Following upon the success of her book, Mediated Women: Representations in Popular Culture, the author’s latest anthology takes a new look at a wide range of contemporary images of women within the media to examine the meanings behind the representations of women in popular culture. This book explores what representation of women says about their positions in society, the factors that shape representation, and the roles that gender, race, class, ethnicity and sexual orientation play within the mediated portrayal of women.

Drawing primarily on qualitative textual analysis of film, reality TV, advertising, the news, children’s programming, soap operas, TV drama, and more, the book situates the representation of woemn in popular culture along a continuum ranging from stereotypical portrayals that underscore women’s bodies as pornographic spectacle to more positive and hopeful depictions. And it argues that the contemporary portrayals of women within popular culture are shaped by two major trends: the mainstreaming of pornography and its resultant hypersexualization of women and girls, and the commodification of those images for a global market.

Contents: Introduction. Women in Popular Culture: All Sexed Up and Global to Go, Marian Meyers. The Pornogrification of Women. A (Bad) Habit of Thinking Challengingand Changing the Pornographic Worldview, Jane Caputi. Lolita Lives!: An Examination of Sexual Portrayals of Adolescent Girls in Fashion Advertising, Debra Merskin. Bodies and Difference. NippleMania: Black Feminism, Corporeal Fragmentation, and the Politics of Public Consumption, Kimberly Wallace-Sanders and Brittany Cooper.