Driven to Perfection

This chapter explores the media construction of the supergirl, or a girl who is not only academically successful, but also skilled at sports, extra-curricular activities, and social life. No other example seems to offer better proof that girls today have it all. Yet, the stories relayed to us by girls who might be deemed ‘supergirls’ suggest that this kind of intensive success comes at a price. The stress and anxiety associated with maintaining perfection is daunting and potentially damaging to girls, who push themselves beyond reasonable limits to stay on top. Such consequences are further compounded by the invisible privilege of class-based and family advantages that very few girls can access.

Cool to Be Smart

In this chapter, we focus on two themes that offer glimpses into places in smart girls’ lives where possibilities for social transformation might be fostered. First, we explore ways that some of the girls in our study were contesting popular femininity through micro-resistances. These small yet potentially influential challenges to popular femininity help shift the landscape of girlhood by subtly expanding who and what a (smart) girl can be. Second, we focus on the importance of school culture in fostering girls’ comfort with academic success. If the culture of the school was open to less traditional forms of gender and sexuality, it seemed that smart girls had a much better chance of thriving rather than hiding. Finally, we conclude with a renewed call for greater care in making broad statements – in media outlets and academic research – about girls and boys in school. Greater attention is needed to intersections of identity, such as gender, ‘race’, class, sexuality, age, and nationhood, including privileges and disadvantages that cut across these categories.

A Deeper Look at Class and “Race”

In Chapter Five we focus on other contextualizing features of smart girls’ lives: intersections of class and ‘race’. Class emerged as a powerful force. On the one hand, it was a source of advantage and judgment between students, and thus a tool that some girls used to bolster their privilege and exclude others. But on the other hand, the deep effects of class were also something that was hidden and simplified. Similarly, ‘race’ emerged as a central feature in definitions of academic success, particularly in relation to the stereotype of the ‘smart Asian’. The girls in our study with Asian backgrounds lamented their pigeonholing as automatically good at math and laughed off these racist stereotypes as “just joking around,” yet such assumptions reproduce a narrow idea that being too smart is not only anti-social, but also the mark of a cultural outsider.

Fitting In or Fabulously Smart?

In this chapter, we explore tensions in smart girls’ lives by focusing on how girls and boys negotiate gender and peer culture. While girls are deemed to be the new dominant sex in education and beyond, we offer stories that illustrate the strategies girls used in order to negotiate their smart identities. We explore the challenges of a smart girl identity in relation to popularity, sexual desirability, fitting in, and standing out. We also explore the strategic negotiations of girls in contrast to boys, who used different tactics to manage their academic success.

Are Girls Taking Over the World?

This chapter sets the context for the book by explaining and then challenging the notion that girls are taking over the world because they have been positioned as the new dominant sex in education. Linked to boys’ failure, girls’ success is both celebrated as ‘real’ girl power and criticized as the feminization of schools and the toppling of the traditional gender order. Set against the backdrop of post-feminism and neo-liberalism, this chapter explores how girls have come to be seen as ‘having it all’, though they still struggle in ways made invisible by the ‘successful girls’ narrative.

Sexism and the Smart Girl

In this chapter, we explore the tension between girls’ assumptions of gender equality and the sexism they (or we) identified. When girls did not see sexism in their lives, it sometimes created tensions, which were in turn interpreted as personal problems that they needed to solve alone. We also juxtapose the stories girls told about their perceptions of gender dynamics in the school to those of boys, who offered a very different perspective. While girls often felt that boys were favored by teachers – allowed to joke around, play the class clown, and derail lessons on a dime – many boys expressed feelings of gender discrimination around assumptions that they were automatic troublemakers.