Girlfriends and Postfeminist Sisterhood [Paperback]

From Mean Girl to BFF, Girlfriends and Postfeminist Sisterhood explores female sociality in postfeminist popular culture. Focusing on a range of media forms, Alison Winch reveals how women are increasingly encouraged to strategically bond by controlling each other's body image through 'the girlfriend gaze'.          

Alison Winch explores the deep and complex emotions involved in female friendships and how these are exploited by brands, television formats and film narratives to tie us into a competitive and unequal consumer culture. By recognising the source of negative as well as positive emotions between women, a more effective political movement could be achieved to counteract this exploitation, she suggests. The book expertly updates and builds on postfeminist scholarly research through close attention to recent popular culture. It makes a compelling argument, challenging established assumptions about the way girls and women are portrayed and how we, in turn, respond. - Jane Arthurs, Middlesex University, UK

Alison Winch is a lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies at Middlesex University, UK. She has published on gender and sexuality in the Journal of Gender Studies, Feminist Media Studies and Women's Writing, among others.