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Stephanie Meyer’s enormously popular Twilight saga of teen vampire romance novels is commonly referred to as the young adult fiction equivalent of what the Harry Potter series was for children. Central to the series, which sells in the tens of millions globally, is an adolescent romantic relationship that, as I will show, is in many ways masochistic. Interrogating gendered subjectivity within the series, particularly in regard to its teenage narrator, Bella Swan, and her relationship with the hyper-idealized vampire hero, Edward Cullen, this article analyses the way the four narratives figure adolescent feminine desire as well as how they link eroticism and death. It also positions the series within broader feminist debates about postfeminism within popular culture, and explores how (and, with more difficulty, why) a masochistic relationship and an undead subjectivity for a teenage girl are seen as utopic sites of possibility in these narratives. If, as Nina Auerbach argues, each age produces the vampire it requires, then might Edward Cullen and his teen vampire bride suggest about the current, purportedly ‘postfeminist’, context and young women in particular?

Nine aardvarks (<em>Orycteropus afer</em>) were captured in the southern Free State, South Africa, for the placement of abdominal radio transmitters. Five combinations of ketamine hydrochloride with xylazine hydrochloride, midazolam or medetomidine hydrochloride were used to induce anaesthesia. In some cases the level of anaesthesia was maintained with 1.5 % halothane. A mixture of ketamine hydrochloride and medetomidine hydrochloride was found to be most effective. Atipamizole reversed the affects of medetomidine hydrochloride, resulting in a smooth and full recovery within 8 minutes. The immobilisation and subsequent anaesthesia of these animals on cold winter nights resulted in hypothermia, and keeping the animals warm was essential to the success of the procedures undertaken. Reversal of the sedative medetomidine hydrochloride proved to be important, because animals that were released before they were fully conscious took refuge in their burrows so that care was impossible

This article focuses on the blogosphere as an oppositional field where the meanings around contemporary Western women's singlehood are contested, negotiated and rewritten. In contrast to dominant narratives in which single women are pathologised, in the blogs by, for, and about single women analysed here, writers aim to refigure women's singleness as well as providing resources, support and a textual community where others can intervene and contribute to the re-valuation of single women. These blogs also function as alternative forms of knowledge, seeking to (re)legitimise women's singleness and to trouble their aberrance and social liminality. Rather than only considering the form in isolation from its content, this article analyses the discourses deployed by bloggers and within blogs and how women bloggers publicly perform their very singleness as part of a personal and political strategy of re-signification. In this way, while cautious not to overestimate the democratic potentialities of the so-called blogosphere, it underscores the important cultural – and indeed political – work being undertaken by single women therein. Moreover, by demonstrating how these blogs use discursive tactics commonly associated with feminism's second-wave – women's consciousness-raising; identity politics; deploying and reiterating the famous feminist dictum: ‘the personal is political’; naming discrimination; and empathy and community-building – it argues that they are using so-called ‘new’ media for what is now problematically believed to be ‘old’ (feminist) politics.

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