Ringrose, J. and Renold, E. (2012) Teen girls, working class femininity and resistance: Re-theorizing fantasy and desire in educational contexts of heterosexualized violence, (original) (raw)
Related papers
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’.
Jessica Ringrose, Postfeminist Education? Girls and the sexual politics of schooling
Feminism and Psychology, 2013
"One of the central aims of Ringrose’s new book is to create a more nuanced way of understanding how young girls and women are located within a knotted array of entanglements and ‘assemblages’, embodied by the cultural figures of the successful girl, the mean girl and the sexy girl. First, the ‘successful girl’ seems to underscore all three figures, as the (white, middle class) girl who is deemed to have benefited too much from the feminist movement. She is a girl whose success, while located at the perfectly neoliberal individual level, has resulted in a broader feminisation of cultural space, to the point where sexism is now a problem faced by boys. In the second figure, Ringrose develops previous work in Feminism and Psychology (Ringrose, 2006), expertly demonstrating the classed bias of the ‘mean girl’. The middle class mean girl’s psychological and indirect aggression has been normalised, so that this normalisation is placed in contrast to the assumed working class violent girl, with Ringrose drawing into this analysis the 2011 London Riot’s media focus on ‘Riot Girls’ (yet another media recuperation of a feminist movement) as symbols of femininity gone wrong. Finally the ‘sexy girl’ is a figure who is pathologised within the saturating rhetoric of the ‘sexualisation of culture’, which requires girls to maintain an image of white middle classed innocence, and yet these girls are at the same time provided with opportunities for their bodies to become a locus of desire and erotic capital. On the one hand girls are seen as the citizens of the future, and yet their sexuality is regarded as dangerous and devious, so that any real discussion of female pleasure (in for example sex education) is regulated and rendered invisible through calls to roll back misplaced feminist notions of ‘sexual liberation’."
Girl Culture - An Encyclopedia, 2007
In this chapter we examine the representational terrain of contemporary girlhood in the West, particularly the discursive construction of successful girls, mean girls, bad girls and violent girls. We will explore the core contemporary dilemma foisted upon girls to somehow balance particular versions of masculinity and femininity, through analysis of media, popular culture and psychological and educational debates, and through data from our own empirical research studies with girls. We use feminist, post-structural, post-Foucauldian methods of mapping discursive regulations of femininity, considering in particular how massive concern over girl aggression and mean-ness might be related to current gender anxieties over middle-class "girl power", and girls success We will look at the pathologization of the successful but mean ‘Supergirl’ and the counterpoint to girls’ success – the failed, deviant, abject, violent non-feminine subject who must be transformed.
The Sad, the Mad and the Bad: Co-Existing Discourses of Girlhood
Child & Youth Care Forum, 2010
Three significant, prevailing and overlapping narratives of teenage girls have dominated North American popular consciousness since the early 1990s: the sad girl, victimized by male privilege and misogyny of adolescence and beyond; the mad grrrls who rejected this vulnerability through music and media; and the bad girls of much current popular debate, those girls who are bad because they are conniving and/or because they are violent. This article reviews these three discourses by locating them within their historical contexts, including conceptualizations of the 'girl' from feminist poststructuralist perspectives. Literature from the field of girlhood studies provides the basis from which the discourses of growing up female are explored. Keywords Girlhood Á Femininity Á Discourse Á Gendered constructions Á Violence Á Relational aggression Á Intersectional analysis This article details three significant, prevailing and overlapping narratives of teenage girls, including the sad girl story that dominated North America the early 1990s, she who was victimized by male privilege and misogyny of adolescence and beyond, the mad grrrls who rebuked this vulnerability, and the bad girls of much current popular debate, those girls who are bad because they are conniving and/or because they are violent. The article begins by examining history and debates surrounding the term 'girl', in order to raise questions regarding the construction of the label and set the context for how these stories have circulated. Literature from the field of girlhood studies provides the basis from which the discourses of growing up female are explored.
Feminisms re-figuring 'sexualisation', sexuality and 'the girl'
Feminist Theory, 2013
"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."
Reassembling feminism, Alyssa D. Niccolini
Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education,, 2014
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.
Introduction Reimagining Girls' Resistance
Since the establishment of Girls' studies as a distinct research field within feminist scholarship in the early 1990s, interest in girls' practices of "doing girl-hood" (Currie, Kelly, & Pomerantz, 2009, p. 3) appears to be blooming and expanding into diverse areas of knowledge-from communications and psychology to education and art. This vibrant expansion is also marked by a desire to situate girls as active agents and producers of culture and meaning and to understand their subject positions: a view that is distinctly different from a previously popular (and largely objectivist) construction of girls as victims of the dominant patriarchal discourses and representations. While we see this recent paradigm shift as important and necessary, since it attempts to access actual girls' lived experiences and goes beyond the analysis of girl constructions in popular texts, we also see it as problematic and contested. Most importantly, it creates what Valerie Walkerdine (2007) called a "split. 0 0 between the passive consumer and the active maker of meaning" (po 5) that perpetuates the dichotomies of "activity and passivity" (p. 7) in our understanding of the girl subject. These dichotomies of active/passive and agent/victim-akin to the classic subject/object split-can lead us to simplistic assumptions that in order to see a girl as a subject, we have to reposition her as an "active" maker of meaning who can intentionally resist the dominant constructions of gender and ultimately liberate herself from them. As Walkerdine argued, this view of activity/agency is rooted in the Cartesian philosophical tradition that under-_2
Journal of British Cinema and Television, 2020
This article focuses on the BBC1 three-part drama Three Girls, broadcast in July 2017, which dramatised the Rochdale child sex-grooming gang scandal of 2011 and won five BAFTAs in 2018. While many of the dominant press narratives focused on the ethnicity of the perpetrators, few accounts of the scandal spoke to the need for a sustained public discussion of the class location of the victims. This article considers how the process of recognising the social problem of sex-grooming is set up for the audience through a particular mode of address. In many ways the drama rendered visible the structural conditions that provided the context for this abuse by drawing on the expanded repertoires of television social realism: the representation of the town as abuser; the championing of heroic working-class women; and the power of working-class vernacular. However, ultimately, the narrative marginalises the type of girl most likely to be the victim of this form of sexual abuse. By focusing on th...
Postmodernist Fictions of Girlhood: "Child-Drag” in The Stain and Blood and Guts in High School
New Horizons in English Studies
Whilst scholarship about postmodernist american literature has tended to focus on the entanglements of power, language, identity, and history, few have noted the important role played by children and child culture. reading rikki Ducornet's The Stain and Kathy acker's Blood and Guts in High School through the lens of literary child studies can usefully demonstrate the ways in which postmodernist literature relies on depictions of childhood to interrogate language and culture acquisition, analogised in terms of parental, pedagogical and institutional control. Ducornet and acker's novels, in particular, use a young girl's voice-to borrow a phrase from acker, a kind of 'child-drag'-to explore themes of control and female sexuality, and to demonstrate the broader difficulty of achieving some 'authentic' identity, when 'identity' is so often viewed as violence submitted from without. In conjunction with poststructuralist and feminist theories of identity-making, this essay will explore how both Ducornet and acker use the form of the bildungsroman to explore how a self-effacing girlhood beset by naïve bad faith can try to transform itself-through a characteristically postmodernist disassembly of language-into a new and more authentic language of the self.