Girls, sexuality, and popular culture : "hey pony! come on!"

Abstract

In this chapter, we turn to the entanglements of being and possibility that arise in girls’ everyday uses of popular texts. These narratives of memory show girls appropriating fragments of popular music, and fictional and non-fictional characters, and putting them to use in the serious play that is the focus of their daily lives. The narratives were generated in our collective biography workshop on sexuality and schooling in response to the prompt: “Remember a time when you made use of popular culture texts to learn about ‘doing girl’/’doing sexuality.’” We were interested in exploring agentic possibilities that arise for girls in sites of popular culture and how these might relate to normative discourses of heterosexuality. However, the analyses we present do not posit these girls as individualistic subjects who can easily enact new subjectivities, as they pick and choose new role models from media and textual resources. Nor do we promote an unconditional celebration of popular culture as a site of radical resistance in young people’s negation of identity. We understand, after Judith Butler, that subjects, including the girls evoked in the stories in this chapter, are always constituted within the discourses available to them, through repletion and citation of gendered practices and norms. The stories from the collective biography workshop show low possibilities for taking up, contesting, and countering hegemonic versions of femininity and girlhood arise within fluid and dynamic assemblages of bodies, texts, matters, and meanings