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culture as a form of liberation, inviting women to reject the notion of a “stable, untested and fixed” self and embrace female identity as “subject to a multiple and on-going process of revision, reform and choices,” yet in ways that almost always affirm the importance of heterosexual desirability (6). This renewed discursive drive to seize the male gaze should be understood in the context of debates surrounding “new femininity,” packaged as a form of self-empowerment enacted by the financially emancipated neoliberal consumer-citizen through a self-regulation and self-objectification of the body. This process of body management is often sympathetically positioned as a revision of passive femininity, and Yael Sherman contends that if traditional femininity connotes “sex object,” then new femininity connotes “competent subject,” and if traditional femininity is “associated with the sin of vanity,” then neoliberal femininity “implies that one is actively self-responsible” (82). Yet, scholars have also located new femininity at the center of the sexualization of Western cultures and the mainstreaming of the porn industry. For example, Feona Attwood comments, “Discourses of sexual agency have been seen as central to the development of new femininities, part of a broader shift in which older markers of femininity such as homemaking skills and maternal instincts have been joined by those of image creation, body work and sexual desire” (“Looking Glass” 203). Thus, while new femininity can be understood as a subversive form of modern female identity in its ostensible rejection of the passivity and dependence associated with traditional femininity, this positioning is problematic. New femininity should be seen, ultimately, as representing modification rather than repudiation, implied by Shelley Budgeon’s observation that even though “women must be assertive, autonomous, and self-determining” under neoliberalism, they “must also retain aspects to traditional femininity, including heterosexual desirability and emotional sensitivity to others” (54). By centralizing the life-affirming neoliberal rhetoric at the heart of new femininity, postfeminist culture insidiously purports the notion that this new subject position is indeed empowering,