through by a narrow binary conception of gender, so that the unitary, essentialised
category of‘girl’is simplistically pitted against the unitary, essentialised category
of‘boy’, which enables statistical claims to be made about girls’success. This
stems from the particular logic of gender as binary quality residing in naturalised
bodies, which can then be measured (Paechter 2006 ). Gender, taken as an essential
quality residing in girl and boy bodies, can be added or subtracted—statistics can be
formulated to (dis)prove gender parity in school and achievement in educational
testing. This misses an understanding of gender as a socially constructed set of
variable traits; rather than tying gender to naturalised‘sexed’bodies, it does not
account for how femininity and masculinity are a set of qualities that are granted
hierarchically valued attributes through historical and social processes, rather than
tying gender to naturalised‘sexed’bodies (Butler 1993 ). It also radically decon-
textualizes gendered experiences of schooling and‘achievement’performance from
a complex web of economic, cultural and material relations and conditions that
shape educational outcomes.
Yet this focus on measuring gendered achievement in school as an essentialised
variable has set the terms for a reactionary educational debate—failing
boys/successful girls—educational debate and resulting in a set of policy formations
for nearly two decades (Jackson 1998 ; Skelton and Francis 2009 ). As Epstein et al.
asked nearly 20 years ago, and we have to keep asking still:‘which boys, which
girls?’How do racialisation, class, economic background, neighbourhood, family
context and multiple other axes of experience inform the (e)quality of educational
experiences?
In the Global North the assumption that girls are‘not a problem’(and have no
problems) in schooling spaces has resulted in the marked neglect of girls’experi-
ences, and a failure to allocate resources to girls’needs in school (Crudas and
Haddock 2005 ). For example, research has shown that many girls still face
exclusion from schools, (Osler and Vincent 2003 ) not all girls are academically
successful (Jackson 2006 ); for some girls (perhaps especially white, middle-class
girls) striving for excellence can be damaging for their bodies and subjectivities
(Evans et al. 2010 ); there are longstanding issues of gender and (hetero)
sexualised-based bullying, aggression, harassment and violence facing girls (and
some boys) at school (Duncan 2006 ; Keddie 2009 ; Payne 2012 ; Ringrose and
Renold 2010 ); and the list could go on.
The dangerous mythologies of girls and women educationally‘on top’appears,
however, to be continuing unabated, however, as seen in the massive uptake of the
bestselling book, Lean In, where Sheryl Sandberg ( 2013 ) argues that sheer staying
power has enabled female breakthroughs and triumph in the corporate world.
Hooks ( 2013 ) launched a powerful black feminist critique of Sandler’s thesis,
pointing to the necessity for a sociological class/race/gender analysis of wealth,
poverty and systemic obstacles missing from Sandler’s arguments about particular
(white, middle-class) women breaking through the corporate glass ceiling.
Hooks’s critique is based upon anti-racist, postcolonial, black, subaltern and
critical race feminist theories, and it is to here we need to (re)turn in order to think
through thefigure of the abstract (yet, white and middle-class?) girl who gains
26 Postfeminist Educational Media Panics, Girl Power... 393