Girlhood

Picture singer Britney Spears, if you can. Imagine her at different moments in her career, starting post-Mickey Mouse Club, impossibly fresh-faced, sweet, innocent. Later, singing "no longer a girl, not yet a woman." Finally, swaggering and brash onstage and off, announcing her engagement to an unemployed back-up dancer and young father of two. Britney proposed and bought the enormous diamond engagement ring. She is, in some very real senses, the "future girl" Anita Harris ably describes in her book. The girl of the future, the women of tomorrow and tomorrow and beyond...

Nineteenth-century girlhood was imagined as a decisive period of liminality: distinct from both childhood and adulthood, it shaped the womanhood that followed it. Shipboard diaries written by emigrants engage with a similar period of transformation. Discussing three diaries written by girls en route from Scotland and Ireland to New Zealand, this essay explores how the liminality of girlhood and the liminality of the emigrant voyage are intertwined. While narrating a spatial and temporal transition, the three texts also negotiate a transformation in the concept of girlhood: the notion of the ideal colonial girl as brave, resourceful and hardworking developed traditional British expectations of women as responsible for the domestic sphere and as upholders of morals. Whereas two of the diarists stress qualities such as bravery, a sense of adventure, and good health, the third diarists focuses on a more traditional concept of girls as pure and virtuous. The texts’ adherence to and departures from the genre conventions of shipboard diaries emphasise the liminality of the journey, mirroring the transformative potential of new notions of girlhood.

He  comisariado el ciclo de cine Gandules 17 'Rebeldes y peligrosas'  para el Centro de Cultura Contemporánea de Barcelona. Entre los días 8 a 24 de agosto se han proyectado las películas 'No soy un ángel' (Wesley Ruggles, 1933)  'Johnny Guitar' (Nicholas Ray, 1954), 'La gran ciudad' (Mahanagar) Satyajit Ray, 1963), 'Instinto Básico' (Paul Verhoeven, 1992), 'Mommy'  (Xavier Dolan, 2014), 'Girlhood '(Bande de filles) (Céline Sciamma , 2014), 'La calle de la vergüenza' (Akasen Chitai) (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1956), 'La novia vestía de negro' (François Truffaut ,1968) y 'Nacidas para sufrir' (Miguel Albaladejo, 2009).
Una programación que tiene como eje la rebeldía y la peligrosidad, personajes femeninos que dinamitan los mandatos de género y sobre todo no asumen el rol de víctimas. Aquí tenéis la presentación al Ciclo así como las críticas de las películas.
Toda la info en: http://www.cccb.org/es/marco/ficha/gandules17-gas-natural-fenosa/226829

Haul videos are a unique vlogging format that is based on showing and reviewing a so called ‘haul’, which consists the outcome of shopping sessions. Haul vloggers are micro- and ordinary celebrities that have a large fan base, especially among female teens.

Bratz dolls, popular among pre-adolescent girls, have been the subject of widespread criticism. Many scholars, activists, educators, and parents have argued that the scantily clad fashion dolls contribute to the sexualization of girls that has been decried by the American Psychological Association, among others. As is often the case in studies of girls’ popular culture, however, these conversations about the problems with Bratz have rarely incorporated the voices of girls in the brand’s target audience. To address this gap, this article analyzes an afternoon of Bratz doll play by a small group of African-American girls, aged between 8 and 10 years. Th is article suggests that although critical concerns about Bratz’ sexualization are warranted, the dolls’ racial diversity may benefi t some girls’ play, enabling them to productively negotiate complex issues of racial identity, racism, and history while paying little attention to the dolls’ sexualized traits.

Building on the work of emerging scholarship on the girl group era of the 1950s and 1960s, this paper further illuminates the extent to which the girl groups challenged dominant discourses and hegemonic ideas of girlhood. By analyzing girl group songs which were both commercially popular and relatively obscure this paper reveals the incredible diversity within a genre that has sometimes been homogenized. Moreover, the paper highlights instances, both on record and in history, where girl group performers demonstrated resistance to the concept of the idealized girl. Feminist rhetoric, transgendered fantasies, same-sex relationships, inter-racial and inter-class romance, leftist and pacifist protest, murder, physical abuse, consensual pre-marital sex, teenage pregnancy, and date-rape were all subjects which were addressed in lyrics. And though girl group performers rarely wrote their own material, instances where these types of lyrics were present featured a disproportionate number of female songwriters and self-written material by group members.

"The ‘girl subject’ and ‘young femininity’ are repeatedly and with great effect being made increasingly visible as a particular social, cultural and psychical problematic in late capitalist societies (Driscoll, 2002). The last two decades have witnessed a burgeoning and interdisciplinary field of critical girlhood studies that have rapidly taken up this contested site of young femininity (e.g. Walkerdine, 1991; Hey, 1997; Walkerdine et al., 2001; Gonick, 2003; Aapola et al., 2004; Harris, 2004; Mitchell
and Reid-Walsh, 2005; Jiwani et al., 2006; Nayak and Kehily, 2007; Duits, 2008;Currie et al., 2009; Kearney, 2011; Hains, 2012; Ringrose, 2013). As a sociopolitical project, the figure of the contemporary girl is over-determined, weighted down with meaning and commonly represented through binary formations of celebratory postfeminist ‘girl power’ vs. crisis discourses of ‘girls at risk’ (Aapola et al., 2004; Gonick et al., 2009). One of the primary ‘luminosities’ (Deleuze in McRobbie, 2008) surrounding girls as both bearers of power and objects of risk centres on girls’ relationship to sexuality and entry into sexual womanhood. In this special issue, we bring together a series of articles that explore a veritable explosion of interest, debate and controversy over what is referred to as the (premature or hyper) ‘sexualisation of the (girl) child’.
One of our aims in this introduction is to invite readers to think about what the collection of articles and shorter ‘interchange’ pieces do together as a type of assemblage, where each article intra-acts with the other to create new potentials for thinking
about girls and sexuality. Each author explores in different ways how the figure of the ‘girl’ connects with culturally specific contexts across a range of topics and practices. The girl travels across the articles in multi-modal ways (as digital, as affect,
as animation, as biology, as brand, as policy discourse) and through different theoretical, disciplinary and political lenses. What follows is our own particular, partial tracing of the girl and her affective address across this engaging range of articles."

Disney animated princesses are broadcasted around the world through Disney Channel and its global affiliates, as well as through numerous other networks that purchase distribution rights.  In an attempt to provide diversity Disney in the last 25 years has featured non-western princesses -- such as Aladdin (1992), Pocahontas (1995), Mulan (1998), and Moana (2016). This study examines how princess in animated Disney movies are perceived and understood by girls (8-15 years) in three different countries, over two time-periods with a gap of nearly a decade (2009 & 2018).
The primary research question, considering Disney’s global reach, is how race, culture, presence of a royal family interact with transnational access to the same media content, in the perception of princess concept and about being a girl.  The selected countries provide an opportunity to explore differences in perception of Disney princesses between girls raised in country with and without a royal family, and between girls in non-western and western countries. Differences in the perception are attributed to local and national cultures that allow a different lens to view the same content.  A mixed method combining interviews, focus groups and participant generated images was used to gather data in India, Fiji and Sweden.  Results indicate Disney princesses, with their ubiquitous presence in various formats, e.g. media content, costumes and school stationery have created a uniform idea of beauty across countries.  Princesses in Disney were perceived by participants as being caucasian and American, regardless of the race or country they represented. Girls in India and Fiji did not identify with Jasmine or Mulan, who they considered ‘American’, whereas girls in Sweden considered Jasmine and Mulan as princesses of non-western origin.  Girls in India and Fiji did not think they could be princesses because of their skin color, and did not want to lead a life ‘restricted with responsibilities’, but girls in Sweden considered the same question from the place of a choice, i.e. they preferred not to lead a ‘boring’ and regulated life like that of a princess.  Participants from Fiji, with the least access to domestic programming that shows girls of Fijian origin were least likely to consider themselves capable of being a princess.

Sonam Doomtso (b. 1987) describes her lived experiences and recollections encompassing the first twenty years of her life. These include living on the grassland in Sichuan Province, experiences with relatives and neighbors; attending schools; moving to Lhasa; religious fasting; pilgrimage; encounters with marmot hunters; attending school in Xining City; and the death of her beloved grandfather.

This chapter seeks to interrogate normative notions of at-risk girlhood and violence, offering a roadmap for a broader terminology and reconceptualization of gender in girlhood studies. I argue that studying the knowledge produced by girl-driven activist organizations enables activist-scholars to rethink what constitutes girlhood from a perspective critical of how criminalized, homeless and street-involved, and incarcerated girls and gender non-conforming youth have been disciplined, managed, corrected, and punished as prisoners, patients, mothers, and victims of multiple, interconnected forms of violence through imprisonment, medicalization, and secure care. By showcasing case studies of anti-violence and abolitionist activism that contest sexual violence, colonial state control, and carceral state violence undertaken by girls whose identities stretch far beyond normative gender and racial binaries, I aim to frame a transnational discussion of girls' community activism within and against exclusionary notions of what constitutes girlhood and girls' social justice activism.

The female child protagonist has always been a major figure in the work of several Jamaican female fiction writers. More recently, however, Jamaican female writers from across the diaspora have begun to reveal a new kind of poetics through the presentation of their female child protagonist and the situations they encounter. This paper will explore the use of an emerging post-diasporic poetics in the work of Jamaican Children’s Literature author Diane Browne, which introduces fluid female identities constructed through the realities of globalisation and post-diasporic conditions. The female child protagonist represents a newly emerging female sensibility and consciousness, which enables readers to access both girlhood and womanhood through realities and perspectives tied to the migrant experience across different periods of time. Each protagonist portrays a self which exists beyond boundaries and outside of the dictates of the social ideals framing femaleness and the female migrant experience, embedded for so long in the Jamaican culture. Browne challenges both traditional and to some extent postmodern models of womanhood and female identity, through the way each of her female child protagonists are portrayed as they move through a post-diasporic process of navigation of both self and space in Browne’s texts.

While researchers and concerned adults alike draw attention to relational aggression among girls, how this aggression is associated with girls' agency remains a matter of debate. In this paper we explore relational aggression among girls designated by their peers as 'popular' in order to understand how social power constructs girls' agency as aggression. We locate this power, hence girls' agency, in contradictory messages about girlhood that, although ever-present 'in girls heads,' are typically absent in adult panic about girls' aggression. Within peer culture, power comes from the ability to invoke the unspoken 'rules' that police the boundaries of acceptable femininity. We thus challenge the notion advanced by Pipher and others that girls' empowerment entails (re)gain-ing an 'authentic voice.' In contrast, we suggest that such projects must be informed by an interrogation of how girls are positioned as speaking subjects.

There is an important emphasis on “one” in “one true love”. True love is coded as eternal and monogamous, fixed on one person, two people functioning as halves that become one completed unit.
We will explore representations of this idea in teen television series The Vampire Diaries (Plec and Williamson 2010-). Heroine Elena is desired by two vampire brothers. The importance of her choosing between them drives the plot; however, Elena’s reluctance to choose creates a radical anti-monogamous narrative space, one which female characters are rarely allowed to occupy. The multiplicity of her desire becomes a pleasurable and necessary perversion: choosing between the objects of her desire would result in her losing part of herself.
We will explore the activeness of Elena’s double desire and the foregrounding of her female gaze. The mise-en-scene, shot structure, and cinematographic framing work to highlight the dominance of the heroine’s gaze at the male object of desire. The design of this formal structure provides an invitation for the viewer to similarly engage in this viewing practice as they are aligned with Elena’s desiring gaze. This not only creates new and more fluid desiring positions for the heroine to occupy; it offers us an opportunity to conceptualise spectatorial practices that go beyond or undermine the strictures of the ‘male gaze’ and woman’s ‘to-be-looked-at-ness’ (Mulvey 1979). The Vampire Diaries powerfully constructs multiple male objects of desire for both Elena and the viewer, creating a subversive space in which viewers can explore their own potentially non-monogamous desires.

Nineteenth-century girlhood was imagined as a decisive period of liminality: distinct from both childhood and adulthood, it shaped the womanhood that followed it. Shipboard diaries written by emigrants engage with a similar period of transformation. Discussing three diaries written by girls en route from Scotland and Ireland to New Zealand, this essay explores how the liminality of girlhood and the liminality of the emigrant voyage are intertwined. While narrating a spatial and temporal transition, the three texts also negotiate a transformation in the concept of girlhood: the notion of the ideal colonial girl as brave, resourceful and hardworking developed traditional British expectations of women as responsible for the domestic sphere and as upholders of morals. Whereas two of the diarists stress qualities such as bravery, a sense of adventure, and good health, the third diarists focuses on a more traditional concept of girls as pure and virtuous. The texts’ adherence to and depar...

The beginning of the twenty-first century saw a vast expansion of media aimed at the pre-adolescent female consumer demographic. Through an analysis of Hannah Montana, and in particular its lead character Miley Stewart/Hannah Montana and star Miley Cyrus, this article argues that tween popular culture uses celebrity as an allegory for growing up female. Drawing upon the concept from within girlhood studies, it demonstrates that the girl ‘becoming’ a woman is paralleled with the girl ‘becoming’ a celebrity. Both are highly invested in formulations of the real and authentic, and Hannah Montana highlights this significance of the notion of staying true to yourself through celebrity, as a way of making sense of the tween’s growing up female. Fitting in with the broader contemporary postfeminist and neoliberal cultural context, Hannah Montana employs the narrative of a perpetual makeover, addressing the tween as a self-surveilling subject who must continually work to retain an ‘authentic’ self as she progresses towards womanhood. Both the onscreen girl and celebrity, Miley Stewart/Hannah Montana, and the franchise’s star, Miley Cyrus, are constructed as simultaneously becoming a woman and becoming a celebrity, and the three personae become more enmeshed as the series nears its end; the franchise draws upon the off-screen persona of Miley Cyrus to further parallel becoming a woman and becoming a celebrity and to emphasise the investment in the real. This article demonstrates that tween popular culture addresses the young, female viewer in terms of her becoming woman by teaching the importance of investing in celebrity, and effectively preparing her for the consumption of adult female films and television programmes.

Memory and storytelling can provide valuable tools for media scholars aiming to better understand popular media audiences from a historical perspective. Girls’ stories are particularly important because they have been absent from most official recorded history and archived documents. In this study, we
interview 30 U.S. women born 1918–1948 in order to uncover their girlhood experiences with mid-20th Century media. Their narratives reveal 1) a shared experience of radio listening; 2) an emphasis on the ‘‘experience’’ of using media artifacts rather than on the content; and 3) the appeal of music and dance as a girlhood pastimes.

ABSTRACT This special issue aims to animate discussions that might help us to make sense of complex social-cultural-material-temporal-historical intensities, forces and struggles of the sexual-girl-child and her body as she traverses diverse social, cultural and political fields: as body, image and affect. Our call for articles asked for engagements that could help theorise, research and understand the complex figuration of the sexual-girl-child in the contemporary socio-political moment, where enduring gendered, classed, raced and sexual inequalities are being recomposed and old and new feminisms are enlivened and re-tooled

The aftermath of the #MeToo campaign saw a myriad interrogations of sexuality and the way women perceive sex and intimacy. But, especially 'bad sex' became a wide topic of conversation in the press. This paper charts changes in media conversation over what constitutes 'bad sex' and consent over the course of the #MeToo campaign by looking at humorous portrayals of young women's painful sexual experiences in popular TV shows. This paper will begin by a brief review of Judith Butler's theory of sex and intercourse as social constructs and will then move onto interrogate some populist and journalistic writings lashing back at #MeToo, citing biological differences and male needs. This will open a conversation over sexual education and views that bypass 'relative deprivation', a theory by which 'disenfranchised groups, having been trained to expect little, tend paradoxically to report the same levels of satisfaction as their better-treated, more privileged peers' (Loofbourow, 2018). In practice this means, that men's account of 'bad sex' often includes erectile problems or a lack of orgasm, while women's accounts of the same term: 'bad sex', include much worse; coercion and physical pain.
This discourse will be built on primary examples from popular TV shows. In these there is a recurring theme where young women engage in sexual intercourse, and while the settings are humorous and invite the viewer to laugh, it makes it equally clear that the woman engaging in sex is suffering physical pain as a result.
In this paper I would like to argue, that 'relative deprivation' has been backdrop upon which male pleasure has been constructed regardless of its contribution to women's physical pain, what will be interesting to see is how these will be negotiated in popular media now in the aftermath of the #MeToo campaign.

In lieu of an abstract

"Author, teacher, mentor, tireless opponent of censorship and the guru of girlhood are just a few of the appellatives Judy Blume has acquired over her nearly fifty-year career as a writer for children and young adults. Through the adventures of Margaret, Deenie, Katherine and a host of others, Blume frankly explores racism, religion, family life, menarche, sexuality, body image, and what it means to be a girl while also legitimising and celebrating the interior lives of young girls. Indeed, Judy Blume's role in the lives of girls and women is indelible. With several of her seminal works — Are You There God? It's Me, Margret (1970), Deenie (1973), and Forever (1975) — first appearing in the early 1970s, Blume is also central to the golden age of young adult literature (YA) and thus to contemporary perceptions of the field. However, while Blume’s books are celebrated, they also face some of the harshest censorship associated with children’s and young adult literature."

FEATURING SIX FABULOUS PAPERS:
Childhood, Responsibility and the Liberal Loophole: Replaying the Sex-Wars in Debates on Sexualisation? by Robbie Duschinsky
Passive, Heterosexual and Female: Constructing Appropriate Childhoods in the 'Sexualisation of Childhood' Debate by Jessica Clark
'The Girl Effect': Exploring Narratives of Gendered Impacts and Opportunities in Neoliberal Development by Farzana Shain
Girls as the 'New' Agents of Social Change? Exploring the 'Girl Effect' Through Sport, Gender and Development Programs in Uganda by Lyndsay M.C. Hayhurst
Bodies in a Frame: Black British, Working Class, Teenage Femininity and the Role of the Dance Class by Camilla Stanger
Challenging Pedagogy: Emotional Disruptions, Young Girls, Parents and Schools by Rosalyn George and John Clay

Talk to University of Birmingham Women and Non-Binary Association, 21 March 2018.

How does a selfie become a weapon? In this talk Hannah will introduce her research on gender and nationalism in Israeli and Palestinian culture, discussing representations of Israel and the Israeli military in social media and pop culture that circulated in the summer of 2014, during Israel's 51-day war on Gaza. Bringing together IDF selfies, Gal Gadot's Instagram,  and Israeli 'dark comedy' Zero Motivation, this talk will situate contemporary representations of women in the Israel Defence Forces in the longer historical context of Zionism's gender politics, as well as contemporary practices of 'pinkwashing' and 'greenwashing'. It will think critically about how pop cultural portrayals of the teenage girl soldier help to shape positive Euro-American perceptions of Israeli military action.

In this paper, I am concerned with how mid-nineteenth-century children’s literature in the United States rhetorically constructed girlhood as a means for developing, teaching, and cementing dominant ideas regarding the formation of a healthy nation through the ideals of the republican family. In particular, I analyze Rebecca Sophia Clarke’s children’s book series Little Prudy, which was published between 1864 and 1868 under the pen name Sophie May. I argue that this series’ treatment of girlhood demonstrates one of the mechanisms through which the shift in the representation of dominant girlhood in this period from an overtly moralistic innocence to an unquestionably natural innocence occurred. I contend that this series participates in this representational shift by connecting a familiar moralistic and didactic narrative structure with the supposedly natural mischievous behavior of young children. That is, innocence is no longer demonstrated through a girl’s innate angelic behavior, but through her ability to learn those preferred behaviors and, eventually, work toward crafting those behaviors in others. In particular, Clarke deploys a narrative structure that is typical of children’s literature in the period and relies primarily on didactic lessons, or modeling. These lessons are contrived almost entirely through the interrelated tropes of mischief and punishment—the girls in the series misbehave and are then reprimanded accordingly. This back and forth between mischievous and corrected behavior not only delineates the behaviors “appropriate” to girlhood but also demonstrates how girls are meant to grow into the moral and emotional caregivers of the republican family, thus perpetuating its values across generations. Additionally, I consider how these tropes of mischief and punishment are complicated by class, race, immigration status, and religion in ways that work to construct the ideal girl as a white, middle-class, Protestant New Englander. Those who do not or cannot learn to conform to these boundaries of girlhood are stigmatized and denied access to the category of the ideal girl—a denial which ultimately works to limit who and what can matter for the construction of the republican family and, thus, the nation.

ABSTRACT This special issue aims to animate discussions that might help us to make sense of complex social-cultural-material-temporal-historical intensities, forces and struggles of the sexual-girl-child and her body as she traverses diverse social, cultural and political fields: as body, image and affect. Our call for articles asked for engagements that could help theorise, research and understand the complex figuration of the sexual-girl-child in the contemporary socio-political moment, where enduring gendered, classed, raced and sexual inequalities are being recomposed and old and new feminisms are enlivened and re-tooled

"Memory and storytelling can provide valuable tools for media scholars aiming to better understand popular media audiences from a historical perspective. Girls’ stories are particularly important because they have been absent from most official recorded history and archived documents. In this study, we interview 30 U.S. women born 1918–1948 in order to uncover their girlhood experiences with mid-20th Century media. Their narratives reveal 1) a shared experience of radio listening; 2) an emphasis on the ‘‘experience’’ of using media artifacts rather than on the content; and 3) the appeal of music and dance as a girlhood pastimes."

The voices, perspectives of girls and young women in history, political and civic education are rare, and those of girls of color are even rarer still. It is seldom that girls direct the researcher’s gaze or control the camera’s lens. What do debates about citizen participation and the roles that women and men play in Canadian society look like from the perspective of young women? How can collaborative, critical approach to research conducted with young women help us understand what young people are learning about their roles in society? What can their experiences and perspectives tell us about how citizenship and participation are conceptualized and learned in Canadian schools?

This interactive workshop will explore the use of participatory, visually-informed research methods with youth to explore gender and citizenship in Canada. In partnership with some of the research participants, this workshop will examine the benefits and challenges of such methods as well as the ethical implications. In addition, this workshop also reports on a study with high school girls group from the Toronto area that advocates for girls' rights, gender equality and civic participation. The girls used an action research methodology called photovoice to explore what they are learning about gender, citizen participation and schooling. By looking at life through the eyes of seven “civically active” girls, this study suggests that the girls identified traditional expectations in their families, schools and communities. This study strongly suggests the need for more opportunities for girls and boys to critically engage with dominant messaging they receive about the ways they participate in society.