‘The geeks shall inherit the earth’: Girls’ Agency, Subjectivity and Empowerment

Abstract

This paper is located in a larger study of girls’ empowerment within the everyday context of school cultures. While much feminist research has focused on the ‘perils’ of feminine adolescence, we are interested in how girls successfully navigate the transition from girlhood to adult womanhood. Thus the sample for this paper includes girls who consciously positioned themselves against an ‘emphasized femininity’ that made their classmates popular, but that has been blamed for girls’ lowered self-esteem, dissatisfaction with their bodies, and disordered eating. Because their self-positioning carried the risk of marginalization within peer cultures, we ask ‘What makes their alternative self-representations possible?’ We are particularly interested in whether their transgressive identities signal a rewriting of girlhood as a social rather than personal project, and how feminism might operate to support girls’ empowerment.

Acknowledgments

Our research was made possible through funding by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Notes

1. The girls chose pseudonyms for their interviews; these are used for this paper.

2. In using the term ‘performative’ we draw on the work of Butler (1990). Following Butler, we prefer the notion of ‘doing gender’ to that of ‘having’ a gender identity. Butler suggests that gender does not exist prior to its expression; this approach treats gender as much more unstable—hence changeable—than implied by socialization theory, which posits that we internalize gender scripts during infancy/childhood that stay with us throughout our lives.

3. As we discuss later, the term ‘popular’ as used in this paper by the girls in our study does not refer to being well-liked. Rather, it refers to high-status girls who gain power through their popularity among boys rather than their female classmates.

4. We acknowledge the tentative nature of their claims.

5. The unintended results can surprise (and worry) well-meaning adults. For example, Merten (1997) found that the contradictory nature of adult messages to young women—messages that celebrate a meritocracy but deny inequality—encourages girls to exercise power in covert ways (through emotional bullying, for example) that do not violate cultural expectations of feminine ‘niceness.’