public discourses circulate and feed‘public feeling’around gender and sexuality
(Cvetkovich 2012 ). Moral panics are largely constructed through the media, as we
explore below, but come to shape and inform policies and practices around social
issues like such as health or and education.
One of the primary sites where gender anxieties around girls’and women’s
‘appropriate’place in society circulate and take force is through representations of
feminism in contemporary news media (Mendes 2011 ). These work to mould
broader ideas about femininity, gender and education,‘shap[ing] public opinion by
directing readers to adopt particular policy priorities and assign responsibility for
political issues’(Cohen 2010 : 106). Ringrose ( 2013 ) connects up these ideas of
moral panics in the news media—which involve a battle of ideas over rightful
‘female’and‘male’rightful places in the educational pecking order—and post-
feminism—the idea that feminism has won equality for girls and women, but may
have gone too far in the other direction at the expense of boys (see also Ta 2004 ).
She Ringrose coined the notion of‘postfeminist panics’over educational issues.
Assembling postfeminism, panic, education and the media together helps us
understand how the power of some educational discourses (ideas) about particular
groups of girls and women or boys and men grip the public imagination and
individual psyches in ways that are often exploited in news media.
Instead of taking at face value the policy and educational discourse about failing
boys and successful girls at face value, then the concept of postfeminist panic
moves our attention to consider why particular concerns emerge and become
remarkable, sensational and news worthy. In Postfeminist Education (2013),
Ringrose considers in depth two further postfeminist panics in education. Besides
thefigure of the‘successful girl’, she also discusses the construction and treatment
of the‘mean girl’through popular culture and educational interventions on rela-
tional aggression and bullying, and she explores thefigure of the‘sexy girl’and the
heightened public anxieties over the‘sexualisation’of girls at the same time that the
topic of girls’sexualities and desires are a‘silenced’or‘missing’‘dilemma’at
school and in sex-and-relationship education (Fine and McClelland 2006 ). Whilst
there are many sorts of gendered and sexualised panics over, for instance, gay rights
to marriage or women entering the priesthood, in this chapter we focus on the panic
related to girls’ and women’s successes in education—waves of postfeminist
anxiety that emerge when the naturalised‘gender order’in education is disturbed in
ways, either explicitly or implicitly, attributed to feminism (McRobbie 2008 ).
26.5 Is the Future Female? UK News Media’s Panic Over
Girls’Success
As we saw above, in the nearly 20 years since Failing Boys? was published, the
gendered postfeminist panic over girls’success has proliferated. In the Anglophone
West, we have been faced with a‘postfeminist’onslaught in the news media of
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