Minding the body,sexing the brain: Hormonal truth and the post-feminist hermeneutics of adolescence

Towards the post-feminist hermeneutics of adolescence

Over the last three decades, although feminist theory and critical psychology have consistently discussed the social construction of ‘girls’ and ‘adolescence’ (e.g. Gonick, 2003; Jackson and Cram, 2003; Lees, 1993; Lesko, 1996; Moore and Rosenthal, 1983; Pipher, 1994; Tolman, 2002; Walkerdine, 1990), the textual media’s scripting of young women’s sexualities has been given relatively sparse attention. Nevertheless, several feminist authors have addressed girls’ magazines’ advice pages as privileged sites of knowledge-power operations where the heteronormative regulation of subjectivities is paramount (e.g. Currie, 2001; Jackson, 2005a, 2005b; Kehily, 1999; McRobbie, 1991). Groundbreaking analyses have stressed the reflexive character of a confessional textuality based on the question-and-answer format (Currie, 2001), ultimately showing its singular ability for doing-undoing desire (Jackson, 2005a) and constructing sexual problems (Jackson, 2005b). Their poststructuralist approach escapes the anxieties concerning ‘media effects’ through which teenage media culture has been traditionally regarded in social psychological studies (see Mastronardi, 2003). More particularly, their framework complicates the ongoing debate on the ‘sexualization of girls’ and the ‘dangers’ of their ‘exposure’ to sexual imageries, as recently re-launched by the American Psychological Association (see APA, 2010). On the other hand, in acknowledging changing modes of youthful femininity within magazine discourses (McRobbie, 1994), feminist scholarship has attested ‘the constructedness and mutability of what are assumed to be natural and naturally occurring teenagers’ (Lesko, 1996: 141). Moreover, by figuring the exponential mainstreaming of a rather knowing and desiring female subjectivity, this scholarship has produced evidence of what Rosalind Gill (2003) would describe as a representational move from sexual objectification to sexual subjectification of women in contemporary media. The recognition of this phenomenology does not imply the negation of mainstream media’s objectifying strategies towards female consumers. On the contrary, it suggests their complexification through a disciplinary upgrading, in which the question of the object (the coercive commodification of selves) is overcome by ‘the question of the subject (the question of knowledge of the subject, the subject’s knowledge of himself [/herself])’ (Foucault, [2001] 2005: 3). This shift is particularly rendered intelligible within the expansive reach of a post-feminist discursive regime that promises women’s empowerment through a consumerist bodily care and a policing sexual knowing of oneself (Attwood, 2005; Gill, 2007, 2008). The epistemological implication of this perspective is of twofold significance here. On the one hand, it challenges a critique of sexualisation reduced to the problematic of girls’ (and women’s) constitution as submissive and powerless sexual objects. On the other hand, it sustains renewed criticality on a production of girlhood that, as Angela McRobbie has recently put, ‘now comprises a constant stream of incitements and enticements to engage in a range of specified practices which are understood to be both progressive but also consummately and reassuringly feminine’ (2009: 57).

As will be argued here, such production of girlhood is best understood within the spectrum of a neoliberal governmental reason and its post-feminist repackaging in contemporary capitalism. A small number of analysts working on post-feminist media culture have already used a similar framework to approach women’s magazines (e.g. Gill, 2009; Pinto, 2009), erotica literary fiction (e.g. Sonnet, 1999), film and television entertainment (e.g. Lotz, 2001; Moseley and Read, 2002), ‘make-over’ reality shows (e.g. Banet-Weiser and Portwood-Stacer, 2006; Hollows, 2003; McRobbie, 2009: 124–149), advertising (e.g. Gill, 2008; Lazar, 2009) and distributors of sexual paraphernalia ‘for women’ (e.g. Attwood, 2005). However, post-feminism has seldom been debated in critical analyses of girls’ magazines, and its internal double dialogue with neoliberalism and capitalism requires further study, particularly in that specific media context. Such a project certainly requires continued attention in feminist theory, not only because these magazines are industrial producers and reproducers of a post-feminist ‘global girl’ (McRobbie, 2009), but also – if not mostly – because they voice the shifting interpretational limits of what is socially constructed and dominantly accepted as female adolescence. In other words, by offering young women sexual guidance and access to the truth about their pleasurable and desiring selves, this unique media genre becomes a privileged regulatory arena where ‘the hermeneutics of the subject’ (Foucault, [2001] 2005) called ‘adolescent girl’ is permanently updated. Furthermore, taking into account ‘their considerable use as a resource in the construction of sexual identities’ (Jackson, 2005b: 296), girls’ magazines are a significant segment of the capitalist industrialisation of sexual difference that frames the general problematic of my study (see Pinto, 2009). More specifically, following Michel Foucault’s theorisations of the material-discursive constitution of subjectivity, I consider these magazines sexual ‘technologies of the self’ (Foucault, 1988). As much as pornography, they are here regarded as pleasure-producing devices drawing on consumers’ ‘will to knowledge’ (Foucault, [1976] 1998) – the pleasure of having the truth of sex revealed – through which the fixing of sexual identities, practices and desire is reasserted. In choosing a focus on knowledge–pleasure dynamics to approach these media sexual technologies, my perspective ultimately intends to situate them within today’s compulsory regime of heterosexual instruction. Adolescence, as argued by Christine Griffin, ‘is one of the key moments at which heterosexuality can be lodged in place, and young women (and men) can be “won” for patriarchal heterosexuality’ (2000: 234, emphasis in the original). It seems to me crucial to keep this standpoint in mind whenever figuring the global democratisation of girls’ sexuality, especially because, as McRobbie posits, the ‘abandonment of critique of patriarchy is a requirement of the new sexual contract, the terms of which are established in key institutional sites dedicated to the production of the category of young women’ (2009: 57).

On the conceptual level, the crossing of Griffin’s and McRobbie’s arguments with Foucauldian ‘hermeneutics’ (Foucault, [1984] 1990, [2001] 2005) and biopolitical theory (Foucault, [2004] 2010) leads me to theorise a post-feminist hermeneutics of adolescence. On the empirical level, my gaze will attend to an absent feature in feminist critique: the biological construction (or rather explanation) of young women’s sexual bodies and desiring selves by the mainstream media. In particular, the analysis will explore how brain and hormonal science enter the discursive apparatus of a Portuguese girls’ magazine, giving ideological ground to a distinctive production of adolescent body-subjects. In the next section I develop the conceptual repertoire for my main theoretical task here: the characterisation of the dominant programme of governmentality in which girls’ sexual subjecthood is today inscribed.

Post-feminism, girlhood, and the liberal art of government

Post-feminism is presented in this article as a construct of paramount usefulness to biopolitical theory, not only for putting in evidence a recently arisen ‘art of government’ (Foucault, [2004] 2010) primarily designed for the female subject, but mostly because of its instrumental significance in the contemporary industrialisation of sexual (and racial) difference. The theoretical debate on post-feminism, which has been especially developed within feminist media theory, has enabled understanding of the intersection of feminist and anti-feminist discourses currently found in mainstream models of women’s subjectification. In particular, recent scholarship stresses the neoliberal recycling of ‘second-wave’ feminist discourses on women’s agency and emancipation (mostly echoing from liberal feminism) into a narcissistic methodology of sexualisation and bodily consumption (see Gill and Scharff, 2011). Post-feminism thus suggests a phenomenology that transcends the theoretical outline of a ‘backlash’ against the feminist movement (Genz, 2006; Gill, 2007). To be sure, it stands on what may be better framed as a socio-political ‘double entanglement’ (McRobbie, 2009): a contradictory process of sexual democratisation that depends on the pervasiveness of heteronormative, self-policing mechanisms; a heavily mediated incitement to women’s empowerment that perniciously reifies feminist critique as needless commonsense in today’s democratic world. The intricate and paradoxical convergence of these conflicting elements, as well as the plurality of meanings it puts to work, leaves little chance for prompt and fixed definitions of post-feminism. Nevertheless, whilst reflecting on the difficulties of a definitive approach, a few feminist authors have invested in important synthesising attempts. For example, Michelle Lazar (2009), following Yvonne Tasker and Diane Negra (2007), sees post-feminism as a dominant discursive system that entails a consumerist ‘culture of post-critique’. For Gill (2007, 2009), on the other hand, post-feminism is best understood as a distinctive ‘sensibility’ closely linked to the neoliberalisation of personhood and social relations. In similarly figurative vein, McRobbie (2009) revisits the (Foucauldian-)Deleuzian notion of ‘luminosity’ to speak of a shimmering way-out for young women’s visibility, conveyed in seductive loci of individualist attention and self-transformation, across which the socio-political implications of feminism and anti-racism are simultaneously ‘undone’. While acknowledging that this ‘luminosity’ – as much as the titillation of a new ‘sensibility’ – ‘softens, dramatizes and disguises the regulative dynamics’ (McRobbie, 2009: 54), I also consider that both notions risk losing their focus on governmentality. More precisely, in trying to capture post-feminist micro-powers from the angle of what I would call their ‘psychological’ effectiveness, these terms are ultimately re-inscribed with the very performative mechanics they want to denounce. On the other hand, it seems to me insufficient to say that post-feminism is a system of uncritical (or post-critical) discourses. Consequently, while building on the above approaches, I offer a more descriptive and comprehensive definition, which may at the same time function as a reminder that this construct is first and foremost about power and discipline.

Post-feminism is here defined as a biopolitical ideal (Pinto, 2009). More precisely, it is presented as a model of governmental rationality ideally projected on to the whole life-spectrum of the female subject. Drawing on Foucault’s ([2004] 2010) analyses of liberalism and neoliberalism, this article links the post-feminist moral rationality, and the post-feminist hermeneutics of adolescence in particular, to a fundamental set of principles of the ‘liberal art of government’: panopticism, the compulsory production-consumption of freedom, the maximisation of danger, and the market as nature (or site of production of governmental truth).

In the first place, one must consider the entangled meanings of freedom in a liberal (and neoliberal) programme of governmentality. As Foucault has defined it,

this governmental practice in the process of establishing itself is not satisfied with respecting this or that freedom, with guaranteeing this or that freedom. More profoundly, it is a consumer of freedom .… It consumes freedom, which means that it must produce it. It must produce it, it must organize it. (Foucault, [2004] 2010: 63)

This is to say that the question of freedom in all forms of liberalism is not simply about the contradictory imperative ‘be free’; it mainly concerns ‘the management and organization of the conditions in which one can be free’ (Foucault, [2004] 2010: 63–64). Post-feminist media markets such as women’s and girls’ magazines are noticeably implicated in the management of a perpetual production-consumption of individual freedom: whilst telling the female subject ‘be free’ (‘be emancipated’, ‘be powerful’, ‘be actively knowing’, ‘be desiring and desired’, and so on), they do not just give the coordinates for girls and women to constantly pursue that ideal; they make freedom available in commodifiable forms ready to be consumed. The instructive character of mainstream media ‘for women’ rests upon an implicit contract in which female subjects are ‘free’ to dedicate the full extension of their existence to a gendered and prosthetic regime of bodily self-surveillance (Pinto, 2009). What post-feminist media markets promise to female subjects is in fact a direct reproduction of a simple liberal formulation: ‘I am going to produce what you need to be free. I am going to see to it that you are free to be free’ (Foucault, [2004] 2010: 63). In other words, subjects’ freedom is itself consumed – and therefore in need of being endlessly re-produced – throughout the post-feminist process of individual updating. This enterprising production-consumption of freedom appears then based on a constant ‘care of oneself’ (Foucault, [1984] 1990, [2001] 2005) – the panoply of practices of personal investment through which female subjects become sexually knowing. Thus, the precept ‘be free’ first of all demands an imperative ‘know yourself’ (Foucault, [2001] 2005), as post-feminist media clearly illustrates. That is also to say that the post-feminist key for knowing the bodily self consists of policing self-awareness, which corresponds to the same regulatory technicalities addressed in Foucault’s ([1975] 1995) analyses of the modern panopticon (the model of prison designed by Jeremy Bentham in 1785). As Foucault later clarified, Bentham proposed the panopticon as being ‘the very formula of liberal government. What basically must a government do? It must give way to everything due to natural mechanisms in both behavior and production’ (Foucault, [2004] 2010: 67). This warm kind of vigilance – no longer produced through the external apparatus of sovereign powers but from within the subject’s own drives, from within the subject’s natural mechanisms – seems to me the actual methodology of post-feminist management of freedom. In other words, I argue that post-feminist micro-powers (or procedures of governmentality) shape female subjects’ experience of freedom according to a panopticist formula of control.

Insofar as contemporary girlhood is a perpetual consumer of freedom, it also entails another precept closely linked to surveillance: that ‘individuals are constantly exposed to danger, or rather, they are conditioned to experience their situation, their life, their present, and their future as containing danger’ (Foucault, [2004] 2010: 66). In particular, the liberalisation of girls’ desire – more than that of any other biopolitical subject – tends to be approached through reference to ubiquitous danger. In mainstream discourses, young women’s knowing of their bodies and sexualities is dominantly incited through fear – fear of exclusion, of not finding a matching partner, of not being desired, of bad reputation, of not being sufficiently feminine, of being too sexual, of not knowing enough, and of all constraints from having to cope with the (hetero)sexual double standard (Jackson and Cram, 2003; Lees, 1993; Orenstein, 1994; Tolman, 2002). To a great extent, post-feminism requires the female subject to fear in order to nourish its own liberal engine, ‘continually having to arbitrate between the freedom and security of individuals by reference to this notion of danger’ (Foucault, [2004] 2010: 66). This argument is particularly helpful to approach the contradictory display of sexual advice found in girls’ magazines, in which positive discourses of sex (as pleasurable and healthy) compete with recurrent constructions of sex as dangerous, painful, and risky (Jackson, 2005b). The post-feminist hermeneutics of adolescence is therefore fed by the ‘stimulation of the fear of danger which is, as it were, the condition, the internal psychological and cultural correlative of liberalism. There is no liberalism without a culture of danger’ (Foucault, [2004] 2010: 66–67). Likewise, there is no post-feminist media culture, nor its programme of education for danger, without the reassertion of fear. In short, the post-feminist ‘be free’ is not so much saying ‘be careful’, even less a repressive ‘be afraid’, as it is reproducing the liberal motto ‘“live dangerously”’ (Foucault, [2004] 2010: 66). Keeping in mind the neoliberal ‘generalization of the “enterprise” form … [as] a model of social relations and of existence itself’ (Foucault, [2004] 2010: 242), I would rather speak today of an inciting promotion of female sexuality in which (hetero)sex is celebrated as a ‘risky enterprise’ (Jackson, 2005b: 300).

Also, since post-feminism engages the female subject in actively knowing the truth about her desiring self, we cannot say that female consumers are figured in this biopolitical ideal as passive recipients. Besides, as Foucault argues following Gary Becker (1976), ‘we should think of consumption as an enterprise activity by which the individual … will produce something that will be his [/her] own satisfaction’ (Foucault, [2004] 2010: 226). Furthermore, as much as any other practices of care of oneself, consumption is marked in post-feminism as an individualist act of choice irreducibly concerned with the subject’s own freedom. ‘This principle of an irreducible, non-transferable, atomistic individual choice which is unconditionally referred to the subject himself [/herself] is what is called interest’ (Foucault, [2004] 2010: 272). When considering a genealogy of post-feminism that suggests its revising of liberal feminist discourses of ‘choice’, one should acknowledge that these discourses are in fact intrinsically related to the neoliberal ‘subject of interest’ (Foucault, [2004] 2010: 273) – the subject as the reason and the source of an interest. By producing their own satisfaction, their pleasure in knowing, in having access to truth, post-feminist subjects become the actual manufacturers of their own governmentality. Their body, all their ‘natural mechanisms’, all their psychosomatic resources are mobilised by the post-feminist marketplace for the enterprising construction of sexual identity, for the endless reassurance of their sexual nature. Born in the liberal art of government, this biopolitical ideal reassures the market that it is a site of truth in its own right. More than any state institution or particular system of knowledge, it is now the market that instructs the specific governmental nature of female subjects, at the same time defining the threshold – and reassuring the naturalness – of the governmental practice itself. Rooted in the same foundational ethics of neoliberal thought, post-feminism hence meets the very principle of all political economy:

nature is not an original and reserved region on which the exercise of power should not impinge, on pain of being illegitimate. Nature is something that runs under, through, and in the exercise of governmentality. It is if you like its indispensable hypodermis. (Foucault, [2004] 2010: 15–16)

Drawing on Foucault’s metaphor, this article argues that girls’ ‘pubescent’ and ‘post-pubescent’ bodies constitute the indispensable hypodermis of the post-feminist hermeneutics of adolescence. Keeping in mind that post-feminism ‘can only make sense under the capitalist project of bodily sexualisation’ (Pinto, 2009: 8), I offer a deeper excavation of post-feminist tectonics (Curt, 1994), ultimately figuring this model of moral rationality, first and foremost, as bodily. Informed by a genealogical understanding of its emergence within the Portuguese process of democratisation, my perspective also suggests that post-feminism, while dependent on the embrace of neoliberal freedoms, has only been possible under the contemporary regime of capitalist semiotics and prosthetics (Pinto, 2009). In arguing that neoliberal and capitalist agendas are both implicated in this phenomenology as conditions of possibility, this article proposes that post-feminism must not be merely perceived and analysed in the abstract form of ideology, but rather as materially linked to the emergence and democratisation of new methodologies of production – the industrialised production of female bodily selves. After all, not only has the body become the central fabric of the global biopolitical apparatus, the resexualisation of women’s bodies (Gill, 2003) has also been key in post-feminist governmentality. This article’s empirical task is to explore how that resexualisation is translated by the mainstream media into the biology of young women’s bodies, into their chemistries and physiologies. And, ultimately, how post-feminism makes a difference.

Materials, method and approach

This article is the result of a study of the sexological contents of Ragazza – a best-selling Spanish-based girls’ magazine also published in Portuguese. Set within a poststructuralist discursive framework, the research covers three years of monthly editions (from January 2006 to January 2009) and focuses on all textual technologies where girls’ sexual bodies and desire are addressed. A corpus with over 150 ‘expert’ and advice features was gathered and methodologically explored by means of Foucauldian discourse analysis (Arribas-Ayllon and Walkerdine, 2008; Parker, 2002). All the translated discursive objects presented here maintain as much as possible the literal phrasing of the original text. Particular attention was given to the construction of subjects in the texts and to the arrays of positioning made available to them. Simultaneously, the analytical process led me to identify a network of prevailing discourses on dominant ‘sexual organs’ and bodily figurations – operating in texts as technologies of power/truth – through which girls’ sexual subjecthood is produced and problematised.

On a larger scale of analysis, my aim is twofold. On the one hand, I intend to reflect on how post-feminist media voices the contemporary scientia sexualis thus producing a specific hermeneutics of girls’ sexual bodies and desire. Insofar as it is argued that the truth of sex is what any sexual market aims to industrialise, the article interrogates the knowledge through which the body is constituted as matter of that truth by Ragazza. Yet, the analysis furthered here is not invested in testing the techno-scientific validity of what this magazine sells as biological truths. Rather, it proposes a genealogical reading of their conditions of possibility, which will be supported by critical scholarship focused on the history of biomedical sciences. On the other hand, I locate the post-feminist hermeneutics of adolescence in terms of the capitalist biopolitical agenda, in which femininity and masculinity have become best-selling products of the most profitable regime of truth of our time: sexual difference. My approach is extensively informed by Beatriz Preciado’s (2008) theory of pharmaco-pornographic capitalism and its imperious regulation of the sexual multitude. As Preciado argues, the production of sexual and gendered subjectivities appears absolutely dependent on a permanent dialogue between the hegemonic lexicons of pornography and the pharmacological management of bodies and selves. Accordingly, the gigantic industrial axis formed by pornographic and pharmaceutical corporations is today the chief informant of all mainstream politics of sexual subjecthood – as the state of the art of post-feminist media vigorously attests (see Pinto, 2009). Therefore, in theorising the post-feminist hermeneutics of adolescence, this article takes into account what Preciado calls the capitalist ‘sexpolitics’ (sexopolítica): the dominant action of contemporary capitalism, through which sexual subjects become pharmaco-pornographically normalised.

While the capitalist management of girls’ bodies constitutes the biopolitical core of this article’s debate, I aim to stress its normalisation in the neoliberal form of enterprise, through which the knowing of the bodily self becomes the central reason for personal investment. This approach to sexual learning as bodily entrepreneurship dialogues with another Foucauldian-based perspective developed around the idea of ‘body projects’ (e.g. Bordo, 1993; Brumberg, 1998; Gill et al., 2005). Set within the problematic of governmentality, both address issues related to power and bodily self-surveillance. On the whole, these two viewpoints share a similar preoccupation with the embodiment of sexual difference and gender aesthetics, understood not only as a cultural imperative, but also as a compelling investment. However, they look at this question from different Foucauldian angles, according to distinct levels of concern. The ‘project’, I would argue, while drawing on the prosthetics of bodily regulation, points to the subject’s merging with a disciplinary machinery in which the body – a ‘docile body’ – is turned into an object of vigilant correction by the subject herself/himself (Foucault, [1975] 1995). My use of ‘enterprise’, on the other hand, while addressing the construction of sexual identities as an endless process of self-reassurance, mostly figures the body as a subject in constant need of being revealed to selves, of being exposed through a permanent investment in knowing the truth about the desiring self (Foucault, [1984] 1990, [1976] 1998). In short, this article’s analysis is less interested in teenage media’s scripting of ‘body projects’ (of prosthetic forms of investment) than in the discursive assertion of young women as body-subjects – subjects who are first and foremost entitled to re-produce (and consume) their bodily truth. Accordingly, I reflect on the post-feminist assumption of the ‘girl’ as a subject supposed to know the truth about her desiring self, who at the same time is a subject supposed to believe in the naturalness of sexual difference.

Analysis: How post-feminism makes a difference

Conclusion

Whilst rethinking the notion of post-feminism and its governmental ethics, this article explored the contemporary construction of ‘girls’ in a key post-feminist site: mainstream media targeted at young women. Drawing on the convergence between this biopolitical ideal and the neoliberal art of government, the article presented a corpus of governmental principles through which girls’ (and women’s) sexual subjectification is today best understood. The networking of its power dynamics (here left open for further exploration) sustains what this article introduced as the post-feminist hermeneutics of adolescence: the neoliberal translation of ‘teenage’ into a self-enterprising contract in which girls, given as heterosexual ‘by default’, are expected to seek sexual information about their pleasurable and reproducible bodies, thus revealing the regulatory ‘mysteries’ of a mature (hetero)sexual life. As our analysis illustrates, this is the hermeneutics through which Ragazza’s ‘girl’ is reasoned: an inevitably desiring body-subject who is required to fear the negative consequences of her own ‘sexual nature’; who must always reassure her femininity and sexual subjecthood through a panopticist knowing of her bodily self; who is entitled to endlessly re-produce and consume her own sexual freedom. Also, the analysis worked to show how this hermeneutics is heavily informed by the pornographic and pharmacological imperatives of contemporary capitalism. On the one hand, young women are idealised in the magazine within the assumption of an orgasmic bodily truth and the mainstream micro-territorialising of the female pleasure-producing body. On the other hand, their subjectivities are now codified by hormonal fictions – which amount to suggesting the complication of femininity – and ultimately reduced to pharmaceutical constructs and narcotic discourses. The truth of sexual difference becomes irreducibly molecular.

Rather than reflecting on subjects’ possibilities of resistance within post-feminist agendas and when reading particular mainstream texts, this article’s task was to show how bodily subjectivity is constituted in a specific hermeneutics of adolescence, as well as the ways in which girls’ bodies are given as the central reason for selves in a post-feminist media product. Nevertheless, empirical investigation seems to me urgent in order to understand how young women actually consume these particular kinds of texts, how they make use of these media sexual technologies, and how they may negotiate mainstream techno-science and post-feminist translations of agency. While calling attention to the lack of such research in the context of contemporary sexualisation and more particularly of post-feminism, this article aims to underscore the importance of those studies for a more in-depth comprehension of young women’s incorporation of technology and scientific ‘truths’ in today’s capitalist democratic world.

Finally, in introducing girls’ magazines as sexual technologies of the self, the article reflects the relevance of this distinctively post-feminist media form in the prevailing industrialisation of sexual difference. In short, Ragazza ends up being a dramatic example of the way in which, as Leonore Tiefer posits,

the message that sex differences ‘are biological’ keeps getting repackaged in whatever biology is popular at the moment – brain anatomy, evolutionary theory, hormones, brain chemistry or gene effects .… Mass media salivate every time a new technology uncovers some measurable physical difference and use each techno-news to trot out familiar generalization, exaggerations, unreplicated findings, selective measurements – the whole 2000 years worth, it sometimes seems. (2004: 437)

While equating girls’ bodily development as the tangible real of sexual subjecthood, post-feminist markets must recreate the meanings of biological difference at all times in order to make it suitable for cultural demand. For post-feminism therefore, nature is not (only) matter of fact; it is matter of production, the limits of which are regulated by the market itself. In this sense, it is not enough for critical theory to question the ethics of the post-feminist interpretation of girlhood; one must also interrogate the moulds of subjectivity it makes available for re-production and their ability to reinvent sexual difference. This is certainly a matter for further investigation.