston's first album cover.  Whitney, an artist attacked for coming across as too White, was nonethless brought to market as the kind of highly racialized yet safely bland product Banet-Weiser describes:

Nicki Minaj, who Butler discusses, was branded as "exotic" with her jungle-set video for "Anaconda," but now we're in a place where music video is not primarily (if at all) seen on TV.  Certainly, MTV in its heyday would never have shown "Anaconda"!  Nicki, to me, feels like one of the last of an apolitical kind, alongside Taylor Swift and Katy Perry.  All have struggled for relevance in a time when popular culture demands political and social commentary.   

It would be easy to say that Hillary Clinton losing the electoral college is a turning point in the move away from postfeminism as a discussion worth entertaining, but 2016 certainly does feel like an epochal year for me.  Butler's characteristics of postfeminist media are excellent, but they feel wildly irrelevant to the market just seven years on.  While the promotion of "consumerism and the commodification of difference" has adapted to cultural discussions around representation and intersectionality, it is tough to argue that feminist activism is no longer relevant.  How this wave defines "good" activism will be our legacy.