ABSTRACT
This book has been about representations of young womanhood, the material conditions young women experience, and the new politics they enact. I have suggested that the needs of global capital shape constructions of the future girl. I have demonstrated how feminist and neoliberal narratives of self-invention have framed policy, advertising, programs, and media about girls’ welfare, justice, education, employment, sexuality, parenting, and citizenship. This language of—and some young women’s capacity for—opportunities, freedoms, choices, and responsibilities facilitates the coalescence of global economic motives with girls’ individual life decisions. Narratives of responsibilization, strategic effort, and choice enlist young women into the service of the new economy. However, it is because these discourses are so pervasive, and because of the new regimes of regulation that manage young women by making them freer subjects than ever before, that new politics have emerged. Different modes of resistance have developed in response to these new strategies of governmentality. I have deemed this future-girl politics, and suggest it works by creating alternative spaces and global networks for public deliberation and that it evades surveillance and appropriation by what social movement theorist Abby Peterson describes as “tunneling in” rather than tackling political systems head-on. In short, new times both regulate and constrain young women in unprecedented ways, which unleashes unforeseen techniques of critique and resistance by them.
