Girls' Studies

Th is article examines the practical construction and eff ects of the schoolgirl as an emergent social category in contemporary Kenyan Maasai society against mainstream development’s fi guring of the girl-child. The paper relies upon ninety-eight interviews with schoolgirls between the ages of ten-seventeen in nine primary schools in Kajiado District, Kenya. A contradictory resistance to traditional gender norms and social forms characterizes the schoolgirls’ narratives of education and development in their daily lives. These narratives are embedded in larger questions regarding the transnational intersections of ethnicity and gender in the formation of local identities in marginalized indigenous communities in postcolonial Kenya.
Without disputing the practical necessities of educating girls, I problematize the seamless rhetoric concerning formal schooling as a neutral public good in order to open up the complex conversation about educational access and attainment in the global south today.

"Guavas for Dummies, American Jíbaras, & Postnational Autonomy: When I Was Puerto Rican in the Hemispheric Turn" (2019) re-engages this text after I taught it in Puerto Rico four years. In this 2009 essay, Santiago’s memoir is said to bridge U.S. and Caribbean lit. WIWPR begins with a remembered Puerto Rico, and ends in the author’s adulthood in the USA. Studying Santiago’s text within a trajectory of immigrant narratives familiarizes the text to readers who are often processing their own entries into the US / its cultural orbit. This essay examines Santiago’s representation of jibaros, a subculture whose place in in Puerto Rico parallels the conflicted relationship many Jamaicans have with Rastafarians. Also, the theme of “Translating and Resisting Imperialism” is developed through a close reading of the chapter “The American Invasion of MacÚn.” Santiago’s treatment of gender roles in her family is also explored.

Beginning with a critique of the resiliency literature, the authors suggest that girls' struggles at adolescence are, fundamentally, a response to loss of power and can best be understood within the relational and sociopolitical contexts of girls' lives. They introduce the notion of hardiness as an alternative to resilience and consider positive relationships with significant adults in girls' lives as potential hardiness zones, that is, spaces of real engagement and opportunities for girls to experience control, commitment, and challenge. Such hardiness zones move the focus from the individual girl to the network of relationships that create girls' social worlds and environments, allowing girls access to skills, relationships, and possibilities that enable them to experience power and meaning. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)

Cultivating hardiness zones for adolescent girls: A reconceptualization of resilience in relationships with caring adults.. Available from: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/232512634_Cultivating_hardiness_zones_for_adolescent_girls_A_reconceptualization_of_resilience_in_relationships_with_caring_adults [accessed Apr 20, 2015].

Iron supplementation has been suggested as a strategy for prevention and treatment of iron deficiency (ID) and iron deficiency anemia (IDA) in many countries, but non-compliance of daily regimens and common dosage remain as major challenges. The aim of this study was to investigate the effects of low dose once weekly iron supplementation in adolescent girls. The study was designed as a community-based, randomized, supplementation trial. The initial sample consisted of 200 female high school students, aged 14–16 years old, of whom 193 students concluded the study. They were randomly selected and assigned into either iron-supplemented group (ISG) or iron-unsupplemented group (IUG). The ISG received 150 mg ferrous sulfate once weekly for 16 weeks, whereas the IUG received nothing. Weight, height, and hematological parameters were measured and compared between the two groups before and after the intervention. There was no significant difference between the initial measures of the two groups before the intervention. After 16 weeks of intervention, mean of hemoglobin and serum ferritin improved significantly in ISG compared to IUG. At the beginning of the study, percent of anemia, IDA, and ID in ISG were 12.5%, 8.3%, and 30.2%, whereas these figures for IUG in this period of study were 14.4, 10.3, and 38.2, respectively, which were not significantly different between the two groups. However, percentages of the above items at the end of study in ISG were 2.1%, 0%, and 21.9%, respectively. In contrast to IUG, all cases of IDA were abolished in the ISG. Our study showed that once weekly supplementation of 150 mg ferrous sulfate for 16 weeks significantly improved iron status in female adolescents and effectively treated IDA. There is no need for higher dosage of iron for supplementation that may cause adverse effects and bear higher costs.

This paper explores the relationship between girls’ schooling and
empowerment in western China in the first decade of the 21st century. This paper
adopted a capability-empowerment framework based on Sen’s capability
approach into which were integrated concepts by Bourdieu, Appadurai,
Nussbaum, Kabeer, and Unterhalter, to help to understand the tenacity with
which village girls pursued schooling. In interviews with a group of 23 girls and
young women, several valued functionings of intrinsic capability sets in the
freedom dimensions of well-being and agency and their association with rising
levels of school attainment were found. The girls were found to be gaining
empowering capabilities through schooling, but that these were not equally
distributed, neatly slicing the group into two sharply defined groups with
different life paths. One set dropped out in the middle school years with a smaller
set of empowerment capabilities to work in low-skilled jobs in cities, which
offered them new places to change. The other set remained in school longer to
achieve a larger set of empowering functionings that they converted into more
substantive freedoms in a variety of settings.

This essay reports on the perspectives of young feminist-identified women who have listened to the music of the riot grrrls and/or the Spice Girls. In previous analyses, scholars have found the Spice Girls’ commercialization of the riot grrrls’ feminist message a
problematic instance of commodity feminism. This essay offers an alternative viewpoint: Commercialized girl power may actually lead some listeners back to the source, indicating that a consideration of the chronology of encounter is necessary in assessing the merits and problems of commodity feminist texts.

A study released in April 2011 by the State Statistics Committee surveyed 19,711 women from 20 regions of Azerbaijan, and 37 percent acknowledged that they had married before the age of 18; 29 % when they were between the ages of 18 and 19. Only 9% of the women surveyed got married at or after the age of 25.

In this study, especially the students attending vocational and technical Anatolian high schools were focused on and the subject was handled from the perspective of students and teachers. First of all, it was tried to determine the vocational goals, future plans of female students attending vocational and technical Anatolian high schools and the obstacles they face while trying to achieve these goals. Secondly, the opinions of the teachers working in the vocational high schools and their contributions to the future plans of their students were determined. The study group consists of 139 students attending the 9th, 10th, 11th and 12th grades of Vocational and Technical Anatolian High School in Bartın city center and six teachers working in this school. In this study, one of the qualitative research methods, case study design was used. In the case study, individuals, events and processes related to a situation are examined in a holistic manner and analyzed using the content analysis method. In the study, it was determined that educational problems are among the factors that affect students' school success. The contribution of the family and the teacher to the student or the indifference of the families, economic problems and psychological problems affect student success to a great extent.

Informed by Michel Foucault’s writings in The Birth of Biopolitics (2010), this paper traces a genealogy of the notion that human capital investments in women are some the most appropriate and effective  ways to achieve development, tracing its uptake by international development agencies, the World Bank, and finally by CSR programs influenced by the girl effect.  These human capital-centered approaches can be situated within the neoliberal reconfiguration of the domain of “the social” as a measurable and optimizable domain (Foucault 2010).  It is within this conception of the social that corporate social responsibility programs targeting global female factory workers propose to act, through targeted investments that are thought to lead not only to increases in productivity – but also to poverty alleviation, gender equality, and development.

This document considers whether the human rights and entitlements afforded to girls are protecting them from sexual exploitation in the UK, and whether those rights under international and national law and legislation are being observed and adhered to when working with girls. At the back of this document (starting at page 12) is a large table of human rights and legislative entitlements that girls who have been subjected to sexual violence should be afforded. The table explores whether the rights and entitlements are being observed and upheld in the UK using recent research and serious case reviews.

HITORI BIYORI (translated both as A Good Day for Being Alone and Being Alone), the second novel by Aoyama Nanae and the recipient of the prestigious 136th Akutagawa prize, follows the year in the life of Chizu Mizuta as she struggles to enter adulthood. It is a narrative that could be any other ‘coming of age’ story if it was not for the character of her elderly landlady. Together, the young woman and the old lady symbolise a meeting of two pervasive tropes of marginalised femininity in Japanese society: the shôjo and the yamamba, (young woman and the mountain witch). Both of these figures have been extensively discussed in previous scholarship, however, few studies look at the two in tandem, or recognise the possibility for such a nexus. By comparing literary and folkloric accounts of the yamamba with Hitori Biyori this article examines the relationship between Chizu and her landlady in terms of these two figures, the shôjo and yamamba, whilst also exploring how the relationship impacts on Chizu’s identity, personal growth and entrance into adulthood.

This article explores the way in which adolescent girls in Cape Town, South Africa, use a cellphone-based instant messaging service called MXit. Bosch addresses key issues such as the ‘why’ and ‘how’ of girls’ use of MXit, and the role mobile telephony plays in forming identity. Although currently MXit is used primarily as a social tool, other uses need to be identified and explored. In South Africa, a significant percentage of adults have access to cellphones, as opposed to fixed lines or the Internet. Against this backdrop, the article argues that MXit can be used as an educational tool, since it offers a promising method of communicating for educational purposes.

In this talk I outline my positions related to research on bullying for the World Anti-bullying Forum 2017, Stockholm #WABF2017. I argue 'bullying' and 'cyberbullying' are concepts that are overused and perhaps reaching the end of their ability to explain or address the complexity of conflict and violence in institutional settings or online in our digitally mediated world. New terminology is needed to enable the reduction of gender, sexual, race-related (and other forms of) violence. Effective strategies to improve the (e)safety and well-being of young people in schools must consider student's backgrounds and protected identities and rights. The terms violence, technologically facilitated violence, harassment, abuse, hate-speech, conflict, sexism, racism, homophobia (and others) all offer useful tools to expand our vocabulary and analysis as we work to tackle aggression and violence in schools.

Since its 2012 debut Girls has received an extraordinary amount of attention and criticism from both academic circles and popular culture critics. It has been critiqued for its depiction of female nudity and its portrayal of female sexual subjecthood. At the center of these debates is how author–star Lena Dunham’s body is positioned and utilized aesthetically and politically. This essay examines the brand of body politics and mode of female sexual subjecthood that the series creates and performs. In order to track how Girls produces this body politics and female sexual subjecthood I position it in relation to earlier feminist television series and indie cinema. This essay argues that Girls’ particular brand of body politics and the mode of female sexual subjecthood it depicts is characterized by emotional intimacy, irony and reflexivity. Furthermore I contend that Girls’ gender politics is enabled by the series’ utilization of a low-key aesthetic and the “smart” tendency, more commonly discussed in relation to American indie cinema.

Premios:
Nicolás Guillén Award to Outstanding Book in Philosophical Literature by the Caribbean Philosophical Association, 2016.
Honorable Mention, Premio Iberoamericano Award, LASA, 2016
Premio Montserrat Ordóñez to Outstanding Book in Feminist Studies, LASA Sección Colombia, 2016
Un estudio de la representación de la infancia femenina en novelas de escritoras del Caribe hispano, La Rebelión es también un ensayo sobre la multifacética relación de los cuerpos y el poder en el Caribe. Desafiando la interpretación común de las narrativas de infancia como reflejo de una nostalgia por la “inocencia”, Celis ilumina las expresiones de deseo y rabia, y las reacciones corporales de niñas y adolescentes ante las variadas estrategias de apropiación patriarcal de su sexualidad. Las batallas de las niñas por “un cuerpo propio”, inspiran la conceptualización de la “conciencia corporal” como fuerza y vehículo de prácticas liberatorias que niñas, mujeres y caribeños siguen oponiendo a los parámetros normativos del género, en la ficción y en el mundo real.

“Un libro poderoso e innovador… que hace sustanciales aportes al campo no solo de los estudios del Caribe hispano, sino a los de la cultura de género latinoamericana” (BEATRIZ GONZÁLEZ-STEPHAN, Rice University).


A study of the representation of girlhood in the work of Hispanic Caribbean women writers, The Rebellion is also a critique of the multifaceted relation of power and gendered bodies in Caribbean cultures. Challenging dominant associations of childhood narratives with nostalgia or lost innocence, Celis sets the spotlight on the desire, anger, and the bodily expressions girls deploy to contest the patriarchal appropriation of their sexuality. The girls’ battles for a body "of their own” inspire the conceptualization of "corporeal consciousness" as a force and the means of emancipatory practices that girls, women and Caribbean subjects continue to oppose to the parameters governing gender, in fiction and in the real world.

“A powerful and innovative work (…) that makes substantial contributions not only to the field of Caribbean studies but also to the study of Latin American gender culture,” (Beatriz Gonzalez-Stephen, Rice University).

The fashion model is a highly visible presence within contemporary culture. Models are featured in fashion shows, magazines, television programmes, websites, and wherever fashion and female beauty imagery are present. Melania Trump, the current First Lady of the United States, is presented as a former model on the US government website. Dress, behaviour, and fashion play important 1 roles within fiction, including in girls' series books. From Louisa May Alcott's novels Little Women, Little Men, and Jo's Boys (1868-1888), Carolyn Keene's Nancy Drew books (1930-) to contemporary series such as Gossip Girl (2002-2011) by Cecily von Ziegesar, Airhead (2008-2010) by Meg Cabot, and Geek Girl (2013-2017) by Holly Smale, series books have evolved and remained popular over the last 150 years. What girls wear and how they look have been important aspects of the genre. Books aimed at girls and young women are historically connected to fairy tales, religious fiction, and education, and have been important in setting standards of behaviour for girls and young women. The fashion model became a frequent role model in girl culture in the 1960s, and her influence has grown over the years. As the chapter explains, in girls' novels, fashion has been more important than romance. The methodological approach of this study is literary and cultural content analysis; it emphasises a sociological and historical viewpoint to understand the role of the fashion model, then and now; fashion cities; female beauty culture; and notions of female achievement as depicted in Janey Scott's four 1961 girls' series of novels, entitled Sara Gay Model Girl.

The mass school shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School (MSD) in Parkland, Florida, which resulted in the deaths and injury of seventeen students and staff members, sparked national outrage over increasingly partisan Abstract: When young people took to the streets on 24 March 2018 as part of March for Our Lives (MFOL), they leveraged narratives of age and generation to inspire others to take action on preventing gun violence incidences across the United States. Despite the political precarity associated with their ages, student-activists claimed public space and voice as more than the victims of the so-called "mass shooting generation." This article explores how narratives of age and generation shape their political legibility and authority in the MFOL movement. Based on analyses of Parkland student speeches and reflections and MFOL protest signs, I consider the paradoxical manner in which youth-activists play with notions of age in order to mark themselves as essential political actors and vulnerable not-yet subjects in need of protection. It is my contention that MFOL illustrates the liminal borders of youth political (in)visibility and the transformative possibilities of age-based politics for youth-activists.

Much of the research on the changing landscape of Internet pornography (Porn 2.0) has neglected the societal implications of the distribution and consumption of pornography within homosocial male-only online communities. The present study uses in-depth interviews to examine how Israeli men, who partake in homosocial pornography exchange on WhatsApp friends' groups of their own creation, capitalize on their activity and its uses, and what sort of capital they suppose they are accumulating. The paper portrays how the users' engagement translates into Bourdieuian capital accumulation. Results indicate that participants benefit from such activity on three main levels, which were conceptualized according to Bourdieu's field theory, as forms of noneconomic capital: social, symbolic, and cultural. We argue that pornographic activity on WhatsApp potentially grants participants a desirable aura of heterosexual masculinity. Such premium is of special importance in the machoistic and militaristic Israeli society, which encourages hegemonic masculinity.

Many of the responses to teen sexting are ineffective and unjust: authorities sometimes blame the victims of nonconsensual sexting, use harsh child pornography laws against minors, and give teenagers the advice to simply abstain. While some scholars champion girls’ media production practices, mass media coverage of girls’ social media use since the early 2000s has emphasized concerns that they are creating and sharing sexual content. In this paper, I illustrate and challenge common concerns about the negative effect of digital and mobile media on how girls communicate and who they can communicate with. I argue that thinking about sexting as media production would encourage researchers to pay more attention to the sexual opportunities of social media as well as the risks. Thinking about consensual sexting as an act of media authorship also pushes models of media production to better account for the privacy rights of people who create social media content.

The Nike Foundation’s flagship corporate social responsibility campaign, “The Girl Effect,” has generated support for targeted investments in adolescent girls as the “key” economic development in the global south. As a representational regime, the campaign is example of an increasingly hegemonic discourse of global girl power via formal education. In an era of “sexualization moral panic” regarding representations of contemporary young female sexual subjectivities in the global north, this paper considers ideological figurings of adolescent female sexual embodiment in the global south through a discursive analysis of the campaign’s three most popular viral videos.

Japanese contemporary culture, including fashion, has increasingly gained popularity outside Japan, making it a timely topic for both scholarly and wider publics. Most current studies of popular culture focuses on manga, anime, and other such forms of visual culture, and dress and design studies are also emerging as a rapidly growing field. Building on the works of McVeigh (2000), Miller (2006), Slade (2010) and Steele (2010), this book addresses this new interest in an innovative fashion, expanding the significance of dress and delving into a wide range of examples from films, magazines, music videos and literature. By connecting diverse topic areas including dress, gender, media and cultural studies, Japanese Fashion Cultures analyzes the relationship of fashion aesthetics and gender identity within an increasingly interconnected, transnational world.
The book pays particular attention to the relationship of past and present. It examines contemporary Japanese fashion trends that adopt and restyle European historical clothing forms: the Edwardian dandy style, Victorian little girls’ dresses, and the Rococo and Romantic dress typical of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Japanese fashion culture actively promoted European clothing styles both politically and aesthetically, particularly since the country’s re-engagement with Euro-America in 1868. Throughout this book, I refer to the theory of “format” and “product” articulated by cultural sociologist Keiko Okamura (2003) where a cultural form, in this case Euro-American clothing styles, can be seen as a “format” when accepted globally. This standardized “format” becomes a carrier of the locality of cultures, allowing its “local” characteristics to be visible, measurable, and comparable with that of other cultures. Through this theoretical idea, I explain complex cultural theory using compelling examples. For instance, differences in preferred modes of masculinity and fashionability in Japan and Euro-America will be explained via garments and advertisement campaigns of Dolce and Gabbana. This process will therefore reveal the characteristics both universal and culturally specific to the Japanese context, including the ways in which Japanese men and women engage with fashion today. This poses a challenge to a widely held, often Eurocentric notion that Japanese men and women simply desire to imitate their Euro-American counterparts.

Japanese Fashion Cultures provides comprehensive insights into representations of clothes and gender in a society still poorly understood by outsiders. I dispel the popular misconception that Japan approves of gender inequalities and that women still occupy inferior social positions to men, expressed also in clothing. I argue that using the lens of fashion reveals the complexities of gender relations in Japan. Four contemporary case studies position the argument: young men’s fashion magazines, female performers’ use of Lewis Carroll’s “Alice” in music video, “Lolita” fashion and Tetsuya Nakashima’s film Shimotsuma monogatari (Kamikaze Girls, 2004), and the continuing remarking of “Ivy-League” style in Japan. These four examples are notable for their adoption of historic European and American clothing forms. Their relatively “mainstream” stature in contemporary Japanese culture comes with a “twist” or unconventional characteristics. The “mainstream” standing of these types of popular culture indicates their reach, consumed by a great number of individuals within Japan. Certain qualities they manifest, on the other hand, impose a subtle, almost “delicate” kind of revolt against a set of idées fixes surrounding the relationship between clothes and gender. Using media and cultural texts as a primary source for discussion enables consideration of these complex links between distortion and reality. As Diana Crane (1990) has argued, both are parts of the “real” world where these case studies are first produced.

The first important issue this book raises is that, through negotiating male readers’ desire to attract admirers and to dress for their own pleasure, young men’s fashion magazines endorse the idea that crafting a pleasant look is the foundation of self-assurance and a successful life. Secondly, I show that female Japanese singers allow an accentuation of femininity without necessarily sexualization through the use of Japanese cute (kawaii) aesthetics. The third possibility this book explores is that highly decorative styles of Japanese Lolita fashion should not be read as symbolic of restriction and passivity. The fourth point this book addresses is that, as illustrated by the Japanese embrace of the “Ivy style,” both men and women engage with fashion in very similar ways. This is a major point of difference with the role of fashion historically in Euro-America.

These readings offer novel ways to understand the relationship between gender and dress, which is often blamed for maintaining repressive distinctions between “man” and “woman” in contemporary culture. Ultimately, this book aims to show that the Japanese appropriation of European clothing forms shows that there might be different, and hence less rigid approaches to understanding the relationship between fashion and gender. Japanese refashioning of European clothing concepts, this book argues, offers a compelling case for the implication of the aesthetics of fashion, gender, and cross-culturalism.

“Masafumi Monden's book is a gem. By bringing together and exploring colourful examples from Japan's vibrant street culture and fashion, he artfully demonstrates just how individualistic, innovative, and original the Japanese are. He also dismantles myths and misperceptions about gender relations, sexuality, and social relations in Japan.” –  Brian J. McVeigh, University of Arizona, USA,

“Monden provides a rich and detailed examination of the subtle intricacies of gendering and sexuality in contemporary Japanese fashion. While exploring the extremes of Tokyo street fashion he is able to illuminate some of the mechanism behind the perplexingly divergent ways to be a man or a woman in today's Japan.” –  Toby Slade, University of Tokyo, Japan,

“Masafumi Monden's fascinating and important book, Japanese Fashion Cultures, will be of great interest to everyone interested in fashion, gender, globalization, and youth culture. His research on young Japanese men and their attitudes towards fashion is especially significant, as it calls into question persistent stereotypes about how men and women are assumed to engage with fashion.” –  Valerie Steele, Director and Chief Curator, The Museum at FIT, New York City, USA

“From the possibility of subversion in lace-trimmed Lolita outfits and petite pinafores straight out of Alice in Wonderland, to the enchantments of Milkboy dandyism, Masafumi Monden's Japanese Fashion Cultures offers up a delightful combination of case studies that reveal the very best thinking in fashion theory today.” –  Laura Miller, Eiichi Shibusawa-Seigo Arai Endowed Professor of Japanese Studies and Professor of Anthropology, University of Missouri–St. Louis, USA

"Masafumi Monden’s Japanese Fashion Cultures shines a spotlight on many of the looks that brought the world’s attention to an island nation which, like Britain, has consistently punched above its weight in matters of dress and appearance...In Japanese Fashion Cultures you have some most interesting comments about gender and I for one have learned a lot about the less reported (in the West at least) looks for young Japanese males." - Ted Polheums, Author of Streetstyle: From Sidewalk to Catwalk

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.

Préface de Michelle Perrot Postface de Coline Cardi
Emprisonnées, infantilisées, médicalisées pour les faire se tenir tranquilles. Voici 20 portraits de jeunes filles qui sortent du cadre.

Si les « mauvais garçons » ont leurs héros, de Gavroche à Joey Starr en passant par James Dean, les « mauvaises filles » sont les invisibles de l’histoire.
Dans cet ouvrage, Véronique Blanchard et David Niget dévoilent ces ombres fugaces qui surgissent au détour d’archives médicales ou judiciaires : « vagabonde », « hystérique », « fille-mère », « prostituée », « fugueuse », « cheffe de bande », « punk », « crapuleuse »…
Par le biais d’une vingtaine de portraits incarnés de « mauvaises filles » jugées immorales, de 1840 aux années 2000, ils rendent un visage et une histoire à ces destins orageux. Ils cartographient les lieux qu’elles traversent ou qui les enferment – lieux de perdition (fête foraine, guinguette, bal), de coercition (internat, couvent, prison, asile), de soumission (maison close, foyer familial).
Étouffées et contraintes depuis des décennies par le poids des normes juridiques, religieuses, médicales, familiales, ces mineures « incorrigibles et rebelles » ont néanmoins fini, par leurs résistances, par devenir des actrices du changement social, culturel et politique.
Alors, déviantes ou dissidentes ?

They were imprisoned, infantilized, and medicalized just to keep them quiet. Here are 20 portraits of young women who break the mold.
While “bad boys” are our heroes, from Gavroche to Joey Starr and James Dean, “bad girls” have been sidelined by history.
In this book, Véronique Blanchard and David Niget shed light on the fleeting shadows which emerge from medical and court archives: “vagrants,” “hysterics,” “teenage mothers,” “prostitutes,” “runaways,” “female gang leaders,” “punks,” and “vamps.”
Using over twenty portraits, taken between 1840 and 2000, of “bad girls” who were judged to be immoral, the authors give these stormy destinies faces and life stories. They map the places of passage or confinement of these women: houses of sin (amusement parks, cabarets, balls), of correction (boarding houses, convents, prisons, asylums), or of submission (brothels, family homes).

Suffocated and chained for decades by the weight of legal, religious, medical, and family norms, these “intractable and rebellious” underage women have nevertheless, through their resistance, become actors of social, cultural, and political change. So, are they deviants or dissidents?