Walters' work serves as both an overview and critique of concepts and themes in feminist cultural theory. Her central theoretical stance is that feminist cultural theory must not limit itself to textual and narrative analyses, as it has done particularly with postmodern and psychoanalytically-based theory, but rather situate its concerns within a larger social, economic, and political context. Walters is primarily interested in moving beyond the "what" and "how" of the majority of traditional feminist cultural theory to ask "why", and to examine why various forms of cultural expression have meaning for us, as particular spectators, in particular ways, at particular moments in history. She takes issue with critics who read texts as discrete cultural products, rather than acknowledging the complex intertextuality of the sociocultural environment which precede, accompany, and follow each cultural event.

Walters' central question is, "How can we begin to develop a specifically feminist cultural theory?" (19) This is a deceptively simple question, as Walters shows, because developments in cultural theory which have been used by feminists have not necessarily been optimal for feminist theoretical concerns or praxis. Walters sees feminist cultural criticism as a double project: "...a critique of existing (patriarchal) representations as well as a construction of alternative or oppositional cultural images and practices." (24) Her goal within this book is threefold: "to critically introduce readers to the main concepts and theoretical frameworks of feminist cultural criticism; to place these concepts and frameworks in the historical context that produced them; and, finally, to present a model of a feminist cultural criticism that is at once intertextual, multidisciplinary, and deeply invested in the demystification of patriarchal images and the creation of feminist ones." (25) She identifies two primary streams of feminist cultural theory: the earlier "images" perspective, derived from sociological and empirical communications research, and the later "signification" perspective, with theoretical roots in poststructuralism and psychoanalysis.

Early Anglo-American feminist cultural criticism grew out of both contemporary sociological research of the time as well as second-wave feminist politics and interventions. As a result, feminist work in cultural theory was concerned with describing and quantifying patriarchal representation, using the theoretical tools of content analysis. Because of its close relation with this ideological and methodological grounding, the theoretical assumptions of feminist research paralleled the theoretical assumptions of prevailing content analysis work at the time. Media was understood as a "reflection of dominant social values, that is, media images [were] the symbolic manifestation of prevailing social norms and ideals", (32) and as "a primary, or even the primary, socializing agent for all Americans, but most particularly with children, that is, the mass media as a teacher, a transmitter of messages and meanings." (32) Studies were done using empirical content analysis and effects, with results confirming theoretical assumptions that women were being actively obliterated within representation, and that audiences were receptive to these messages. The underlying strategic supposition was that problematic representation could be changed to show women "as they really are", and that this change would then affect public perception.

To a feminist grounded in the theory of the late 1990s, obvious critiques of this early work present themselves. First, this theory assumes that cultural products function like mirrors, reflecting various unmediated realities back to the audience, and that "real" images exist that need only to be "properly" represented. Second, this theory assumes that audiences passively receive the images of reality which are reflected back to them, and do not engage in actively processing or making meaning from them. Third, this approach derogates the use of stereotypes without asking why such stereotypes might find cultural resonance for audiences, or how audiences come to recognize some familiar images as stereotypes. Fourth, in terms of making "better" or "truer" images, who is to say which images should be granted ideological authenticity? Fifth, the strategy proposed by early theorists, that is to say placing more women in positions of cultural visibility, has the same problems as all liberal-feminist-oriented strategies of this nature: namely, that more women does not necessarily mean more feminist, and that working within the constraints of the system of representation does not fundamentally challenge the patriarchal relations which shape it. Finally, this paradigm leaves the spectator unanalyzed, and subsumes his/her specificity (with regard to race, class, gender, sexuality, experience, etc.) in the larger category of "the audience". However, though this earlier work proved to be highly problematic, it was nevertheless an important step in the development of feminist cultural criticism, as it documented existing sexism and patriarchal representations where before there had been little notice of such things, and no language to describe it when it was noticed.

The new paradigm of feminist criticism, which Walters labels the "signification" paradigm, and which grew from responding to the problems in this original work, began to articulate issues of image production and signification. The new question was not what was represented or reflected, but how it was represented, and how representations constructed sexual difference both within the logic of the cultural product itself as well as in the mediation between spectator and text.

In this chapter Walters focuses on the politics of the gaze in cultural theory, examining the ways in which "looking at images is constructed by gendered divisions and the social relations of patriarchal power." (50) Building on the signification approach which I outlined briefly above, this paradigm is concerned with the processes and mechanisms that produce women as sexual spectacle and object to be looked at.

Feminist concern with the politics of looking is not new, and other theorists, such as Haraway and Code have remarked on the power dynamics inherent in who is able to do the looking and who/what is being seen/examined. In her discussion of early scientific method, Haraway describes the "modest witness", who is discursively posited as an anonymous bystander to the unfolding of science, but who is in reality a very particularly located subject who, in the act of looking, engages actively with that which is being studied. Likewise in feminist cultural studies, theorists have recognized that objectification of women and the male gaze is not merely a result of sexist stereotypes, but is built into the fundamental structures of image production.

Laura Mulvey's seminal article "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" outlined the basic tenets of feminist theory of the gaze: that men look, and women are looked at, and that those who get to do the looking find two main pleasures in it: voyeurism and fetishism. According to Mulvey, there are three "looks" which comprise the male gaze: men within the narrative looking at women, the spectator who identifies with the male gaze in the narrative, and the omnipotent gaze of the camera itself. Though Mulvey's work was influential, it was also critiqued. First, some feminists were uncomfortable with the idea of full-scale rejection of mass narrative film in favour of avant-garde film which appealed to a limited number of elite viewers. Second, feminist cultural theorists are wary of the extent to which Mulvey's work can be generalized to cultural products other than film, such as television. However, the notion of the gaze as intrinsically connected to male power remains a significant concept in feminist cultural theory.

One major area of feminist cultural criticism has been narrative analysis. Since issues of narrative are so closely linked with notions of subjectivity and a critique of the ideology of realism, it is easy to see why feminists would find this theoretical point of entry to be appealing. The narrative analysis paradigm lends itself to a rather formalist, structuralist analysis, since the analysis is limited to the internal logic of the narrative itself, and tends to disregard the role of the spectator in making meaning from the text.

Some feminists have questioned whether or not reclaiming is a desirable goal strategically. Stuar Hall has suggested a three-part "encoding-decoding" model: the viewer either accepts the narrative unproblematically, accepts the narrative with some critique, or challenges the fundamental assumptions of the representation.

Returning to the question of mass culture and femininity, some feminists have sought to reclaim some genres that are directed at a female audience, such as soap operas.

In this chapter Walters details the shift within narrative analysis from analyzing the internal structure of narrative to examine the process of producing meaning. This shift requires both a methodological shift from positivist, empirical analyses towards a more qualitative model, as well as a shift from viewing "audiences" as an undifferentiated mass towards an understanding of the socially constituted "spectator" who engages with the cultural product to derive meaning.

Though positioning the spectator as a more individual subject was a move in the right direction, many theorists recapitulated the earlier problems of designating an "audience" by merely casting a theoretical female spectator in its place. There remained some ambivalence about just how the female spectator was to be understood: as a product of a patriarchal system, as a product of her contradictory lived experiences, as a psychoanalytic or ideological construct, or even as a subject who might not be part of the audience at all.

This work with the female spectator built on earlier narrative analysis work to produce a paradigm that examined how female spectators might read particular cultural texts. Thus this model uses both structural narrative analysis as outlined in Chapter 3, as well as attention to the epistemological "reading" positions of hypothetical female spectators. One of the aims of this model was to try to reclaim or discover a "female gaze" which could be considered an alternative to the patriarchal male gaze, and to "locate resistance in women's ways of seeing images and constructing meaning".

However, as Walters notes, although this view of the female spectator is an improvement over the "passive vessel" model, it gives too much weight to the power of the female gaze, and does not acknowledge the sometimes overwhelming power of dominant patriarchal ideologies. In addition, this ethnographically-based research, though it has advantages over psychoanalytic paradigms, can lead to a search for the unmediated "truth" of interpretation. As Walters points out, this gives rise to the question, "Who/what has the power to determine meaning?" It is not enough to indicate that meaning is negotiated; what feminists need is an understanding of who or what has the most negotiating power. This model also does not tell us to what degree this resistance is significant, nor how it is used in women's lives. Thus, the next step for feminist cultural criticism was to develop some method of assessing the political and strategic effectiveness of the resistance of the female gaze.

Walters describes the antifeminist backlash and how it emerges in various cultural products of the 1980s, using and warping feminist rhetoric and ideology to show that feminism "doesn't work", or that it is ultimately destructive to women. Academic postfeminism, on the other hand (according to Walters), dilutes feminism through engagement with other theoretical discourses that challenge any unitary category of "woman", propose eternal slippage and plurality, and more importantly, are generally restricted to the realm of theory instead of praxis. The effect of both kinds of postfeminism, argues Walters, is ultimately destructive to feminist goals.

One of the main problems that Walters notes with most cultural theory, feminist or not, is a lack of engagement with social context. Though some attention is given to the specificity of the spectator, minimal work has been done on situating spectators within a personal, social, ideological, and historical context. Walters links this lack of social context to an analytic paradigm which begins from a theoretical framework (psychoanalysis, poststructuralism, etc.) instead of from the fundamental methodological tenets of feminist theory and analysis. In effect, many critics have produced feminist cultural criticism which erases women.