T O P G I R L S ? Y O U N G W O M E N A N D
T H E N E W S E X U A L C O N T RA C T
Since early decisions on education and employment influence later possibilities, it is
only younger women who are able to make many of the major work and life decisions
in a context of legally enforceable equal opportunities. Age is thus crucial in
new forms of difference and inequalities between women . (Walby 1 997: 4 1 )
The education of girls is probably the most important catalyst for changes i n society.
(Augusto Lopez-Claros Chief Economist at the World Economic Forum q uoted in the
Guardian 1 8 May 2005 : 8)
And now it's quite clear that the danger has changed . (Foucault 1 984: 344)
Resurgent patriarchies and gender retrenchment
This chapter presents an analysis of a new sexual contract currently being
made available to young women, primarily in the West, to come forward
and make good use of the opportunity to work, to gain qualifications, to
control fertility and to earn enough money to participate in the consumer
culture which in turn will become a defining feature of contemporary
modes of feminine citizenship.1 The analysis interrogates the terms and conditions,
the inclusions and exclusions, as well as the social and political consequences
of such a contract. A range of technologies are set in motion, so
that these invitations to come forward can be issued. Young women are
being put under a spotlight so that they become visible in a certain kind of
way. The Deleuzian term luminosity is useful here, supplanting Foucault's
panopticon as a mode of surveillance (Deleuze 1986). The theatrical effect
of this moving spotlight softens, dramatises and disguises the regulative
dynamics. 1 also use the term 'spaces of attention' to examine these luminosities
in everyday life.
The chapter takes as a starting point some passing comments by a number of
feminist theorists inthe last few years. First, as discussed in the previous chapter,
there is Butler's mention, in regard to her rich and complex equivocations on
TOP GiRLS? YOUNG WOMEN AND THE N EW SEXUAL CONTRACT
gay marriage and her reflections on the politics ofkinshig that there has been a
decline in radical sexual politics (Butler 2004). Second there is Mohanty's
important argument in her article ' ''Under Western Eyes" Revisited', that the
restructuring of flexible global capitalism now relies on the willing labour of
girls and women andthatthis entails both a decisive re-definition ofgender relations
and also forms ofretrenchment on the part of 'patriarchies and hegemonic
masculinities' (Mohanty 2002). (Labour and the capacity to work will be key
themes throughout this chapter.) Mohanty argues that young women are allocated
a pivotal role in the new global labour market, but that this coming forward
coincides with the fading away of feminism and the women's movement,
such that post-Beijing, the most significant site for pursuing struggles for gender
justice has been the anti-globalisation movement.
With feminism giving way to women's rights, and women's rights now
largely integrated into the vocabulary of human rights, there is, Mohanty
acknowledges, a good deal of scope for feminist scholarship to track, from
the perspective of the poorest of women, the chains of expropriation of
knowledge and resources on the part of global corporations (e.g. biopiracy)
which intensify the disadvantage and dependency of non-First World
women. And it is in this kind of scholarship and associated pedagogies that
Mohanty sees the possibility again for feminist transnational cross-border
solidarity. But when she wrote 'Under Western Eyes' there had been, she
recalls, 'a very vibrant, transnational, women's movement, while the site 1
write from today is very diff�rent' (Mohanty 2002: 499). Mohanty suggests
that the general shift in global politics towards the right, and the decline of
social welfarist models coincides with 'processes that recolonise the culture
and identity of people' (ibid: 5 15). (I will return to the word 'recolonise' .)
Both of these observations by Butler and Mohanty chime also with the
analysis of gender, media and popular culture presented in Chapter 1. There
1 argued that emerging from largely First World scenarios, the attribution of
apparently post-feminist freedoms to young women most manifest within
the cultural realm in the form of new visibilities, becomes, in fact, the occasion
for the undoing of feminism. The various political issues associated
with feminism are understood to be now widely recognised and responded
to (they have become feminist common sense) with the effect that there is
no longer any place for feminism in contemporary political culture. But
this disavowal permits the subtle renewal of gender injustices, while vengeful
patriarchal norms are also re-instated. These are easily overlooked, or
else a blind eye is turned to them, by those who are well versed in sexual
politics, but who are now weary and perhaps persuaded by the high-visibility
tropes of freedom currently attached to the category of young women.
On this basis post-feminism can be equated with a 'double movement',
gender retrenchment is secured, paradoxically, through the wide dissemination
of discourses of female freedom and by what lean-Luc Nancy has
55
THE AfTERMATH Of fEM!NISM
called the 'pretences of equality' (Nancy 2002). Young women are able to
come forward on condition that feminism fades away.
Sylvia Walby's rationale for the shift away from earlier and more
autonomous forms of feminist practice to the engagement with mainstream
politics on a national and global stage stands in sharp contrast to this analysis
of the new constraints on female equality (Walby 2002). It is because
there have been various feminist successes, Walby argues, that it is now
appropriate to re-position feminist politics within the mainstream.
Feminism has had a major impact in the field of global human rights and
has in effect transformed the human rights agenda. It has also been effective
at the level ofthe nation state so that gender issues are now thoroughly integrated
into the wider political field. These changes, along with the participation
of women in work, give rise to a new 'gender regime' . Walby's model
is therefore accumulative in terms of gains which have been made, and linear,
in that feminism moves from localised actions and autonomy onto the
world stage and because of this presence and participation, and in the light
of possibilities which emerge from globalisation, feminism itself changes to
comprise advocacy networks, alliances and coalitions which are capable of
being tailored to meet particular or culture-specific requirements. Walby
endorses a kind of multi-faceted, gender mainstreaming politics on the basis
of institutional recognition. She offers a top down account of the professionalisation
and institutionalisation of feminism (her involvement in the
UK Women's Budget Group has been important) . But this model of gender ·
regime is quite different from what I pose in the pages that follow. This is
because Walby implies that institutionalisation and capacity-building and
indeed participation as well as the growth of feminist expertise and the
presence of women professionals on the world stage, have come about in a
progressive way. She does not engage with the wider and punitive conditions
upon which female success is predicated. Nor is she alert to the new
constraints which emerge as the cost of participation, and, more generally,
the re-shaping of gender inequities which are an integral part of resurgent
global neo-liberal economic policies. I will return to Walby and the question
of gender mainstreaming in the concluding chapter, for now we might also
note that Walby acknowledges women's place as workers and producers in
the global economy, but overlooks their significance as consumers of global
culture, even though it is within the commercial domain that processes of
gender change and re-stabilisation are most in evidence.
This chapter asks the question: how do we account for the range of social,
cultural and economic transformations which have brought forth a new category
of young womanhood? If such changes find themselves consolidated
into a discernible trend in the UK (and elsewhere) in the last 10 to 15 years,
what are we to make of the decisive re-positioning of young women this
appears to entail? Transformations such as those which will be described
56
TOP GIRLS? YOUNG WOMEN AND THE N EW SEXUAL CONTRACT
below, tend to be seen as positive. Across the spectrum from left to right the
apparent gains made by young women are taken to be signs of the existence
of a democracy in good health, these are palpable reminders that women's
lives have improved, living testimony that social reform and legislation has
been effective. But the feminist perspective I present here is alert to the
dangers which arise when a selection of feminist values and ideals appear to
be inscribed within a more profound and determined attempt, undertaken
by an array of political and cultural forces, to re-shape notions of womanhood
so that they fit with new or emerging (neo-liberalised) social and economic
arrangements. And, within a context where in many parts of Europe
and in the US there has been a decisive shift to the right, this might also be
seen as a way of re-stabilising gender relations against the disruptive threat
posed by feminism. Its not so much turning the clock back, as turning it forward
to secure a post-feminist gender settlement, a new sexual contract.2
Young womanhood currently exists within the realm of public debate as
a topic of fascination, enthusiasm, concern, anxiety and titillation (see
Harris 2004). The fact that the volume of attention has reached such an
unprecedented level is not entirely attributable to the expansion of both
popular and so-called quality media. Nor can it be wholly explained on the
basis of there now being a much more substantial female audience, a population
of women consumers (mothers and daughters alike) for whom such
material is directed. Neither is it only the case that this concern can be
understood within the cycles of moral panic, which periodically fix upon
and demonise a seemingly dangerous sector of the population, so as to permit
an intensification of social control, usually along some new axis of anxiety.
The meanings which converge around the figure of the girl or young
women, are more weighted towards capacity, success, attainment, enjoyment,
entitlement, social mobility and participation. The dynamics of regulation
and control are less about what young women ought not to do, and
more about what they can do. The production of girlhood now comprises a
constant stream of incitements and enticements to engage in a range of
speCified practices which are understood to be both progressive but also
consummately and reassuringly feminine. What seems to underpin these
practices is a suggestion that young women have now won the battle for
equality, they have gained recognition as subjects worthy of governmental
attention and this has replaced any need for the feminist critiques of what
Mohanty labels hegemonic masculinities. This abandonment of critique of
patriarchy is a requirement of the new sexual contract, the terms of which
are established in key institutional sites dedicated to the production of the
category of young women.3 The girl emerges across a range of social and
cultural spaces as a subject worthy of investment. Within the language of
Britain's New Labour government, the girl who has benefited from the equal
opportunities now available to her, can be mobilised as the embodiment of
57
THE AFTERMATH OF FEMINISM
the values of the new meritocracy. This term has become an abbreviation
for the more individualistic and competitive values promoted by New
Labour, particularly within education. Nowadays the young woman's success
seems to promise economic prosperity on the basis of her enthusiasm
for work and having a career. Thus a defining feature of contemporary girlhood
is the attribution of capacity, summed up, as Anita Harris describes, in
the Body Shop phrase the 'can do' girl (Harris 2004). This begs the question,
what is at stake in this process of endowing the new female subject
with capacity? The attribution of both freedom and success to young
women, as a series ofinterpellative processes, take different forms across the
boundaries of class, ethnicity and sexuality, producing a range of entanglements
of racialised and classified configurations of youthful femininity. So
emphatic and so frequently repeated is this celebratory discourse that it
comes to function as a key mechanism of social transformation. From being
assumed to be headed towards marriage, motherhood and limited economic
participation, the girl is now endowed with economic capacity. Within specified
social conditions and political constraints, young, increasingly welleducated
women, of different ethnic and social backgrounds, now find
themselves charged with the requirement that they perform as economically
active female citizens. They are invited to recognise themselves as privileged
subjects of social change, perhaps they might even be expected to be
grateful for the support they have received. The pleasingly, lively, capable
and becoming young woman, black, white or Asian, is now an attractive harbinger
of social change.
This is certainly not the first time that such a youthful female figure has
been used to signal progress and modernity, the girl was invoked in a similar
manner particularly in the 1 920s and 1 930s. Indeed in a recent study
which Ire-castes) gendered modernity within an international frame' Barlow
et al. show, in a way which confounds the more usual equation of the 'modern
girl' with Western urban modernity, that 'Everywhere the Modern Girl
indexed the racial formation of the nation or colony in which she resided'
(Barlow et al., 2008: 247). Later in this chapter the racial inflections of contemporary
girlhood will be examined in more depth, but for now it is significant
to note that there are novel features in this recent deployment
within dominating Western discourse. Seemingly post-feminist vocabularies
are drawn upon to establish a kind of gender settlement, a new deal for
young women. This is a strategy which forcefully rejects the importance of
a renewal of an autonomous sexual politics, with a series of pre-emptive
moves. In the pages that follow I examine this new standing of young
women by considering four 'luminous' spaces of attention, each of which
operates to sustain and re-vitalise what Butler has famously called the
heterosexual matrix, while also re-instating and confirming, with subtlety,
norms of racial hierarchy as well as re-configured class divisions which now
58
TOP GIRLS? YOUNG WOMEN AND THE N EW SEXUAL CONTRACT
take on a more autonomously gendered dimension. Defining such spaces of
attention as luminosities I will propose thatthese comprise first the fashionbeauty
complex (a phrase I borrow from Bartky, 1 990) from within which
emerges a post-feminist masquerade as a distinctive modality of prescriptive
feminine agency. Second there is the luminous space of education and
employment, within which is found the figure of the working girl. Third, is
the space of sexuality, fertility and reproduction from which emerges the
phallic girl. Fourth is the space of globalisation and in particular the production
of commercial femininities in the developing world, including
impoverished countries, as well as countries like China now undergoing
rapid transformation. This luminosity comprises a new deal for the global
girl and it is one which seeks to supplant other more social democratic, gender-mainstreaming
and human rights based models for gender and social
change in the so-called Third World. This is a brash, commercial, updating
and translating of a liberal feminist model now being made available as a
style of global femininity. The sexual contract on the global stage is
most clearly marked out in the world editions of young women's fashion
magazines like Bile, Marie Claire, Grazia and Vogue. The friendly (hence
unthreatening), beautiful and somehow pliable, global girl who exudes good
will, thus marks out the spaces of undoing of post-colonial critical pedagogy
as well as of post-colonial feminist critique. Or at least we might understand
this to be the underlying (and re-colonising) aim of the promotion of global
girlhood by the global media, the commercial domain (the fashion-beauty
complex) and through specifically neo-liberal forms of governmentality.
Shining in the light : the post-feminist masquerade
Young women have been hyper-actively positioned in the context of a wide
range of social, political and economic changes of which they themselves
appear to be the privileged subjects. We might now imagine the young
woman as a highly efficient assemblage for productivity. (This also marks a
shift, women now figure in governmental discourse as much for their productive
as reproductive capacities.) In the UK the young woman has government
ministers encourage her to avoid low paid and traditionally
gendered jobs like hairdressing. She is an object of concern when a wide discrepancy
is revealed between high levels of academic performance, yet pervasive
low self-esteem.4, She also merits attention of government on the basis
of remaining inequalities of pay and reward in the labour market. She is
addressed as though she is already gender aware, as a result of equal opportunities
policies in the education system. With all of this feminist influence
somehow behind her, she is now pushed firmly in the direction of independence
and self-reliance (Budgeon 200I, Harris 2004). This entails selfmonitoring,
the setting up of personal plans and the search for individual
59
THE AfTERMATH Of fEMINISM
solutions. These female individualisation processes require that young
women become important to themselves. In times of stress, the young
woman is encouraged to seek therapy, counselling or guidance. She is thus an
intensively managed subject ofpost-feminist, gender-aware biopolitical practices
of new governmentality. What are we to make of this attention? Does
it ultimately seek to re-install re-traditionalised styles of normative femininity
to be adhered to, despite these winds of gender change (Probyn
1988/1997, Adkins 2002) . This certainly would be one way of understanding
the full force of triumphant neo-conservatism in its address to women. But
the term re-traditionalisation does not completely capture the incorporation
and appropriation of liberal feminist principles which are then taken into
account so that they can be acknowledged as no longer relevant. Feminism
taken into account is also feminism undone, and this movement permits reconfigured
and spectacular modes of femininity to conle to prominence.
Deleuze, writing about what Foucault meant by visibilities, suggests that
they are not 'forms of objects, nor even forms that would show up under
light, but rather forms of luminosity, which are created by the lightitself and
allow a thing or object to exist only as a flash, sparkle or shimmer' (Deleuze
1986: 52). This luminosity captures how young women mightbe understood
as currently becoming visible. The power they seem to be collectively in possession
of, is 'created by the light itself' . These luminosities are suggestive of
post-feminist equality while also defining and circumscribing the conditions
of such a status. They are clouds of light which give young women a shimmering
presence, and in so doing they also mark out the terrain of the consummately
and re-assuringly feminine. Within this cloud of light, young
women are taken to be actively engaged in the production of self They must
become harsh judges of themselves. The visual (and verbal) discourses of
public femininity, come to occupy an increasingly spectacular space as sites,
events, narratives and occasions within the cultural milieu. The commercial
domain provides a proliferation of interpellations directed to young women,
with harsher penalties, it seems, for those who refuse or who are unable to
receive its various addresses.5 That is, it becomes increasingly difficult to
function as a female subject without subjecting oneselfto those technologies
of self that are constitutive of the spectacularly feminine. There are new
norms of appearance and self-presentation expected not just in leisure and in
everyday life but also in the workplace, and government concerns itself with
this aspect of self-management through various initiatives.6
Drawing on Lacan's concept of the Symbolic as the source of patriarchal
authority, the oedipal portal which requires subjection to its presiding order
as a condition of acquiring both language and sexual identity, Judith Butler
has already conjectured that this patriarchal power (or the Symbolic) has
been confronted in recent years by feminism as a political antagonism (Butler
2000a). Butler's analysis can be drawn on here to argue that this feminist
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TOP GIRLS? YOUNG WOMEN AND THE N EW SEXUAL CONTRACT
confrontation has forced some adjustment on the part of the Symbolic. And
this required shift has also coincided with transformations within the economic
realm such that countries ofthe affluent West now find it expedient to
employ women, across the boundaries of age, sex, class and ethnicity. Of
course women, especially poor women across the world, have always worked,
usually for low wages in low status sectors. My point is that work and wageearning
capacity come to dominate rather than be subordinate to women's
self-identity, and this inevitably has a ripple effect within the field of power.
The Symbolic is faced with the problem of how to retain the dominance of
phallocentrism when the logic of global capitalism is to loosen women from
their prescribed roles and grant them degrees of economic independence. Of
course this raises the question, does access to work and earning a living necessarily
permit possibilities of independence? For the global girl working 18
hours a day in a clothing factory in an Export Processing Zone and sending
most of her wages home, independence is surely a very different thing?
The Symbolic is thus presented with a triple threat, first from the nowoutmoded
and hence only spectral women's movement, in the activist
sense, second, from the aggressive re-positioning of women through these
economic processes of female individualisation, and third, a newer threat
which emerges from feminist theory itself, and especially from Butler's
work and from its popularity and wider dissemination. This is a threat
because what Butler does, after all, is to expose and explain those features
of heterosexual power which tend to remain inscrutable and unquestioned
on the basis of being so deeply embedded, so resistant to challenge. More
broadly we could say this is the danger to the Symbolic posed by queer theory.
The Symbolic has had to find a new way of exerting its authority and
does so by delegation. Just as power (including sovereign power) in late
modernity is increasingly dispersed across many institutions and agencies,
and as it, in these dispersed forms, directs itself towards bodies, their wellbeing,
their productive as well as reproductive capacity, then we might surmise
that the Symbolic allows itself to be dispersed, or governmentalised.
The luminosities of femininity provide the spaces for this authority to be
exerted anew. The Symbolic discharges (or maybe franchises) its duties to
the commercial domain (beauty, fashion, magazines, body culture, etc.)
which becomes the source of authority and judgement for young women.
The heightening of significance in regard to the required rituals of femininity
as well as an intensification of prescribed heterosexually-directed pleasures
and enjoyment are among the key hallmarks of this de-centred
Symbolic. In the language of health and well-being, the global fashionbeauty
complex charges itself with the business of ensuring that appropriate
gender relations are guaranteed. This field of instruction and pleasure oversees
the processes of female individualisation which requires the repudiation
of feminism which is frequently typecast as embodying bodily failure,
6 1
THE AfTERMATH Of FEMINISM
hideousness or monstrosity. Repeated incitements to perform a register of
restricted acts to confirm the illusion of an appropriately gendered sel£
have, of course, been understood by Butler, as imperative to the social fiction
of sexual difference, even though there is always scope for failure and
even though the need for repetition reminds us that femininity is never so
easily secured (Butler 1 990, 1993). Because the commercial domain is now
so dominant, as social institutions are reduced in their sphere of influence,
we can detect an intensification in these disciplinary requirements and also
we can perceive new dynamics of aggression, violence and self-punishment,
as I show in the following chapter.
Confronted with the prospect of women becoming less dependent on men
as a result of participation in work and with the possible de-stabilisation of
gender hierarchy which might ensue, so it becomes all the more important for
the Symbolic to re-secure the terms of heterosexual desire. Great effort is
invested in this task of maintaining and consolidating masculine hegemony for
the very reason that there are forces that appear to threaten its dominance.
Thus the paraphernalia of marriage culture assumes such visibility within
popular culture at the very moment that its necessity is being put in question.
If for women in the West survival itsel£ and the well-being of children, no
longer rests on the finding of a male partner who will be a breadwinner, then
the cultural significance of marriage is much reduced. This is precisely the
dilemma which emerges out of social welfare regimes making provision for
women and children and so substituting for the male breadwinner so that the
role of husband is no longer necessary. As various feminist critics have argued
the so-called crisis of welfare especially in the US and the UK can be understood
as a fearful response to this scenario (see e.g. Brown 1995, Fraser 1997).
For younger women without children this degree ofindependence introduces
a new tension into the field of dominant heterosexuality. This is a case ofwhat
is no longer economically central becoming, for this very reason, culturally
necessary. Such a scenario also gives rise to a veritable minefield of sexual
antagonisms, on the basis that women are no longer intelligible primarily in
terms of their exchange in the marriage market. And the social anxieties that
arise as a result of this have repercussions right across the cultural field.
Within a framework marked out in various ways, as post-feminist, the commercial
domain undertakes to carry out the work ofthe Symbolic by means of
the attention it pays to the female body.7 The authoritative voice of consumer
culture is intimate, cajoling and also encouraging. It produces a specific kind of
female subject within the realm of its address. By generating bodily dissatisfaction,
the beauty and fashion industries respond directly to the fraught
state of non-identity which we all inhabit and which is predicated on unfathomable
loss, a loss which is incurred as the cost of acquiring language and sexual
identity. The young woman is congratulated, reprimanded and encouraged to
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TOP GIRLS? YOUNG WOMEN AND THE N EW SEXUAL CONTRACT
embark on a new regime of self-perfectibility (i.e. self-completion) in the hope
of making good this loss. And now that she is able to make her own choices, it
seems as though the fearful terrain ofmale approval fades away, and is replaced
instead with a new horizon of self-imposed feminine cultural norms.
Patriarchal authority is subsumed within a regime of self-poliCing whose strict
criteria form the benchmark against which women must endlessly and repeatedly
measure themselves, from the earliest years right through to old age.8 A
key feature of the work of the fashion-beauty complex in this new postfeminist
situation is that it wrestles to re-gain control over disrupted temporalities.
These have challenged the inevitable cycle of life-events associated
with the categories ofwoman and also girl, through sexual freedom, control of
fertility, delay in age ofmarriage, delay in childbearing, low birth rate, the viability
ofremainingunmarried, etc. The fashion-beauty complex, standing in for
the Symbolic, is charged with the role of imposing new time frames on
women's lives. As a result there is a proliferation of activities which impose
new temporalities through, for example, beauty products routinely recommended
to very young girls as well as so-called age defying treatments for
young women who are barely in their twenties. There are also relentless warnings
about fertility, and there is also the creation of new age-related categories
of feminine pathology (e.g. middle-aged anorexia).9 The opportunity to work
and earn a living is thus offset by the emphasis on lifelong and carefully staged
body maintenance as an imperative of feminine identity. Temporality finds
itself re-defined according to the rhythms invented largely by the fashion and
beauty system to manage and oversee other disruptions brought about by the
call of the labour market, which could in turn de-stabilise and put into crisis
the heterosexual matrix. There is then a tension in regard to time and this provokes
the production of a proscribed new time for young women.
Butler, by means of her concept of lesbian phallus, embarks ov. a kind of
social rendering of Lacan's Symbolic. She does this in her book Bodies That
Matter (1993) where she subjects to close analytical scrutiny the means by
which Lacan posits as universal his concept of Symbolic. There is no space
here to discuss how Butler arrives at this more social rendering of the
Symbolic, but it is a theme which she also pursues in her later book
Antigone's Claim (2000a), where there is, she argues, an inevitable entanglement
of psychic processes with changes in social and political culture.10 What
I propose here is that a key containment strategy on the part ofthe Symbolic,
faced with possible disruption to the stable binaries of sexual difference, and
to the threat posed therein to patriarchal authority, is then to delegate a good
deal of its power to the fashion-beauty complex where, as a 'grand luminosity',
a post-feminist masquerade emerges as a new cultural dominant. This
strategy pre-empts and re-contains the threat posed by Butler's work on gender's
fictive status, its artifice and its performative existence in daily life. It
63
THE AfTERMATH Of FEMINISM
permits the possibility of distance from the unbearable proximity of feminini�
as described by Doane, through a licensed, ironic, quasi-feminist
inhabiting of femininity as excess, which is now openly acknowledged as fictive
(Doane 1982) . The Symbolic here shows itself to be highly adaptable
and capable of operating at high speed, to pull back into the field of constraint,
actions which have sought to subvert the subordinate status of femininity.
It is as though the post-feminist masquerade is a direct response to
the feminist theorising of both Doane and Butler. It openly acknowledges
and celebrates the fictive status of femininity while at the same time establishing
new ways of enforcing sexual difference. The masquerade, as defined
by Riviere in 1 929, and engaged with by Doane in her highly influential
essay 'Film and the Masquerade: Theorising the Female Spectator' (1 982)
and then returned to by Butler in 199011999, has re-appeared as a highly
self-conscious means by which young women are encouraged to collude with
the re-stabilisation of gender norms so as to undo the gains of feminism, and
dissociate themselves from this now discredited political identity (see Figure
1, advertisement for Grazia magazine in the Guardian 1 7 January 2006). As
a psychoanalyst, Riviere was interested in how 'women who wish for masculinity
may put on a mask of womanliness to avert anxiety and the retribution
feared from men' (Riviere 192911986: 35, quoted in Butler 1999a, 2nd
edn: 65). Riviere understands womanliness and/masquerade to be indistinguishable,
there is no naturally feminine woman lurking underneath this
mask. Butler is interested in the 'homosexuality of the woman in masquerade'
and in the question of what exactly the masquerade conceals, if not an
authentic femininity. She suggests that Riviere disavows the complexity and
ambivalence of desire in the masquerade. Butler claims this to be a site of
both 'the refusal of female homosexuality and hyperbolic incorporation of
that female other who is refused' (Butler 1999a: 65).
This leads Butler some pages later to develop the idea of heterosexual
melancholia. While this is indeed a persuasive engagement with Riviere, I
want to introduce the post-feminist masquerade as a new form of gender
power which re-orchestrates the heterosexual matrix in order to secure,
once again, the existence of patriarchal law and masculine hegemony, but
this time by means of a kind of ironic, quasi-feminist staking out of a distance
in the act of taking on the garb of femininity.11 The Symbolic permits
the presence of a feminist gesture as it adjusts to ward offthe threat of feminism.
There is a useful slippage in Riviere's account between the actuality
of the masquerade as a recognisable phenomenon which she perceives in
her female patients and their encounters, and images of femininity found in
the cultural realm. This intersection between the styles of femininity that
Riviere observes in everyday life, and those portrayed in feminine popular
culture, permits me here to propose the post-feminist masquerade as mode
of feminine inscription, across the whole surface of the female body, an
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TOP YOU NG WOMEN AND THE N EW SEXUAL CONTRACT
Figu re 1 Grazia advertisement in the Guardian 17 January 2006. Cou rtesy
Grazia magazine.
interpellative device, at work and highly visible in the commercial domain
as a familiar (even nostalgic or 'retro'), light-hearted (unserious), refrain of
femininity. It has been re-instated into the repertoire of femininity ironically
(as the wearing of clothes in inverted commas). This signals that the hyperfemininity
of the masquerade which would seemingly re-Iocate women
back inside the terms of traditional gender hierarchies, by having them wear
spindly stilettos and 'pencil' skirts, for example, does not in fact mean
entrapment (as feminists would once have seen it) since it is now a matter
65
THE AfTERMATH Of FEMINISM
of choice rather than obligation. The element of choice becomes synonymous
with a kind of feminism. But what the young woman is choosing is
more than just participation in consumer culture. No aspect of physical
appearance can be left unattended to. The post-feminist masquerade functions
with this microscopic attention to detail. As ever more obscure beauty procedures
are made available, traditional feminine practices of self-maintenance,
like manicures and pedicures, are also re-instated as norms of feminine
grooming. Such routine practices as these are required by all women who want
to count themselves as such, and these rituals constitute the post-feminist masquerade
as a feminine totality.
This new masquerade constantly refers to its own artifice. Its adoption by
women is done as a statement, the woman in masquerade is making a point
that this is a freely chosen look. The post-feminist masquerade does not fear
male retribution. Instead it is the reprimanding structure of the fashion and
beauty system which acts as an authoritative regime; hence the seeming
disregard for male approval, especially if the outfit and look is widely
admired by those within the fashion milieu.12 The masquerade creates a
habitus for women who have now found themselves ensconced within
fields of work, employment and public life, all of which hitherto had been
marked out as masculine domains. The masquerade disavows the spectral,
powerful and castrating figures of the lesbian and the feminist with whom
they might conceivably be linked. It rescues women from the threat posed
by these figures by triumphantly re-instating the spectacle of excessive femininity
(on the basis of the independently earned wage) while also shoring
up hegemonic masculinity by endorsing this public femininity which
appears to undermine, or at least unsettle the new power accruing to
women on the basis of this economic capacity. There are many variants of
the post-feminist masquerade (sometimes summed up in the word immaculate)
but in essence it comprises a re-ordering of femininity so that oldfashioned
styles (rules about hats, bags, shoes, etc1 which signal submission
to some invisible authority or to an opaque set of instructions, are reinstated.13
In practice it can be read as a nervous gesture on the part of
young women (think of Bridget lones's short skirt and flirty presence in the
workplace and her 'oh silly me' self-reprimands), who have become aware
that their coming forward and competing on the labour market with men
as their equals has certain repercussions. They are nervous because they are
still unused to power, it ill-befits them, they are inexperienced, they cannot
afford for it to be relaxed or casual, they are anxious it will make them
unfeminine. It is not so much fear, as recognition that this appropriation of
power which they have found themselves assuming, impacts on their negotiation
of heterosexuality and potentially detracts from their desirability.
The post-feminist (anti-feminist) masquerade comes to the young women's
rescue, a throwback from the past, and she adopts this style (assuming for
66
TOP GIRLS? YOUNG WOMEN AND THE NEW SEXUAL CONTRACT
example the air of being 'foolish and bewildered' (Riviere, 1 929/1986: 29)
to help her navigate the terrain of hegemonic masculinity without jeopardising
her sexual identity, which, because she is actually and legitimately
inside the institutional world of work, from which she was once barred or
had only limited access to, can become a site of vulnerability (she might be
made to feel herselftoo old, past her best, still on the shelf, etc). Or else she
fears being considered aggressively unfeminine in her coming forward as a
powerful woman, she fears being mistaken for a feminist, and so adopts the
air of being girlishly distracted, slightly flustered, weighed down with bags,
shoes, bracelets and other decorative candelabra items, all of which need to
be constantly attended to. She is also almost inappropriately eager to please.
The new masquerade draws attention self-consciously to its own C2rafting
and performance. The post-feminist masquerade (embodied in the figure of
the so-called fashionista) is then a knowing strategy which emphasises its
non-coercive status, it is a highly-styled disguise of womanliness which
is now adopted as a matter of personal choice. But the theatricality of
the masquerade, the silly hat, the too short skirt, the too high heels,
are once again means of emphasising, as they did in classic Hollywood
comedies, female vulnerability, fragility, uncertainty and deep anxiety, indeed
panic, about the possible forfeiting of male desire through coming forward
as a woman.
Both Riviere and Butler refer to the sublimated aggression directed
towards masculinity and male dominance in the form of the masquerade.
Riviere uses words like triumph, supremacy and hostility to describe the
female anger which underpins the fa�ade of excessive feminine adornment,
she pinpoints the fury of the professional women who perceives her own
subjugation in the behaviour of her male peers. All of this gets transmogrified
into the mask of make-up and the crafting of a highly styled look. This
strategy re-appears today in very different circumstances. Women now routinely
inhabit these masculine spheres, they now find themselves in competition
with men on a daily basis. They take their place alongside men thanks
to the existence of non-discriminatory policies, and ·more recently to systems
of meritocratic reward as advocated by New Labour. The woman in
masquerade wishes to have a position as a 'subject in language' (i.e. to participate
in public life) rather than existing merely as 'women as sign' (Butler
1 990/1999a) . It is precisely because women are now able to function as
subjects in language (i.e. they participate in working life) that the new masquerade
exists to manage the field of sexual antagonisms and to re-instate
women as sign. The successful young woman must now get herself endlessly
and repetitively done up, so as to mask her rivalry with men in the world of
work (i.e. her wish for masculinity) and to conceal the competition she now
poses because only by these tactics of re-assurance can she be sure that she
will remain sexually desirable. She fears the loss of her own desirability, so
67
THE AfTERMATH Of FEMINISM
she gets all done up, but where in the past this was a necessity, now it is a
personal choice, and male approval is sought only indirectly. And in any case
patriarchy and hegemonic masculinities have removed themselves from the
scene and are now replaced by the cultural horizon ofjudgement provided
by the fashion and beauty system. This becomes the source of reprimand,
this is where punishment is meted out. Women disguise their bid for power
by means of masquerade and patriarchal authority absents itself from the
scene ofjudgement and delegates this power to the beauty and fashion system
which requires constant self-judgement and self-beratement, against a
horizon of rigid cultural norms. This makes it look as though women are
'doing it for themselves'. If patriarchy, at the time when Riviere was writing,
objected vigorously to women's bid for power and threatened punishment,
the only way in which women could avoid this punishment was by
retreating from the bid for power into re-assuring femininity thereby letting
men know that they posed no threat. But the need for masquerade in a postfeminist
context remains also a source of sublimated anger. This becomes
privatised or even illegible for the reason that the critique of masculinity
would return complaining women to the camp of the repudiated feminist,
thus there is a good deal of searching about for an appropriate cultural space
for the venting of this anger. In some ways there is a 'damn you men' gesture
in the narcissistic self-absorption of super-fashionable young women
today. The controlling and constraining aspects of the post-feminist masquerade,
recognises and panders to the sublimated critique of masculinity,
and even to heterosexual melancholia as described by Butler. This melancholia
lurks beneath the surface, threatening to transmogrify into rage, as
will be discussed in the chapter that follows. The heroines of popular fiction
(including so-called chick lit) regularly express anger, outrage and frustration
in their diaries that they have, once again, to make themselves submissive
in order to appeal to men.
Riviere argues that by exaggerating the way in which she inhabits her gender
and sexuality so as to draw attention to objects and the accoutrements of
her femininity, the woman both masks her bid for masculine power and
retreats from it at the same time. She is fearful of seriousness (hence the
comedic nature of spectacular femininity) and even when positioned as
authoritative she will allude to her inhabiting of femininity so that she
remains recognisable within the terms ofmale desire.I4 Riviere describes how
the prominent woman demonstrates her professional skills in a public environment
(giving a lecture) but goes on to undermine the effect ofproficiency
and expertise with an excessive display of 'coquettishness' and feminine gestures.
She reassures her male colleagues that she remains nonetheless a real
(and thus subjugated) woman. The masquerade functions to re-assure male
structures of power by defusing the presence and the aggressive and competitive
actions of women as they come to inhabit positions of authority. It
68
TOP GIRLS? YOUNG WOMEN AND T H E N EW SEXUAL CONTRACT
re-stabilises gender relations and the heterosexual matrix as defined by
Butler by interpellating women repeatedly and ritualistically into the knowing
and self-reflexive terms of highly-stylised femininity. The post-feminist
masquerade works on behalf of the Symbolic pre-emptively in the light of
the possible disruptions posed by the new gender regime. It operat�s with a
double movement, its voluntaristic structure works to conceal that patriarchy
is still in place, while the requirements of the fashion and beauty system
ensure that women are in fact still fearful subjects, driven by the need
for 'complete perfection' (Riviere 192911986: 42).
But the next question, which must be asked, concerns the racial underpinning
ofthe post-feminist masquerade. IS How is whiteness inscribed within this
re-ordering of the feminine? How do black and Asian young women find
themselves interpellated (or not) by the addresses which seek to encourage the
adoption ofthis bodily norm of 'complete perfection'? The post-feminist masquerade
is also a means ofre-instating whiteness as a cultural dominant within
the field of the fashion-beauty complex. This too is a moment of profound
undoing, a mode of re-colonisation through a range of complex strategies
which can be identified within the visual discourses of popular culture. What
do I mean re-colonisation? What do I mean undoing? In the addresses to young
non-white women across the media and culture, there is an insinuation or a
suggestion that the fight for racial equality is no longer relevant. Overt antiracism
combined with feminism, is also associated with the past, with the
angry period of the 1 970s and 1980s which pre-dated the more enlightened
time ofthe New Labourgovernment. As already noted in the previous chapter,
this coincides with the shift in governmental thinking away from endorsing
multi-culturalism and the policy strategies associated with anti-racism, and
instead the encouraging ofnew styles ofintegration and assimilation,while also
of course celebrating black and Asian success as key features ofthe new meritocracy.
New integrationism has the (post 911 1) ring of the contemporary, and
the visibility of black and Asian people including 'modern' young women
within the ranks ofthe talent-led economy would ideally replace the need for
arguments about institutionalised racism and the prevalence and reproduction
of racial inequalities. The particular element of undoing relevant to discussions
of femininity resides in something as straightforward as the sustained, marked,
inattention by predominantly white editors, journalists, and other people occupying
important roles in the world ofmedia, culture and inside the social institutions,
to what used to be called issues of equal opportunities and to, as
discussed in the previous chapter, questions of representation. In the last few
years, there is a very noticeable decrease in inlages of black and Asian women
on the pages of the women's and girls' magazines, but equally important, this
is no longer a focus for discussion.
Questions about the numerical representation of black and Asian people
in the media, takes us right back to the early days of feminist and anti-racist
69
THE AFTERMATH OF FEMINISM
research and scholarship in the humanities and social sciences. It is almost
too crude a point to make. My mention here of an observed decline in black
models and in coverage of issues relating to non-white women in the field
of feminine popular culture bears the hallmark ofjust that, a kind ofinstinctive
noticing, that even on the pages ofthe liberal press which now devotes
so much space to fashion and beauty and which so forcefully pursues a
female readership, most often there are no black or Asian bodies at all to be
seen amongst the endless pages of fashion tips, beauty schedules, information
about cosmetic surgery and so on. It is as though, in a climate now
openly critical of so-called 'political correctness', and thus no longer
expected or required to engage with equal opportunities issues, as they
might have done in the recent past, editors and journalists, revert to relying
on the norms and conventions which governed their practice in the era prior
to the rise of feminist and anti-racist politics. Thus there is an undoing of
anti-racist feminist cultural politics in the press and across the popular
media. Black and Asian girls have a minimal presence as a result in the various
styles incorporated within post-feminist masquerade. The luminosities
of femininity are unapologetically and invariably white. The clouds of light
which fix upon the figures of female success and the top girls can accommodate
to black and Asian femininity but only on condition that there is a
subsuming of difference (into Western glamour) so that it complies with
specific requirements endlessly repeated by the fashion and beauty system.
Otherness is also signalled, and there are prescribed pathways for cultural
difference to find some negotiated space within the post-feminist masquerade
(the occasional black female celebrity featured in the magazines, as a
style icon) but overall the post-feminist masquerade implicitly re-instates
normative whiteness and it exacts a violent exclusion of diversity and otherness
thereby resurrecting and solidifying gendered racial divisions in the
cultural realm.
Thus we might say tha� the post-feminist masquerade re-secures the
terms of submission of white femininity to white masculine domination,
while Simultaneously resurrecting racial divisions by undoing any promise
of multi-culturalism through the exclusion of non-white femininities from
this rigid repertoire of self-styling. This amounts to a double process of resubordination,
with again, somewhere in the background the hint that of
course feminism and anti-racism have been already dealt with, they have
been taken into account, young black and Asian women now have the
opportunities to succeed alongside their white female counterparts. Of
course they are included in the encouragement to achieve 'complete perfection'.
This element of confident coming forward, which is so central to
the dominant discourses of governmentality, makes it all the more difficult
to resurrect a language of discrimination, injustice and exclusion. But the
idea of complete perfection embodied within this post-feminist masquerade
70
TO� GIRLS? YOUNG WOMEN AND THE N EW SEXUAL CONTRACT
is elusive, unviable, and beyond reach, it seems, for non-white women,
unless they relinquish almost all signifiers of racial difference ?-nd subsume
ethnicity into the dominant repertoire of normative white femininity.
These current interpellative addresses of the fashion and beauty system
to black female subjects has not attracted the attention of feminist scholars
in the way such issues did in the 1 980s and early 1 990s (see Young 2000).
The feminine commercial domain operates then with a limited and thus
exclusionary address, inviting young (light skinned) black and (respectably
demure) Asian women to accept minimal terms of representation within
these visual economies. This readership only has the option of adjusting to
the norms of dominant white glamorous and high maintenance femininity.
There are very few black celebrities whose everyday lives are the subject of
paparazzi attention for the gossip magazines. The film version of Bridget
Jones's Diary evokes a landscape of whiteness with barely a gesture towards
London as a multi-cultural city. There was no black girl among the main cast
of characters in Sex and the City, no black girl in Friends (other than the
occasional 'date'). There is a successful genre of Asian chick lit, and there
are a handful of black models who embody 'complete perfection', but the
pool of light which attempts to bring order and stability to the landscape of
change for young women by means of a post-feminist masquerade offers
young non-white women only the option of mimicry, accommodation,
adjustment and modification. This is a kind ofracial violence within the celebratory
white visual economies of the fashion-beauty complex which goes
almost unnoticed. The post-feminist masquerade derives its meaning from
the hey-day of (white) Hollywood glamour, and from the conventions of
high fashion glossymagazines like Vogue. The retro, nostalgia forthis kind of
whiteness ensures that the new masquerade, if not unavailable to black or
Asian women, is then only available at the cost of negating modes of style
and beauty associated with blackness, with cultural diversity and ethnic difference
(Dyer 1 997) . The fashion-beauty complex functions on behalf of
patriarchal authority so as to ensure the stability of the heterosexual matrix
especially when it is threatened by social changes brought about by women
coming forward into the world of work and employment. It is also a key
mechanism in the active production and reproduction of racialising differences.
And likewise the various forms of feminine popular culture whose
focus of attention is sexuality, desire, and the conduct of love and intimacy,
here too the interpellative address of heterosexuality is simultaneously one
which generates and reinforces racial and ethnic difference. These systems
of racialised meaning are so deeply inscribed within the dominant language
of love, and what young women now need to do to secure a partner or
husband (the so-called rules), that the only available logic of difference,
within the commercial domain, is the production of an equivalent system
of feminine popular culture for black or Asian young women. Hence the
7 1
THE AfTERMATH OF fEMINISM
proliferation of self-help handbooks for black or Asian women, black fashion
magazines, Asian fashion labels, Asian chick lit and so on.
Education and employment as sites of capacity: the
visibility of the well -educated working girl
The luminosities of the post-feminist masquerade and the clouds of light
bestowed on the figure of the young women by the fashion and beauty
system are matched, if not surpassed, by (and frequently intersect with) the
visibilities which produce the well-educated young woman and the working
girl. Together these comprise two key elements of the new sexual
contract. It is the wage earning capacity on the part ofyoung women which
is the critical factor that underpins the exuberance of the commercial
domain, as commerce embraces the possibilities opened up by the dispo�able
income of young women, who now are expected to not just have an
occupation, but to prioritise earning a living as a means of acquiring status,
ensuring an independent livelihood, and gaining access to the world of feminine
goods and services. And the ability to earn a living is also the single
most important feature of the social and cultural changes of which young
women find themselves to be the privileged subjects. Governmental activity
is put into making young women ready for work, and this requirement
takes the form of urging young women towards agency across the whole
range of talents and abilities (Rose 1 999b, Allen 2008). As I attempt to
demonstrate, within the terms ofthe UK government's modernising project,
the prescribed manner of acquiring capacity also ensures the re-stabilisation
of gender hierarchies. In this next section I consider some of the ways in
which education and employment play this role of re-designating young
women as subjects of capacity who will refrain from challenging existing
gender hierarchies as they come forward to occupy a position of visibility.
Young women are now integral to social change and to processes of social
re-structuring with all that entails in relation to social divisions, new polarities
between wealth and poverty and the creation of what New Labour
labels the new meritocracy.
As well-trained women gain their own more independent middle-class
status so also are they encouraged to repudiate their social inferiors and celebrate
their own individualistic success. As I show in Chapter 5, the reappearance
of hierarchy, class disdain, indeed hatred, in regard to the habits
and appearance of low-income women, gains acceptability in the guise of
entertainment, in popular culture and the media, as a mark of women no
longer needing the support of each other now that they have access to the
means of becoming successful and competitive. Implicit within this discourse
of popular culture (BBe TV programmes like What Not To Wear) is
the idea that women's lives have changed dramatically. Working-class
72
TOP GIRLS? YOUNG WOMEN AND THE N EW SEXUAL CONTRACT
women are urged to abandon fatalistic ideas about the inevitability of ageing,
the decline in appearance and the traditional requirement of mothers and
wives to be self-sacrificing. This landscape of self-improvement substitutes
for the feminist values of solidarity and support and instead embraces and
promotes female individualisation and condemnation of those who remain
unable or unWilling to help themselves. The new temporalities of women's
time mean that they are now called upon to attend to body image and personal
skills so that they will remain presentable in the workplace and
employable in the longer term. Occupational identity and the acquisition of
qualifications mean that young women are no longer classified primarily
according to their place within structures of family and kinship. Their highly
visible bodies are now marked by the possession of grades, qualifications and
occupational identities. As they emerge through the education system,
young women, more so than their male peers, come to be associated with
the gaining of qualifications. Until the late 1 980s, being in proud possession
of a clutch of high graded GCSEs and A levels was the privilege of a small
number of middle class and largely white young women, so much so that it
was not a subject which attracted wide public attention. This has changed
dramatically. The impact of class inequalities, racism and the sheer persistence
of unsurmountable obstacles for girls growing up in poverty are
eclipsed by the emphasis on improvement, success and the significant
increase in the numbers of young women going to university.16 These
changes also feature prominently in the process of young women coming
forward, and being seen to benefit from the attention of government. The
education system now looks favourably towards young women and rewards
them for their effort. The result is that the young woman comes to be
widely understood as a potential bearer of qualifications, she is an active and
aspirationa1 subject of the education system, and she embodies the success
of the new meritocratic values which New Labour have sought to implement
in schools. This re-positioning is a decisive factor in the new sexual
contract. The contractual dimension entails an offer made to young women
which cannot be refused, without painful repercussions. But this requires
further unpacking and contextualisation. How, for example, have feminist
scholars responded to a situation which suggests that young women have
now gained equality in the education system and thus might appear no
longer to be subjects of injustice or discrimination?
Education has been a site in which years of feminist struggle have indeed
reaped some rewards. If second wave feminism paid great attention to the
gender inequalities across the school system, with socialist feminists and
black feminist scholars also mapping this vector of disadvantage together
with those of class and ethnicity, this longstanding commitment to achieving
equality in schooling for young women could be understood in Walby's
terms as having resulted in the mainstreaming of gender issues as matters
73
THE AfTERMATH Of fEMI NISM
for attention within the wider political arena. The increase in educational
qualifications referred to above, as well as the growing numbers ofgirls staying
on at school after 1 6, and going to university, means that it is in effect
primarily young women who are providing the New Labour government
with reasons to claim that their policies are successful. 17 This could also be
seen as an example ofwomen coming forward and feminism fading away on
the basis of its work being done, substantial degrees of equality having been
won, and enduring inequities are now attended to by mainstream governmental
processes. However my emphasis here is rather different. And this is
not just a matter of pointing to the unevenness of success, the discrepancy
between the rates of achievement and under-achievement on the basis of
class, and the continued pernicious impact of racial disadvantage on young
black and Asian women across the class divide. The violent impact of racial
prejudice on young black and Asian women's educational prospects continues
to undermine any straightforward notion of feminist gains in the educational
field, particularly as these are described within a vocabulary of
gender mainstreaming. We need a much more detailed empirical account of
the educational experiences ofyoungblack andAsian women in the UK and
in Europe whichwould, we might assume, temper any premature optimism
about success and social mobility. What can be argued however is that the
coming forward of young women and the attribution of capacity to these
now seemingly privileged subjects also plays a role within the modernising
agenda of New Labour. Indeed this is a key role, it shows that there remains
a solid, social democratic 'heart' to New Labour, and that indeed wise
investment in education has proved to reap rewards especially with a social
group, i.e. young women who in the past were destined to under-achieve.
There are a range of studies from the US, the UK, Australia and Europe
which provide detailed accounts of inequities newly generated by changes
to welfare regimes, the decline in state funding of education, and the emergence
of meritocratic systems of reward. These show how such policy shifts
towards an audit and target-based system, as well as privatisation, impact
negatively on the educational achievements of young women from low-:income
families (Walkerdine et al. 2002). Middle-class girls and those from
privileged Asian and black families (who will still of course experience discrimination)
will become part of the new competitive elite, while lower
middle class girls and many oftheir working class counterparts will now be
expected to gain degree level qualifications and enter the labour market in
occupations appropriate to the qualifications gained. As Kim Allen shows,
overall in the UK in the early years of the twenty first century there is an
exceptionally high level of activity for girls, in schools, in training, in further
and higher education and in employment, leaving only 2% of girls who finish
school with no qualifications and who are, as a result, now singled out
more forcefully as educational failures (Allen 2008). Such a distribution of
74
TOP GIRLS? YOUNG WOMEN AND THE N EW SEXUAL CONTRACT
young women, by means of educational qualifications, looks like a simple
reproduction of existing class divisions, with the double proviso, first that
women are now gaining their own class identity through work and qualifications,
and second that there are specifically feminine pathways of social
mobility.IS The acquisition (or not) of qualifications therefore comes to
function as a mark of a new gender divide. Young women are ranked according
to their ability to gain qualifications which provide them with an identity
as female subjects of capacity. (They can become obsessed with grades.)
The principles that underscore the new gender regime require willingness,
motivation and aptitude on the part ofyoung women that ifinstilled within
the school system will be sustained and further developed in the workplace.
In singling out young women for special attention, New Labour and other
governments seem to be fulfilling some of the hopes of earlier generations
offeminists, while in factthey are encouraging female activity as a new form
of social mobility. Government substitutes for feminism, and instils in place
of those now outmoded values, styles of feminine competition which also
give rise to new and more opaque entanglements of class, race and gender.19
Because the language and ideas which circulate across the culture in relation
to young women's working lives are so dominated by personal narratives, and
by colourful 'self-biographies', and by TV programmes like FameAcademy or
TheApprentice, which emphasise talent, determination,and the desire to win,
and which feature highly motivated young women, it becomes more and
more difficult to discern the real sociological intersections of structural factors
of ethnicity, social class and gender, in regard to young women. In the
individualising narratives of popular culture, for example in the Daily Mail,
a good deal of attention is given to the young woman who will step forward
as an exemplary black or Asian young woman on the basis of her enthusiasm
for learning, her taste for hard work, and her desire to pursue material
reward.
High rates of success in gaining qualifications have become the benchmark
of equality as achieved. It is assumed that gender inequities have now
(more or less) been successfully dealt with, such that young men are now
the losers, and they are in effect discriminated against. Thus one form the
backlash against feminism takes is to argue that it has gone too far, that it
has overstepped its limits and that having succeeded in achieving equality
for young women it has indirectly contributed to male under-performance
through the feminisation of schooling.20 And the extent to which this argument
is taken up by government, makes it all the more difficult to continue
to make a case for young women's inequality despite apparent success in
schooling. A range of sociological studies have challenged the sensational
headlines in the press about female success and male failure, and have provided
important qualifications to such inflated claims, see Arnot et al.
(1999), Harris (2004), Driscoll (2002), Safia-Mirza (1 997), Bettie (2003),
75
THE AFTERMATH OF fEMINISM
Budgeon (2001). Arnot et al. writing about UK schooling both contextualise
and historicise female success. They point to how feminist practice on
the part of teachers in schooling from the mid-1 970s, was gradually supplanted
by a more harshly competitive, Thatcherite, target-oriented and
accountability-directed, regime. However, as a result of residual feminist
pedagogic principles still intact, it was possible for the former nonetheless
to be translated so as to accord with the meritocratic logic ofthe latter, with
young women thus able to reap some benefits from both old feminist and
New Labour policies. Arnot et al. describe the way in which the attack by
the new right on educational practices associated with the left and feminism,
forced teachers to abandon the vocabulary that had been in place in
regard to girls and schooling, in favour of one which emphasised results, targets
and external ratings. Feminism was made to fold into the new values of
competition and excellence so that the high-achieving girl came to embody
the improvements and changes in the educational system as a whole.
Notwithstanding the perpetuation within secondary education of glaring
inequities, the authors say 'successive generations of girls have been challenged
by economic and social change and by feminism' (Arnot et al. 1 999:
1 50). However this notion of challenge remains rather vague. The new educational
vocabulary addressed to young women is actually more aggressive
in its attempts to eradicate the traces of feminism so that feminist pedagogy
is seen to be a thing ofthe past, frozen in educational history as marking out
a moment of outmoded radicalism. This coincides with recent parallel
efforts to associate anti-racist educational practices with similar meanings,
in the move, in the aftermath ofthe events of 911 1 to find ways ofre-instating
vocabularies of assimilation and integration rather than those of cultural difference
and muticulturalism. For black and Asian girls there is the impact of
a double process of discrediting the radical values which had been established
in the school system from the mid-1970s to the mid-1 990s and
which had also shaped at least parts of the curriculum.
The account I have presented so far of educational changes is certainly
schematic, and aims more at drawing attention to the shift away from
debates which historically focused on questions of girls and schooling, to
those which now assume that young women are being relatively well-catered
to by education and consequently understood as subjects of capacity, subjects
who are in a position to do well. The actuality of the schooling process for
young women and the re-drafting of inequalities clearly require a good deal
more analysis. But in regard to the process of young women as subjects of
capacity we might also point to the convergence in values between the UK
endorsing of competitive female individualisation and the comments made
by Gayatri Spivak about the forms of pedagogy advocated within Western
aid programmes ostensibly to the benefit of the new global girl. Spivak (in
contrast with Nussbaum) urges caution in endorsing the seeming support for
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TOP YOUNG WOMEN AND THE NEW SEXUAL CONTRACT
girls' education on the part of governments in impoverished Third World as
well as wealthy countries oftheWest (Nussbaum 2003b, Spivak 2002b). The
investing in girls as subjects of educational capacity as a sign of progress, she
argues (contra Walby), must be countered with recognition that they will
noW most likely be educated according to pedagogic principles which are
completely compliant with the values of neo-liberalised global capitalism.
Spivak questions the role of such forms of knowledge and the paternalism
which underpins the categorising of the girl as worthy of investment. Of
course she is not saying that young women should reject the possibilities for
becoming educated, rather that the terms and conditions within which this
provision is made be subject to critical scrutiny. The attention of Western
government to the category of girl shows the extent to which the global girl
is now a figure who promises a great deal within the new international division
of labour. Where once she was simply known for her nimble fingers, the
global girl now emerges as a subject of micro-credit worthiness, gender training,
enterprise culture as well as an active practitioner of birth control
(Spivak 1 999, 2002a, 2002b, Mohanty 2002).
If education remains the privileged space within the countries of the affluent
West for promulgating female participation, the recent attempts on the
part ofgovernment to create more direct links between education and employment
by emphasising work experience, internships, employability, and enterprise
culture, have particular resonance for young women. Right across a range
of recent studies of young women's self-identity it is apparent that occupational
status has become an overriding factor in the presentation of self
Interviewees, across the boundaries of class and ethnicity, are motivated and
ambitious, they have clear plans about what direction they might hope to follow
from a young age and they frequently refer to the support they receive
from their parents, especially from their mothers (Budgeon 2001, Harris
2004). Having a well-planned life emerges as a social norm of contemporary
femininity. And conversely the absence of such styles of self-organisation
becomes an indicator of patholo� a signal of failure or a symptom of some
other personal difficulties. As Harris and others have pointed out this governmental
vocabulary of self-responsibility also personalises disadvantage and
marks out poverty and economic hardship as issues connected with family and
dysfunctionality rather than as socially generated phenomena. For those young
women who appear to be in possession of the social skills of confident selfpresentation
and ambition, the question that arises is how these are transposed
into the workplace? For those without such advantages, the transition to work
will surely entail being pushed towards low pay, low skill work but with the
proviso that for those who wish to improve their chances in the labour market
there are indeed pathways to further education, day release schemes and training.
The result is that those young women under-achievers, and those who
do not have the requisite degrees of motivation and ambition to improve
77
THE AFTERMATH OF fEMINISM
themselves, become all the more emphatically condemned for their lack of
status and for other failings, than would have been the case in the past.
At the opposite end of the scale, we might ask how the middle class and
lower middle class young women, who have, as Arnot et al. argue, benefited
both from the feminism ofthe earlier period, and then have been designated
as subjects of immense capacity through the ethos of meritocracy and competition
by the New Labour government, find themselves positioned within
the field of work and employment? If this section of the female population
are the winners, can they also be losers? Are their grounds for claiming that
here too gender retrenchment takes place, despite a fac;ade of opportunity
and capacity and despite the various attentions which produce specific visibilities
around the figure of the working girl or the young career woman?
Certainly it is the hard working and aspirational young woman who in popular
culture transmogrifies into the luminosity which surrounds the figure of
the 'working girl'. She has benefited from feminism, and can now afford to
wave goodbye to its values, in favour of pursuing her own personal desires.
She again is invariably white and finds herself the subject of countless narratives
in film, TV drama as well as within the repertoire offeatures in girls and
women's magazines. Charlotte Brunsdon writing in the 1990s on films like
Working Girl (directed by Mike Nichols in 1989), shows exactly how postfeminist
meanings emerge in popular cinema directed at a female audience
through narratives which acknowledge, or make some gestures to the impact
of the women's movement, on ordinary women's lives and their current
investment in work and careers. Brunsdon reflects on the disavowal of feminism
in a number of 1980s and early 1990s Hollywood women's genre films,
and in many ways my argument in this book takes Brundson's n-otion of disavowal
further by looking at how feminism is actively taken into account, in
order that it is also undone, and so that it might never happen again
(Brunsdon 1 991, 1997). The prevalence of powerful and attractive working
girls across the landscape of media and culture and the incorporation of
working identity as integral to the post-feminist masquerade comes to provide
a benchmark against which young women are invited to measure their
own capacity in the world of work.
The film Working Girl provides a narrative account of young women's
movement, or coming forward, to occupy these spaces of luminosity. Indeed
this film enacts a passage from masquerade to post-feminist masquerade by
means oftwo competing female figures. The middle class, feminist-influenced
executive figure, Katherine, played by Sigourney Weaver is eventually
eclipsed by her rival and social inferior in the typing pool (played by Melanie
Griffith) who studies her closely, and learns how to dress so that she too
embodies 'complete perfection', but who remains endearingly feminine and
succeeds in work and in love by these means. In the film Melanie Griffith
plays Tess McGill, an office girl with poor taste in dress. An opportunity
TOP GIRLS? YOUNG WOMEN AND THE N EW SEXUAL CONTRACT
arises (her boss has a skiing accident) which allows Tess not just to emulate
the immaculate style of her boss Katherine, but also to seduce her boyfriend
and turn herselfinto an equally high-powered executive by means of a combination
of old-fashioned feminine conniving and instinctive intelligence.
Tess's post-feminist masquerade entails learning and applying all the fashion
rules, but she remains nervous, unsure of hersel£ and eager to please, and
playing these qualities up, she attracts the attention of the handsome executive
and Katherine's long-term boyfriend played by Harrison Ford. This is
only one of many working girl narratives, but, as is often the case with mainstream
Hollywood films, it anticipates with perspicuity many ofthe key thematics
of gender and social as well as cultural change of the last 20 years.
These include post-feminist competition and unbridled rivalry among
women, female social mobility, working-class ambition, and the post-feminist
masquerade as feminine performance which succeeds for Tess for the reason
that she works out why Katherine, despite her expensive wardrobe, will fail
when it comes to men and sexuality. Katherine is too near to being a feminist.
In her style as well as her manner, she presents herself as equal to men,
and she is beaten in love by her less well-educated rival who is better able to
adjust to the requirements of masculine domination.21
The post-feminist masquerade exacts then on the part ofthe working girl
a kind of compromise, she takes up her place in the labour market and she
enjoys her status as a working girl without going too far. She must retain a
visible fragility and the displaying of a kind of conventional feminine vulnerability
will ensure she remains desirable to men. This compromise
enacted in the cultural field also finds expression, as social compromise, in
the field of work and employment. I borrow this term from Rosemary
Crompton to account for the way in which the new sexual contract operates
in the workplace, setting limits on patterns of participation and gender
equality (Crompton 2002). Rosemary Crompton focuses on women who
are also mothers and their re-positioning in the labour market on return to
work after the birth of children. The relevance of this work to the discussion
here lies in the implicit abandonment of critique of masculine hegemony
in favour of compromise. Young working mothers, it appears, draw
back from entertaining any idea of debate on inequality in the household in
favour of finding ways, with help from government, to manage their dual
responsibility. This links with the previous discussion of the post-feminist
masquerade as a strategy of undoing, a re-configuring of normative femininity,
this time incorporating motherhood so as to accommodate with masculine
domination. In the social compromise there is then, once again, a
process of gender re-stabilisation. Rosemary Crompton points to the significant
rates of retention in employment or return to work shortly after having
children by UK women. This corresponds with government's focus on
women's employability and the transition to lifelong work for women as an
79
THE AFTERMATH OF fEMINISM
alternative to traditional economic dependence on a male breadwinner. The
compromise requires that woman play a dual role, active in the workplace
and primarily responsible for children and domestic life (Crompton 2002).
Instead of challenging the traditional expectation that women take primary
responsibility in the home, there is a shift towards abandoning the critique
of patriarchy and instead heroically attempting to 'do it all' while also looking
to government for support in this Herculean endeavour. The transition
to this feminine mode of activity comes into existence by means of a series
of luminosities (the glamorous working mother, the so-called yummy
mummy, the city high-flyer who is also a mother, and so on) images and
texts which are accompanied also by popular genres of fiction including
best selling novels such as I Don't Know How She Does It (Pearson 2003).
The UK government substitutes for the feminist, displaces her vocabulary
and intervenes to assist working mothers who are coming forward, and to
avert the possibility of critique by women of their double responsibilities
and thus of possible crisis within the heterosexual matrix.22 Government
thus acts to protect masculinity hegemony by supporting women in their
double role, while the media and popular culture endeavour to re-glamorise
workingwives and mothers through post-feminist styles ofself-improvement,
hyper-sexuality and capacity. This feature ofthe new sexual contract requires
compromise in work as well as within the home. Despite the rhetoric of
heroism in the combining of primary responsibility for children with maintaining
a career} in practice the emphasis by various agencies whose subject
of attention is the young working women, entails the scaling down of ambition
in favour of a discourse of managing following the onset of motherhood.
In the light of these new responsibilities the young woman is
counselled to request flexibility of her employer. Government is certainly
not encouraging women back into the home after having children. The new
sexual contract instead offers support and guidance so that the return to
employment (often part-time) is facilitated in the form of a work-life
balance. There is an implicit trade 0-££ what the working mother wants or
needs from her employer is recognition of her dual role, and some degree of
accommodation in this respect. The work-life balance is now underpinned
in the form of better safeguards in law for part-time workers and also pension
rights for women.
Government also makes strenuous efforts to encourage men to become
better fathers and to make family life important. Important as these initiatives
are, this looking to government for support for working mothers brings
a new dimension to feminist public policy debate about the state replacing
the husband i.e., 'the man in the state' . But in this scenario the state intervenes
not to replace the husband (by supporting single motherhood) but
rather to allow the husband the chance to pursue his working life without
female complaint, without the requirement that he curbs his working hours
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TOP YOUNG WOMEN AND THE N EW SEXUAL CONTRACT
so that he can play an equal role in the household. A kind of post-feminist
realism, or governmental pragmatism prevails. Ideally men will devote more
time to the family, but that must be a personal choice. Thus we might argue
that in this case women come forward as willing subjects of economic
capacity, while also undertaking to retain their traditionally marked out
roles in the household, rather than radically challenge the division oflabour
within the home, as feminists did with noticeable effect from the mid-
1 970s onwards. How successful the individual heterosexual woman might
be in achieving equality in relation to domestic labour and childcare then
becomes a private affair, or rather evidence that she has chosen well or fortuitously
from the range of possible partners. Her life-plan in this regard has
worked to her advantage.
The social compromise defined by Crompton is then a key element of the
new sexual contract, which is premised on the management of gender and
sexuality by a wide range of biopolitical strategies which pre-empt the possibilities
of renewed feminist challenges to patriarchal authority. Of course this
settlement could also be understood as part of the process of gender mainstreaming,
New Labour have now fully incorporated women's needs into
their wider political programme of modernisation} and feminist issues of the
past have been taken up and are now being seriously addressed at the level of
national government. However true this may be, it is also the case that what
is quite absent from these discussions are any elements drawn from the old
feminist 'demand', that men be prepared to relinquish some oftheir privileges
and advantages in work and in the home, in order to achieve equality in the
domestic sphere. A decade ago Nancy Fraser argued that men must again
become more accountable to gender inequities in the household, while what
I have attempted to demonstrate here are the forces whichprevail against this
kind of expectation re-emerging as a possibility (Fraser 1997). Fraser also
argued that the Universal Breadwinner Model increasingly takes precedence
over the Caregiver Model which was associatedwith the older welfare regime
which took into account womens's role as care-givers and the limits that role
put on possibilities for economic activity (Fraser 1997). This care role was
central to feminist debate from the mid-1970s onwards and still figures in
feminist discussion today (Lister 2002, Williams 2002). At the heart of these
debates was the tendency towards maternalist essentialism on the part of
those who defended the Caregiver Model. But what the social compromise
now suggests is that the Universal Breadwinner Model requires of women a
joint responsibility which also, more or less, guarantees subordinate status in
terms of wage earning capacity in the realm of work and employment over a
lifetime. At the same time the coming forward of women into work offers
government the best opportunity of cutting the long-term costs of welfare.
If we extend this model of assumed activity into the field ofthe new flexible
economy the question arises as to how women fare under these new
8 1
THE AfTERMATH Of fEMINISM
more competitive often casualised and precarious conditions? Armed with
good qualifications and having been encouraged to display enthusiasm and
willingness to pursue careers as a mark ofnew and independent sexual identities,
this female participation becomes an important feature ofthe success
of the new economy. Labour market participation over a lifetime reduces
the cost of welfare to women as traditionally low paid earners, and it will
ideally bring down the high rate of female poverty in old age. And in addition
this immersion in work also creates a thriving and re-energised consumer
culture directed towards women. It is for these reasons that we can
make a claim that young women are privileged subjects of economic capacity
and it is on this basis that we can also expect degrees of social mobility
to be more marked among women without children.
We have already discussed how gender re-stabilisation is achieved through
the social compromise on the part ofworking mothers, but do young women
without children also find themselves subjected to a new work regime where
their presence and their coming forward is also however the occasion fortheir
re-subordination? The most obvious indicator of enduring inequality in
employment is of course the pay gag the substantial discrepancy between
male and female wages, a feature ofthe labour marketwhich has indeed given
rise to close governmental attention in recent years. But the decline ofbureaucracy,
public services and trade unionism in the light of privatisation and
de-regulation, the growth ofenterprise culture and the so-called cutting ofred
tape all contribute to the diminishing role and significance of sex discrimination
policies in the workplace. As already discussed in Chapter 2, Scott
Lash remarks that women are 'reflexivity losers' in the context of the information
society (Lash in Beck et al. 1994). And Lisa Adkins has explored in
more detail they way in which re-traditionalised gender relations re-emerge in
the de-regulated workplace and with the return to small-scale family-run
enterprises which are integral to the production processes which underlie
global consumer culture (Adkins 2002). There are also various exclusions
generated by the informal networking practices which come to dominate the
freelance precarious economies in the cultural and creative sector. Wittel's
analysis of 'network sociality' overlooks the way in which these reproduce
social elites and create material barriers to those who lack the social and
cultural capital to participate (Wittel 2001, McRobbie 2002). Project work,
informal recruitment procedures, the opacity of structures and pathways into
new media and cultural work, as well as the long hours culture based on competition
and aggression (see for example Nixon's recent account of grossly
unequal gender relations and the unashamedly resurgent hegemonic masculine
cultures inside the UK advertising world) are all features which become
more widespread in an era of de-regulation and privatisation (Nixon 2003).
Thus there is a paradoxical situation that the young women who are so visibly
coming forward, and flowing into the labour market, are doing so just at
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the point in which the social democratic conditions which were recently
propitious to their arrival are being dismantled. The new sexual contract to
women requires that they compromise career aspirations to fulfil domestic
obligations which in effect means complying with existing gender hierarchies.
They must also acquire the individualised capacities to fulfil the demands of
the new flexible economy by emulating the pathways to achievement associated
with the competitive values of corporate culture rather than by attempting
to retrieve or uphold the more anonymous cultures of the workplace and
the less individualistic values of the public sector and bureaucracy.
Phallic girls : recreational sex, reproductive sex
The post-feminist masquerade, and also the figure of the working girl, are
two of the means by which the new sexual contract, as an urging to agency,
makes itself available to young women. Here I introduce a further figure, the
phallic girl,23 and then in the final section, the global girl. Butler envisages
the 'phallic lesbian' as a political figure who wrestles some power from the
almighty Symbolic. In an interview Butler is asked if heterosexual women
might also be able to pick up the phallus in this way and she responds that
this might be an important thing to do (Butler 1 994). But now, more
recently, and within the terrain of Western post-feminist culture, the
Symbolic reacts swiftly to the antagonism which not just feminism has presented,
but also which Butler's lesbian phallus and queer theory per se present
by pre-emptively endowing young women with the capacity to become
phallus-bearers as a kind of licensed mimicry of their male counterparts.
This also precludes any radical re-arrangement of gender hierarchies despite,
indeed because of this 'pretence' of equality, that permits spectacles of
aggression and unfeminine behaviour on the part of young women, seemingly
without punishment. The phallic girl gives the impression of having
won equality with men by becoming like her male counterparts. But in this
adoption of the phallus, there is no critique of masculine hegemony. I have
already rehearsed some aspects of this scenario, which, within the landscape
of UK popular culture, culminates in the figure of the so-called 'ladette'
(McRobbie 2005). This is a young woman for whom the freedoms associated
with masculine sexual pleasures are not just made available but encouraged
and also celebrated. She is being asked to concur with a definition of
sex as light-hearted pleasure, recreational activity, hedonism, sport, reward
and status. Luminosity falls upon the girl who adopts the habits of masculinity
including heavy drinking, swearing, smoking, getting into fights, having
casual sex, flashing her breasts in public, getting arrested by the police,
consumption ofpornography, enjoyment oflap-dancing clubs and so on, but
without relinquishing her own desirability to men, indeed for whom such
seeming masculinity enhances her desirability since she shows herself to
83
THE AFTERMATH OF FEMINISM
have a similar sexual appetite to her male counterparts. But this is a thin
tightrope to walk, it asks of girls that they perform masculinity, without
relinquishing the femininity which makes them so desirable to men. If the
post-feminist masquerade undercuts the power of young women coming
forward into the world of work and employment through the encouragement
to once again adopt the mask ofsubmission and servitude and to invest
time and effort in the crafting of a self which ensures desirability, youthful
female phallicism (and it cannot be old) is a more assertive alternative to
masquerade. It can also be understood as a kind of strategic endowment to
young women, a means of attributing to them degrees of capacity but with
strict conditions which ultimately ensure gender re-stabilisation. The taboobreaking
phallic girl also emerges as something of a challenge, not only to the
repudiated feminist, but also to what Butler again calls the spectre of the
'phallicised dyke' (Butler 1990). By being able to take up some ofthe accoutrements
of masculinity, the drunken, swearing and leering young woman
who is not averse to having sex with other girls, demonstrates that within the
presiding realm of Symbolic authority, many things are possible. A version of
lesbian desire can be accommodated within this space of female phallicism,
as long as it remains Visually coded to conform to the requirements of the
fashion and beauty system which, as has already been demonstrated, sits in
judgement, substitutes for hegemonic masculinity and presides over the
management of the capaci"tyj in this case sexual capacity, with which young
women are endowed. (In the novel Brass by Helen Walsh the main character
Millie adopts a 'licensed' lesbian phallicism which entails consuming
large quantities of drugs, alcohol and picking up prostitutes, Walsh 2004.)
This licensed transgression is also facilitated not just by the fashion and
beauty system but by the wider leisure industries which have responded vigorously
to the possibilities opened up by women's disposable income, daring
indeed, to define themselves as champions ofwomen's rights. Consumer
culture, the tabloid press, the girl's and women's magazine sector, the lads'
magazines and also downmarket, trashy television all encourage young
women, as though in the name of sexual equality, to overturn the old dou�
ble standard and emulate the assertive and hedonistic styles of sexuality
associated with young men, particularly in holiday locations, or in the context
of the UK city centre leisure culture which has developed around late
night drinking and the relaxation of the laws in regard to the consumption
of alcohol. This assumption of phallicism also provides new dimensions of
moral panic, titillation, and voyeuristic excitement as news spectacle and
entertainment. The phallic girl is epitomised in the so-called glamour
model, who earns most of her money posing naked for the soft-porn pages
of the press and magazines and who, if successful, will also launch herself as
a brand, lending her name and image to various products, usually ranges of
underwear, make up, perfume or other fashion items. But for her ordinary
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TOP GIRLS? YOUNG WOMEN AND THE N EW SEXUAL CONTRACT
counterpart, the girl on the street, assuming phallicism more often simply
means drinking to excess, getting into fights, throwing up in public places,
swearing and being abusive, wearing very short skirts, high heels, and skimpy
tops, having casual sex, often passing out on the street and having to be
taken home by friends or by the police. Under this pretence of equality
which is promoted by consumer culture, such female phallicism is in fact a
provocation to feminism, a triumphant gesture on the part of resurgent
patriarchy. There is also hostility to women underpinning this particular
form of freedom. In coming forward and showing herself to be, in common
parlance, 'up for it', the phallic girl also allows herselfto be the target of oldfashioned
sexist insults and hostility from the men she seeks both to please
and to emulate. The Symbolic uses the field of popular culture and entertainment
to accommodate some prior feminist demands in relation to the
right or entitlement to sexual pleasure, for example challenging the old sexual
double standard, so that women are no longer punished in quite the
same way for pursuing sexual desires, but this 'right' is then totally disconnected
from any notion of a renewed feminism, quite the opposite. The
champions of this new freedom, the phallic girls like TV presenter Denise
Van Outen, glamour model Jodie Marsh and even Spice Girl Geri Halliwell
are all vociferously disparaging of feminism.24
So as long as she does not procreate while enjoying casual and recreational
sex, the young woman is entitled to pursue sexual desire seemingly without
punishment. Indeed the appropriate uses of sexual pleasure are prescribed
within the many manuals and forms of instruction which constitute the
terms and conditions of this new sexual contract. Delay in age of marriage
and also delay in the birth of a first child on the part of young Western
women, are directly connected with their being able to come forward into
the labour market. It is this movement on the part of women, which has
accelerated in recent years, that gives rise to the focus on reproductive capacity.
Young motherhood, across the divisions of class and ethnicity now carries
a whole range ofvilified meanings associated with failed femininity and with
disregard for the well-being of the child. Poor white and black young women
alike are targeted by government because the high rate ofteenage pregnancy
(set against the falling birth rate among older and better educated young
women) is almost exclusively concentrated within this group. Middle-class
status requires the refusal of teenage motherhood and much effort is
invested in ensuring thatthis norm is adhered to. Ifthe young woman is now
envisaged as an assemblage ofproductivity, then she is also now more harshly
judged for inappropriate reproductive activity. The concept of planned parenthood
emerges in Western liberal democracies as an address to young
women so that they may postpone early maternity to accrue the economic
advantages of employment and occupational identity and thus contribute to
the solving ofthe crisis of welfare. Single mothers are seen as feckless or else
8 5
THE AfTERMATH Of fEMINISM
are charged with depriving a child of his or her 'human right' to a father. As
Harris and others have described, the subsidised availability of IVF treatment
and the investment in reproductive technologies implicitly address this postponement
of childbirth into the 30s and the encouragement ofthis as a mark
of respectability, social responsibility and citizenship (Harris 2004).
Despite, or rather because of the proliferations of different modes of kinship
in increasingly multi-cultural and sexually diverse cultures, the marital
couple re-emerges as the favoured form for family life. Here too there is a
case to be made for the re-stabilisation of gender norms against a perceived
threat of disruption from non-Western forms ofkinship, from feminism and
from the gay and lesbian movement. Interventions to ensure that help is
given to those who abide by the rules ofresponsible parenthood, means that
those young career women in the UK who have followed the advice of
New Labour, and have postponed childbirth until they have secured wage
earning capacity, become deserving subjects of investment in scientific
research.25 More so than in the past the reproductive years are intensely
monitored by government, from the debate about 1 2 year old girls being
given the pill, to lesbian couples hoping for genetic parenthood, to older
women in their 50s also having access to IVF treatment. And it is on condition
that she does not reproduce outside marriage or civil partnershig or
become the single mother of several children, that the young woman is now
granted a prominence as a pleasure-seeking subject in possession of a
healthy sexual appetite and identity. In the UK such is the importance to
government of discouraging teenage motherhood, that contraceptive and
morning after facilities are easily available to most teenage girls. The enjoyment
of sexual pleasures on the basis of practising effective birth control as
well as safe sex, is one of the most visible features of so-called female freedom
today. However this activity, when set within a wider social environment
where de-regulated dominant (consumer) culture intersects sharply
with already-existing patterns of class and racial inequalities, gives rise to
unanticipated consequences such as rising rates of sexually transmitted diseases,
alcohol abuse, as well as conflicts and anxiety on the part of young
women in regard to what they might now expect of sex and intimacy within
the heterosexual matrix. The seeming freedom of the phallic girl, her openness
to sexual adventure, is also, in fact, a means of re-constituting and
shoring up divisions between heterosexual and lesbian young women, in the
light ofthe perceived threatthat such boundaries might also come tumbling
down. The 'real lesbian' is reviled in much the same way as the repudiated
feminist. The rigorous requirements ofthe commercial domain addressed to
young women are radically uninhabitable by young lesbian women, and so
the phallic girl like her counterpart who inhabits the post-feminist masquerade,
functions on the part of dominant culture to re-instate boundaries,
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withthe effect that life outside the heterosexual matrix requires the production
ofdistinctly other queer spaces and temporalities, despite the illusion promoted
within the commercial domain that gay and lesbian identities are now also
mainstreamed (Halberstam 2005).
The g lobal girl
The account so far of recreational sex as practised by phallic girls, and then
of reproductive sex now the subject of even more intense government
attention than in the past, offers further illustration of how the terms and
conditions by which young women come forward, take the form of invitations
to specified modes of self-actualisation. Female phallicism is as restrictive
as the post-feminist masquerade in that its endorsing of licentiousness
and bad behaviour also ensures this plays out in a field of leisure activity
which assumes a white female subject. These figurings of young womanhood
are also boundary-marking practices within popular culture. It is one
thing for young white women to playfully disrupt the divisions which
underpinned the old double standard between the good girl and the whore,
but adopting the appearance and the street-style of whore, brings starkly
into visibility, the divisions which exist between white privileged femininity
and its black and still disadvantaged counterpart. For Afro-Caribbean
young women, whose sexuality is always regarded as suspect by the state,
being drunk and disorderly while also dressed like a prostitute is not a risk
worth taking. As various black feminists have argued, within a context dominated
by the prevalence of the racist imagination, notions of respectability
and constraint in the field of desire have been embedded within black
women's sexual identities, a response to the virulent racism which assumes
sexual availability, appetite or else which assumes that poverty makes prostitution
or addiction a likelihood (Noble 2000). It is not surprising then that
expressions of sexual autonomy and enjoyment on the part of young black
women tend to be channelled towards black music subcultures such as hip
hog or else are located more specifically within leisure forms associated
with the black community (e.g. Jamaican dance-hall culture).26 For young
Asian women we could surmise that white female phallicism functions as a
provocation to the assumed norms of submissiveness to patriarchal and religious
authority, typically attributed again within the racist imagination, to
those Asian girls who do not embrace Western styles of fashion and sexual
display. The phallic girl is a summation of the sexual freedoms which have
been granted to young Western women. Her activities appear to transgress
all the boundaries of feminine docility, even though as I have argued above,
her active pursuit of sexual pleasure, remains not just thoroughly subjected
to patriarchal authority and judgement, but is also completely compatible
87
THE AfTERMATH Of FEMINiSM
with the requirements of a re-adjusted and seemingly liberalised heterosexual
matrix. There are good reasons then why the spectacle of skimpily
dressed, drunken, shouting, black or Asian girls, baring their breasts on the
street at closing time in city centres to groups of passing boys, black and
white, and eventually getting picked up by the police and bundled offto the
police station to dry out, is an unlikely scenario.
These considerations suggest that both the figurations of the post-feminist
masquerade and the phallic girl mark out by subtle means processes of
exclusion and re-colonisation. There are patterns of racialised retrenchment
embedded within these re-configured spaces offemininity. The post-feminist
masquerade fulfils this notion of re-stabilisation by extolling the virtues
of dissembled feminine weakness, and fragility. But playing at tradition
in this way, adopting a style of femininity which invites once again a display
of masculine chivalry, gallantry, power and control, resurrects norms of
white heterosexuality from which black women and men have historically
been violently excluded. Since the first post-war waves of migration, black
women in the UK have always worked and earned a living, usually in menial
jobs. Black feminist history has over the years demonstrated that in the context
of labour exploitation of black women, from slavery to the modern
international division of labour, the feigning of feminine fragility has been a
mark of racial privilege. The post-feminist masquerade as a cultural strategy
for re-stabilising gender relations within the heterosexual matrix produces
a new interface between working life and sexuality which is implicitly white
and which assumes kinship norms associated with the Western nuclear
family. In line with the new ethos of assimilation and integration rather than
the now failed multi-culturalism of the 1980s and 1 990s, aspirant young
black women are invited, as readers of magazines like Grazia or viewers of
television programmes like Friends, or films like Bridget Jones's Diary, to
emulate this model.
The global girl comes forward, primarily in the advertising images from
fashion companies like Benetton, and also through the different editions of
global fashion magazines like BIle, Marie Claire, Vogue and Grazia, which are
customised from one country to the next, as emblematic of the power and
success of corporate multi-culturalism. This envisages young women,
especially those from Third World countries, as enthusiastic about membership
of and belonging to, a kind of global femininity. There is both difference
and homogeneity in this fashion and beauty system in a way which is very
similar to that analysed by Barlow et al. in the course of their study of the
Modern Girl of the 1 920s and 1930s (Barlow et al. 2005). The modernity
of the global girl today is expressed in her new found freedoms, her wage
earning capaci� her enjoyment of and immersion in beauty culture and in
popular culture, and in her pleasing and becoming demeanour which lacks the
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TOP GIRLS? YOUNG WOMEN AND THE N EW SEXUAL CONTRACT
ironic inhabiting offemininity ofher post-feminist masquerading counterparts,
and the aggression and sexual bravado of the phallic girls. Indeed global girls
are defined in terms of an intersection of qualities which combine the natural
and authentic, with a properly feminine love of self-adornment, and the
playfully seductive with the innocent, so as to suggest a sexuality which is
youthful, latent and waiting to be unleashed. This marks out a subtle positioning,
a re-colonisation and re-making ofracial hierarchy within the field of
normative femininity. But there is also a different spatial and temporal
momentuminvoked in the mobilisation ofthe global girl. Unlike herAmerican
or British counterpart there is less underpinning ofthis figuring of femininity
by the full range of governmental discourses, precisely because this young
women is increasingly mobile herself and thus often inhabiting a kind of
transnational status. The idea of a sexual contract as a convergence of attentions,
spanning a range of bodily activities, and permitting modes of coming
forward on condition that anyresidue ofsexual politics fades away, is aWestern
formulation addressed to those who are assumed to have full citizenship and
the right to remain in the country of abode. In this contract economic activity
is foregrounded and politics reduced to the margins of significance in
favour ofthe seeming attractions of consumer citizenship. However we might
surmise that for those who are excluded from this privileged model of freedom
based on the state provision of education, followed by participation in
training and in the labour market, there are other spaces of attention, and also
undesignated spaces and liminal zones marked out by brutalities, cruelties and
hardship. We might point here to the global flows of young women, who, as
they somehow find the means ofmoving from the country to the ci� or from
the east to the West or from south to north, as they also find themselves in
various border zones, are the subjects of a globalised political economy which
orders and re-orders these other femininities according to fears and anxieties
about 'immigrant' fertility. In such a context the consumer-led discourse of
the global girl functions as an ideal, these are girls who do not threaten the
West with migration and uncontrolled fertili� instead they stay put and
yearn for the fashion and beauty products associated withWestern femininity
and sexuality (Hoefinger 2005).
In conclusion, this chapter has provided an account of the means by
which young women in contemporary sociality, in a post-feminist gesture
which implies that feminism has been taken into account, and that equality
is in the process of being achieved, are called upon by a range of commercial
and governmental forms of attention, to come forward as subjects
of agency and capacity on the basis that there is also a relinquishing of
political identities accruing from perceived inequities of gender or sexuality
associated with those styles of feminism which have, as well as being
taken into account, also been repudiated and vilified. The chapter charts
89
THE AFTERMATH OF FEMINISM
the process of feminism being undone through high levels of intervention
and attention being directed towards the young woman, whose significance
in terms of wage earning capacity is now substantial. There is a new sexual
contract issued to young women which encourages activity concentrated in
education and employment so as to ensure participation in the production
of successful femininity, sexuality and eventually maternity. The commercial
domain requires that young women prioritise consumption for the
sake of sexual intelligibility and in the name ofheterosexual desire, and this
in turn intersects with and confirms the neo-liberal turn by contemporary
government (especially in the UK) with its emphasis, as we shall see in the
chapter that follows, on consumer-citizenship. The spaces of attention and
the luminosities I have described, supplant and substitute for the various
forms of political mobilisation which were associated with feminism as a
social movement, they also relegate politics to the margins of women's
lives, and political culture comes to be dominated by a technocratic style
of 'corporate managerialisrn' . As Chantal Mouffe has argued this marginalisation
of the sphere of formal politics puts the 'civic bond in jeopardy'
(Mouffe 2000) .
By focusing on the links between governmental and commercial discourses
it has been my aim to demonstrate in this chapter how sexual politics
is presented as irrelevant. This chapter also reflects on the young
women who as global girls are the subjects of different forms of attention
but whose wage-earning capacity within the international division oflabour
marks them out as emergent and becoming. I have argued that these 'movements
of young women' or 'coming-forwards', in the various figurations I
have described, which are also created through specific 'spaces of attention',
function as a kind of shadow feminism, a substitute and palliative for the
otherwise forced abandonment of a new feminist political imaginary.
Notes
I use the phrase sexual contract in the manner which Stuart Hall might use it,
i.e. to refer to a form of power which entails negotiation at the social and cultural
level with the objective of a settlement within the field of sexuality. In this
current context the term permits an analysis of a combination and intersection
of forces constitutive of an address to young women, a 'space of attention', the
regulative dynamics of which are subsumed within a language which implies
this attention as the outcome of a progressive concern for sexual equality.
2 The term is associated with Pateman's important book The Sexual Contract
(1 988). However I use the phrase in a quite different sense.
3 I use the term patriarchy with some hesitation. It has been used within feminism
as a universalising and homogenising strategy, a means of proposing that
women across the world share the same forms of subjugation. This has been
subjected to extensive critique and bearing this in mind it I propose it can be
90
TOP YOUNG WOMEN AND THE N EW SEXUA.l CONTRACT
re-employed particularistically by drawing on Mohanty's terminology and her
use of the word patriarchies.
4 The Rt. Hon. Tessa Jowell (Minister of Culture from 2000-2007) made comments
to this effect in the context of the Body Image Summit 21 June 2000,
see www.sizenet.com
5 For how the contemporary fashion-beauty complex intersects with lesbian sexuality,
see Lewis (1997).
6 The UK New Labour government adopted a model for assisting unemployed
single mothers into the workplace similar to the US Dress for Success initiative
which encouraged well-paid working women to donate cast-offs suitable for
office wear. The UK version comprises second-hand clothes shops and outlets
such as the Camden Job Train shop in London NW5.
7 See also The Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf (1991).
8 Butler makes the point in Gender Trouble (1990) that the Symbolic merges
with, to become indistinguishable from, dominant culture.
9 Recent reports in the press indicate anorexia extending beyond teens and twenties
into middle age, not unconnected, we might surmise, with the above discussions and
with the prevalence of advertisements like those discussed by Ros Gill (in conference
June 2006) showing an older woman in a bikini shotfrom behindwith the caption,
as though spoken by her daughter looking on at this unsightly body; that
although she loved her mother she didn't like her cellulite (See Gill 2006).
10 See McRobbie 2003.
1 1 Mary Ann Doane's essay shapes my own thinking here. Drawing on feminist
psychoanalytic writing which problematises femininity as 'claustrophobic
closeness', as 'presence to itself', as 'spatial proximity', as a place of either
masochistic or narcissistic over-identification, then, argues Doane, that dangerous
closeness which locks women into this rigid position, can somehow be
opened up and loosened through distance-producing strategies, such as the
masquerade. 'The masquerade, in flaunting femininity, holds it at a distance'
(Doane 1982: 135). Doane argues thatthe masquerade in effect skewers or re-aligns
femininity so that a gap or a distance is produced, this in turn re-positions the
woman away from simply occuping that subordinated, powerless, space of
male desire within dominant heterosexuality. This is achieved through the
'hyperbolisation of the accoutrements of femininity', (ibid: 1 39) which throw
the male gaze off course, which make it strange and unfamiliar, perhaps
unseemly. In short the masquerade is a distance-producing strategy, and my
claim here is that this subversive possibility has now been incorporated,
indeed promoted by consumer culture, as a sign of female independence and
empowerment.
1 2 This is a regular theme in Sex and the City, Carrie's date may not care for her
silly hat which she knows only fashion experts would appreciate. Thus the
wearing or not of the hat provokes much self-reflexivity. Should she or shouldn't
she? Carrie tends to cling onto these seemingly ridiculous items, as a mark
of her own independent identity. But we (the audience) know that in the end
these items work to the advantage of her femininity. They actually make her
more endearing to men. Their excessive quality shows her vulnerability, and
her child-like enjoyment of dressing up. If she gets it wrong and she looks a
little foolish, it is because she is still a girl, unsure of herself as she takes on the
mantle ofwomanliness. Indeed getting it wrong is a mark ofher girlishness, and
this failing makes her all the more desirable to men.
9 1
THE AfTERMATH OF fEMINISM
13 Fashion journalists in the serious press, especially in The Independent and The
Guardian frequently adopt a self-mocking tone when they are making recommendations
about what to wear and how to look. They imply that, along
with their readership drawn from the liberal to left middle classes, they share
some ironic distance from the more didactic, authoritative and judgemental
language of fashion writing. But this use of irony also has the effect of safeguarding
such journalists from critique.
14 Cherie Booth QC, the wife of former Prime Minister, Tony Blair, exemplified
this inhabiting of the post-feminist masquerade. At every available opportunity
she drew attention to her investment in the paraphernalia of femininity, as
though to deflect attention from her status and power as a barrister. In July
2003 she allowed a Marie Claire journalist into her bedroom, and even let her
have a qUick look inside her chest of drawers, which was predictably full of
frilly feminine lingerie.
1 5 Riviere in her masquerade work uncritically draws on the racist stereotype of
white women's fears (and fantasies) of being attacked by a 'negro'.
16 For detailed accounts of changes in educational qualifications see Arnot et al.
1999 and Allen 200S.
1 7 See Kim AlIens's PhD Thesis, Goldsmiths College 200S, also thanks to Kim
Allen for pointing me in the direction ofwww.dfes. gov.uklregateway/DB/SFRI
s00070S/SFR04 for information on activity rates of young school leavers.
I S This is a certainly a topic on which there are different views. While most sociologists
dispute the reality ofsocial mobility in the UK during the New Labour
years, i.e. from 1 997 onwards, the activity rates of young women in the labour
market and the staying on rates in further and higher education, taken alongside
the cultural emphasis on doing well and on becoming aspirational subjects
suggests that, what I here refer to as the new sexual contract, comprises an
encouragement to young women to themselves become socially mobile, or to
aim for some degree of upward mobility. This may take years to become visible
statistically, but if so many young women are now gaining university
degrees, then the argument that there is no social mobility seems questionable
(Devine et al. 2004, Walkerdine 2004 and Skeggs 2005). �1 9 Arnot et al. 1 999 refer to a study which showed the Asian young women interviewed
to be aiming for upward social mobility into professional occupations.
20 Making it also more difficult to insist that it remains important and relevant
to engage with the new as well as the old inequalities facing young women
today, for example significant under-achievement in science subjects, across
all member states of the European Community, see www.europa.eu/reseach/
science-society/womenlwir/pdf
21 Several essays by Charlotte Brunsdon (1 997, 2005) analyse, with prescience,
the emergence, in film and television of a post-feminist sensibility .
22 See the work undertaken by the Women and Work Commission 2006
(www.womenandequalityunit.gov.uklwomen_work_commission) which implicitly
blames women themselves for making the wrong choices of career which in
turn locks them into the low pay sector.
23 See Bennett and Woollacott (1 9S7) for an analysis ofthe phallicism of the Bond
Girls in the fiction and films based around Fleming's James Bond 007 character.
24 In a recent interview with the glamour model Jodie Marsh in the Guardian
following her humiliating experiences on Big Brother, where her 'tarty' appearance
and her reputation as a 'slapper' made her the butt of a series of hostile
9 2
TOP GIRLS? YOUNG WOMEN AND T H E N EW SEXUAL CONTRACT
and misogynist comments, she nevertheless directed her own anger against
'those feminist bitch women'.
25 The London Evening Standard ran a headline in May 2006 'Fertility Test For
Career Women' as though to imply that these women were the only deserving
subjects of this new test.
26 The exuberant sexuality of Kelis in the video for her single 'Milkshake', as well
as the more explicitly soft-porn videos for a range of hip hop acts, requires
more extensive sociological and cultural analysis than is available to date (see
Rose 1 994, Noble 2000).
9 3
,