Single Women in Popular Culture : The Limits of Postfeminism

Single Women in Popular Culture demonstrates how single women continue to be figures of profound cultural anxiety. Examining a wide range of popular media forms, this is a timely, insightful and politically engaged book, exploring the ways in which postfeminism limits the representation of single women in popular culture. Has the way single women are represented in western popular culture really changed over the past few decades? What might the single women we find in chick lit novels, on reality television shows, and in self-help manuals reveal about postfeminism and its politics? From Bridget Jones to Carrie Bradshaw, the single woman has become more visible than ever before, prompting some commentators to suggest that she is now celebrated where once she was denigrated. However, in this book Anthea Taylor compellingly demonstrates how the single woman -- despite appearing at times to be glamorized -- continues to be a deeply problematic figure in popular culture. Drawing upon a wide range of media forms, she finds that singleness is commonly represented as a state that women must actively work to overcome, while coupledom is vigorously promoted as a postfeminist 'choice'. In this thought-provoking book, Taylor foregrounds how postfeminism operates in tandem with neoliberalism to limit the stories being told about single women. Characteristic of the book's nuanced approach, she also examines sites where women are attempting to refigure and validate singleness, including the blogosphere. Making an important contribution to scholarship on both singleness and postfeminism, Single Women in Popular Culture is a timely and politically engaged account of how modern single women are represented -- and why it matters Front Matter....Pages i-viii Introduction....Pages 1-5 Theorizing Women’s Singleness: Postfeminism, Neoliberalism, and the Politics of Popular Culture....Pages 6-32 From the Second-wave to Postfeminism: Single Women in the Mediasphere....Pages 33-71 Spinsters and Singletons: Bridget Jones’s Diary and its Cultural Reverberations....Pages 72-104 Desperate and Dateless TV: Making Over the Single Woman....Pages 105-141 Self-Help and the Single Girl: From Salvation to Validation....Pages 142-178 Blogging Solo: Women Refiguring Singleness....Pages 179-209 Back Matter....Pages 210-242 'Rejecting oversimplified accounts of her metamorphosis from spinster to singleton, this original book astutely assesses paradoxical cultural discourses wherein the single woman is sometimes approvingly evaluated for her exemplary conduct as a neoliberal subject yet often anxiously positioned as a challenge to heternormativity in a 'couple culture' that strenuously resists self examination.' - Diane Negra, University College Dublin, Ireland