sensationalism and panic in order to make the topic news worthy. Second, we
explore the globalising reach of postfeminist notions of‘girl power’and the cel-
ebratory promise of how girls’educational success will enable wider transnational
economic revolution, through a consideration of the corporate social media cam-
paign, the‘Girl Effect’, in the Global South. We argue this campaign also operates
through media forms that generate the promise of salvation from difficult structural
conditions. Through these examples, we argue binary understandings of gender
formations (girls vs. boys) and the reductive marshalling of gendered‘affect’(for
instance emotional tenors of crisis vs. celebration over girls) can be usefully
challenged through an intersectional feminist approach.
26.2 Postfeminism: Neo-liberalism, Femininity
and Education
Postfeminism has been theorised as a set of discourses and political practices
grounded in assumptions that gender equity has now been achieved for girls and
women in education, the workplace and the home (McRobbie 2004 , 2008 ;Gill
2007 ; Gill and Scharff 2011 ). Angela McRobbie ( 2004 : 4), a keyfigure in theo-
rising postfeminism, suggests it is characterised by a set of discourses that‘actively
draw on and invoke feminism...in order to suggest that equality is achieved, [and]
in order to install a whole repertoire of meanings which emphasise that it is no
longer needed, a spent force’. Postfeminist discourses also promote the idea that
girls/women have now won total equality or have even surpassed boys/men, so that
feminism is considered to have ‘gone too far’ and unleashed girls’/women’s
competitive and aggressive qualities and power (Ta 2004 ). Moreover, girls’/-
women’s over-success is positioned as having been won at the expense of taking
away something from men (especially working-class men in the British context)
(Walkerdine et al. 2001 ). Postfeminism as a concept describes, then, both the
cultural diffusion of feminism into the public domain and a backlash against fem-
inism, due to fears and anxieties over the shifting gender‘order’.
A key component of postfeminism is the positioning of girls as the primary
benefactors and winners of globalisation in the twenty-first century (Harris 2004 ;
Aapola et al. 2005 ). Anita Harris’s powerful thesis in Future Girl is that girls and
notions of girlhood have become a projective vehicle for contemporary desires
about what is possible in the late-modern world of complex globalised
de-industrialised societies—girls are, it seems, seen as bearing and being respon-
sible for contemporary aspirations and emotions. Harris argues young women are
‘constructed as idealflexible subjects; they are imagined as benefiting from feminist
achievements and ideology, as well as from new conditions (of education and work)
that favour femininity and female success’(Harris 2004 : 8). Davies and Bansel
( 2007 : 248) suggest that neo-liberalism is characterised by‘the transformation of
the administrative state, one previously responsible for human well-being, as well
386 J. Ringrose and D. Epstein