Where are all the woke kids? lived experience first: re-sequencing media literacy practice to explore gender performativity and media with 17- to 18-year-olds

Media literacy education – typically embedded within secondary school Media Studies classes – routinely begins by analysing popular culture texts to reveal how gender identity is represented. By contrast, this study starts with the day-to-day experiences and opinions of young people, asking them who they admire, and the values associated with those people before turning to media texts. Foregrounding lived experience, I argue, better informs media literacy practices and advances scholarship on gender identity. This also addresses gaps in how young people's perspectives are integrated into media literacy research. This shift matters because young people's direct encounters are typically treated as secondary or anecdotal. The study was conducted with two senior secondary school media-studies cohorts (ages 17–18) over 2 weeks in Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand. I centre learners’ personal and social contexts within classroom practice. This, in turn, creates richer opportunities for reflection and provides a more fruitful starting point for analysing media texts and negotiating gendered identities. The findings show that older adolescents can identify gendered behaviours and aspects of gender performativity in figures they admire; however, their willingness to critically interrogate socially embedded gender norms varies considerably. Dominant misogynistic and anti-feminist discourses remained prominent in participants’ responses – more so than anticipated – despite New Zealand's reputation as a progressive liberal democracy. This tension informs the framing of the article's title, ‘Where Are All the Woke Kids?’