Girls, Texts, Cultures ed. by Clare Bradford and Mavis Reimer (review)

In their excellent introduction to this excellent collection, editors Clare Bradford and Mavis Reimer explain the aim of the 2010 University of Winnipeg symposium that was the origin of this book—a desire to "generate and sustain dialogue between two groups of scholars: those focusing on texts for and about girls [children's literature scholars] and those who investigate contemporary girlhoods [scholars from the field of girls' studies]" (1). They note that "the title of the book signals its disciplinary and conceptual breadth" (9). Whereas the term "girlhood" suggests "a unitary state of being a girl," the plural term "girls" instead emphasizes "the diversity of girls' locations and ways in which familial, cultural, and national discourses shape subjectivities" (8). The plural term "texts" reflects the collection's adoption of "an expansive view of texts, and their genres, forms, styles, and functions" (9). And the plural term "cultures" points to both "the diversity of cultural contexts in which girls are located and also to the fact that girls are active in producing texts and engaging with others to create cultural forms" (9).

The twelve chapters in the collection indeed make good on its claim to respect the plurality of girlhoods and the need to understand each one in its historical, geographic, and cultural specificity. So Kabita Chakraborty's chapter exploring Indian girls' reactions to the representation of romance in Bollywood films focuses in particular on the specific ways in which unmarried Muslim young women in the slums of Kolkata "pick and choose different aspects of Bollywood culture to inform their dating processes and romantic lives" (203). Sandrina de Finney and Johanne Saraceno's chapter analyzing responses by indigenous girls in Canada to racialized representations of their identities limits its focus to indigenous girls living in small towns and cities, to contrast with previous work on indigenous girls in large cities or rural settings. Claudia Mitchell's chapter on the shifting boundaries of knowledge in social justice research is sensitive to differences among girls in Ethiopia, Rwanda, and South Africa. Readers learn how and why specificity matters. With the same commendable breadth of topics combined with carefully focused lens of inquiry, the range of texts examined here includes not only the familiar category of books for young readers but films and television shows, paper dolls and flap books, video games and other digital game play, and, perhaps most important, photographs, videos, and commentary created by girls themselves.

The chapters are informed not only by recognition of the significance of place in understanding representations of girlhood but also of time. Some of the most thought-provoking essays look at the evolution of a textual form from one historical period to another. Jacqueline Reid-Walsh's lovely chapter, "Movable Morals: Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Flap Books and Paper Doll Books for Girls as Interactive 'Conduct Books,'" lets us see today's interactive media texts as heirs of much older texts that, like the texts of today, "both reinforce the conventional and also provide spaces where girls can resist, negotiate, or subvert the aims of these texts" (212). She traces the historical evolution from the more limited autonomy-respecting possibilities of eighteenth-century flap books to the more transgressive "affordances" of nineteenth-century paper dolls, whose movable heads make possible multiple play patterns: "Since there is a physical separation between the paper doll figure and the scripted narrative, the paper figures have their own potential life as toys that could extend or subvert the story" (228).

Likewise, Pamela Knights's insightful close reading of ballet books from Noel Streatfeild's Ballet Shoes to twenty-first-century offerings gives nuanced attention to shifting ways of navigating and reconciling the active drive and discipline needed to excel as a dancer with the passive hyper-femininity ("ethereal, beautiful, silent, and sublime"[77]) idealized by classical ballet, with more recent boy ballet books diverting ambition "into the plots of masculine drives and desires" (96) and in the process arguably displacing girls altogether...