Teen girls, working-class femininity and resistance: retheorising fantasy and desire in educational contexts of heterosexualised violence

Abstract

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’.

Keywords:

• postfeminism
• girlhood
• Butler, Deleuze and Guattari
• subjectivity
• achievement

Notes

Debates on child and girl sexualisation are increasing internationally. High-profile government reports and debates on ‘corporate pedaeophila and child sexualisation’ have been released in Australia (Rush and La Nauze 2006). In the USA, a report on the sexualisation of girls was commissioned in 2007 from the American Psychological Association, which reported on the ‘adultification of children’ and ‘pornification’ trends impacting children and girls. In the UK, the Home Office conducted a fact finding review on the sexualisation of young people and drew links to violence against women and girls (Papadopoulous 2010). The Canadian government is also supporting research focused on the sexualisation of young women and girls and is drawing links with dating violence.

For an overview of the international spread of typically media-driven educational achievement discourses of ‘successful girls’ and ‘failing boys’ (see Ringrose 2007, 2008a).

Post-feminist is a way to describe a set of defensive gender discourses and politics in our contemporary era, that position feminism as having achieved its aims and as therefore now not only obsolete but politically regressive. We understand post-feminist and recuperative masculinity discourses as both reacting to and defending against feminist initiatives.

Deleuze and Guattari refer to their philosophy as ‘transcendental empiricism’, which is related to the notion of immanence and becoming. Hickey-Moody and Malins (2007, 3) suggest Deleuze's ‘call for an immanent form of ethics: one which resides within (rather than above or outside) matter and practice, and which seeks to evaluate relations as they emerge, rather than judge them a-priori’. We are using immanence here to refer to the unknown and becoming nature of the fantasies in the narrative in our research stories. Understanding the narrative as immanent does not foreclose its possibilities in the social.

For further work exploring links between Butler and Deleuze (see Hickey-Moody and Rasmussen 2009; Renold and Ringrose 2008).

These are young people who are either subject to care orders (and are in foster or residential care, living with relatives, or placed back at home), or who are voluntarily accommodated away from home with the ‘agreement’ of their parents.

Norwegian Centre for Child Research (NOSEB) and the Centre for the Study of Children, Youth and Media (Institute of Education, University of London, UK)

Sensitive to the ways in which cultural, social, material, affective, psychic and embodied processes all play a part in the production of privilege and disadvantage (Reay 2001; Skeggs 1997), the term ‘working class’ is not adopted unproblematically. Rather, it is used primarily as a heuristic device to identify cultural/socio-economic backgrounds of the research participants and their locales, while drawing attention to the ways in which working class femininity is subject to a range of abject signifiers (see Hey 2010).

The core research team for the project Young People and Space include Gabrielle Ivinson and Kate Moles.

The research was carried out with Rebekah Willett.

Bebo is the social networking site (SNS) used predominately by 14–18-year-olds in the UK (Smithers 2008).

For instance, her older sister was a hair dresser and her ‘blended’ family had a complex structure in which her step-father is the only adult doing full-time labour to support two families, while her mother worked part time between pregnancies.