This book focuses on girls and girlhoods, texts for and about girls, and the cultural contexts that shape girls’ experience. It brings together scholars from girls’ studies and children’s literature, fields that have traditionally conducted their research separately, and the collaboration showcases the breadth and complexity of girl-related studies.
Contributors from disciplines such as sociology, literature, education, and gender studies combine these disciplinary approaches in novel ways with insights from international studies, postcolonial studies, game studies, and other fields. Several of the authors engage in activist and policy-development work around girls who experience poverty and marginalization. Each essay is concerned in one way or another with the politics of girlhood as they manifest in national and cultural contexts, in the everyday practices of girls, and in textual ideologies and agendas.
In contemporary Western societies girls and girlhood function to some degree as markers of cultural reproduction and change. The essays in this book proceed from the assumption that girls are active participants in the production of texts and cultural forms; they offer accounts of the diversity of girls’ experience and complex significances of texts by, for, and about girls.
Chapter 1
From Girlhood, Girls, to Girls Studies: The Power of the Text
Dawn H. Currie
In this chapter Dawn Currie reflects on her own past and ongoing research in girlhood studies, demonstrating how frames of analysis have shifted since the 1980s. Currie argues that researchers’ own experiences shape the way they understand girlhood and the scholarly work in which they engage.
Chapter 2
On Secrets, Lies, and Fiction: Girls Learning the Art of Survival
Kerry Mallan
Kerry Mallan considers the strategies of survival proposed by contemporary texts for girls; strategies which include dissimulation, secrets, and concealment. Mallan considers how female identities are represented and advocated in Jacqueline Wilson’s Secrets, Mariko and Jillian Tamaki’s Skim, and Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis.
Chapter 3
Disgusting Subjects: Consumer-Class Distinction and the Affective Regulation of Girl Desire
Elizabeth Bullen
In this chapter Elizabeth Bullen takes up questions of consumerism, taste, and class to consider the discourses of desire and disgust which inform depictions of girls in contemporary texts. Bullen examines how girls are treated as sexual subjects in Cecily von Zeigesar’s Nothing Can Keep Us Together, the eighth novel in the Gossip Girl series, and Julie Burchill’s novel, Sweet.
Chapter 4
Still Centre Stage? Reframing Girls' Culture in New Generation Fictions of Performance
Pamela Knights
Pamela Knights focuses on how girls’ bodies are treated in the popular genre of ballet books. Her analysis points to the many contradictions which surround performances of female bodies in ballet settings, commencing with Noel Streatfeild’s classic Ballet Shoes (1936) and moving on to the pink-wrapped picture books and series books which continue to attract girl readers.
Chapter 5
Warrior Girl and the Searching Tribe: Indigenous Girls’ Everyday Negotiations of Racialization Under Neocolonialism
Sandrina de Finney and Johanne Saraceno
In this chapter Sandrina de Finney and Johanne Saraceno draw upon interviews with Indigenous girls living in three communities on Vancouver Island to identify the discourses which shape how Indigenous girls are perceived in these communities, the girls’ struggle to articulate Indigenous identities, and the political and bureaucratic processes which inhibit their self-determination.
Chapter 6
Girls’ Texts, Visual Culture and Shifting the Boundaries of Knowledge in Social Justice Research: The Politics of Making the Invisible Visible
Claudia Mitchell
In this chapter Claudia Mitchell discusses case studies she conducted among girls in Canada, South Africa, Ethiopa, and Rwanda. She focuses on what happens when girls are encouraged to interpret the visual images they themselves have produced, and the issues which arise from this style of participation.
Chapter 7
“Doing their bit”: The Great War and Transnationalism in Girls’ Fiction
Kristine Moruzi
Kristine Moruzi discusses girls’ fiction published during and immediately after the 1914-18 World War. Moruzi’s sample texts incorporate Australian, British, American, and Canadian fiction of this period and identify a transnational girlhood which both transcends discourses of nationhood, and also relies upon the circulation of texts and discourses across national boundaries.
Chapter 8
Bollywood as a Role Model: Dating and Negotiating Romance
Kabita Chakraborty
The lives of the young Muslim women who feature in Chakraborty’s chapter are regulated by the local and particular practices (social and religious) of the bustees (slum communities) of Kolkata. Simultaneously they are engrossed by the global products constituted by Bollywood films, whose narratives typically involve heterosexual romance. Chakraborty offers an analysis of how these young women negotiate the interplay between global media and local practices.
Chapter 9
Movable Morals: 18th and 19th Century Flap Books and Paper Dolls Books for Girls as Interactive “Conduct Books”
Jacqueline Reid-Walsh
The flap books and paper doll books analysed by Reid-Walsh propose highly conservative versions of conventional femininity; yet, as Reid-Walsh demonstrates, these interactive texts are susceptible to resistant and even parodic manipulation on the part of young readers.
Chapter 10
Wild Australian Girls? The Mythology of Colonial Femininity in British Print Culture, 1885-1926
Michelle J. Smith
Michelle Smith’s essay considers how depictions of Australian heroines in British texts between 1885 and 1926 construct a version of colonial femininity which critiques the British class system and asserts the virtues of imperial identity.
Chapter 11
Dynamic (Con)Texts: Close Readings of Girls’ Video Game Play
Stephanie Fisher, Jennifer Jenson, and Suzanne de Castell
Stephanie Fisher, Jennifer Jenson and Suzanne de Castell’s chapter profiles the behaviours of girl video game players. Through their gameplay and their production of alternative narratives, these girls formed “gaming identities” which destabilized the male/female gamer binary which has been promulgated by gaming companies and accepted as a given in much gaming research.
Chapter 12
Reading Smart Girls: Post-Nerds in Post-Feminist Popular Culture
Shauna Pomerantz and Rebecca Raby
Shauna Pomerantz and Rebecca Raby examine how the “post-nerd smart girl”--attractive, intelligent and sexually desirable--is portrayed in The Gilmore Girls, High School Musical and Veronica Mars. Analysing the figures of Rory, Gabriella and Veronica, Pomerantz and Raby consider the extent to which these “smart supergirl” figures are inflected by post-feminist and neo-liberal discourses.
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