Glamour: Reflections, refractions and the ghost of the modern woman

In this piece, I set out to trace the contours of postfeminism in my upbringing. Believing it to be constitutive rather than manipulative of neo-liberal subjectivity, I reflect on the figure of the modern woman, from whom rigorous self-discipline and meticulous appearance management is not only expected but also constructed as pleasurable and freely chosen. In keeping with others, I believe she amounts to a sinister obfuscation of the heterosexist logics that subtend modern feminine subjectivities – and the political order itself. However, as I examine her, I realize she is ghosted by the paradoxical feminist potential of subjectivation through self-shattering. The modern woman is a site of self-authorization through citation, a process which undermines the construction of the neo-liberal subject as unitary, free and self-knowing. This undoes the very premise from which she emerges and postfeminism proceeds. While it has traditionally been the feminine’s vulnerability that has rendered it abject, the modern woman is a feminist figuration, a betrayal of the way there is no subjectivity not defined by its mediation through others – by its very objectification. She is a shape-shifting presence whose contours might only be mapped provisionally before she recedes into the surfaces that project her: a glimmer, a glamour.