INTRODUCTION KATHARINE SARIKAKIS University of Vienna LIZA TSALIKI National and Kapodistrian University of Athens Post/feminism and the

politics of mediated sex This issue of Media and Cultural Politics wishes to explore some of the ways in which sex and sexuality are mediated, as well as the culturally determined 37 conditions and the inherent politics of this mediation. Sex and sexuality are 38 important aspects of cultural life in general, but also in terms of personal devel- 39 opment, integrity and identity. As objects of policy, they are often accompanied 40by anxieties expressed in state and societal responses, themselves medi- 41 ated through policy and communicative and cultural representations thereof. 42 Questions about the conditions under which sex and sexuality are mediated, 43 expressed and manifest, and about the degree of appropriateness and suit- 44 ability of such mediations for commonly accepted morals, often come hand in 45 hand with questions about the conditions under which authentic and liberating 46 mediations of sexual expressivity can take place. At the same time, sex media- 47 tions constitute one of the core content elements of cultural and technological 48 markets, drafting anew the narratives of sexual and gender relations as well as 49 the cultural environment for youth to relate to. As powerful economic factors, 50 sexually explicit imageries in various forms have been channelled to promote 51 the adoption of communication technologies especially of the Internet and 52 mobile communications. Meanwhile, the culture industries, globally, are the August 4, 2011 19:16 Intellect/MCP Page-109 MCP-7-2-Proof-1 MCP 7 (2) pp. 109119 Intellect Ltd 2011 109Katharine Sarikakis and Liza Tsaliki 110 object of concerns and panics about the ways in which their products, 01 from music to fashion, and entertainment to High Arts, use and encourage 02 the hyper-sexualization of women and young girls, in particular. 03 Feminist critique of contemporary sexual mediations and their historical 04 development is the epistemological lens of this special issue, as it is through 05 the contribution of feminism in media and cultural studies, alongside other 06 disciplines, that the field of academic enquiry has opened up to place women 07 at its centre, while maintaining a social justice agenda. The question of medi- 08 ation of sex and sexuality in the global circuits of culture is one of paramount 09 importance for feminists, as it is one of the fundamental areas that determine 10 womens liberation and self-governance. 11 This issue aims to contribute to the opening up of spaces for feminist under- 12 standings and interrogations, critique and analysis of sexual mediations that 13 may self-characterize as postfeminist. As such, feminist critique has been 14 instrumental in the formation of the new media and cultural studies, in the 15 sense that 16 [[...]there is no cultural studies which is not post feminist, not in the sense of having moved beyond it but rather in the sense of having opened itself to the radical critique and implications of feminist theory and politics. 17 18 19 20 21 ((Grossberg 1993: 26) 22 23 24 Within this context, initially at least, the move from feminism to postfem25 inism represented a paradigm shift which, along with postmodernism and 26 postcolonialism, challenged academic cultures modernist discourses. With 27 second-wave feminism being

limited by its own political agenda and modernist 28 inclinations, postfeminism transpired as a result of critiques from within and 29 without feminism (Brooks 1997: 210). Central in the early discussions, back in 30 the 1980s, of this kind of representational politics was the popular cultural phe31 nomenon of Madonna a valuable case study framing feminist/postfeminist 32 inflections of cultural studies. Writing about Madonna, Fiske argued that she 33 offered her fans a feminist ideology/critique of her own, where she challenged 34 binary oppositions as a way of conceptualizing femininity, while making room 35 for independent meanings of feminine sexuality for young girls (1987: 275). The 36 representation of Madonna as situated at the interface of postfeminism and 37 cultural studies dominated feminist discourse for much of the 1990s, where she 38 has been extensively discussed as a site of subversion, while also maintain39 ing a cautionary stance against an overoptimistic interpretation of her work 40 (Brooks 1997; Kaplan 1993; Schwichtenberg 1993). In fact, Kaplan questioned 41 the extent to which Madonna subverted patriarchal culture by unmasking it, or 42 whether she reinscribed it by allowing voyeuristic recuperations of her body 43 (1993: 156). At the same time, a number of voices raised the issue of how 44 Madonna (the material girl par excellence) worked as a commodity promot45 ing market forces and how this commodification intersected with issues of 46 subjectivity and gender (Brooks 1997; During 1993; Kaplan 1993). 47 However, one of the issues that have shaped and continue to frame debates 48 within feminist media studies to date is the putative divide between second- 49 wave feminism and postfeminism a buried binary according to Lumby (2011: 50 96) that stalks attempts to move beyond received and unproductive opposi51 tions. Lumby has been contemplating the notion of postfeminism as a way 52 AAugust 4, 2011 19:16 Intellect/MCP Page-110 MCP-7-2-Proof-1 01 to steer through feminist politics for a while now (Bad Girls 1997) and argues 02 that fifteen years down the line, the debate is characterized by the same old 03 dichotomies, as exemplified in the classic woman as sexual subject versus 04 woman as sexual object one (2011: 97). This is hardly surprising if we consider 05 that 06 07 [t]he notion of postfeminism has become one of the most important in 08 the lexicon of feminist cultural analysis. Yet there is little agreement about 09 what postfeminism is, and the term is used variously (and frequently 10 contradictorily) to signal an epistemological break with (second wave) 11 feminism, an historical shift (to a third wave), or a regressive political 12 stance (backlash). 13 (Gill 2007: 147) 14 15 Gill argues that instead of interpreting postfeminism as any of the above, we 16 should instead opt to see it as a sensibility, thus making it a critical object under 17 scrutiny instead of an analytical perspective (2007). She unpacks this postfem- 18 inist sensibility by identifying several distinct features: an obsessive preoccupa- 19 tion with the body in order to define femininity; porno chic representations of 20 girls whereby girls are deliberately sexualized in advertising, magazines, web- 21 sites and television while adult women are girlified; a new regime of sexiness 22 marked by a shift from being a sex object to becoming a sexual subject within 23 which power operates not from an external, male, judging gaze but from an 24 internalized, self-policing, narcissistic gaze. Girls and women are invited to 25 become a particular kind of self, and endowed with agency on condition that it 26is used to construct oneself as a subject closely resembling the heterosexual 27 male fantasy that is found in pornography, notes Gill (2007: 152). Follow- 28 ing this, comes a grammar of individualism, seen in talk shows, advertising 29 and makeover shows where the emphasis is put on personal empowerment, 30 selfdetermination and taking control, forfeiting though in this way notions 31 of politics (e.g. racism, homophobia, domestic violence) and putting forward 32 a neo-liberal understanding of feminism. The intensity of careful and con- 33 tinuous self-monitoring and self-induced discipline always presented as the 34 outcomes of free choice is not so evident as in the popular makeover narrative; 35 in such content, flawed womens bodies and lives are amenable to reinvention 36 or transformation on the basis of bullet-proof advice offered by relationship,

37 design, lifestyle or sex experts. This is all wrapped up in an aura of tongue-in- 38 cheek irony, seen in the return of terms such as totty, used by middle-class 39 male television presenters, or the coining of new ones in lads magazines, such 40 as chesticle to account for the difference between the left and right breasts in 41 a 2005 best pair of tits contest in the British FHM (For Him Magazine) all of 42 which, says Gill, are well meant, of course, in a just for laughs kind of way. 43 At the same time, the discussion regarding what follows after feminism 44 still abounds, with many voices raising their concern about the aftermath of 45 feminism (McRobbie 2009). Initially diagnosed and identified as an antifemi- 46 nist trend in the late 1980s, postfeminism has been established by now within 47media studies, with several media texts as exemplary case studies: chick flicks 48 such as Sleepless in Seattle; primetime drama Ally McBeal, Sex and the City and 49 Desperate Housewives or Xena: Warrior Princess; reality TV in the form of What 50 Not to Wear (BBC 2002), Wife Swap (Channel 4 2002); cooking shows such as 51 Nigella Bites (Channel 4 200102); or chick-lit such as Bridget Joness Diary (and 52 the two films based on it, 2001, 2004) (Koivunen 2009). August 4, 2011 19:16 Intellect/MCP Page-111 MCP-7-2-Proof-1 Post/feminism and the politics of mediated sex 111 Katharine Sarikakis and Liza Tsaliki 112 Looking back at her own work in the 1990s, when writing about womens 01 and girls magazines, McRobbie (2009) acknowledges her over-enthusiasm 02 about the kind of popular feminism encapsulated in the mainstream media as it 03 seems that feminist content is thinning and being replaced by aggressive indi- 04 vidualism, by a hedonistic female phallicism in the field of sexuality and by an 05 obsession with consumer culture. Various trends, as for example pole dancing, 06 are being marketed as yet another form of female agency while it is becoming 07 increasingly difficult to raise any criticism as feminism and feminists are con- 08 structed as harsh, punitive, inauthentic and as not articulating womens true 09 desires (Tasker and Negra 2005). What we are witnessing, then, is not merely 10 a state of affairs where prefeminist ideals are being repackaged as postfeminist 11 achievements in ways that reinforce heteronormative femininity (Probyn 1997, 12 quoted in Gill 2007: 162), but an undoing, a dismantling of feminism, 13 nnot in favour of re-traditionalisation, women are not being pushed back into the home, but instead there is a process which says feminism is no longer needed, it is now common sense, and as such it is something young women can do without. 14 15 16 17 18 ((McRobbie 2009: 8) 19 20 21 In that respect, then, postfeminism draws on and invokes feminism as some- 22 thing that can be taken into account in order to establish a new set of meanings 23 which work to suggest that as equality is achieved, feminism itself is no 24 longer needed it has become a spent force. Here comes McRobbies main 25 contribution to the debate, where she describes postfeminism as a double 26 entanglement. In this schema, she argues, neoconservative values regarding 27 gender, sexuality and family life coexist with equal processes of liberaliza28 tion, while, all the same, feminism is both accepted and repudiated even 29 hated. This double entanglement took place with a parallel dismantling of fem- 30 inism from within, situated in the early 1990s, where the second-wave feminist 31 regime is challenged by post-structuralist feminists such as Spivak, Trinh and 32 Mohanty and by theorists such as Butler and Haraway who, influenced by Fou- 33 cault, conceived power as flows and convergences of talk and discourses while 34 denaturalising the postfeminist body all along. The impact of Butlers concept 35 of subjectivity (1990, 1993) and the means by which forms and interpellations 36 call women into being and produce them as subjects, what McRobbie calls the 37 new feminist politics of the body, are paramount in this process (2009: 13). Two 38 more

theoretical developments characterize this dismantling of feminism from 39 within, says McRobbie the first triggered when Charlotte Brunsdon (1991) 40 raised the housewife or ordinary woman as the subject of feminist attention; 41 the partial and exclusive character of the object of inquiry, which was exhausted 42 largely with white, affluent, heterosexual housewives, was not realized until 43 much later. The other was the rise of popular feminism in the early 1990s, 44 seen in the wider dissemination of feminist issues in the mainstream media 45 something that was interpreted at the time as feminist success and created 46 an optimistic elation. The downside of this, however, was that this newfound 47 apparent popularity of feminism meant that young women not only would dis- 48 tance and dis-identify themselves from it and treat it with ambivalence, but 49 would actually repudiate it and denunciate it the dominant gender debate 50 would follow a similar rhetoric. This is the cultural space of postfeminism 51 (McRobbie 2009: 15).52 AAugust 4, 2011 19:16 Intellect/MCP Page-112 MCP-7-2-Proof-1 01 It could be argued that in order for feminism to become acceptable in a 02 postfeminist era, a makeover was required at some point, whereby the femi- 03 nist Murphy Brown (CBS 19881998) would be transformed to the postfeminist 04 Ally McBeal only this time independent women like Murphy Brown are not 05 depicted to be challenged by their independence; they are portrayed as being 06 unhappy because of this independence (Kim 2001). The problem is that such 07 postfeminist discourse can be turned on its head to condemn feminist achieve- 08 ments and suggest a halt to feminist struggle. When it comes to the depiction 09 of women in shows such as Ally McBeal or Sex and the City, their existence is 10 far from being a feminist warrant, as, in line with the ideological work of cin- 11 ema, strong female characters on television are usually carefully managed, if 12 not punished. Discussions about such shows have flourished over the past few 13 years (Akass and McCabe 2004; Gerhard 2005; McRobbie 2009), with critics 14 questioning the extent to which Ally McBeal or Sex and the City have suc- 15 ceeded in moving women away from being the object of desire to being its 16 subject, or whether the women depicted in them are empowered and liber- 17 ated, and therefore in no more need of feminism. Kim argues that the move 18 from passive object of the male gaze to self-objectification that is, the con- 19 scious effort to gain sexual attention through ones feminine traits does not 20 actually achieve subjectivity; instead, it may stand for a false freedom since it 21 implies the performance of femininity (2001: 324). 22 More particularly, looking closely into the narrative of Sex and the City 23 reveals a number of caveats. The first is the pathologization of singletons 24 amidst proliferating neoconservative pressures to determine womens lives in 25 terms of marriage and domesticity. This should be set within the broader con- 26 text of an intensified culture of family values which ranges from the rise 27 of mother-focused sales campaigns and the emergence of convenient park- 28 ing for mothers and mothers-to-be at supermarkets, to the endorsement 29 of abstinence-oriented high school sex education programmes by the Bush 30 administration in the early 2000s; the latter forwarded the notion that sex out- 31 side marriage is likely to be physically and psychologically harmful and called 32 for various wedding warm-ups such as abstinence ceremonies and purity 33 rings. The rise to prominence of a wedding culture, seen in the emergence 34 of the wedding film and such reality shows, and the intensification of the 35 bridal industry (with a $32 billion annual turnover in the United States), are 36 concomitants of this broader culture (Negra 2004). 37 Having said that, it is interesting that Sex and the City manages to stay 38 away from the retreatism (i.e. away from the professional path and into the 39 homestead and an idealized motherhood) and the renunciation scenarios con- 40 temporary romantic comedy is associated with (whereby female characters 41 chose to downscale their careers in favour of a life high-flying professional 42 women are barred from1); in that respect, although the four women in Sex and 43 the City wrestle with difficult dilemmas and occasional despair, the

series does 44 not curtail their options or finalize their choices, and therefore they do not 45 have to abide by one of the key premises in current antifeminist postfeminist 46 constructions of women which is to abandon any over-ambitious project of 47 having it all, for 48 49 50 whereas mainstream chick flicks often include an epiphany in which 51 the heroine perceives the futility of following such a path and re- 52 prioritizes the elements of her life in favour of heterosexual romance This is pertinent even when Samanthas flitting sexual affair with another woman is considered. and/or motherhood, Sex and the City throws open such decision mak- 01 ing in ways that would go against the script of the mainstream romance. 02 (Negra 2004: 12) 03 04 Second, the series setting in metropolitan New York is indispensable in 05 contextualising its group of friends in a world of cutting-edge urbanity, a luxu- 06 rious lifestyle often cited as explanation for unconventional or unruly female 07 behaviour in direct contrast with suburban domesticity. After all, argues 08 Negra, New York is traditionally associated with a certain permissiveness when 09 it comes to the social identities of urban women, its distinctive mix of savvy cos10 mopolitanism and vulnerability being a trademark of the so-called New York 11 girl from the 1930s gold digger musicals to Audrey Hepburns Holly Golightly 12 and Diane Keatons Anny Hall. 13 Eventually, Sex and the City occupies a significant yet complicated space 14 within the visual representation of women. From one perspective, it offers com- 15 plex portrayals of single (and then some married), sexually active, professional 16 women, and in this sense, the series cannot be said to reflexively participate in 17 a cultural postfeminism that leaves behind the more challenging, complex and 18 unresolved questions and issues of earlier feminisms (Negra 2004: 22). Concur19 rently, however, Sex and the City also projects an urgency to explore the endless 20 possibilities of a postfeminist, freefloating desire, which is always linked to 21 consumption and sexuality; least we forget that the series remains irrelevant 22 to larger sections of (American, and not only) women, as its restricted race 23 and class focus is identifiable in the WASP surnames of its four protagonists 24 (Hobbes, Bradshaw, York and Jones), while also exhibiting susceptibility to an 25 apolitical consumerism (2004: 22). This is rather disconcerting because it can 26 be seen to foreground a type of postfeminism that caters for individual rather 27 than collective empowerment, and an entitlement to pleasure where the lat- 28 ter is related to consumer choice rather than political struggle. However, this 29 is an ideological formation where female empowerment has been assimilated 30 by capital and consumer culture, and, therefore, in this, postfeminism not only 31 betrays the political strength of feminism but forecloses the potential for chal32 lenging the distribution of gender power. In addition, the postfeminist right 33 to sexual pleasure works to naturalize heterosexuality, as the activities of both 34 Bridget and Carrie attest2 (Maddison 2009: 44). 35 Commenting on the scarcity of use of the word sexism within feminist aca- 36 demic writing and everyday talk increasingly perceived to denote something 37 pass and archaic Gill equally notes that despite the considerable progress 38 made, sexist practices are invariably experienced by women, and offers five rea39 sons why we should put sexism back on the agenda again (2011: 62). At first, 40 she talks of the unspeakable inequalities within contemporary media labour 41 markets where men still enjoy privileges in the equal opportunities workplace 42 and draws attention to the new forms sexism takes within postfeminism: (Gill 2011: 63) 49 50 She then discusses how despite the significant steps forward in media repre- 51 sentations of gender and in gender relations, sexism has not been conquered 52 1114 [...]a key way in which sexism operates in contemporary media work- places is precisely through the invalidation and annihilation of any language for talking about structural inequalities. The

potency of sexism lies in its very unspeakability. August 4, 2011 19:16 Intellect/MCP Page-114 MCP-7-2-Proof-1 01 yet rather it has taken new forms; Gill draws from Robert Goldmans notion 02 of commodity feminism (1992) to describe the process through which adver- 03 tisers have appropriated the tropes of feminism and sold it back to women, 04 devoid of its political content. She reads a practice of sexism into the new post- 05 feminist regime, which she links to neo-liberalism, and explores what she calls 06 the specific modalities of postfeminism sexism (Gill 2011: 64) the empha- 07 sis on self-surveillance, monitoring, the resurgence of ideas of natural sexual 08 difference, individualism and choice, a commitment to a profoundly gendered 09 makeover paradigm. Third, she singles out the predominant enthusiasm sur- 10 rounding the pornification discourse, seen for example in the rising popularity 11 of porn star T-shirts, and discusses how the appropriately made over sexual 12 subjectivity of women should from now on be perceived in terms of sexism 13 rather than sexualization. Not only that but, she argues, we need to pivot 14 what is a profoundly classed, racialized and heteronormative debate away from 15 its privileged object of concern the white, western, middle-class girl. 16 Her views are echoed elsewhere as well. Discussing what she calls the 17 relentless pornification of feminism, Abigail Bray raises a number of prob- 18 lems within the discourse of media and sexual empowerment accommodated 19 by present-day feminism. She argues that we have come to the point where the 20 neo-liberal ideology of Big Porn has colonized just about everything, including 21 what passes for feminism in corporate culture, as a result of which girls and 22 women are expected to be hot and up for it, and that while they are being sub23 jected to new waves of misogyny, they are actually forbidden to speak up for 24 fear of being slandered as frigid feminists (2010). Describing the modern face 25 of postfeminist sexual self-empowerment on the basis of the up yours! femi- 26 nism of Coco de Mer the sex shop chain launched by the daughter of the late 27 Anita-Body Shop-Roddick, Sam in 2010 in London, Los Angeles and New 28 York Bray (2010) comments that 29 30 [. . .]inevitably, the products converge into an image of the post-feminist 31 consumer on her knees, with various expensive items inserted into vari- 32 ous parts of her body, wearing a dog mask, with a strap on dildo, being 33 spanked, whipped and flogged with another womans hair, looking into 34 a mirror. All of this would cost, oh say, 4000. 35 36 Another point of concern regards the way in which sexism has become an 37 entrenched culture and ideology which affects common sense and our ways 38 of thinking and feeling and calls for an urgent evoking of the psychosocial. 39 Only by understanding the psychosocial dimensions of power and ideology 40 can we understand the intimate relationship between culture and subjectiv- 41 ity (Gill 2011). Two reasons make this even more important: with the rise of 42 social media, and the resulting blurring between producers and consumers, 43 the binary between subject and object becomes increasingly obsolete; second, 44 and significantly, as notions of active, agentic and resistant audiences or 45 consumers are becoming hegemonic within media studies, we seem to have 46 abolished any sense of influence, thus 47 48 49 50 51 52 rreinstating precisely the model of the rational, deliberative, unified self that the last twenty-five years of post-modernist, post-structuralist, psy- choanalytic, post-colonial and feminist social theory sought to interro- gate. Finally, attention is drawn to how muted the vocabulary of sexism has become 01 today and how, all along, any talk of capitalism has largely been abandoned 02 as the West rests on its comforting liberal account of itself as egalitarian, while 03 displacing the need for feminism to others in need of rescuing. It is to this 04 avail that we need to appreciate that social positions are relational rather than 05 additive, and, thus, think conjuncturally the relations between things (Gill 06 2011: 68). 07

This issue takes up the contradictions and multi-relational foci of 08 post/feminism as an epistemological lens to explore the points of critique artic09 ulated around sexuality, sex and sexual agency in relation to the Internet and 10 the new media. It includes six critical articles on the politics of mediated sex 11 that range from sociological research attending to the microlevel of everyday 12 experience to theoretical and analytical pieces that marry the microlevel to the 13 macrolevel of institutions, as well as pieces on the usefulness of new research 14 methods. Ringrose and Eriksson Barajas and Vares, Jackson and Gill open the 15 debate with a look at young girls sexual identities in the media. Through rich 16 empirical data they propose a more complex picture of the realities of girls 17 lives in relation to the ways in which mediations about sex and sexual iden- 18 tities are experienced and suggest an analysis beyond the binary approaches 19 that have dominated our public debates. Mary Griffiths continues this inter- 20 rogation of the relation between young people and sexually explicit material 21 through a discussion of cases from Australias High Arts world (the infamous 22 Benson case) and the phenomenon of young peoples own production and 23 use of sexual mediations. Griffiths moves on the debate from the sociological 24 analysis of everyday life to the analysis of the role of social and political institu- 25 tions in the emergence of new directions in policy debates. Salam Al-Mahadin 26 offers a much needed indepth analysis of the most popular soap operas of 27 the Arab world and their treatment of female sexuality. The sexual mediations 28 in these soap operas echo the position of women in the Arab society, their 29 everyday struggles and polarizations of morals, experience and political claims. 30 Al-Mahadin navigates through the morals and levels of acceptance of womens 31 sexual (and political) agency vis--vis religious and cultural morals, contextu32 alized within the broader lucrative political economy of the role of the media in 33 the religious calendar. Following, Christensen and Jansson offer a discussion on 34 the possibilities of theoretical openness in understanding the potential of sex- 35 ual expressivity through examples of online spaces in Sweden. Their piece aims36 to provide a theoretical contribution to the ways in which sexual mediations 37 can be seen as formats of cultural citizenship under certain conditions. The 38 issue concludes with a look at the pornography industry by Jennifer Johnson 39 who offers a new methodological approach to the study of what is out there 40 in the world of organized industrial production of sexual mediations. Johnsons 41 interest is the claim of choice of the (mostly male) consumer in the world of 42 pornography and the ways in which researchers can map the contexts of the 43 workings of the industry. 44 For certain, the debate surrounding the thesis of sexualization of culture, 45 indeed pornification of culture, and the role of post/feminism is lively across 46 the English-speaking world and in many other parts of the world too. The 47 media are very interested in the suggestion of hyper-sexualization while state48 commissioned reports or reports by professional organizations in Australia, the 49 United States and the United Kingdom have pointed to what they see as sat- 50 urated sexualization of culture and the suffocating, pressurizing and sexually51 oppressive environment it creates for children. What is less certain is the degree 52 01 to which conflicting views about the phenomenon of sexualization, with some 02 academic corners rejecting the thesis of sexualization or doubting the harm- 03 ful effects of pornification, can result into a constructive public debates with 04 social relevance. The need for a nuanced debate that recognizes the complex- 05 ity of sex and the media and social life and is sensitive to the requirement for 06 better articulation of ideas in the media, policy-making and academy has led 07 the guest editors of this issue to start a series of debates under the sponsor- 08 ship of the British Academy on the socialization of sexually explicit imagery. 09 The project with the same title brought together (in various locations) aca- 10 demics, activists and policy-makers with often opposite views in an attempt 11

to open up spaces that these differences would meet.3 This issue constitutes 12 such a space where analysis of the complexity of sexual mediations is discussed 13 from a multi-angled approach. From everyday soap operas in the Arab world 14 to the everyday uses of sexualized language and online media in the lives of 15 young girls, and from the debates of the role of High Arts in the representa- 16 tion of nudity (or nakedness) of young people in Australia to the sophisticated 17 machinery of Internet pornography as a networked industry, these contribu- 18 tions showcase not only the unspoken, unintended, unusual corners where 19 mediations of sex and dimensions about it that may or may not be just about 20 sex, but also the variety of ways to understand and critique them. So, in the 21 light of the views aired in this special issue, Catharine Lumbys words are all 22 the more appropriate: Besides, let us not forget that there may well be times when we want to expe- 34 rience what it would feel like to live between the dichotomies upon which 35 feminist authority frequently depends (Hollows 2003: 197); for it becomes 36 increasingly clearer that [. . .].the choice between femininities is not straight- 37 forward, but bound up within a series of moral rules feminist and oth- 38 erwise (2003: 198). After all, the definite answer to where lies the future of feminism and whether postfeminism is the correct way ahead is yet to be deter- 40 mined; perhaps we should accept that feminism, perhaps a little like television 41 according to Brunsdon (2003: 18), is just more ordinary and that we experi- 42 ence a different disposition towards feminism as we struggle to understand it 43 as something full of difference. 44 45