From the Girl to the World: Good Girls as Political Endorsers and Agents of Change

Abstract

This article explores the ways in which "good girls" have been drawn into political discourse since the 1990s and how they are figured as political endorsers and as agents of change. Girls are increasingly addressed as active subjects and future citizens. In a postfeminist context they are regarded as entrepreneurial and self-motivated; constructed as pioneers of progress through protocols activating the "feminisation of responsibility". Girls are also increasingly prominent as advocates of social reform through their own deployment of social media. It seems then that girls are, in many ways, central to the political scene. Through an examination of good girl figures including Jackie Evancho and Malala Yousafzai this article explores how politicians and political discourse work to harness the voices of girls, to co-opt their youthful promise and to extract symbolic capital from association with them. The overall argument is that girls' assumed future success becomes (mis)represented in political discourse as evidence of progress which is always achievable and soon to be attained by all.

‘I don’t want to be known for it’: Girls, leadership role models and the problem of representation

“…In their attempts to shape individual subjectivities, popular role-model campaigns align with neoliberal thinking that ignores material inequalities beyond gender and promotes instead 'equality of opportunity' (Littler, 2018: 153). These campaigns belong to the genre of girl-empowerment initiatives that centre aspiration as the desirable, necessary force behind individuated social mobility, and in this case, potential leadership (Biressi, 2018;Harris, 2004). They characterise structural barriers as surmountable through the development of self-sufficiency and leadership skills and self-promotion (Banet-Weiser, 2015;Wilson, 2017).…”

“…Girls were invariably less concerned with the public role a woman occupied, and more with how far her concerns represented issues of importance to themselves. Their choices are also illustrative of ways in which girls' explorations of such ideas are shaped by the wider discursive context in which they take place; their favourite women leaders were among those identified by Anita Biressi (2018) as exemplifying mainstream politics' attempts to revivify itself through mobilising girls to promote conservative political discourse, a discourse in which both representations of and exhortations to female success are taken as signs that equality has been achieved.…”

“…They saw women overcoming difficult conditions, including gendered restrictions, to achieve status and power as demonstrating that society is working as it should be in terms of providing opportunity and rewarding merit. This was tempered, however, with the ideas of 'austere meritocracy' (Mendick et al, 2018: 9), of entrenched forms of classed and masculinised power, and of the 'implied whiteness' of ideal forms of femininity, including those implicit in ideals of female leadership (Biressi, 2018). Just as celebrity culture is classed, raced and geographically contingent, and hierarchies of oppression operate along these axes (Christiansen and Richey, 2015;Currid-Halkett, 2013;Skeggs and Wood, 2008;Tyler and Bennett, 2010), class, race and gender were pronounced in the framing both of girls' admiration of prominent women and of their awareness of their own opportunities.…”

“…As the gender imbalance in decision-making roles garners increasing attention in the public sphere, a lack of role models in girlhood is popularly identified as a key factor in the shortage of women leaders in adulthood (BBC News Online, 2016;Fraser, 2014;Warrell, 2018). The prevalence of this way of thinking can be understood within the wider discursive positioning of the 'agentic girl' as an emblem of social mobility and change (Biressi, 2018;McRobbie, 2009), and simultaneously, as vulnerable to the influence of mass media (Gill, 2007). Role-model solutions addressing girls are, we argue, attempts to shape a specific element of the 'public pedagogy' of media texts (Giroux, 2004).…”

“…Rather, their tendency is to encourage girls to function more successfully within its terms. There is a vast array of similar initiatives and programmes (Banet-Weiser, 2015;Biressi, 2018) and it could be argued that they are needed, as national and international surveys find that girls struggle to name female leaders they admire (Estrada et al, 2015;Girl, 2018). However, popular role-model solutions are often based on simplistic ideas of gender-matching in which the complex relationships that young people have with media figures are reduced to the assumption that exposure will lead to imitation.…”