Gender and Education ISSN: 0954-0253 (Print) 1360-0516 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cgee20 Bodies, hoodies, schools, and success: post-human performativity and smart girlhood Shauna Pomerantz & Rebecca Raby To cite this article: Shauna Pomerantz & Rebecca Raby (2018): Bodies, hoodies, schools, and success: post-human performativity and smart girlhood, Gender and Education, DOI: 10.1080/09540253.2018.1533923 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/09540253.2018.1533923 Published online: 18 Oct 2018. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 19 View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=cgee20 GENDER AND EDUCATION https://doi.org/10.1080/09540253.2018.1533923 Bodies, hoodies, schools, and success: post-human performativity and smart girlhood Shauna Pomerantz and Rebecca Raby Department of Child and Youth Studies, Brock University, St. Catharines, Canada ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY This article adds to the literature on smart girlhood by exploring the topic through Karen Barad’s theory of post-human performativity. We focus on the transcripts of two participants from a larger study on girls and academic success in Canada in order to highlight the material, discursive, embodied, and temporal entanglements that co-produce the possibilities for girls’ academic subjectivities. Using a diffractive methodology, we highlight the mutually arising agencies of bodies, hoodies, schools, grades, and media constructions of multi-talented ‘supergirls.’ This analysis highlights the importance of an intersectional approach to academic success alongside an understanding that inequalities, such as sexism, still endure for smart girls. We conclude by emphasizing the power of materiality in girls’ everyday lives to shift understandings of self, school, and smartness, as well as the importance of moving beyond dichotomous and decontextualized accounts of girls’ high achievement that have circulated for over twenty years. Received 3 March 2017 Accepted 28 August 2018 KEYWORDS Girls; academic success; posthuman performativity; intraactivity; Karen Barad Introduction For over twenty years, smart girlhood has remained an important topic of study for feminists in the field of gender and education. Seeking to challenge the biological essentialism that often structures media and popular psychological accounts of boys and girls in school, feminists working in this area have sought to tease out the gendered assumptions in the ‘feminization of schooling’ argument, the reductionism inherent in arguments that focus on girls’ and boys’ brains, and the lack of intersectionality in arguments that focus on gender as a stand-alone category (for an overview, see Pomerantz and Raby 2017). To combat accounts that pit ‘effortlessly’ successful girls against ‘predictably’ failing boys, feminist researchers have written numerous counter narratives that forge new pathways into the lives of high achieving girls by adding social, cultural, historical, economic, discursive, and material contexts. This wide body of research continues to deepen discussions of smart girlhood as a complex and intersected social category with multiple dimensions that move away from dualistic and biological representations. Much of the research on smart girlhood, including our own, has taken a feminist poststructural approach to the topics of agency and subjectivity (see Butler 1990, 1993). For CONTACT Shauna Pomerantz spomerantz@brocku.ca Department of Child and Youth Studies, Brock University, 1812 Sir Isaac Brock Way, St. Catharines, ON L2S 3A1, Canada © 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group 2 S. POMERANTZ AND R. RABY example, a feminist post-structural lens helped us contextualize smart girlhood vis-à-vis the ’interconnection[s] between power, knowledge, subjectivity, and language’ (Alaimo and Hekman 2008, 1) and to engage with agency as a discursively produced construct, rather than part of a pre-discursive, innate sense of self. We focused on how girls negotiated academic success in relation to the discourses of gender, ‘race’, and class, as well as popularity, sexism, and contemporary post-feminist narratives that deny the existence of gender inequality while simultaneously perpetuating it (Pomerantz and Raby 2011, 2017; Pomerantz, Raby, and Stefanik 2013; Raby and Pomerantz 2015). In this article, however, we draw on post-human performativity, and the work of feminist philosopher and physicist, Karen Barad, to add to the ever-growing and theoretically rich conversation on smart girlhood. This framework opens different questions about girls’ academic success that move beyond discursive performativity, which emphasizes epistemological questions in order ‘to avoid a metaphysics of presence or substance’ (Jagger 2015, 323). Instead, post-human performativity asks ontological questions that theorize matter as an active participant in the production of distributive agencies and co-created subjectivities. Taylor (2013, 690) suggests that a post-human lens creates deep contextualization that pushes beyond discursive/epistemological inquiries to reconsider how subjectivities are ‘transformed and continually re-made through the concerted co-constitutive acts of objects–bodies–spaces.’ In what follows, we pursue this perspective in relation to girls’ academic subjectivities and the co-constitutive agencies out of which possibilities for smart girls might arise. Drawing on multiple identity contexts as they entwine with material objects, bodies, locations, and temporal shifts helps us to highlight not just the impossibility of gender as an independent unit of analysis that defines whether and how a girl will be smart, but also the deep complexities of smart girlhood that have been left to the wayside in headlines and popular books about girls’ academic success and boys’ concomitant failure. As part of this constantly shifting constellation of meaning, we first situate our analysis within the literature on smart girlhood to highlight the varied trajectories and critiques that gender and education researchers have brought to the topic. We then describe our post-human framework, and, specifically, Barad’s (2007) understanding of post-human performativity as a form of non-intentional affective force that occurs due to colliding agencies among human and non-human phenomena. Our use of the term ‘affective force’ follows other feminist theorists who have brought the Deleuzo-Guattarian notion of affect into conversation with Barad’s post-human performativity (see Davies 2014; Hultman and Lenz Taguchi 2010; Ringrose and Renold 2014). Referring to a collective and shared intensity within spheres of relations, in his introduction to A Thousand Plateaus, Massumi (1987, xvi) notes that affect is ‘an ability to affect and be affected,’ but not through conscious and individualized human intension. Instead – and drawing on the affective turn in the social sciences since 2000 – we use the term affective force to refer to a much wider and flatter understanding of interactions, bodily expressions, and experiences to contextualize smart girlhood as a shifting and fluctuating social category that affects and is affected by myriad possibilities within material, embodied, discursive, spatial, and temporal relations. Following this discussion of the world’s ‘ongoing intra-activity’ (Barad 2003, 803), we describe Barad’s (2007) notion of diffraction as methodology, where forms of interference create shifts in meaning and understanding. We then offer a post-human analysis of GENDER AND EDUCATION 3 interviews with Ginger and Veronica, fifteen-year-old sisters and self-defined smart girls, to illustrate the complex connectivity that gives rise to smart girl subjectivities and to further contribute to the unsettling of smart girlhood as a known, uncomplicated, and discrete entity. Smart girlhood in the literature Two decades ago, popular and scholarly attention in the West turned to girls’ ‘newfound’ academic success and boys’ associated failure. Coverage emphasized girls’ achievement in terms of high school grades and extracurricular achievements (e.g. Conlin 2003; Kindlon 2006), university entrances and graduation rates (e.g. Lewin 2006), and increasing enrolments in certain typically male-dominated fields, such as medicine and law (e.g. DiPrete and Buchmann 2013). This ‘successful girls’ narrative (Ringrose 2007) was considered evidence that educational initiatives for girls were no longer needed (Pomerantz, Raby, and Stefanik 2013; Ringrose 2007). Instead, concern for the comparatively lower academic success of boys became widespread in media, popular psychological, and educational accounts of gender and schooling (e.g. Conlin 2003; Rosin 2012; Sax 2009; see Francis and Skelton 2005 and Ringrose 2007), with some critics suggesting that girls’ success was at the expense of boys, and that girls were leaving boys behind (e.g. Sommers 2013; see Epstein et al. 1998). In response, school policies and resources shifted dramatically to support boys (Ringrose 2007). Stories of ‘successful girls’ and ‘failing boys’ are often framed by a post-feminist narrative, which draws on liberal feminist language of choice, self-empowerment, and ‘girl power’ within an assumed context of equality (Baker 2010; Gill 2007; McRobbie 2009; Ringrose 2007). Feminist research into smart girlhoods has countered this post-feminist myth (McRobbie 2009), however, critiquing the successful girls and failing boys narratives for neglecting ongoing gender inequalities experienced by girls and for homogenizing girls’ (and boys’) lives (Harris 2004; Pomerantz, Raby, and Stefanik 2013; Ringrose 2013). Ironically, gender inequality continues to thrive in the context of its denial, including within schools. Girls are less likely to be in the lucrative and prestigious areas of science and technology, for instance (Francis and Skelton 2005; Huhman 2012). Girls also continue to face ongoing sexual harassment and objectification (see Francis, Read, and Skelton 2012; Renold and Allan 2006; Ringrose 2013; Walkerdine, Lucey, and Melody 2001). Broader gender inequalities continue later in girls’ lives, including unequal pay for equivalent work, the persistent glass ceiling, and women’s ‘double day’ of both paid work and the bulk of the housework and childcare (Baker 2010; Francis and Skelton 2005; Hayes 2003; Noonan 2013). Rather than viewing girls’ high grades as evidence of gender equality, we can instead see girls’ academic focus reflecting increased competition and compulsory perfectionism among girls who strive to be individually successful to surmount these anticipated gender inequalities (Francis and Skelton 2005; Pomerantz and Raby 2017). These pressures undoubtedly take a toll on girls in terms of stress and anxiety (Pomerantz and Raby 2017; Skelton, Francis, and Read 2010; Walkerdine, Lucey, and Melody 2001). Research on gender and education also continues to highlight intersectional inequalities beyond gender that are deeply relevant to young people’s academic success. Ringrose (2007) argues that it is, in part, the liberal feminist focus on a girl/boy binary, alongside the measurement of gendered achievement through standardized testing 4 S. POMERANTZ AND R. RABY that has fostered the current climate of pitting boys against girls in education debates. She points out that this approach ‘decontextualizes gender from all class, cultural, racial and economic dimensions through which gender manifests as an axis of experience and identity’ (480). Interventions to support boys ignore girls who are economically or racially marginalized (Ringrose 2007). Hayes (2003) similarly suggests that advantage and disadvantage in school is significantly complicated by class and Indigeneity, while Gerodetti and McNaught-Davis (2017), Harris (2004), and Walkerdine, Lucey, and Melody (2001) all emphasize that the successful girl narrative is really a middle-class story that fails to consider the relevance of socio-economic status. Many feminist post-structural studies examine how diverse girls navigate academic success within this post-feminist context. Often, girls negotiate tension between their academic lives and popular femininity – a challenge that shifts based on school context and girls’ diverse identities (Pomerantz and Raby 2017; Renold and Allan 2006; Skelton, Francis, and Read 2010). Girls at both the primary and high school levels find that they must prioritize either smartness or popular femininity (Raby and Pomerantz 2015; Renold and Allan 2006), although some (super) girls manage this tension by carefully embracing academics through a successful embodiment of popular femininity (Francis, Read, and Skelton 2010; Skelton, Francis, and Read 2010), including heterosexual dating (Cobbett 2014). However, such balance between academic success and popularity is precarious, tends to be concentrated around conventional attractiveness (Francis, Read, and Skelton 2010) and classbased privilege (Pomerantz and Raby 2017), and remains elusive to most girls (Renold and Allan 2006). More recently, gender and education scholars have drawn on post-humanism to contextualize gender and success in school. Taylor (2013, 688) engages with Barad’s theory of intra-activity to explore ‘how material cultures of everyday classroom life are both active and constitutive in processes that recreate gender inequalities.’ Taylor focuses on specific objects, such as a teacher’s chair, a flipchart, and words on a student’s t-shirt to illustrate how mundane forces intra-act to produce a gendered school space. Lenz Taguchi and Palmer (2013, 684) have similarly drawn on Barad, exploring Swedish girls’ ill- and well-being, including over-achievement and stress, ‘as enactments of (material-discursive) intra-activities’ that shift across contexts and are collectively produced. Our engagement with post-human performativity in this article seeks to add to this strand in the literature by focusing on how subjectivities are intra-actively produced through everyday material contexts that enact affective force in the lives of smart girls in seemingly subtle, yet ultimately profound, ways. A post-human framework for exploring smart girlhoods While post-human theory manifests in numerous forms (see Braidotti 2016), in this article, we focus on Karen Barad’s (2003, 2007) theory of post-human performativity, which opens new ways of thinking about subjectivity and agency that avoid ontologically privileging any phenomenon over another. Instead, Barad (2003, 2007) calls for a relational ontology, where all human and non-human phenomena are understood to be co-constituted through ‘intra’ actions or relations within, rather than ‘inter’ actions or relations of exteriority. Barad’s relational ontology draws from physicist Niels Bohr’s quantum insights into the ‘inseparability of “observed object” and “agencies of observation”’ (Barad 2003, GENDER AND EDUCATION 5 814), which she applies to the realm of everyday life. Based on Bohr’s theory of wave-particle duality, where photons become either waves or particles depending on how they are measured, Barad (2003, 810) similarly challenges us to see how ‘matter makes itself felt’ as a relational intra-action in how meanings are produced. In Barad’s post-human framework, the perceived boundaries around human and non-human, space and time, subject and object, discourse and materiality, are viewed as temporary distinctions held in place only by a set of circumstances that causes them to be seen as discrete entities. Barad (2007, 140) calls these conditions ‘agential cuts’ that create ‘boundary-drawing practices.’ Such practices produce the perception of a world filled with distinct humans and objects, rather than a relationally dependent world enlivened and continually reshaped by intraacting connectivity Barad’s (2003, 2007) post-human framework thus challenges the presumed permanence of borders, disciplines, hierarchies, dualisms, and separateness, especially the idea that discursive practices and the material world are separate, inter-acting entities. Discourses are not just constraining bodies of knowledge that relate to the human subject, but are in ‘specific material (re)configurings of the world through which local determinations of boundaries, properties, and meanings are differentially enacted’ (828). From Barad’s (2003, 2007) post-human perspective, performativity is the ongoing intra-activity between material, discursive, historical, spatial, and temporal forces; and agency, rather than a uniquely human characteristic, is the dynamic and unintentional process that emerges from these deep entanglements. The analytical openings created by this framework offer spaces of encounter for smart girlhood, where deep contingencies can be explored as intra-acting agencies that create constellations of meaning held in place by circumstances that are in dynamic flux. Inspiring renewed discussions of agency and subjectivity in feminist theory, girlhood studies, educational studies, and affect theory (see Alaimo and Hekman 2008; Allen 2016; Coole and Frost 2010; Davies 2014; Ivinson and Renold 2013; Juelskjaer 2013; Lenz Taguchi 2012; Lenz Taguchi and Palmer 2013; Renold and Ivinson 2014; Ringrose and Rawlings 2015; Taylor 2013), Barad offers a powerful conceptual framework for the contextualization of smart girlhood. As post-human performativity calls for ‘a novel understanding of and a renewed emphasis on materiality’ (Coole and Frost 2010, 5), this framework enables us to engage with the mundane artifacts in and of smart girls’ lives that hold affective force to coconstitute smart girls’ subjectivities. Such an engagement emphasizes the self as but one intra-acting element in a constellation of distributed agencies. Smart girlhood can thus be understood as a relational component within colliding affective forces rather than a self-contained entity rooted in essentialism or locked in a binary pairing based on gender alone. As a result, new and complex understandings of girls’ lives emerge that offer insight into the wide sphere of influence and entanglements that continuously shape girls’ subjectivities in school. Before turning to a post-human exploration of smart girlhood, we next explain our methodological framework of diffraction in order to discuss how data intra-act with other entangled agencies through waves of interruption, interference, and intervention. As Barad (2007, 185) notes, we ‘don’t obtain knowledge by standing outside the world; we know it because we are of the world.’ This move from a relation of exteriority to one of interiority offers a diffractive shift in methodological thinking, including regarding the nature of research design and data analysis. 6 S. POMERANTZ AND R. RABY Diffraction as methodology Within the realm of physics, diffraction is defined as the act of interference on water, sound, or electromagnetic waves by a barrier or aperture, which then generates a distinctly different pattern. For example, when a water wave encounters a breakwater, it flows through or around, creating overlapping or concentric circles that shift the course of a wave’s pattern from its previous trajectory. In Barad’s post-human conception, this understanding of diffraction is applied across human and non-human phenomena, where meanings are produced through interference as they become constantly entangled in various apparatuses that bend, turn, and divert their trajectories (see also, Van der Tuin 2014). As Davies (2014, 735) explains, [i]deas and concepts are not innocent or neutral, but actively engage in the diffractive entanglement of any research. Like particles of light, ripples on a pond, or crisscrossing waves on the ocean, they affect each other – they interfere with each other. Barad (2007) extends Haraway’s (1992) use of diffraction as a metaphor for rethinking relationality. Haraway (as sited in Barad 2003, 803, n3) writes that diffraction ‘is a mapping of interference, not of replication, reflection, or reproduction. A diffraction pattern does not map where differences appear, but rather maps where the effects of differences appear.’ For example, we cannot point to a place in an interview transcript and say, this is where something significant has happened. This fixing of meaning would suggest stasis among intra-acting elements that are in constant flux. Instead, Barad (2007, 30) notes that a diffractive analysis ‘involves reading insights through one another in ways that help illuminate differences as they emerge: how different differences get made, what gets excluded, and how these exclusions matter.’ While we cannot point to something in a transcript as an ontologically separate component, we can intra-actively highlight entanglements to show how ideas interfere with and complicate each other, thus generating a method that allows differences to become noticeable – not as fixed findings, but as waves of interrupted meaning. These are the spaces where patterns change and become something else (Van der Tuin 2014). Barad (2014, 176) explains that these differences are not ‘a blending of separate parts or a blurring of boundaries,’ as this interpretation would suggest ontologically distinct events and experiences. Instead, what becomes important in a diffractive analysis are the materially felt consequences of entangled patterns and how such consequences ripple across circumstances to enact transformation or variation. The researchers, research design, and data analysis are entangled in this ‘research assemblage’ (Fox and Alldred 2015, 399, see also Allen 2016) that intra-actively participates in post-human performativity. We do not view our data – two 90-minute interviews with 15-year-old sisters and self-defined smart girls, Ginger and Veronica – as autonomous and self-contained units of truth. Rather, we see them as emerging, co-constituting events, wherein data are understood as existing inside of, and not in a relation of exteriority to, the research assemblage (Lenz Taguchi 2012). As Allen (2016) argues, from a posthuman perspective, data are not inert words on the pages of a transcript awaiting the researcher’s definitive analysis – such a reading forecloses on the intra-acting possibilities of the research assemblage to elicit new possibilities and map the effects of diffractive patterns of difference. As such – and in keeping with post-qualitative inquiry (St. Pierre and Jackson 2014) – we did not code the two transcripts as if we were ontologically separate GENDER AND EDUCATION 7 from the words on the page, but sought to engage in a diffractive reading where the data spoke to and with us. MacLure (2013) calls this post-human approach ‘the wonder of data,’ which focuses on data’s affective intensity to call out and draw attention to itself. As MacLure (2013, 228) explains, data exist in a wondrous state between ‘knowing and unknowing,’ and it is this liminality ‘that prevents wonder from being wholly contained or recuperated as knowledge and thus affords an opening into the new.’ A diffractive analysis is focused on what newness might emerge in such an experimental space (see Allen 2016; Davies 2014; MacLure 2013; Ringrose and Renold 2014). Veronica and Ginger responded to a recruitment flyer for a larger study, which read, ‘Are you a smart girl who does very well in school, or could if you tried?’ While they each saw themselves as differently connected to academic success, the term ‘smart girl’ resonated for both. Shauna interviewed the sisters two times in their home, and these interviews then became part of a larger data set on smart girlhood that was analyzed through the lens of feminist post-structuralism in various publications. But at a later point, we decided to look again at these two transcripts through the lens of post-human performativity because it offered us fresh and powerful conceptual tools with which to discuss the complex emergence and dynamic fluctuation of smart girl subjectivities. We specifically engaged with Veronica and Ginger’s interviews because they spoke loudly to us and initiated curiosity, questions, and interferences in the process of data analysis. As a result, we enact an agential cut by specifically paying attention to this ‘disconcerting data’ (Ringrose and Renold 2014, 778). Our own intra-activity also drew us to these transcripts: we struggled with Veronica and Ginger’s stories because they were particularly complicated, dynamic, and shifting; this complexity provided us with analytical challenges that has us engaging with each other, our own academic subjectivities, and the materiality of the transcripts. The transcripts were diffractive in this way – bringing about waves of difference that challenged our thinking and shifted our understanding of smart girlhood. Following Fox and Alldred’s (2015) description of post-human research design and data analysis, which calls for paying attention to the affective flows within a research assemblage rather than individual subjects, in what follows, we intra-actively co-produce an examination of two entwined montages from Ginger and Veronica’s two interviews to illustrate the complexities of smart girl subjectivities. We do so by ‘highlighting relationality’ (Allen 2016, 8) between human and non-human phenomena, as well as attending to diffractive configurations in the girls’ stories that map the effects of differences in how they understood themselves to be smart girls. These diffractive shifts are sometimes obvious (good or bad grades) and sometimes subtle (a brief comment, a focus on athletics, a change in schools, an article of clothing). By focusing on the everyday, mundane things in Ginger and Veronica’s intraacting narratives, we see how matter acts in potent yet sometimes hard-to-detect ways because we are not used to looking for or at matter as an active force. But a diffractive approach to the data shines a light on how materiality persistently acts, helping to produce shifts in meaning at every turn and through all facets of smart girls’ lives. Montage one: grades-bodies-schools-supergirls Sitting in their wood-paneled basement on a wet autumn night, Ginger and Veronica, both in grade ten, talked to Shauna about what it was like to be smart girls. ‘I have extraordinarily high marks – this semester probably a 90 average coming up.’ Veronica was 8 S. POMERANTZ AND R. RABY brimming with confidence. She spoke boldly and with purpose – her body poised on the edge of the couch, rising with each answer. Conversely, Ginger sunk deeply into the couch when she talked, hiding her face in her dark blue school hoodie embossed with bright gold lettering: Riverview. Living in a mixed socio-economic neighborhood in Greenville, a small, blue-collar, low-income Canadian city with high unemployment, the girls came from a middle-class family where education was a priority, as was a deep commitment to extra-curricular activities. Most days, the girls were busy from 5am, when their alarms went off for rowing practice, until late into the afternoon for school play rehearsals. Their lives were heavily scheduled and they seemed to like it that way. Ginger and Veronica understood themselves as academically successful long before they positioned themselves as smart in response to our call for participants. As Veronica proclaimed: I considered myself smart probably in grade one. That’s when I thought I would turn smart because I got a bunch of Bs and As. [But] It wasn’t until grade three that I was actually smart. That’s when I was a straight-A student and I kind of thought, ‘Oh, my average is higher than everyone else’s!’ And Ginger, while less confident than Veronica, also saw herself as smart: ‘I actually got better [at school] and now I’m a straight-A student. Yay! […] I made friends with people who were all, like, open and also smart, and I realized I wasn’t that dumb.’ Marks delivered in pen at the top of assignments, such as photocopied tests and projects completed on florescent bristle boards, had affective force to produce Veronica and Ginger’s smart subjectivities. They did not understand themselves as smart until the grades named them as smart. Written As, Bs, and Cs diffract students’ understandings of themselves and each other – an improvement in grades and suddenly a girl can be seen completely differently, through waves of shifting patterns that inflect movement in her sense of self, and with others at school, among friends, and within family. High grades had a significant material power in the lives of Ginger and Veronica, creating pride and a sense of accomplishment, but also carrying the potential for negative consequences. Ginger experienced taunting and physical aggression in elementary school for being a ‘teacher’s pet’ who put up her hand too much, got high grades, and was not sufficiently social to offset these detrimental activities (see Skelton, Francis, and Read 2010). And while Veronica was more social than her sister, she felt uncomfortably branded as a smart kid who had to answer everyone’s questions. In grade five, when tests were handed back, ‘it was kind of weird, because everyone would always ask me and if I got it wrong, it was like, “Oh. My. Gosh. You don’t have the answer?!”’ Then it started to get worse. In grade six, everyone would always ask me what’s the answer for this or the answer for that. I was, like, ‘Back off! I love you guys but I’m not your dictionary.’ It was, like, Veronica is the ‘smart one’ and not the ‘athletic one.’ Veronica articulated a familiar dichotomy between being smart and athletic, a dynamic that is often more pronounced among boys (see Frosh, Phoenix, and Pattman 2001; Swain 2006). In our larger study, athletics allowed boys to retain high marks while ensuring that they were social (Pomerantz and Raby 2017). There was a strong association between sports and sociality for girls too, but adherence to hegemonic femininity (see Schippers GENDER AND EDUCATION 9 2007) was almost always necessary to maintain high social status, a point we return to later. Feeling trapped by the material force of her grades, in grade six Veronica intra-actively co-constituted a new subjectivity by simultaneously letting her marks drop to below 60 percent and becoming extremely athletic. The new grades visible on her tests signaled a shift to her peers that she was no longer the smart girl who could answer all their questions. She began working out, bulking up, and developing star basketball skills. Already broad-shouldered and large boned, shifts in muscle and stance led people to interpret Veronica in a new way: athletic, masculine, strong, and intimidating. This physical prowess also enabled Veronica to defend herself and her sister from what they described as constant bullying: ‘I didn’t take anything from anybody,’ Veronica explained. The first time somebody tried to start a fight with me, I didn’t want to, and he punched me, and I went home with a bleeding nose. […] The second day he tried to fight me, I sent him home [all bruised up] […], and no one ever messed with me [or my sister] since. While Veronica co-constituted her body anew through exercise, eating, and aggressive posturing, her body also constructed a diffractive barrier between academic and athletic subjectivities, producing a shift in how others saw her and how she saw herself: her body now fashioned her as athletic rather than smart. From the perspective of post-human performativity, we do not make decisions as distinct and unique individuals: ‘intention is something distributed that emerges from a complex network of human and nonhuman agents, including historically specific sets of material conditions’ (Lenz Taguchi and Palmer 2013, 23). While Veronica felt that she made a conscious choice to shift how she was perceived, her strategies were entangled in a constellation of colliding agencies, exemplifying how subjectivities intra-actively materialize (Jackson and Mazzei 2012). In their study of high achieving girls’ bodies, Lenz Taguchi and Palmer (2013, 671) suggest that media constructs of academically successful girls’ anxieties in Sweden became ‘part of a larger and extended apparatus of producing school girls’ (multiple) realities and their enactments of ill- or well-being in those realities.’ Rather than seeing stress as embedded in the individual, Lenz Taguchi and Palmer show how the co-constituting agencies of girls’ high achievement offer a wider apparatus through which to view and contextualize individualizing moral panics about girls. They highlight girls’ bodies as more than a ‘primary ontological unit … with inherent boundaries and fixed properties’ (673), and instead focus on ‘the ontological inseparability/entanglement of intra-acting “agencies”’ (Barad 2007, 139) of girls, bodies, schools, discourses, and the materialization of language in media coverage of girls. Similarly, Veronica’s body was not a separate unit marked by boundaries between it and the rest of the world – it was inseparable from other distributed forces, such as grades, basketball, peer culture, schools, popular girlhood, and widespread media accounts of girls who excel at everything (including grades) that were in high circulation at the time of our interviews (see, for e.g. Funk 2009; Kindlon 2006; Lakshmi 2007; Rimer 2007). Part of a so-called post-feminist generation in the West (Kindlon 2006), girls today are commonly perceived to effortlessly achieve in school, sports, extra-curricular activities, and friendships. This idealized supergirl profile includes a thin, fit, and feminine body that conforms to popular conceptions of ‘hotness’ (see Rimer 2007). It is this body that epitomizes supergirl success because it is part of what enables girls to engage in academic and 10 S. POMERANTZ AND R. RABY athletic achievement while also remaining popular and desirable because they do not seem ‘too’ smart or ‘too’ strong. The supergirl body thus holds affective force to intraactively produce particular kinds of smart girl subjectivities that enable a girl to be academically successful without being seen as a ‘loner’ or ‘teacher’s pet,’ and athletically successful without being seen as a ‘dyke’ or a ‘tomboy’ (see Adams, Schmitke, and Frankiln 2005; Skelton, Francis, and Read 2010). This embodied, material context through which the discourse of the supergirl manifests is diffractive in its ability to interfere with Ginger and Veronica’s academic subjectivities. While they might never have heard the term ‘supergirl’ before, its force surrounded them, particularly at their academically focused high school, where popular girls who could ‘do it all’ abounded in relation to expectations of ‘normal’ smart girlhood. As the following story of the Bear shows, Veronica’s growing uncertainty about her muscular embodiment exemplifies the affective force of a supergirl form of hegemonic femininity. Veronica’s athletic skills and physical prowess became legendary in her elementary school, winning her a nickname that stuck: The Bear. In grade seven, almost a year after she started dumbing down, a male teacher called her a ‘Bear’ in front of the class. Pretending to be her teacher, Veronica imitated the remark: ‘Not everyone is shaped the same way. Take Veronica, for example, she’s a Bear! She could pound half of you guys!’ Veronica was initially flattered as this nickname provided her with a kind of prestige that high grades never had. Even in her interviews, the power of Veronica’s body was impossible to miss. Her frame was tall, straight, and strong, particularly in relation to Ginger’s slenderness. It was difficult not to notice the juxtaposition in the way Veronica’s body took up space in a room, occasionally eclipsing Ginger by flinging out an arm or standing up to make an emphatic point. But Veronica explained that when her elementary teacher called her a bear, she was also embarrassed: ‘It was supposed to be a compliment, but come on! I didn’t say anything [about it], but it was my nickname for a long time.’ Though her teacher seemed to frame Veronica’s physical strength as an advantage, other comments he had made about girls being weaker than boys put a negative and confusing spin on the nickname. Was Veronica being praised for her muscular build or ridiculed for her lack of femininity? While on the one hand, a masculine, athletic embodiment countered the stigmatized role of ‘smart girl’; on the other hand, her teacher tapped into a concern Veronica was starting to have about not being feminine enough. Her ambivalent desire to be both feminine and masculine was entangled with her and her sister’s longing for power and strength as Veronica embodied it. Both girls were deeply invested in Veronica’s strength, but this investment was diffracted by other intra-acting agencies, such as entering an academically focused high school and Veronica’s realization that in her new school, she could maybe be smart, athletic, and popular at the same time. Riverview High had a reputation for academic excellence and now being smart could bring social success. After entering Riverview, Veronica explained that she ‘started getting back into the whole ‘smart’ stuff. I noticed there were other smart people and I was able to compare with them and it made it a lot easier.’ Veronica and Ginger felt free to engage their academic identities again, and to do so without fear of ridicule. At Riverview, Veronica learned that she could be both smart and athletic – that these two seemingly incompatible subjectivities in elementary school were, in fact, compatible in this new ‘material-discursive school environment’ (Lenz Taguchi and Palmer 2013, 672). The GENDER AND EDUCATION 11 material markers of academic success in the hallways – awards for academic contests and posters for academic clubs – suggested that being smart was valued. And the similarly prominent material markers of athletic success in the hallways and gymnasium – team pennants, trophies, and the constant rumble of practice on the field after school – equally suggested that being athletic was valued. Even the school clothing served as a reminder that academics and athletics were entangled; the thick navy-blue cotton with its gold embossed lettering performed sporty athletic gear and high (class) achievement simultaneously. It was in this new school environment that Veronica understood herself to be a girl who could embody what media commentators call supergirl success. She confidently rose up to achieve accolades in academics, athletics, and other extra-curricular activities. But her embodiment remained muscular, thus precluding her fulfillment of hegemonic femininity. She still took up the Bear moniker as a badge of pride: I’m the Bear because I’m the fastest runner on my rowing team and my basketball team. I can shoot from behind the half line. I am a bit stronger than an average girl. It’s in my character and I have grown to like it. I own that name! But she also expressed concern about her body: ‘You know, if I could lose ten pounds I’d be completely happy. I weigh 130 pounds, but you know that’s fine because I’m muscle.’ Ginger, constantly supportive of her sister’s physical strength, responded: ‘Like you said, you can knock out as many guys as you want!’ Reflecting on Ginger’s compliment for a moment, Veronica continued, ‘At the same time it’d be kind of cool to be, like, “Yeah, I weigh 120.”’ Ironically, while Veronica had achieved some measure of supergirl status, she was still up against the sexism of the supergirl construct, which requires Western girls to perform the full ‘package’ – an oppressive, stressful conformity to hegemonic femininity on top of, and in tension with, everything else. With the girls’ continued – almost preoccupied – focus on Veronica’s body, its material power comes into view. Veronica’s body performed a shift from academic to athletic subjectivities, offered protection from bullying, embodied pride and embarrassment, and shifted back to include an academic subjectivity infused with near-supergirl success. This surprising bodily force was co-constituted by the mundane artifacts of the girls’ everyday lives including printed report cards, gymnasiums, peer fashions, and shifting school contexts and cultures, all of which collided with the broader media construct of supergirl success. The diffractive power of these intra-acting agencies highlights how the girls’ subjectivities materialized and then dissipated into multiple possibilities for smart girlhood. In the next section, we carry forward waves from this montage but move from a constellation that highlights the material-discursive power of shifting grades, bodies and school cultures to a constellation that highlights how material artifacts produce and are productive of class- and gender-based hierarchies, with force to enact which and how bodies matter in one school. Montage two: school-body-hoodie Ginger and Veronica took the bus every day to Riverview, a well-resourced high school across town that had an academic – and wealthy – reputation. While certainly not all students at Riverview were well off, the school was firmly embedded within a prosperous 12 S. POMERANTZ AND R. RABY community of middle- and upper middle-class professionals and relatively well-paid white- and blue-collar workers. Veronica was in a French immersion program, which was integral to Riverview’s academic reputation. Despite having left the higher status of French to pull her marks up, Ginger saw herself as a smart girl with academic ambitions, and, like Veronica, took her studies very seriously. But aside from schoolwork, what both girls really took seriously was their school – unlike their elementary school, they had a profound love of Riverview High, which was evident in their discussion of what they liked to wear. As Veronica explained, ‘A lot of us like to wear baggy sweaters with our school logos on it – especially with our school logos on it, because we love our school!’ Ginger jumped in: ‘It’s very nice to wear your school sweater.’ When Shauna asked if they were proud of their school, Veronica continued to talk about clothing. ‘Our school loves wearing our school clothes.’ ‘And it’s so comfy,’ Ginger noted, while hugging herself inside her hoodie. Veronica repeated, ‘It is comfy!’ Here, a constellation with affective force comes into view: school-body-hoodie. All three exist in intra-acting relation bound up in the material-discursive notion of ‘comfy’. In their analysis of girls living in a post-coal-mining locale in South Wales, Ivinson and Renold (2013, 717) make visible ‘how girls’ bodies are entangled with bikes, water, mud and other elements in moving assemblages … ’ In a similar way, we started to focus on school-body-hoodie, not as separate entities, but as co-constructive of the girls’ academic subjectivities. We wondered how girls’ bodies were enmeshed in schools, hoodies, and the other material contexts through which discourses surrounding girls manifest (Lenz Taguchi and Palmer 2013; Ringrose and Rawlings 2015; Taylor 2013). How is the school-body-hoodie part of the hidden ‘constitutive material force in producing what and who matters within classrooms’ (Taylor 2013, 688)? Ginger and Veronica felt comfy in their school hoodie because it resonated with their embodied middle-class tastes. As Bettie (2003) argues, class identity is made visible through the concrete objects that are productive of material relations, routines of daily life, and shared histories of the body. For Ginger and Veronica, this hoodie provided a ‘social skin’ (Pomerantz 2008, 16), where body and hoodie intra-act to create not just a sense of physical comfort, but continued reverberation between subjectivity, school, and class-based embodied dispositions. It is this sense of belonging that was comfy for the girls as much as the thick warmth of the navy cotton. The body-in-that-hoodie was also a body clearly marked as attending Riverview, well known as a school with high academic standards. The comfortable feeling generated from the hoodie thus intra-acted with the school’s wealthy and academic reputation. Veronica’s continued discussion of her hoodie demonstrates these class- and statusbased entanglements: if people walk around in school clothing – that sets them apart. It’s definitely the cool people. If you see people walking around with school sweaters and track pants and bandanas, it’s like that person’s cool because they can afford to wear our clothes. This status indicator intra-acted with the girls’ investment in status and the school’s reputation to position the girls as engaged in a certain kind of (comfy) social and economic power that was part of their already embodied middle-class habitus, adding multiple and relational layers to the kind of comfort a school hoodie can provide. GENDER AND EDUCATION 13 In this analysis, the school-body-hoodie constellation is not just a discursively produced system of signs with symbolic power – it is the relational mechanism by which meanings materialize, take shape, and matter in certain girls’ lives. Post-human performativity opens this broader exploration, allowing us to see the intra-active complexity of smart girlhood. Expanding this profound relationality further, the school-body-hoodie constellation also intra-acts with femininity and heterosexual regulation, illuminating ‘how that which is resolutely mundane within everyday pedagogic practice nevertheless possesses a surprising material force’ (Taylor 2013, 688). The discussion of comfy school clothing in the first interview became diffracted by the term ‘classy’ in the second interview. Referring to the looseness of her hoodie, Ginger was keen to address our question on what kind of clothing they liked to wear: ‘sweaters cannot be very tight. If they are tight, they aren’t comfy. At our school if it’s not a comfy outfit, it’s not cool.’ Veronica then added: ‘It has to be classy, but comfy.’ Here, classy and comfy are brought into relation with one another as diffracted waves of difference. The concept of comfy, while intra-acting with class-based material-discursive practices, such as belonging and fitting in with an academic student body, was interrupted by the invocation of classy, a concept that denotes both having material wealth and being a certain kind of girl (i.e. not trashy) (Armstrong et al. 2014). Ginger helped to clarify Veronica’s comments by standing up and pointing to her own hoodie. ‘As you [can] see, very nice and warm, not too baggy, but not extremely tight. And these [points to pants], they don’t give me butt crack or underwear type stuff. No underwear or butt!’ Shauna then asked the sisters to describe clothing that they felt would not be classy for girls to wear: Veronica answered first. Miniskirts, butt-showing short shorts, over the top V-neck shirts. You have to walk into [our] school, [then] you would know! We were going shopping and there was this one girl who looked like she was wearing party clothes, but she was wearing [them] casually. I was like, ‘I wonder what she would dress like at a party?’ She was wearing a droopy shirt and a mini skirt that came up high, but was short at the bottom. […] She was wearing knee high boots with big stilettos. The school-body-hoodie constellation is diffracted again by the invocation of twenty-first century Western girlhood, femininity, and sexuality as it continues to powerfully intra-act with class- and status-based practices. As comfy and classy, the school hoodie performs as not just academic success and wealth, but also as appropriate attire for (smart, middleclass) girls. Within a relation of heterosexual regulation (Ringrose and Rawlings 2015), clothing has force to indicate which girls have class and which do not (Bettie 2003; Pomerantz 2008), while also making visible girls’ potential resistance to hegemonic femininity by wearing a dark, modest hoodie, rather than more revealing clothing. Through the lens of discursive performativity, the girls’ talk would be coded as the rigorous policing of norms that both maintain and challenge a narrow heterosexual matrix (including the discourse of ‘slut’ enacted by Ginger and Veronica’s negative view of certain clothing). In this reading, agency might emerge as discursive recognition. However, through the lens of post-human performativity, agency dynamically materializes through the intra-acting components of a set of relations that enact differences through boundary-making cuts (Barad 2007). As comfy and classy make clear, for Ginger and Veronica the hoodie was productive of cuts, which ‘enact what matters and what is excluded 14 S. POMERANTZ AND R. RABY from mattering’ (Barad 2007, 148) at Riverview. Beyond the body as regulated by classgender-sexuality norms, this post-human perspective asks: What materializes from the boundary-making practices that are enacted through human and non-human agencies? The school hoodie is not ‘slutty’ because it is not tight, and not a mini skirt or short shorts. With its shiny gold lettering, drawstring top, and baggy fit, this hoodie, instead, materializes another set of meanings: sporty, athletic, and, as Veronica and Ginger describe, fitting for a certain embodiment of (smart, middle-class) girls their age. Productive of multiple and intersecting high-class materializations, the Riverview hoodie thus held affective force in Ginger and Veronica’s lives to co-produce how they saw and presented themselves. A girl in a Riverview hoodie was marked as high class (she could afford it), in a class unto herself (she was cool), conforming to her class (she was accepted) and yet non-conforming (she resisted hyper-sexualization), classy (she wore appropriate clothing for girls within a particular material-discursive practice of middle-class, heterosexual regulation), and at the head of the class (she was identified as attending a high achieving school). This reading suggests another layer of smart girlhood – one that focuses on the affective force of everyday artifacts in girls’ lives to produce class-gender-sexuality hierarchies as they intra-act with academic success. Smart girlhood as post-human performativity The complex intricacies of Ginger and Veronica’s academic subjectivities highlight the intra-action between human and non-human agencies through post-human performativity. Beyond the realm of human intention, agency emerges in these montages as the conditions of possibility that arise out of entangled constellations of material objects, human bodies, discourses, and shifting locations. What these montages suggest is that there is neither one kind of subjectivity for smart girls nor a singular form of agency, but rather a constant flow of diffracted agencies that give rise to various configurations of subjectivity that have multiple and diffracting effects. Such diffracted agencies mark patterns of difference, including shifts in who is popular and who is not, who is smart and who is not, and who is comfortable in school and who is not. The complexity of smart girlhood is made evident through post-human performativity, as it is produced through intra-actions of geographic, temporal, affective, material, and discursive forces, including specific measurements and representations of smartness, the materiality of bodies and clothing, and school cultures. For example, we became aware of the force held by grades as they defined someone within a school context, shifted how students were seen, and shaped subjectivities beyond academic life, including athletic subjectivities. We also became aware of corporeal power. Veronica’s muscular embodiment offered us our most challenging analytical moments as her body could both shift her subjectivity away from academics and cause her to feel doubt about hegemonic femininity in the near-attainment of supergirl success. Lastly, we became aware of the affective force a certain hoodie held within Riverview as it signaled which bodies mattered, particularly in relation to wealth, academic success, and (modest, middle-class) femininity. Our diffractive analysis of these mundane yet compelling aspects of Ginger and Veronica’s two interviews participates in this co-production. We sought to explore the ways that everyday objects of high achievement coalesced to create smart girls’ sense of self. In so doing, we have contributed to ‘an enactment of flows of differences, where differences GENDER AND EDUCATION 15 get made in the process of reading data into each other, and identifying what diffractive patterns emerge in these readings’ (Lenz Taguchi and Palmer 2013, 767). What we learned from this diffractive analysis is that academic success cannot be teased out from the myriad everyday layers of context that co-produce it, including our own intra-acting academic subjectivities, research pursuits, and analytical interests. Our goal has been to show that no one element of smart girls’ lives can be taken as distinct from the many other elements that surround it. In relation to quantum physics, Barad (2007, 142) explains this entanglement ‘as macroscopic material arrangements through which particular concepts are given definition, to the exclusion of others, and through which particular phenomena with particular determinate physical properties are produced.’ In relation to smart girlhood, this means that the context of gender and achievement is much broader than binaries touting successful girls and failing boys, or the perceived self-containment of gender as a measure for academic success. The enmeshed layers above offer a different way to discuss a familiar topic – one that might shift debate away from arguments grounded in de-contextualized gender wars to a relational approach entangled in – and productive of – smart girlhood. Disclosure statement No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors. Funding This work was supported by Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada [grant number 41020101392]. 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