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This book is the first extended study into the politics of whiteness inherent within postfeminist popular cinema. It analyses a selection of Hollywood films dating from the turn of the millennium, arguing that the character of the ‘melancholic white woman’ operates as a trope through which to explore the excesses of late capitalism and a crisis of faith in the American dream. Melancholia can function as a form of social capital for these characters yet betrays its proximity to a gendered history of emotion and psychopathology. This figure is alternately idealised or scapegoated depending on how well she navigates the perils of postfeminist ideology. Furthermore, the book considers how performances of melancholia and mental distress can confer benefits for Hollywood actresses and female auteurs on the labour market, which in turn has contributed to the maintenance of white hegemony within the mainstream US film industry. Case studies in the book include Black Swan (Darren Aronofksy 2010), Gone Girl (David Fincher 2014) and Alice in Wonderland (Tim Burton 2010).

In-depth and refreshingly readable, this book is a bold analysis of postfeminist gothic, a literary genre that continues to jar readers, reject happy endings, and find powerful new ways to talk about violence against women. The book explores the genre's challenge to postfeminist assumptions of women's equality and empowerment. The authors it examines—Patricia Cornwell, Jodi Picoult, Susanna Moore, Sapphire, and Alice Sebold—construct narratives around socially invisible and physically broken protagonists who directly experience consequences of women's ongoing disempowerment. Their works ask readers to inhabit women's suffering and to face the uncomfortable, all-too-denied fact that today's women must navigate lives fraught with risk. The book's analysis places the authors within a female gothic tradition that has long given voice to women's fears of their own powerlessness. But it also reveals the paradox that allows the genre to powerfully critique postfeminism's often sunshiney outlook while uneasily coexisting within the same universe.

What does sexiness mean today? Has sexiness become something that is bought and sold? What identity effects does a sexiness informed by consumer culture have? This book addresses these questions, off the back of a heightened visibility of “sex,” “sexiness,” and “sexualization” in everyday life. Neoliberal, consumerist, and postfeminist media culture have shaped ways of understanding, embodied by the figure of the choosing, empowered, entrepreneurial consumer citizen-woman, whose economic capital determines feminine success (and failure). Informed by older constructs of privilege (e.g., class, sexuality, race, and (dis)ability), this version of sexiness also constrains by folding contemporary femininity back into previous panics about youth, excess, “bad” consumption, and appropriate feminine behavior. This book identifies how current understandings of sexiness in public life and academic discourse have produced a “doubled stagnation”: stuck places that cycle around old debates without forward momentum. Developing a theoretical and methodological framework from which to work productively within these debates, the book expands on the notion of a “technology of sexiness.” What happens when people make sense of themselves within the complexities of consumer-oriented constructs of sexiness? How do these discourses come to “transform the self”? Through this framework, the book provides the opportunity to understand how women make sense of their sexual identities in the context of a feminization of sexual consumerism. Exploring age-related femininities in the context of what “sexiness” means today, the book develops a series of insights into various “technologies of the self” through analyses of space, nostalgia, and claims to authentic sexiness.

In recent years, feminists have turned to digital technologies and social media platforms to dialogue, network, and organize against contemporary sexism, misogyny, and rape culture. The emergence of feminist campaigns such as #MeToo, #BeenRapedNeverReported, and Everyday Sexism are part of a growing trend of digital resistances and challenges to sexism, patriarchy, and other forms of oppression. Although recent scholarship has documented the ways digital spaces are often highly creative sites where the public can learn about and intervene in rape culture, little research has explored girls’ and women’s experiences of using digital platforms to challenge misogynistic practices. This is therefore the first book-length study to interrogate how girls and women negotiate rape culture through digital platforms, including blogs, Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, and mobile apps. Through an analysis of high-profile campaigns such as Hollaback!, Everyday Sexism, and the everyday activism of Twitter feminists, this book presents findings of over 800 pieces of digital content, and semi-structured interviews with 82 girls, women, and some men around the world, including organizers of various feminist campaigns and those who have contributed to them. As our study shows, digital feminist activism is far more complex and nuanced than one might initially expect, and a variety of digital platforms are used in a multitude of ways, for many purposes. Furthermore, although it may be technologically easy for many groups to engage in digital feminist activism, there remain emotional, mental, or practical barriers that create different experiences, and legitimate some feminist voices, perspectives, and experiences over others.

This book documents the unorthodox case of the Sexy Jewess, a distinctive figure of twenty-first-century American Jewishness. Versions of her image proliferate in US popular culture among neoburlesque, movie musicals, comedic television, ballet parody, and progressive pornography. In embodied plays with sexed-up self-display, the Sexy Jewess revises long-standing stereotypes of the ugly hag, the insatiable Jewish mother, and the self-obsessed Jewish American princess that sustain images of excess even as they have assimilated into the American mainstream. Talking back and dancing back at these stereotypes through gender and humor rebellion, a slew of celebrity and lesser known performers play up their Jewish and female difference as self-conscious comments on their majoritarian sameness. In doing so, performers invoke the Sexy Jewess as a postassimilatory, postfeminist persona with radical and conservative effects. The introduction, five chapters, and the conclusion show how this occurs in a spectrum of spectacle embodiments across a range of performance contexts. Extending across stage and screen legacies of a hundred years, The Case of the Sexy Jewess links humor to classed ideas about sexiness and links ethnicity to gendered constructions of race. Unique to the study of American Jewishness but not limited by its scope, the book situates the body as a site of critical agency in discussions of parody and representational politics, with an emphasis on cultural appropriation and reappropriation that provokes questions applicable to a wide range of other identity acts and impersonations.

Emily Spiers explores the recent phenomenon of ‘pop-feminism’ and pop-feminist writing across North America, Britain, and Germany. Pop-feminism is characterized by its engagement with popular culture and consumerism; its preoccupation with sexuality and transgression in relation to female agency; and its thematization of intergenerational feminist discord, portrayed either as a damaging discursive construct or as a verifiable phenomenon requiring remediation. Central to this study is the question of theorizing the female subject in a postfeminist neoliberal climate and the role played by genre and narrative in the articulation of contemporary pop-feminist politics. The heightened visibility of mainstream feminist discourse and feminist activism in recent years—especially in North America, Britain, and Germany – means that the time is ripe for a coherent comparative scholarly study of pop-feminism as a transnational phenomenon. Pop-Feminist Narratives constitutes the first attempt to provide such an account of pop-feminism in a manner which takes into account the varied and complex narrative strategies employed in the telling of pop-feminist stories across multiple genres and platforms, including literary fiction, the popular ‘guide’ to feminism, film, music, and the digital.

Working Girls: Fiction, Sexuality, and Modernity investigates the significance of a new form of sexual identity at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century. Young women of the lower middle and working classes were increasingly abandoning domestic service in favour of occupations of contested propriety. They inspired both moral unease and erotic fascination. Working Girls considers representations of four highly glamorized yet controversial types of women worker: telegraphists and typists (in newly feminized offices), shop assistants (in the new department stores), and barmaids (in the new ‘gin palaces’ of major British cities). Economically emancipated (more or less) and liberated (more or less) from the protection and constraints of home and family, shop-girls, barmaids, typists, and telegraphists became mass media sensations. They energized a wide range of late Victorian and modernist fiction. This study will bring late Victorian and modernist British writers into intimate conversation with a substantial new archive of ephemeral sources often regarded as remote from high art and its concerns: popular fiction; music hall and musical comedy; beauty pageants and fairground exhibitions; visual art and early film; careers manuals; magazine and periodical journalism; moral reform crusades, royal commissions, and attempts at protective legislation. Working Girls argues that these seductive yet perilous young women helped writers negotiate anxieties about the state of literary culture in the United Kingdom. Crucially, they preoccupy novelists who were themselves beleaguered by anxieties over cultural capital, the shifting pressures of the literary marketplace, or controversies about the morality of fiction.

This book concerns young, class-privileged women in the Nigerian city of Lagos who dress in a “spectacularly feminine” style characterised by the extravagant use and combination of normatively feminine technologies of dress: cascading hair extensions, false eyelashes and nails, heavy and immaculate makeup, and so on. Based on interviews with such stylized women, the book offers a critical consideration of the kinds of feminine subjectivities that they are performing and desiring. Tracing the repertoires of individualist choice, pleasure, entitlement and “can do” that run through the women’s talk, it argues that they subscribe passionately to the notion, or what the book frames more specifically as the “postfeminist promise,” that immaculate and spectacularized feminine beauty now constitutes and signals feminine power. Seeing themselves as “already empowered,” then, what the women do not see is the need for cultural critique, nor for feminism in the form of collective political struggle. The first book on postfeminism both as a cultural formation in the global South and as it interpellates black women, the work offers a groundbreaking new understanding of the culture as performative and transnationally mobile, and a richly theorised account of how women live, embody, and to some extent suffer it, in the flesh.

In light of their tremendous gains in the political and professional sphere, and their ever-expanding options, why is it that most contemporary American films aimed at women still focus almost exclusively on their pursuit of a heterosexual romantic relationship? American Postfeminist Cinema explores this question and is the first book to examine the symbiotic relationship between heterosexual romance and postfeminist culture. The book argues that since 1980, postfeminism’s most salient tensions and anxieties have been reflected and negotiated in the American romance film. Case studies of a broad range of Hollywood and independent films reveal how the postfeminist romance cycle is intertwined with contemporary women’s ambivalence and broader cultural anxieties about women’s changing social and political status.