Schizoid subjectivities?: Re-theorising teen-girls’ sexual cultures in an era of ‘sexualisation’, (original) (raw)
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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.
Journal of Sociology, 2011
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...
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, 2012
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’.
Feminist Media Studies, 2012
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.