‘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.

Dance-drug use has a characteristic pattern that has implications for health promotion and criminal policy.

The contradiction between support for egalitarian employment practices and the maintenance of occupational androcentrism was examined by discursively analysing constructions of equality and discrimination from 46 interviews with professional men. Accounts of equality were produced through the interpretative repertories of 'interchangeability', 'individual ability' and 'pragmatism'. This enables, first, an understanding of discrimination as 'non-individualism', a term used to describe the treatment of social group memberships as salient, and second, defined interventions based on a structural analysis of equality as discrimination. These repertoires minimized the gendered nature of men and women's experiences and negated the use of context in favour of an abstract principle of individualism. Participants warranted their accounts through feminist arguments, two-sided argument formulations, and the construction of a dichotomy between individualist-equality and structuralist-discrimination-supporting the material practice of 'affirmative non-action', the active support of non-action. Relating the findings to equal opportunity policy, occupational cultural analyses and the discursive production of 'new sexism', the article identifies the absence of an account that conceptualizes both individual and structural facets of equality.

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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.

From the early days of hippie counter-culture, music festivals have been an important part of the British summer. Today they are commercialised offerings without the counter-cultural discourse of earlier times. Drawing on participant observation, interviews and focus groups conducted at a rock festival and a smaller boutique festival, the paper examines how their design, organisation and management are co-created with participants to produce authentic experiences. The paper contributes to research on authenticity in tourism by examining how authenticity emerges and is experienced in such co-created commercial settings. It presents the importance that the socio-spatial plays in authenticity experiences and how socio-spatial experience and engagement can also be recognised as a form of aurapublishersversionPeer reviewe

This paper explores the role of online 'body talk' (text-based communication about bodies and bodily experiences) in the management, negotiation and development of eating disorder related identities. Two anorexia related Internet discussion forums (a 'pro-ana' and a 'recovery' website) were analyzed through the means of discourse analysis. The analysis focused on the type of body-talk produced in the different sites and the functions of this talk in relation to eating disorder related identities. Three forms of body talk were identified: descriptions of doing something with the body; descriptions of the body and descriptions of bodily experiences. On both sites these forms of body talk reproduced the thin ideal; demonstrated valid claims of group membership; and, for the pro-ana group, dynamically (re)produced eating disorder related identities through the reframing of health/appearance concerns as markers of success.