The sexualization of the female body in contemporary media has created considerable anxiety about its impact on girls. Much of the resulting research focuses on the influence of visual media on body image and the flow-on effects for girls' health. Rather less attention is paid to the pedagogical role of popular romance fiction in teaching girls about their sexuality. Given the pronounced increase in eroticized fiction for girls over the past decade, this is a significant oversight. This article applies Hakim's (2010) concept of erotic capital to two chick lit novels for girls. The elements of erotic capital—assets additional to economic, cultural and social capital—are used to explore the lessons these novels teach about girl sexual subjectivities and sociality in a sexualized culture.
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Emily Bent
ongoing challenges related to expanding girls’ political capital and influencing global policymakers while we are all laboring under neoliberal narratives of exceptional girl power. Girl activism networks today must balance promoting “girls’ agency as
Amrita De
heading “Global Patterns,” Connell is foreshadowing what Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval (2013) refer to as the era of neoliberal governance—when nation-state boundaries have become increasingly more porous with transnational flows of capital directly
Robert Morrell
in Durban in a period of post-election euphoria, the grim shadow of a violent past still lay darkly across the country and reached into research agendas. In 1995, Human Rights Watch had declared South Africa to be the rape capital of the world ( Human
The Inheritance of Activism
Does Social Capital Shape Women's Lives?
Supriya Baily, Gloria Wang, and Elisabeth Scotto-Lavino
curious as to how those experiences might have stayed with them, what impact they might have had on their adult lives, and what connection those experiences might have had with their social capital the further they were removed from their girlhood activism
Conditional Freedom
A Portrait of Young Men's Sense of Belonging to the Street in Maputo, Mozambique
Andrea Moreira
, the capital of Mozambique, which explored how these young men strategically performed their masculinities in attempting to subvert dominant discourses of what it means to be a man in urban Maputo. Through the method of participant observation, I
I’m Not Loud, I’m Outspoken
Narratives of Four Jamaican Girls’ Identity and Academic Success
Rowena Linton and Lorna McLean
their schooling experience—suffering injustices at school, substituting social capital, and constructing resistive identity—that capture the strategies used by them to excel in school. The first two themes recollect the girls’ descriptions of their
Personal, Powerful, Political
Activist Networks by, for, and with Girls and Young Women
Catherine Vanner and Anuradha Dugal
Girls’ Political Capital at the United Nations.” She illustrates how the same systems that celebrate girls’ activism can be used to diminish the perspectives of girl activists and calls on adult feminists to push back against concern for optics in order
A Social Negotiation of Hope
Male West African Youth, ‘Waithood’ and the Pursuit of Social Becoming through Football
Christian Ungruhe and James Esson
influential way of thinking through the perceived sense of powerlessness afflicting those who have outgrown childhood but remain unable to accumulate social and economic capital and reach the sphere of social adulthood. While we agree that socioeconomic
Michael R. M. Ward
on extensive fieldwork, in our final regular article Andrea Moreiras explores how a group of young men construct their sense of belonging to a public space, namely, a market in the capital city of Mozambique, Maputo. The article shows how these young