Julia the hottie and 'you go, girl' : role models for girls and young women?

Australia acquired its first female Prime Minister on June 24th 2010 when Deputy Prime Minister Julia Gillard confronted PM Kevin Rudd whose reputation had been in freefall. She quickly called an election for August 21st which resulted in a hung parliament. After 17 excruciating days of vote counting and deal-making, on 7th September, a Gillard Labor government was delivered to power with the support of a posse of independents. These weeks of waiting, first for the election, and then for the election result, provided ample opportunity for reflection for feminist educators like me, who surprised ourselves with our ambivalent responses. Surely, I thought, more than a century after suffrage, decades of International Women's Day school assemblies and thousands of stickers proclaiming that "Girls can do anything", and despite my poststructural theoretical leanings, this would be an event worth celebrating. Women friends and colleagues reported similar responses. Accordingly, and with a particular interest in exploring traces of ambivalence and contradiction, I began to map some of these celebratory responses to Gillard as our first female PM through the media, particularly in the "women's interest" segment of the market.