Drawing on feminist and queer epistemologies, this article is concerned with the post-feminist media’s construction of girls’ sexual subjecthood. Broadly defined as a biopolitical ideal, post-feminism is here related to a set of principles of the neoliberal art of government. It will be argued that these principles ethically sustain the exponential mainstreaming of a post-feminist hermeneutics of adolescence and its programme of governmentality. The article also links post-feminism to a particular methodology of subjectification, ultimately locating its hermeneutics of adolescence within (...) the pornographic and pharmacological imperatives of contemporary capitalism. On the empirical level, the analysis explores how techno-scientific discourses and bodily figurations (namely brains and hormones) enter the discursive apparatus of a Portuguese girls’ magazine, giving ideological ground to a distinctive production of adolescent body-subjects. Post-feminist media markets are finally discussed as a significant segment of the capitalist industrialisation of sexual difference that frames the general problematic of this study. (shrink)

Recent feminist theorizing has pointed to a `resurgent patriarchy' within neo-liberal postfeminist times, which re-orders and restabilizes the heterosexual matrix through a politics of `postfeminist masquerade' demanded of girls and women (McRobbie). This paper seeks to complicate this thesis, exploring the regulation and rupture of Butler's `heterosexual matrix' as a complex performative politics through which girls' conflictual relationships with themselves, and other girls and boys are staged and through which dominant versions of tweenage and teenage femininity are reinscribed but also (...) reworked, in race and class specific ways. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari's powerful conceptual repertoire for disrupting Oedipal logics in Anti-Oedipus, we offer a `molecular mapping', illustrating cracks and ruptures in what is a porous heterosexual matrix, exploring a rhythm of `deterritorializations' and `reterritorializations' of the normative in our respective ethnographic and narrative interviews with girls. We also trace more sustained ruptures of heteronormative femininity drawing upon Deleuze and Guattari's notion of `lines of flight' and Braidotti's concept of `alternative figuration'. We argue ruptures and alternative figurations are not constitutive of total `molar' resistance to norms, but are significant spaces of doing girl differently and crucial to map if we are to perceive the malleability and multiplicity of contemporary girl subjectivities, which exceed heteronormative femininity and phallogocentric desire. (shrink)

This paper uses an intersectional analysis to look at contemporary forms of women's popular protest in the hopes of raising questions about the explicit use of the gendered body in struggles for women's emancipation. Specifically, it explores the protests of SlutWalk and FEMEN to suggest that such body protests exemplify a problematic interface between third-wave and postfeminism. This interface or junction is most noticeable and problematic in relation to uncontested auto-sexualisation or ‘femmenism’. I argue that any subversive potential these recent (...) mobilisations might offer is limited through their reproduction of patriarchal, hegemonic norms. This piece is theoretical in the main, though it does include some preliminary qualitative research by way of drawing on websites, news reports, Twitter feeds, Facebook pages, and other online content produced by or about SlutWalk and FEMEN. The hope is to raise questions about the value of this increasingly pervasive use of sexualised, gender protest for feminist organising, not merely as an academic exercise but for its utility in practice. (shrink)