ABSTRACT
This chapter centralizes the postfeminist relationship between women and work, fi rst noting the large number of recent Hollywood romances in which a female protagonist is situated in a low-paying, low-status (though often nurturing and symbolically domestic) mode of employment, then considering professional women who discard their jobs and/or repudiate their “female” professions (as in fi lms such as How to Lose a Guy in Ten Days and Someone Like You) and fi nally analyzing a set of adjustment narratives in which working women must downsize the importance of work in their lives. In addition I will analyze the inverted but related dynamics that give rise to a postfeminist preoccupation with certain kinds of women’s work. Thus, later sections of the chapter examine the new respectability (even, at times, idealization) of the female sex worker, the representational prominence of nannies, and the emergence of fl ight attendant chic in a variety of forms of popular culture.
