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Feminisms re-figuring 'sexualisation', sexuality and 'the girl' Emma Renold and Jessica Ringrose Feminist Theory 2013 14: 247 DOI: 10.1177/1464700113499531 The online version of this article can be found at: http://fty.sagepub.com/content/14/3/247

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Introduction

Feminisms re-figuring ‘sexualisation’, sexuality and ‘the girl’

Feminist Theory 14(3) 247–254 ! The Author(s) 2013 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1464700113499531 fty.sagepub.com

Emma Renold Cardiff University, UK

Jessica Ringrose Institute of Education, University of London, UK

The girl is a site of a culture’s most intensified disinvestments and re-castings of the body. (Grosz, 1994: 174) The girl is a radical singularity constituted in relations of power between statements and visibility. (Driscoll, 2002: 193)

The ‘girl subject’ and ‘young femininity’ are repeatedly and with great effect being made increasingly visible as a particular social, cultural and psychical problematic in late capitalist societies (Driscoll, 2002). The last two decades have witnessed a burgeoning and interdisciplinary field of critical girlhood studies that have rapidly taken up this contested site of young femininity (e.g. Walkerdine, 1991; Hey, 1997; Walkerdine et al., 2001; Gonick, 2003; Aapola et al., 2004; Harris, 2004; Mitchell and Reid-Walsh, 2005; Jiwani et al., 2006; Nayak and Kehily, 2007; Duits, 2008; Currie et al., 2009; Kearney, 2011; Hains, 2012; Ringrose, 2013). As a sociopolitical project, the figure of the contemporary girl is over-determined, weighted down with meaning and commonly represented through binary formations of celebratory postfeminist ‘girl power’ vs. crisis discourses of ‘girls at risk’ (Aapola et al., 2004; Gonick et al., 2009). One of the primary ‘luminosities’ (Deleuze in McRobbie, 2008) surrounding girls as both bearers of power and objects of risk centres on girls’ relationship to sexuality and entry into sexual womanhood. In this special issue, we bring together a series of articles that explore a veritable explosion of interest, debate and controversy over what is referred to as the (premature or hyper) ‘sexualisation of the (girl) child’.

Corresponding author: Emma Renold, School of Social Sciences, Cardiff University, 2.34 Glamorgan Building, King Edward VII Avenue, Cardiff CF10 3WT, UK. Email: [email protected]


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Public and private anxieties over the eroticised child have long circulated throughout history (Egan and Hawkes, 2010; Egan, this issue), most notably via protectionist discourses of child abuse and child protection, and often in moments of big societal and cultural change, such as seismically shifting sexual and gender relations (Nayak and Kehily, 2007; Bray, 2008). However, in the contemporary context, the discourse of ‘sexualisation’ is gaining hegemonic status in the way that childhood sexuality is framed, which is why a range of commentators have dubbed child sexualisation as a contemporary ‘moral panic’ (Buckingham et al., 2009). In the past several years, popular and consumer culture has been subject to a regulatory gaze from a range of government and non-governmental bodies across the global north (Rush and La Nauze, 2006; APA, 2007; Papadopoulos, 2010; Bailey, 2011), accompanied by a steady stream of sensationalist popular cultural texts purporting to illuminate the real problems of ‘sexualisation’ (for a critical overview, see: Egan, 2013). Given the enormous public attention to the topic, there has been a growing number of academic critiques that have deconstructed the tensions, assumptions and effects of the ‘sexualisation’ debates in special issues of journals in the areas of psychology (Sex Roles, 66(11–12); Tolman, 2012), media studies (Albury and Lumby, 2010) and education (Attwood and Smith, 2011; Epstein et al., 2012). Commentators have particularly sought to gender the sexualisation discourse to explore how the primary objects of looking and fear are girls (Egan and Hawkes, 2010; Egan, 2013), and to consider what the multiplicitous effects of such gendered moral panics may be for diverse groups of children and young sexualities more widely (Fahs et al., forthcoming; Renold et al., forthcoming). In our own work (Renold and Ringrose, 2011: 391), we have previously identified and here adapt how the ‘sexualisation of girls’ discourse: . codifies almost any sexual expression (e.g. sexual desire) and related concerns (e.g. body image, sexual violence, etc.) as an effect of and thus evidence for ‘sexualisation’; . focuses exclusively on the harmful effects of media exposure with little analysis of how girls themselves make meaning of, and negotiate the media in their everyday lives; . produces a ‘scary futurology’ (Smith, 2010), with an overemphasis on protectionism, victimisation and objectification; . neglects girls’ sexual agency, rights and pleasure (including how the eroticisation of innocence features in girls’ own sexual subjectification practices); . renews enduring binaries of active, predatory male sexuality versus passive, nonagentic female sexuality (where girls’ sexuality is always risky/at risk); . encourages either/or position-taking among stakeholders between sexual empowerment and pleasure versus sexual danger and protectionism; . legitimises a heteronormative and linear developmental trajectory of ‘healthy’ female heterosexuality;


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. operates as a white middle class panic over the desire for and loss of a raced and classed sexual innocence, and thus reproduces the othering of working class/ racialised cultures as evidence of hyper-sexuality; and . refuses psychoanalytic understandings of how girls live under the burden of adult desires, projections and fantasies. Notwithstanding these critiques, the ways in which the girl figure continues to be colonised, exploited, abused and commodified have perhaps intensified in an ever increasing global girl market, where ‘girl’ becomes synonymous with ‘sex’. Discussing the historical and contemporary domain of children’s sexuality, Faulkner (2010) encourages us to think about how girls’ sexual innocence is now so fetishised that it has become an irretrievable lost object. We see a visceral longing for innocence in what is constructed as a toxic, impure and spoiled sexual landscape. Nowhere are these desires more evident than in the UK policy review The Bailey Report: Letting Children be Children (Barker and Duschinsky, 2012). Developing Fine’s ‘seminal’ work on the missing discourse of girls’ desire, Fine and McClelland (2006) have cogently argued that girls’ sexual desire is not so much ‘missing’ anymore, but rather caricaturally displayed everywhere in sex-saturated visual representations. How this enmeshes or not with girls’ ambivalent accounts of embodied desire, however, has largely still to be rendered visible (McClelland and Fine, 2008; Tolman, 2012). Foucault’s discursive incitement to sex is thus girlified in the sexualisation moral panic, such that all girls are unevenly subject to a new figuration of the ‘proto-sexual girl’; a working class femininity whose sexuality continually poses a social threat (Walkerdine, 1999). As Driscoll theorises, drawing on Deleuze, the girl is ‘defined by a conception of her body as sexualised territory’: the girl becomes sex (Driscoll, 2002: 256; Driscoll, this issue). Also reminiscent of Walkerdine’s ground-breaking work on classed fantasies of femininity are the mass fantasies of the eroticised-innocent girl child that work in highly paradoxical ways. Where historically paedophilia was a site of perpetual danger reserved for a sick and abject individualised minority (Walkerdine, 1997), commentators are now noting that such desires are normalised and writ large in ‘lad mags’, for instance, through what has been conceptualised as a ‘paedophilic imaginary’ (Bray, 2008). Moreover, the notion of ‘corporate paedophilia’ has been used by Rush and La Nauze (2006) to shame corporations’ ‘ageinappropriate’ commercialisation of girls’ bodies for profit. Given this highly complex landscape, this special issue aims to animate discussions that might help us to make sense of complex social-cultural-materialtemporal-historical intensities, forces and struggles of the sexual-girl-child and her body as she traverses diverse social, cultural and political fields: as body, image and affect. Our call for articles asked for engagements that could help theorise, research and understand the complex figuration of the sexual-girl-child in the contemporary socio-political moment, where enduring gendered, classed, raced and sexual inequalities are being recomposed and old and new feminisms are enlivened and re-tooled.


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To engage these contradictions, our own work engages Deleuzo-Guatarrian notions of feminism as schizo practice (Lorraine, 2008) to help us navigate what we see as the ‘schizoid’ conditions of living young femininities (Renold and Ringrose, 2008, 2011, Ringrose and Renold, forthcoming). A schizo-feminist analysis would explore ‘sexualisation’ as a dynamic post-human ‘sexuality assemblage’ (see also Fox and Alldred, forthcoming), made up of animate and inanimate technological, virtual, material, discursive and semiotic elements. A schizo-feminist mapping of the girl in this assemblage would trace the multiple movements territorialising and de-territorialising girls’ sexual becomings. It would involve tracing the nomadic ‘vitalising paths’ (Lorraine, 2008: 80) of what a girl can do, become and bear inside this and other sexuality assemblages. One of our aims in this introduction is to invite readers to think about what the collection of articles and shorter ‘interchange’ pieces do together as a type of assemblage, where each article intra-acts with the other to create new potentials for thinking about girls and sexuality. Each author explores in different ways how the figure of the ‘girl’ connects with culturally specific contexts across a range of topics and practices. The girl travels across the articles in multi-modal ways (as digital, as affect, as animation, as biology, as brand, as policy discourse) and through different theoretical, disciplinary and political lenses. What follows is our own particular, partial tracing of the girl and her affective address across this engaging range of articles. In the first contribution, aptly titled ‘What does sexualisation mean?’, Robbie Duschinsky sets the scene, carefully deconstructing the different ways in which the girl is evoked in and through media and policy discourses on ‘sexualisation’. He elaborates how sexual-isation, as portmanteau, frames sexuality as passive enculturation, delimiting and displacing the possibility of girls’ sexual agency, and masking the contradictory conditions that contain and shame young female subjectivity in the contemporary socio-political context. His analysis gestures towards how ‘sexualisation’ emerges as an amorphous and elastic set of ideas with complex psychosocial effects, particularly in terms of how sexualisation discourses produce pernicious gendered and heteronormative truisms that operate to pathologise Other girls and young women. Next, Danielle Egan explores similar affective dynamics, using psychoanalysis to think about how ‘sexualisation’ forms a site of melancholia and protection, and even a politics of resentment for some feminist commentators. Taking up Angela McRobbie’s (2008) figure of the ‘phallic girl’, Egan traces the classed and racialised pronouncements in this formulation, questioning the way that it positions girls as blindly adopting hyper-sexualisation and laddette culture. Egan urges us to resist this reductionist and seductive narrative of girls’ sexuality in crisis, and encourages us instead to afford feminine subjectivity ‘nuance, complexity, ambivalence or difference’. Edell, Tolman and Brown outline the practical challenges of acknowledging this complexity when adult feminists partner with teen girls, in this case to develop the USA organisation SPARK (Sexualization Protest: Action, Resistance, Knowledge) dedicated to creating space for girls to voice their analyses and stage actions


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through media engagement, blogging and activist events. They share the paradoxes of teen girls managing the multifaceted and contradictory messages about girls’ sexuality mobilised in the notion of ‘sexualisation’, narrating the story of a SPARK teen girl activist, Emma, who appears on national television to discuss a protest against Teen Vogue’s digital airbrushing, wearing a ‘miniskirt [that] does not quite reach the top of her black thigh-high knee socks’. The article speculates on the projective adult desires and anxieties that surround Emma, throwing up a series of questions about how to support girls’ ‘choices’ whilst sitting with our own discomfort and projections, particularly as academic and activist feminists. Catherine Driscoll’s article pushes us to challenge discourses of ‘choice’ by critically engaging with theoretically nuanced accounts of girls’ sexual agency through an extended analysis of Tiqqun’s Raw Materials for a Theory of the YoungGirl (2001). YoungGirl is a philosophical French text which relates the figure of the girl to the functions of capital. Drawing connections between Tiqqun’s assertions about girls as sexual commodities and the generalisations and universalisms incited in recent ‘sexualisation’ debates, Driscoll urges girl studies to continue to research the complexities of commodification and the ‘economies of attention’ through which girls get defined and ‘bear the burden of representing sex’ in ways that account for the inseparability of material and discursive girlhoods, from the ‘idealised’ through to ‘counter-images’. Celia Roberts also draws attention to and disrupts traditional ontologies of the material and discursive in her provocative challenge for feminists to critically engage with sexuality assemblages created by evolutionary psychology. Taking the pubertal girl-body as her unit of analysis, Roberts considers controversial theory and research from Belsky, Steinberg and Draper, who suggest that early onset of puberty is an effect of traumatic and stressful socio-familial conditions (e.g. parenting patterns and absent fathers), thus rupturing and reversing causal and linear explanations of the timings of puberty. Her article encourages us to think with post-human developments in feminist science studies and the ‘infoldings’ of sexual embodiment, and to explore the intra-action, rather than separation or inter-action, of social-biological-psychological accounts of ‘premature sexualisation’. The human–non-human assemblage of girls’ mediated bodies is pivotal in Ringrose, Harvey, Gill and Livingstone’s article, which returns us to the luminosity of the self-sexualising young feminine subject. They examine the gendered moral economy of sexual exploitation in teen ‘sexting’, questioning the ‘postfeminist’ contradiction where adult women are assumed to be empowered by sexy selfdisplay, but girls as ‘not-yet-woman’ are morally condemned and shamed for ‘sexting’ images. Drawing on qualitative research with minority ethnic young people living in London, they analyse teens’ meaning-making practices in what they call the ‘visual economy’ of networked, digital peer culture, exploring both the ambivalent pleasures of digital flirtation, but also persistent sexual double standards in the way images of girls’ bodies can be traded like currency at the same time as the bodies in images can be devalued as ‘slut’.


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Gywnne’s article takes up the acute moral anxieties surrounding the sexualisation of the animated girl-body in the context of Japan, locating them in a wider sexuality assemblage of the changing status of Japanese womanhood and the ‘crisis of (Japanese) masculinity’. Exploring the figure of the sexualised schoolgirl mobilised in Manga comic books aimed at male readers, Gywnne deliberates on whether the sexy schoolgirls should be read as postfeminist empowered vixens or sexualised victims. The article challenges simplistic readings of Manga, showing the psychosocial force of sexual power projected on to the sexualised schoolgirl, and underscoring the vulnerability of the male body, the fragility of male sexual power and masculine desire for sexually assertive females. Debating whether this is simply a patriarchal fantasy for a ‘phallic’, hyper-sexualised girl, or a measure of the progressive nature of Manga, the article raises critical questions about changing norms of Japanese masculinity and desire. In the final article, Heather Switzer explores the power of mediated and discursive girlhoods, analysing how the figure of the girl is mobilised in the representational regime of the Nike Foundation’s flagship corporate social responsibility campaign, ‘The Girl Effect’. The article does the crucial work of establishing how concern over girls’ sexuality takes differing forms in development discourses of the global south, where ‘panics are less about girls being ‘‘too sexy too soon’’. . . and more about girls being ‘‘too reproductive too soon’’ and not commodified enough, insofar as their labour is unproductive and illegible to the state and their consumptive patterns are stalled at subsistence’. Psychosocially, ‘The Girl Effect’ mobilises a power fantasy for Western girls in particular to save ‘other girls’ from patriarchal sexual slavery as ‘child brides’, for instance, through a mechanics of erasure that ignores the politics of location of girlhood, leading ultimately to ‘securing the status quo’. Collectively, this special issue highlights a diverse range of theoretical and methodological challenges involved in engaging in the contested and contradictory terrain of girlhood, sexuality and ‘sexualisation’. Exploring the myriad assumptions, silences and myths associated with the seemingly ubiquitous discourse of ‘sexualisation’ and its wide-ranging psychosocial effects/affects, the articles offer critical tools for interrupting and displacing sexualisation’s disciplining forces as these come to settle upon and re-regulate girls and girlhood sexuality. Acknowledgements We would like to thank the editorial team at Feminist Theory for providing us with an opportunity to guest-edit this special issue. A special thank you goes to Carolyn Pedwell and Celia Roberts who have been wonderfully supportive in enabling this collection to come to fruition. Thank you also to the anonymous reviewers, and to each of the authors for their contributions.

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