Working Girls investigates the thematic concerns of contemporary Hollywood cinema, and its ambivalent articulation of women as both active, and defined by sexual performance, asking whether new Hollywood cinema has responded to feminism and contemporary sexual identities. Popular cinema has often assumed an equation between working women and sexuality or sexual performance, an association encapsulated in the phrase working girls . While feminist criticism has embraced the transgressive power of modern femmes fatale such such as Linda Fiorentino in The Last Seduction , the recurrent, class-bound figure of the prostitute has received less attention. Through a series of case-studies, Yvonne Tasker covers an enormous range of contemporary genres to provide a thorough analysis of the representation and role of women in contemporary popular cinema, as actors, viewers and directors, and tackles questions rased by female authorship in film. Whether analysing the rise of films centred around female friendships or the entrance of pop stars such as Whitney Houston and Madonna into film, Working Girls is an authoritative investigation of the presence of women both as filmmakers and actors in contemporary mainstream cinema.