‘Having It All’? : Pre-Teen Girls Negotiate Successful Femininity

Abstract

Depictions of girls and young women as powerful, unconstrained and outshining boys and men characterise the modern postfeminist cultural climate and imbue femininity with wide reaching success. However, research into postfeminist discourse reveals a far more complicated picture than this straightforward ode to success. Previously the focus has been on successful femininity within education or employment, or on the future aspirations of girls and young women. Yet considering the grandiose postfeminist claims of successful femininity it is important to examine specifically what success means to those who are expected to hold it. The current research has done so from the perspective of ethnically diverse pre-adolescent girls, addressing the lack of research with this age group and with girls from minority ethnic backgrounds. Incorporating the latter enabled the thesis to examine how ethnic identities may intersect with understandings of successful femininity. Focus groups and photo-narrative books were used to explore the ways 32 girls between 11- and 13-years old made sense of successful girl/womanhood, including media representations of successful femininity. Participants were recruited from two urban schools within New Zealand. The study used a feminist poststructuralist framework and employed thematic and Foucauldian discourse analysis to analyse the data. Two overarching themes were identified: ‘Success as Individual Qualities’ and ‘Spheres of Success.’ Across these themes the girls’ drew heavily on postfeminist and neoliberal discourses and constructed success through the competing and contradictory discourses of girl power and traditional femininity. Successful femininity was constructed as a highly individualised endeavour, predicated on the individual qualities of hard work, constant striving towards goals and overcoming adversity. These qualities were required to accomplishing success within three mandatory spheres of success; education, employment and motherhood. The successful female subject was expected to move linearly through these three spheres, engaging in higher education to earn a successful career in order to financially sustain motherhood. Discussions of employment success oscillated between constructions of unbounded possibility for young women in the workforce and recognition of the barriers facing young women and especially Māori women who work. Motherhood, described as the apex of successful femininity, was also shot through with complexity. The girls constructed a narrow scope for success through motherhood: those who had children without planning, had many children or who gave birth while young or single were positioned outside of this successfulness. The ultimate form of successful femininity required a delicate balancing of the three spheres of success in order for women to achieve the contradictory and unobtainable task of ‘having it all.’ Findings demonstrate girls’ lack of access to a language with which to articulate oppression and inequality and emphasise the problematic entanglement of ‘new’ discourses of equality, empowerment and success with the enduring presence of powerful and regulatory traditional discourses of femininity.