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This paper develops new lines of analysis for understanding the relationships between globalisation, the imagination and emergent models of the 'girl-citizen'. It begins by outlining a new critical framework for studying globalisation that takes as its object of study not what globalisation is, but what globalisation does. Making use of Foucault's analytics of governmentality, it argues that globalisation can be usefully understood as a complex and contradictory set of movements that establish new modes of regulation over the conduct of individual citizens. It further argues that within the current global milieu, the imagination operates as part of a broader neo-liberal project of government that situates the global citizen in the role of entrepreneur of the self. For girls and young women the imagination becomes a tool for constructing and governing their gendered selves alongside idealised models of global citizenship and cosmopolitan identity. Finally, it is proposed that examining the role and effects of the imagination in 'making' and 'managing' global citizenship-subjects is vital to understanding the emergent models of girl-citizenship both within and outside schooling contexts.

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Using Showtime's The L Word as a case study, we argue that lesbian sexuality and lesbian lifestyles are produced alongside broader discourses of cosmopolitan consumer citizenship. The lesbian characters in this program are first and foremost constructed through their investments in certain neo-liberal consumer and lifestyle practices that limit the possibility of what lesbian subjectivities and/or lesbian politics can or cannot become. We offer an alternative strategy of reading lesbians in image-based media and popular culture that attends to the ways in which lesbian subjectivities are produced in a climate of neo-liberal consumer and lifestyle practices that have shifted the ways in which sexual citizens are produced. Our aim is to provide a critical framework that can be applied to other lesbian-themed television texts and to a range of other image-based visual media including film, commercial advertising, and new media.