Cupcakes, Pinterest, and Ladyporn: Feminized Popular Culture in the Early Twenty-First Century
Description
Media expansion into the digital realm and the continuing segregation of users into niches has led to a proliferation of cultural products targeted to and consumed by women. Though often dismissed as frivolous or excessively emotional, feminized culture in reality offers compelling insights into the American experience of the early twenty-first century.Elana Levine brings together writings from feminist critics that chart the current terrain of feminized pop cultural production. Analyzing everything from Fifty Shades of Grey to Pinterest to pregnancy apps, contributors examine the economic, technological, representational, and experiential dimensions of products and phenomena that speak to, and about, the feminine. As these essays show, the imperative of productivity currently permeating feminized pop culture has created a generation of texts that speak as much to women's roles as public and private workers as to an impulse for fantasy or escape.
Incisive and compelling, Cupcakes, Pinterest, and Ladyporn sheds new light on contemporary women's engagement with an array of media forms in the context of postfeminist culture and neoliberalism.
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Reviews
"By foregrounding the complexity of gender in a postfeminist culture increasingly opposed to gender-specific analysis, Levine reminds us that these projects of feminist media analysis are as important in the 21st century as they were during the early days of feminist studies... Levine's collection provides a fresh, updated look at feminized pop culture."--Feminist Collections
"Cupcakes shows that the seemingly most traditional forms of popular culture, the sites that appear to simply reify normative femininity, are actually locations for complex and agentic negotiations of gendered, raced, and classed expectations in the often contradictory field of popular culture."--Signs
"Through its manifold critiques of digital media, cultural products, and gendered spaces, Cupcakes, Pinterest, and Ladyporn has the potential to reinvigorate contemporary scholarship in feminist media studies and bring "feminized cultures" back into focus."--Feminist Media Studies
"Taken as a whole, Cupcakes, Pinterest, and Ladyporn reads as a roundtable discussion on new roads ahead for feminist media and cultural studies more deeply concerned with issues of gender, race, and sexuality than ever."--The Velvet Light Trap
"Levine has assembled a comprehensive set of smart, accessible, and interesting essays that truly capture 'feminized' popular culture in the early twenty-first century United States. This will be the definitive volume on 'post-feminist' popular cultural productions for some time to come."--Rebecca Wanzo, author of The Suffering Will Not Be Televised: African American Women and Sentimental Political Storytelling
