“A Place Where It Was Acceptable To Be Unacceptable”: Twenty-First-Century Girls Encounter Nineteenth-Century Girls Through Amateur Theatricals and Dance

This self-reflexive article about girl-centered, performance-based historiography uses Carole Lynne D’Arcangelis’s cautions about self-reflexive research writing and Caroline Caron’s concerns about girl studies as activist research focused on social change to explore how the presence of girls and listening to girls shaped the knowledge that was created. By staging encounters between living 21st-century girls and 19th-century girls, the process reveals possibilities about the lives of girls in both eras. Encounters drew attention to issues concerning power, gender, agency, present-mindedness, emotion work, embodiment, and racialized identities. The article demonstrates how girls’ actions and insights complicated understandings about 19th-century girlhoods and at-home theatricals and, simultaneously, exposed power structures influencing their lives today and opportunities to work within or subvert them. Working through concepts like “radical reflexivity” (D’Arcangelis), “theatrical ethic of inappropriation” (Michelle Liu Carriger), “the wince” (Stephen Johnson), and the “foolish witness” (Julie Salverson), the article describes research pivot points and argues that ways of listening to girls alters how meaning is made.

Muslim Girl Studies

A colloquium on “girl studies,” organized by Marcia Hermansen (director,IslamicWorld Studies) and Laura Miller (professor, Department of Anthropology)took place on 12 April 2008, at Loyola University Chicago.Presently, the study of adolescent females – increasingly referred to as girlstudies – as a separate realm of focus is a contested idea in academe.Supporters claim that girl studies is a worthwhile research domain due to theprior disregard for age within women’s studies and gender within youth studies.Detractors note that the category and boundaries of what is considered a “girl” are unstable and historically and culturally varied. More specifically,such scholars as Sharon R. Mazzarella, Norma Odom Pecora, and CatherineDriscoll have argued that over time, literature, popular reading, and consumerismhave become the means through which the mainstream culture instructsgirls on how to become women. In turn, many girls negotiate their interests,sexual expression, body image, and rites of passage in culturally approvedways. Other girls, however, engage in personal, subjective interpretation byrejecting hegemonic standards of femininity in a post-industrial western worldand often in the context of violence, displacement, and resistance.Loyola’s conference highlighted the impact of mainstream norms andethnocentrism in girl studies by including scholarship from a range ofAmerican and non-American cultural contexts. We investigated how girls’lives are constructed in an era of massive change as communities around theworld experience processes of both globalization and localization ...