Postfeminist fatherhood and contemporary Hollywood stardom

Contemporary Hollywood cinema is rife with representations of fatherhood, and such depictions have been mediated most visibly and ubiquitously through major stars such as Tom Cruise, Mel Gibson, Tom Hanks and Eddie Murphy, via their screen personae and wider publicity images. This is indicative of a media culture inflected with values specific to a postfeminist ideological climate. Postfeminism operates to naturalise these images of fatherhood as both progressive in terms of the gender politics they purport to depict, and inevitable given the effects, perceived or otherwise, of second-wave feminism on contemporary Western consensuses regarding parenting and gender equity. This representational phenomenon is also symptomatic of a socio-political state of affairs with a hegemonic ideological viewpoint, perpetuated with aid from these judiciously mediated images of postfeminist fatherhood, that have emerged from a media culture that seems superficially to dissipate the insidious aspects of this postfeminist yet patriarchal ideology.