Exploring girl power : gender, literacy and the textual practices of young women attending an elite school

Popular discourses concerning the relationship between gender and academic literacies have suggested that boys are lacking in particular, school-based literacy competencies compared with girls. Such discourses construct “gender” according to a binary framework and they obscure the way in which literacy and textual practices operate as a site in which gendered identities are constituted and negotiated by young people in multiple sites including schooling, which academic inquiry has often emphasized. In this paper I consider the school-based textual practices of young women attending an elite school, in order to explore how these practices construct “femininities”. Feminist education researchers have shown how young women negotiate discourses of feminine passivity and heterosexuality through their reading and writing practices. Yet discourses of girlhood and femininity have undergone important transformations in times of ‘girl power’ in which young women are increasingly constructed as successful, autonomous and sexually agentic. Thus young women’s reading and writing practices may well operate as a space in which new discourses around girlhood and femininity are constituted. Throughout the paper, I utilize the notion of “performativity”, understood through the work of Judith Butler, to show how textual practices variously inscribe and negotiate discourses of gender. Thus the importance of textual work in inscribing and challenging notions of gender is asserted. I argue that critical literacy is just as important, but perhaps no more guaranteed, within elite girls’ education as it is within boys’ education.

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.

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.

'You're no-one if you're not a netball girl' : rural and regional living adolescent girls' negotiation of physically active identities

Despite the widely articulated health implications of physical inactivity, declines in youth participation levels, particularly for adolescent girls, have fuelled social and moral panics about the importance of regular physical activity. Recent attempts to explain these participation trends have focused on the institutional and cultural discourses that are drawn on to construct particular identities and social practices connected with sport, physical education and leisure interests. In this paper we report on the findings of data collected through interview and focus group sessions with 138 females ranging from 14 to 16 years of age across six rural and regional communities in the state of Victoria, Australia. Adopting a feminist poststructuralist methodology and drawing on the work of Foucault, we explore the impact that dominant discourse-power relations operating in the context of rural and regional sport and physical education can have in the negotiation of physically active identities for adolescent girls.

A girl like you

A Girl Like You (2012) is a response to a work I made in 2003 titled “Memory + Moments” reflecting on unexpected and unsolicited comments from friends and strangers during my early years… “can I touch your hair?” “you’re very well-spoken” “where do you get your colour?” “are you wearing a bustle?” In 2011 I re-discovered my teenage diaries from 1989-1995. The process of redaction is about coming to terms with my vulnerability through a process of revealing and exposing the internal monologue of a teenage girl, growing up in Hobart during the 80s.

Fast and Fashionable: The Girls in the Girl of the Period Miscellany

The Girl of the Period Miscellany is particularly interesting in that it reworked the Girl of the Period from an object of disdain into a figure who might be humorous, but who was also engaging and sympathetic. Rather than being easily categorized and dismissed, the Girl of the Period found in the Miscellany has some characteristics that invite satire but she is also capable, entertaining, and attractive. Moreover, there is a significant difference between thinking about the article that spawned the phenomenon and the Miscellany itself. Appearing in the conservative Saturday Review, the article was provocative and seemingly intended to be so. In contrast, the Miscellany was designed to attract and retain a readership. This article will examine how and why the Miscellany is able to resist Linton’s simplistic construction of the Girl of the Period and instead depicts a variety of different girls who, although their behaviour might be more “modern,” are nonetheless worthy of respect and attention as pure, virtuous, middle-class girls. In addition, the publication of the Miscellany demonstrates the challenges of attracting as readers a group of girls and young women whose self-conception was rapidly shifting at the end of the 1860s.

Feminine Bravery: The Girl's Realm (1898–1915) and the Second Boer War

With the advent of the Second Boer War in 1899, The Girl’s Realm incorporated heroism within its production of English femininity by presenting images of wartime girlhood where girls understood their roles and responsibilities as supporters of the war effort. Nonetheless, the representations of feminine bravery in the magazine are complex and somewhat ambiguous. Although the magazine encourages heroism in a variety of forms, its contributors betray a tendency to fall back onto traditional domestic models of bravery. Thus the Boer War was pivotal in depictions of girls’ bravery, yet it also limited that bravery.

The ‘Australian Girl’ and the domestic ideal in colonial women’s fiction

The vast majority of novels and periodicals read by colonial Australian girls were written and published in Britain. ‘Daughters of the Southern Cross’ were more likely to have access to the Girl’s Own Paper by subscription or to imported fictions that had proven popular with British girl readers than any locally produced depictions of girlhood. From the 1880s, however, Australian authors produced several milestone fictions of girlhood for both adult and juvenile audiences. Rosa Praed's An Australian Heroine (1880) and Catherine Martin’s An Australian Girl (1890)  gave voice to the lived experience of Australia for young women, and their publication in Britain contributed to an emergent reciprocal transpacific flow of literary culture.

Two canonical Australian novels that focus on the maturation of girl protagonists who live on bush homesteads were also published in this period. Ethel Turner’s Seven Little Australians (1894) and Miles Franklin’s My Brilliant Career (1901) feature intelligent girls who are not able to be effectively socialised to embrace domesticity. Turner’s Judy Woolcot is distinct among her six siblings as a plucky girl who instigates trouble, while Franklin’s aspiring writer Sybylla Melvyn is informed that ‘girls are the helplessest, uselessest, troublesomest little creatures in the world.’

The 1890s saw an agricultural depression in Australia that only fuelled the urban perpet-uation of the idealised and nationalistic bushman myth in literary and popular culture. The ubiquity of the myth problematised any attempt to situate women heroically within the nation outside of the home. British fictional imaginings of Australian girls lauded their lack of conformity and physical abilities and often showed them bravely defending the family property with firearms. In contrast, Australian domestic fiction, this chapter argues, is unable to accommodate bracing female heroism, postulating ambiguous outcomes at best for heroines who deviate from the feminine ideal.

Judy’s grandmother describes her ‘restless fire’ as something that ‘would either make a noble, daring, brilliant woman of her’, or ‘would flame up higher and higher and consume her’. Turner does not allow Judy’s unconventionality to prosper. Instead, she is killed by a falling gum tree while saving the life of her brother, leaving the future fulfilment of the domestic ideal to her sister, Meg, whose subsequent story occupies Little Mother Meg (1902). Franklin’s Sybylla expresses her inability to be content with the simple pleasures of keeping a home, and this informs her decision to reject a marriage proposal from a wealthy suitor. The novel’s indeterminate conclusion does not allow fulfilment of Sybylla’s writing aspirations, situating her outside the feminine ideal yet not affirming the merits of her desire to reject married life.

While Sharyn Pearce suggests that Judy’s tragic end follows a narrative pattern that sup-ports the glorification of male heroes and renders ‘over-reaching women’ as ‘noble failures’, the novel might also productively be read within the context of other fictions featuring girl protagonists of the period, such as Praed and Martin's novels. This chapter makes the case that Turner and Franklin’s thwarted heroines critique the containment of Australian girls to the banalities of the home by exposing the negative and uncertain outcomes for those who desire the freedoms and aspirations permitted to boys and men. Unlike British fictions that champion adventurous girls, these Australian fictions critique the continuation of gendered restrictions in the colonies by proposing that girls who desire excitement and independence ‘should have been…boy[s]’ (as Sybylla’s mother remarks).