Abstract
This article engages with the postfeminist debate on girls’ sexuality in contemporary Italy. The huge popularity among adolescents of social network sites (SNSs), which involve a vast mobilisation of personal images, has given rise to new concerns and a moralising gender panic about girls’ sexuality. Drawing on critical girls’ studies, and based on the outputs of a qualitative research project, the article discusses the gender discourses that emerge from Italian girls’ digital practices on SNSs, with specific reference to girls’ online self-representation through posting and sharing photos on Facebook and other SNSs. The article explores how sexual regulation works among girls in the digital context by analysing the postfeminist norms of female sexual embodiment in contemporary Italian digital culture. In doing so, the article hopes to contribute to the transnational academic debate in media and cultural studies by showing the discursive and visual conditions of possibility which shape girls’ digital sexual subjectivity on social network sites.
Highlights
When I presented an initial version of this article at a conference in Athens, a young researcher approached me to share a story my talk had reminded her of: she was at a dinner with some friends when someone started joking about her and her sexual habits, suggesting that she was not a ‘good girl’ because of her many male sexual partners
This paper aims to investigate the link between gender norms and visual display in the mediated experiences of girls on Facebook, considering the postfeminist context in which they live
I have focused on the gender norms reproduced through girls’ narratives
Summary
When I presented an initial version of this article at a conference in Athens, a young researcher approached me to share a story my talk had reminded her of: she was at a dinner with some friends when someone started joking about her and her sexual habits, suggesting that she was not a ‘good girl’ because of her many male sexual partners At first she felt puzzled, she said, but after a while, she proudly replied to them: ‘I can’t defend myself, because I have a bad reputation to maintain!’ I was impressed by how her short story was able to make fun of the concept of female reputation, recognising its normative nature, and how she had reaffirmed the possibility of deciding autonomously on her sexuality. In this article I will discuss how these ambivalences affect girls’ agency in the sphere of sexuality
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