Girlhood Studies

Studying the textual spaces of girlhood is a complex task for we have to consider the textual readings derived through literary and document analysis along with producer texts as read through the experiences of girls themselves. Studying textual spaces can extend even into a consideration of material space and how we might engage in decolonizing practices that attend to the dynamics of power and colonial violence. This investigation into a broad range of textualities serves as a reminder of the past, a consideration of the present, and a looking towards imagined futures. It also helps us to appreciate the interrelatedness of textual spaces so that that it is possible to consider what might be regarded as classics of colonial literature for girls alongside new platforms for addressing social justice and how they might inform each other. It is only in an unthemed issue of Girlhood Studies that addressing such a wide range of texts and textualities is possible.

Published 70 years apart and adopting contrasting approaches to real-world detail, Lewis Carroll's Alice books and Noel Streatfeild's Ballet Shoes bear a number of affinities. Both portray dynamic, creative, and skillful girls whose dreams and destinies they probe. In this article, I highlight Alice's inventiveness and the curtailment of her dreams, then examine Streatfeild's employment of a production of Alice in Wonderland to delineate two distinct modes of female creativity. While the endings of the two works seem distinct, offering far greater possibilities of self-fulfilment for Streatfeild's heroines, neither is unproblematic. If Streatfeild has no time for the interpersonal relationships and domesticity imposed upon Alice, she nevertheless insists upon a hierarchized value system that downgrades the very creativity it purportedly celebrates.

The power of imagination and the capacity for storytelling can mirror creation and God-like capabilities: anything can occur if one can imagine it. Observing this connection between narrator and God, in this article I analyze the representation of girlhood in British author Dodie Smith's I Capture the Castle (1948). I show how protagonist and narrator Cassandra uses the framework of her girlhood to narrate and create the lives of those around her and examine the ways in which her power alters as she begins to enter the stage of grown womanhood. With a close reading that understands Cassandra's storytelling powers as Biblically structured, I consider the narratorial possibilities of girlish fantasy and father-daughter dynamics.

Although young women claim sexual freedom and purport to re-signify the word slut as being a positive definition of sexual agency, sexuality studies show that they often lose control of this signification in the broader community, and the social consequences remain detrimental. In this article, I trace the feminist project of re-signification of the slut back to Judith Butler and apply it to Kody Keplinger's contemporary young adult novel The DUFF. I show that this novel illustrates what can be a hard truth for feminists and feminism to accept—the tension between the feminist imperative to re-signify discourse as a sign of personal empowerment, and the reality that changing discourse relies on others (particularly men) to become allies.

In this article, I focus on the contexts in which the Brontë juvenilia and Riot Grrrl zines were created, rather than offering a literary study of them. My focus is on how the different creators produced their texts. I explore the theoretical approach of feminist media studies with particular attention to its notions of identity formation as foundation for the comparison of these texts. I outline the Brontë juvenilia and provide a brief history and background of Riot Grrrl zines and offer a comparative analysis of the two media. I conclude by identifying the importance of studying girls’ engagement with the practice of writing in terms of identity formation and expression, and suggest ways that this study can be applied to future critical work.

In this article, we examine how postfeminist Girl Effect discourse is deployed and extended in Plan International's Digital Empowerment for Girls campaign. Based on critical discourse analysis of campaign texts, we outline how the campaign situates digital empowerment as a way of building girls’ capacity to overcome barriers of poverty and gender equality by allowing them to pursue careers, manage their health, and advocate for governmental change. Drawing on the theory of healthism, we argue that the campaign's discourses of economic empowerment are intertwined with, and scaffolded upon, girls’ perceived ability to manage their reproduction. We problematize how these constructions responsibilize girls for solving social and economic problems, even as the campaign acknowledges ongoing systems of oppression.

Recent research on systems of social control demonstrates how young men experience surveillance and the harmful effects of these types of practices. However, missing from this discourse is the understanding of how girls experience these practices and the gendered challenges associated with surveillance. In this article, we discuss the experiences of 12 Latina girls who were interviewed inside a juvenile detention center in California. Drawing from semi-structured interviews with them and extensive ethnographic fieldnotes, we examine the perceptions of surveillance experienced by this group of girls. Our findings suggest that girls struggled with the lack of privacy and felt that surveillance practices were degrading. We also discuss how the criminalization of girls through constant surveillance influenced their behavior negatively.

In this article, I explore girlhood pedagogies embodied and enacted by girls of color who participated in a social justice leadership program. I facilitated dialogues with these girls that unearthed how white supremacy and heteropatriarchy shape their sociopolitical realities. Drawing on the insights the girls offered and scholarship from women of color feminists theorizing and enacting solidarity, I define and illustrate critical and coalitional girlhood pedagogies. I evidence how girls of color embodied this praxis by engaging in dialogue in spaces that welcome the gravity, vulnerability, and divergent perspectives that emerged through examinations and reflections on their encounters with oppression and argue that spaces that center critical and coalitional girlhood pedagogies engender criticality, compassionate understanding, and coalitional thinking and acting.

We examine the possibilities for Indigenization afforded by a visit from the girls’ group, Young Indigenous Women's Utopia (YIWU), to York University. Through classroom presentations, workshops, and a book launch, the girls shared their knowledge, perspectives, culture, and art, challenged stereotypes, and inspired university community members. The visit encouraged local students and faculty to find innovative ways to disrupt prevailing colonial norms by employing strategies such as public workshops, the Alternative Campus Tour and curating exhibits so as to integrate Indigenous knowledge, histories, and epistemologies. In this article, we explore the transformative potential of such encounters and emphasize the imperative to prioritize Indigenous knowledge systems and empower Indigenous girls in educational realms.

Field, Corinne T., and LaKisha Michelle Simmons (eds.). 2022. The Global History of Black Girlhood. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press