Within neoliberal postfeminism young women are depicted as powerful, unconstrained and ready to work for success. However, research reveals a far more complicated picture than this straightforward ode to success. We explore the intersection of racialised, classed and gendered ideals of successful femininity from the perspective of Maori…

The focus on, and concern about, young girls and preteens or "tweens" relates to the "sexualisation" of girlhood and the notion that girls are "growing up too fast" and becoming "too sexy too soon". In both popular and academic accounts, "tween" magazines and the increasingly "sexualised"…

Children's cultural worlds provide them with many different sources of information about gender and work. Early school reader illustrations, for example, are a cultural resource that produces particular meanings about gender, however children may also draw on understandings from other contexts to make their own sense of these representations. The…

Children's reading materials are a widely available cultural resource that children may draw on to make sense of gender. Much of the research on gender and reading materials has used content analysis and has focused on children's literature. The research we present in this article detours from these approaches, using a feminist post-structuralist…

Considers ways in which the works of Henry Giroux and Paulo Freire might inform feminist educational theory and how feminists have built their work considering new levels of insight. It calls for feminist perspectives to be interwoven with the ideas of educationists such as Giroux and Freire to enable women and men to move toward a feminist…