Jessica Ringrose

Schizoid subjectivities? Re-theorizing teen girls’ sexual cultures in an era of ‘sexualization’

Drawing on three case studies from two UK ethnographic research projects in urban and rural working-class communities, this article explores young teen girls’ negotiation of increasingly sex-saturated societies and cultures. Our analysis complicates contemporary debates around the ‘sexualization’ moral panic by troubling developmental and classed accounts of age-appropriate (hetero)sexuality. We explore how girls are regulated by, yet rework and resist expectations to perform as agentic sexual subjects across a range of spaces (e.g. streets, schools, homes, cyberspace). To conceptualize the blurring of generational and sexual binaries present in our data, we develop Deleuzian notions of ‘becomings’, ‘assemblages’ and ‘schizoid subjectivities’. These concepts help us to map the anti-linear transitions and contradictory performances of young femininity as always in-movement; where girls negotiate discourses of sexual knowingness and innocence, often simultaneously, yet always within a wider context of socio-cultural gendered/classed regulations.

Regulating the Abject: The TV Make-Over as Site of Neoliberal Reinvention Toward Bourgeois Femininity

In this paper, through an examination of mostly British make-over television programs we examine how the feminine has become a new site of limitless possibility and endless consumption, the fulcrum of intensifying processes of neo-liberal reinvention of continuously making over the self into successful, post-feminist bourgeois subjects. We argue that the central premise of contemporary make-over programs is the question: “Is the transformation of abject subjects possible?” We also suggest the focal object of transformation in many shows is the working class woman who fails both as subject/object of self-reflexivity, desire, and consumption. We argue it is her mind and body that represents a core site of abjection—a subjectivity designated as uninhabitable and therefore also a central site of regulation. It is upon the working class womans mind and body that the drama of possibility and limitation of neo-liberal reinvention is played out. We also argue that it is perhaps in reference to that which is made abject and uninhabitable that it becomes possible to talk about class as a dynamic of identifying against what we must not be, and which fuels incessant attempts to refashion selves into generalized and normalized bourgeois feminine subjects.

Teen girls, sexual double standards and ‘sexting’: Gendered value in digital image exchange:

This article explores gender inequities and sexual double standards in teens’ digital image exchange, drawing on a UK qualitative research project on youth ‘sexting’. We develop a critique of ‘postfeminist’ media cultures, suggesting teen ‘sexting’ presents specific age and gender related contradictions: teen girls are called upon to produce particular forms of ‘sexy’ self display, yet face legal repercussions, moral condemnation and ‘slut shaming’ when they do so. We examine the production/circulation of gendered value and sexual morality via teens’ discussions of activities on Facebook and Blackberry. For instance, some boys accumulated ‘ratings’ by possessing and exchanging images of girls’ breasts, which operated as a form of currency and value. Girls, in contrast, largely discussed the taking, sharing or posting of such images as risky, potentially inciting blame and shame around sexual reputation (e.g. being called ‘slut’, ‘slag’ or ‘sket’). The daily negotiations of these new digitally mediated, heterosexualised, classed and raced norms of performing teen feminine and masculine desirability are considered.

Normative cruelties and gender deviants: the performative effects of bully discourses for girls and boys in school

Since the 1990s the educational community has witnessed a proliferation of ‘bullying’ discourses, primarily within the field of educational developmental social psychology. Drawing on ethnographic and qualitative interview data of primary and secondary school girls and boys, this article argues that the discourse ‘bullying’ operates to simplify and individualise complex gendered/classed/sexualised/racialised power relations embedded in children’s school‐based cultures. Using a feminist post‐structural approach, this article critically traces the discursive production of how the signifiers ‘bully’ and ‘victim’ are implicated in the ‘normative cruelties’ of performing and policing ‘intelligible’ heteronormative masculinities and femininities. It shows how these everyday gender performances are frequently passed over by staff and pupils as ‘natural’. The analysis also illustrates how bully discourses operate in complex racialised and classed ways that mark children out as either gender deviants, or as not adequately performing normative ideals of masculinity and femininity. In conclusion, it is argued that bully discourses offer few symbolic resources and/or practical tools for addressing and coping with everyday school‐based gender violence, and some new research directions are suggested.

Beyond Discourse? Using Deleuze and Guattari's Schizoanalysis to Explore Affective Assemblages, Heterosexually Striated Space, and Lines of Flight Online and at School.

This paper explores how Deleuze and Guattaris philosophical concepts extend and elaborate discursive and psychoanalytic interpretations of qualitative research findings. Analyzing data from a UK research project exploring young peoples engagements with Social Networking Sites (SNSs), Deleuze and Guattaris schizoanalytic method is drawn upon to consider complex desire‐flows in the social. In particular the notion of ‘affective assemblages’ is developed to explore the relationships between school and online spaces and subjective interfacing with these spaces. The paper suggests online space is heterosexually striated and SNSs create new intensified gendered and sexualized identities and affective relations between young people. Investigating the case study of a teen girl, Louise, who is socially rejected through the affective assemblage of the SNS, then pathologized at school for violently retaliating against being called a ‘fat slag’ online, the paper suggests a Deleuzoguattarian analysis offers new theoretical tools for thinking about discursive subjectification but also for mapping complex desire‐flows and micro movements through and against discursive/symbolic norms.

A New Universal Mean Girl: Examining the Discursive Construction and Social Regulation of a New Feminine Pathology

This article examines recent sensationalist media attention to mean girls. Popular constructions of the mean girl are argued to be rooted in a developmental psychology debate on girls as indirectly and relationally aggressive. The developmental psychology model of feminine aggression is analyzed as a postfeminist discourse, illustrated to pathologize girls through universalizing, essentializing and context-devoid models of girlhood, which contribute to a shift from notions of girls as vulnerable to girls as mean in popular culture. Constructions of the mean girl are also linked to postfeminist gender anxieties over middle-class girl power and girl success. Regulatory strategies emerging to manage mean girls are examined as oriented toward maintaining appropriate modes of repressive, white, middle-class femininity. When ‘other’ girls do figure in the mean girl story, it is through sensational incidences of isolated girl violence, held up as a dangerous risk of uncontained feminine aggression. Girlhood is argued to remain carefully regulated, through class and race-specific categories of femininity, which continue to produce normative (mean) and deviant (violent) girls.

‘Just be friends’: exposing the limits of educational bully discourses for understanding teen girls’ heterosexualized friendships and conflicts

The present paper explores the conceptual limitations of the bully discourses that ground UK anti‐bullying policy frameworks and psychological research literatures on school bullying, suggesting they largely ignore gender, (hetero)sexuality and the social, cultural and subjective dynamics of conflict and aggression among teen‐aged girls. To explore the limitations of bully discourses in practice, the paper draws on a pilot, interview‐based study of girls’ experiences of aggression and bullying, illustrating how friendships and conflicts among the girls are thoroughly heterosexualized, en‐cultured and classed. Drawing on girls and parent interview narratives, I also trace some of the effects of bully discourses set in motion in schools to intervene into conflicts among girls. I suggest these practices miss the complexity of the dynamics at play among girls and also neglect the power relations of parenting, ethnicity, class and school choice, which can inform how, why and when bullying discourses are mobilized.

Rethinking white resistance: exploring the discursive practices and psychical negotiations of 'whiteness' in feminist, anti-racist education

This article explores how under‐theorized representations of whiteness in pedagogical literatures have informed simplistic ideas about white resistance among students. It is argued that the performance and practice of discourses of whiteness in pedagogical contexts, and the subjective, psychical and emotional complexities of engaging with discourses of whiteness, have been neglected in pedagogical research, diminishing the potential for understanding processes of subjective and social change through anti‐racist education. Analyzing observational findings from an ethnographic study of a course focused on issues of ‘women’s diversity’ in a Canadian Women’s Studies programme, the author explores how discourses of whiteness play out in the context of a feminist classroom in ways that contributed to a predominance of individualizing discourses of racism. She draws on psychoanalysis to analyze the highly defensive dynamics enacted among students, examining projective practices where some subjects are positioned as wholly resistant to anti‐racism with very difficult effects. However, the potential for shifting investments among white women and evidence of movement away from defensiveness over whiteness, when whiteness is complicated by other axes of ‘privilege and oppression,’ are also traced through interview narratives. The author suggests that documenting students’ negotiations of discourses of whiteness in the classroom and in their reflections upon classroom conflict can teach us as researchers and pedagogues what is problematic in our theories of whiteness, and also begin to tell us what differently located, and racially marginalized, students need from an anti‐racist, feminist curriculum and pedagogy.

Travelling and sticky affects: Exploring teens and sexualized cyberbullying through a Butlerian-Deleuzian-Guattarian lens

In this paper we combine the thinking of Deleuze and Guattari (1984, 1987) with Judith Butlers (1990, 1993, 2004, 2009) work to follow the rhizomatic becomings of young peoples affective relations in a range of on- and off-line school spaces. In particular we explore how events that may be designated as sexual cyberbullying are constituted and how they are mediated by technology (such as texting or in/through social networking sites). Drawing on findings from two different studies looking at teens’ uses of and experiences with social networking sites, Arto in Denmark, and Bebo in the UK, we use this approach to think about how affects flow, are distributed, and become fixed in assemblages. We map how affects are manoeuvred and potentially disrupted by young people, suggesting that in the incidences discussed affects travel as well as stick in points of fixation. We argue that we need to grasp both affective flow and fixity in order to gain knowledge of how subjectification of the gendered/classed/racialised/sexualised body emerges. A Butlerian-Deleuzian-Guattarian frame helps us to map some of these affective complexities that shape sexualized cyberbully events; and to recognize technologically mediated lines of flight when subjectifications are at least temporarily disrupted and new terms of recognition and intelligibility staked out.

Feminisms re-figuring ‘sexualisation’, sexuality and ‘the girl’

The ‘girl subject’ and ‘young femininity’ are repeatedly and with great effect being made increasingly visible as a particular social, cultural and psychical problematic in late capitalist societies (Driscoll, 2002). The last two decades have witnessed a burgeoning and interdisciplinary field of critical girlhood studies that have rapidly taken up this contested site of young femininity (e.g. Walkerdine, 1991; Hey, 1997; Walkerdine et al., 2001; Gonick, 2003; Aapola et al., 2004; Harris, 2004; Mitchell and Reid-Walsh, 2005; Jiwani et al., 2006; Nayak and Kehily, 2007; Duits, 2008; Currie et al., 2009; Kearney, 2011; Hains, 2012; Ringrose, 2013). As a sociopolitical project, the figure of the contemporary girl is over-determined, weighted down with meaning and commonly represented through binary formations of celebratory postfeminist ‘girl power’ vs. crisis discourses of ‘girls at risk’ (Aapola et al., 2004; Gonick et al., 2009). One of the primary ‘luminosities’ (Deleuze in McRobbie, 2008) surrounding girls as both bearers of power and objects of risk centres on girls’ relationship to sexuality and entry into sexual womanhood. In this special issue, we bring together a series of articles that explore a veritable explosion of interest, debate and controversy over what is referred to as the (premature or hyper) ‘sexualisation of the (girl) child’.