‘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.

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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.

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Self-help promises the chance of being ''better''. Across multifarious platforms, including books, apps and television shows, it offers hope that we can be our own agents of change for a happier life. Critical research troubles this premise, arguing that the recurring trope of the individualistic ideal-self found in self-help literature is at the expense of seeking solutions in collective, feminist, or otherwise politicised activism. Self-help is also problematically gendered, since women are often positioned as particularly in need of improvement, an understanding further intensified by postfeminist sensibility. These issues are examined conceptually before introducing 10 articles on self-help published in Feminism & Psychology across three decades and brought together as a Virtual Special Issue to offer a significant body of work for scholars and students alike.

This paper critically reviews how feminist academic psychologists, social scientists and media scholars have developed Rosalind Gill?s (2007a) generative construct ?postfeminist sensibility?. We describe the key themes of postfeminist sensibility, a non-coherent set of ideas about femininity, embodiment and empowerment circulating across a range of media. Ideas that inform women?s sense of self, making postfeminist sensibility an important object for psychological study. We then consider research that drew on postfeminist sensibility, focusing on new sexual subjectivities, which developed analysis of agency, empowerment, and the possibilities and limitations in taking up new subjectivities associated with postfeminism, as well as who could take up these subjectivities. We show how such work identified complexities and contradictions in postfeminist sensibility and offer suggestions for how this work might be further developed, particularly by intersectionality-informed research. In the final section, we address contemporary debates surrounding postfeminism. We consider challenges and counter arguments to postfeminist sensibility as a useful term for describing contemporary patterns of sense making on gender, making the case for continuing research on postfeminist sensibility in the areas of digital cultures, a transformative imperative that includes the mind as well as the body, transnational postfeminism, and new forms of feminist activism. We conclude that such work would benefit from considering the ways that different technologies mediate the ideas and practices associated with postfeminist sensibility.Peer reviewe

We have characterized mutations in the early arrest gene, harpy (hrp), and show that they introduce premature stops in the coding region of early mitotic inhibitor1 (Rca1/emi1). In harpy mutants, cells stop dividing during early gastrulation. Lineage analysis confirms that there is little change in cell number after approximately cycle-14. Gross patterning occurs relatively normally, and many organ primordia are produced on time but with smaller numbers of cells. Despite the lack of cell division, some organ systems continue to increase in cell number, suggesting recruitment from surrounding areas. Analysis of BrdU incorporation shows that endoreduplication continues in many cells well past the first day of development, but cells cease endoreduplication once they begin to differentiate and express cell-type markers. Despite relatively normal gross patterning, harpy mutants show a number of defects in morphogenesis, cell migration and differentiation resulting directly or indirectly from the arrest of cell division.