This paper analyzes the reviews received by the movie Barbie (2023) and the TV show She-Hulk: Attorney at Law (S1, 2022). After framing them as popular feminist texts that are arguably socio-politically involved, we discursively analyze online reviews on IMDb and Metacritic to observe how viewers articulate thoughts and critiques of feminist issues. We found nuanced and contrasting discourses. On one hand, some reviewers focus on the popular feminist message disclosing more constructive expectations for popular feminist culture. On the other, we found a popular misogynist review-bombing that operates in reaction to the feminist texts by instrumentalizing postfeminist masculinity as a misandrist and oppressive form of representation. We conclude by advancing the construct of postfeminist masculinity as a potential tool that complicates the antagonistic relationship between popular feminism and popular misogyny, and by suggesting implications this can have on the popular feminist media landscape.
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Pajé et al. (2026) studied this question.
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