Introduction

Since the mid-1990s, the heterosexual single woman has been hyper-visible in Western popular culture. As the first generation since feminism’s second-wave moved into their 20s and 30s, a purportedly new subjectivity for women appeared to be gaining cultural currency in Western media culture. Indicative of this trend, Sex and the City seemed to celebrate the single woman of a certain demographic (white, financially secure, and heterosexual). She also appeared in popular fiction and film in the form of the loveable, scatty Bridget Jones and other similar ‘chick lit’ heroines. More recently, newspaper articles coining new labels for the single woman have been appearing with increasing regularity. Single women have variously been cast as ‘freemales’, ‘TWITS’ (teenage women in their 30s), and let’s not forget that offensive age-specific appellation for mid-life women who date younger men: ‘cougar’. As a consequence of the intense public focus upon her, the ‘Single Woman’ has even been pronounced a ‘cultural obsession’ (Dux & Simic, 2008, p. 77). Rather optimistically, I would argue, some critics have celebrated this as evidence of a ‘new cultural affirmation’ of being single (Macvarish, 2006), designating the current epoch ‘“the singles’ century”’ (Budgeon, 2008, p. 301). Indeed, the transnational proliferation of the ‘SYF’ (Single Young Female), an economically self-sufficient subject with extensive consumer clout, is said have heralded a ‘New Girl Order’ (Hymowitz, 2007). In this book, acknowledging the competing, contradictory discourses around women’s singleness in popular culture, I interrogate such academic and popular claims about this supposed new cultural acceptance and celebration of singleness for women, attending to both texts that continue to position women’s singleness as an aberration and others that attempt its refiguration.