ABSTRACT
This chapter continues the leitmotif that ‘sexuality is what little girls are made of ’ (or perhaps draw upon to make themselves and make each other) by exploring girls’ preoccupations with heterosexual relations of desire and intimacy. I have already explored how the majority of girls were fashioning their femininities within a heterosexual framework of ‘impressing the boys’ where to be romantically desirable was almost a validation of themselves, as ‘normal’ regular girls. This chapter extends the discussion of the construction and regulation of (hetero)sexualised femininities as girls negotiate an increasingly salient boyfriend/girlfriend culture and recount their erotic attachments to media stars (see Hatcher 1995; Kehily et al. 2002;Ali 2003) and other imagined heteronormative futures with key boys (their age) within and beyond the school gates.What results is an intricate and complex cast of heterosexualised performances and intimacies in which girls are the producers, directors and casting agents of a heternormative script that is difficult to both interpret and re-write. Indeed, girls’ take-up of multiple and competing sexual subject positions empower and disempower in a range of contradictory ways.
