Technologies of Sexiness: Sex, Identity, and Consumer Culture
Adrienne Evans and Sarah Riley
Abstract
What does sexiness mean today? Has sexiness become something that is bought and sold? What identity effects does a sexiness informed by consumer culture have? This book addresses these questions, off the back of a heightened visibility of “sex,” “sexiness,” and “sexualization” in everyday life. Neoliberal, consumerist, and postfeminist media culture have shaped ways of understanding, embodied by the figure of the choosing, empowered, entrepreneurial consumer citizen-woman, whose economic capital determines feminine success (and failure). Informed by older constructs of privilege (e.g., class, ... More
What does sexiness mean today? Has sexiness become something that is bought and sold? What identity effects does a sexiness informed by consumer culture have? This book addresses these questions, off the back of a heightened visibility of “sex,” “sexiness,” and “sexualization” in everyday life. Neoliberal, consumerist, and postfeminist media culture have shaped ways of understanding, embodied by the figure of the choosing, empowered, entrepreneurial consumer citizen-woman, whose economic capital determines feminine success (and failure). Informed by older constructs of privilege (e.g., class, sexuality, race, and (dis)ability), this version of sexiness also constrains by folding contemporary femininity back into previous panics about youth, excess, “bad” consumption, and appropriate feminine behavior. This book identifies how current understandings of sexiness in public life and academic discourse have produced a “doubled stagnation”: stuck places that cycle around old debates without forward momentum. Developing a theoretical and methodological framework from which to work productively within these debates, the book expands on the notion of a “technology of sexiness.” What happens when people make sense of themselves within the complexities of consumer-oriented constructs of sexiness? How do these discourses come to “transform the self”? Through this framework, the book provides the opportunity to understand how women make sense of their sexual identities in the context of a feminization of sexual consumerism. Exploring age-related femininities in the context of what “sexiness” means today, the book develops a series of insights into various “technologies of the self” through analyses of space, nostalgia, and claims to authentic sexiness.
Keywords:
sexiness,
sexualization,
postfeminism,
neoliberalism,
consumerism,
identity,
femininity
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2014 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780199914760 |
| Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: August 2014 |
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199914760.001.0001 |
