Skater Girlhood: Resignifying Femininity, Resignifying Feminism

Abstract

While there is general consensus that ‘gender’ is a socially and theoretically significant identity category, there is less agreement on exactly how. Disagreement reflects the emergence of previously unthinkable possibilities and an accompanying sentiment — expressed in both popular and academic thought — that identities are now self-constructed. As traditional markers of ‘femininity’ and ‘masculinity’ are being challenged, what it means to be a ‘gendered subject’ is a matter of everyday as well as scholarly speculation. Informing the latter is the notion that the current neoliberal context favours what has been associated historically with femininity — the flexible, self-fashioning subject (Walkerdine, 2003).¹ Within this context, girlhood is being redefined; as girls are reported to outperform boys academically, and young women defer marriage and motherhood in order to pursue careers, characterizations by second-wave feminists of girlhood as preparation for subservient roles associated with conventional femininity have been replaced by what Harris (2004, p. 17) calls ‘future girls’:

a unique category of girls who are self-assured, living lives lightly inflected but by no means driven by feminism, influenced by the philosophy of DIY (do it yourself), and assuming they can have (or at least buy) it all.