Complicating hetero‐femininities: young women, sexualities and ‘girl power’ at school

Abstract

This paper is concerned with expanding knowledge of how femininity/sexuality intersections are constituted in secondary schools. Existing studies have drawn upon Judith Butler’s notion of a ‘heterosexual matrix’ in order to understand how intersections of femininity/sexuality are produced in schools through normative discourses of heterosexuality and gender. Drawing on ‘after‐queer’ theoretical resources from within cultural studies that focus on the deployment of notions of sexuality within constructions of intelligible citizenship, I explore how the femininity/sexuality intersection within secondary schools might be complicated, when the significance of discourses of ‘girl power’, linked with successful neoliberal citizenship, is considered. I analyse young women’s discussions of key ‘girl power’ icons in popular culture, generated through fieldwork in an elite girls’ school in Australia. Throughout the analysis I explore how understanding intersections of femininity/sexuality in secondary schools requires an analytical framework that can attend to both familiar notions of heterosexuality and gender – and their ongoing currency – as well as how notions of sexuality are mobilized in the production of successful neoliberal girl citizens. I propose that this analytical approach is useful in terms of avoiding the reinscription of sexuality identity categories in education research.

Keywords:

• young femininities
• sexualities
• schooling

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers, and the editorial team, for their comments on prior drafts of this paper.

Notes

1. Lyla Girls’ Grammar School is a pseudonym.

2. Anthony Callea is the young man who was runner up to Donovan in the final of the 2004 Australian Idol competition. Yet his career in the years directly following the competition has been markedly more successful than Donovan’s. In the same few years, Donovan has appeared in more than one women’s magazine accompanied by stories about her ‘weight disaster’ and more, recently, her ‘triumph’ for losing 15 kilograms.