Notes
N o t e s CHAPTER 1 I use notational devices to mark different sources of ethnographic material. FN indicates fieldnotes and TR ANS indicates transcript material which are recordings of the focus group discussions with the girls who participated in the video project. The date follows the FN or TR ANS designation. The lines of the transcripts are numbered and the parenthetical references in the texts are to the line numbers. Nonstandard English used by the girls is transcribed as spoken. A transcript line that ends with “—” and is followed by a sentence beginning without a capital in the first word, indicates an interruption to the first speaker by the second. 1. For a very interesting discussion on new forms of classed femininity emerging out of processes of globalization see Walkerdine, Lucey, and Melody 2001. 2. For example, the issue of girls’ lack of self-esteem has recently surfaced as one such social concern. In some of the outburst of popular literature on the topic, there is a sense of moral panic in the tone of the argument. See for example Pipher 1994, Sadker and Sadker 1994, and Orenstein 1994. 3. Of the many vocabularies for understanding culture and power currently circulating , I have used two. The first, “discourse,” is associated with Foucault and the second, “hegemony,” with Gramsci. The former vocabulary is particularly useful for bringing together issues of meaning and practice in examining the construction of power; the latter calls attention to divergent political stakes in processes of social transformation. Used together , they make it possible to ask how people shape the very ideas and institutions that make it possible for them to act as subjects. 4. Although the video consisted of five characters only three of their stories are presented and analyzed in this book. 5. This formulation of the issue has been most significantly developed within certain philosophic and psychoanalytic traditions. Diana Fuss, for example, identifies Hegel and French Hegelianism as having a long history exploring the issue of alterity and its relationship to different attempts to address the question, “[H]ow is it that only through the other I can be myself, only in the place of the other I can arrive at a sense of self?” (1995, 3–4). This work has also been influential within some psychoanalytic discussions, for example, Jacques Lacan’s 189 well-known concept of the mirror phase (“The Mirror-Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience” Ecrits, trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: WW. Norton, 1977). 6. See the section on “Lordship and Bondage” in G. W. F. Hegel’s 1977 The Phenomenology of Mind. 7. Axel Honneth presents a similar case for the interrelationship between recognition and identity. Combining the philosophy of the young Hegel with the social psychology of Mead, he argues that the “struggle for recognition” is a condition that gives rise to the possibility of subjectivity. Like Frantz Fanon (1967), who argues for an ethics of mutual identification, “a world of reciprocal recognitions,” Honneth sees the promise for an ethical form of life with a moral potential to lie within the dependence on mutual recognition . He says, “[O]ne can develop a practical relation to self only when one has learned to view oneself, from the normative perspective of one’s partner in interaction, as their social addressee. This imperative, which is anchored in the social life process, provides the normative pressure that compels individuals to remove constraints on the meaning of mutual recognition, since it is only by doing so that they are able to express socially the continually expanding claims of subjectivity” (1996, 92). 8. While I am focussing on the ambivalent structure of discourses of femininity in the late twentieth century, many commentators writing about women as a group and on female identity in earlier time periods have also noted some kind of dual relationship to definitions offered by various dominant forces. See for example, Rachel Blau Du Plessis’s (1985) discussion of the work of Simone de Beauvoir, John Berger, and Gerda Learner. Jane Miller (1991) also presents an interesting discussion of the ambivalence and doubleness associated with women’s experience dating back to the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. 9. I am using the term “negative capability” as Jackson (1998, 14) suggests to mean the capability of “being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” 10. See for examples, Davies 1989 and 1993, Essed 1991, Fine and Macpherson...
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