Engaging with feminist new materialism, Toni Ingram reveals the ways in which the school ball (or prom) can be understood as an assemblage of material objects, spaces, practices, ideas and imaginings which contribute to the process of becoming school ball-girl. The ball-girl is not a fixed identity or subject but is an intra-active becoming a dynamic, shifting process where bodies, sexuality and femininities are relationally produced. (Re)conceptualising the school ball-girl as emergent phenomena provides openings for thinking about girls and this schooling practice beyond popular cultural narratives. Building on the social theory of Barad, Bennett, Best, Deleuze and Guattari, this book offers a new perspective on girls, sexuality, gender and schooling, while also exploring the potential of feminist new materialisms for rethinking educational practices and the human subject.
This thesis employs a feminist new materialist approach (Barad, 2007) to explore the relations in-between girls, sexuality and the school ball. The aim of the study is to explore the becoming of the school ball-girl through dynamic entanglements of things, bodies, discourses, spaces and imaginings. Previous sexualities research highlights how dominant discourses of gender and sexuality structure girls’ experiences of the schooling practice (Best, 2000; Smith, 2012). Extending these understandings, this thesis considers the possibilities for becoming ball-girl when matter is taken into account. The ball-girl is conceptualised as intra-actively becoming through entangled material-discursive and affective forces, opening-up understandings of the school ball-girl beyond a discursive constitution. Attention shifts to material objects, spatial-temporalities, embodied practices and affective forces: things that may have previously been overlooked. Forty-one girls (aged 16-18 years) from two urban high schools in Aotearoa–New Zealand participated in the research. Adopting a posthumanist approach to research ‘data’, the study examines entanglements enacted through girls’ talk, photographs and videos. Rather than an isolated spatial-temporal event, the school ball is conceptualised as continually becoming through shifting entanglements of space, time and matter. This theorising troubles popular cultural constructions of the ball as a ‘rite of passage’ or ‘coming of age’ ritual. It endeavours to open up possibilities for imagining the ball-girl in ways that do not rely on linear or developmental logic. A key contribution the thesis offers is an understanding of ball-girl-bodies as emergent and relational. Becoming ball-girl does not refer to a stable identity or femininity; rather, it is a making and unmaking of bodies that exceeds the discursive and the human. In the reconfiguring of bodies, sexualities are also rethought; rather than an attribute of an individual human body, ball-girl sexualities emerge via entangled human and more-than-human relations. The significance of this understanding of ball-girl-bodies and sexualities is that possibilities and capacities are not wholly constrained by discursive practices, nor are they located in, or do they emanate from, human intention and action. This open-ended potential offers possibilities for new imaginings for what a ball-girl can do and become.
