Is there such a thing as feminism in the mass media? What does it look like? These are some of the questions explored in this volume. Covering texts as diverse as Hollywood movies, Taiwanese women’s magazines, the HBO series The Sopranos, and science fiction, the writers represented here all argue that in some complex way mainstream films and bestselling publications are developing their own feminist language, whose alphabet we still need to learn. Does the gendered violence in The Sopranos simply reproduce misogynist prejudice, or does it challenge it? Does the emphasis on beauty and fashion in the coverage of feminism in women’s magazines in Taiwan challenge Western Second Wave ideals of what feminism should be? Is the Borg Queen in the Star Trek movie First Contact really a feminist role model? Are the beauty parlors in films like Desperately Seeking Susan and Legally Blonde represented as oppressive or liberating for women? Twenty-first century mass media offer possibilities for the creation of feminist spaces and the discovery of feminist voices that often constrain as much as they liberate.
  In the first article in this volume, “Gangster Feminism: The Feminist Cultural Work of HBO’s The Sopranos,” Merri Lisa Johnson argues that the fifth season of the cult HBO series can be read as a sophisticated feminist analysis of the social, economic, and cultural roots of gendered violence. As Johnson demonstrates, there is a thin line between a media critique of violence and its reproduction in shows such as The Sopranos. She seeks to avoid a binary model of either subversion or containment and instead shows “how to read representations of violence as both reiterations of sexism and primetime challenges to sexism.” The article is focused on the episode “University,” in which Tracee, a dancer at the Bada Bing! is killed by her lover, Mafia member Ralphie Cifaretto, while a second storyline follows Meadow, Tony Soprano’s daughter, as she negotiates the social and sexual challenges of her first year at Columbia University. Johnson shows how “University” dramatizes the interdependence of brutal commercial spaces like the strip club and the apparently loving haven of the middle-class home. In her words, “Tracee and Meadow hold within their separate social roles traces of the other, calling the good girl/bad girl binary of traditional Western thought directly into question and . . . pointing beyond gender to class as a defining axis of feminine respectability.” The episode can be read as an example of what Johnson calls “sex worker feminism,” with Tracee’s miserable end the result of “sex worker stigma, a combination of traditional misogyny and class disgust.” However, immediately after Tracee’s murder, Ralphie’s own vulnerability as a working-class man is thrown into relief when Tony brutally beats him as a punishment for his treatment of Tracee. Tony’s contempt for Ralphie and Ralphie’s unsuccessful attempts to rise within the hierarchy of the Mafia family mean that Ralphie is forced to draw attention to his own aggression and masculinity in an attempt to increase his earning power. Like Tracee, he “barters for status and wealth with his body.”

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Preface
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Merri Lisa Johnson
Gangster Feminism: The Feminist
Cultural Work of HBO’s “The Sopranos”
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Jennifer Scanlon
“If My Husband Calls I’m Not Here”: The Beauty Parlor as Real and Representational Female Space 
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Anjali Arondekar
The Voyage Out: Transacting Sex under Globalization
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Faith Ringgold
Coming to Jones Road
(Art Essay)
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Fang-chih Irene Yang
Beautiful-and-Bad Woman: Media Feminism and
the Politics of Its Construction
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Stephanie A. Smith
Octavia Butler:A Retrospective
(Review Essay)
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Tudor Balinisteanu
The Cyborg Goddess: Social Myths of Women as
Goddesses of Technologized Otherworlds
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K. Gorcheva-Newberry
A Matter of Hydraulics (Fiction)
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Elizabeth Rees
Rolling Out the Dough; Performance Artist (Poetry)
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Suzume Shi
Song; The Book of Love: Husband (Poetry)
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Nancy White
The Wonder (Poetry)
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Notes on Contributors
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Guidelines for Contributors
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Publications Received
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Front and Back Cover
Faith Ringgold, Under a Blood-Red Sky, 1999.
Acrylic on canvas, quilted. 78.5 x 56 inches.
Faith Ringgold © 2007