Digital media and ‘girling’ at an elite girls' school

Abstract

In this article, I draw on Judith Butler's notion of performativity to investigate the role of digital technologies in processes of gendered subjectification (or ‘girling’) in elite girls' education. Elite girls' schooling is a site where the potential of digital technologies in mediating student‐led constructions and explorations of ‘femininity’ sits alongside school‐produced digital media in the form of promotional texts, in which young femininity is regulated by discourses of ‘girl power’. Whilst such schools are well equipped with digital resources that might be utilised towards students' interrogation of how ‘femininity’ is understood, thus politicising the girling process, school‐produced digital media inscribe a more prescriptive picture of ‘who’ an elite school‐girl can ‘be’. Lyla Girls' Grammar School (LGGS) is an elite secondary school in Melbourne, Australia. I report on research undertaken at two institutional levels of LGGS: the ‘school’ level in which digital media representations of young women are produced by the school and the ‘classroom’ level, in which media education pedagogy includes interactive web conferencing software. The use of digital technologies in media education appeared to support student‐led construction and interrogation of femininities to some extent. I argue that this kind of student‐led girling is important in the context of more prescriptive school‐level girling practices.

Acknowledgements

I would like to acknowledge the staff and students at LGGS who generously offered the support and time that allowed me to undertake data collection for this project. Particular thanks are due to Wil and his year 10 students. Thanks also to the two anonymous reviewers, and the editorial team, for their extremely useful feedback on an earlier draft of this article.