ABSTRACT
In this chapter I analyze modes of postfeminist temporality, arguing that one of the signature attributes of postfeminist culture is its ability to defi ne various female life stages within the parameters of “time panic.” Postfeminism has accelerated the consumerist maturity of girls, carving out new demographic categories such as that of the “tween”; it has forcefully renewed conservative social ideologies centering on the necessity of marriage for young women1 and the glorifi cation of pregnancy; and it has heightened the visibility of midlife women often cast as desperate to retain or recover their value as postfeminist subjects. Crisis and fulfi llment in virtually all these life stages center upon the discovery of personal destiny, the securing of a romantic partner and motherhood, and the negotiation of the problem of paid work (seldom its rewards). Those women who cannot be recuperated into one of these life-stage paradigms generally lose representability within a popular culture landscape dominated by postfeminist defi nitions of femininity.
