Introduction

This is a book about the politics of gender, sexuality, race, class and location in contemporary culture, at a moment that, we argue, is, in many places, distinctively neoliberal and postfeminist. The book brings together 20 original essays in which scholars were asked to reflect on the changes and continuities in gender relations and other intersecting axes of power, across a range of different texts, sites and practices. The collection traverses disciplines, geopolitical spaces and approaches. It is marked by an extraordinarily wide focus — from analyses of North American and British celebrity magazines and makeover shows to examinations of the experiences of young female migrants to Europe; from readings of diasporic Indian cinema to an analysis of the complicated positioning of African American First Lady Michelle Obama; from examinations of alternative female-produced pornographies, to new, Third Wave and critical race feminisms. What unites the contributions is not their sub-stantive focus, nor their disciplinary ‘take’, but their attempts to think critically about the contours of the current moment in all their troubling complexity.