Between a Rock and a Hard Place: Un/Defining the "Girl"

The Problem with Definitions

When I was invited to participate in a panel, entitled "Disciplinary Definitions of the Child," at Congress 2009, I was a little confused about what to do. I teach in the multidisciplinary department of Child and Youth Studies at Brock University, and I do not think of myself as having a discipline per se. My research is located at the crossroads of feminist sociology and youth cultural studies, and my training is in the field of education. Given this background, how could I offer a single disciplinary definition of the "child"? More importantly, why would I want to? My research seeks to dismantle the humanist drive for classification, particularly in relation to young people. Such a drive empowers western researchers to colonize the "objects" of their studies, rendering them safe, knowable, and "Other" (Fine; Said; Tuwahi Smith). I did not want to reinforce, however inadvertently, the ways in which young people continue to be obsessively dissected and fixed by "moral panic" (Cohen) and "single certainty" (Barthes).

Further, as the other contributions to this forum make clear, the "child" is a social, cultural, and historical construction. Patrizia Albanese points out that official and legal definitions of childhood are vague and confusing. A child, she notes, can be anyone under ages ranging from six to nineteen, or can be any age at all as long as he or she is single and resides with a parent (138). And as Mona Gleason suggests, the "child" has a history unto itself. In her discussion of Philippe Ariès, she notes that childhood did not always exist. In the Middle Ages, for example, children were treated as "little adults" (125). Over time, Gleason explains, the sentimental value of children grew as their economic value waned, prompting cultural shifts in how children were treated. Children came to be seen as in need of protection and adult supervision. Conversely, Julia Emberley explores the idea that the "child" is represented more and more as the child of experience rather than the child of innocence. The child of experience has been inducted into the adult world of knowing—knowing pain, knowing death, knowing war, and knowing the need to testify. As a result, the "child" can also be the "adult." Given all of these variations, locating one True definition of the "child" is not only impossible, but also undesirable.

While the shifting social, cultural, and historical contexts of the "child" presented me with difficulties in coming up with a disciplinary definition, the "child"—as a category—did not totally jibe with my own research, which focuses on social and cultural constructions of girls and girlhoods (see Currie, Kelly, and Pomerantz; Pomerantz). While the "girl" is subsumed under the word "child," girls are rarely seen within the parameters of this term. In many bodies of literature, particularly anthropology and sociology, the "child" is gender-less, sex-less, and desire-less, leaving no room for a discussion of girls, or gender as it intersects with "race," ethnicity, class, and sexuality. And in other bodies of literature, particularly classic cultural studies and popular media accounts, the term "youth" tends to refer to young men (McRobbie), rendering girls virtually invisible as participants in or creators of youthful cultural practices (Kearney). So, while girls are indeed children, they are also constructed through distinct social, cultural, and historical trajectories that make the "girl" a unique entity from the "child." While the same could be said for the "boy," during the early-twenty-first century, girls have become an "incitement to discourse," whereby they have been obsessively written about and represented as in trouble and out of control (Pomerantz). Such moral panics include the "mean girl" crisis (Fey; Simmons), the Ophelia complex (Pipher), and the girls-gone-wild syndrome (Levy; Hardwicke), to name but a few. As a result, girls have endured an enormous amount of surveillance, bad press, and negative labelling, making deconstructive interventions crucial in order to counterbalance the harmful effects of this discursive formation on girlhood (Kelly and Pomerantz).

To reconcile myself to the panel, then, I had to find a way...