Core Response 4

I wonder how we might apply a regional lense to postfeminist discourse. I see a real danger in the term "postfeminist"
as Jess Butler does in her article when citing McRobbie, "perhaps the discursive space of postfeminism is effectively
closed to nonwhite women" (p. 48). Feminism's second wave is popularly located on the American coasts during the
1960s and 70s, and this movement was contemporary with the civil rights movement that is popularly centered around
Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee, and the American South at large. My proposition is that for Southern women the term
"postfeminism" (with its implications of being beyond gender inequality) masks the still-all-too-relevant inequality
between white women and black women. While this affirms Butler and McRobbie's analyses, I complicate their notions
by bringing regional politics into play. If we take for granted that the self-liberating women of the second wave were
largely urban and coastally located and that the civil rights unrest fully consumed the South's imagined capacity for
change during that time, "postfeminism" is not only damaging in assuming the completion of a national political project
but in presuming the project worked uniformly on a national level. I would argue that for white women of the South, any
identification with postfeminism does not reflect a significant cultural, ideological shift. Rather, they term themselves
postfeminist in an attempt to circumvent or simply excuse a midcentury paradigm of misogyny and racism. Not only
does postfeminism only allow white women into its discursive space, it allows them to circumvent a consciousness
for structural change, akin to slapping a band-aid on someone's compound fracture.

Butler goes on to say that McRobbie "contends that the postfeminist masquerade reinforces racial divisions and
reinstates whiteness as the racial standard" (48). If we take this analysis to be accurate, in the Southern context,
postfeminism may be employed to undo the racial progress of the 60s and 70s by pointing toward a political project
shared between white and black women of the South that has not actually existed. To give an example of how this
discourse might work, let's go to the University of Alabama. For the entire first half of the 21st century, the SGA
presidential elections were controlled by the elite white fraternities through a secret organization called The Machine.
Throughout the 1970s and 80s, a series of contenders challenged The Machine. Most notably, Cleo Thomas was
elected the first black SGA president at the University in 1976. To take on the Machine, he needed a voting block that
could rival the fraternities, so he enlisted the help of the elite white sororities who were also getting tired of Machine
rule. Cleo's election represents an intersection between the second wave feminism latent in the white sororities and
the movement for change across racial and governmental lines in the state of Alabama. However, this alliance against
the white men of campus held only a year. The following year, the Machine allowed the elite white sororities into the
secret society but no people of color, whether they were independents or affiliated with historically black fraternities or
sororities. The UA student body didn't elect another black president until the 2010s, and the entire Greek system remains
practically segregated today. In this location, feminism for white women extends only as far as their political influence
and is unconcerned with racial equality as a principle belief.