The Vulnerable Empowered Woman: Feminism, Postfeminism, and Women''s Health

Winner of the Organization for the Study of Communication, Language, and Gender 2013 Outstanding Book Award

Winner of the 2013 Bonnie Ritter Book Award from the Feminist and Women's Division of the National Communication Association

The feminist womens health movement of the 1960s and 1970s is credited with creating significant changes in the healthcare industry and bringing womens health issues to public attention. Decades later, womens health issues are more visible than ever before, but that visibility is made possible by a process of depoliticization

The Vulnerable Empowered Woman  assesses the state of womens healthcare today by analyzing popular media representationstelevision, print newspapers, websites, advertisements, blogs, and memoirsin order to understand the ways in which breast cancer, postpartum depression, and cervical cancer are discussed in American public life. From narratives about prophylactic mastectomies to young girls receiving a vaccine for sexually transmitted disease, the representations of womens health today form a single restrictive identity: the vulnerable empowered woman. This identity defuses feminist notions of collective empowerment and social change by drawing from both postfeminist and neoliberal ideologies. The woman is vulnerable because of her very femininity and is empowered not to change the world, but to choose from among a limited set of medical treatments.

The medias depiction of the vulnerable empowered womans relationship with biomedicine promotes traditional gender roles and affirms womens unquestioning reliance on medical science for empowerment. The book concludes with a call to repoliticize womens health through narratives that can help us imagine womenand their relationship to medicinedifferently.