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Book Review: Beyond the Margins: Reflections of a Feminist Philosopher

principle in post-feminist culture and also as specifically appropriate to Ann Summers’ fascination with ‘willies’ (p. 106). Being an Ann Summers ‘girl’ is being a heterosexual woman who defines, enjoys and lives her femininity in relation to men (and the phallus) (p. 90). Storr’s analysis of Ann Summers homosociality as the intersection and production of gender and sexual identities also pays attention to how ‘being “one of the girls” . . . usually meant being a white girl’ (p. 63, emphasis in original). Whiteness was assumed so that only ‘white’ vibrators were ‘realistic’ (p. 115) and so that ‘non-white’ women were understood as holding values which did not fit with the particular homosociality of Ann Summers parties; in the words of one party organizer, ‘pakis’ were never any good as either partygoers or organizers (p. 67). Class relations were also produced and reproduced through the homosociality of Ann Summers parties where ‘being one of the girls’ involved certain workingand lower-middle class ‘tastes’. Taking up ideas developed in Skeggs’ (1997) ethnography on white working-class women, Storr argues that ‘taste’ is not simply a choice but rather is a classifier through which class relations are formed (p. 182). The women involved in the research both distinguish their own tastes from the tastes of ‘posh’ women, who are excluded from being ‘one of the girls’, but also negotiate their tastes with understandings of Ann Summers as ‘tarty’, ‘cheap’ and ‘slaggish’. These complex negotiations of class, race, gender and sexuality are carefully, intriguingly and often humorously explored through the book as contemporary power relations which Storr argues interconnect and, crucially, produce each other as a specific instance of white, workingor lower-middle class heterosexual femininity. These relations of power are both stretched and resisted through the pleasure and possibility of Ann Summers – friendships, ‘time out’ of family life and the opportunity for independent earning for example. Ultimately, however, Storr argues that Ann Summers parties, through processes of consumption, exclusion and heterosexual regimes, feed into and solidify already existing configurations of power which organize and limit the possibilities of what it might mean to be ‘one of the girls’ as a ‘post-feminist fantasy’ (p. 222) rather than a liberatory, material reality.