Girls Run the World? Caught Between Sexism and Postfeminism in the School

• In Event: Roundtable Session 76
  In Roundtable Session: Theoretical Perspectives in Gender and Education

Abstract

How do teenage girls understand sexism in an era where gender injustice has been constructed as a thing of the past? Our paper addresses this question by exploring the complex and paradoxical ways that girls articulate sexism in the school in the wake of celebratory post-feminist narratives touting gender equality. Rooted in an ethos of neo-liberalism, these post-feminist narratives construct girls as unfettered by socio-structural constraints. Post-feminism thus assumes that girls are no longer “victims” of gender inequality. The purpose of our paper is to qualitatively investigate how girls articulate their experiences of sexism in an era where depoliticizing post-feminist narratives make gender injustice in the school appear as nothing more than individualized problems or as nonexistent.

Authors

• Shauna Pomerantz, Brock University

• Rebecca Raby, Brock University

• Andrea Stefanik, Brock University