Olga Ivashkevich
University of South Carolina, Department of Art, Faculty Member
- Cultural Studies, Digital Media & Learning, Art Education, Poststructuralist Feminist Theory, Childhood studies, Girlhood Studies, and 17 moreFeminist Pedagogy (Women s Studies), Girls' Studies, Children's Visual Culture, Children's Media, Preteen Girls Playing, Contemporary Art, Gender, Digital Humanities, Continental Philosophy, Media Education, Feminist Philosophy, Judith Butler, Media Convergence, Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, Digital Media And New Literacies, and Black Feminist Theory/Thoughtedit
- Ph.D. in art education from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (2008). Dissertation title "Making meanings t... morePh.D. in art education from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (2008). Dissertation title "Making meanings through popular culture: Self-initiated drawing in the lives of preadolescent girls."edit
Since the establishment of Girls' studies as a distinct research field within feminist scholarship in the early 1990s, interest in girls' practices of "doing girl-hood" (Currie, Kelly, & Pomerantz, 2009, p. 3) appears to be blooming and... more
Since the establishment of Girls' studies as a distinct research field within feminist scholarship in the early 1990s, interest in girls' practices of "doing girl-hood" (Currie, Kelly, & Pomerantz, 2009, p. 3) appears to be blooming and expanding into diverse areas of knowledge-from communications and psychology to education and art. This vibrant expansion is also marked by a desire to situate girls as active agents and producers of culture and meaning and to understand their subject positions: a view that is distinctly different from a previously popular (and largely objectivist) construction of girls as victims of the dominant patriarchal discourses and representations. While we see this recent paradigm shift as important and necessary, since it attempts to access actual girls' lived experiences and goes beyond the analysis of girl constructions in popular texts, we also see it as problematic and contested. Most importantly, it creates what Valerie Walkerdine (2007) called a "split. 0 0 between the passive consumer and the active maker of meaning" (po 5) that perpetuates the dichotomies of "activity and passivity" (p. 7) in our understanding of the girl subject. These dichotomies of active/passive and agent/victim-akin to the classic subject/object split-can lead us to simplistic assumptions that in order to see a girl as a subject, we have to reposition her as an "active" maker of meaning who can intentionally resist the dominant constructions of gender and ultimately liberate herself from them. As Walkerdine argued, this view of activity/agency is rooted in the Cartesian philosophical tradition that under-_2
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In this article the author offers observations on the relationship between power, pedagogy and contemporary art education practices. Particular focus is given to how modern institutions of schooling operate under the assumption that... more
In this article the author offers observations on the relationship between power, pedagogy and contemporary art education practices. Particular focus is given to how modern institutions of schooling operate under the assumption that students are lacking in knowledge and maturity. The author describes how she overcame her fears of giving students power over content, process organization and aesthetic choices. An installation art project she developed about peer pressure that positioned her students as producers of knowledge is also discussed.
Despite widespread argument that contemporary girls are limited by the boundaries of normative femininity and negatively influenced by patriarchal and overly sexualized images of females in Western cultures, a growing number of... more
Despite widespread argument that contemporary girls are limited by the boundaries of normative femininity and negatively influenced by patriarchal and overly sexualized images of females in Western cultures, a growing number of ethnographic accounts of girl culture suggest that girls often subvert, resist, and transgress normative/iconic femininity and undo gender limitations and taboos. These observations, which are supported by Judith Butler’s theory of gender as performance and her concept of gender parody in particular, frame my exploration of preadolescent girls’ subversive gender play as manifested through caricature drawing and consuming alternative products that enable the crossing of gender boundaries. These girls’ cultural productions and participation offer localized and nuanced understandings of how dominant gender ideas are challenged and disrupted, and how such disruption blurs the boundaries between the personal and the political.
To identify the promises, challenges, and paradoxes of the popular discourse of girl power, this article examines girl power as an artifact of postmodernity whose meanings are revealed through both popular cultural representations and... more
To identify the promises, challenges, and paradoxes of the popular discourse of girl power, this article examines girl power as an artifact of postmodernity whose meanings are revealed through both popular cultural representations and contemporary girls’ practices of doing girlhood. Specifically, by examining the representations of girl power in media texts and the drawings and play projects produced by actual girls, it explores the following questions: What aspects of the girl power discourse pose challenges to the very idea of girls’ empowerment? Can traditional feminine qualities and the new emancipated attitude of a power girl coexist? And are girl power opportunities equally accessible to all girls?
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Abstract: Within the modern institution of schooling, educators portray children as lacking in knowledge and maturity and try to restrict their access to the issues that undermine this assumed innocence. Such renditions of children... more
Abstract: Within the modern institution of schooling, educators portray children as lacking in knowledge and maturity and try to restrict their access to the issues that undermine this assumed innocence. Such renditions of children produce hierarchical power relationships ...
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This article uses queer performance theorist José Muñoz’s metaphor of disidentification to interpret digital narratives produced by adolescent girls in the juvenile arbitration program. Muñoz views public artistic performances of... more
This article uses queer performance theorist José Muñoz’s metaphor of disidentification to interpret digital narratives produced by adolescent girls in the juvenile arbitration program. Muñoz views public artistic performances of marginalized subjects as a liminal strategy. While they cannot embody the normative (“good” middle class, White, heterosexual subject) image, their rebellious (“bad” subject) enactments can lead to further stigmatization. A third, liminal strategy of disidentification allows them to use dominant representations and narratives by shifting, altering, and subverting their logic and ultimately remaking their stigmatized social positions. For the girls in juvenile arbitration who carry an institutional label of law offenders and who are required to conceal their faces to avoid public recognition, working with a digital camera opened up an ambiguous, liminal space of visibility. Through their video and animation performances of disidentification in which they acted as disguised actors and doll animators to produce autobiographic fictions, the girls were able to enter public discourses that stigmatize and label them, and remake and reframe their own representations and subject positions.
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Because prosumption is a popular creative method that young people employ in their daily lives as digital users (Duncum, 2011; Jenkins, 2006; Jenkins, Purushotma, Weigel, Clinton, & Robinson, 2009), bringing it into the art curriculum... more
Because prosumption is a popular creative method that young people employ in their daily lives as digital users (Duncum, 2011; Jenkins, 2006; Jenkins, Purushotma, Weigel, Clinton, & Robinson, 2009), bringing it into the art curriculum can be engaging and relevant to students of all ages. While building collaborative, peer-to-peer “affinity spaces” (Jenkins et al., 2009, p. 9) that exist online can prove difficult in a regular school environment, where students may not have shared interests and/or access to popular sites such as YouTube and Facebook, focusing on the conceptual, aesthetic, and technical aspects of digital appropriation of popular images and artifacts can be very productive. In my new media class for preservice art teachers, I invited students to remake a popular toy of their choice by producing a short stop-motion animation film. Their act of remaking a toy involved its playful interrogation by creating an alternative animation script that would change this toy’s dominant meaning (that is, generated by its production company). Creative interrogation strategies developed by students in the process of making their animation films included recontextualization, narrative disruption, and parody. Engaging a Prosumer: Preservice Teachers Interrogate Popular Toys Through Stop-Motion Animation O L G A I V A S H K E V I C H
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The authors discuss their participant observation study with the 10-year-old boy and 8year-old girl who collaborated on making digital videos at home. Major themes that emerged from this research include appropriation of popular culture... more
The authors discuss their participant observation study with the 10-year-old boy and 8year-old girl who collaborated on making digital videos at home. Major themes that emerged from this research include appropriation of popular culture texts, parody, gender play, and managing self-representations. These themes highlight the benefits of video production for children and youth, which allows them to take on the roles of writers, producers, directors, actors, and editors in their own right and understand the inner workings of new media enterprise. It also offers them an opportunity to respond to and rework popular images, scripts, and characters; try on and enact multiple identities; and make important decisions about their self-representations. IJEA Vol. 14 o. 2 http://www.ijea.org/v14n2/ 2 Appropriation, Parody, Gender Play, and Self-representation in Preadolescents’ Digital Video Production Increased access to new technologies such as digital photography, video, computer application...
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This chapter describes the collaborative analysis of artwork created by first-time female offenders participating in a juvenile justice program. Using a feminist intersectional framework, the authors identified sociocultural obstacles and... more
This chapter describes the collaborative analysis of artwork created by first-time female offenders participating in a juvenile justice program. Using a feminist intersectional framework, the authors identified sociocultural obstacles and inequalities represented in the teenage girls’ art and digital media work and generated a conceptual rhizomatic map of overlapping and interconnected themes. Relationships, body image, and agency were salient themes woven throughout the artwork. Participants addressed diverse issues ranging from partner violence, peer pressure, family conflicts, sexualized social norms, bullying, and media influence to alternative concept of beauty, physical health, empowerment, emotional release, and hope for the future.
play, and self-representation in preadolescents ’ digital video production. International Journal of Education & the Arts, 14(2). Retrieved [date] from
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Despite widespread argument that contemporary girls are limited by the boundaries of normative femininity and negatively influenced by patriarchal and overly sexualized images of females in Western cultures, a growing number of... more
Despite widespread argument that contemporary girls are limited by the boundaries of normative femininity and negatively influenced by patriarchal and overly sexualized images of females in Western cultures, a growing number of ethnographic accounts of girl culture suggest that girls often subvert, resist, and transgress normative/iconic femininity and undo gender limitations and taboos. These observations, which are supported by Judith Butler’s theory of gender as performance and her concept of gender parody in particular, frame my exploration of preadolescent girls’ subversive gender play as manifested through caricature drawing2 and consuming alternative products that enable the crossing of gender boundaries. These girls’ cultural productions and participation offer localized and nuanced understandings of how dominant gender ideas are challenged and disrupted, and how such disruption blurs the boundaries between the personal and the political.
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This article positions remix as an agentive site for girls and women in their consumption and production of popular media, one that disrupts dominant gender norms and representations and the pervasiveness of male gaze. Noting girlhood as... more
This article positions remix as an agentive site for girls and women in their consumption and production of popular media, one that disrupts dominant gender norms and representations and the pervasiveness of male gaze. Noting girlhood as connected to but also unique from womanhood (Kearney, 2009), the authors offer feminist interpretations of collage and video mash ups created by adolescent girls in a program of juvenile arbitration as a series of messy, non-linear readings of visual and textural fragments of girls’ work, interlaced with authors’ reactions to girls’ productions as female facilitators/audience. The authors pose that this double-folded, dialogic, intergenerational remix generates a flow of female gaze—as a continuous repetition and collaborative disruption of dominant gender codes—which is produced, reproduced, and passed on to other girls and women to elicit reactions of difference.
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The iconic Barbie doll and young girls’ Barbie play, in particular, is an ambiguous site where the distinctions between Barbie as a normative gendered object and girls’ subjective desiring and fantasizing through the doll play, collide in... more
The iconic Barbie doll and young girls’ Barbie play, in particular, is an ambiguous site where the distinctions between Barbie as a normative gendered object and girls’ subjective desiring and fantasizing through the doll play, collide in an act of abjection. Using Julia Kristeva’s (1982) feminist theory of abjection, we substantiate our argument with two ethnographic cases of preadolescent girls’ transgressive Barbie play, which includes homosexual enactment, gender bending, and violent acts. We analyze these acts as replacing the dominant symbolic order, or what Kristeva calls the Law of the Father, with the maternal, affective, (pre)symbolic bodily performance. Furthermore, we propose to view young girls’ Barbie play as a form of public pedagogy that offers opportunities for a productive disruption and critique of the hegemonic gender regimes.
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... Dogs Wear Dresses 166 Friendship and Popularity: A Contested Relationship 171 Exploring the Boundaries of ... own identities and the factors influencing their constructions of the world (eg, the ... educators have advocated expanding... more
... Dogs Wear Dresses 166 Friendship and Popularity: A Contested Relationship 171 Exploring the Boundaries of ... own identities and the factors influencing their constructions of the world (eg, the ... educators have advocated expanding art lessons beyond the realm of museum art to ...
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In this article, we discuss a video project, Occupying Anonymous, conducted with a group of adolescent girls in an arts-based arbitration program for first-time juvenile offenders. By law, the program requires all adolescent participants... more
In this article, we discuss a video project, Occupying Anonymous, conducted with a group of adolescent girls in an arts-based arbitration program for first-time juvenile offenders. By law, the program requires all adolescent participants to conceal their faces and other physical identity markers in their artwork to protect their public image. Through Occupying Anonymous, we aspired to address the tension between our participants’ public visibility and anonymous art making by embracing anonymity as a performative strategy. The girls transformed their physical identities by creating alternate personas using wigs, makeup, costumes, and props to perform their poems or prose about significant issues in their lives. We employ productive intersections between theoretical frameworks of Munoz’s (1999) theory of disidentification, Deleuze’s and Guattari’s (1987) concept of becoming, and Butler’s (1990, 1993) notion of performativity to reframe gendered identity and self as supple, fluid, and ...
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The article examines impromptu video narratives produced by a Black 9-year-old girl Kiara during the video-making sessions at the shelter for homeless families in Columbia, South Carolina. I argue that these video narratives create a new... more
The article examines impromptu video narratives produced by a Black 9-year-old girl Kiara during the video-making sessions at the shelter for homeless families in Columbia, South Carolina. I argue that these video narratives create a new discourse of girlhood that ruptures existing media, popular culture, and other societal scripts about girlhood and disenfranchised communities—a discourse of girlhood unscripted—which brings into play the complex intersections of class, ethnicity, race, and gender and produces a new realm of representation. Drawing on her daily experiences of poverty, hunger, violence, incarceration, and racism, Kiara’s narratives also pose a challenge to the field of girlhood studies which continues to focus on White, middle-class femininity thereby creating a scholarly trap of representation.
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Since the establishment of Girls' studies as a distinct research field within feminist scholarship in the early 1990s, interest in girls' practices of "doing girl-hood" (Currie, Kelly, & Pomerantz, 2009, p. 3) appears to be blooming and... more
Since the establishment of Girls' studies as a distinct research field within feminist scholarship in the early 1990s, interest in girls' practices of "doing girl-hood" (Currie, Kelly, & Pomerantz, 2009, p. 3) appears to be blooming and expanding into diverse areas of knowledge-from communications and psychology to education and art. This vibrant expansion is also marked by a desire to situate girls as active agents and producers of culture and meaning and to understand their subject positions: a view that is distinctly different from a previously popular (and largely objectivist) construction of girls as victims of the dominant patriarchal discourses and representations. While we see this recent paradigm shift as important and necessary, since it attempts to access actual girls' lived experiences and goes beyond the analysis of girl constructions in popular texts, we also see it as problematic and contested. Most importantly, it creates what Valerie Walkerdine (2007) called a "split. 0 0 between the passive consumer and the active maker of meaning" (po 5) that perpetuates the dichotomies of "activity and passivity" (p. 7) in our understanding of the girl subject. These dichotomies of active/passive and agent/victim-akin to the classic subject/object split-can lead us to simplistic assumptions that in order to see a girl as a subject, we have to reposition her as an "active" maker of meaning who can intentionally resist the dominant constructions of gender and ultimately liberate herself from them. As Walkerdine argued, this view of activity/agency is rooted in the Cartesian philosophical tradition that under-_2