Discourses of Singledom: Living in the Cultural Imaginary of Single Femininity

(Hardback)

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This book examines the representation of the single woman in contemporary popular culture from the UK, US, and Europe, and places it in juxtaposition to the experience and self-narratives of single femininity in everyday life.

Based on interviews with 25 women living in London and an analysis of eight US, UK, and European cross-genre media texts, Kate R. Gilchrist illuminates where women's experiences draw on or converge with representations of single women and where their narratives rework such ideas. Gilchrist interrogates the representation of the 'successful' single woman in media, who is portrayed as free, autonomous, and independent, yet whose only path to success paradoxically relies upon intensive self-regulation and self-transformation. When the single woman fails to do so, she is subject to painful processes of silencing, invisibility, and incoherence, reinforcing the notion of the 'ideal' femininity as a coupled one. Building on existing research that has largely centered on North American-based contexts, Gilchrist also considers how these discourses operate across age, class, and regional groups to achieve a fuller understanding of how experiences of singledom are shaped by multiple external factors. Ultimately, this book significantly expands upon and complicates our theorizations of the relationship between cultural representations and gendered subjectivity formation in a postfeminist cultural context.

Author Bio

Kate R. Gilchrist is Lecturer in Digital Media at University College London's Department of Culture, Communication and Media.