Rethinking Agency and Resistance: What Comes After Girl Power?

Abstract

introduction to a special issue Neo-liberalism and a post-feminist sensibility are closely connected in that neo-liberalism insists on the individual as a rational self-reflexive ‘agent’ constructing a lifelong ‘choice’ biography (Davies and Bansel 2007). Concomitantly, a post-feminist sensibility and political discourse problematically dismisses sexism as an on-going feature of contemporary life in the West (Gill 2008; Taft 2004; McRobbie 2004). Girls and women are constructed as the ideal rational actors who have succeeded in re-inventing themselves, adapting to shifting global market forces as the new reflexivity winners in educational achievement and employment. he effects of neo-liberal discourses individualize and depoliticize and have enabled post-feminist discourses to thrive, since the individualizing, fragmenting logic works to destabilize collective movements like feminism.he ‘Girl Power’ in the title of the Special Issue, is therefore, a heavily contested pair of signifiers (Gonick 2006) signaling a discourse that is embroiled in a post-feminist narrative of women’s and girls’ successes that works to render continuing gendered/sexual inequalities largely invisible (McRobbie 2008). While girl power emerged within the economic, socio-political context of the 1990s where girls could be active, in the 2000s they are now expected/demanded to be fully self-actualized neo-liberal subjects. However, the constraints of heteronormative white femininity are also firmly entrenched, though not necessarily in exactly the same old versions. Herein lies the paradox that underpins depoliticized notions of agency and girl power: girls are still bound by the body and sexual difference (Braidotti 2006). Writing from a cultural studies framework about representations of girls and women, both Gill and McRobbie argue that agency needs to be specifically re-theorized in relation to new formulations of gendered and sexual politics and discourses. As Gill suggests, “for young women today in post-feminist cultures, the display of a certain kind of sexual WHAT COMES AFTER GIRL POWER? b 3 knowledge, sexual practice and sexual agency has become normative— indeed, a ‘technology of sexiness’ has replaced ‘innocence’ and ‘virtue’ as the commodity that young women are required to offer in the heterosexual marketplace” (2007: 72). McRobbie (2008) has a similar analysis of what she calls a “post-feminist masquerade” in which girls and women living in neo-liberal societies are to balance masculine qualities of phallic power with renewed pressures around hypersexualized visual display and performances of normative femininity. We argue that girls are confronted with discourses of girl power, which are obviously culturally and contextually contingent, with highly unequal effects. his multiple and contradictory terrain of masculinity and femininity, agency and accommodation, and global and local articulations demands that new questions be asked or that old questions be asked anew. How might agency and resistance be imagined and analyzed within and against the signifiers of ‘girl power,’ ‘post-feminism’ and ‘globalization’? If discourses of agency and resistance are continually commodifed by the capitalist machine, what does this mean for a feminist notion of political (Kennelly 2009), critical (McRobbie 2008) agency? What does resistance look like? How do we identify it? Where do the possibilities for resistance lie? What kinds of global exchanges are taking place with respect to the formation, transmission and circulation of new discourses of girlhood? What is the relationship between girls, agency and neoliberal policy? In what ways do girls resist new and old discourses of femininities and their intersections with other discourses of race, ethnicity, sexuality, ability etc? How is girls’ resistance and agency represented in popular and alternative cultures? How do girls themselves use cultural production as a mode of resistance? hus, rather than connote the end of a project, the question “What comes after girl power” is meant to bring to the surface the possibility that multiple and concomitant strategies of analysis are required in a time of dense convolution - 4 Much of the current analyses continue to draw and build on theorizing that emerged out of the UK Gramscian tradition of Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall (Corrigan 1979; Hall and Jefferson 1976; Hebdige 1979; Willis 1977). In this view culture must be viewed not as a given set of relations and ideas structuring social life, but as something that is produced through human intention and action. hus, culture is understood through what people do, not, as more structural approaches would have it, through the symbolic or economic calculations assigned to them. he emphasis is on how the structure is produced, reproduced and transformed through human agency. Understanding this dynamic relation assists us to understand why people consent to oppressive rule and under what circumstances they resist. In exploring the relationship between consent and coercion, Gramsci recognized the role of culture in manufacturing consent—in permitting the exercise of control in the absence of violence. He theorized that it is in the domain of culture that economic and political ‘persuasions’ become inserted into the moral universe and get taken up by individuals as common sense. People consent to rule when they accept as given (or at least desirable relative to perceived alternatives) the values, norms, and versions of justice supporting the existing distribution of goods and identifying the permissible range of dissent. hey resist when they recognize the arbitrary foundations of rule. Individual practice thus expresses a tenuous relationship between and among consent, domination and resistance - 5 his Special Issue is concerned with how gender difference and femininity are re-made through normative, socially constraining often contradictory (schizoid) spaces of family, the media, school and popular culture. hough aspects of femininity are taken on as practices of self, they are still mutable, dynamic, immanent and open to transformation. In suggesting that gender is never separate from its various spatialities and contexts, we argue for complex theorizations of gendered agency and resistance that illuminate what is enabling and constraining, and how femininities are contingent and ambiguous.