‘The geeks shall inherit the earth’: Girls’ Agency, Subjectivity and Empowerment

Abstract

This paper is located in a larger study of girls’ empowerment within the everyday context of school cultures. While much feminist research has focused on the ‘perils’ of feminine adolescence, we are interested in how girls successfully navigate the transition from girlhood to adult womanhood. Thus the sample for this paper includes girls who consciously positioned themselves against an ‘emphasized femininity’ that made their classmates popular, but that has been blamed for girls’ lowered self-esteem, dissatisfaction with their bodies, and disordered eating. Because their self-positioning carried the risk of marginalization within peer cultures, we ask ‘What makes their alternative self-representations possible?’ We are particularly interested in whether their transgressive identities signal a rewriting of girlhood as a social rather than personal project, and how feminism might operate to support girls’ empowerment.