Scraton [(1992). "Shaping up to womanhood: Gender and girls' physical education." Buckingham: Open University Press)] asserts in her conclusion to 'Shaping up to Womanhood' that feminist analysis of PE (and sport and leisure more broadly) needs to engage more directly with masculinity as a means to understanding the 'dynamics of gender'.…

Visual and cultural identities are situated in habitus, social theory on the body and clothing. Framed by narrative inquiry, girl method, and feminist research, I investigated the mean girl experiences of Grace and Hayley, who witnessed hostility alongside an exaggerated policed feminine sartorial aesthetic. White, middle and upper class, managers…

This paper aims to explore young Chinese girls' aspirations and ideal environments for engagement in Health and Physical Education (HPE) and physical activity (PA) in Greater Western Sydney. Interviews are used to elicit these girls' perceptions of their future and ideal environments in relation to HPEPA. Their data offer insights into key…

In this paper, we explore how physically disabled youth who participate in mainstream education discursively construct and position themselves in relation to dominant discourses about sport and physicality that mark their bodies as "abnormal" and "deviant". We employ a feminist poststructuralist perspective to analyze the…

This paper revisits the missing discourse of female desire [Fine, M. 1988. Sexuality, schooling and adolescent females: The missing discourse of desire. "Harvard Educational Review" 58, no. 1: 29-53] in secondary schools. Instead of echoing previous studies that have documented how female desire is missing, this research starts from the…

This paper explores the public political media spectacle of Bristol Palin's teenage pregnancy and her status as a single mother through the lens of a critical feminist discourse analysis. The author explores how cultural anxieties over teenage sexuality and unintended pregnancy in America are constructed when the pregnant teen is the daughter…

This viewpoint begins by exploring whether the global phenomenon of the 2011 "SlutWalks" constitutes a feminist politics of re-signification. We then look at some qualitative, focus group data with teen girls who participated in a UK SlutWalk. We suggest girls are not only negotiating a schizoid double pull towards performing knowing…

One of the most dreaded insults in sports is, "You throw like a girl," because it epitomizes society's gender logic about physiological differences between men and women. Although physiological differences between the sexes exist, people label these abilities and behaviors as masculine or feminine as a result of social and cultural expectations.…

In this article the authors provide a general overview of the controversies associated with urban street fiction, a brief introduction to the genre and an introduction to the complex representations of Black adolescent femininity within two contemporary titles, "Black and Ugly" (Styles, 2006) and "Bitch" (King, 2006). The authors provide a…

This essay examines the representation of adolescent girlhood, sexual violence and agency in Francesca Lia Block's contemporary fairy tale collection "The Rose and The Beast." Focusing specifically on the tale "Wolf," the author provides a literary analysis of how Block draws on and reworks traditional Western fairy tale variants to reintroduce…

For over a decade, battles have raged between conservative Abstinence Only Until Marriage (AOUM) sexuality education advocates and liberal Comprehensive Sexuality Education (CSE) advocates. While these battles have focused on the inclusion of health information about contraception and whether or not a curriculum must advocate abstinence as the…

One's practice as a school nurse affords numerous privileges. One that stands out in my mind is the privilege of bearing witness to the lives of countless girls as they navigated their own aspirations and the expectations of the culture. The stories they iterated to me in my school nurse office form the basis for this discussion regarding the…

Drawing primarily on three case studies, this article proposes a framework that those concerned about the welfare of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and questioning (LGBTQ) youth can consider when developing, evaluating, or arguing for more effective programming: a relational assets approach. The relational assets approach merges the…

Questionnaire results indicated the majority of daughters who have a good relationship with their mothers see themselves and their mothers as feminist. However, they do not attribute their positive relationship explicitly to feminism. For daughters who claim to have a poor relationship with their mothers, they do attribute the problems to…

Young citizens growing up in different societies experience multiple socialization processes that help to shape their values and attitudes toward the political life of their societies. In this cross-national study, researchers asked students directly about their views of what "good" citizens do, how they saw themselves participating in…