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CUPCAKES, PINTEREST, AND LADYPORN Feminized Popular Culture in the Early Twenty-First Century edited by Elana Levine University of Illinois Press, 2015 296 pp.; paper, $28.00; cloth, $95.00
REVIEWED BY TAYLOR COLE MILLER
LAST NOVEMBER, MELISSA A. CLICK, A FORMER assistant professor at the University of Missouri, became the subject of intense public scrutiny after a video of her confronting a student journalist during a series of racial justice protests went viral, and she was summarily fired. Just as quickly as they emerged, blogs, think pieces, and posts on myriad social media morphed from defenses of the First Amendment, to condemnations of Click's actions, to the public shaming of her and her work-something the Daily Caller called "The 9 Most Preposterous Parts of Melissa Click's Absurd Résumé."4 Such pieces invariably listed Click's salary before ruminating on the viability of her research "at taxpayer expense, including Twilight, Martha Stewart," and Fifty Shades of Grey-the not-so-veiled implication of which was that the texts she considers are not worthy of study.
The way Click was mocked for her research interests was certainly gendered, and it underscored not only the crucial purpose of a book like Cupcakes, Pinterest, and Ladyporn but also the reason why such a book would emerge at this particular moment. The fact that Click's article, "Fifty Shades of Postfeminism: Contextualizing Readers' Reflections on the Erotic Romance Series," is both number 3 on the Daily Caller's list and chapter 1 in this thirteenchapter anthology, edited by Elana Levine, is but icing on the (cup)cake.
Through an engagement with a variety of media and newer cultural forms, the chapters in Cupcakes, Pinterest, and Ladyporn explore discourses of femininity and the proliferation of...