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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]

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]

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]

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.