A powerful and popular argument has dominated discussions of young people’s academic success for the last fi ft een years: girls are thriving in school, while boys are trailing behind (see, for example, Pollack 1998; Kindlon and Thompson 2002; DiPrete and Buchmann 2013). This patt ern is, in turn, interpreted as a sign that girls now live in a world in which gender inequality has disappeared or perhaps even been reversed. This narrative is part of a postfeminist, neoliberal context that denies structural gender inequalities that hinder girls. Instead, commensurate with a postfeminist, neoliberal sensibility, we see an overwhelming celebration of girls’ individualized accomplishments alongside a failure to recognize any links between girls and gender oppression in the school and beyond (see Harris 2004; Gill and Scharff 2011; Pomerantz et al. 2013). Yet many studies have pointed to the ongoing diffi culties that girls continue to face as they negotiate gender inequality (see Renold and Allan 2006; Pomerantz and Raby 2011; Francis, Skelton, and Read 2012; Pomerantz et al. 2013), particularly the intersections in girls’ lives that hinder an exclusive concentration on gender (Harris 2004; Ringrose 2013). Drawing on data collected from a three-year study, “Smart Girls: Negotiating Academic Success in a Post-feminist Era,” our work enters into this critical conversation through interviews with girls about their experiences of academic success. The point of these conversations was to contextualize smart girlhood as a shift ing and mediated subject position, and to challenge the postfeminist context in which girls are situated within some popular and academic accounts of gender and education. In talking with girls who self-identify as academically successful, we have learned that smart girlhood is not the individualized, depoliticized state suggested by postfeminist narratives, but is, rather, a complex, multifaceted subject position that is fraught with sexist interactions, stress management, and elaborate interplays between and among girls, peers, teachers, and the school (see Pomerantz and Raby
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