My academic footprint exists around developing accounts of intimacy in the context of a postfeminist sensibility, through concepts including technologies of sexiness, aesthetic labour, postfeminist healthism and postdigital mediated intimacies. My distinctive expertise is in developing accounts of how intimacy is understood in a culture where ways of understanding the self are determined by the language of economics, competition and individualism, and what happens when these ways of understanding shape how we can relate to ourselves and others. I am also interested in expanding accounts of intimacy, beyond kinship and sexual intimacy, to include a range of human and non-human relationalities. Such accounts are important in a context where notions of the self have radically changed. The significant societal changes that my work addresses include seismic shifts in gender relations, the development of digital culture and the gendered and digital transnationalism that is afforded by new global networks. My research has considered what it might mean to live through such significant changes and how we feel about ourselves in these contexts. My research has been published in many high-ranking international journal and edited collections. I am co-author of Technologies of Sexiness (2014, Oxford University Press) and Postfeminism and Health (2018, Routledge).

My research is inspired by a deep interest in the way gender organises personal, social, intimate and cultural relationships, and how these relationships are shaped and reflected in media culture. Through my research, I hope to create new ways of thinking about these links and the way they can stimulate more positive, inclusive and feminist-inspired identities.