Table Of ContentElite Girls’ Schooling, Social Class
and Sexualised Popular Culture
Young women’s identities are an issue of public and academic interest across a
number of western nations at the present time. This book explores how young
women attending an elite school for girls in Australia understand and construct
‘empowerment’. It investigates the extent to which, and the ways in which, their
constructions of empowerment and identity work to overturn or resist key
regulations and normative expectations for girls in post-feminist, hyper-sexualised
cultural contexts.
The book provides a succinct overview of feminist theorisations of normative
femininities in young women’s lives in western cultural contexts. It includes
familiar sexist discourses such as sexual double standards, as well as more recent
commentary about the regulation of young women’s subjectivities in con-
temporary cultures. Drawing on ethnographic research in the context of an elite
girls’ secondary school, the author explores how empowerment for young
women is constructed and understood across a range of textual practices. From
visual representations of young women in school promotional material, to
students’ constructions of popular celebrities, the question of how girls’ resistance
to normative femininities begins to develop is examined.
This rich empirical work makes a unique contribution to the study of elite
schooling within the sociology of education, drawing on important insights from
the fi eld of critical girlhood studies and posing a challenge to popular feminist
notions about media literacy, young women and empowerment. It will be of
interest to scholars and postgraduates in the areas of gender studies, sociology,
education, youth studies and cultural studies.
Claire Charles is a Lecturer in Education Studies at Deakin University,
Australia.
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Elite Girls’ Schooling,
Social Class and Sexualised
Popular Culture
Claire Charles
First published 2014
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2014 Claire Charles
The right of C. Charles to be identifi ed as author of this work has been
asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced
or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means,
now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording,
or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in
writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for identifi cation and explanation
without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Elite girls’ schooling, social class, and sexualised popular culture / Claire
Charles.
ISBN 978-0-415-63656-8 (hardback) — ISBN 978-0-203-08510-3
(ebook) 1. Girls—Education—Social aspects. 2. Elite (Social
sciences)—Education—Social aspects. 3. Feminism and education.
4. Sex differences in education. 5. Sex in popular culture. I. Title.
LC1481.C47 2014
371.822—dc23
2013025932
ISBN: 978-0-415-63656-8 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-203-08510-3 (ebk)
Typeset in Baskerville
by Refi neCatch Ltd, Bungay, Suffolk
Contents
Acknowledgements vii
1 Beholden to no one: elite schoolgirls in the 21st century 1
2 ‘Normative’ femininities: from romance and domesticity to
raunch and visibility? 17
3 (Re)searching for girls’ resistance 39
4 Becoming ‘lady bountiful’: elite schooling, social class and
girl citizenship 65
5 ‘Hey skank face, you can’t dress properly!’: revisiting sexuality
and social class 91
6 ‘She’s doing it for herself’: negotiating sexualised popular culture 115
7 Conclusions: ‘elite’ schoolgirls, normative femininities/sexualities
and resistance 141
References 153
Index 165
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Acknowledgements
I am grateful to many people for their support and assistance throughout the
development of this book and the research upon which it is based. Beginning as
my doctoral work at Monash University, this research was originally supported by
an Australian Postgraduate Award. I would like to express particular thanks to
Mary Louise Rasmussen, who has always offered great encouragement with
my research and writing. Originally one of my doctoral supervisors, she has
also provided generous advice and assistance in relation to the development
of other areas of my academic life. I am also grateful to Georgina Tsolidis, who
fi rst encouraged me to take up an Honours study of young women, schooling,
sexuality and popular culture, and who contributed to my Honours and doctoral
supervision.
I would like to express my gratitude to Alexandra Allan, with whom I have col-
laborated now over several years. Thanks, Sandy, for your intellectual companion-
ship in relation to girls and elite schooling. Our co-writing and numerous
conversations over the years have undoubtedly informed and improved this
manuscript, and your friendship and humour have enriched my life.
Various other colleagues and friends have generously read sections of this
manuscript and provided feedback and encouragement, or provided other
forms of engagement and encouragement at different points on my academic
journey toward completing it, as well as years of intellectual discussion, research
collaboration and camaraderie. There are too many to name individually but
particular thanks are due to Annabelle Leve, MaryLou Rasmussen, Johannah
Fahey, Christina Gowlett, Kristina Gottschall, Jane Kenway, Catherine Beavis,
Ros Gill, Emma Renold, Alison Hart, Ann Ryan and Rob and Holly Haworth. I
would also like to thank my colleagues in the School of Education at Deakin
University, who have been supportive and encouraging toward me while I have
been writing.
Family and old friends have been there for me throughout the research and
writing process. My parents, Dorothy and Graeme Charles, have been patient,
caring and encouraging. Thanks especially to my partner Rebecca, who always
believes in me and has been there from the fi rst day of my academic life, living
viii Acknowledgements
through every colourful moment leading to the publication of this manu-
script. Thanks to Allan, Leonie, and Nat for your ongoing encouragement and
friendship. I am eternally grateful to you for your support.
Finally, I would like to extend grateful thanks to the staff and students of LGGS,
who kindly allowed me into their school in order for the research to be undertaken,
and who generously spoke with me about life, school and celebrities. The names
of students, and the school, which appear in the book are pseudonyms used in
order to protect the identities of research participants.
1 Beholden to no one
Elite schoolgirls in the 21st century
‘I don’t know why, but I’m just really good at a lot of things.’
‘I didn’t ask to be born hot.’
Ja’mie King
This book is about how young women attending an elite private girls’ school in
Australia construct empowerment, and how their constructions might work to
reproduce or resist particular normative confi gurations of femininity and sexual-
ity. Media culture in western contexts is now replete with images of girls’ power
and empowerment in a post-feminist, neoliberal political landscape, in which
it is often imagined that young women are unambiguous success stories.
Representations of high-achieving, privileged young women are generating the
interest of feminist academics internationally. The growing cultural presence
of privileged girls and girls’ power requires scholarly attention, in terms of how
dominant confi gurations of sexuality, class, and race are reproduced through
the depictions of such girls in media culture, and in terms of how ‘real’ privileged
girls navigate cultural messages about empowerment, as well as how construc-
tions of identity may work to (re)produce and/or resist dominant confi gurations
of femininity.
When I was an adolescent in the early 1990s, certain ideas about young
women and sexuality fi rst came to my attention. At that time, the various images
of ‘empowered’ girls that now dominate media culture were yet to become such a
ubiquitous feature of the cultural landscape of young femininity. My experience
as a young woman in a school context was that girls were frequently labelled ‘tart’
or ‘slut’ for reasons ranging from fashion choice to seeking attention from boys.
Such labels were rarely used in relation to any concrete evidence about a girl’s
actual sexual or romantic activity, yet they served as a powerful reminder about
the need to manage the self in order to be seen as appropriately attractive and
desirable without being constituted as ‘too sexy’. Sexual harassment was a common
occurrence at school, directed at girls mostly by young men. At the same time,
there were some examples of women in media culture – such as the American pop
