‘Blah, Blah, Blah … [not] business as usual’: politics through the lens of young female climate leaders

Girls and young women have played leading roles in Australian climate politics since 2018. The distinctive age-cohort and gendered characteristics of this movement and the implications of this for contemporary politics and democracy are not well documented. Focusing on School Strike 4 Climate movement, we ask how to best understand this development? Is their appearance as leaders and speakers in political forums politically significant, and if so, how? We use 41 speeches to examine what ‘being political’ means for them. We identify the reflexively gendered ways these young women are experiencing – and remaking – contemporary politics. This is consonant with a tradition of political theory developed by Arendt, Wolin and Rancière’s idea of ‘the political’ as what reveals the exclusion of people who aren’t normally allowed to take part.