Girlhood Studies

2. Sexting is often coercive. Sexting does not refer to a single activity but rather to a range of activities which may be motivated by sexual pleasure but are often coercive, linked to harassment, bullying and even violence. There is no easy line to be drawn between sexting and bullying, for instance, and much may be learned from anti-cyberbullying initiatives to address the problem of sexting. To achieve this, teachers, parents and other adults must be willing to discuss sexual matters and sexual bullying and cyberbullying with teenagers, including as part of existing anti-bullying initiatives.

This viewpoint begins by exploring whether the global phenomenon of the 2011 ‘SlutWalks’ constitutes a feminist politics of re-signification. We then look at some qualitative, focus group data with teen girls who participated in a UK SlutWalk. We suggest girls are negotiating a schizoid double pull towards performing knowing sexy ‘slut’ in postfeminist media contexts, but also managing de-sexualising protectionist discourses in school, particularly in relation to the highly regulatory moral panic over child ‘sexualisation’. We consider whether the SlutWalks are adult-centric and if teen girls’ involvement in a SlutWalk offered any critical rupturings to sexual regulation in their everyday lives.

ABSTRACT Drawing upon theories that reconceptualize toys and artifacts as identity texts, this study employs mediated discourse analysis to examine children's videotaped writing and play interactions with princess dolls and stories in one kindergarten classroom. The study reported here is part of a three-year ethnographic study of literacy play in US early childhood classrooms.

""Postfeminist Education? challenges a contemporary postfeminist sensibility grounded not only in assumptions that gender and sexual equality has been achieved in many Western contexts, but that feminism has gone ‘too far’ with women and girls now overtaking men and boys - positioned as the new victims of gender transformations. The book is the first to outline and critique how educational discourses have directly fed into postfeminist anxieties, exploring three postfeminist panics over girls and girlhood that circulate widely in the international media and popular culture. First it explores how a masculinity crisis over failing boys in school has spawned a backlash discourse about overly successful girls; second it looks at how widespread anxieties over girls becoming excessively mean and/or violent have positioned female aggression as pathological; third it examines how incessant concerns over controlling risky female sexuality underpin recent sexualisation of girls moral panics. The book outlines how these postfeminist panics over girlhood have influenced educational policies and practices in areas such as academic achievement, anti-bullying strategies and sex-education curriculum, making visible the new postfeminist, sexual politics of schooling.

Moving beyond media or policy critique, however, this book offers new theoretical and methodological tools for researching postfeminism, girlhood and education. It engages with current theoretical debates over possibilities for girls’ agency and empowerment in postfeminist, neo-liberal contexts of sexual regulation. It also elaborates new psychosocial and feminist Deleuzian methodological approaches for mapping subjectivity, affectivity and social change. Drawing on two UK empirical research projects exploring teen-aged girls’ own perspectives and responses to postfeminist panics, the book shows how real girls are actually negotiating notions of girls as overly successful, mean, violent, aggressive and sexual. The data offers rich insight into girls’ gendered, raced and classed experiences at school and beyond, exploring teen peer cultures, friendship, offline and online sexual identities, and bullying and cyberbullying. The data illuminates how and when girls take up and identify with postfeminist trends, but also at times attempt to re-work, challenge and critique the contradictory discourses of girlhood and femininity. In this sense the book offers an opportunity for girls to ‘talk back’ to the often simplistic either wildly celebratory or crisis-based sensationalism of postfeminist panics over girlhood.

This book will be essential reading for those interested in feminism, girlhood, media studies, gender and education.""

This paper provides a case study of African-descent girls of multiracial heritage, who have been culturally constructed as 'white' girls prior to puberty, only to later construct a non-white 'black' or 'biracial' identity after moving to a different residential, cultural and ideological community - the University of California at Berkeley. Drawing upon 16 taped interviews with African-descent university students, this paper delineates the specific cultural conditions under which a racially neutral 'white' identity is acquired, constructed and then re-constructed by a segment of the African-descent community, who are the daughters of Asian and/or European American women in economically privileged households in suburban communities.

Postfeminist Digital Cultures provides a detailed and theoretically informed account of girls’ and young women’s social media practices and self-representations.  It is especially concerned with social media practices that have largely been framed as ‘dangerous’ and ‘problematic’.  Dobson draws on feminist and sociological theories of media and culture to examine young women’s sexual images on social network sites, notions of ‘transparency’ and ‘authenticity’ in young women’s social media self-descriptions, sexting, ‘Am I Pretty or Ugly’ videos, and girls’ YouTube vlogs describing bullying and self-harm. Dobson delves beyond alarmist accounts to ask what it is we fear about young women’s self-representation in networked publics and why.  In doing so she provides a cogent account of the complexity of digitally mediating young femininity in the postfeminist era.

"The popularity of classical ballet as a cultural form grows apace in a global context. Even in a country like Japan, which has not been previously identified as a “ballet capital,” it is receiving wide public attention. As a conventionally female-dominated arena, ballet and the ideas that circulate around it reveal the complex interrelationship between femininity, beauty, and selfhood. A prime example is the understudied genre of “ballet manga” in Japanese Shōjo Manga culture.

With the first examples published in the mid-1950s, the history of ballet-themed manga reveals that, particularly in the years following the Second World War, ballet was the epitome of a dream world, connoting luxury, beauty, and glamour. “Ballet manga” used this particular art form, its costumes, and romanticized, almost fairy tale-like settings of Old World Europe as a mix of femininity, rigor, and elegance remade for Japanese audiences. Since the 1970s, some authors have attempted to combine this imagery of ballet with the idea of feminine independence and agency, thus negotiating the paradox of reality and fantasy in lived experience. Ballet, therefore, is not presented simply on the stage but in Japan is frequently interpreted/experienced through Shōjo Manga. This distinctive situation deserves closer scholarly investigation. "

This chapter examines the representation of female friendship on MySpace, based on a sample of 45 public MySpace profiles owned by young Australian women, aged between 18 and 21 years old. Two prominent constructions of female friendship on this social network site are outlined: firstly, female friendships as idealistically party-oriented, ‘wild’, and rowdy; and secondly, female friendships as close, loyal, and intimate — comparable in the depth of feeling and connection expressed to romantic partnerships or family ties. These idealised, performative constructions of female friendship, in the context of online self-presentation, also seem to rely on exclusivity, and opposition of selves and friendship groups to a feminised outsider/‘other’. Some of the political implications of such representation are discussed from a feminist perspective. I suggest some ways in which ideals and goals of female representation to emerge from second-wave feminist media and performance critique might be said to have actualised and failed to actualise in these online performances of friendship and identity created by young women.

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.

In this paper I argue towards a theory of complicity between two recently prominent constructions of young womanhood in popular mediated culture: the figure of the ‘sexy’ girl and the figure of the ‘laddish’ girl.  The panics that exist around both the figures of the ‘sexy girl’ and the ‘laddish girl’ lead me to try to unpack how it is that concerns about women’s ‘sexiness’, and the gendered reinforcement of the sex-object role, relate to discourses of gender ‘transgression’ that often circulate around the figure of the ‘ladette’ in popular culture, and the supposedly new-found freedoms she is exercising.  As I discuss, we can see evidence of ‘sexy’ and ‘laddish’-type self-representation on young women’s own public social network site postings.  This appropriation of ‘sexiness’ and ‘laddishness’ in self-produced media may lead to a further opening and complication of meanings when it comes to interpreting such representations from a feminist perspective. However, I suggest that, ultimately, a central impact of the co-existence of these two figures may be that they act to prop each other up within a post-feminist media landscape.  It may be that, politically and ideologically, one could not exist without the other being somewhere close at hand; or rather, ‘close at sight’ in our collective cultural mind’s eye, our ‘public imagination’ (Tyler, 2008, p. 18). Young women’s material and discursive ‘sexualisation’ may not propagate so relentlessly and easily without the oppositional figure of ‘social change’ which the ‘ladette’ has come to symbolise.  Likewise, the ‘laddish girl’ figure may not be so prominent within recent Western popular culture without the ready availability of the figure of feminine deferral offered by her ‘sexy girl’ counterpart.

Resumen. El propósito del artículo consiste en analizar los elementos ideológicos que atraviesan las políticas de intervención con la infancia vulnerable a través de la consideración crítica del mismo concepto de vulnerabilidad. Para ello, nos remitimos a los debates sobre el sujeto que nos permiten analizar los modos de reconocimiento hegemónico de la infancia como dependiente, vulnerable y sin agencia. La infancia se construye de manera relacional a la de los agentes de intervención social (sistema de protección y ayuda humanitaria) que serán los encargados de rescatar a la infancia de su situación de vulnerabilidad. Seguidamente, analizamos dos casos de construcción de infancia vulnerable: la de los niños (en masculino) que migran solos del Sur al Norte global y la de las niñas (en femenino) que ocupan los relatos de las campañas de desarrollo de los países empobrecidos. Nos encontramos con dos construcciones generizadas de la infancia a la que se le aplican atributos diferenciados en cuanto a la consideración de su capacidad agente y a la interpretación y limitación de su vulnerabilidad. En un caso, los chicos migrantes son construidos como molestos para el sistema, mientras que el otro, las niñas en los países en desarrollo se construyen como como referentes inspiradores. Palabras clave: Infancia; agencia; vulnerabilidad; neoliberalismo; postfeminismo. [pt] Nem vilões nem heroínas: discursos sobre crianças vulneráveis Resumo. O objetivo deste artigo é analisar os elementos ideológicos que cruzam as políticas de intervenção com crianças vulneráveis através da consideração crítica do próprio conceito de vulnerabilidade. Nos referimos aos debates sobre o sujeito que nos permitem analisar o modo hegemônico de reconhecimento da infância como dependente, vulnerável e carente de agência. A infância é construída de maneira relacional à dos agentes de intervenção social (sistema de proteção e ajuda humanitária) que serão responsáveis por resgatar as crianças de sua situação vulnerável. Dois casos de construção de uma infância vulnerável são estudados: o de meninos (no masculino) que migram sozinhos do Sul para o Norte global e o de meninas (no feminino) que ocupam as histórias das campanhas de desenvolvimento de países pobres. Encontramos duas construções geradas da infância às quais atributos diferenciados são aplicados em relação à capacidade de seus agentes e à interpretação e limites de sua vulnerabilidade. Por um lado, os meninos migrantes são construídos como irritantes para o sistema; por outro, as meninas nos países em desenvolvimento são construídas como referências inspiradoras. Abstract. The aim of this article is to analyze the ideological elements that cross intervention policies with vulnerable children through the critical consideration of the very concept of vulnerability. We refer to the debates on the subject that allow us to analyze the hegemonic mode of recognition of childhood as dependent, vulnerable and lacked of agency. Childhood is built in a relational way to that of social intervention agents (protection and humanitarian aid system) who will be responsible for rescuing children from their vulnerable situation. Two cases of construction of vulnerable childhood are studied: that of boys (in masculine) who migrate alone from the South to the global North, and that of girls (in feminine) that occupy the stories of the development campaigns of impoverished countries. We find two generized constructions of childhood to which differentiated attributes are applied regarding their agent capacity and the interpretation and limits of their vulnerability. On one hand, migrant boys are constructed as annoying for the system, on the other girls in developing countries are constructed as inspiring references.

This paper uses close analysis of two couples to examine the micro-practices and processes of gendered power within middle-class young people's intimate partner relationships. It is based on in-depth interviews with 14–16 year old young people in an affluent area of England. The paper argues that intimate relationships can be spaces of intense pleasure, as well as providing a site of calm and escape from the peer surveillance of the broader social network. However, they can also be oppressive sites of constriction and control, and reproduction of traditional gendered narratives; in these couples, the young women were rendered responsible for the “emotion work”. The young women, though, often disavowed and downplayed inequalities, negotiating the contradictory and schizoid nature of contemporary girlhood.

Within physical education and sport, girls must navigate discourses of valued athletic and gendered bodies that marginalise or ‘other’ non-normative performances through systems of surveillance and punishment. The purpose of this paper is to share girls’ perspectives on how these discourses affected their gender performances and activity engagement. Students aged 13-14 in one ethnically diverse UK secondary school were invited to create a photo diary of the physical activities they engaged in. Photo elicitation interviews in small groups followed. The girls positioned themselves as physically active but had to carefully manage their activity choices and gender performances in a single-sex physical education environment that regulated deviation from the fit, slender, girly girl. Although the girls demonstrate the difficulty of resisting, they indicate moments of positioning themselves against norms that suggest the possibilities of shifting gendering processes. The paper points out the importance of listening to ‘other’ girls’ narratives in building positive physical education engagements.

This article examines the recently released Girl Rising film and
associated campaign to analyze how the guarantee that girls’
education is panacea for local, national and global solutions is
sedimented through affective logics. I view Girl Rising as a
curriculum inclusive of the film, accompanying packaged lesson
plans for educators, and related discourses and affects. The Girl
Rising curriculum is part of a larger discursive development
apparatus that anchors particular storylines about the relationship
between girlhood, education and development as truth. I attend to
textual and visual representations of empowered Third World
girlhood in the Girl Rising curriculum. While empathy is often
understood as a good feeling, I analyze its precarious dimensions,
which are cultivated through curricular encounters between the
Western spectator/learner and the Third World Girl. I ask: How is the
ideal Third World Girl produced in and as curriculum? What are
viewers provoked to feel as they consume her potential, and what
knowledges about development do these feelings crystallize?
Finally, what implications does this have on the production of Third
World girlhood?

This chapter is a companion to the previous one, since Lee and Park come from the very same village in North Korea and their life-writing projects capitalize on the notion of a North Korean girl who  escapes, travels to China and onto a Global North final destination. Girlhood is maximized by both, but their self-narration differs in other ways. Though Park fits the girl trope of humanitarian discourse, she strives to move past the category of victim and redefine herself as a survivor. The remediation/curation of Park’s self on social media platforms—but also offline—is assessed to gauge the impact those may have had in crafting a public persona, a celebrity activist, as she has been enrolled in causes beyond Korean activism, namely feminism.

This article explores girls' learning about issues of femininity that takes place in the presence of others online, connected through chat rooms, instant mes-saging, and role-playing games. Informed by critical and poststructuralist feminist theorizing of gendered subjectivity, agency, and power, the article draws from qualitative interviews with 16 girls in Vancouver, Canada. Girls reported that online activities allowed them to rehearse different ways of being before trying them out offline, where they might have been reined in for going against perceived expectations for their gender. The article shows that girls enjoyed playing with gender and being gender rebellious. They practiced taking more initiative in heterosexual relationships than is currently authorized in prevailing rules of romance. Without necessarily challenging the underlying gendered power inequalities, some battled back in cyberspace against sexual harassment. In the conclusion, the authors reflect on the implications for girls' individual and collective empowerment and for transforma-tive pedagogy.

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’.

The currents of elitism surging through curriculum studies in the United States have long been of chief concern to critical scholars in the field. Elements of this elitism running along racialized, gendered, classed and other such lines elide to marginalize knowledge generated by and about the “other.” For this racialized, gendered, classed and otherwise marked “other,” curriculum can be conceptualized as an unwelcoming and uninhabitable space. In this article, I focus on how Black feminist theorizing refuses the “othering” of Black girls and women in curriculum. I re-search the curricular space through a Black feminist framework, and discover the hopeful existence of Black social life, as opposed to social death, in its charred soils. My application of this lens to a reparative reading of Jamaica Kincaid’s “Girl” finds that the author subversively disrupts the status quo by de-centering the Western world – in which whiteness is inherently deified – while simultaneously representing Black girls and women as agentic, textured subjects, rather than passive, one-dimensional objects. These findings magnify the radical affordances of Black feminist theorizing for critical curriculum studies by illustrating the promise of this framework for propelling the field beyond deconstruction and toward re-imaginings of the human, as well as engagements with diverse versions and visions of the human unhinged from the White, Western man as the quintessential human being.

This paper explores representations of girls in current discourses of neoliberal development through an analysis of a range of texts that promote the global Girl Effect movement. These representations are situated in the context of theoretical debates about gender mainstreaming and policy developments that construct girls and women's 'empowerment' as 'smart economics'. The paper draws on postcolonial and transnational feminist analyses that critique market-led approaches to development and their complicities in the dynamics of neo-colonialism and uneven development, to contextualise the Girl Effect movement. It is argued that the Girl Effect movement draws on colonial stereotypes of girls as sexually and culturally constrained, but reworks these through the discourses of neoliberal development to construct girls as good investment potential. In doing so, it reproduces a dominant narrative that highlights the cultural causes of poverty but obscures structural relations of exploitation and privilege.

Dominated by LGBTQ+ and female-identified fans from various backgrounds, Tumblr blogs dedicated to queer readings of the BBC television series Sherlock (2010–ongoing) are a breeding ground for less-discussed forms of unremunerated queer labor: utopian, heuris-tic, and care work. In their digital fanworks, Tumblr queer users marry crafts associated with domestic heterosexual femininity (collage and scrapbooking) with established female fan practices (slashing and shipping) to articulate complex sexual and gender identities and navigate neuro-divergent mental health statuses. This article examines the shifts real-time digital interactivity and transmedia storytelling have introduced to viewer/producer power relations. Unpacking " queer cryptography " as a form of reception labor offers a feminist reading of the diverse modes of LGBTQ+ identification, kinship, and activism performed by queer female viewers on Tumblr, while questioning the vulnerability and possible exploitation of the unsanctioned affective labor produced by such a desperately underrepresented demographic.

The aim of this article is to examine the ‘turn to the girl’ and the mobilisation of ‘girl power’ in contemporary global humanitarian and development campaigns. The paper argues that the ‘girl powering’ of humanitarianism is connected to the simultaneous depoliticisation, corporatisation and neo-liberalisation of both humanitarianism and girl power.
Located in broad discussions of campaigns around Malala, Chime for Change and the Girl Effect, the paper seeks to understand the construction of girls as both ideal victims and ideal agents of change, and to examine the implications of this. It suggests that this shift is intertwined with what we call ‘selfie humanitarianism’ in which helping others is intimately connected to entrepreneurial projects of the self, and is increasingly figured less in terms of redistribution or justice than in terms of a makeover of subjectivity for all concerned.

Although many studies have examined the image of women in advertising, the current study is the first to look at the representations of motherhood and mothering practices in contemporary Israeli TV commercials in an attempt to shed light on the ideological constructs they reflect and promote. 64 TV commercials were analyzed using critical discourse analysis.
In many ads the mother is depicted as aesthetically pleasing and shapely. This inclusion of the beauty myth in all its cruel demands into the can-do mother myth, could lead Israeli women to a sense of failure as they compare themselves to the glamorous image in the ads and invariably fall short.
The hetero couple-headed nuclear family shown in many ads seems to be a conservative manifestation of the assumption that the “good mother” exists only in the framework of the normative family unit. It seems that in the context of the advertising genre, it is products that lie at the heart of family and couple relationships, and that it is therefore possible to speak of the commodification of the family. The study also found progressive images of the clever, resourceful mother alongside the pathetic, ridiculed one – a new kind of a 'bad mother'.

About the book
Offering critical response to a range of popular debates on children's sexual cultures, this ground-breaking volume challenges preconceived and accepted theories regarding children, sexuality and sexualisation. The contributions to this collection offer compelling accounts from a range of disciplinary fields and transnational contexts to present original empirical research findings, which offer
new ways to make sense of children's sexual cultures across complex political, social and cultural terrains. Organised into five sections, this book addresses the history of young
sexualities research and theory across disciplinary boundaries; pre-teen sexualities and a rethinking of sexual agency and innocence; how space, place and history shape young queer
sexualities; the representation of young sexualities in the popular cultural imaginary; and the role of new media and digital technology in the formation of children and young
people's sexual cultures.

"“Bernstein’s powerful account of how the sentimental ideology of childhood innocence, and particularly its highly gendered manifestations, function to articulate racial hierarchies gives strong and detailed evidence for how paying attention to childhood serves to refocus many all too familiar, and troublesome, facets of American culture. I know of virtually no one of her generation who writes with this kind of verve, authority and pleasure. Racial Innocence will prove an important and widely read book—in part simply because it will be so much fun to read.”
—Karen Sánchez-Eppler, Amherst College

“Nineteenth and early twentieth-century material culture comes alive in Robin Bernstein’s brilliant study of the racialized and gendered ideologies that shape, inform and continue to haunt notions of American childhood into the present day. Through imaginative and masterfully innovative archival research, Bernstein shows how representations of childhood and child’s play are integral to the making of whiteness and blackness and citizenship in this country. Racial Innocence is a groundbreaking book that for the first time illuminates the powerful and critical connections between constructions of girlhood, racial formations and American popular culture.”

—Daphne Brooks, Princeton University

In Racial Innocence, Robin Bernstein argues that the concept of “childhood innocence” has been central to U.S. racial formation since the mid-nineteenth century. Children—some imbued with innocence, others excluded from it—figured pivotally in sharply divergent racial agendas from slavery and abolition to antiblack violence and the early civil rights movement.

Bernstein takes up a rich archive including books, toys, theatrical props, and domestic knickknacks which she analyzes as “scriptive things” that invite or prompt historically-located practices while allowing for resistance and social improvisation. Integrating performance studies with literary and visual analysis, Bernstein offers singular readings of theatrical productions from blackface minstrelsy to Uncle Tom’s Cabin to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz; literary works by Joel Chandler Harris, Harriet Wilson, and Frances Hodgson Burnett; material culture including Topsy pincushions, Uncle Tom and Little Eva handkerchiefs, and Raggedy Ann dolls; and visual texts ranging from fine portraiture to advertisements for lard substitute. Throughout, Bernstein shows how “innocence” gradually became the exclusive province of white children—until the Civil Rights Movement succeeded not only in legally desegregating public spaces, but in culturally desegregating the concept of childhood itself.

Robin Bernstein is Associate Professor of African and African American Studies and Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Harvard University. Her previous books include Cast Out: Queer Lives in Theater.

In the America and the Long 19th Century series"

Often girls are the objects of the camera's lens and subjects of the researcher's gaze. This article describes a qualitative study using a collaborative, creative and critical methodology to explore girls' perspectives on gender, citizenship and schooling. The seven adolescent girl participants used Photovoice to engage with their roles as girl-citizens. Despite Canada's international reputation as a leader in gender equality, evidence reveals that challenges still prevent their full participation, particularly in formal politics. This research raises questions about what life is like for girls and women in Canada beyond the rhetoric and global rankings, and adds to the often disconnected bodies of literature on girlhood, citizenship and education.

This chapter first contextualizes the cam girl phenomenon by discussing the values signified by ‘girl power’ narratives in popular culture and culture for girls - visibility, celebrity and consumerism.    I argue that this public exposure of girl ‘bedroom culture’ does not necessarily signify a change in the nature of girl culture as traditionally private, personal and domestically located, but further blurs the boundaries between public and private space and life for girls.  While the cam girl scenario may have turned teenage-girl bedroom culture into a public, productive and commodified cultural space, the phenomenon seems to be still dependant on a reproduction and exploitation of more traditional notions of girl culture (as private and domestic) and well-established representations of young femininity.

In a textual analysis of public social network site (SNS) profiles owned by young women aged between 18 and 21, many of the profiles contain representations of self which would typically be considered ‘unfeminine’. Photos of young women and their friends posed with wide open mouths and protruding tongues and images depicting drunkenness and raucousness are common. This kind of ‘laddish’ performativity by young women leaves feminists, especially those concerned with cultural representation, with a dilemma: is ‘feminist representation’ to be found in this aspect of SNS representation, in this kind of ‘symbolically inverted’ depiction of feminine bodies? Does this kind of ‘laddish’ performativity by young women function less as a rebellion against femininity and more as a kind of ‘giving in’ to a certain model of masculinity; as a ‘phallic’ form of girlhood now licensed by the patriarchy; or even an indication of ‘feminine melancholia’, predicated on the broader cultural rejection of critical feminist voices? In this article, I suggest that neither paradigms of resistance or conformity completely suffice for understanding ‘laddishness’ by young women in the context of a viewing premise of self-production, such as that we encounter with SNS material. I start by offering a possible feminist reading of ‘laddish’ body performativity by young women on SNSs, drawing from theories of the ‘grotesque body’ in representation as well as from Mulvey's psychological explanation of ‘voyeuristic’ viewing pleasure in narrative cinema. I go on to develop the concept of ‘performative shamelessness’ by young women and expand upon its possible significations in the post-feminist, neoliberal cultural landscape. Engaging in particular with McRobbie's ideas about the post-feminist era, I suggest that performative shamelessness may be one of the few options available to young women wishing to maintain a sense of self-definition in the face of intense social and cultural scrutinizing, and often sexually objectifying, gazes.

The Girlhood Project (TGP) is a community based, service-learning/research program that is part of the undergraduate course at Lesley University called “Girlhood, Identity and Girl Culture.” TGP works with community partners to bring middle and high school girls to Lesley’s campus for nine weeks as part of intergenerational girls’ groups that are co-facilitated by Lesley students (also referred to as TGP students). TGP fosters the development of feminist leadership, critical consciousness, voice, and community action, and activism in all participants. In this article, we describe how we adapted TGP’s model to a virtual and synchronous platform for students during COVID-19 and supported their learning competencies. We reflect critically on this experience by centering the voices and perspectives of girls, students, and professors.

This article considers the representation of the adolescent female body and the relevance of corporeality in Catholicism in three Western European films, which have at their centre the religious confirmation. These are: Un poison violent (Love Like Poison, 2010, Katell Quilléveré), Corpo celeste (Heavenly Body, 2011, Alice Rohrwacher), and Kreuzweg (Stations of the Cross, 2014, Dietrich Brüggemann). The sacrament of confirmation as portrayed in the three films becomes the axis around which the dynamics of adolescence (i.e., changing body, blossoming sexuality, family conflicts) unfold, opening up a space for the analysis of the interplay between female subjectivities and Catholicism's regulatory role. We look at the often-subtle violence exerted by Catholicism in an attempt to tame the female body and the ways female adolescents (re)negotiate their identity against the backdrop of religious authority. Our contention is that, in the films, the female protagonists' subtraction from the confirmation becomes a way to distance themselves from the Catholic obedient body and reaffirm their individual, embodied subjectivity. To this end, we engage with the complex relationship between Catholicism, women, and women's bodies, exploring the dichotomy between the Catholic ideal, unchangeable body and the continually-changing, desiring female bodies.

Investment in girls' education is offered as a salve to the Global South that will alleviate poverty, prevent terrorism, and curb gender-based violence. Rather than treat this thesis and its evidentiary basis as axiomatic, we examine some of the conditions for the intelligibility of this crisis, prevalent in much international development and education reform discourse today. Archival study of transnational school reforms in Kenya Colony-specifically the Jeanes School in the 1920s and 1930s and Mau Mau prison camp reeducation in the 1950s and 1960s-makes visible how domesticity has offered a shifting biopolitical strategy, wherein acceding to one's properly gendered roles was made a condition for economic and political maturity for racialized populations. We explore how residues of colonial domesticity persist in the exceptionalism of the girl, yoking the performance of "proper" notions of modern girl and womanhood as conditions for social progress and economic development.

This article explores the multiple discursive negotiations through which adolescent fat subjectivities are reconstituted in two films, namely Gippi (2013) and Fanney Khan (2018). Taking an intersectional approach between the fat acceptance movement and girlhood studies, it demonstrates how the female protagonists challenge, question, and eventually undermine the hitherto existing paradigms of corporeality in Hindi cinema. The fat female body that is often relegated to the margins of the diegetic spaces of visual representations and popular cultures in South Asia, is accorded narrative centrality to provide a differential grammar of beauty, success, and empowerment. Though fatness is delineated in these two films as either a subject of intense hostility and antagonism between competing girls or a matter of desexualized femininity and traditional sartorial choices, it still facilitates an oppositional and counter-hegemonic ideal that destabilizes dominant notions of sizeism and fatphobia.

Abstract: There seems to be a global consensus that girls’ education is a commonsensical solution to issues as wide-ranging as poverty, fertility, human trafficking, and terrorism, in the global south. In this article, I inquire into how this common sense about girls’ education is produced and sustained. I examine how two radically specific happenings – the shooting of Malala Yousafzai in Pakistan in 2012, and the kidnapping of schoolgirls in Chibok, Nigeria, in 2013 – were transformed into ‘events’ of international concern, and how girls’ education has come to be proposed as the solution. In doing so, I highlight the histories, and social and political realities, that the common sense around girls’ education conceals and its implications for the well-being of populations in the global south.

In recent years, depictions of strong but feminine girl heroes have become common in children’s television programming. These girl power icons reflect changing cultural ideas about girlhood. Nickelodeon’s My Life as a Teenage Robot is a cartoon popular among preadolescents, which follows the exploits of Jenny, a powerful, female-gendered robot who must save the world while also surviving the trials of high school. This article examines My Life as a Teenage Robot’s discourse on girl power and the construction of identity. It focuses on a key theme that contradicts other texts about girl heroes: that strength, agency, and normative femininity cannot be embodied in the same individual. This article interrogates the ways in which the show’s messages are simultaneously progressive and regressive, and it calls for further research on girls’ reception of media texts.