Girls are constrained by a host of factors that may impact how they choose to dress: parental control, economic resources, peer and media pressure, cultural and religious restrictions, racial and ethnic codes, body type, homophobia, and gender normativity — among many others. While girls may see themselves as fixed within narratives beyond their control, they may also feel that they have the power to modify how they are positioned within and by those narratives—particularly through style.
Style as a mode of agency can offer girls the power to make either subtle or explicit changes to their images. An image is dependent upon a girl's “look” to showcase her personality, interests, and affiliations. A girl may try on a variety of images throughout her schooling or may develop one specific image over a period of years. But however a girl chooses to play with her image, its cultivation highlights the identity materials made available to girls within their specific positioning. This active engagement enables girls to gain some measure of control over how they have been shaped by structures beyond their control. In this way, not only are modification and transformation possible, but a form of power is made available to girls who might otherwise feel lost or trapped in the narratives that govern their lives. Using style to craft an image enables a girl to inscribe herself, rather than simply being inscribed by others-to use her own voice to speak back to how she has been spoken to. Girls may spend a great deal of time cultivating, renovating, and re-inventing their images while simultaneously laboring to ensure that they appear authentic and not posed. Images are staged representations of identity, but ones that must appear “natural” and “organic” if they are to be believed.
As a form of agency, style is used to purposefully shape how a girl is seen by others. For instance, a girl who is known to be quiet at school can use elements of style to become more socially visible; a girl with a religious background can use style to showcase another side to her personality, such as music lover or athlete; a social outcast can use style to forge an unforgettable image; a preppy girl can seek to become less mainstream by wearing clothing deemed to be unfashionable; an academic girl can be seen as sporty by wearing a “real” track suit and “real” sneakers; a girl who feels like one of the crowd can distinguish herself as alternative by wearing facial piercings or by dyeing her hair a different color; a girl can cultivate a laid-back image by refusing to care about what she wears and by doing her own thing; a girl can become affiliated with a different race or ethnicity by engaging in particular elements of style that signify her belonging to that cultural group. A girl may also use style to complicate her image, to keep others from guessing “who” she is, or to engage in what might be described as hybrid forms of identity, where several identities are tried on at the same time. For example, as noted above, a girl might test out being sporty and academic at the same time.
The cultivation of particular images offers insight into the ways that girls may seek explicit forms of power and authority in their own lives. They may cultivate an image from a particular subculture such as punk, goth, hip hop, skater or rave-to name just a few. Doing this may offer a particular form of power that enables girls to critique mainstream girlhood. While little has been written specifically on girls in subcultures, Lauraine Leblanc's (1999) study of punk femininity explores the ethos of DIY, or a do-it-yourself attitude. Girl punk style resists uncomplicated, sweet, and innocent femininity and takes up instead the more complicated bricolage, or combinations of “looks”-aimed at critiquing not just parental or corporate culture but also the masculine edge of the punk subculture, often viewed as misogynist and anti-female. Creating their looks from “found objects,” used clothes, and a bondage gear aesthetic, girl punks use style to forge an image of resistance, intimidation, and anger.
Using fashion against itself, girl punks often put traditionally feminine items, such as skirts, makeup, and fishnet stockings, together with harder-edged items, such as dog collars, chains, combat boots, and facial piercings. Marked by irony and parody, girl punk style plays with traditional gender norms and pushes the boundaries of what is and is not acceptable for girls in the social world. While subcultural affiliations can offer counter-cultural examples of style as a form of power, the most common kind of power that teenage girls seek to generate through style is one based on a dominant view of female sexuality. Sexual power within a heterosexual matrix is perhaps the most utilized form of power that teenage girls enact through style, triggering a long-standing feminist debate. In second-wave feminism, pro- and anti-sex camps have debated the issues surrounding sexual power since the mid-1960s.
Pro-sex feminists see sex and sexuality as sources of empowerment for women, and anti-sex feminists see sex and sexuality as forms of heteronormative control used to objectify women. More recently, third-wave feminism has addressed sexual power as a tool for independence, liberation, and pleasure. The personal enjoyment of sex and sexuality has also become associated with postfeminism, where individual power (“It's all about me”) has superseded a collective politics (“United we stand”). Using sex and sexuality as forms of power has thus been dubbed “do-me,” “lipstick,” or “babe” feminism and conflates the pursuit of sexual pleasure with the end of gendered oppression. Girls' style has mimicked this conflation with T-shirt slogans such as “hottie,” “dream on,” “sex fiend,” “slut,” “porn star,” and “pay to touch.”
But sexual power through style is not available to just anyone. A teenage girl must fit into a particular mold of heterosexual beauty and be seen as conventionally “sexy.” To be conventionally “sexy” is to emulate the mainstream pop and film stars of the day. In the early twenty-first century, such stars include Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, Jennifer Lopez, Lindsay Lohan, and Paris Hilton. The styles made popular by these stars include low-rise jeans, visible thongs and bra straps, exposed cleavage, midriff-revealing T-shirts and tank tops, and pants that fit tightly, showing the outline of a girl's figure. Despite their controversial nature, it is hard to ignore the ways in which teenage girls use these items of apparel to cultivate their images.
Such an image may offer teenage girls power in the school's symbolic economy of style, where conventionally “sexy” dress might equal popularity, attractiveness, thinness, preppiness, status, and the ability to get boyfriends. While this kind of influence has been critiqued within certain feminist circles, it is the one power girls are taught to utilize from a very early age. Though girls are told that using sexy modes of dress to gain attention is empty and shallow, they see ample evidence of this power in magazines, on television, and in films. Given this contradictory message, it is not surprising that teenage girls view a sexual power attainable through conventionally “sexy” styles as a quick way to garner attention and status.
