(School) girl power : the construction and contradiction of the cultural figure of the schoolgirl across contemporary popular culture

Girls are significant consumers of media and popular culture. As the girl power movement gained popularity alongside the rise of postfeminism in the late 1990s, representations of girls were held to demonstrate model citizenship. With schoolgirls being representative of almost all women and girls, the figure amassed popularity and is a repeated subject of media texts. However, despite representing adolescent girls, the “schoolgirl trope” has inflicted sexual meaning onto the overarching figure. Through a textual analysis, this thesis analyses the overarching construction of the schoolgirl, investigating six examples of how the schoolgirl figure is represented across a variety of media formats, genres and audience demographics. One text is from 1954, in comparison with its 2007 reboot. The remaining texts span 1998-2009. Both of these periods are significant for girls’ emergence as audiences with high consumer power and demand. The findings show that the media schoolgirl is always imbued with some form of sexualisation, and despite their represented agency and autonomy, it is within the confines of patriarchy and heteronormativity. The schoolgirl is subjected as a site of governance for representing girlhood as governed by patriarchal commodification and postfeminist empowerment, which offer contradicting objectives of the texts and their constructed audiences. The schoolgirl trope works to accommodate and veil the immorality of the sexualisation of schoolgirls for a male gaze, which needs problematising for its accommodation of a normalisation of the potential paedophilic gaze. Ultimately, this thesis contributes to the discourse of the sexualised adolescent schoolgirl, a topic which is in urgent need of reform.

Grantor dc:publisher

Oxford Brookes University

Author dc:creator

• Gough, Anna Rose

Contributors dc:contributor

• Yelin, Hannah
• Paule, Michele

Statement dc:rights

• All rights reserved

Language dc:language

en

DOI dc:identifier

https://doi.org/10.24384/mcmn-5f65

OAI identifier oai:identifier

tle:bfd56efd-d993-44e1-940f-2c384d165051:d6bd9758-527a-46cd-bfe2-c433766e8fca:1