This edited anthology critically engages with the intersection of feminism, politics, and popular culture, with an emphasis on how shifts in cultural discourse have shaped the perception, understanding, and practice of feminist thought in contemporary society. Drawing on Foucault, this volume provides a critical framework for understanding how feminist movements—particularly second-wave feminism—were commodified and subsumed into capitalist logics. It demonstrates how feminist aims like gender equity and bodily autonomy are rendered into categories that can be surveilled, managed, and ultimately co-opted once they are made legible to power and argues that this transformation diminishes the efficacy of feminist action, as its revolutionary potential becomes subsumed into the very structures it seeks to resist. The future of feminism is thus framed as a question of how to contend with its past: How do we reconcile the radical aims of the second wave with the neoliberalization of contemporary feminism? Each chapter bridges scholarly theory with contemporary analysis, making use of academic sources as well as cultural texts like media. This volume will be of interest to students and scholars in feminist theory, gender studies, literary criticism, critical theory, and pop culture studies.

Christine M. Battista is the co-editor of Critical Theory and the Humanities in the Age of the Alt-Right (Palgrave, 2019) and co-author of Literary Feminist Ecologies of American and Caribbean Expansionism: Errand into the Wilderness (Routledge, 2023). She has published numerous articles and book chapters in the fields of environmental humanities, literary theory, postcolonial studies, and American literature. She is an instructor of English at the University of Colorado Denver, USA.

Melissa R. Sande is the co-editor of Critical Theory and the Humanities in the Age of the Alt Right (Palgrave, 2019) and co-author of Literary Feminist Ecologies of American and Caribbean Expansionism: Errand into the Wilderness (Routledge, 2023). She has published numerous articles and book chapters, in venues such Studies in American Fiction. She is associate vice president for Academic Affairs and dean of Humanities at UCNJ Union College of Union County, New Jersey, USA.