ABSTRACT
In this chapter, Zaslow analyzes the #iammorethanadistraction campaign, organized by middle-school girls and their parents to address school dress codes that unfairly discriminate against girls. She locates the girls’ political activism in the nexus of the conflicting and contradictory discursive environments that saturate their adolescence, including a school culture that enforces a moralistic and sexist dress code, a postfeminist sensibility that equates female sexuality with empowerment, a beauty culture that profits from surveillance and regulation of teen girls and women, and a body positive popular and digital culture that claims to embrace all forms of female bodies. Engaging in both hashtag and local politics, the girls in this study are also equally influenced by their parents’ second-wave feminist and collectivist approach to political action, which informs the intergenerational feminist politics in which they engage.
