A growing number of authors recognise the increasing expectations placed on young women as the vanguard of economic, social and cultural change. This paper explores how these imaginings have come to bear upon young women's bodies, as part of a special issue on pedagogical responses to the changing position of girls and young women. In examining how "girlhood" has been constituted as the vanguard of cultural change, attention is cast specifically towards the central role of embodiment, health and subjectivity in these images of the future. (Contains 1 table and 2 notes.)