ABSTRACT
So far in this book I have been mapping some of the dominant contemporary postfeminist discourses and moral panics surrounding girlhood. To review, I position these panics as ‘postfeminist’ because they have emerged in a trail of assumptions about gender equality in society and vehement disinvestment and disavowals of feminist thinking in public consciousness (McRobbie, 2008). I explored how postfeminist anxieties relate to fears over feminine excess (Walkerdine, 1991), including concerns over girls as too academically successful, too indirectly mean or overtly aggressive and too sexual. Some central contradictions arise out of these moral panics over contemporary girlhood. These form the central paradoxes I am exploring in this book: if girls are so (un-problematically) successful, why is there a moral panic over their forms of relating and relationships; and assertions they are too aggressive in the wrong ways, as mapped in Chapter 3? If girls are apparently freed from their sexed bodies and enjoying unprecedented success at school, work etc. (Kindlon, 2006), why does heterosexual desirability and competition for male attention still rate as so important in Western and global popular culture to the degree that it has motivated a moral panic over girls at risk of hyper-sexualisation, as mapped in Chapter 4? Are we really living in gender equal times? How can we go about theorising these complex contradictory discourses about success, aggression and sexuality and girls' agentic capacities to maneuver these discourses?
