Shauna Pomerantz

Skater girlhood and emphasized femininity: ‘you can't land an ollie properly in heels’

This study draws from interviews with 20 girls in British Columbia, Canada who participated to varying degrees in skateboarding culture. We found that skater girls saw themselves as participating in an ‘alternative’ girlhood. Becoming skater girls involved the work and play of producing themselves in relation to alternative images found among peers at school, at skate parks, online and in music videos. The alternative authority of skater girl discourse gave the girls room to manoeuvre within and against the culturally valued discourse of emphasized femininity. A subgroup of middle class skater girls, the ‘in‐betweeners’, used skater girl discourse as a way of distancing themselves from the sexism evident in skater culture as well as emphasized femininity. They used one discourse against another and took advantage of contradictions within skater discourse to forge a positive identity for themselves.

‘The power to squash people’: understanding girls’ relational aggression

While researchers and concerned adults alike draw attention to relational aggression among girls, how this aggression is associated with girls’ agency remains a matter of debate. In this paper we explore relational aggression among girls designated by their peers as ‘popular’ in order to understand how social power constructs girls’ agency as aggression. We locate this power, hence girls’ agency, in contradictory messages about girlhood that, although ever‐present ‘in girls heads,’ are typically absent in adult panic about girls’ aggression. Within peer culture, power comes from the ability to invoke the unspoken ‘rules’ that police the boundaries of acceptable femininity. We thus challenge the notion advanced by Pipher and others that girls’ empowerment entails (re)gaining an ‘authentic voice.’ In contrast, we suggest that such projects must be informed by an interrogation of how girls are positioned as speaking subjects.

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

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.

“No Boundaries”? Girls’ Interactive, Online Learning About Femininities:

This article explores girls’ learning about issues of femininity that takes place in the presence of others online, connected through chat rooms, instant messaging, and role-playing games. Informed by critical and poststructuralist feminist theorizing of gendered subjectivity, agency, and power, the article draws from qualitative interviews with 16 girls in Vancouver, Canada. Girls reported that online activities allowed them to rehearse different ways of being before trying them out offline, where they might have been reined in for going against perceived expectations for their gender. The article shows that girls enjoyed playing with gender and being gender rebellious. They practiced taking more initiative in heterosexual relationships than is currently authorized in prevailing rules of romance. Without necessarily challenging the underlying gendered power inequalities, some battled back in cyberspace against sexual harassment. In the conclusion, the authors reflect on the implications for girls’ individual and collective empowerment and for transformative pedagogy.

Girls Run the World? Caught between Sexism and Postfeminism in School

How do teenage girls articulate sexism in an era where gender injustice has been constructed as a thing of the past? Our article addresses this question by qualitatively exploring Canadian girls’ experiences of being caught between the postfeminist belief that gender equality has been achieved and the realities of their lives in school, which include incidents of sexism in their classrooms, their social worlds, and their projected futures. This analysis takes place in relation to two celebratory postfeminist narratives: Girl Power, where girls are told they can do, be, and have anything they want, and Successful Girls, where girls are told they are surpassing boys in schools and workplaces. We argue that these postfeminist narratives have made naming sexism in schools difficult for girls because they are now seen to “have it all.” Utilizing Foucault’s (1978) law of the tactical polyvalence of discourse, this article analyzes girls’ contradictory engagement with postfeminism in order to both show its importance in girls’ lives, and its instability as a narrative that can adequately explain gender injustice.

‘Oh, she’s so smart’: girls’ complex engagements with post/feminist narratives of academic success

This article explores how six teenage girls talk about being smart in the wake of celebratory discourses touting gender equality in education and beyond. Set against the neo-liberal backdrop of ‘What about the boys?’ and ‘girl power’, it is assumed that smart girls today ‘have it all’ and, therefore, no longer require feminist interventions in the school. Issuing a challenge to these post-feminist assumptions, we highlight complex narratives of girls’ academic success, including post-feminist narratives of individualisation and the ‘supergirl’, alongside feminist narratives of gender inequality in the school and the broader social world. We conclude by highlighting the impossible terms within which post-feminism frames girls, and the dangers that this pervasive discourse poses to girls’ educations.

Listening to girls: discursive positioning and the construction of self

Recent decades have seen a proliferation of books that ‘listen in’ on the everyday lives of girls. In their research the authors maintain that ‘listening’ to girls in order to make claims about what they ‘heard’ is a theoretically mediated process, and therefore it is not as straightforward as many authors imply. The purpose of this paper is to explore what they call the ‘symptomatic reading’ of interview transcripts. While attending to the contradiction and inconsistencies that characterize interview texts, they also recognize stabilizing strategies—what they call ‘trump discourses’—that make social life possible. Such a way of working enables us to see how power works through discourse. It helps us understand why many girls express a feminist Subjectivity, while distancing themselves from the identity as ‘feminist.’

‘I don't want to stereotype… but it's true’: Maintaining whiteness at the centre through the `smart Asian’ stereotype in high school

Abstract The ‘smart Asian’ stereotype, part of the model minority discourse, depicts Asian students as studious and academically successful. We draw on critical race theory, with a focus on critical whiteness studies and the concepts of democratic and cultural racism, to examine the racialising effects of this seemingly positive stereotype. Drawing on in-depth interviews with over 60 self-identified smart, teenagers from schools in the Southern Ontario, we identified three themes which together illustrate how the ‘smart Asian’ stereotype reflects and reproduces a hegemonic white center. First, a number of our participants deployed, and then trivialised the ‘smart Asian’ stereotype as ‘just joking’. Second, through discussing this stereotype, white participants often excluded students with Asian backgrounds from conceptualisations of what it means to be Canadian and to fit in. Finally, this stereotype was experienced ambivalently by Asian-identified students who found it brought academic rewards, but at the expense of exclusion.

Playing it down/playing it up: girls’ strategic negotiations of academic success

Through the lens of post-structural agency, this article focuses on how self-identified smart girls strategically negotiate their academic identities within the gendered terrain of the school. Based on interviews with 51 smart high school girls in Canada, our analysis complicates current narrative of girls’ easy achievement in school. Participants discussed balancing the hazards of being overly academic with the rewards of academic success. In response to this tension, girls carefully and consciously performed ‘smart girlhood’, drawing on resources that are more available to some girls than others, and indicating that girls’ academic success is neither easily embraced nor unambivalently accepted.

Skater Girlhood: Resignifying Femininity, Resignifying Feminism

While there is general consensus that ‘gender’ is a socially and theoretically significant identity category, there is less agreement on exactly how. Disagreement reflects the emergence of previously unthinkable possibilities and an accompanying sentiment — expressed in both popular and academic thought — that identities are now self-constructed. As traditional markers of ‘femininity’ and ‘masculinity’ are being challenged, what it means to be a ‘gendered subject’ is a matter of everyday as well as scholarly speculation. Informing the latter is the notion that the current neoliberal context favours what has been associated historically with femininity — the flexible, self-fashioning subject (Walkerdine, 2003).1 Within this context, girlhood is being redefined; as girls are reported to outperform boys academically, and young women defer marriage and motherhood in order to pursue careers, characterizations by second-wave feminists of girlhood as preparation for subservient roles associated with conventional femininity have been replaced by what Harris (2004, p. 17) calls ‘future girls’: a unique category of girls who are self-assured, living lives lightly inflected but by no means driven by feminism, influenced by the philosophy of DIY (do it yourself), and assuming they can have (or at least buy) it all.