This art icle was downloaded by: [ Newsam Library and Archive Services, I nst it ut e of Educat ion, Universit y of London] On: 11 March 2014, At : 23: 33 Publisher: Rout ledge I nform a Lt d Regist ered in England and Wales Regist ered Num ber: 1072954 Regist ered office: Mort im er House, 37- 41 Mort im er St reet , London W1T 3JH, UK Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education Publicat ion det ails, including inst ruct ions for aut hors and subscript ion informat ion: ht t p:/ / www.t andfonline.com/ loi/ cdis20 Reassembling feminism Alyssa D. Niccolini a a Depart ment of English Educat ion, Teachers College, Columbia Universit y, New York, NY, USA Published online: 06 Mar 2014. To cite this article: Alyssa D. Niccolini (2014): Reassembling feminism, Discourse: St udies in t he Cult ural Polit ics of Educat ion, DOI: 10.1080/ 01596306.2014.892661 To link to this article: ht t p:/ / dx.doi.org/ 10.1080/ 01596306.2014.892661 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTI CLE Taylor & Francis m akes every effort t o ensure t he accuracy of all t he inform at ion ( t he “ Cont ent ” ) cont ained in t he publicat ions on our plat form . However, Taylor & Francis, our agent s, and our licensors m ake no represent at ions or warrant ies what soever as t o t he accuracy, com plet eness, or suit abilit y for any purpose of t he Cont ent . Any opinions and views expressed in t his publicat ion are t he opinions and views of t he aut hors, and are not t he views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of t he Cont ent should not be relied upon and should be independent ly verified wit h prim ary sources of inform at ion. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, act ions, claim s, proceedings, dem ands, cost s, expenses, dam ages, and ot her liabilit ies what soever or howsoever caused arising direct ly or indirect ly in connect ion wit h, in relat ion t o or arising out of t he use of t he Cont ent . This art icle m ay be used for research, t eaching, and privat e st udy purposes. Any subst ant ial or syst em at ic reproduct ion, redist ribut ion, reselling, loan, sub- licensing, syst em at ic supply, or dist ribut ion in any form t o anyone is expressly forbidden. Term s & Condit ions of access and use can be found at ht t p: / / www.t andfonline.com / page/ t erm sand- condit ions Downloaded by [Newsam Library and Archive Services, Institute of Education, University of London] at 23:33 11 March 2014 Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 2014 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01596306.2014.892661 REVIEW ESSAY Reassembling feminism Alyssa D. Niccolini* Department of English Education, Teachers College, Columbia University, New York, NY, USA Postfeminist education? Girls and the sexual politics of schooling, by Jessica Ringrose, London and New York, Routledge, 2013, 190 pp., US$44.95 (paperback), ISBN 978-0-415-55749-8 If indeed we live in what Brian Massumi (2002) describes as image-saturated late capitalism, where Billboard’s ‘Woman of the Year’, Katy Perry, cheerily disclaims being a feminist while championing ‘the power of women’ (Berlatsky, 2012), and where learning and living interface more rapidly within digital and virtual media spaces, educational research is in dire need of some new tools. As curricular and feminist scholar, Janet L. Miller (2013), notes, as ‘mass migrations, mass media, fragmentations, interdependencies and hybridities’ shape postmodernity, our research methodologies must, following Whitlock (2006), similarly remain ‘in transit’ potentially ‘build[ing] upon and utiliz [ing], for example, the extensive and unprecedented power and speed of cultural exchanges in the present’ (Miller, 2013). How do we get up to speed in our readings of the complex interplays of media, pedagogy, and gender, and how do we map their movements and effects within educational theory and policy? Putting to work an array of feminist, poststructural, psychosocial, and posthumanist theorists, particularly the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1984, 1987), as well as an impressive coalition of educational scholars, Jessica Ringrose (2013) has begun to assemble such a toolkit in this book, Postfeminist Education? Girls and the sexual politics of schooling. Ringrose’s book offers ‘new sociological/philosophical tools for mapping the intricacies of flow of affect and ruptures of normative capture, offering new ways of thinking about, researching and interpreting feminine subjectivity’ (p. 69). The Deleuze– Guattarian figuration of the assemblage that she deploys throughout her book is an apt conceptual framework to describe her own compilation of media and cultural analysis, policy critique, empirical work on teenaged girls, and the digital and virtual worlds they navigate, and the ways these disparate forces ‘plug into’ (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012) educational discourses. Ringrose’s impressive theoretical and empirical assemblage proves an apt medium for the movements Miller (2013) and Whitlock (2006) describe above and an opportunity, as Ringrose argues: to explore how girls’ experiences and narratives are plugged into wider popular culture and where counter-narratives (like the global SlutWalks or gender equality curriculum of school) make new spaces for thinking and doing ‘girl’. (p. 147) *Email: adn2106@columbia.edu © 2014 Taylor & Francis Downloaded by [Newsam Library and Archive Services, Institute of Education, University of London] at 23:33 11 March 2014 2 A.D. Niccolini The transitivity of Ringrose’s verbiage – the thinking and doing of girl – the active girling – suggests a perpetual incompleteness to the process invoking Butler’s (1990, 1993) notion of performativity and the ‘necessary incompleteness’ (Miller, 2005) of research narratives on gender subject positions. Postfeminism, as Ringrose highlights, is itself an assemblage as it embodies a contradictory and ‘complex constellation of objects, bodies, expressions, qualities, and territories that come together for varying periods of time to ideally create new way of functioning’ (Livesey, 2010, p. 18). Gesturing simultaneously to ‘different spaces and moments, the history and futuricity of feminist engagements’ (Ringrose, 2013, p. 5), postfeminism as a concept both heralds a collapsing of the temporally ordered ‘waves’ of feminism and enfolds its abject specter – a ‘“backlash” discourse that blames feminism and women’s gains for social ills’ (p. 5). Ringrose sees these disparate forces as working on and through each other in dynamic assemblages, and her book evokes the multiple resonances within postfeminism – in its early chapters exploring how feminism has been deprecated within media and educational discourses as girls are perceived to have achieved and aggressively ‘gone too far’ in the quest for gender equality as threateningly ‘mean’, ‘sexy’ and ‘successful’, and in its later half, carving out new theoretical, pedagogical and material spaces for reinvigorating feminism within intellectual and embodied lives. As her title curls into the spiral of a question mark, Ringrose ultimately urges her readers to put pressure on the idea that we have reached a utopic (or dystopic) place ‘beyond’ feminism, and offers her book as a theoretical intervention that will, she hopes, spin off possibilities for feminism’s futures. Assembling affect If we look at (post)feminism as an assemblage, we can follow Ringrose’s question, ‘what do assemblages enable or disenable bodies to do and how does this align with or disrupt dominant (molar) power formations?’ (p. 82). As comixtures of affects, discourses and bodies, assemblages are comprised of a range of ‘forces that unmake and make territories’ (Livesey, 2010, p. 18), invoking the plasticity of the spatial, institutional, affective, and pedagogical flows that are undercut by ‘striated’, or hierarchized and gridded, formations like femininity. Rather than fixed phenomena, assemblage theory orients us to theorize bodies (material, human, and ideational) and ‘events’ as confluences of forces and flows. Moving toward what Deleuze and Guattari envision as ‘smooth’ spaces, these formations are always in flux, perpetually setting off lines of flight into de- and reterritorialisations (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). Deftly deploying the assemblage figuration, among others, Ringrose explores how the ‘complex interface of media, popular culture, research and policy scapes’ (p. 34) coalesce to create ‘commonsense’ feminine subjectivities, but also elicit lines of flight that work to shift and rework these configurations into new and unforeseen discursive and material ‘bodies’. She asks us to consider what happens when we look critically at the education policy and media machines that seek to represent, administer, and correct ‘problem girls’, and how they may offer sites of both empowerment and enervation, set forth (re)imaginings of femininity as well as reentrench and intensify age-old gender dynamics. She finally queries how students, educators, and researchers can move within such a ‘contradictory representational terrain that centres on staking out the limits and possibilities of what it means to be feminine’ (p. 30), but rather than paralyzing pessimism, urges us to use the ‘theoretical and Downloaded by [Newsam Library and Archive Services, Institute of Education, University of London] at 23:33 11 March 2014 Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education 3 methodological tools outlined in [the] book’ to ‘address, reimagine and transform the sexual politics at play in [our] own educational spaces’ (p. 150). One means of doing this is through mobilizing Deleuze and Guattari’s (1984) notion of ‘schizoanalysis’, in Ringrose’s words, ‘as a way to draw attention to the contradictory, schizoid conditions that typically surround us in conditions of “late capitalist modernity”’ (Braidotti, 2006), but which we are demanded to erase, through calls to inhabit unambiguous, ‘unitary, non-contradictory subjectivity’ (2013, p. 79). Ringrose ‘direct[s] our attention to social flows and forces, for instance the schizoid conditions informing new norms of teen femininity’ (Renold & Ringrose, 2011; Ringrose, 2013, p. 80). We see these schizoid pulls within Daniela’s (14 years old) use of Bebo, a popular social networking site, in the chapter ‘Girls negotiating postfeminist, sexulised media contexts’. Ringrose persuasively describes how Daniela uses Bebo to agentically and pleasurably (re)present a version of self and to resignify injurious (Butler, 1993) terms such a ‘slut’, while also being embroiled within molar power configurations where ‘girls remain defined by their sexualised bodies’ (p. 138). Yet rather than reconciling her analysis into a celebration or demonisation of new media, Ringrose sees social networking sites as complex assemblages of ‘visual, discursive spaces with immanent possibilities’ (p. 137). Affective assemblages Ringrose’s work (2003, 2007, 2010, 2011) is always on the cutting edge of theory, but it is this book’s attention to both discursivity and materiality, through its invocation of affect theory, that particularly breaks new ground within educational research. Ringrose takes up a Deleuze–Guattarian conception of affect and puts it to work in a figuration she terms ‘affective assemblages’ (Ringrose, 2010, 2011, 2013 – this book). Looking at how affects move and ‘stick’ within social spheres in the chapter ‘Sexual regulation and embodied resistance’, Ringrose maps the fractious affective networks that circulate between a peer group of girls as well as their affective relations to the postfeminist discourses that surge within and around their ‘demonized’ (Lucey & Reay, 2003) secondary school. As an example, Ringrose complicates the perpetrator/victim ‘dualism machine’ (p. 79) that propels bullying discourses and instead looks at the more complex affective and racialised dimensions that underlie perceived bullying dynamics. Faiza (14 years old), an Iraqi-Welsh student, and a group of her friends are labeled as bullies after an ‘incident’ with another student. Ringrose moves beyond a reductive bully/bullied binary to explore the ‘complex affective terrain’ (p. 110) that extends beyond the individuals involved, thus stymying the easy interventions offered by most antibullying programs. Here the affects that motivates and are unleashed by the incident are shifting and contradictory such as both the anxieties and the pleasures attendant with disrupting a ‘middle class ethic of repressive and indirect feminine ideals of relationality, since to be positioned as girl bully transgresses the normative conditions of femininity’ (p. 106). Ringrose illustrates how this affective flux is further complicated by larger national and racial politics as parental fears that the school was ‘being over-run by immigrants’ (p. 103) motivate one mother ‘to manipulate the boundaries of school allocation’ (p. 104) and have her white child removed. Through fascinating interviews conducted outside of the confines of school, Ringrose explores how the circulation of affect is central to the dynamics within this peer group, their parents, and implicitly their nation, and how research that ‘map[s] the nuance of their affective relations and their affective capacities to trouble (or not) the boundaries of the norm as girls in moments like these is important’ (p. 112). 4 A.D. Niccolini Downloaded by [Newsam Library and Archive Services, Institute of Education, University of London] at 23:33 11 March 2014 Although there are several, at times competing, camps of affect theory, Ringrose compellingly draws on a Deleuze–Guattarian inflected strand. She quotes an apt passage from Deleuze that draws heavily on Spinozist conceptions of affectus to illustrate her stance: We know nothing of a body until we know what it can do, in other words, what its affects are, how they can or cannot enter into composition with other affects, with the affects of another body, either to destroy that body or be destroyed by it, either to exchange actions and passions with it or to join with in composing a more powerful body. (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, quoted in Ringrose, 2013, p. 81, emphasis in original) Yet a reader need not be indoctrinated into the ‘“high” theory’ (p. 77) of Deleuze and Guattari to enjoy this book, as Ringrose proves a confident and clear pedagogical guide through complex continental thought. For a growing number of scholars tackling the complex and shifting assemblages that shape schooling worlds, Deleuze and Guattari have proven to be welcome guides. One might go so far as to say that Deleuze is theoretically ‘hot’ at the moment, as evidenced by a proliferation of work on Deleuzian analysis and methods, including Coleman and Ringrose’s (2013) newly published Deleuze and Research Methodologies. In a debatedly ironic stamp of commodification, Foucault famously declared: ‘Perhaps one day this century will be known as Deleuzian’, and certainly, for Ringrose (2013), Deleuze and Guattari offer us a means of ‘doing something different than searching for sustained, rational accounts from unitary and coherent actors’ and instead ‘offers new ways to re-figure fantasy, for instance, as not just harnessed to individual lack but to the possibility of thinking and even acting something different’ (p. 112). Theoretical tool box In his translator’s forward to Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) A thousand plateaus, Massumi invites readers ‘to lift a dynamism out of the book entirely, and incarnate it a foreign medium’ and as such to approach the ideas in the book as a ‘tool box’ (p. xv). Jackson and Mazzei (2012) utilize Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) notion of ‘plugging in’ to evoke a similar dynamic. As they write, ‘plugging in to produce something new is a constant, continuous process of making and unmaking. An assemblage isn’t a thing – it is the process of making and unmaking the thing’ (p. 1). They quote from A Thousand Plateaus: When one writes, the only question is which other machine the literary machine can be plugged into, must be plugged into in order to work. (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 4, quoted in Jackson & Mazzei, 2012, p. 1) Ringrose urges a similar dynamic in repeatedly describing her own approach as potential ‘tools’ (p. 69, 150) for other educational researchers. To conclude this review, I’d like to take up Ringrose’s offer of her work as a compilation of theoretical tools and put it to work as a thinking companion to ‘read’ two mediated forms of public pedagogies surrounding femininity: a NYC public health advertisement and the Facebook images posted by 19-year-old Tunisian FEMEN activist Amina Sboui. Media analyses can offer productive points of investigation for educational theorists since, in Ringrose’s words, ‘media stories and “events” capture the political moment, but also gesture both backwards historically and forwards to the future’ (p. 1). In accord with the theoretical tools, Ringrose puts to work in her own book, I too try to theorize these two media ‘events’ not Downloaded by [Newsam Library and Archive Services, Institute of Education, University of London] at 23:33 11 March 2014 Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education 5 as frozen instantiations of or injunctions to particular forms of femininity, but per Ringrose’s (2013) urging, as invitations to pay heed to how ‘bodies interact in new and different ways … [and to] the nuance of their affective relations and their affective capacities to trouble (or not) the boundaries of the norm’ (p. 112). Femininity ‘in transit’ After teaching a late-night seminar, I hazily registered a public service advertisement sponsored by New York City government on my train ride home. It depicts a woman slumped against a railing in a subway station, the contents of her bag carelessly spilled over the steps. As a form of public pedagogy, the ad adopts a moralistic second person, admonishing, ‘Two drinks ago you could still get yourself home’. The public intimacy of its address is paternalistic, perhaps intentionally seeking to invoke in viewers the affective charge of parental discipline. Through this complex temporal recall, the ad simultaneously mourns a missed opportunity in the past, exposes a shameful present, and puts stock in the promise of its pedagogy to improve the future. Ringrose (2013) argues that we are witnessing a rise in ‘sensationalized media headlines [that] play on our emotional investments, cultivating affect – a sense of moral outrage and fear over changing forms of femininity, particularly disruptions to the status quo’ (p. 30). The postfeminist dynamics she explores in her book, particularly where women are perceived as overly or aggressively successful, mean, and/or sexy, and thus in need of corrective curricula and pedagogies, are certainly at work in this ad. Its interpellative ‘you would have’ reveals a complex moral topography that invokes precisely the neoliberal discourses of choice and of risk, Ringrose investigates in her own Downloaded by [Newsam Library and Archive Services, Institute of Education, University of London] at 23:33 11 March 2014 6 A.D. Niccolini studies on postfeminist girlhood. She explains that ‘individualization and risk [are] defining features of advanced capitalist society where the subject becomes defined though their capacity to safeguard against risks as part of market competition (financial, social, etc.)’ (p. 3). Neatly quantifying ‘excess’ (two drinks), the ad positions the woman as a poor reader of risk, and thus in need of her public shaming and moralizing pedagogy. ‘The neoliberal ethos is to change, to transform, to adapt, to reinvent, and to self-perfect toward the goal of marketability and consumption’, Ringrose explains: and this logic transfuses the dynamic of education and learning more generally, including self-help, spirituality, new age, fitness and health make-over genres, which hold specific pedagogical dynamics around perfecting the self. (Ringrose, 2013, p. 4) Through these invocations of choice and poor risk-assessment, there is an implicit message that the drunken woman is ‘asking for’ sexual assault. Part of the discourses of ‘slut shaming’ that Ringrose investigates in her book, the ad works to check unregulated female bodies. In its own promiscuous circulation within a mobile public space it ironically enfolds the ‘modern’ and ‘liberated’ women in age-old regulatory discourses around female mobility. Although the woman’s neat and professional attire suggests a careful attempt by the ad designers to stymie associations between dress and sexual risk, her business-casual also insinuates the dangers haunting ‘empowered women’. Her ambiguous race further raises questions about which bodies are considered ‘risky and “at risk”’ (p. 27) particularly within biopolitical conceptions of populational health (and NYC has a history of racially and socioeconomically targeted public service ads for obesity and diabetes, for example). In its various iterations, these curricula assure the NYC citizenry that the government cares about their health and welfare, and they can best serve the state by caring for themselves. Yet although the ad accosts a seemingly narrowly defined ‘you’ – a certain ‘irresponsible’ gendered and ambiguously raced citizen – its pedagogy also works to (re)educate the general subwayriding public about female impropriety stoking ‘public anxieties that certain forms of behavior are “deviant” and post a menace to the social order’ (p. 4). Here it is the ‘gender order’ (Connell, 1987) that is at risk. Positioned in plexiglass cases that usually display advertisements for commercial products, the woman’s intoxicated body and (mis)behavior can be read at-a-glance and easily ‘consumed’ by the subway-riding public. As Ringrose and Walkerdine (2008) argue, neoliberalism has resulted in ‘an intensification of feminine as site (both subject and object) of commodification and consumption’ (p. 230). This sharply attired woman has certainly failed as a free-market ‘chooser’ (Ringrose, 2013, p. 3) having ‘consumed’ too much according to the copy in the ad, and she becomes the embodiment of an inevitably ‘failing’ female subject (p. 91). In its masculinized counterpart, a bloodied man is told that with two drinks ago he could have walked away from a bar-room brawl. In the seconds it takes to take in these ads, ‘the gender order’ (Connell, 1987) is firmly reentrenched where, as Ringrose explores in her book, ‘the feminine is set against a neutral, normal male version of aggression’ (p. 32). Invoking postfeminist sensibilities, which the ad insinuates, that women invite risk when they misuse their gained empowerment and public mobility and men can become violent when alcohol tampers with masculine rationality (‘Stop drinking while you’re still thinking’). It is quite easy to see how postfeminist discourses might travel from public pedagogies into educational policies and Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education 7 Downloaded by [Newsam Library and Archive Services, Institute of Education, University of London] at 23:33 11 March 2014 practices and how the ‘processes of “mediasation” where media and educational policy mutually inform one another’ (p. 7) gain traction. As Ringrose argues: Moral panics and shared group anxieties are a useful framework for thinking about the affective dimensions and dynamics of how public discourses circulate and emote. It helps us understand the power of some educational discourses to grip the public imagination and individual psyches and enliven controversy and fear over the ‘gender order’. (p. 4) Naked protest Unlike the woman in the subway ad who is directly addressed by a moralizing state agency, I want to conclude by looking at an example of a girl ‘speak[ing] back’ (p. 137) to regulatory gender discourses. However, I want to be careful not to herald her act as a triumph of feminist empowerment, a move that would be complicit with the ‘competing modes of celebration versus crisis’ (p. 4) that Ringrose cogently argues dominate postfeminist discourses, and instead theorize her act as a moving assemblage of discourses, affects, and geopolitical forces. Tunisian 19-year-old and FEMEN activist Amina Sboui gained international notoriety in 2012 for posting topless photos of herself on her Facebook page that read in Arabic ‘My body belongs to me’. With a hardened expression, cigarette in one hand and book in another, Sboui could be argued to embody a conflation of the ‘successful’, ‘sexy’, and ‘mean’ postfeminist subject positions Ringrose explores in her book. Albeit in a strikingly different cultural setting than the British schoolgirls Ringrose investigates, Sboui’s image may have been seized upon by Western media precisely because she taps into affective fears that circulate around feminism. In recounting the acerbic comments to her own mention in the Daily Mail, Ringrose relates how: The media event highlights the contested political ideologies and discourses around gender and sexuality and just how threatening feminism continues to be for some. Indeed, we witness strong affects in the form of vehement disgust over feminism. (p. 143) Reception of Sboui’s act was similarly met with ‘strong affects’ – with some heralding her as a feminist hero, and others voicing disgust and outrage at her act. As the force of her protest comingled with larger geopolitical forces, she became a fraught exemplar in both mideastern and Western imaginaries of the dangers and powers attendant with agentic girlhood with death threats being levied against her by some Islamic groups. The Western media’s fascination with and ‘capture’ of Sboui’s image further entangles it within an assemblage of protectionist liberal discourses that seek to position Muslim girls as trapped by Islam and in need of empowerment, education, and ‘enlightened’ Western intervention. Declared by some as an act of ‘topless jihad’, her body additionally gets taken up within racialized fantasies that align it with the ‘unnatural’ or queer sexuality that Jasbir Puar (2007) argues are part of the production of ‘terrorist assemblages’. Yet, Sboui seems to be intentionally playing with the interpellating of divergent ‘readers’ of her act and in fact may be welcoming the unwieldy affects these disparate readings of her body generate. By choosing to display her image on Facebook, Sboui pits the mobile circulation of images and affects on social media networks (Kofoed & Ringrose, 2012) against the ‘sticky signifiers’ (Ringrose, 2013, p. 93) that perniciously adhere to the bodies of Muslim women. Furthermore, her feminist act is addressed simultaneously to both a local Downloaded by [Newsam Library and Archive Services, Institute of Education, University of London] at 23:33 11 March 2014 8 A.D. Niccolini audience with its message in Arabic as well as to a global viewership through her ties to the international feminist group FEMEN and its display on a Western Internet platform. Unabashedly displaying her naked torso, she revokes Islamic injunctions to cover the female body in modesty but equally revokes Western Orientalist phantasies that seek to control and eroticize the ‘unveiling’ of Muslim women. Proffering her body as an object, she also upends the typical production and consumption of female nudity in popular culture. Whereas Daniela (14) in Ringrose’s study used social media to ‘channel her affect around producing a recognizable form of idealized feminine corporeality’ (p. 122), Sboui’s affect is chanelled into assertively unsettling such idealized forms. As Ringrose points out ‘we actually have very little qualitative research about how children or girls are negotiating their sexual identities in the contexts of the assumed shift that is called the “sexualisation” or “pornification” of culture’ (p. 56). Ringrose further urges us to be attentive to, but not oversimply celebrate, ‘energ[ies] of refusal’ and ‘lines of flight’ girls are taking from their ‘violent capture’ (p. 137) within mediascapes. Sboui’s politicized nudity might be a good case study of how girls are negotiating gender scripts in complex ways. While some teens proliferate stock forms of idealized and sexualized femininity on social media, others may find media ‘life affirming in that it enables [them] to speak back and construct alternative narratives’ (p. 137). Sboui’s act engendered both vilifications and celebrations of feminism. As Ringrose argues, we cannot predict the ways media, discourses, and affects will be taken up and reassembled and as researchers must always be attentive to the ‘immanent possibilities’ (p.137) unceasingly at play in both our research subjects’ and our becomings. On the move Ringrose’s book offers a compelling look at the complex assemblage that is postfeminism. In a time when feminism is seen as anachronistic or worse a dirty word, where subway ads seek to fix the mobility of feminine identity, and where girls use social media to both bolster and destabilize ‘the gender order’, Ringrose’s work is particularly pertinent. Perhaps most importantly, in an educational landscape where, as Ringrose writes, ‘The neo-liberal logic of practicality in the context of accountability, audit cultures and performance targets of schooling shut down thinking’ (p. 149) and where dominant modes of research seek ‘to still and quell the perpetual motion of assemblages, to capture and reduce them, to harness their threatening mobility’ (Puar, 2007, p. 213), Ringrose’s bold theoretical maneuvering and fresh empirical analysis help to remind us that theory itself is an assemblage that is and always should be on the move. I am confident that the theoretical tools which Ringrose has set forth in her book will help many of us wriggle into new spaces of knowledge and prize-free stuck methodologies. Although, I am not exactly sure of the directions they’ll take us, I am delighted to have Ringrose as a companion on the trip. References Berlatsky, N. (2012, December 5). Katy Perry’s aversion to feminism shows feminism is still radical. The Atlantic. Retrieved February 24, 2014, from http://www.theatlantic.com/sexes/ archive/2012/12/katy-perrys-aversion-to-feminism-shows-feminism-is-still-radical/265951/ Braidotti, R. (2006). Affirming the affirmative: On nomadic affectivity. Rhizomes, 11/12. Retrieved February 24, 2014, from http://www.rhizomes.net/issue11/braidotti.html Butler, J. (1990). Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity. New York, NY: Routledge. Downloaded by [Newsam Library and Archive Services, Institute of Education, University of London] at 23:33 11 March 2014 Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education 9 Butler, J. (1993). Bodies that matter: On the discursive limits of ‘sex’. New York, NY: Routledge. Coleman, R., & Ringrose, J. (Ed.). (2013). Deleuze and research methodologies. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Connell, R. W. (1987). Gender and power. Cambridge: Polity. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1984). Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. London: Continuum. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. (B. Massumi, Trans.). Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Jackson, A. Y., & Mazzei, L. A. (2012). Thinking with theory in qualitative research: Viewing data across multiple perspectives. London and New York: Routledge. Kofoed, J., & Ringrose, J. (2012). Travelling and sticky affects: Exploring teens and sexualized cyberbullying through a Butlerian-Deleuzian-Guattarian lens. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 33(1), 5–20. doi:10.1080/01596306.2012.632157 Livesey, G. (2010). Assemblage. In A. Parr (Ed.), The Deleuze dictionary: Revised edition (pp. 18– 19). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Lucey, H., & Reay, D. (2003). The limits of ‘choice’: Children and inner city schooling. Sociology, 37(1), 121–142. Massumi, B. (2002). Parables for the virtual: Movement, affect, sensation. Durham and London: Duke University Press. doi:10.1215/9780822383574 Miller, J. L. (2005). Sounds of silence breaking: Women, autobiography, curriculum. New York, NY: Peter Lang. Miller, J. L. (2013). Traveling auto/biography. Paper presented at the American Educational Research Association annual meeting, San Francisco. Puar, J. (2007). Terrorist assemblages: Homonationalism in queer times. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Renold, E., & Ringrose, J. (2011). Schizoid subjectivities? Re-theorising teen-girls’ sexual cultures in an era of ‘sexualisation’. Journal of Sociology, 47, 389–409. doi:10.1177/1440783311420792 Ringrose, J. (2003). Learning too late? A psychoanalytic reflection on the affective, defensive and repressive dynamics of learning about ‘race’ in Women’s Studies. Resources for Feminist Research, 30(1–2), 33–50. Ringrose, J. (2007). Successful girls? Complicating post-feminist, neo-liberal discourses of educational achievement and gender equality. Gender and Education, 19, 471–489. doi:10. 1080/09540250701442666 Ringrose, J. (2010). Sluts, whores, fat slags and Playboy bunnies: Teen girls’ negotiations of ‘sexy’ on social networking sites and at school. In C. Jackson, C. Paechter, & E. Renold (Eds.), Girls and education 3–16: Continuing concerns, new agendas (pp. 170–182). Basingstoke: Open University Press. Ringrose, J. (2011). Beyond discourse? Using Deleuze and Guattari’s schizoanalysis to explore affective assemblages, heterosexually striated space, and lines of flight online and at school. Educational Philosophy & Theory, 43, 598–618. doi:10.1111/j.1469-5812.2009.00601.x Ringrose, J. (2013). Postfeminist education? Girls and the sexual politics of schooling. London and New York: Routledge. Ringrose, J., & Walkerdine, V. (2008). Regulating the abject: The TV make-over as site of neoliberal reinvention toward bourgeois femininity. Feminist Media Studies, 8, 227–246. doi:10. 1080/14680770802217279 Whitlock, G. (2006). Soft weapons: Autobiography in transit. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.