ABSTRACT
Young women, unlike their male counterparts in working-class Freeway, took a stab at reworking gender while still in high school. Unwilling to accept the lives of their mothers and grandmothers as their own, Freeway High white girls strut forward, exhibiting an inchoate sense of “girl power” while attempting to remake the class/gender intersection more to their liking, engaging in the “remaking of girls and women as the neoliberal subject; a subject of selfinvention and transformation who is capable of surviving within the new social, economic and political system” (Walkerdine, Lucey, & Melody, 2001, p. 3). For Freeway youth this meant a female-based income, one earned in the public wage labor sector; a perhaps illdefined sense of independence (“the freedom dream”); and a life which could conceivably move forward comfortably even if they experienced the divorce then so commonplace in their community-a phenomenon that virtually every young woman commented upon in the mid1980s.1
