The relationship between mainstream femininity and resistance to it has been theorized in a number of ways. In one approach, mainstream femininity is identified as a patriarchal set of public texts that women accept, negotiate, or resist in practice. Another view sees mainstream femininity as a dominant cultural practice to which there are resistant subcultural responses. Taking a poststructuralist view, this article offers an alternative to these models. The focus of the article is the differing ways in which a set of interviewees validated their participation in a type of relationship that is socially constructed as a departure from mainstream femininity, namely, a voluntary sexual relationship between an adult man and an adolescent girl.
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.
References
1.
Baker, Caroline D.1983. The age of consent controversy: Age and gender as social practice.Australia and New Zealand Journal of Sociology19: 96-112.
2.
Baker, Caroline D.1984. The `search for adultness': Membership work in adolescent-adult talk.Human Studies7: 301-23.
3.
Carrington, Kerry.
1986. Girls' toilet graffiti. Paper presented at the annual conference of the Sociological Association of Australia and New Zealand, University of New England, Australia.
4.
Christian-Smith, Linda.1987. Gender, popular culture, and curriculum: Adolescent novels as gender text.Curriculum Inquiry17 (4): 365-406.
5.
Connell R. W.
1987. Gender and power: Society, the person and sexual politics.Sydney: Allen & Unwin.
6.
Davies, Bronwyn.
1989. Frogs and snails and feminist tales: Preschool children and gender.Sydney: Allen & Unwin.
7.
Davies, Bronwyn
, and Rom Harre.1990. Positioning: Conversation and the production of selves.Journal for the Theory of Social Behavior20: 43-63.
8.
Foucault, Michel.
1977. Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
9.
Foucault, Michel.
1980. The history of sexuality—Volume 1: An introduction. Translated by R. Hurley. New York: Vintage.
10.
Fraser, Morris.
1981. The child. In Perspectives on paedophilia, edited by Brian Taylor. London: Batsford Academic.
11.
Gilbert, Pam.1988. Stoning the romance: Girls as resistant readers and writers.Curriculum Perspectives8 (October): 13-18.
12.
Gilbert, Pam
, and Sandra Taylor. 1991. Fashioning the feminine: Girls, popular culture and schooling.North Sydney: Allen & Unwin.
13.
Gilligan, Carol.
1982. In a different voice: Psychological theory and women's development.Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
14.
Greer, Germaine.
1972. The female eunuch.London: Granada.
15.
Griffin, Christine.
1982. Cultures of feminity: Romance revisited.Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, Sp. No. 69.
16.
Hudson, Barbara.
1984. Femininity and adolescence. In Gender and generation, edited by Angela McRobbie and Mica Nava. London: Macmillan.
17.
Lees, Sue.
1986. Losing out: Sexuality and adolescent girls.London: Hutchinson.
18.
Modleski, Tania.
1984. Loving with a vengeance: Mass-produced fantasies for women.New York: Methuen.
19.
Nilan, Pam.1991. Exclusion, inclusion and moral ordering in two girls' friendship groups.Gender and Education3: 163-82.
20.
Nilan, Pam.1992. Six girls in a tree.Social Semiotics2/1: 44-60.
21.
Radway, J. A.
1987. Reading the romance: Women, patriarchy and popular literature.London: Verso.
22.
Rossman, Parker.
1985. Sexual experience between men and boys.Hounslow, Middlesex: Maurice Temple Smith.
23.
Sandfort, Theo.
1982. The sexual aspect of paedophile relationships: The experience of twenty-five boys.Amsterdam: Pan/Spartacus.
24.
Scott, Joan W.1988. Deconstructing equality-versus-difference: Or, the uses of poststructuralist theory for feminism.Feminist Studies14/1: 33-50.
25.
Silverman, David.
1985. Qualitative method and sociology: Describing the social world.Aldershot, U.K.: Gower.
Smith, Dorothy E.
1988. Femininity as discourse. In Becoming feminine: The politics of popular culture, edited by L. G. Roman and L. K. Christian-Smith. London: Falmer.
28.
Weedon, Chris.
1988. Feminist practice and poststructuralist theory.Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
29.
Willis, Ellen.
1984. Feminism, moralism and pornography. In Desire: The politics of sexuality, edited by Ann Snitow, Christine Stansell, and Sharon Thompson. London: Virago.
30.
Wilson, Paul.
1981. The man they called a monster: Sexual experiences between men and boys.North Ryde, Australia: Cassell.
