Slut narratives in popular culture
In: Routledge research in cultural and media studies
"Slut Narratives in Popular Culture explores representations of slut shaming and the term "slut" in U.S. popular media, 2000-2020. It argues that cultural narratives of intersectional gender identities are gradually but unevenly shifting to become more progressive and sex positive. Moving beyond prior research on slut shaming, which exposes problematic conflations between women's morality and a sexual purity associated with White economic privilege, this book examines how narratives that perpetuate slut shaming are both contested and reinscribed through stories we circulate. It emphasizes effects of twenty-first century developments in digital communication and entertainment. The rapid evolution of genres combined with increased access to the consumption and production of texts stimulates more diverse storytelling. The book's analyses demonstrate twenty-first changes in how slut shaming is depicted and understood, while encouraging consumers and producers of pop culture to attend to cultural narratives as they reify or challenge the subordination