Diffractive Ripples of Girls, Schooling, Feminism and Femininities

Abstract

This article explores the relational becomings of girls, feminism, femininity and the schooling environment. Drawing on feminist new materialisms and affect theory, it conceptualises femininity and feminism as emerging through dynamic material-discursive assemblages of sensations, bodies, things, ideas and practices. These assemblages derive from a study conducted in Aotearoa New Zealand examining girls’ engagements with the school ball; a practice deeply entangled with traditional norms of femininity and heterosexuality. Verbal and embodied fragments from study participants, feminist theory and ideas are diffractively read through one another to see what ripples, connections and questions might emerge. I consider how a relational approach shifts understandings of feminism and femininity away from pre-existing, self-contained entities or identities, towards thinking about the specificities through which they emerge. This perspective offers nuanced understandings of the relations in-between girls, femininity and feminism that avoid judgements based on binary logic (e.g. good/bad, feminist/not feminist), and instead, helps do justice to the lively and multifaceted nature of feminism, femininities and girls’ lives.