TAKING UP A POSITION:

Abstract

The relationship between mainstream femininity and resistance to it has been theorized in a number of ways. In one approach, mainstream femininity is identified as a patriarchal set of public texts that women accept, negotiate, or resist in practice. Another view sees mainstream femininity as a dominant cultural practice to which there are resistant subcultural responses. Taking a poststructuralist view, this article offers an alternative to these models. The focus of the article is the differing ways in which a set of interviewees validated their participation in a type of relationship that is socially constructed as a departure from mainstream femininity, namely, a voluntary sexual relationship between an adult man and an adolescent girl.