Blurring Boundaries

In 1984 British feminist Rosalind Coward published a collections of essays, Female Desire: Women’s Sexuality Today, which had considerable impact because of its explanatory power, and because it made available a particular interpretation of feminist approaches to everyday cultural forms, from food porn to astrology, fashion to romance novels. At that time, media representations and popular understandings of feminism were distorted and often stereotypical. They had not caught up on the more nuanced and diverse critical thinking filtering through the activist networks and academy. Coward’s book charted new directions in thinking through feminism and thinking about feminism.

Barbara Creed’s Media Matrix: Sexing the New Reality is such a book. It intersects with the present preoccupation with new global media forms and their implications for how we think about sex and the public. While the differences within feminism have long since made it impossible to write a book that accurately represents any singular feminist approach, Media Matrix sets out the cardinal theoretical points informing feminist critical theory: postmodernism, psychoanalysis, queer theory, globalisation. It also introduces key feminist writers over a range of cultural forms that one way or another make contact with feminine identity.