Theorizing Women’s Singleness: Postfeminism, Neoliberalism, and the Politics of Popular Culture

Abstract

Single Women in Popular Culture presumes that popular media forms help provide the narratives through which we come to constitute ourselves/are constituted as subjects. In the case of single women, such texts work to profoundly mediate women’s understanding of being single (as they do other modalities of difference). When invoked in the public sphere, the idea of singleness appears with startling regularity as a problem to be rectified, despite concurrent depictions of (certain forms of) singleness as a permissible type of prolonged adolescence. In terms of how women’s singleness is discursively constituted there is, therefore, a tension. At times the single woman appears to be celebrated — within specific temporal limits and for particular commercial purposes — and at others she continues to be pathologized, seen as a lamentable product of the pervasive feminist rhetoric that encouraged women to pursue independence and autonomy at the cost of a husband and, perhaps more importantly, a nuclear family.1 Arguably there is nothing new about the single woman being a problematic figure in mainstream media culture and in Western discourse more broadly; currently, however, she is made-to-mean in a number of competing ways that speak to broader changes in how women (and indeed feminism) are being figured in so-called postfeminist media culture.2 How do such intensely contradictory discourses operate alongside each other in various sites of popular culture? What is sayable about women’s singleness, and by whom? What kinds of single women — in terms of age, race, sexuality, and class — are granted visibility? What ideological purposes do these representations serve? And how — and where — are they being contested?