“You Just Have to be True to Yourself”

although agency and sexual subjectivity are difficult for most girls to achieve, some girls do. Many girls have moments of subjectivity, agency, or sexual subjectivity, and a few girls have built it firmly into their sense of self. Socio-cultural forces do help to shape girls’ selves both internally and externally, but they are not completely determining. Girls are able to subvert, reconstruct, and modify these socio-cultural influences, at least occasionally. Research on adolescent girls often depicts them as completely without power and subjectivity, but girls do often speak as subjects and agents. ¹⁷⁷ I will not discuss boys much in this chapter, for although they are not complete agents or sexual subjects, the problems of agency and sexual subjectivity are not so great for them, as we have seen in the proceeding chapters. I focus here specifically on what possibilities there might be for girls to feel agentic and sexually subjective. 108