Media expansion into the digital realm and the continuing segregation of users into niches has led to a proliferation of cultural products targeted to and consumed by women. Though often dismissed as frivolous or excessively emotional, feminized culture in reality offers compelling insights into the American experience of the early twenty-first century.

Elana Levine brings together writings from feminist critics that chart the current terrain of feminized pop cultural production. Analyzing everything from Fifty Shades of Grey to Pinterest to pregnancy apps, contributors examine the economic, technological, representational, and experiential dimensions of products and phenomena that speak to, and about, the feminine. As these essays show, the imperative of productivity currently permeating feminized pop culture has created a generation of texts that speak as much to women's roles as public and private workers as to an impulse for fantasy or escape.

Incisive and compelling, Cupcakes, Pinterest, and Ladyporn sheds new light on contemporary women's engagement with an array of media forms in the context of postfeminist culture and neoliberalism.

| Cover Title Copyright Contents Acknowledgments Introduction: Feminized Popular Culture in the Early Twenty-first Century / Elana Levine PART I: PASSIONS 1. Fifty Shades of Postfeminism Contextualizing Readers' Reflections on the Erotic Romance Series / Melissa A. Click 2. ABC's Scandal and Black Women's Fandom / Kristen J. Warner 3. Television for All Women? Watching Lifetime's Devious Maids / Jillian Báez 4. Women, Gossip, and Celebrity Online: Celebrity Gossip Blogs as Feminized Popular Culture / Erin A. Meyers PART II: BODIES 5. Mothers, Fathers, and the Pregnancy App Experience: Designing with Expectant Users in Mind / Barbara L. Ley 6. Fashioning Feminine Fandom: Fashion Blogging and the Expression of Mediated Identity / Kyra Hunt 7. Women's Nail Polish Blogging and Femininity: "The girliest you will ever see me" / Michele White 8. Dance, Dance, Dance, Dance, Dance, Dance, Dance All Night! Mediated Audiences and Black Women's Spirituality / Beretta E. Smith-Shomade PART III: LABORS 9. Working Girls: The Precariat of Chick Lit / Suzanne Ferriss 10. After Ever After: Bethenny Frankel, Self-Branding, and the "New Intimacy of Work" / Suzanne Leonard and Diane Negra 11. Keeping Up with the Kardashians: Fame-Work and the Production of Entrepreneurial Sisterhood / Alice Leppert 12. Pinning Happiness: Affect, Social Media, and the Work of Mothers / Julie Wilson and Emily ChIve Yochim 13. Sweet Sisterhood: Cupcakes as Sites of Feminized Consumption and Production / Elizabeth Nathanson Contributors Index | "An enlightening consideration of the ways women consume media."—Bust

"Taken as a whole, Cupcakes, Pinterest, and Ladyporn reads as a roundtable discussion on new roads ahead for feminist media and cultural studies more deeply concerned with issues of gender, race, and sexuality than ever."—The Velvet Light Trap
"Cupcakes shows that the seemingly most traditional forms of popular culture, the sites that appear to simply reify normative femininity, are actually locations for complex and agentic negotiations of gendered, raced, and classed expectations in the often contradictory field of popular culture."—Signs


|Elana Levine is an associate professor in the Department of Journalism, Advertising, and Media Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. She is the author of Wallowing in Sex: The New Sexual Culture of 1970s American Television and co-author of Legitimating Television: Media Convergence and Cultural...

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