Artificial Women (The 1970s, Mass Culture, and Feminism)

In Artificial Women, Victoria Hesford returns to the culture and politics of the 1970s to offer a new reading on the relationship between feminism and mass media. Considering how mainstream US television and film represented feminism and feminists, Hesford shows that popular culture demonstrated a widespread concern with the artificiality and unpredictability of women—a concern that evidences the larger technological, political, and historical processes through which 1970s feminism was formed. From The Stepford Wives to Maude, Foxy Brown to the SCUM Manifesto, Hesford offers a reframing of 1970s feminism and its representations in popular culture to demonstrate how the Second Wave is coterminous with, rather than distinct from, the poststructural, queer, black, and women of color feminisms of the 1980s and 1990s. Incorporating contemporary confrontations between trans and transphobic feminisms, Artificial Women argues that 1970s feminism, rather than working toward the abolition of gender, instead produced an excess of gender and a too-muchness of women that feminists and mass culture still navigate today.