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ISSN: 2183-2439

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The Meaning of the Feminist T-Shirt: Social Media, Postmodern Aesthetics, and the Potential for Sociopolitical Change

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Abstract:  This article examines the potential for political or social change as part of postmodern cultural expression in consumer culture. Throughout the article, I discuss the way sociopolitical messages, circulating in contemporary culture, represent an interesting element in terms of their intertextual referencing and postmodern blurring. Postmodern aesthetic features merge commodifying, resistive, and identifying processes, which can enable sociopolitical messages to spread into new arenas of resistance and fly under the radar, so to speak. In particular, I claim that new forms of engagement in social media communication produce an alternative venue for politics—one created by neoliberalism itself. I explain that sociopolitical messages presented via postmodern aesthetics in consumer culture, particularly when circulated using social media, can function counter-hegemonically, even while using hegemonic structures to gain commercial success. With this, the potential for change can come about; power lies in the hands (or social media accounts) of consumers.<

Keywords:  consumer culture, postmodern aesthetics, resistance, social media, sociopolitical change

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.17645/mac.v6i2.1302


© Trine Kvidal-Røvik. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits any use, distribution, and reproduction of the work without further permission provided the original author(s) and source are credited.