Femininities, School Balls, and New Materialism

[From Introduction] Schools are central players in the construction of femininities, actively shaping and regulating girls’ understandings, bodies, and behavior (Paechter, 2006). Schooling environments are a complicated terrain where girls are required to navigate multiple, often contradictory, discourses of femininity and girlhood. These negotiations and tensions frequently play out at a visceral bodily level where discourses of girlpower (Aapola et al., 2005) sit alongside ideas of ‘appropriate’ femininity and “ladylike” behavior (Allan, 2009), shaping how girls are expected to look, dress, and behave. Girls’ bodies are prime subjects of school rules, critique, admiration, and surveillance, where expectations and judgment largely cohere to dominant gender and sexual norms. Yet at the same time, school girl bodies function as a powerful means for the expression of personal style, identity, confidence, and desire (Pomerantz, 2008); potentialities that can generate a sense of resistance to dominant expectations and feminine norms. School balls and proms are fertile sites for these complex negotiations. Discourses of gender and sexuality are intimately entangled with the materiality of girls’ bodies, clothing, and embodied practices – all of which are integral components within the landscape of sexuality education. By focusing specifically on school balls, it is possible to trace key theoretical approaches for conceptualizing femininities and the materialization of girls’ bodies. In doing so, what these approaches offer for understanding agency and resistance within the sphere of research about sexualities at school is considered.