Sex, Identity, and Consumer Culture

Sex(t) Talk: A Qualitative Analysis of Young Adults’ Negotiations of the Pleasures and Perils of Sexting

“…see Dobson 2015;Hasinoff 2014Hasinoff , 2015Karaian 2012;Ringrose 2013;Ringrose et al 2012). It must be acknowledged, though, that in a contemporary post-feminist media culture, the requirements on young females in particular to produce and perform or display a 'sexy' body through negotiating new 'technologies' of feminine sexiness (Gill 2008;Evans and Riley 2015;Evans et al 2010) certainly raises concerns about this complicated issue of agency. It is necessary that agency be further examined and more specifically framed within contemporary discourses of post-feminism, neo-liberalism and cultural sexualisation.…”

“…As Cover (2003) surmises, contemporary 'western culture authorizes particular sites of nakedness, some of which are ostensibly and explicitly linked with the sexual, others which are not' (p. 56). In addition, Evans and Riley (2015) have noted how the 'sexualisation of culture has complicated notions of the male gaze' where 'women now increasingly gaze at both other women and themselves' (p. 32). They have described the emergence of a 'post-feminist gaze' which 'allow[s] women to judge how well (or not) they [are] performing embodied femininity' (p. 54).…”

Immaculate consumption: negotiating the sex symbol in postfeminist celebrity culture

“…The discourses of postfeminism, neoliberalism and consumerism are thus enacted in complex and interconnected ways (Gill 2008, Evans andRiley 2013). In this matrix of co-productive discourse, and intersecting with women's increasing economic capacity through entry into the workplace, the female subject has become a consumer citizen.…”

A critical review of postfeminist sensibility

“…Although there is variation in how neoliberalism develops in different countries, neoliberal citizenship orients around values of self-management and self-enterprise made sense of through discourses of risk, responsibility, choice, and freedom (Ong, 2006). Neoliberalism provides the conditions of possibility for postfeminist sensibility, since an understanding of the self as in need of constant work and transformation, often through the use of consumption, is shared by both neoliberal and postfeminist sensibilities (Gill, 2007;Evans & Riley, 2014;Riley, Evans & Robson, forthcoming). v See Ahmed (2012) and Grzanka et al (2016) for a discussion of the rhetorical power that reduces sustained academic challenge of inequality and the status quo by calling something "over.…”

“…It also allowed researchers to account for patterns in women's sense‐making, including the way that second‐wave feminist arguments could be mobilised to support practices such feminists had problematised. For example, young women used second‐wave feminist arguments around the importance of women being able to express their sexuality to position “glamour” models as empowered by their work (Evans & Riley, , ), even through second‐wave feminists had critiqued such work as sexually objectifying.…”