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`It's a Nice Day for a White Wedding': The Debutante Ball and Constructions of Femininity

National Centre in HIV Social Research, Youth/General Population Program, La Trobe University, Victoria, Australia

This article focuses on three young women's experiences in relation to their participation in a debutante ball in their penultimate year of secondary school. The debutante ball is used to explore the place of desire and fantasy in the lives of young women and the ways in which their bodies are disciplined, within its rituals, into the normalizing discourses and discursive practices of femininity and heterosexuality. The analysis makes evident the discursive construction of a femininity/feminism opposition and the effect this opposition has on these young women's perceptions of the place of feminism in their lives. Practices of femininity are related to pleasure whereas feminism is often perceived in terms of a coercive form of puritanism.

Feminism & Psychology, Vol. 7, No. 4, 495-516 (1997)
DOI: 10.1177/0959353597074004


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