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In this paper, we explore how what we term "sext education" pedagogies intersect with young people's understandings of, and talk about, sexting through a feminist analysis of two cyber-safety campaign films: "Tagged" from Australia and "Exposed" from the UK. The films tell alarming stories about the ways in which teenage girls' digital interactions and representations can be misused by their peers. We explore the normative construction of schools as sites for policing sex and gender norms in the films. We then investigate how young people take up, manage and sometimes question these gendered logics in their own digitally networked peer groups through an analysis of data from several school-based qualitative research projects on young people's digital sexual cultures and their responses to sexting in cyber-safety films in London, UK and Victoria, Australia. We critique the naturalisation of digital realms as extensions of the schoolyard in the films and for young people themselves, and suggest that such assumptions need questioning in future forms of sext education.

This paper explores how Tinder marketing responds to gender politics and discourses within contemporary postfeminist media cultures transnationally. We provide a comparative semiotic analysis of the prominent Tinder advertising campaign Single, Not Sorry, which runs across several European countries, as well as the UK and USA, with marketing material from Tinder India's YouTube page. Challenging sexist cultural stereotypes and norms of feminine sexual passivity and modesty has a clear economic rationale as a marketing strategy for Tinder. The Tinder marketing media analysed appears to be largely aimed at young women and speaks to postfeminist notions of women's new sexual freedom in global neoliberal modernity, with Tinder positioning itself as a tool enabling such. Yet, as we illustrate, some key differences emerge across these marketing messages about women's empowerment and the kind of gender roles and "modern" heterosexual relations made available through Tinder in the European and Indian contexts. The analysis we offer contributes to scholarship on transnational postfeminist media cultures and discourses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports on data from interviews conducted with parents of high school-aged teens as part of a study which was aimed at better understanding the gendered dimensions of youth sexting and social media use, and the community responses to it. Here, we outline the findings on parents' key concerns around digital and social media, their perceptions of the gendered dynamics of youth self-imaging practices, and their attitudes towards sexting and potentially "sexualized" self-images. Echoing other research in this area, parents were not overly concerned about sexting, nor sexual image-sharing or sexual media use among teens. Rather, their key concerns were more generally about the intensities and pressures of constant contact with peers in the digital era. They did, however, articulate key gender differences and socialization processes around youth self-imaging practices. We discuss the gendered cultural "attunements to sexualization" that parents negotiate in relation to social media image-sharing practices and suggest that the perspectives and experiences described can be understood as part of a broader cultural "psychologization", and often psycho-pathologizing, of youth self-images in digitally networked intimate publics that is particularly intense around the vectors of gender and sexuality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Vulva-positive websites, a sub-type of body-positive sites, reveal women's discursive, affective, and pragmatic responses to ideals of "normal" and "beautiful" female genitalia. Body-positive sites have been positioned by critical feminist and Foucauldian theorists as facilitating women's self-surveillance and regulation. To understand how women represent what a vulva-positive site does and what it means to them, we analysed a year's textual posts to the Large Labia Project. We identified three key themes: the site as (1) a pedagogical tool addressing a knowledge gap, (2) a provider of support and solidarity, and (3) an enabler of challenge to female genital normativity. These themes constitute a discursive orientation towards the pedagogical and social rather than primarily the individual and psychological. We argue that vulva-positive sites can function as significant sources of solidarity and support for women within complex and contradictory post-feminist digital cultures. In this context, however, we maintain a critical stance of "ambivalence" towards such sites, considering intensified gendered calls towards self-actualisation through self-exposure. In post-feminist media cultures that are frequently contradictory in address to women and girls, we conclude that the call to "exposure" comes from an increasingly complex range of voices and under diverse pretexts for women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Feminist scholars have begun to unpack the ways in which neoliberalism is underpinned by particular gendered affective investments: drives for perfection, confidence, and the careful observance of feeling rules mandating a pleasing balance of resilience and approachability. In this context, we are interested in mapping the cultural production of affective dissonances with neoliberal modes of thriving. We draw attention to post-recessional television made by and about young women that articulate affective dissonances with the confident subjectivities associated with neoliberal cultural mythologies of girlpower. We suggest that within recent, largely USA, television some important questioning of such mythologies is taking place through the articulation of young women's anger, insecurity, anxiety, and misplaced confidence. Such affective dissonances may to some extent serve to problematise myths about both the accessibility and appeal of highly individualist career-oriented lifestyles idealised in cultural mythologies of powerful "can-do" girls. Our analysis aims at two-fold consideration of: first, how giving voice to young women as "suffering actors" may open space for dissonant affective positions that connect to feminist aims of social transformation; and second, consideration of the ways in which exclusionary technologies of femininity may also operate through representations of young women's anger, insecurity, and anxiety. Through this analysis we contribute to understanding dialectical tensions in the psychic and affective life of post-feminism and feminine subjectification in the neoliberal, post-recessional socio-cultural context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social media platforms and apps have become increasingly important tools for governance and the centralisation of information in many nation states around the globe. In China, the government is currently piloting a social credit system in several cities in an ambitious attempt to merge a financial credit score system with a broader quantification of social and civic integrity for all citizens and corporations. China has already begun to experiment with metrics and quantification of the value and virtue of its citizens, going beyond the function of measuring workplace performance and health-related self-tracking to measuring one's purchasing and consumption history, interpersonal relationships, political activities, as well as the tracking of one's location history. China has also already begun to apply a reward and punishment system that rewards those who comply with the Chinese government's ideals and punishes those who deviate from them. Although there are no such ambitiously unified systems currently proposed in Western liberal democratic countries, some aligned structures and cultures of social media use are already well in place. This article seeks to offer a comparative examination of the structures and cultures of China's social credit system with those which are already present and in place in Western liberal democratic countries. While it may be convenient to digitise everyday social, political and economic life, China's social credit system brings about a vision of what may be to come, should democratic countries continue to do so without stricter data use policies in place. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Women considering female genital cosmetic surgery (FGCS) are likely to use the internet as a key source of information during the decision-making process. The aim of this systematic review was to determine what is known about the role of the internet in the promotion and normalisation of female genital cosmetic surgery and to identify areas for future research.Methods: Eight social science, medical, and communication databases and Google Scholar were searched for peer-reviewed papers published in English. Results from all papers were analysed to identify recurring and unique themes.Results: Five papers met inclusion criteria. Three of the papers reported investigations of website content of FGCS providers, a fourth compared motivations for labiaplasty publicised on provider websites with those disclosed by women in online communities, and the fifth analysed visual depictions of female genitalia in online pornography. Analysis yielded five significant and interrelated patterns of representation, each functioning to promote and normalise the practice of FGCS: pathologisation of genital diversity; female genital appearance as important to wellbeing; characteristics of women's genitals are important for sex life; female body as degenerative and improvable through surgery; and FGCS as safe, easy, and effective. A significant gap was identified in the literature: the ways in which user-generated content might function to perpetuate, challenge, or subvert the normative discourses prevalent in online pornography and surgical websites.Conclusions: Further research is needed to contribute to knowledge of the role played by the internet in the promotion and normalisation of female genital cosmetic surgery. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Post-structuralist youth studies theorists have argued for nuanced perspectives on agency that are not reliant on an assumption of subjects as rational and internally coherent individuals, and understand subjectivity and social structure as produced in concert. These are important theoretical developments that have shaped recent scholarship on girls' identities and cultures. In this paper, we seek to give them some further sociological grounding by thinking through their resonance for the specific debate about young women and what feminist agency consists of, or looks like today. What we wish to further flesh out is how more familiar, modernist ideas about girls' agency have started to reach their limits not merely because of the post-structuralist turn, but because of the socio-cultural conditions of neoliberalism, post-feminism and post-girlpower. We unpack some recent shifts and complexities around three concepts: choice, empowerment and voice. These are the terms by which the possibility of girls' and young women's agency has traditionally been understood in feminist scholarship and much work in girls' studies. However, when we interrogate these concepts within the specific neoliberal, post-feminist, post-girlpower context, their usefulness for either understanding or enabling feminist agency is thrown into question. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Unpacking ideologies at work within contemporary popular media discourses about young womanhood can be challenging when the terrain of their representation is often presented in a kind of binary-oppositional fashion. There is concern that in contemporary popular culture traditional gender roles are becoming even more entrenched, with femininity increasingly defined around notions of (hyper, hetero-normative) “sexiness.” At the same time, it seems that certain aspects of masculinity, namely sexual hedonism and social, drinking-centred hedonism, have conditionally opened up to young women. The panics that exist around both the figures of the “sexy girl” and the “laddish girl” lead me to unpack here how it is that concerns about women's excessive “sexiness,” and the gendered reinforcement of the sex-object role, relate to discourses of gender “transgression” that often circulate around the figure of the “ladette,” and the supposedly new-found freedoms she is exercising. I suggest that while the figures of the “sexy girl” and the “laddish girl” are both to some extent deplored and constructed as “excessive” and “transgressive” in recent media discourses, they are also both normalised and publicly imag(in)ed through such discourses as central post-feminist paradigms of young womanhood. I go on to explore a possible ideological function of the co-existence of “sexy” and “laddish” girls as normative figures within contemporary media culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a textual analysis of public social network site (SNS) profiles owned by young women aged between 18 and 21, many of the profiles contain representations of self which would typically be considered ‘unfeminine’. Photos of young women and their friends posed with wide open mouths and protruding tongues and images depicting drunkenness and raucousness are common. This kind of ‘laddish’ performativity by young women leaves feminists, especially those concerned with cultural representation, with a dilemma: is ‘feminist representation’ to be found in this aspect of SNS representation, in this kind of ‘symbolically inverted’ depiction of feminine bodies? Does this kind of ‘laddish’ performativity by young women function less as a rebellion against femininity and more as a kind of ‘giving in’ to a certain model of masculinity; as a ‘phallic’ form of girlhood now licensed by the patriarchy; or even an indication of ‘feminine melancholia’, predicated on the broader cultural rejection of critical feminist voices? In this article, I suggest that neither paradigms of resistance or conformity completely suffice for understanding ‘laddishness’ by young women in the context of a viewing premise of self-production, such as that we encounter with SNS material. I start by offering a possible feminist reading of ‘laddish’ body performativity by young women on SNSs, drawing from theories of the ‘grotesque body’ in representation as well as from Mulvey's psychological explanation of ‘voyeuristic’ viewing pleasure in narrative cinema. I go on to develop the concept of ‘performative shamelessness’ by young women and expand upon its possible significations in the post-feminist, neoliberal cultural landscape. Engaging in particular with McRobbie's ideas about the post-feminist era, I suggest that performative shamelessness may be one of the few options available to young women wishing to maintain a sense of self-definition in the face of intense social and cultural scrutinizing, and often sexually objectifying, gazes. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various reports within the issue on topics including girls, young women, and technological developments.

The author offers a categorisation of hetero-sexy material found on a sample of MySpace profiles maintained by young Australian women. She describes a hetero-sexy material as an imagery, iconography, and decorations on the profiles that reinforce notions of feminine gender performativity as sexualised. She explores feminist performance theory while taking into account the premise under which it is viewed as representation made by women themselves in the context of public self expression.