Yayoi Uno Everett

I enjoyed your nuanced interpretation! Third-wave feminism may be synonymous with postfeminism in that the latter discourse celebrates the female character’s agency, independence, and joie de vivre–all of the characteristics BBC’s Irene Adler seems to display in abundance. For more on postfeminism, I recommend Yvonne Tasker and Diane Negra, eds., Interrogating Postfeminism: Gender and the Politics of Popular Culture (Duke University Press, 2007). Angela McRobbie, in her essay, refers to the supermodel Claudia Schiffer, who takes off her clothes in a TV advertisement, which she does out of her own choice and for her own enjoyment; “the shadow of disapproval is evoked (the striptease as a site of female exploitation) only instantly to be dismissed as belonging to the art, to a time when feminists used to object to such imagery” (33).

Thank you for this article! I’d like to add The Hours (2002), directed by Stephen Daldry, and starring Nicole Kidman, Meryl Streep, and Julianne Moore, as a female-centered film that doesn’t revolve around romanticized love. It Interweaves the lives of three women, who either wrestle with suicidal impulses themselves or someone with suicidal thoughts. It deals with the subject of love, sacrifice, and existential irony in a manner that moves far beyond the romanticized convention of love.

Thanks for this thought-provoking article! As you mention in the last paragraph, I also remain hopeful that the media’s stereotyping of Asian-Americans is shifting toward a new positive prototype, as exhibited by Lucy Liu’s portrayal of Joan Watson in Elementary. Also films like Clint Eastwood’s Gran Torino (2008) presents a more realistic narrative, which shows that allegiances can be formed across ethnic lines by focusing on Kowalski’s friendship with the young Vietnamese boy.