Future girl? Exploring girls’ digital sexual cultures through speculative fabrications

Research reveals a significant gap between young people’s lived experience with digital technologies and the scripted content of online safeguarding programmes that focus on young people’s rational, individual decision-making regarding safe and responsible use. Rarely do online safeguarding programmes engage with the wider gender and sexual norms shaping young people’s digital cultures. This paper outlines how experimenting with speculative fiction offers generative possibilities for digital sexualities research and education. Drawing on group interviews and arts-based data produced by five girls aged 11–12 years old, it explores the competing and contradictory demands of contemporary digitally-networked girlhood. The paper briefly outlines how girls are promoted as empowered, choice-making agents in contemporary digital culture before examining the difficulties girls encounter when expressing their frustration at enduring gender and sexual inequities at school and online. It moves to explore how experimenting with speculative fiction through arts-based methods allowed new forms of voicing to emerge which challenged the vision of girls as vanguards of a new socio-economic order. By engaging in a diffractive analysis of the cut-up poem ‘Test Subject 15066’ and the fabricated future girl figure produced by three girls in the study, this paper explores alternative figurations of future girlhood.