Teen girls, working-class femininity and resistance: retheorising fantasy and desire in educational contexts of heterosexualised violence

Abstract

This paper challenges post-feminist discourses and recuperative masculinity politics in education that have evoked mythical constructions of the successful ‘achieving’ girl in ways that flatten out social and cultural difference and render invisible ongoing gendered and sexualised inequalities and violence in the social worlds of schools and beyond. We map how girls negotiate contradictory neo-liberal discourses of girlhood that dominate in popular culture; what McRobbie calls the new ‘post-feminist masquerade’, which portends that girls can be/come anything they want, so long as they simultaneously perform ‘hyper-sexy’, the new aspirational feminine ideal. Drawing on individual case studies from four qualitative research projects with teen girls in urban and rural working class communities across England and Wales, we explore how specific ‘working-class’ girls struggle to negotiate this contradictory terrain of girlhood through imaginary ‘lines of flight’ in their narratives. Specifically, we are interested in applying Deleuze and Guatarri's writings on immanence and the productive, social status of desire and fantasy through an analysis of girls' (violent, aggressive or utopian) fantasies in ways that move beyond the binary of ‘real/not real’, and thus reject a reading of fantasy as futile, ‘escapist’ or ‘pathological solutions to working class life’. We suggest fantasy might operate as a space of survivability, political subjectivity and resistance to girls' subordination within Butler's ‘heterosexual matrix’.