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Routledge F (2007) Exploring the use of feminist philosophy within nursing research to enhance post-positivist methodologies in the study of cardiovascular health. Nursing Philosophy 8: 278–290. Stanley L (1990) Feminist praxis and the academic mode of production – an editorial introduction. In: Stanley L (ed.) Feminist Praxis. London/New York: Routledge, pp. 3–19. Tickner JA (2005) What is your research program? Some feminist answers to international relations methodological questions. International Studies Quarterly 49: 1–21. Wadsworth Y (2001) What is feminist research? Bridging the gap. In: Feminisms and Participatory Action Research Conference, Boston, 22–24 June 2001. Conference Papers: http://ggsc.wnmu.edu/gap/wadsworth.htm
Jessica Ringrose, Postfeminist Education? Girls and the Sexual Politics of Schooling, Routledge: London, 2013; 200 pp.: ISBN: 978-0-415-55749-8 (pbk), ISBN: 978-0-415-55748-1 (hdb) Reviewed by: Adrienne Evans, Coventry University, UK
‘Science, It’s A Girl Thing!’ is the EU Commission’s recent 2012 campaign that aims to encourage more girls to study science subjects in schools. A YouTube video was created to help launch and advertise the campaign, with the video showing a combination of smolderingly attractive male scientists, ‘fashionista’ female scientists, and allusions to make-up-as-science. Although the video received criticism and was consequently removed from YouTube, the postfeminist theme of the video is maintained on the campaign’s website, where the logo of the campaign is written in lipstick and the main image features three stylish young white women holding a camera phone, with their photograph transforming them into three young women in laboratory coats. Campaigns such as those created by the EU Commission provide yet more evidence of a new ‘luminosity’ on girls and young women as harbingers of success, independence, and productive hardworking economic independence (McRobbie, 2009). Girls and young women are addressed through such media in a ‘constant stream of incitements and enticements to engage in a range of specified practices which are understood to be progressive but also consummately and reassuringly feminine’ (McRobbie, 2009: 57). Girls are here understood as economic citizens who should otherwise be taking it upon themselves to enter into what was once the masculine domain of science. A context of gender equality underlies ‘Science, It’s A Girls Thing!’, where the only thing holding women back from high-flying careers in the sciences is the subject’s lack of appeal to ‘girliness’. The video and website demonstrates the incapacity of policy initiatives to take seriously the social contexts that underlie girls’ unwillingness to study science subjects. There is little attempt in such initiatives to challenge the heterosexual matrix, whereby being interested in masculine subjects signals becoming a man (hence the hyperfemininity), nor the classed bias in the way such advertising blends aspects of consumer-oriented femininity (e.g. make-up, mobile phones, stilettos) with education (Harris, 2004; Walkerdine et al., 2001). Indeed it would be impossible to imagine a campaign to encourage girls to become plumbers or electricians: science being, as it is, a more
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appropriately middle class occupation for the well-educated successful postfeminist subject. The notions in this and in other education initiatives of gender equality, assumption of girls’ successes regardless of class and race, and the way such postfeminist sentiments address and recuperate feminist critique, underscores the analysis developed by Ringrose throughout Postfeminist Education? One of the central aims of Ringrose’s new book is to create a more nuanced way of understanding how young girls and women are located within a knotted array of entanglements and ‘assemblages’, embodied by the cultural figures of the successful girl, the mean girl and the sexy girl. First, the ‘successful girl’ seems to underscore all three figures, as the (white, middle class) girl who is deemed to have benefited too much from the feminist movement. She is a girl whose success, while located at the perfectly neoliberal individual level, has resulted in a broader feminisation of cultural space, to the point where sexism is now a problem faced by boys. In the second figure, Ringrose develops previous work in Feminism and Psychology (Ringrose, 2006), expertly demonstrating the classed bias of the ‘mean girl’. The middle class mean girl’s psychological and indirect aggression has been normalised, so that this normalisation is placed in contrast to the assumed working class violent girl, with Ringrose drawing into this analysis the 2011 London Riot’s media focus on ‘Riot Girls’ (yet another media recuperation of a feminist movement) as symbols of femininity gone wrong. Finally the ‘sexy girl’ is a figure who is pathologised within the saturating rhetoric of the ‘sexualisation of culture’, which requires girls to maintain an image of white middle classed innocence, and yet these girls are at the same time provided with opportunities for their bodies to become a locus of desire and erotic capital. On the one hand girls are seen as the citizens of the future, and yet their sexuality is regarded as dangerous and devious, so that any real discussion of female pleasure (in for example sex education) is regulated and rendered invisible through calls to roll back misplaced feminist notions of ‘sexual liberation’. The emotional investments in femininity’s passivity, innocence or niceness make the figures of contemporary girlhood seem culturally problematic, so that surrounding these discussions of Ringrose’s figures of postfeminist education is a broader context of what she calls ‘postfeminist panics’, for example in the growing concerns over the ‘sexualisation of children’. The overarching sense in the opening chapters is how much these postfeminist panics frame contemporary girlhood as normatively pathological. Drawing on both Harris’ (2004) ‘can-do’ vs. ‘at-risk’ girl and Gonick’s (2006) discussion of how ‘Girl-Power’ and ‘Ophelia’ rhetoric function together to support a self-perpetuating consumer culture, Ringrose’s figures illustrate the ways femininity has become defined by a psychologising individualism, particularly in how this ‘madness’ is deployed in highly classed and racialised ways. One of the outcomes of a postfeminist sensibility, then, appears to be a construct of femininity as the ‘site of perpetual failure’ (p. 91); femininity is consistently positioned as problematic, too excessive, too much. Framed in this way, femininity is publically positioned as something that needs regulation. And in the analysis of popular media and policy, Ringrose demonstrates how feminism has become the linchpin of these contemporary essentialising gender-based ‘problems’, while the
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invisibility of the intersections of class and race in the sense-making of gender equality discourse underscores the postfeminist logic of these figures. To make sense of the figures of femininity described above, Ringrose’s more nuanced perspective develops a conceptual and methodological approach situated within psychosocial perspectives. The psychosocial perspectives that Ringrose describes attempt to build on concepts of governmentality that make sense of the way subjectivity is formed within discourses, but also develops alongside this an account of how these discourses are also activated and come to feel so deeply personal. And it is largely in the work of Deleuze and Guattari (1987) that Ringrose develops these conceptual tools and analytic vocabulary for a methodology interested in ‘power’s effectuation’. The real strength of this form of analysis is developed through the book’s empirical chapters and in the application of these Deleuzian concepts to girls’ narratives of their own lives. For example, Ringrose’s schizoanalysis of the term ‘slut’ is able to perfectly capture the multiplicity (or rhizomatic quality) of the term. In her first analysis chapter, ‘slut’ is understood as a ‘sticky signifier’; slut travels as Ringrose’s participants share the term between themselves, with it finally sticking to another girl as a way of locating her outside the group. And Ringrose’s second analysis chapter details a participant’s use and ownership of ‘slut’ as a self-descriptor in a username on her social networking site, where the analysis considers it as a form of re-signification and ‘line of flight’, as well as part of the obligation to participate in forms of knowing sexiness. There are also issues of readability and intelligibility, as the participant drops the ownership of ‘slut’ when she is not in a heterosexual relationship, suggesting that the sexual excess represented by the term ‘slut’ is only accessible when heterosexual desirableness is confirmed by relationship status. Through the use of these Deleuzian concepts, Ringrose’s analysis is able to capture the ruptures, the slippages and the unintended consequences that go beyond simply problematising girls’ negotiations, and in a way that does not locate these at an individualised neoliberal level or works to place the ‘problems’ within the bodies of the girls themselves. This form of analysis is key in this book’s contribution to the field, and these chapters themselves represent a significant shift beyond either all-out critique of ‘what’s wrong with our girls’ or jubilant celebration of girls’ strategies for self-reflexive resistance. The analysis takes seriously the everyday ruptures of postfeminist logic in the girls’ discussions, but is also able to locate girls’ subjectivity within a broader context that places restrictions on the conditions of possibility within the intersections of class, race, religion, and the body. What are the wider implications of the ideas presented in Postfeminist Education? For researchers, the use of ‘young girls’ as the ‘subject’ of the book does not detract from the theoretical and methodological contributions and the applicability of these ideas to other research contexts beyond the school. The book itself is affective; the narratives the girls provide of their schooling experiences deeply resonate and seem memorable and recognisable, despite the very different media/digital landscape that these girls are negotiating, inside and outside of school. And while other texts on the consequences of a postfeminist sentiment
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appear to treat the ‘girl’ or ‘young woman’ as if she were the only addressee of contemporary forms of gendered discourses, there is a strong sense in the book that the theoretical and methodological contributions can be applied in different research contexts. For me, it is clear that women much older than the girls discussed in this text are working through similar sets of complex negotiations around ‘sexualisation’ in particular, as well as in terms of performing successful entrepreneurial femininity and the intersubjective regulation and management of nice girl vs. mean girl. The need in research around postfeminism for a complex set of conceptual tools is certainly provided in this book, which will help unpack the duality and ambivalence of girls’ and women’s negotiations of postfeminist sentiment, particularly in terms of how this sentiment comes to feel so personally rewarding and painfully restrictive. For those outside academia the implications of the book are perhaps more opaque. Ringrose herself suggests that such ideas are often difficult to communicate when educational initiatives and policy is limited by audit culture and the neoliberal imperative for hard scientific fact above complex theorisation. And public engagement appears all the more challenging in a cultural context where neoliberal and postfeminist ways of understanding have become so takenfor-granted, as evidenced in the author’s balanced reflection on her own media coverage that sets the scene for the final chapter. However, as Ringrose suggests in her conclusions, ‘[w]e need feminisms capable of attending to complexities and of finding new spaces for feminist political imaginaries’ (p. 147). In this line of thought, Ringrose cites a school where initiatives have taken less of a quantitative and more of a ‘local’ approach in their application of gender equality, allowing the establishment of a ‘girl power’ group within the institution and the group’s resulting attendance at the 2011 SlutWalks. Through anecdotal evidence of this successful initiative, and one that does still take place within the logic of postfeminist sentiment, the book does not get stuck in doomsday thinking in its closing statements, instead pointing to the need for working within the current framework of postfeminist rhetoric to make use of the cracks and fissures in its logic. Thus Ringrose’s book maintains a critical feminist ethos of attempting to improve the lived conditions of women. This book then is a call to ‘think differently’ (p. 149) about how we work within the current economic and political climate, and how we can create new assemblages within the ambivalences and contradictions of postfeminist subjectivity.
References Deleuze G and Guattari F (1987) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. London: Continuum. Gonick M (2006) Between girl power and reviving Ophelia: Constituting the neoliberal girl subject. NWSA Journal 18(2): 1–23. Harris A (2004) Future Girl: Young Women in the Twenty-First Century. London: Routledge. McRobbie A (2009) The Aftermath of Feminism: Gender, Culture and Social Change. London: Routledge.
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Ringrose J (2006) A new universal mean girl: Examining the discursive construction and social regulation of a new feminine pathology. Feminism and Psychology 16(4): 405–424. Walkerdine V, Lucey H and Melody J (2001) Growing Up Girl: Psychosocial Explorations of Gender and Class. Basingstoke: Palgrave.
