Girlhood Studies

In the evolving discourse of contemporary feminism, a critical intersection at the nexus of girlhood studies and the experiences of refugee and displaced girls is evident. We are witnessing unprecedented levels of such displacement because of conflict and climate change among other causes of instability, and this brings the challenges and the triumphs of girls on the move into sharp focus in feminist advocacy and scholarship. This Special Issue, Girls on the Move: Girlhood and Forced Displacement, Migration, and (Re)settlement, guest edited by Rosemary Carleton and Nesa Bandarchian Rashti explores some of the intricacies of this intersection and the articles as a whole advocate for a nuanced feminist response centered on the rights, needs, and voices of refugee and displaced girls.

As we write these words to introduce this Special Issue, scores of girls and young women around the world are facing a myriad of challenges as they are forced to flee their homes, leaving behind friends, family, communities, and being propelled into uncertain and very often precarious migratory journeys. Without a doubt, we live in deeply troubling times. While numbers provide a mere glimpse into the devastating humanitarian crisis of forced displacement, they are shocking. Forced displacement, migration, and (re)settlement following conflict, violence, human rights violations, persecution, disasters, and the impacts of climate change, both in nations and across borders, is an ever-escalating crisis affecting tens of millions of people worldwide. Acknowledging that these numbers are unprecedented, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (2023a) reported that by the end of June 2023, over 110 million people were forcibly displaced worldwide and projected that this number would increase to 130 million by the end of 2024. This projected increase takes into account the mass displacement caused by the war between Israel and Hamas as well as ongoing and escalating conflicts in Sudan, Ukraine, and Afghanistan. While current headlines focus principally on the continuing crises in the Middle East and Ukraine, we cannot lose sight of the millions of forcibly displaced persons elsewhere in the world, including those in Eritrea, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Somalia, Syria, Türkiye, Myanmar, India, Venezuela, and Haiti. Recognizing regional diversity in the staggering numbers serves to underscore forced displacement as a transnational issue that requires urgent global attention.

Against the background of recent extraordinary narratives of displaced girls, I consider two accounts of refugee girls in Britain at earlier historical moments: Lore Segal's Other People's Houses ([1964] 2018) about her memories of being a Kindertransportee in the late 1930s, and Vesna Maric's Bluebird (2009), a memoir of her journey into refugeehood as a teenage girl following the outbreak of the war in Bosnia in the early 1990s. I read their framing of the refugee experience as interventions into hegemonic scripts of displaced girlhood that ultimately destabilize the wider stories of nationhood that such narratives often uphold. Read through the frames of girlhood and refugeetude, these narratives point to alternative modes of imagining refugee girls and their position in and beyond the nation.

In exploring the figuration and physical presence of Little Amal, a 12-foot Syrian girl puppet and main character in a moving piece of epic public theater titled The Walk, I consider the dueling realities of welcomeness and unwantedness, hypervisibility and invisibility, spatial dignity and spatial denial faced by refugee girls, real and represented. Accessing a feminist refugee epistemology, I position Amal in contrast to yet another symbol of refugee girlhood—popstar M.I.A.—to move away from the typical simultaneously superfluous and stunted representations of sanctuary-seeking girls and toward a provocation that accepts their creative and complex lifeworlds.

Arts-based programs can provide space for forcibly displaced youth to process pre-migration and resettlement experiences creatively. While these programs can facilitate growth and healing, limited research addresses forcibly displaced girls’ perceived benefits of engaging in arts-based programs. Through in-depth interviews with 20 high school girls who resettled in a Midwest City in the United States, I explore this group's motivation to engage in arts-based activities like dance, drama, and theater. My findings suggest that participants engaged in arts-based programs to explore their artistic interests, connect with other girls with similar cultural identities, and manage feelings of homesickness and loss. I discuss how schools and community organizations can tailor arts-based programs to help forcibly displaced girls manage socio-emotional and educational needs.

For refugees, the experience of displacement does not always end with resettlement. Multidisciplinary research with educators and refugee students at a Tennessee high school demonstrates how some school personnel prioritized the alienating concept of so-called paperwork selves when talking about their refugee students, highlighting exotic stereotypes of innocence, ignorance, and a lack of educational history. I focus here on educators’ perceptions of Arabic-speaking refugee girl students, and contrast these with the girls’ own words about their experiences and self-understanding. The girls’ narratives demonstrate their keen sense of identity as young women connected to real places, remembered histories, and imaginaries of a future as transnational young women with global possibilities.

We conducted a qualitative study among Eritrean refugees residing in Israel to explore the impact of armed conflict and displacement on adolescent girls’ transition to adulthood. We conducted 19 interviews with young Eritrean refugee women who, as girls and young women, escaped conflict-affected Eritrea and made their way on foot, through Sudan, the Sinai desert, and Egypt to Israel. Our findings reveal how structural and symbolic violence shaped the gendered realities of these Eritrean girls throughout their migration journey. In Israel, while such violence in the forms of precarious immigration status and intimate partner violence were embedded in their everyday lives, participants also drew actively on creative strategies to resist and contest violence.

We based this article on a qualitative study that focuses on barriers to the integration of Somali Muslim urban refugee girls in Uganda. We were interested in how different ethnic and gender identities influence Somali refugee girls’ access to education and participation in society. Based on 75 semi-structured interviews with refugee children between 10 and 16 years of age in Kampala, we used constant comparative analysis to explore the intersectional experiences of Somali refugee girls. We found that they face specific gender-based discrimination and temporal and spatial restraints. This plays a key role in their ability to integrate into society. We conclude that it is important to avoid homogenizing refugee children's experiences and to incorporate intersectional analysis in studying integration.

In this article, I explore Sibirskiy dnevnik (henceforth Siberian Diary) of Arpenik Aleksanyan, a Soviet student of Armenian origin who, together with her family, was exiled to Siberia in one of the late Stalinist deportations of ethnic minorities. Arpenik's diary provides a unique perspective on forced displacement and exile through the eyes of a young woman. I treat the diary both as an historical source revealing gendered experiences of forced displacement and as autobiographical writing that provides a glimpse into late Stalinist girlhood and young women's subjectivity. I provide a reading of Siberian Diary that reveals Arpenik's seemingly contradictory integration of Stalinist ideologies of the so-called new woman and nationalities as a foundation for self-construction as well as individual resistance to persecution.

Growing up in Aleppo, Syria, for the first twenty years of my life, I listened to my grandparents’ stories of their experiences and their survival of the Armenian Genocide (1915 to 1916) alongside the stories of my parents growing up as refugees in Syria. Approaching the 100th anniversary of the Genocide when I was 18, I did not ever expect to relive the suffering and challenges faced by my grandparents and parents let alone end up with the status of refugee. At the time of my graduation from high school, the war hit Syria. Everything that had been beautiful was annihilated or destroyed and happiness turned into profound suffering. In front of me was evidence of the terrible experiences that I had heard about only in the stories of my parents and grandparents. In addition to this, I saw my opportunity and my right to higher education vanish.

For me, a border is not passing

It is not to pass from one country

If you are not allowed

to take part in life.

     – Parwana Amiri