1. A discourse popularized by the mass media in the 1990s reflecting a reaction against the feminist theories of the 1970s and 1980s, often on the basis that the ‘battle of the sexes’ is over. In popular rhetoric, a shift from ‘women's lib’ to ‘girl power’. It is characterized by an (essentialist) emphasis on femininity as well as on ‘the career woman’. The feminist notion of women as the passive victims of patriarchy is rejected: for instance by the American post-feminists Naomi Wolf (b.1962) and Camille Paglia (b.1947).
2. A postmodern feminist discourse building upon earlier concerns about patriarchy but extended into other areas such as eco-feminism and cyberfeminism. It is influenced by poststructuralism in its rejection of gender essentialism (e.g. in Butler's engagement with queer theory).
