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2013, Feminist Theory
"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."
Global Perspectives and Key Debates in Sex and Relationships Education Addressing Issues of Gender, Sexuality, Plurality and Power
Postfeminist Media Panics over girls' 'sexualisation': Implications for UK sex and relationship guidance and curriculumThis chapter explores how what I call a postfeminist media panic over child 'sexualisation' rests on repeating discursive truths around young feminine sexual risk, age-appropriate sexual experience, and normative accounts of ‘healthy hetero-sexuality’ (for girls in particular). The most pressing implication of the public, media-driven anxieties over girls’ premature sexualisation for sex education is that these converging discourses support and normalize a SRE curriculum and guidance in the UK that erases girls’ rights to sexual pleasure and is therefore incapable of addressing the gendered power dynamics and sexism that continue to shape the wider sexual politics of schooling.
Journal of Sociology
Schizoid subjectivities?: Re-theorising teen-girls’ sexual cultures in an era of ‘sexualisation’,Drawing on three case studies from two UK ethnographic research projects in urban and rural working-class communities, this article explores young teen girls’ negotiation of increasingly sex-saturated societies and cultures. Our analysis complicates contemporary debates around the ‘sexualization’ moral panic by troubling developmental and classed accounts of age-appropriate (hetero)sexuality. We explore how girls are regulated by, yet rework and resist expectations to perform as agentic sexual subjects across a range of spaces (e.g. streets, schools, homes, cyberspace). To conceptualize the blurring of generational and sexual binaries present in our data, we develop Deleuzian notions of ‘becomings’, ‘assemblages’ and ‘schizoid subjectivities’. These concepts help us to map the anti-linear transitions and contradictory performances of young femininity as always in-movement; where girls negotiate discourses of sexual knowingness and innocence, often simultaneously, yet always within a wider context of socio-cultural gendered/classed regulations.
Drawing on three case studies from two UK ethnographic research projects in urban and rural working-class communities, this paper explores young teen girls’ negotiation of increasingly sex-saturated societies and cultures. Our analysis complicates contemporary debates around the ‘sexualisation’ moral panic by troubling developmental and classed accounts of age-appropriate (hetero)sexuality. We explore how girls are regulated by, yet rework and resist expectations to perform as agentic sexual subjects across a range of spaces (e.g. streets, schools, homes, cyberspace). To conceptualise the blurring of generational and sexual binaries present in our data, we develop Deleuzian notions of ‘becomings’, ‘assemblages’ and ‘schizoid subjectivities’. These concepts help us map the anti-linear transitions and contradictory performances of young femininity as always in-movement; where girls negotiate discourses of sexual knowingness and innocence, often simultaneously, yet always within a wider context of socio-cultural gendered/classed regulations.
This paper challenges post‐feminist discourses and recuperative masculinity politics in education that have evoked mythical constructions of the successful ‘achieving’ girl in ways that flatten out social and cultural difference and render invisible ongoing gendered and sexualised inequalities and violence in the social worlds of schools and beyond. We map how girls negotiate contradictory neo‐liberal discourses of girlhood that dominate in popular culture; what McRobbie calls the new ‘post‐feminist masquerade’, which portends that girls can be/come anything they want, so long as they simultaneously perform ‘hyper‐sexy’, the new aspirational feminine ideal. Drawing on individual case studies from four qualitative research projects with teen girls in urban and rural working class communities across England and Wales, we explore how specific ‘working‐class’ girls struggle to negotiate this contradictory terrain of girlhood through imaginary ‘lines of flight’ in their narratives. Specifically, we are interested in applying Deleuze and Guatarri's writings on immanence and the productive, social status of desire and fantasy through an analysis of girls' (violent, aggressive or utopian) fantasies in ways that move beyond the binary of ‘real/not real’, and thus reject a reading of fantasy as futile, ‘escapist’ or ‘pathological solutions to working class life’. We suggest fantasy might operate as a space of survivability, political subjectivity and resistance to girls' subordination within Butler's ‘heterosexual matrix’.
International Journal of Inclusive Education
Teen girls, working class femininity and resistance: Re-theorizing fantasy and desire in educational contexts of heterosexualized violence2012 •
This paper challenges post-feminist discourses and recuperative masculinity politics in education that have evoked mythical constructions of the successful ‘achieving’ girl in ways that flatten out social and cultural difference and render invisible ongoing gendered and sexualised inequalities and violence in the social worlds of schools and beyond. We map how girls negotiate contradictory neo-liberal discourses of girlhood that dominate in popular culture; what McRobbie calls the new ‘post-feminist masquerade’, which portends that girls can be/come anything they want, so long as they simultaneously perform ‘hyper-sexy’, the new aspirational feminine ideal. Drawing on individual case studies from four qualitative research projects with teen girls in urban and rural working class communities across England and Wales, we explore how specific ‘working-class’ girls struggle to negotiate this contradictory terrain of girlhood through imaginary ‘lines of flight’ in their narratives. Specifically, we are interested in applying Deleuze and Guatarri’s writings on immanence and the productive, social status of desire and fantasy through an analysis of girls’ (violent, aggressive or utopian) fantasies in ways that move beyond the binary of ‘real/not real’, and thus reject a reading of fantasy as futile, ‘escapist’ or ‘pathological solutions to working class life’. We suggest fantasy might operate as a space of survivability, political subjectivity and resistance to girls’ subordination within Butler’s ‘heterosexual matrix’.
This article critically explores the seduction of contemporary tomboyism for young tweenage girls within neo-liberal postfeminist times and an in- creasingly commodified (hetero)sexualised girlhood culture. A central aim of the article is to contextualize the persistence of the tomboy discourse and girls’ appropriation of tomboyism within competing schizoid discourses of presumed innocence and compulsory normative (hetero)sexuality. Drawing on past and current predominantly UK based ethnographic research map- ping girls’ relationship to tomboyism, the first half of the article considers how to theorise girls’ fluid appropriation of ‘being a bit tomboy’ within a discursive terrain of multiple femininities and fashion feminism. The second half of the article revisits a case study of one eleven-year-old self- identified tomboy, Eric/a, to re-think conceptualisations of girls’ sustained appropriation of ‘tomboy’ as more than some licensed mimicry of mascu- linity when it is taken-up as a performative politics of subverting empha- sized (hetero)sexualized femininities. The article concludes with a call for future theorizations of girlhood (for example, tomboyism) that foreground the intersection of gender, sex, sexuality, age and time and their socio- cultural and contextual contingency.
Queer Masculinities: A Critical Reader in Education
Phallic girls?: Girls' negotiation of phallogocentric power2012 •
In this chapter, we return to questions and theorizing about phallogecentricism, particularly in the educational contexts of schools where we conduct our empirical research. We explore ongoing fears over the symbolic castration of boys/masculinity and educational anxieties over a free floating phallus which in individualised, neo-liberal discourse can be taken-up by girls, hence the title of our chapter – ‘phallic girls’. Rather than girls being able to easily occupy a lived subject position of ‘phallic girl’, however, we will argue girls are increasingly demanded to display a whole series of contradictory characteristics – those ascribed to femininity (nice, nurturing, passive, sexually desirable via hyper-feminine embodiment and display) as well as those ascribed to masculinity (rational, competitive, sexually assertive – bearing the phallus). Our empirical data thus underscores the impossibility of the fantastical figure of the ‘phallic girl’ and illustrates the abiding regulative rhythm of phallogecentric power in schooling. We will also, however, map some of the complex ways girls are negotiating phallic-centred sexual regulation in their everyday performances of ‘girl’ at school. But rather than understand girls’ attempts to take up masculinity as mere mimicry of the phallus, as has been promoted in recent feminist theorizing, we suggest, drawing on Butler, Braidotti, and others, that many of their practices indicate radical disruptions and displacements of phallogecentric power.
Feminist Theory
(Post)Feminist Development Fables: The Girl Effect and the Production of Sexual SubjectsThe 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.
British Educational Research Journal
Normative cruelties and gender deviants: the performative effects of bully discourses for girls and boys in school2010 •
Since the 1990s the educational community has witnessed a proliferation of ‘bullying’ discourses, primarily within the field of educational developmental social psychology. Drawing on ethnographic and qualitative interview data of primary and secondary school girls and boys, this article argues that the discourse ‘bullying’ operates to simplify and individualise complex gendered/classed/sexualised/racialised power relations embedded in children's school-based cultures. Using a feminist post-structural approach, this article critically traces the discursive production of how the signifiers ‘bully’ and ‘victim’ are implicated in the ‘normative cruelties’ of performing and policing ‘intelligible’ heteronormative masculinities and femininities. It shows how these everyday gender performances are frequently passed over by staff and pupils as ‘natural’. The analysis also illustrates how bully discourses operate in complex racialised and classed ways that mark children out as either gender deviants, or as not adequately performing normative ideals of masculinity and femininity. In conclusion, it is argued that bully discourses offer few symbolic resources and/or practical tools for addressing and coping with everyday school-based gender violence, and some new research directions are suggested.
Gender and Education
Slut-shaming, girl power and 'sexualisation': thinking through the politics of the international SlutWalks with teen girls2012 •
2013 •
Girlhood Studies
" Every Time She Bends Over She Pulls Up Her Thong" Teen Girls Negotiating Discourses of Competitive, Heterosexualized Aggression2008 •
The Politics of Place: Contemporary paradigms for research in girlhood studies, New York: Berghan
Teen Feminist Killjoys? Mapping Girls’ Affective Encounters with Femininity, Sexuality, and Feminism at School2013 •
Feminism & Psychology
Hot right now: Diverse girls navigating technologies of racialized sexy femininityFeminism & Psychology
The whole playboy mansion image': Girls' fashioning and fashioned selves within a postfeminist culture2013 •
Confero: Essays on Education, Philosophy and Politics
Posthuman performativity, gender and ‘school bullying’: Exploring the material-discursive intra-actions of skirts, hair, sluts, and poofs2015 •
Feminist Media Studies,
Sluts that Choose vs. Doormat Gypsies: Exploring affect in the postfeminist, visual moral economy of My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding2013 •
Education and Political Subjectivities in Neoliberal Times
Selfies, relfies and phallic tagging: posthuman part-icipations in teen digital sexuality assemblagesFeminist Media Studies
‘Sexy’ and ‘laddish girls’: unpacking complicity between two cultural imag(inations)es of young femininity2012 •
Learning Bodies - the body in youth and childhood studies, eds. Julia Coffey, Shelley Budgeon, Helen Cahill
”Fuck your body image”: Teen girls’ Twitter and Instagram feminism in and around schoolGirl Culture - An Encyclopedia
Exploring some contemporary dilemmas of femininity and girlhood in the West, Jessica Ringrose and Valerie Walkerdine2007 •
International Journal of Media and Cultural Politics
Gendered Risks and Opportunities? Exploring teen girls’ digitised sexual identity in postfeminist media contexts2011 •
2017 •
PhD thesis
Exploring young people's digital sexual cultures through creative, visual and arts- based methods2020 •
Feminist Theory
Regulation and Rupture: Mapping Tween and Teenage Girls' Resistance to the Heterosexual Matrix2008 •
Gender and Education
Both here and elsewhere: rural girls’ contradictory visions of the future - Gender and Education2014 •
forthcoming in Renold, Ringrose and Egan (eds) "Children, Sexuality and the Sexualisation of Culture", Palgrave.
Mud, mermaids and burnt wedding dresses: mapping queer becomings in teen girls’ talk on living with gender and sexual violence.2015 •