Claire Charles

Would the ‘real’ girl gamer please stand up? Gender, LAN cafés and the reformulation of the ‘girl’ gamer

In this paper we consider the significance of cyber ‘LAN’ cafés as sites where on and off‐line practices meet in way that complicates binary notions of the gendered gamer. Existing research into computer games culture suggests a male dominated environment and points to girls’ lower levels of competence and participation in games. Building on recent studies interested in the constitution of gender through engagement with online technologies, we draw on Judith Butler’s politics of performative resignification, and conceptualise digital culture as a resource through which ‘girl’ gamers are mobilised and potentially reformulated, experiencing their gaming identities in contradictory ways, and fragmenting the category ‘girl’ in the very act of articulating their place in a male dominated gaming culture. It is argued that through the meeting of on and off‐line practices, LAN cafés operate as a location that is particularly amenable to reformulative work in relation to gendered gaming identities.

Complicating hetero-femininities : young women, sexualities and girl power at school

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.

Challenging Notions of Gendered Game Play: Teenagers playing The Sims

This paper challenges notions of gendered game playing practice implicit in much research into young womens involvement with the computer gaming culture. It draws on a study of Australian teenagers playing The Sims Deluxe as part of an English curriculum unit and insights from feminist media studies to explore relationships between gender and game playing practices. Departing from a reliance on predetermined notions of “gender”, “domestic space”, and “successful game play”, it conceptualizes The Sims as a game in which the boundaries between gender and domestic space are disturbed. It argues that observing students’ constructions of gender and domestic space through the act of game play itself provides a more productive insight into the gendered dimensions of game play for educators wishing to work computer games such as The Sims into curriculum development.

Cosmo girls: configurations of class and femininity in elite educational settings

In this paper we offer a unique contribution to understandings of schooling as a site for the production of social class difference. We bring together the rich body of work that has been conducted on middle-class educational identities, with explorations of the centrality of the feminine in representations of class difference from the field of critical girlhood studies. This is done in order to explore how young femininities mediate the representation of class difference in the environment of the private girls’ school. Drawing from our two research studies, located in private girls’ schools in Australia and the United Kingdom, we argue that the notion of ‘disgust’, commonly used in recent engagements around class, has only limited purchase in understanding the representation of class difference in these schools. It is the inconsistencies and complexities in how class and class relations are produced that we wish to illuminate.

Preparing for life in the global village: producing global citizen subjects in UK schools

This paper adds to a growing body of literature which views global citizenship education as part of a broader social and cultural process of subjectivity production. Rather than focus on global citizenship in relation to pedagogy or curriculum content, as much of the previous research literature has done, this paper examines it in relation to the practice of travel. Drawing on data generated in ethnographic fieldwork in two UK schools, the paper explores the way in which the young people in these settings used travel to position themselves as successful, mobile, global citizen subjects. The paper argues that these subjectivities were negotiated as part of a dynamic process: one which took place across multiple spaces, in a myriad of different relationships, and in the deployment of a number of different power relations. The paper concludes with some thoughts about the practice of school travel and how it might effectively be focused upon in future research.

New girl heroes: the rise of popular feminist commentators in an era of sexualisation

The level of public interest in what has variously been called ‘raunch culture’, ‘pornification’ or more broadly ‘sexualisation’ of culture, has created new opportunities for enterprising women. In recent years, a number of immensely popular books have emerged raising concerns about girls and sexualisation by female authors across Western nations such as the USA, Australia and the UK. Here, I explore the media work of two prominent Australian media commentators on girls and sexualisation, Melinda Tankard Reist and Dannielle Miller. I explore how, in their educative work designed to empower girls and free them from the stifling, damaging aspects of sexualised popular culture, these commentators may be citing and performing other normative dimensions of contemporary young femininity that go unremarked upon and are thus reinscribed as normal and expected.

Gender and popular culture

professional practice. This certainly echoed my own research in this area where one participant, a gay man working as a high school deputy head, stated, ‘I wish I could be in a job where I could just be me’. As one might expect, there is a section on ‘Youth and sexualities’. The book sets itself apart from other volumes here also because of the focus upon the focus upon transgender and queer young people. As a whole, I found this publication to be a refreshing addition to a growing number of texts about sexuality and education. Its focus on the USA gives a good point of comparison for those of us living elsewhere and its engagement with activism, art and politics give it an engaging edge. The 9 sections and 36 chapters give us a lot to get lost in. I would therefore highly recommend this volume to anyone interested in the current state of play regarding sexuality and education internationally.