Adrienne Evans

Technologies of Sexiness: Theorizing Women’s Engagement in the Sexualization of Culture

‘Raunch’ culture and ‘porno-chic’ are examples of a dramatic rise in the re-sexualization of women’s bodies. Wrapped in discourses of individualism, consumerism and empowerment, and often excluding those who are not white, heterosexual and slim, this sexualization of culture has created significant debates within feminist literature with regard to the question of how to value women’s choices of participation in sexualized culture while also maintaining a critical standpoint towards the cultural context that has enabled such postfeminist sexual subjectivities. In this paper we contribute to these debates by presenting ‘technologies of sexiness’, a theoretical framework that draws on Foucauldian theorizing of technologies of the self and Butler’s work on performativity. The technology of sexiness framework conceptualizes a blurring between subjectivity and consumer and media culture and highlights the doubled movements in which agency is complexly enabled and disabled in relation to technology, performance/parody, multiplicity and recuperation.

Immaculate consumption: negotiating the sex symbol in postfeminist celebrity culture

Contemporary female celebrity is produced within a context of postfeminism, sexualised culture, consumerism and neoliberalism. Feminist analyses often argue that such celebrity figures commodify female sexuality and depoliticise feminist issues regarding autonomy and sexual agency; although some celebrate contemporary celebrity as a site for producing less conventional sexual identities. In this paper we contribute to these debates with analysis of focus group and interview data from 28 white heterosexual women aged between 23 and 58 living in the UK. For the women in our study, female celebrities were figures of successful neoliberal entrepreneurial selves, with the capacity to make money from their bodies. This capacity was associated with continuous work on the bodies, rather than a natural beauty; and while there was often admiration for the work that went into this self-transformation, a consequence for the participants of equating beauty with normatively unattainable levels of body work was that they came to understand themselves as falling short of even ‘achievable’ attractiveness. We conclude that these participants made sense of celebrity sexiness through neoliberal rhetoric of ‘choice’, entitlement and pleasure, which worked to constantly underscore the ‘ordinary’ womans inability to measure up.

Postfeminist Heterotopias: Negotiating ‘safe’ and ‘seedy’ in the British sex shop space

This article contributes to debates concerning the sexualization of culture in the European context by analysing shifts in contemporary forms of British women’s (hetero)sexual sexual subjectivities in relation to consumer culture. The article employs a ‘heterotopological’ analysis of how space is materialized through history, power and discourse. A two-part analysis is employed that, first, maps the history of British sex shops in relation to two discourses of sexuality and consumption, namely ‘safe’ and ‘seedy’; and second, analyses how these discourses can be taken up and negotiated by young women today, as evidenced in a focus group discussion on ‘Ann Summers’. It concludes that new directions and interesting insights into the intersections of space, power, gender and sexuality within neoliberal postfeminist shifts in feminine identity can be made by considering female-oriented sex shops as ‘postfeminist heterotopias’.

It’s just between girls: Negotiating the postfeminist gaze in women’s ‘looking talk’:

Feminists have argued that women’s bodies, appearance, and subjectivity are formed through a multitude of regulatory dispositif and disciplinary apparatus. One such disciplinary technique has been “looking”, evidenced in work on the male gaze, disciplinary power, misrecognition, objectification, and indirect social aggression. But there remains a significant gap in the role of women’s looking in subject formation, particularly within the context of a postfeminist sensibility. To address this gap a poststructuralist informed discourse analysis was performed on interviews with 44 white heterosexual British women (aged 18–36). Four discourses deployed by the participants when talking about looking between women were identified. These discourses were as follows: judgemental looking between women is pervasive; judgement is consumption oriented; women’s looks are prioritised over men’s, foregrounding a female gaze; and appearance is the vehicle to recognition. We conclude by highlighting the importance of a postfeminist gaze for understanding women’s subjectivities, and how looking works in a postfeminist context to maintain regulation, anxiety, surveillance, and judgement.

Engaging with the Bailey Review: blogging, academia and authenticity

This article reproduces and discusses a series of blog posts posted by academics in anticipation of the report on commercialisation, sexualisation and childhood, ‘Letting Children Be Children’ by Reg Bailey for the UK Department of Education in June 2011. The article discusses the difficulty of ‘translating’ scholarly work for the public in a context where ‘impact’ is increasingly important and the challenges that academics face in finding new ways of speaking about sex in public.

Glitter (Foot)ball Tactics: Negotiating Mainstream Gender Equality in Iceland

Sterken are an Icelandic gay football team, whose practices fit with a wider discourse of gender mainstreaming. Iceland provides an exceptional context to investigate gender mainstreaming: it has been rated first for gender equality by the World Economic Forum and until recently had a lesbian Prime Minister dedicated to introducing gender equality-led policy; but Iceland has long maintained a commitment to neoliberal ideology. In this article, we present field data collected with Sterken, and introduce the analytic of “glitter(foot)ball tactics:” the glitter representing gay identity politics, while the original shape of the football maintaining hegemonic concepts of masculinity. Drawing on the metaphor of gliter(foot)ball tactics, our analysis shows how masculinity in homonormative cultures was able to uphold male gender power through reconciling both sides of the glitter(foot)ball. Gender mainstreaming here acts as a depoliticized discursive tool in constructing these versions of gay male identities in the context of neoliberal politics.

Pain, pleasure and bridal beauty: mapping postfeminist bridal perfection

Despite renewed media attention on the wedding, and the emphasis that this pays to bridal performance, feminist analysis of wedding culture has made few inroads. Accounts are needed that understand womens experience of the wedding day, the narrative of becoming the bride, and the way this takes place against a backdrop of postfeminist ambivalence, where traditional wedding practices are re-fashioned through discourses of (consumer) choice and empowerment. In this article, we draw on qualitative data collected with five married women from the Netherlands, who spoke to us about their wedding day and their experience of being/becoming brides. We show how retraditionalisation shapes a new romaticisation of wedding day storytelling, constructed through transformation and the experience of beauty. In analysing these narratives, we show how postfeminist bridal perfection comes to anchor the subjective and affective power of ‘the wedding’ in contemporary culture.

The Entrepreneurial Practices of Becoming a Doll

‘Living dolls’ is a term that emerged online during 2010 to describe a group of women who participate in the practice of appearing ‘doll-like’. Living dolls take part in a number of beauty techniques in order to achieve a doll appearance through, for example, using wide-rimmed contact lenses, hair extensions and corsetry. An online community also holds that the living dolls achieve their appearance through the use of photo-editing technologies (e.g. Photoshop) and/or surgery—including rib removal, eye widening, breast implants and liposuction.

He’s a total TubeCrush : Postfeminist Sensibility as Intimate Publics

Abstract In this paper, we analyze the website TubeCrush, where people post and share unsolicited photographs of “guy candy” seen on the London Underground. We use TubeCrush as a case study to develop Berlant’s intimate publics as a lens for examining post-feminist sensibility and masculinity in the liminal space between home/work. The paper responds to notions of reverse sexism and post-sexism used to make sense of women’s apparent objectification of men in the digital space, by asking instead where the value of such images lies. We suggest that in TubeCrush, value is directed onto the bodies of particular men, creating a visual economy of post-feminist masculinity of whiteness, physical strength, and economic wealth. This celebration of masculine capital is achieved through humor and the knowing wink, but the outcome is a reaffirmation of urban hegemonic masculinity.

Diversity in gender and visual representation: a commentary

Visual images deserve our critical attention more than ever. In this commentary, I draw together the papers in this Special Issue on Diversity in gender and visual representation. The collection here is ‘diverse’ in terms of the breadth of visual representations, and through the methodological interdisciplinary approach of its contributions. I consider the overlaps within this diversity, and identify the contribution that these articles make in opening up discussion of activism, the body, history and emotions. I conclude with particular attention to how this Special Issue highlights the importance of returning to the politics of visibility, and how collectively these articles ask us to question the costs, limitations and possibilities of being represented in todays visually mediated societies.