McRobbie's academic research spans almost four decades, influenced by the work of Stuart Hall and the British sociologists of the school of Birmingham in its inception, and developed from the theoretical traditions of feminism and Marxism.
Her thesis on Jackie magazine explored the ideologies of working class patriarchy embedded in popular culture aimed at gender-neutral readers, and identified the centrality of romantic individualism.
[3] McRobbie later described her thesis, which focused on a simplistic model of the absorption of ideology by readers, as "a kind of weak afterthought" and an "immersion in left-wing radical and feminist politics".
[4] McRobbie contends that Marxism and psychoanalysis would have provided a much wider set of possibilities for understanding sexuality, desire and pleasure, in particular, the ISAs essay by Althusser had opened up a whole world for media and cultural analysis through ideology and interpellation.
[7] By downplaying boyfriends and husbands-to-be, and instead emphasising self-care, experimentation, and self-confidence, to McRobbie girls' magazines seemed evidence of the integration of feminist common sense into the wider cultural field.
[9] In 1993, McRobbie published an essay "Shut Up and Dance: Youth Culture and Changing Modes of Femininity"[10] where she analysed the paradoxes of young women identifications with feminism.
[11] In The Aftermath of Feminism, McRobbie examines diverse socio-cultural phenomena embedded in contemporary women's lives such as Bridget Jones, fashion photography, the television "make-over" genre, eating disorders, body anxiety and "illegible rage" through feminist analysis.
[13] She argues against the process of taking feminism into account to propose that it is no longer needed, and looks at the notion of disarticulation carried out alongside and subsumed by a seemingly more popular discourse of choice, empowerment and freedom in commercial culture and the government.
To become equal and visible young women take advantage of the opportunity to study, gain qualifications and work, but in exchange for control over their fertility, exploring their sexuality and participating in consumer culture,[14] where the threshold of power and authority has been replaced by the fashion and beauty complex.
First termed by Gilles Deleuze, McRobbie uses the language of luminosity to argue that girls are carefully produced and regulated by a new global economy after being interpellated into subject positions that provide them with limitless capacities.
To contextualize her argument, McRobbie takes the genre of 'make-over' television programmes where women are transformed in order to be full participants in contemporary labour market and consumer culture, especially the fashion industry".
Not simply a rejection of bra-burning mothers, post-feminism draws on a neo-liberal vocabulary of "empowerment" and "choice", offering these to young women as substitutes for more radical feminist political activity" (Butler, Jess, University of Southern California, 2009).
Moreover, her bleak prognosis for the future of feminism, while certainly justifiable, leaves little room for post-feminists themselves to begin engaging with questions of subjectivity, inequality, and power in neo-liberal capitalist societies."