The Carnal Feminine: Consuming Representations of Womanhood in a Contemporary Media Text

This chapter explores women's cultural identification with carnality and nature in two contemporary media texts, Sex and the City, and its sequel, Sex and the City 2. The authors deconstruct these texts to show how they trace and perhaps encapsulate what has become a defining zeitgeist in embodied femininity as it is currently portrayed in popular culture. This spirit, which we term the 'carnal feminine' has been described in both positive and negative ways by commentators. Most recently, it has increasingly been argued that the identification of women with the carnal has paved the way for what many believe is a trend towards hypersexualisation, the mainstreaming of sex and the 'pornification' of relationships in contemporary Western culture. Our analysis ultimately seeks to gain a better understanding of how gender, culture and consumer behaviour interact with one another in the marketplace to create performances of femininities that ultimately commodify the female body, and it concludes by considering the wider implications of this.