Girlhood Studies

The first “White House Research on Girls” Conference took place on 28 April 2014, in Washington, DC. At this event the Girls Research Coalition was formed, and the White House Council on Women and Girls also announced the establishment of the Girls Portal, a clearinghouse for research on girls, hosted by Re:Gender (formerly known as The National Council for Research on Women, Inc.), and meant to facilitate the sharing of existing research on girls, and to provide opportunities to explore new directions in research. This initiative is an important one for ensuring that the burgeoning research on girlhood reaches the many different audiences who need to have access to its findings. As the editors of GHS, we strongly endorse the establishment of the Girls Research Coalition and the Girls Portal.

The term girl heroine is an ambiguous signifier in discourses surrounding action-adventure cinema. Film scholars occasionally refer to adult action heroines as girls, while adolescent warriors remain largely overlooked in the literature. Research on women warriors focuses primarily on “musculinity” films of the 1980s or on more recent “action babe” movies featuring adult women. However, movies like Kick-Ass, Hanna, Violet & Daisy, Hard Candy, True Grit, and The Hunger Games demonstrate that films with adolescent action heroines are increasingly popular. This article argues that contemporary depictions of girl warriors emerge as a result of recent shifts in cultural attitudes towards girlhood sexuality and girlhood aggression. It also argues that the rise of the adolescent action heroine points to anxieties about changes in nuclear family structures, and that contemporary action films imply that young girls should be responsible for maintaining moral order. Ultimately, such films thus contain regressive as well as progressive messages.

In this article we report on the results of a semester-long critical media literacy initiative with underserved fourth- and fifth-grade girls. Building on the work in girls' studies, feminist pedagogies and critical media studies, this project was designed to privilege girls' voices, experiences, and agency by culminating in the girls' own media production of zines—hand-made, hand-distributed booklets based around the author's interests and experiences. By examining before and after focus group interviews conducted with participants and analyzing the content of their zines, we interrogate participants' general—but hardly linear—shift from positions of celebratory, uncritical media exposure, to self-affirming, transgressive media consumption and production. Ultimately, our findings both emphasize the need for feminist critical media literacy education, and articulate its pedagogical challenges.

Tween is a commonly used consumer-media label for girls aged anywhere between 9 and 14 years. The girls' desire to belong in friendship and peer groups has been considered by feminist and cultural studies scholars through their consumption activities and their negotiations of young, feminine girlness. Yet there is limited scholarship that explores the significance of their everyday practices in their own local, social worlds. Drawing on the findings from my year-long ethnographic study in a Melbourne Primary School, I consider the meaning behind the ordinary obviousness of the girls' everyday practices. I reflect on the often complex meanings of the girls' practices as they pursue their desire to belong. As I discovered, there is significant knowledge to be gained from exploring the girls' everyday considerations and negotiations of belonging. This article draws on two key examples of my ethnographic study to highlight the significance in understanding the girls' everyday practices.

Jane Addams (1860–1935) was a major reformer of the American Progressive Era (1890 to 1920) whose ideas about social justice continue to engage contemporary scholars. This article contributes to the recent examination of her feminist insights by investigating a source of her voice of social critique. Situating Addams in the first generation of white women to have access to both secondary and tertiary education, I use a feminist developmental lens to attend to a repeated figure in her earliest public addresses, “the college woman.” By highlighting parallels between Addams's presentation of “the college woman” and the developmental strengths, struggles, and resistance of contemporary girls and adolescents, I offer a reading of her motivations that brings into focus the socially transformative potential of young women.

This article examines a group of Malawian teachers' views of the relationship between gender and achievement in order to highlight their participation in students' constructions of gendered identities, which in turn have an impact on achievement. Based on a survey with 35 teachers and interviews with 20 of them, the study on which this article is based shows how teachers position boys as high achievers and girls as low achievers. The teachers drew on a number of identity-related concepts that included sexuality, notions of femininity, differential gender socialization in the home, and self image to explain girls' underachievement. I discuss the implications of the findings and suggest how teachers can be encouraged to have a more positive attitude towards girls and their achievement.

Identity politics in the everyday lives of girls is of continual global concern to gender studies. I argue that neither educational factors nor those pertaining to mass media can stand alone in accounting for what girlhood means in Hong Kong where the study of what it means to be a girl has not yet attracted much attention from academic scholars. Because of the promotion of a sexually repressive framework in the educational sector, the concept of girlhood remains confined by an already established notion of femininity. I argue that it is hence vital for us to use texts of popular culture in education to allow for a more appropriate concept of girlhood in contemporary Hong Kong given that this concept affects the ways in which girls identify themselves.

In spite of its popularity, makeover television is controversial with reality programs such as Toddlers & Tiaras transforming young girls into pint-sized versions of sexualized women. In this article I use various methods of analysis to better decode the visual images of the children appearing on the sensational series. Understanding the program makes clearer how gender and identity are constructed for the girls profiled in each episode. Findings reveal that youngsters' identity is approved of during beauty pageants only when they are hyper-gendered, follow heteronormative gender conventions, and undergo careful scrutiny of appearance by experts, yet exude original personality.

According to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (article 27) every child has the right to a standard of living adequate for the realization of her or his physical, mental, spiritual, moral and social development. Adequate housing, food and clothing underpin the adequacy of a child’s standard of living. UNICEF estimated nearly ten years ago that one out of every three children, or 640 million children around the world, live in inadequate housing (Bellamy: 2005). Despite this commitment to child rights, little appears to be documented on the safety and security of children with regard to housing generally, and, more specifically, housing in slums or informal settlements: urban growth in the Global South is set to be virtually synonymous with the expansion of slums and informal settlements, and, seven years ago, there were 199 million slum dwellers in Africa alone (Tibajuka 2007). It is impossible, then, to address violence against children and the related issues of child protection, without taking into account the importance of adequate housing, and the significance of what goes on inside houses: the inclusion of the voices of children themselves, currently woefully unheard, is critical.

Jessica K. Taft. 2011. Rebel Girls: Youth Activism & Social Change Across the Americas. New York: NYU Press.

Hains, Rebecca C. 2012. Growing Up with Girl Power: Girlhood on Screen and in Everyday Life. New York: Peter Lang.