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)

This article focuses on youth feminist political action in Ecuador and Peru and its relationship to contemporary gender hierarchies. I examine how and why youth gender justice activists understand their political action differently from the professionalized adult feminists who mobilize them. Grounded theory was used to collect and analyze interviews with 21 young women and men activists on gender justice. Youth activists seek cultural changes using social advocacy to target the family, household, and intimate partnerships, what I describe as politicizing (...) the sociocultural. They develop new ways of perceiving political action in response to challenges produced by emergent gender hierarchies, which they understand as blurred gender inequalities or processes that simultaneously enable and constrain gender equality. (shrink)