What Does God Know About Teenage Girls? On Brio Magazine, Conservative Girlhood, and the Politics of Power

Scholarship on evangelical women has boomed over the past decade, offering insight into the American Christian Right and its politics of gender and sexuality. But a major gap within this sub-field remains: historical analysis of evangelical girlhood(s) and the nuanced power structures therein, especially as separate from a theological or confessional approach. Building on the work of Heather Hendershot, Emily Suzanne Johnson, and Sara Moslener, and utilizing a Foucauldian framework of power, this paper examines Focus on the Family's Brio Magazine and argues that evangelical girls exist at specific nexus of disenfranchisement and unique authority that constitutes them as a particular type of subject in both religious and political discourses. Girlhood is a unique position that cannot be earned nor disposed of; Indeed, it is impossible to fully grasp the trajectory of contemporary evangelicalism without understanding the role that teenage girls play in the evangelical imagination and American political realities.