Naughtiest girls, go girls, and glitterbombs: Exploding schoolgirl fictions

This transdisciplinary article considers the White British and Australian schoolgirl through a notionally comparative study of Enid Blyton’s The Naughtiest Girl in the School series and the contemporary Go Girl series, texts spanning the researcher’s lived experience as girl, mother and teacher. Through incendiary fragments of memory and media, the researcher/writer seeks the girl addressed by these texts and suggests the struggles, denials and ambivalences that produce and are produced by reading the schoolgirl. This girl resists historical determinism, coalescing as contemporaneous past, present and future as the reader performs her own girlhood through reading and writing. This creative analytical article notices the visual and physical manifestations of texts, as well as their linguistic discourses. Through this work, we perceive postfeminist entanglement in the ongoing re-configuration of the schoolgirl, with implications for policy and practice in education and for cultural and girlhood studies.