Sites of Girlhood

Where are the girls who made history? What evidence have they left behind? Are there places and spaces that bear witness to their memory? Girl Museum was founded in 2009 to address these questions, among many others. Established by art historian Ashley E. Remer, whose work revealed that most, if not all, museums never explicitly discuss or center girls and girlhood, Girl Museum was envisioned as a virtual space dedicated to researching, analyzing, and interpreting girl culture across time and space. Over its first ten years, we produced a wide range of art in historical and cultural exhibitions that explored conceptions of girlhood and the direct experiences of girls in the past and present. Led by an Advisory Board of scholars and entirely reliant on volunteers and donations, we grew from a small website into a complex virtual museum of exhibitions, projects, and programs that welcomes an average 50,000 visitors per year from around the world.

Reading Dress: Fashion And Friendship In A Little Princess And Anne Of Green Gables

This Major Research Project (MRP) argues that fashion is a key tool for the critical examination of textual and visual works. Specifically, this research illustrates fashion’s impact on the social identities of young female protagonists in early-twentieth-century adolescent literature, through a comparative literary study of A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett and Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery. Engaging theories of fashion, literature, and girl culture, as well as theories of semiotics and fashion diffusion, dress is shown to be instrumental in developing episodes of closeness and friendship for the protagonists in these novels, along with moments that may isolate them. This MRP examines the illustrations and accompanying textual descriptions found in the 1905 (London) and 1908 (Boston) editions of each work in order to expose fashion’s mirroring and shaping of social identity; ultimately, this study reveals the tension between fashion’s ability to both cement and subvert dominant cultural norms and ideals at the turn of the century.

Reading Dress: Fashion And Friendship In A Little Princess And Anne Of Green Gables

This Major Research Project (MRP) argues that fashion is a key tool for the critical examination of textual and visual works. Specifically, this research illustrates fashion’s impact on the social identities of young female protagonists in early-twentieth-century adolescent literature, through a comparative literary study of A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett and Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery. Engaging theories of fashion, literature, and girl culture, as well as theories of semiotics and fashion diffusion, dress is shown to be instrumental in developing episodes of closeness and friendship for the protagonists in these novels, along with moments that may isolate them. This MRP examines the illustrations and accompanying textual descriptions found in the 1905 (London) and 1908 (Boston) editions of each work in order to expose fashion’s mirroring and shaping of social identity; ultimately, this study reveals the tension between fashion’s ability to both cement and subvert dominant cultural norms and ideals at the turn of the century.

What a Girl Wants, What a Girl Needs: Analyzing Postfeminist Themes in Girls’ Magazines

Girls’ magazines play an important role in the maintenance of gender perceptions and the creation of gender by young girls. Due to a recent resurgence within public discussion and mediated content of feminist, postfeminist, and antifeminist repertoires, centered on what femininity entails, young girls are growing up in an environment in which conflicting messages are communicated about their gender. To assess, which shared norms and values related to gender are articulated in girl culture and to what extent these post/anti/feminist repertoires are prevalent in the conceptualization of girlhood, it is important to analyze magazines as vehicles of this culture. The current study analyzes if and how contemporary postfeminist thought is articulated in popular girl’s magazines. To reach this goal, we conducted a thematic analysis of three popular Dutch teenage girls’ magazines (N = 27, from 2018), <em>Fashionchick</em>, <em>Cosmogirl</em>, and <em>Girlz</em>. The results revealed that the magazines incorporate feminist, antifeminist, and as a result, postfeminist discourse in their content. The themes in which these repertoires are articulated are centered around: the body, sex, male–female relationships, female empowerment, and self-reflexivity. The magazines function as a source of gender socialization for teenage girls, where among other gendered messages a large palette of postfeminist themes are part of the magazines’ articulation of what it means to be a girl in contemporary society.

Dangerous Women Feminism

In the last 10 years, feminism has been foregrounded in popular music more than at any time. At the same time, female pop music artists have been the target of hostility because of the feminist messages they espouse. This chapter examines US-based female popular music artists who have embraced a postfeminist agenda. This agenda engages messages of empowerment, sex positivity, and elements of girl culture. In addition, this chapter explores the notion of resilience in relation to how these music artists have used the voice of feminism to become outspoken and show independence and strength in celebrating the female body. In particular, the author discusses the discourse of their concert tours, as this is a time when these artists are in the spotlight through both their performance and the promotional materials for those performances and as a consequence are more open (and vulnerable) to critique than at other times.

The Girlhood Project

The Girlhood Project (TGP) is a community based, service-learning/research program that is part of the undergraduate course at Lesley University called “Girlhood, Identity and Girl Culture.” TGP works with community partners to bring middle and high school girls to Lesley’s campus for nine weeks as part of intergenerational girls’ groups that are co-facilitated by Lesley students (also referred to as TGP students). TGP fosters the development of feminist leadership, critical consciousness, voice, and community action, and activism in all participants. In this article, we describe how we adapted TGP’s model to a virtual and synchronous platform for students during COVID-19 and supported their learning competencies. We reflect critically on this experience by centering the voices and perspectives of girls, students, and professors.

Emergent Feminisms and Racial Discourses of Televisual Girlfriendship

This chapter focuses on the cycle’s integration of emerging feminist discourses and its disruption of the postfeminist sensibility by interrogating its focus on female friendship. It highlights how the centrality of female friendship demonstrates the cycle’s liberal politics and therefore its appeal to upscale liberal or progressive audiences. The close, complex, honest relationships between main female friends on these shows, like Abbi and Ilana on Broad City, Gretchen and Lindsay on You’re the Worst, Quinn and Rachel on UnReal, or Rebecca and Paula on Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, allow them a critical self-awareness to interrogate gender norms, whiteness, and millennial culture. But the cycle’s incredibly insular and encouraging friendships also obscure racial politics and diversity by recentering whiteness and celebrating a particularly narrow type of liberal feminist girl culture that also frequently centralizes white fragility. Thinking through the critical humor and other modes of political discourse of these friendships within the context of television’s racist and postfeminist roots, this chapter situates these representations of female friendships in the context of contemporary empowerment rhetoric to interrogate the potential and limitations of television’s representational politics in this era of the reemerging or mainstreaming of feminism.

Think Pink

Ballet has come to be an important part of girl culture, in part because so many girls in the United States take ballet at some point in their lives. Consumer products like dolls and music boxes have brought ballet into girls’ homes and reinforce a problematic link between ballet and femininity, though real girls who take ballet class are often quite thoughtful about the way ballet empowers them. Books for children, both non-fiction and fiction, have been important examples of the intersection between ballet and girl culture since the early twentieth century. Children’s ballet books deal with artistic expression, physical challenges, competition, gender, sexuality, racial and ethnic diversity, class barriers, and many other elements of real girls’ experiences with ballet class.

“Girl-on-girl culture”

This article investigates the construction of sex advice for queer women as it features on the world’s most popular lesbian website, Autostraddle. Based in the United States, the website is a “progressively feminist” online community for lesbian, bisexual and other queer women. Using multimodal critical discourse analysis and corpus linguistics, this article explores how representations of sexual and gender identity facilitate the construction of homonormativity on the website. It argues that these representations involve a tension between exclusivity and inclusivity. On the one hand, Autostraddle wants to construct an exclusive markedly lesbian subjectivity and a subcultural model of lesbian sex, which is lacking in mainstream culture. On the other hand, it aims to be inclusive of transgender and bisexual women, and to deconstruct the idea of sexual homogeneity. Findings show that Autostraddle discursively negotiates these competing goals to construct a distinctly “queer female” normativity centred on young cisgender feminine lesbians.