In this chapter we examine the representational terrain of contemporary girlhood in the West, particularly the discursive construction of successful girls, mean girls, bad girls and violent girls. We will explore the core contemporary dilemma foisted upon girls to somehow balance particular versions of masculinity and femininity, through analysis of media, popular culture and psychological and educational debates, and through data from our own empirical research studies with girls. We use feminist, post-structural, post-Foucauldian methods of mapping discursive regulations of femininity, considering in particular how massive concern over girl aggression and mean-ness might be related to current gender anxieties over middle-class "girl power", and girls success We will look at the pathologization of the successful but mean ‘Supergirl’ and the counterpoint to girls’ success – the failed, deviant, abject, violent non-feminine subject who must be transformed.

"The ‘girl subject’ and ‘young femininity’ are repeatedly and with great effect being made increasingly visible as a particular social, cultural and psychical problematic in late capitalist societies (Driscoll, 2002). The last two decades have witnessed a burgeoning and interdisciplinary field of critical girlhood studies that have rapidly taken up this contested site of young femininity (e.g. Walkerdine, 1991; Hey, 1997; Walkerdine et al., 2001; Gonick, 2003; Aapola et al., 2004; Harris, 2004; Mitchell and Reid-Walsh, 2005; Jiwani et al., 2006; Nayak and Kehily, 2007; Duits, 2008;Currie et al., 2009; Kearney, 2011; Hains, 2012; Ringrose, 2013). As a sociopolitical project, the figure of the contemporary girl is over-determined, weighted down with meaning and commonly represented through binary formations of celebratory postfeminist ‘girl power’ vs. crisis discourses of ‘girls at risk’ (Aapola et al., 2004; Gonick et al., 2009). One of the primary ‘luminosities’ (Deleuze in McRobbie, 2008) surrounding girls as both bearers of power and objects of risk centres on girls’ relationship to sexuality and entry into sexual womanhood. In this special issue, we bring together a series of articles that explore a veritable explosion of interest, debate and controversy over what is referred to as the (premature or hyper) ‘sexualisation of the (girl) child’. One of our aims in this introduction is to invite readers to think about what the collection of articles and shorter ‘interchange’ pieces do together as a type of assemblage, where each article intra-acts with the other to create new potentials for thinking about girls and sexuality. Each author explores in different ways how the figure of the ‘girl’ connects with culturally specific contexts across a range of topics and practices. The girl travels across the articles in multi-modal ways (as digital, as affect, as animation, as biology, as brand, as policy discourse) and through different theoretical, disciplinary and political lenses. What follows is our own particular, partial tracing of the girl and her affective address across this engaging range of articles."

To identify the promises, challenges, and paradoxes of the popular discourse of girl power, this article examines girl power as an artifact of postmodernity whose meanings are revealed through both popular cultural representations and contemporary girls’ practices of doing girlhood. Specifically, by examining the representations of girl power in media texts and the drawings and play projects produced by actual girls, it explores the following questions: What aspects of the girl power discourse pose challenges to the very idea of girls’ empowerment? Can traditional feminine qualities and the new emancipated attitude of a power girl coexist? And are girl power opportunities equally accessible to all girls?

The edited volume “Becoming Girl”, published in 2014 by Marnina Gonick and Susanne Gannon, sets out to further knowledge on young women’s lives and identities through the method of collective biography. The book situates itself in the field of “girlhood studies,” which encompasses scholarship from a range of disciplines such as history, sociology, ethnography or media studies. As a subfield of women’s and gender studies, girlhood studies seeks to elucidate the social realities and discursive production of young women’s lives at the intersection of multiple forms of dominance. It aims to generate knowledge about girls’ life-worlds as well as destabilize taken for granted beliefs about what it means to be “a girl.” Becoming Girl partakes in this academic endeavour by presenting outcomes of collective memory sessions conducted by groups of feminist scholars and students connected to the editors. As Gonick and Gannon state in the introduction, the book is the outcome of a group effort, which shows in the fact that most chapters are written by different combinations of a recurring set of authors. While this lends the book a coherence that edited volumes often lack, it also leads to recurring themes and approaches across the chapters and limits the overall scope of the volume. The books’ eleven chapters are organized in two sections: Four chapters present the methodology of collective biography as conducted by the authors and reflect upon potentials and limitations of this method in the light of post-structuralist thinking. The remaining seven chapters are assembled under the header of “themes” and present analyses of material produced in collective biography sessions. This organization of the book is particularly helpful to readers interested in the method of collective biography but makes it also a worthwhile read for scholars of girlhood.

The Nike Foundation’s flagship corporate social responsibility campaign, “The Girl Effect,” has generated support for targeted investments in adolescent girls as the “key” economic development in the global south. As a representational regime, the campaign is example of an increasingly hegemonic discourse of global girl power via formal education. In an era of “sexualization moral panic” regarding representations of contemporary young female sexual subjectivities in the global north, this paper considers ideological figurings of adolescent female sexual embodiment in the global south through a discursive analysis of the campaign’s three most popular viral videos.