Girlhood Studies

We open this issue with two articles about different kinds of playacting. First, we have Alude Mahali's “A Girlhood Disrupted: Performing Memory Using the Girlfriend Aesthetic” in which she discusses her play, Katuntu (…and you too), that she wrote to “depict loss caused by an uprooted girlhood, [that portrays] the consequences of fragmented memory on Black African women with immigrant pasts, in the hope that it might resonate with others who share the experience of similarly disrupted girlhood.” For her, the girlfriend aesthetic provides a way of “re-membering by providing a reflective surface upon which one sees in the experience of the girlfriend other, something that incites one's own memory.”

In this article, I discuss Katuntu (…and you too), a work I devised and performed with Injairu Kulundu in fulfilment of my Masters in Theatre Making from the University of Cape Town in October 2009. In the play, we harnessed memory to depict loss caused by an uprooted girlhood, portraying the consequences of fragmented memory on Black African women with immigrant pasts, in the hope that it might resonate with others who share the experience of similarly disrupted girlhood. We used song performance in the creation of shared girlfriend memory. I argue that the concept of girlfriend aesthetic offers a methodology for re-membering by providing a reflective surface upon which one sees in the experience of the girlfriend other, something that incites one's own memory.

In the study on which this article is based, I examined, from a gendered perspective, the Purim costumes market in Israel, to see what I might learn from a comparison between costumes aimed at boys and those aimed at girls. I conducted a visual and textual analysis of 60 Purim costumes for girls and boys, as presented on retail websites and found that Purim costumes offered on these popular Israeli websites present such clearly demarcated gender differentiations that I can claim that they play a part in the commodification of gender. The alleged choice of costumes is in fact strategically governed by marketing practices that mobilize the media culture targeted at children.

Teaching Black girl pedagogies is a way to truly see them in educational spaces, to see them in their fullness, recognizing their complex and entangled identities. Black feminism and womanism are foundational to Black girl pedagogical praxis, and work to push against misrepresentations of Black girls and Black girlhoods, as well as identify and challenge the linked processes of criminalization and adultification experienced by all Black children. Through my own experiences as a Black girl in the US K-12 education system I draw on Black feminism to highlight the importance of engaging with and using Black girl pedagogies as a practice of co-creation between educators and students.

Research suggests that girls frequently experience a sense of devaluation in their everyday lives at school. Narrow models of learning and teaching further limit the scope of what can be valued. In contrast, Girl-Kind, a school-based program, aims not to address an assumed deficit but to allow girls to be recognized as excellent learners and experts in their own lives. We conceptualize the program as creating valuing spaces in which value is created through action and not simply imported from the wider context. Here, we situate Girl-Kind in the research on girls in schools, detail how this space is created, and argue that the program acts as a counterpoint to the devaluation girls frequently experience. Finally, we outline the tensions of delivering such a program.

In this article, we explore how girls identify and resist the girly-girl, an imaginary white, middle- or upper-class, cis-gendered, able-bodied, and heterosexual abstraction ubiquitous in media representations. She reflects a globalized youth culture that encourages girls to become visibly successful. We ran a series of workshops that allowed girls to engage with girl-centered media and products geared towards them but necessarily created by them. The girls in this study expressed a dislike of the girly-girl and the girl-type leisure activities associated with her. Yet, at times they took pleasure in some girly-girl activities. This contradiction led us and the girls to engage with the girly-girl by incorporating their lived experiences in the creation of their own definitions of girlhood.

Today, Black girls use social media, including TikTok, as sites for storytelling and for creating their own self-definitions. In this article, I address the question of how Black girls use social media aesthetics to construct digital narratives about their Black girlhoods. To do so, by analyzing a case study of TikToks, I explore the rise of the Soft Black Girl aesthetic and its connections to larger, white-dominated aesthetics, such as Cottagecore. Furthermore, I trace the political implications of social media sub-aesthetics that Black girls create, as well as how such sub-aesthetics are used to both deconstruct stereotypes pertaining to the adultification of Black girls and disengage from whiteness in online spaces.

Seventeen magazine's minimal coverage of contraception and abortion provides teen girl readers with inadequate and limited information regarding reproductive and sexual health. This pre-Dobbs historical analysis of the content of the main editorial sections of the magazine from 2010 to 2018 demonstrates a lack of discourse regarding contraceptive methods for readers. Examining how contraception and abortion are discussed in the print versions of Seventeen magazine through a postfeminist lens can assist in identifying and responding to gaps in education and misperceptions of these topics in order to better serve teen girl readers.

Aria S. Halliday. 2022. Buy Black: How Black Women Transformed US Pop Culture. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press

In 2023, Barbie, the long-awaited movie, was hyped up on social media; podcasts insisted that Barbie would be the new feminist role model. Young Icelandic feminists were eager to see her take on gender inequality issues that they have prioritized and that are prominent in the fight for gender equality in their environment. In this article, as Icelandic feminists we reflect on our own expectations and offer our views on the content and messages of the movie. We connect all this with our current and future feminist work. We collected the data through cooperative inquiry that included reflections and conversations on social media. We found that the movie could have gone further in addressing the multifaceted gender inequality issues we face today.

I had the pleasure of watching Barbie when it first came out. I immediately thought of the genre of broad satire, especially visual, as in eighteenth-century Hogarth paintings and prints but with women creators. My first impulse was to laugh at the blatantly inverted world the movie creates. As someone interested in literature of the long eighteenth century—both popular prints such as broadsheets and later novels by British women—I was struck by the strategies used in the film and how they recalled some of those practiced hundreds of years ago to escape the official censor through laughter. I thought of the seventeenth-century prints depicting a world turned upside down with the oppressors at the bottom of the sheet and the oppressed at the top.¹ Stemming from this, eighteenth-century theatrical pantomimes carried the inversions onto the stage; this continues today in comic performances that use a camp style. While watching Barbie, the brashness of the blatant inversions made me gasp and laugh.

For my final assignment in a university course called “Arts Education: Pedagogical Theory and Practical Applications in the Teaching of Developmental Drama, Dramatic Forms, Improvisation and Theatre Art”¹ I had to do a four-minute monologue performance. I chose to perform Gloria's (America Ferrera) monologue from Barbie (2023)² because it constitutes a message about how women and girls in society are stressed by thinking about, and aiming for, perfection as well as by finding ways to please everyone in their work, school, and home environment. The monologue articulates the struggles that women experience in feeling constantly that they must please everyone. However, it also points out that we cannot make everyone happy all the time. As girls and women, we must stop thinking constantly about every detail of every task that society tells us to do and every role we are told to perform. We must stop thinking all the time about how we are meant to be. As women, we must not compete; we must be there for each other.

Barbie showcased, in part, many women's dream world—one in which we are dominant. It also presented the everyday truths of women's lives and society's expectations. As young women, we see posed models on billboards and on TV, and now that we have access to personal cellphones that highlight and broadcast images of beautiful women, we are reminded constantly of women who are apparently naturally more attractive than we are. We are bombarded by advertisements that tell us about the steps we need to take if we are to achieve this level of perfection. It is exhausting! Being a young woman in the digital age is extremely challenging; not only are we comparing ourselves to our friends and to famous women but now we can see women from around the world with whom we did not even know we were competing.