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Artificial Women

The 1970s, Mass Culture, and Feminism

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Book

Pages: 272

Illustrations: 15 illustrations

Release Date: February 16, 2027

Author: Victoria Hesford

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.

Praise

“As candidates for public office tout their masculinity (often surgically or medically assisted), while opposing gender-affirming care for trans people, Victoria Hesford theorizes feminist futures by tracing media technologies’ roles in shaping or constituting ‘artificial women.’ In this un-put-downable-book, visual culture is a partner in thinking, not just an object for theory to analyze, and feminism is an agonistic politics. A brilliant synthetic account of 20th century feminism, media, and theory.” - Bonnie Honig, author of A Feminist Theory of Refusal

“In Artificial Women, Victoria Hesford explores how the unmooring of the category of ‘woman,’ definitive of 1970s feminisms, was, surprisingly, best exemplified by the mass cultures of the era. Films and TV series both participated in and tried to contain the threat of woman’s unmooring. A continuation of Hesford’s significant advancement of the historiography of the 1970s, Artificial Women is also a welcome addition to feminist, queer, and trans media studies.” - Jed Samer, author of Lesbian Potentiality

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Victoria Hesford is Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Stony Brook University. She is the author of Feeling Women’s Liberation, also published by Duke University Press, and coeditor of Feminist Time against Nation Time.

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Paper ISBN: 978-1-4780-3951-8 / Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4780-3457-5 / eISBN: 978-1-4780-6316-2 /