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Post-structuralist youth studies theorists have argued for nuanced perspectives on agency that are not reliant on an assumption of subjects as rational and internally coherent individuals, and understand subjectivity and social structure as produced in concert. These are important theoretical developments that have shaped recent scholarship on girls' identities and cultures. In this paper, we seek to give them some further sociological grounding by thinking through their resonance for the specific debate about young women and what feminist agency consists of, or looks like today. What we wish to further flesh out is how more familiar, modernist ideas about girls' agency have started to reach their limits not merely because of the post-structuralist turn, but because of the socio-cultural conditions of neoliberalism, post-feminism and post-girlpower. We unpack some recent shifts and complexities around three concepts: choice, empowerment and voice. These are the terms by which the possibility of girls' and young women's agency has traditionally been understood in feminist scholarship and much work in girls' studies. However, when we interrogate these concepts within the specific neoliberal, post-feminist, post-girlpower context, their usefulness for either understanding or enabling feminist agency is thrown into question.

We usually think about intimacy as to do with our private, personal lives, as describing feelings and relationships that are most inner, most 'inward to one's personhood' (McGlotten, 2013, p. 1), and concerned with relationships that are most important to us. Sociologists have theorised intimacy as centrally involving mutual self-disclosure (Giddens, 1992), time spent in co-presence, physical affection, and acts of practical care (Jameison, 2011). But, as queer theory and sexuality studies tell us, intimacy is very much socially sanctioned, defined by institutions, laws, and normative social pressures (Berlant, 1998; Plummer, 2003). The sociology of intimacy helps illuminate what, specifically and empirically, is involved in the doing of intimacy in different places and cultures, and for different genders, classes, and social groups. Queer and feminist critical cultural theorists like Berlant have explained how, in late-modern cultures, having a 'life' has become equated with having an intimate life (Berlant, 1998, p. 282). Further, as Cefai and Couldry note, 'What queer theory has taught us is that heteronormativity shapes what can appear to us as "intimate" even in settings where questions of sexual identity are typically not articulated as such' (2017, p. 2). Understandings of intimacy are culturally and socially specific, rather than 'global' or 'universal' (Jameison, 2011). However, in many places right now intimacy names 'the affective encounters with others that often matter most' (McGlotten, 2013, p. 1). From the perspective of poststructuralist queer and feminist theory, producing intimacy can be understood as part of subjectification processes that centrally involve the hierarchical ordering of relationships and psychic concerns, in socially legible ways, in order to make sense of ourselves and those around us. How social media figures in such processes of psychically and materially ordering relationships and shaping what appears as intimate is part of what we consider in this collection. In this chapter, and this collection more broadly, we are interested in how social media practices challenge and disrupt, as well as how they reinforce and concretise (hetero)normative notions of intimacy as a concept that creates boundaries around certain relationships and ethics of care. Social media are now centrally involved in processes whereby pedagogies of intimate life as life itself are learnt, reproduced, given value, contested, and exploited.

In this paper, I ask what the self-representations of young women on social network sites can tell us about the conditions and experience of inhabiting femininity in the digitally mediated post-feminist context. First, I outline four conditions of post-feminist girlhood that I suggest young women must navigate in the processes of subjectivity construction. I then describe some of the common kinds of performativity found on a small selection of social network site profiles owned by young Australian women. I suggest that a ‘shameless’ affect may be a necessary form of self-protection for these young women, operating in contexts that appear to require copious amounts, and intense forms, of self-display. The kind of ‘shameless’ affectations we can see on young women’s social network site profiles may also be a way of resisting the dominant terms by which contemporary femininity is understood as normatively ‘melancholic’ or damaged.