SMARTGIRLS.TV: DISCOURSES OF ACHIEVING GIRLHOOD IN SCHOOLS, ON SCREEN AND ONLINE
This thesis explores the nature and circulation of achieving girl discourses within and across school and television contexts. It examines the alignment of such discourses with those of neoliberal self-management and post-feminist possibility, and investigates the persistence of some historical models of gendered intelligence and feminised achievement within contemporary accounts. The study draws on Foucault’s (1969) Archaeology of Knowledge to examine the nature and production of discourses in specific contexts. This enables an intertextual approach in which television narratives, participant accounts in school and online forum responses can be examined as instances of a wider discourse of achieving girlhood. The design thus recognizes contemporary conditions of media convergence and also enables a consideration of the importance of context in producing objects of knowledge. I argue that common tropes circulate between popular, policy and local contexts to create endorsed identities and structured life narratives for achieving girls. These identities and narratives are not equally available, but normalise middle class values and practices at the same time as promoting a model of the self-creating successful subject. I find that girls, with varying degrees of knowingness, draw on these tropes to frame stories of intelligible selfhood and to present themselves as deserving winners within educational meritocracies. I demonstrate that the ‘smart girl’ is not wholly constructed in the vanguard of success, but is restrained in some traditionally gendered ways by discourses which set limits on feminised ambition and endorse hyperfeminised performances and subordinated roles.
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