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Rad istražuje kakav je prikaz postfeminističkog lika plavuše u suvremenom američkom filmu. Temelji se na analizi filmova Plavuša s Harvarda (2001) i The House Bunny (2008) u kojima su protagonistice plavuše. Radi se o chick flick filmovima koji prikazuju predrasude i stereotipe o plavušama i s kojima se glavni likovi svakodnevno susreću. Prije same analize, rad donosi pregled razvoja i podjela lika plavuše, od prikaza plavuša kroz povijest do postfeminističkog prikaza lika plavuše koji se analizira u radu. Istraživanje je pokazalo kako je dominantna tema u oba analizirana filma prikaz ženstvenosti i važnost međusobne ženske solidarnosti i podupiranja. Prilikom analize, postfeministički lik plavuše se pokazao se kao slojevit lik koji je na različite načine diskriminiran zbog svoje boje kose, ali i lik koji se ponosi svojim ženskim osobinama i promiče snagu ženske solidarnosti. Svakodnevno su diskriminirane od strane društva, najčešće od žena. Ne ulaze u konflikte s drugim ženama i ne odgovaraju na provokaciju, već ih razuvjere svojom dobrotom, razumijevanjem i podrškom – tj. ženskim osobinama., The paper explores the portrayal of the postfeminist character of the blonde in contemporary American film. Research is based on an analysis of the films Legally Blonde (2001) and The House Bunny (2008) in which the protagonists are blondes. These are chick flick movies that show prejudices and stereotypes about blondes and that the main characters encounter on a daily basis. Prior to the analysis, paper offers an review of the development and division of the blonde character, from the historical representation of blondes until the postfeminist depiction of the blonde character analyzed in the paper. The research showed that the dominant theme in both analyzed films is the depiction of femininity and the importance of mutual female solidarity and support. In the analysis, the postfeminist blonde character proved to be a layered character who was discriminated against in various ways because of her hair color, but also a character who is proud of her feminine qualities and promotes the strength of female solidarity. They are discriminated against on a daily basis by society, mostly by women. They do not engage in conflicts with other women and do not respond to provocation, instead they reassure them with their kindness, understanding and support – female qualities.

Girls in Western societies are increasingly exposed to feminist ideas, often led by women celebrities. The current study explores how Israeli girls negotiate feminist concepts such as ‘girl power’ ...

Since the 1990s, girl power discourse has heralded young girls as smart, capable, and feminine. However, today, overwhelming numbers of girls still lack confidence in their skills and remain underrepresented in leadership positions. In response to this confidence gap, two trends have emerged. First, a brand of all-inclusive girl power that features young girls has become more prevalent in advertising than ever before. Second, countless new girl-geared objects and spaces have emerged, all of which are committed to improving the lives of girls across the United States under the banner of girl power. Nowhere has this been more evident than in initiatives that seek to increase girls’ involvement in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). GoldieBlox, a toy ecosystem that aims to encourage girls to learn engineering concepts through play, is one such initiative. Leveraging material rhetoric and Barthes’ analysis of play, I examine how GoldieBlox acts both on and with those who play with it, as well as its impact on girl power rhetoric. I argue that GoldieBlox’s form enables a style of play that pushes back on girl power by emphasizing agency over femininity and a productive “apprentice” role over consumption as a means to empowerment.

Jennifer Croll. Bad Girls of Fashion: Style Rebels from Cleopatra to Lady Gaga. Illustrated by Ada Buchholc. Annick Press, 2016.Vancouver journalist and fashion historian Jennifer Croll, author of Fashion that Changed the World (2014), has here shifted gears to acquaint younger readers with the role of fashion in the history of women’s empowerment and liberation. Through the lens of biography, Croll traces the gradual rise of Girl Power reflected in, and partly driven by, the fashion choices of forty women, all of them “Style Rebels.” She divides them into ten categories that include Leaders, Modernizers, Instigators, Gender-Benders, Radicals, Decadents, and Freaks.Egypt’s Queen Cleopatra VII and England’s Queen Elizabeth I crafted their regal images partly through their fashion choices; Cixi, the Dowager Empress of China, also outlawed the binding and deforming of girls’ feet; the excesses of Frances’s Queen Marie Antoinette helped to seal her doom; Amelia Bloomer and George Sand (aka Aurore Dupin) scandalized nineteenth-century society by shunning traditional women’s clothing; Coco Chanel replaced traditional corsetry and petticoats with comfortable fashions (and gave the world an eponymous perfume); fashion magazine editors Diana Vreeland and Anna Wintour reigned as arbiters (many said “dictators”) of late-twentieth-century fashion; artists as geographically and culturally diverse as Japan’s Yoko Ono and Rei Kawakubo and Mexico’s Frida Kahlo influenced fashion with their idiosyncratic styles; movie stars such as Louise Brooks, Marlene Dietrich, Marilyn Monroe, Diane Keaton, and Cher Bono became trend-setters in fashion by expanding acceptable boundaries of femininity and gender; while pop-star singers Madonna, Lady Gaga, Björk, Rihana, Nicki Minaj, Beth Ditto, and the ladies of Pussy Riot pushed still further the limits of attention-grabbing self-expression in their attire (or lack of it).Croll’s cast of characters is a large one—this is only a partial list—but one that she stage-manages adroitly. It’s also one that could have been considerably expanded; one notes, for example, the absence of such iconic, fashion trend-setters as Katherine Hepburn and pioneer aviator Amelia Earhart. Book designer Natalie Olsen has provided a stunning layout, one awash in bold colours, and illustrated with both photographs and original, caricature portraits by Polish illustrator Ada Buchholc. In this serious contribution to social history, the author neither shuns, nor sensationalizes, but treats lightly some of her subjects’ love affairs, marital infidelities, sexual preferences, and the role and influence of Lesbian fashions. These nonetheless mark this excellent book as one best suited to older, the publishers suggest ages 12+, and adult readers. Recommended for all public, high-school, and academic curriculum libraries, as well as specialized women’s studies collections.Highly Recommended: 4 out of 4 starsReviewer: Merrill Distad Historian and author Merrill Distad enjoyed a four-decade career building libraries and library collections.

This article aims to broaden critical discussions of postfeminist culture and mediated girlhoods through attention to the visual stylistics operating at their convergence – ‘post-girl power’ film and television. Complicating Angela McRobbie's theory of postfeminism, this project analyzes the phenomenon of ‘sparkle’ in contemporary US girls' media. As well it updates Rachel Moseley's pioneering work on luminous aesthetics in teen-girl film and television, while enlarging the scope of her analysis beyond texts featuring witches. Expanding our understanding of sparkle's relationship to post-girl power media, this study also deploys queer theories of camp and femininity to offer an alternate perspective on sparkle's significance to female youth and feminism. It problematizes the binary of constraint/agency often raised in scholarship on (post)feminism by considering girls' negotiations of post-girl power discourse via their own forms of sparkly media.

Reclaiming Adolescent Sexuality: Images of Girlhood in Petra Collins’s BabeThis paper examines photographs, drawings, collages and other art forms collected in the book Babe, edited by photographer Petra Collins and published by Prestel in 2015. I read the collected artwork as an attempt to present the image of the girl (including her sexuality) from a young woman’s perspective. Babe, which includes works such as photographs of teenagers with visible period blood on the underwear or a to-do list with the goal of never faking another orgasm, asks who a contemporary girl is and how young artists can challenge traditional images of femininity. In my analysis I focus on the excessive use of the color pink in Babe, characterizing the way artists blend innocence with eroticism. I argue that by playing with artifacts of “girlishness,” artists can both expose the absurdity of the image of the girl in popular culture and reclaim symbols of girlhood. I suggest that Collins – despite her ambitions to create an inclusive platform for female artists – does not present a diverse image of girls, who in Babe is still predominantly white and able-bodied. I introduce the potential reading of Babe as a feminist visual manifesto, in reference to the Riot Grrrl movement and the cultural phenomenon of “girl power.” I suggest that the book offers a possibility of exploring the figure of the girl from the perspective of young female artists. Odzyskując młodzieńczą seksualność: wizerunki dziewczyńskości w „Babe” Petry CollinsArtykuł jest analizą fotografii, rysunków, kolaży i innych prac zebranych przez fotografkę Petrę Collins w albumie „Babe", wydanym w 2015 roku przez Prestel. W artykule odczytuję zebrane prace jako szansę zaprezentowania wizerunku dziewczyny (w tym jej seksualności) z perspektywy młodej kobiety. Babe – w której znajdują się zarówno fotografie nastolatek z widoczną krwią menstruacyjną na bieliźnie, jak i zdjęcie listy zadań, na której artystka umieszcza postanowienie, by nigdy więcej nie udawać orgazmu – zadaje pytanie kim dzisiaj jest dziewczyna i w jaki sposób młode artystki mogą kwestionować utarte obrazy kobiecości. Podczas analizy skupiam się na przewadze różu w warstwie wizualnej albumu, ukazując sposób, w jaki artystki łączą pozorną niewinność z erotyzmem. Twierdzę, że poprzez grę z konwencjami „dziewczyńskości” autorki prac mogą zarówno eksponować sztuczność wizerunku młodej kobiety w kulturze popularnej, jak i odzyskiwać symbole dziewczęcości. Sugeruję, że Collins – mimo próby stworzenia inkluzywnej platformy dla artystek – nie oferuje zróżnicowanego obrazu dziewczyny, która w Babe wciąż jest przeważnie biała i pełnosprawna. W odczytaniu Babe jako feministycznego wizualnego manifestu odwołuję się do ruchu Riot Grrrl i fenomenu kulturowego reprezentowanego przez hasło „girl power”. Sugeruję, że album oferuje zgłębienie postaci dziewczyny z punktu widzenia młodych artystek.

In this paper, I use qualitative data to explore the practices engaged in by Kenyan schoolgirls to participate in modern consuming womanhood, as well as the contradictory implications of these practices for thinking about globalized mediated femininities and their enactment in resource-poor settings. The paper examines the centrality of consumption to valued modern femininity among young women around the world, as well as the structural reality of gendered access to income. I show how the cooptation of the materiality of romantic love and normative expectations of male provision in romantic relationships bridge the gap between consumption desires and economic realities among Kenyan schoolgirls in both powerful and problematic ways. The paper ends with a reflection of the implications of these findings for post-girl power, the post-feminist age and the re-inscription of patriarchy.

In this paper, I ask what the self-representations of young women on social network sites can tell us about the conditions and experience of inhabiting femininity in the digitally mediated post-feminist context. First, I outline four conditions of post-feminist girlhood that I suggest young women must navigate in the processes of subjectivity construction. I then describe some of the common kinds of performativity found on a small selection of social network site profiles owned by young Australian women. I suggest that a ‘shameless’ affect may be a necessary form of self-protection for these young women, operating in contexts that appear to require copious amounts, and intense forms, of self-display. The kind of ‘shameless’ affectations we can see on young women’s social network site profiles may also be a way of resisting the dominant terms by which contemporary femininity is understood as normatively ‘melancholic’ or damaged.

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’.

This chapter focuses on how the target group of the 1990s girl power phenomenon made meaning of girl power in the Finnish context. The chapter takes a retrospective look at the phenomenon through the lens of girl energy, a concept used for girl power in Finland. Through memory work, Aino Tormulainen, Heta Mulari and Myry Voipio analyze a sample of adult women’s experiences of being adolescents during the most intensive years of Finnish girl energy. The chapter focuses on three key themes through which the informants remembered the phenomenon: femininity, gender equality, and friendship.

In this paper I explore the popular Australian television character of Ja'mie King – a teenage private school girl created and performed by male comedian Chris Lilley. I conceptualise Lilley's satire as a public pedagogy of young femininity. My reading of his satire responds to recent feminist scholarship around young femininities and ‘girl power’, which explores representations of young femininity in popular culture in Western nations. Drawing primarily on the 2005 television mockumentary We can be heroes, I explore how King can be read in terms of exaggerated ‘girl power’ subjectivity. I examine the relationships, fashioned through the character of King, between ‘sexuality’ and global citizenship activity. I consider the extent to which King's character teaches that young women can ‘have it all’. I explore the extent to which her character teaches that they can be ‘beautiful’ and ‘brainy’, ‘self-determined’ and ‘sexy’ at the same time.

This article considers the intersection of girlhood, agency, and indigenousness through a reading of the internationally renowned film Whale Rider. I suggest that Whale Rider presents a double project that resymbolizes girlhood as it also produces a “decolonizing of the screen.” On the one hand the film resonates with what emerged in the 1990s as the assertion of “girl power” and the notion of a new, active, powerful and agentic femininity. On the other hand, the film mobilizes a re-articulation of these discourses of “new femininities” by “indigenizing the image” of the empowered girl.

The representation of women in the waves of feminism swifts into more empowered women in the era of post feminism. Chick lit as subgenre of postfeminist fiction depicts female protagonists who enjoy freedom and feminity. It is a genre that highlighted girl power. This paper analysed the represented identity of female sleuths and the aspect of girl power portrayed in the chick lit novels of Maya Calica’s Undercover TaiTaiand Gemma Halliday’s Killer in High Heels. It was found out that female protagonists represent women who are tough, wear social masquerade, amateur sleuths, and celebrate feminity to influence others. They used their individual power, beauty and sexual attractiveness power to achieve their goals in life personally and professionally. The representations of girl power in these chick lit novels give space for women to celebrate their femininity and gain their power at the same time. Keywords: Chick lit genre, Female sleuth, Girl power, Postfeminist.

This article examines the politics of The Powerpuff Girls. It situates the series’ three super-powered heroines within the 1990s popular discourse of ‘Girl Power’, presenting empowered images of young femininity. The narrative premise of child characters triumphing over adults also engages with a generational politics with some precedence in television for children. However, an assessment of the limitations of the politics of this ‘Girl Power’ series reveals the marginalization and vilification of certain identity formations outside the white middle-class heterosexual girlhood represented by the show’s protagonists.

This paper is concerned with expanding knowledge of how femininity/sexuality intersections are constituted in secondary schools. Existing studies have drawn upon Judith Butler’s notion of a ‘heterosexual matrix’ in order to understand how intersections of femininity/sexuality are produced in schools through normative discourses of heterosexuality and gender. Drawing on ‘after‐queer’ theoretical resources from within cultural studies that focus on the deployment of notions of sexuality within constructions of intelligible citizenship, I explore how the femininity/sexuality intersection within secondary schools might be complicated, when the significance of discourses of ‘girl power’, linked with successful neoliberal citizenship, is considered. I analyse young women’s discussions of key ‘girl power’ icons in popular culture, generated through fieldwork in an elite girls’ school in Australia. Throughout the analysis I explore how understanding intersections of femininity/sexuality in secondary schools requi...

The Shrek films are a popular worldwide and economic success. Drawing on an analysis of the film as well as responses from undergraduate students enrolled in a children's literature course, we analyze Shrek 2 as a teaching machine in which normative discourses of gender and sexuality circulate under the guise of ‘girl power’. We argue that while Shrek 2 purports to offer viewers a more progressive curriculum about girlhood in relationship to other media texts such as Disney, it ultimately reifies heterosexual white femininity as the norm.

In this paper I explore how a group of female university students, mostly British Asian and in their late teens and early twenties, perform femininities in talk about heritage languages. I argue that analysis of this talk reveals ways in which the participants enact ‘culturally intelligible’ gendered subject positions. This frequently involves negotiating the norms of ‘heteronormativity’, constituting femininity in terms of marriage, motherhood and maintenance of heritage culture and language, and ‘girl power’, constituting femininity in terms of youth, sassiness, glamour and individualism. For these young women, I ask whether higher education can become a site in which they have the opportunities to explore these identifications and examine other ways of imagining the self and what their stories suggest about ‘doing being’ a young British Asian woman in London.

This study examines females' participation in the male-dominated sport of motorcycling. Group interviews with female motorcyclists explore the meaning of this leisure activity in their lives and various factors that facilitate their participation. A grounded-theory approach reveals five sources of empowerment that women gain by participating in motorcycling. This study demonstrates the role facilitators play in creating and cultivating sources of empowerment. It also exposes how feelings of guilt, vulnerability, and concern about societal images can undermine women's feelings of empowerment. “Girl power” represents women's attempts to redefine femininity in a way that embraces the positive aspects of both femininity and masculinity and resists negative stereotypes that restrict women's choices of leisure pursuits.

In recent years, depictions of strong but feminine girl heroes have become common in children's television programming. These girl power icons reflect changing cultural ideas about girlhood. Nickelodeon's My Life as a Teenage Robot is a cartoon popular among preadolescents, which follows the exploits of Jenny, a powerful, female-gendered robot who must save the world while also surviving the trials of high school. This article examines My Life as a Teenage Robot's discourse on girl power and the construction of identity. It focuses on a key theme that contradicts other texts about girl heroes: that strength, agency, and normative femininity cannot be embodied in the same individual. This article interrogates the ways in which the show's messages are simultaneously progressive and regressive, and it calls for further research on girls' reception of media texts.

In this article, I draw on Judith Butler's notion of performativity to investigate the role of digital technologies in processes of gendered subjectification (or ‘girling’) in elite girls' education. Elite girls' schooling is a site where the potential of digital technologies in mediating student‐led constructions and explorations of ‘femininity’ sits alongside school‐produced digital media in the form of promotional texts, in which young femininity is regulated by discourses of ‘girl power’. Whilst such schools are well equipped with digital resources that might be utilised towards students' interrogation of how ‘femininity’ is understood, thus politicising the girling process, school‐produced digital media inscribe a more prescriptive picture of ‘who’ an elite school‐girl can ‘be’. Lyla Girls' Grammar School (LGGS) is an elite secondary school in Melbourne, Australia. I report on research undertaken at two institutional levels of LGGS: the ‘school’ level in which digital media representations of young w...

This article is located in the body of feminist work on “girl culture” that has as its focus the shifts in constructions of femininity. A number of feminists have contextualised these shifts within the broader discursive influences of neo-liberalism, post-feminism, and “girl power,” each of which produce the millennium “girl” subject in particular ways. The independent, “sassy,” and “sexually free” girl may be seen as constructed at the intersection of these discourses. Nonetheless traditional discourses of femininity endure and “post-feminist” girl must negotiate the contradictory tangle of conventional femininity and feminism. Drawing on these ideas, this article examines representations of teenage femininity and sexuality in the New Zealand soap, Shortland Street. Focusing on the main teenage character, Claire, the article analyses ways in which she is produced within conventional and “new” discourses of femininity. These analyses suggest Claire is re/produced as a “postmodern” girl for whom sexual “fr...

This article examines recent sensationalist media attention to mean girls. Popular constructions of the mean girl are argued to be rooted in a developmental psychology debate on girls as indirectly and relationally aggressive. The developmental psychology model of feminine aggression is analyzed as a postfeminist discourse, illustrated to pathologize girls through universalizing, essentializing and context-devoid models of girlhood, which contribute to a shift from notions of girls as vulnerable to girls as mean in popular culture. Constructions of the mean girl are also linked to postfeminist gender anxieties over middle-class girl power and girl success. Regulatory strategies emerging to manage mean girls are examined as oriented toward maintaining appropriate modes of repressive, white, middle-class femininity. When ‘other’ girls do figure in the mean girl story, it is through sensational incidences of isolated girl violence, held up as a dangerous risk of uncontained feminine aggression. Girlhood is argued to remain carefully regulated, through class and race-specific categories of femininity, which continue to produce normative (mean) and deviant (violent) girls.

The essay reads two British novels about teenage girls – Alan Warner's The Sopranos (1998) and Bella Bathurst's Special (2002) – within the context of recent sociological Girls' Studies research. Particular attention is given to processes of self-formation, group dynamics, and twenty-first-century girls' attitudes to both traditional femininity and feminist politics. Contrasting a group of working-class girls with a group of middle-class girls, the essay explores the discourse of ‘girl power’ by pitting the post-feminist ideal of the ‘can-do’ girl against the Ophelian spectre of the ‘at-risk’ girl, thus raising issues of low self-esteem as well as the politics of girls' anger and young female ‘re/sisterhood’. Comparing Bathurst's image of wounded femininity to Warner's carnivalesque symbolism of a parrot on the loose, the essay also interrogates the feminist commitment of both texts, especially in relation to Warner's novel as an example of male ‘cross-writing’.

This article investigates two of the discourses currently organizing mean-ings of girls and girlhood. These are the multi-stranded “Girl Power” and “Reviving Ophelia,” which both emerged in the early 1990s. I argue that “Girl Power” and “Reviving Ophelia” set up an intriguing illustration of not only competing definitions of femininity but also how discourses may interpellate feminine/feminist subjects in a non-unitary way. At first glance, the two discourses seem to offer opposing significations of femi-ninity. On the one hand, “Girl Power” represents a “new girl,” assertive, dynamic, and unbound from the constraints of femininity. On the other hand,”Reviving Ophelia” presents girls as vulnerable, passive, voiceless, and fragile. However, this article demonstrates that it is also possible to view the two discourses as other than opposing, competing, and contradictory. Rather, this article investigates how the two discourses position girls in varying ways in relation to the emerging configurations of subjectification demanded by shifting relations of production, global-izing economies, and redefined relationships between governments and citizens related to the rise of neoliberal policy and practice.

Two interrelated yet seemingly contradictory discourses framing girlhood studies depict feminine identities as either restricted by the Ophelia girl in crisis or overwhelmed by the complexity of feminine norms confronting the Girl power girl. Currently missing from this polarized discussion is how online social networks provide a unique venue for creating and expressing the subjectivities of girlhood. In this paper, we study how 25 young women and girls in Hong Kong engage with Facebook and how this online social space is used to push beyond the linear crisis vs. power continuum to claim a more multidimensional understanding of feminine identity. We evaluate the reasons why Facebook is popular among these users and highlight how these young women expand the “rescue versus empowerment” debate by claiming new spaces to create, experiment and express their own unique forms of femininity.

This chapter first contextualizes the cam girl phenomenon by discussing the values signified by ‘girl power’ narratives in popular culture and culture for girls - visibility, celebrity and consumerism. I argue that this public exposure of girl ‘bedroom culture’ does not necessarily signify a change in the nature of girl culture as traditionally private, personal and domestically located, but further blurs the boundaries between public and private space and life for girls. While the cam girl scenario may have turned teenage-girl bedroom culture into a public, productive and commodified cultural space, the phenomenon seems to be still dependant on a reproduction and exploitation of more traditional notions of girl culture (as private and domestic) and well-established representations of young femininity.

This chapter looks at the recent backlash against postfeminist discourses of empowerment through special reference to the commercial phenomenon of “Girl Power”. Since the late 1990s, this backlash has manifested itself in the British press, which has generated and fuelled a “moral panic” about binge drinking, alcohol-induced violence, and increasing levels of sexually transmitted diseases in the young. This generally gives cause for concern about adolescent behaviour, which is persistently formulated as “out of control” — a formulation that was validated, to some extent, by the introduction of anti-social behaviour orders (ASBOs1) under the 1998 Crime and Disorder Act. Much of this attention has been aimed at young women, who are commonly referred to as “ladettes”2 because of their perceived adoption of behaviours more usually associated with young British men. As Katy Day et al. have shown, many British national newspapers in the period 19982000 reported on studies of teenage drinking which claimed that young women were “bigger binge drinkers” than their male counterparts. Such articles trade on wider moral panics about the behaviour of young women and are used to represent women as a threat to themselves (on account of the fact that their drinking leaves them more exposed to the risks of assault and ill-health) and to patriarchy (through the challenges they pose to established norms of female passivity). Although this chapter will focus primarily on representations of young women in British media texts, the anxieties with which these texts engage are not limited to the United Kingdom and are, as Ariel Levy observes in Female Chauvinist Pigs (2006), equally widespread in contemporary American culture.

Against a background of significant social change experienced by Spanish women from the 1960s onwards, new gender identities and conflicts have emerged. These factors have barely been taken into account in the research work done in Spain. This article looks into the conversations of young people concerning their relationship with risky sexual behaviour, recreational drug use and sexual identity. Drawing from a qualitative study of discussion groups and semi-structured interviews with young recreational drug users, the article suggests that there are at least two models of femininity among the recreational drug consumers that have taken part in this study. First there is a traditional romantic model whereby young women associated risky sexual behaviour with being in love or trusting in the partner. Here the young woman does not link her sexual behaviour to the effects of using recreational drugs but, rather, to the characteristics of her emotional relationship. Second, there is a model of new values and gender roles that are closer to those traditionally associated to males, where the young women use recreational drugs as a form of empowerment to take on new situations concerning their sexuality. The article analyses the perceptions of risk among the different identity groups, along with the negotiations to begin sexual relations and the use of the condom in these groups of recreational drug users. Issues for policy and practice are also briefly considered.

The female action hero has received significant popular and academic attention. Whether gracing the posters of academic conferences on postfeminism1 or the cover of Vogue (April 2002), she is a catalyst for discussions of feminism, female agency and femininity. Images of girls ‘kicking ass’ proliferate in magazines and marketers have exploited the market potential of postfeminist girls who think it is cool that girls can kick ass — but are more interested in purchasing the designer stiletto the girl is kicking ass in. Stephanie Mencimer boasts that the muscle-bound stars of the action-film blockbusters of the ’80s and ’90s have found themselves ungraciously drop-kicked out of the genre by, of all things, a bunch of girls. Girl power flicks like Charlie’s Angels, Crouching Tiger, and Tomb Raider are topping the $100 million mark once dominated by men like Schwarzenegger. (15)

Media discourses proclaiming “Girl Power” have exploded in recent years, Katherine Dieckmann (1996) arguing that, in response to this explosion, girls today have a variety of empowerment models from which to chose. Barbie, Mattel’s infamous toy designed for young girls, has recently become a professional basketball player, the president, a doctor and an astronaut. Several years ago the popularity of Spice Girls, the pop music group imported from England whose hit single “Wanna Be” became a girl culture phenomenon, gave girls various images of femininity they could aspire to, from “Sporty” to “Posh.” This empowerment for young girls, courtesy of the Spice Girls and others, has been manifested in the phrase “Girl Power” now a mantra (and marketing tool) in girl culture. Within the realm of sports, female athletes like Brandi Chastain, whose sports bra clad body was featured after the 1999 U.S. women’s soccer team won the World Cup on the cover of Newsweek along with the announcement that “Girls Rule!” are held up for girls and young women as models of this new female empowerment.

In her discussion of ‘girl power’ in The Whole Woman, Germaine Greer laments the ‘catastrophic career of “girls,” “girls behaving badly,” “girls on top”’ (399). Beginning with the Buffalo Girl, Vivienne Westwood, Greer maps out a lineage of career girls through Madonna, Courtney Love and Bjork, who have acted as figureheads for ‘succeeding generations of aggressively randy, hard-drinking young females, who have got younger with every passing year, until they are now emerging in their pre-teens’ (400). Having denounced three decades earlier the ‘relentless enculturation’ and stereotypes of female passivity and modesty to which girls were subjected in The Female Eunuch (92), she identifies an equally, if not more, insidious form of indoctrination in the construction and marketing of ‘girl power’ — that is, of the paraphernalia of sexualised femininity — to girls and young women by the media. ‘The propaganda machine that is now aimed at our daughters is more powerful than any form of indoctrination that has ever existed before… To deny a woman’s sexuality is certainly to oppress her but to portray her as nothing but a sexual being is equally to oppress her’ (410–411). The trajectory of Greer’s analysis thus highlights a discursive shift from the decorous ‘good girl’ to the sexually aggressive ‘bad girl’ in popular constructions of girlhood and its representations — a Madonna/whore dichotomy that is all too familiar.

Genz, Stephanie. (2009). Postfemininities in Popular Culture. London, England: Palgrave MacMillan, 2009. 1+218 pp. $90.00 (hardcover). ISBN-13: 978-0-230-55150-3. Western culture popularly understands feminism and femininity as opposites. The concepts are interconnected, yet society often portrays them as incompatible, forcing women to choose between feminist and feminine identities. Challenging this false duality, St6phanie Genz argues that for many women lived experience is a complicated patchwork and integration of feminism and femininity. Genz's 2009 book, Postfemininities in Popular Culture, begins to develop the terminology and theoretical constructs with which to describe, contextualize, and critique the lived experiences of these conflicted identities. Drawing on current postfeminist scholarship, including work by Dow, Inness, McRobbie, Gill, and Whelehan, Genz argues that the conflicting but intertwined concepts of feminism and femininity can be reunited and that postfeminist entertainment performs the first stumbling attempts at expressing these new postfemininities. While Genz uses the terms feminism and femininity in a traditional manner, her definitions for postfeminism and postfemininity are technical. Genz defines postfeminism as theory, entertainment, and/or practice occurring after second-wave feminism and harboring "within itself the threat of backlash as well as the potential for innovation" (24). Then, arguing that second-wave feminism significantly changed the feminine landscape, Genz coins postfemininity to "depict the paradoxes of contemporary femininity," referencing both "traditional narratives of feminine passivity" and the more "progressive scripts" of women's empowerment (17). Just as postfeminism is simultaneously liberal and conservative, postfemininity is both traditional and progressive, expressing the "manifold layers" of feminine experience (17). Organized into two parts, with several chapters each, Postfemininities in Popular Culture explores the constructions of femininity, first within prominent feminist writings and then in popular culture. By putting feminist theory and popular culture into direct conversation, Genz provides a representational history of femininity from the 1960s to the present. Analyzing feminist writings in the first part of the book, Genz explores four historical stages of feminist thought: (1) liberal feminism, exemplified by Friedan's The Feminine Mystique; (2) radical feminism, exemplified by Millet's Sexual Politics; (3) the 1980s' backlash, exemplified by Friedan's reactionary work, The Second Stage; and finally (4) girl power in the 1990s, exemplified by third-wave feminism's focus on girls, media, and consumer culture. This first section successfully demonstrates the different configurations of gender and femininity that these feminist theories entail. Genz's work carefully argues that feminism has a fluctuating relationship with femininity, and that different feminist theories alternately renounce, embrace, or attempt to redefine femininity. The second part explores media portrayals of femininity. Again, Genz works historically, tracing the popular representations of women from the 1960s to the present. …