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This chapter explores the contemporary world of campus pageantry across diverse university contexts and examines the discourses of primarily white contestants and organizers as they attempt to accommodate and negotiate celebrity, corporeality, and the cerebral. Topics include the staging of pageants, the campus activities of various queens, the legitimations participants give for participating in pageants, and their arguments for why they see pageants as more than a vacuous world of sprays, gels, and silicone artifice. Today’s contestants often rely on post-feminist and “girl-power” discourses of choice and personal empowerment as well as neo-liberal discourses of self-enterprise to assert the academic relevance of beauty competition. This chapter also highlights a recent protracted struggle between feminists and post-feminists about a multi-university beauty pageant covered extensively in the mainstream media. The recent surge of male pageants showcasing racialized masculinities in a venue originally created for the display of women’s bodies is also profiled.

Framed by an examination of neoliberalism’s emphasis on individual agency – and claims that feminism is no longer needed or relevant – this chapter animates the figure of the killjoy to explore solo works in which public displays of unhappiness, dysphoria and ingratitude force a re-examination of the relationship between gender, individual responsibility, and the social. If the killjoy is imagined to spoil everyone else’s good time, it is only because they draw attention to the bad faith social contracts – exemplified and exaggerated by the politics of austerity – which oblige some but not all to practice self-sacrifice in the name of a greater social good. Featured practitioners: Bridget Christie, Ursula Martinez, Adrienne Truscott, La Ribot, Cristian Ceresoli and Silvia Gallerano, Gary Owen.

This chapter sets the context for the book by explaining and then challenging the notion that girls are taking over the world because they have been positioned as the new dominant sex in education. Linked to boys’ failure, girls’ success is both celebrated as ‘real’ girl power and criticized as the feminization of schools and the toppling of the traditional gender order. Set against the backdrop of post-feminism and neo-liberalism, this chapter explores how girls have come to be seen as ‘having it all’, though they still struggle in ways made invisible by the ‘successful girls’ narrative.

In this chapter, we explore the tension between girls’ assumptions of gender equality and the sexism they (or we) identified. When girls did not see sexism in their lives, it sometimes created tensions, which were in turn interpreted as personal problems that they needed to solve alone. We also juxtapose the stories girls told about their perceptions of gender dynamics in the school to those of boys, who offered a very different perspective. While girls often felt that boys were favored by teachers – allowed to joke around, play the class clown, and derail lessons on a dime – many boys expressed feelings of gender discrimination around assumptions that they were automatic troublemakers.

This chapter focuses on Mormon fundamentalist polygamists. Unlike the groups featured in previous chapters, Mormon fundamentalist polygamists are socially disconnected from the LGBTQ+ rights movement, socially conservative, and disapproving of homosexuality. Yet, by talking of coming out as polygamist, they liken their “lifestyle” to that of gay men and lesbians. This chapter argues that this has been facilitated by talk, among powerful people and institutions, of polygamy and same-sex marriage as analogous—leading many Mormon fundamentalist polygamists to support the legalization of same-sex marriage to create a legal pathway for polygamy. For a small minority of Mormon fundamentalist polygamists, a sense of linked fate with members of sexual minorities seems also to be generating some degree of solidarity with members of sexual minorities. This chapter examines how Mormon fundamentalist polygamists distance themselves from the most notorious polygamist sects, while insisting that polygamy can help women balance work and family.

Considers instead the relationship between women and food, in professional and domestic environments. Cooking is presented as a way for women to assert themselves and their independence, while at the same time allowing unconventional negotiations of gender, class, and race with their environment. Fried Green Tomatoes (Avnet, 1999), No Reservations (Hicks, 2007) and its German predecessor Mostly Martha (Nettelbeck, 2001), Waitress (Shelly, 2007), The Ramen Girl (Robert Allan Ackerman, 2008), and Julie & Julia (Ephron, 2009) present the lead (white) female characters as powerful and autonomous, but the films collectively work to undermine the characters’ political agency at the expense of their ability to function in the kitchen. As such, they tend to privilege a heterosexist perspective and elevate white characters over characters of color.

This chapter is a close reading of Wendy and Lucy, a film loosely based on the depictions of disaster victims and the perceived governmental failing to provide and protect those affected by Hurricane Katrina. It is Reichardt’s political statement about being homeless and female in America. Highlighting distribution details, the chapter explores the necessity of a micro-budget that dictate and contribute to many independent filmmakers’ aesthetics. The chapter discusses her use of “slow cinema,” ecofeminism, and the rejection of a capitalistic and patriarchal “American Dream.” Reichardt highlights the overlooked or marginalized in America: women, the working classes, and the poverty stricken. Influenced by the Italian Neorealists of the 1940s, the film addresses current issues of poverty juxtaposed with consumerism in America. Finally building on work of Anita Harris and Sherry Ortner’s analysis of lower class women’s representation in independent film, the chapter situates Wendy and Lucy in relation to post-feminist and third wave feminist concerns.

This chapter uncovers a complex dialogue in and between Gothic texts about the ageing woman – one that both reflects the fear, anxiety and revulsion evoked by the ageing female body in many cultures but that also offers counter narratives that redeem ageing as a time of energy and liberation. It suggests that post-feminism is retrograde in its attitude to age and argues that it has served the purpose of a dominant culture that marginalises the older woman. The fetishisation of the youthful body inevitably produces fears of ageing in the young and is reflected in many popular Gothic texts, such as the Twilight series. The chapter traces a long tradition of writing that represents the older woman as sinister, manipulative and predatory but notes instances of subversion and challenge to the stereotype. In the twentieth century Rebecca’s Mrs Danvers is such a figure, for example, but the older du Maurier portrays the older woman more subtly as strange, wise and emotionally prescient. Post-colonial fiction offers the figure of the soucouyant as another configuration: that of the older woman as insightful, independent and capable of supernatural transformations, while comic Gothic allows the subversion of conventional attitudes to the older woman.

This chapter explores an explosion of serialized vampires after television’s deregulation. Like newspapers and newscasts, serialized television can produce national audiences around topical issues about citizenship and difference. What cinema often excludes due to the financial risk, television can include by offshoring production and narrowcasting transmission. Although Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003) ushered in “girl power” and a place for same-sex relationships, it was criticized for its racial insensitivity. With greater racial/ethnic diversity, True Blood, The Vampire Diaries, and The Originals explore legacies of racial oppression. Transnational Hollywood largely masks locations, prioritizing economic over cultural consideration. Some series are produced in southern California, others elsewhere—Gabriel, amor inmortal (2008) in Florida, The Vampire Diaries and The Originals in Georgia, True Blood in Louisiana, From Dusk till Dawn: The Series (2014–present) in Texas, The Strain (2014–present) in Ontario, and Penny Dreadful (2014–2016) in Ireland. Web series emerge as a means of narrative and economic experimentation, ranging from UGC in The Hunted (2001–present) to cross-platform marketing and narrative experiments of Valemont (2009) and Carmilla (2014–present) to videogames.

Feminism as grand theory may be over. However, feminism has developed an expertise in analyses of gender that continue to have purchase, and that can and are put to use in the analysis of contemporary discourses and relations. I argue that feminism, alongside other critical/progressive intellectual projects, needs to move from criticism to critique. Criticism has an object, and is an exercise in fault-finding. Much feminism legal theory and feminist theory more generally, has been criticism: of the sexist or patriarchal nature of laws and social practices, arguing for their correction. Much of this work has been done. It remains politically unfinished, but intellectually, the work has been done. What feminism needs is a more self reflexive shift to critique. Feminism, as an intellectual project, needs this disruption and disorientation.