Though the cupcake craze of recent years has abated somewhat, random organizations still want to give us excuses to eat these delicious items. We thank them. Yet the true date of National Cupcake Day remains in flux, with different declarations noting different days for us to get thee to a bakery and inhale a frosted delight or two. One such day is today.

Note that the UIP takes no stand on which cupcake day to celebrate. That is to say, we advocate celebrating all of them, or even making every day National Cupcake Day. Our recent release, Cupcakes, Pinterest, and Ladyporn, in the meantime, offers your mind the frosting and sprinkles it needs to make sense of today’s feminized pop cultural production, including, yes, cupcakes.

Analyzing everything from Fifty Shades of Grey to Pinterest to pregnancy apps, the contributors examine the economic, technological, representational, and experiential dimensions of products and phenomena that speak to, and about, the feminine. As these essays show, the imperative of productivity currently permeating feminized pop culture has created a generation of texts that speak as much to women’s roles as public and private workers as to an impulse for fantasy or escape.