Feminist New Materialism Girlhood And The School Ball

Engaging with feminist new materialism, Toni Ingram reveals the ways in which the school ball (or prom) can be understood as an assemblage of material objects, spaces, practices, ideas and imaginings which contribute to the process of becoming school ball-girl. The ball-girl is not a fixed identity or subject but is an intra-active becoming – a dynamic, shifting process where bodies, sexuality and femininities are relationally produced. (Re)conceptualising the school ball-girl as emergent phenomena provides openings for thinking about girls and this schooling practice beyond popular cultural narratives. Building on the social theory of Barad, Bennett, Best, Deleuze and Guattari, this book offers a new perspective on girls, sexuality, gender and schooling, while also exploring the potential of feminist new materialisms for rethinking educational practices and the human subject.

By exploring the material-discursive production of gender norms in Australian secondary schools, this book offers a novel feminist posthuman new materialist perspective on how schoolgirls are pre-determined within educational space and place. The text ultimately illustrates how gender and race inequity is reproduced through presumptive thinking and a failure to recognize student potential. Affect and the Making of the Schoolgirl maps affective accounts of students’ everyday experiences in school spaces. Student negotiations with prescriptive processes of subject participation and subject selection are explored to illustrate how inequities are systematically reproduced. Chapters also offer an examination of STEM subject fields as entitled male space. Engaging theoretically with concepts from performative feminist new materialism and affect theory, the text highlights filmic semblances created as part of an onto-epistemological project, and calls for alternative educational encounters which affirmatively acknowledge difference and promote non-binary thinking. This text will benefit postgraduate researchers, academics, and scholars with an interest in gender and sexuality education, teacher education, STEM education, gender inequality, intersectionality, and the sociology of education. Those interested in gender studies, affect theory and feminist theory, as well as educational policy and politics more broadly will also benefit from this book.

This book explores the circulation and reception of popular discourses of achieving girlhood, and the ways in which girls themselves participate in such circulation. It examines the figure of the achieving girl within wider discourses of neoliberal self-management and post-feminist possibility, considering the tensions involved in being both successful and successfully feminine and the strategies and negotiations girls undertake to manage these tensions. The work is grounded in an understanding of media, educational, and peer contexts for the production of the successful girl. It traces narratives across school, television and online in texts produced for and by girls, drawing on interviews with girls in schools, online forum participation (within the purpose-built site www.smartgirls.tv), and girls’ discussions of a range of teen dramas.

Harnessing the energy of provocative theories generated by recent understandings of the human body, the natural world, and the material world, Material Feminisms presents an entirely new way for feminists to conceive of the question of materiality. In lively and timely essays, an international group of feminist thinkers challenges the assumptions and norms that have previously defined studies about the body. These wide-ranging essays grapple with topics such as the material reality of race, the significance of sexual difference, the impact of disability experience, and the complex interaction between nature and culture in traumatic events such as Hurricane Katrina. By insisting on the importance of materiality, this volume breaks new ground in philosophy, feminist theory, cultural studies, science studies, and other fields where the body and nature collide.

Color coded terror alerts, invasion, drone war, rampant surveillance: all manifestations of the type of new power Brian Massumi theorizes in Ontopower. Through an in-depth examination of the War on Terror and the culture of crisis, Massumi identifies the emergence of preemption, which he characterizes as the operative logic of our time. Security threats, regardless of the existence of credible intelligence, are now felt into reality. Whereas nations once waited for a clear and present danger to emerge before using force, a threat's felt reality now demands launching a preemptive strike. Power refocuses on what may emerge, as that potential presents itself to feeling. This affective logic of potential washes back from the war front to become the dominant mode of power on the home front as well. This is ontopower—the mode of power embodying the logic of preemption across the full spectrum of force, from the “hard” (military intervention) to the "soft" (surveillance). With Ontopower, Massumi provides an original theory of power that explains not only current practices of war but the culture of insecurity permeating our contemporary neoliberal condition.

'Girl Power': Girls Reinventing Girlhood examines the identity practices of girls who have grown up in the context of 'girl power' culture. The book asks whether - and which - girls have benefited from this feminist-inspired movement. Can girls truly become anything they want, as suggested by those who claim that the traditional mandate of femininity - compliance to male interests - is a thing of the past? To address such questions, the authors distinguish between 'girlhood' as a cultural ideal, and girls as the embodied agents through which girlhood becomes a social accomplishment. The book identifies significant issues for parents and teachers of girls, and offers suggestions for 'critical social literacy' as a classroom practice that recognizes the ways popular culture mediates young people's understanding of gender. 'Girl Power' will be of interest to researchers of contemporary gender identities, as well as educational professionals and adult girl advocates. It is relevant for students in gender studies and teacher-education courses, as well as graduate student researchers.

This book addresses contemporary philosophical issues in higher education and how we can create socially just pedagogies and a socially just university. Providing a forum for thinking through how critical posthumanism, affect theory and feminist new materialisms provide a useful lens for higher education, and shows how these standpoints can benefit methods and practices of learning and teaching. Gross inequalities in higher education continue to affect pedagogical practices across geopolitical contexts and there is a need to consider new theories which call into question the commonplace humanist assumptions currently dominating the discourse around social justice in this context. However scholarship on the affective turn, critical posthumanism and new material feminisms, opens both new possibilities and responsibilities for higher education pedagogies. The approaches of this book also provide imaginative ways of engaging with current dissatisfactions with higher education, from the marketization of education, to issues of racism, discrimination and lack of diversity. Of international relevance, this collection particularly foreground southern contexts and case studies, such as the student activism in South African universities that has sparked a global project of decolonization and social justice in educational institutions. This book is an urgent call to reconceptualize, rethink and reconfigure pedagogies in higher education and the implications for future citizenship and social participation.

Feminists Researching Gendered Childhoods charts the evolving nature of feminist theory and research methods in childhood studies and the generative potential this holds for researchers, academics and educators to continue to push ideas and practices. The book traces the threads of affect and effect that feminist theories and methodologies have made over time to thinking more, and differently, about gender in childhood. In the wake of the 'new materialist turn' in feminist research, the book sought to address two pressing questions: what is especially new about feminist new materialism, and what is especially feminist about feminist new materialism. These questions are generative, troubling, unsettling and invited the contributors on an adventure that involved re-turning and reconfiguring ideas and practices about gender and childhood. Along with the editors, Jayne Osgood (UK), and Kerry H. Robinson (Australia), five key international feminist scholars, Mindy Blaise (Australia), Bronwyn Davies (Australia), Debbie Epstein (UK), Jen Lyttleton-Smith (UK), and Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw (Canada) collaborated on this book project. Their reflective accounts capture the contribution of their own work and that of their peers, to advancing research practices and theorisations of gender in childhood. Having all approached the study of gendered childhoods in creative and critical ways, these important feminist researchers re-engage and critically reflect on their earlier work alongside their more contemporary contributions to the field. The book is as much about the processes involved in its creation as it about the material/digital end product. The chapters work with both familiar and unfamiliar feminist methodological frameworks that bring affect, materiality and embodiment, as well as textual representations of gender and childhood, into play. The book engages with, and generates artwork, poetry, photographs as a means to grapple with how gender, childhood, family, curriculum and policy have been, and might be researched. The book captures a lively, collaborative, feminist experiment that sought to make space for fresh conceptualisations of gender in childhood. Issues addressed include: social justice and transformative methodologies in childhood research; advancing theoretical perspectives that contribute to fresh understandings of gender in young children's lives; the ways that research into gender in childhood play out in educational agendas; and the specific gender issues perceived critical to address in contemporary childhoods lived in the post-Anthropocene.