ABSTRACT
Chapter 7 explored how tween to teen girls in Years 8 and 9 (age 12–14) were negotiating the heterosexualised playing field and peer group at school. In this chapter I explore how older teens in Years 10 (14–15) and 11 (15–16) are managing new challenges of navigating the sexualised and ‘pornified’ media cultures explored in Chapter 4. Here I continue to elaborate my psychosocial and affective approach by mapping how girls negotiate and ‘perform’ sexual identities in the context of new digital technologies. I aim to engage with and challenge the binaries of savvy agentic actor vs passive dupe or victim of sexual objectification outlined in Chapter 5. I will argue again that girls have not made any miraculous escape from their sexed body as ‘successful’ females, the discourse I examined in Chapter 2. Rather, they continue to be defined by their bodies and sexuality in highly classed and raced ways, with pressing implications for life at school. I aim to shift debate from moralistic statements about girls' sexuality and conflicts as wrong or bad, as documented in Chapters 3 and 4, to analysis of their embodied engagements and affective flows. I also challenge a simplistic online–offline divide, documenting how digital identity thoroughly mediates and shapes ‘real’ life experiences and relationships at school (Kearney, 2006; boyd, 2008).
