This interchange explores the role of girl (ages thirteen to twenty-two) activism in the USA organisation SPARK (Sexualization Protest: Action, Resistance, Knowledge). Some of the many initiatives and programmes SPARK has enacted with girls, including online forums, blog spaces, marches, and summits directly address recent calls to attend to the complexity in understanding and resisting ‘sexualisation’ with teen girls. Several of the girls’ media appearances are explored in detail to illustrate the dynamics of girls’ agency and resistance that emerge in (...) their embodied engagements with ‘sexualisation’. (shrink)

The Nike Foundation’s flagship corporate social responsibility campaign, ‘The Girl Effect’, has generated support for targeted investments in adolescent girls as the ‘key’ economic development in the global south. As a representational regime, the campaign is an example of an increasingly hegemonic discourse of global girl power via formal education. In an era of ‘sexualisation moral panic’ regarding representations of contemporary young female sexual subjectivities in the global north, this article considers ideological figurings of adolescent female sexual embodiment in the (...) global south through a discursive analysis of the campaign’s three most popular viral videos. (shrink)

In her 2006 bestseller about the rise of 'raunch culture' and of such self-ascribed 'Female Chauvinist Pigs' as the tawdry socialite Paris Hilton, Ariel Levy describes these phenomena as being indicative of a drastic cultural shift. Serious concerns have been raised, most recently by the American Psychological Association, about the effects of this culture on young girls. Recent Web sources have coined a term for the self-concept embodied and projected by Paris Hilton and her admirers: 'Hiltonism'. In this paper, I (...) examine this type of self-concept. I begin by exploring raunch culture and Hiltonism in some detail and by delineating three main principles of Hiltonism. Two sections follow in which I scrutinise two putative hypotheses on the provenance of the Hiltonistic self-concept: the postmodern and the hedonistic hypotheses. I conclude that only the hedonistic hypothesis holds water. I close by extracting some of the moral and educational implications of Hiltonism as a modern form of hedonism. (shrink)

This article explores the relationality between women’s bodies and selfies on NSFW (Not Safe For Work) tumblr blogs. We consider the way selfie practices engage with normative, ageist and sexist assumptions of the wider culture in order to understand how specific ways of looking become possible. Women’s experiences of their bodies change through interactions, sense of community and taking and sharing selfies. This article provides an empirical elaboration on what sexy selfies are and do by analysing interviews, selfies and blog (...) content of nine women in the NSFW self-shooters community on tumblr. For our participants, self-shooting is an engaged, self-affirmative and awareness raising pursuit, where their body, through critically self-aware self-care, emerges as agentic, sexual and distinctly female. Thus, this is a reading of selfies as a practice of freedom. (shrink)