Minding the body, sexing the brain: hormonal truth and the post-feminist hermeneutics of adolescence

Abstract

Drawing on feminist and queer epistemologies, this article is concerned with the post-feminist media's construction of girls' sexual subjecthood. Broadly defined as a biopolitical ideal, post-feminism is here related to a set of principles of the neoliberal art of government. It will be argued that these principles ethically sustain the exponential main-streaming of a post-feminist hermeneutics of adolescence and its programme of governmentality. The article also links post-feminism to a particular methodology of subjectification, ultimately locating its hermeneutics of adolescence within the pornographic and pharmacological imperatives of contemporary capitalism. On the empirical level, the analysis explores how techno-scientific discourses and bodily figurations (namely brains and hormones) enter the discursive apparatus of a Portuguese girls' magazine, giving ideological ground to a distinctive production of adolescent body-subjects. Post-feminist media markets are finally discussed as a significant segment of the capitalist industrialisation of sexual difference that frames the general problematic of this study.