English Teaching: Practice and Critique
Exploring “girl power”: Gender, literacy and the textual practices of young women attending an elite school
Volume 6 Number 2 September 2007
Dr Claire Charles (Deakin University, Australia)
Popular discourses concerning the relationship between gender and
academic literacies have suggested that boys are lacking in particular,
school-based literacy competencies compared with girls. Such discourses
construct “gender” according to a binary framework and they obscure the
way in which literacy and textual practices operate as a site in which
gendered identities are constituted and negotiated by young people in
multiple sites including schooling, which academic inquiry has often
emphasized. In this paper I consider the school-based textual practices
of young women attending an elite school, in order to explore how these
practices construct “femininities”. Feminist education researchers have
shown how young women negotiate discourses of feminine passivity and
heterosexuality through their reading and writing practices. Yet
discourses of girlhood and femininity have undergone important
transformations in times of ‘girl power' in which young women are
increasingly constructed as successful, autonomous and sexually
agentic. Thus young women's reading and writing practices may well
operate as a space in which new discourses around girlhood and
femininity are constituted. Throughout the paper, I utilize the notion
of “performativity”, understood through the work of Judith Butler, to
show how textual practices variously inscribe and negotiate discourses
of gender. Thus the importance of textual work in inscribing and
challenging notions of gender is asserted. I argue that critical
literacy is just as important, but perhaps no more guaranteed, within
elite girls' education as it is within boys' education.