Abstract
This chapter critically responds to Judith Halberstam’s concern that studies of masculinities are confined to boys and boyhood and Angela McRobbie’s despair that the “phallic girl” with her licensed mimicry of masculinism disavows any resistance to regulatory gender/sexual regimes. Inspired by Judith Butler’s notion of performativity and her desire to trouble and undo gender/sex/sexuality binarisms, this chapter queers the field of masculinity/boyhood studies and addresses postfeminist concerns about the lack of a politics of resistance by foregrounding the seduction of contemporary tomboyism for young tweenage girls in their negotiation of an increasingly (hetero)sexualized girlhood (Mitchell & Reid-Walsh, Seven going on seventeen: Tween studies in the culture of girlhood. New York: Peter Lang, 2005). A central aim of the chapter is to problematize the binary logic of sexual difference that has informed past and current, even queer theorizations of tomboyism by queer(y)ing the ways in which girls’ ditching of or deviation from normative femininity is often theorized as performing masculinity. We argue, following Butler, that interpreting tomboyism as mimesis in this way misses how girls can manipulate norms, exceed them, and rework them and thus “expose the realities to which we thought we were confined as open to transformation” (Butler, Undoing gender. London: Routledge, 2004, p. 217). The chapter concludes by asking what would it mean (theoretically, methodologically, and empirically) to create gender taxonomies that are flexible enough to recognize a more capacious femininity that can embrace subversion and resistance without ejecting such queer performances into the realm of masculinity and thus reproducing dominant discourses of masculinity as “power” and femininity as “lack.”
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Notes
- 1.
The Lilith Shrine, http://www.lilitu.com/lilith, retrieved July 13, 2008.
- 2.
http://virtual.clemson.edu/caah/women/ws301/ppt/Lilith/Lilith.PPT, retrieved July 20, 2008.
- 3.
For a more extensive media analysis of international panic over “overly successful girls,” see Ringrose (in press).
- 4.
This project was a yearlong ethnographic study exploring the construction of children’s gender and sexual identities in their final year (Year 6) of elementary school. This research was conducted during the academic year 1995–1996 in two contrasting elementary schools situated in a small semirural town in the east of England. Jo went to Tipton Primary (white, working-class, and middle-class geographic area) and Erica to Hirstwood Primary (white, predominantly middle-class geographic area). Alongside ongoing participant observation, one of the main methods to get close to the children’s social worlds was through unstructured exploratory group interviews. These interviews often took off in some quite unexpected directions, including discussions and disclosures in more sensitive areas such as bullying, homophobia, sexual harassment, boyfriends and girlfriends, as well as talk about schoolwork, play, friendships, music, popular culture, fashion, and appearance.
- 5.
This project explored girls’ and boys’ perceptions and experiences of how they feel about and perform academic success in Year 5 (9- and 10-year-olds). This research was carried out over a 6-week period in June and July 2002, in three Year 5 classes, by Sandy Allan and me in three schools in a city in South Wales, U.K. Nyla went to Riverbank Primary (multiethnic, working-class geographic area) and Libby went to Allbright Primary (predominantly white, middle-class geographic area). We adopted a multi-method approach, integrating friendship group interviews, participant observations, and pupil diaries. While the interviews predominantly explored children’s views about school and schoolwork, and specifically the gendering of children’s relationship to school/schoolwork, a significant part of the interview involved encouraging children to talk about gender relations and gender identity work more widely.
- 6.
Jessica’s data draw upon narrative interview research with girls’ friendship groups from a recently completed pilot study funded by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada, “Girls and the Subject of Aggression and Bullying.” The data for this paper draw on three successive interviews with a friendship group of girls (5 girls, aged 12–14) attending Herbert Secondary, an inner-city school in South Wales, with high proportions of ethnically and economically marginalized students, and with student performance well below national averages. Jessica’s research, however, was not based at/in school. She drew on work in cultural and youth studies, which have developed strategies for working with girls outside the regulative institutional context of schools (Hall, 2000; McRobbie & Garber, 1976). After meeting the mother of one of the girls during research in the local community center, Jessica conducted two successive focus group interviews with this group and then in-depth individual interviews with each of the girls at this mother’s home. The interviews focused on a range of issues related to friendship and conflict at school and beyond.
- 7.
- 8.
The terms “middle class” and “working class” are not adopted unproblematically. Sensitive to the ways in which cultural, social, material, and discursive resources all play a part in the production of privilege (Skeggs, 2004), we use these terms here primarily as a heuristic device to identify contrasting cultural/socioeconomic backgrounds.
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Renold, E., Ringrose, J. (2012). Phallic Girls?: Girls’ Negotiation of Phallogocentric Power. In: Landreau, J., Rodriguez, N. (eds) Queer Masculinities. Explorations of Educational Purpose, vol 21. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-2552-2_4
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