IN 1984 BRITISH feminist Rosalind Coward published a collections of essays, Female Desire: Women’s Sexuality Today, which had considerable impact because of its explanatory power, and because it made available a particular interpretation of feminist approaches to everyday cultural forms, from food porn to astrology, fashion to romance novels. At that time, media representations and popular understandings of feminism were distorted and often stereotypical. They had not caught up on the more nuanced and diverse critical thinking filtering through the activist networks and academy. Coward’s book charted new directions in thinking through feminism and thinking about feminism. Barbara Creed’s Media Matrix: Sexing the New Reality is such a book. It intersects with the present preoccupation with new global media forms and their implications for how we think about sex and the public. While the differences within feminism have long since made it impossible to write a book that accurately represents any singular feminist approach, Media Matrix sets out the cardinal theoretical points informing feminist critical theory: postmodernism, psychoanalysis, queer theory, globalisation. It also introduces key feminist writers over a range of cultural forms that one way or another make contact with feminine identity. As a film theorist, Creed brings a distinctive voice to discussions of wider forms of media and visual culture, from reporting on ‘terror’ to the queer carnivalesque, digitised synthespians to cybersex. Creed also transcends an imperative for the new that sometimes seems to operate in critical theory and that can cycle, almost like fashion, through particular writers. Freud continues to have descriptive use in her analyses of perversion, abjection and fantasy, and their peculiar and complex interplay between screen and spectator. Creed never takes half measures in her deployment of theoretical terms: if she’s going to talk about voyeurism, it will have the rigour of correct use, but with accessible explanation of terms. With characteristically deceptive simplicity, Creed writes, ‘in film “to screen” thus has a double and contradictory meaning: to show and to cover’. Cinema has thus produced a particular historical subject, a voyeur with an insatiable desire for the new, the real, the shocking and a fascination in sexuality — while it draws on psychic structures that are ‘the realities of human nature’. These historical and psychic conditions have not situated the cinema spectator as passive, however, and Creed is faithful to a postmodern orthodoxy: meaning does not reside in a text but is actively produced by the viewer. One of Media Matrix’s pleasures lies in its surprising but perfectly sensible ideas. With Big Brother, Creed traces reality television back to ethnographic documentary, but argues that this scrutiny of the ‘primitive’ has been turned towards the Western modern subject. In Sex and the City, she sees single women as treating sex as a comm
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