of gender in the media, and an up-to-dateassessment of the key issues and debates. Eschewing a straightforwardly positive or negative assessmentthe book explores the contradictory character of contemporarygender representations, where confident expressions of girl powersit alongside reports of epidemic levels of anorexia among youngwomen, moral panics about the impact on men of idealizedrepresentations of the 'six-pack', but near silence about thepervasive re-sexualization of women's bodies, along with a growinguse of irony and playfulness that render critique extremelydifficult.The book looks in depth at five areas of media - talk shows,magazines, news, advertising, and contemporary screen and paperbackromances - to examine how representations of women and men arechanging in the twenty-first century, partly in response tofeminist, queer and anti-racist critique.Gender and the Media is also concerned with thetheoretical tools available for analysing representations. A rangeof approaches from semiotics to postcolonial theory are discussed,and Gill asks how useful notions such as objectification, backlash,and positive images are for making sense of gender in today'sWestern media. Finally, Gender and the Media also raisesquestions about cultural politics - namely, what forms of critiqueand intervention are effective at a moment when ironic quotationmarks seem to protect much media content from criticism and whenmuch media content - from Sex and the City to revenge adverts - canbe labelled postfeminist.This is a book that will be of particular interest to studentsand scholars in gender and media studies, as well as those insociology and cultural studies more generally.

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