Post-feminism and the complications in
educational achievement was the premise of Jessica Ringrose’s article
“Successful girls? Complicating post-feminist, neoliberal discourses of
educational achievement and gender equality.” The “failing boys” discourse she
describes in her article stems from a discourse that grew in popularity in the
mid 1990s. This discourse is based upon the idea of girls superiority in
educational achievements compared to boy’s achievements. As Betty Francis
argues “Girls’ success is continuously framed through an oppositional dynamic
of boys’ failure, and the enormous complexity of educational issues involved in
struggling for ‘equality’ greatly muddied.”
What is most interesting and equally
frustrating to me about this article is that there is this contradiction
between this proliferation of post-feminist stories and representations in
which girls are seen as successful (academically speaking that is) and the idea
that this success that is continuously framed around the academic failure of
boys. As Ringrose states, “…the debate on gender and achievement is framed
through a narrow binary conception of gender so that the unitary category of
‘girl ‘is simplistically pitted against the unitary category of boy.’” While
reading, I couldn’t help but think of how post-feminist this situation is.
There is this idea that gender equality is simply gone. The success of girls
however has initiated this gender crisis in which society must save boys from
the power and intelligence of girls. The academic success of boys or lack there
of is, in this argument, the fault of women. This fails to bring to light that
their academic performance might not be so much a gendered issue but could be
the result of other factors that lead to their lower rankings. Overall, what I
would like to see is this situation switched. Would there be a sudden “failing
girls” discourse if girls academically performed worse than boys?
Adriana,
ReplyDeleteYes! I think that's the question on all of our minds-- would there even be such a debacle if the situation was switched around and boys were the ones attaining more success than girls? Would there even be such societal ‘furor' or ‘moral panic’ if there was suddenly an emergence of 'failing girls'?
There is a certainly a double standard, an absence of gender equality-- even in society today. I, too, was extremely frustrated by how the readings this week showed how much of a gender crisis we are still in. As Ringrose mentions in her article, these panics over the encroaching 'feminization of education' exist as the “symptoms of the 'gender anxieties' in our contemporary period of gendered instability and flux" (476).
-Pamela Chan