This Is Not Another Girl-Power Story: Reading Emma González as a Public Feminist Intellectual

Abstract

On March 24, 2018, more than 2 million people participated in the March for Our Lives, a nationwide student-led demonstration held to protest gun violence and support gun control legislation following the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, Florida. The March for Our Lives, which the Associated Press has called “one of the biggest youth protests since Vietnam,” captured the fearless outrage and awakened energies of American youth. Students of all genders and backgrounds took part in the march, yet popular media outlets often identified girl activists, and in particular Emma González, as the true leaders of the gun control movement. Based on a critical reading of González’s public speeches and mainstream media representation, this article explores the perils and possibilities associated with public feminism when teenage girls do this critical work. I argue that González circulates across media sites in three intertextual ways: as a celebrity leader, a media spectacle, and a cautionary tale for girls who push too far beyond the boundaries of normative girlhood. By documenting the push and pull of González’s hypervisibility, the article considers the ways in which narratives of exceptional girlhood accumulate around and in turn shape her activism and public address. González’s resistance to repeated positioning as a girl-power feminist, coupled with her struggle to maintain her voice and vision as her own, illustrates the complexities of public feminism as a world-making process. Reading González as a public feminist intellectual allows us to see how girls engaged in projects of resistance grapple with competing demands on their political lives.