Chapter 26
Postfeminist Educational Media Panics,
Girl Power and the Problem/Promise
of‘Successful Girls’
Jessica Ringrose and Debbie Epstein
26.1 Introduction
For the past 20 years, the story of‘failing boys’and‘successful girls’has been seen
regularly in the media. In reaction, and in contrast, to feminist concerns around
getting girls into‘masculine’subjects and higher education during the 1980s, we
have since the 1990s we have been faced with an overarching story about boys’
chronic underachievement and‘failure’at school. Debbie Epstein and colleagues
began charting the dominance of this narrow understanding of gender and
achievement in education in their now—‘seminal’book Failing Boys? ( 1998 ).
From the United Kingdom and elsewhere in the Global North to South Africa in the
Global South, this trope can be found over and over again up to the contemporary
moment.
In this chapter, we position the debates around‘failing boys’as a postfeminist
educational media panic (Ringrose 2013 ). This is because these debates typically
invoke and blame feminism for boys’demise, and call up a second, binaryfigure,
the overly‘successful girl’, who has put masculinity into crisis (Walkerdine et al.
2001 ). We use the framework of postfeminism to think about how stories of both
crisis and celebration over girls’educational success continue to take shape. First,
we explore how neo-liberal‘discourses’(that is ideas, ways of understanding the
world, that often seem like common sense) of feminine educational success have
influenced what we call a postfeminist media panic that constructs girls as wholly
successful in the Global North, through a review of British policy on gender and
education and news media reporting. We explain how the news media whips up
J. Ringrose (&)
University College London, London, England, UK
e-mail: [email protected]
D. Epstein
University of Roehampton, London, England, UK
e-mail: [email protected]
©Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2017
M.A. Peters et al. (eds.),A Companion to Research in Teacher Education,
DOI 10.1007/978-981-10-4075-7_26
385