Girlhood
Introduction: Girlhood: Surveying The Terrain
Yasmin Jiwani, Candis Steenbergen, Claudia Mitchell
Girls, Girls, Girls!
The last fifteen years have witnessed a proliferation of books, articles, magazines and products on and about girls and young women in North America. "Girls" (and/or their behaviour, dress, relationships, education, consumption habits and more) have prompted frequent newspaper headlines, driven investigative documentaries, and fuelled plotlines for countless mainstream films and prime-time television dramas. Often framed in terms of declining moral standards, rising hemlines/plunging necklines, increased aggression, and the demise of feminism, popular attention about or directed at girls has been considerably--and consistently--bleak. Recent captions read: "Protect Young Girls," "From Schoolgirl to Siren: Why 13-year-olds go Wild," "Nasty Clique Behaviour among Girls Draws New Attention," "Never Easy, Being a Girl is Harder than Ever," and, simply: "What is Happening to Our Girls?" In addition, young women have become a valuable target market stemming in part from the exploitation of "girl power" scripting girls and young women as commercially lucrative as well as a hyper-sexualized population.
Reaction to the "new" girl of the millennium has been as diverse as it has been swift, due in part to the ambiguous definition of who actually constitutes a "girl." In 1985 (the International Year of Youth), the United Nations advanced the idea that "youth" were "persons between fifteen and twenty-four years old." Four years later, the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (which called for the protection of the rights of the girl-child) considered "children" as persons under the age of eighteen. Prompted by the World Summit for Children, the 1990s were declared "the Decade of the Girl Child" and at the UN Fourth World Conference on Women in 1995 the Girl Child was considered "one of the Twelve Critical Areas of Concern" of the Beijing Platform for Action. While extremely significant, this designation served only to emphasize one element of girls' multiple realities: their vulnerability.
Outside legal frameworks, the category "girl" has been used freely as a signifier of a wide range of groupings. The very word "girl" is highly context specific: it can connote community and inclusiveness among friends ("one of the girls," "you go, girl!") or denote status (little girl, young girl, older girl). It is an index of age. It can also be an insult ("you throw like a girl"), condescension ("the girls at the office"), or a term of endearment. Overlapping definitions--coupled with often-contradictory meanings --illustrate that "girl" is a far more complicated word (and identity) than many acknowledge.
While the amount of attention that the category "girl" (however loosely defined) has increased in recent years, there remains a propensity among researchers to favour an ostensibly more encapsulating focus on "youth" rather than concentrating on the multifaceted nature of girls' lived realities; to collapse gender differences to examine a theoretical "whole." This tendency has also translated into a blurring of age distinctions by focusing on the category of "women" in general. Either way, any and all elements--as well as the nuances--of "being a girl" vanish. Simultaneously, these categorizations have been accompanied by a strategic move that dismantles differences between and among girls and young women--differences based on their location at diverse intersecting and interlocking sites of societal and structural forces.
Similarly, "girlhood" tends often to be confined within the realm of "childhood." Childhood, of course, has strong connotations of innocence, purity, and naivety. "Children" as a homogenous group move, it seems, in very linear fashion from childhood to adolescence and adulthood. The transition appears natural; particularly within the context of a market economy that privileges a specific construction of this space as an area to be simultaneously exploited and protected.
This construction of "childhood" is also a particularly Western one; a condition made abundantly clear when one contrasts the North American situation with other parts of the world, where the shift from childhood to adulthood can occur almost overnight. Yet these differences underscore the fact that neither stage of life can be viewed in an essentialized manner. Girlhoods in other parts of the world are often used to reinforce ideological binaries, as in the "traditional, oppressive East" versus the "libratory, progressive West" (Berman and Jiwani, 2001). We would argue that such binaries are strategic as are the very notions of "childhood" and "adulthood." We agree with Chandra Mohanty (2002) that while there are differences, there are also linkages. And in the interests of building solidarity, we need to deconstruct not only what may appear as "natural" categories but also highlight the ways they cohere around commonalities that throw into relief the interconnectedness and linkages that characterize our current global situation.
This book embraces a more holistic approach towards girls and girlhoods; with chapters emphasizing the power, agency and complicity of girls in resisting and negotiating oppression and inequality within the matrices of structural forces that constrain, impose limits on and contribute to their vulnerabilities. Indeed, we contend that childhood is always a gendered, raced, sexed and classed space, inscribed by particular behavioural dictates, social norms and mores and ways of seeing the world. It is also context-bound; rooted in language and the politics of location. Like the category "girl," "girlhood" is also a highly contested space, determined and sometimes over-determined by social forces. Our interest here lies in surveying the confluence of the various dimensions that shape and define contemporary girlhoods, especially as they are constrained by prevailing social forces and articulated by girls themselves.
Girlhood: The Canadian Terrain
Broad brushstrokes of existing works that epitomize the vast and varied landscape of girlhood studies have already been conducted (see, for example, Harris, 2004) and indeed, most of the chapters in this volume are indebted to these works. It is difficult to separate out Canadian texts from the broader literature on girls, especially given that Western girlhood studies include many works by Canadian scholars and activists. While Canadian monographs are scarce, rigorous research is being conducted on girls in multiple sectors. Since the 1990s--a decade signalling an enhanced awareness of the situation of the "girl-child" globally--Canadian research on girls has grown exponentially.
In many ways, girlhood studies in the Canadian context has followed a trajectory similar to its American and British counterparts. Of the academic texts that have been published recently, many have enjoyed considerable success; particularly Artz's Sex, Power and the Violent Schoolgirl (1998), Currie's Girl Talk (1999), Handa's Of Silk Saris and Mini Skirts (2003), a study of the ways in South Asian girls negotiate, imagine and construct community and identity through mediated discourses of race, nation and culture, Gonick's Between Femininities (2003) which explores the discursive map of femininity as played out and performed by a group of girls in Toronto, and more recently, Mitchell and Reid-Walsh's Seven Going on Seventeen (2005). These texts have also been accompanied by themed issues in various journals such as the McGill Journal of Education (edited by Mitchell and Blaeser, 2000) and the special issue of Canadian Woman Studies entitled "Young Women: Feminists, Activists, Girls" (2001).
The latter half of the 1990s witnessed a veritable explosion of texts both created by and providing spaces for girls and young women to speak on, about and out on issues that pertained directly to their own lives. Fireweed's (1997) special issue, entitled "Revolution Girl Style" was one such compilation, assembling everything from personal experiences, rants, raves, and essays to comic art--with contributions from girls located across the nation. Girls, it seemed, had a lot to say on a spectrum of issues; and once the valves opened, the writing kept coming. Sara Torres' (1999) anthology of essays, That Body Image Thing: Young Women Speak Out! contains practical narratives written by young women aged thirteen to nineteen on issues ranging from eating disorders and depression to body modification through dancing and sport, to the body in relation to cultural traditions. Azmina Ladha (2003) edited a collection for the FREDA Centre with a similar mandate--by girls, for girls--four years later.
2001 saw another burst of production on girls and by girls. Sharlene Azam, founder of Reluctant Hero (the first magazine in Canada produced by and for teen girls), published her Rebel, Rogue, Mischievous Babe: Stories About Being a Powerful Girl that year, showcasing articles that break prevailing myths around the realities of girls' relationships with their bodies, their families, sex and sexuality, bullying, violence and racism. In the same year, Sumach Press published Turbo Chicks: Talking Young Feminisms (Karaian, Rundle and Mitchell, eds), which contained a number of pieces that either spoke to girls, were voiced by girls or addressed issues of girlhood. These works deal more specifically with a younger generation of feminists who, despite self-defining as "girls," were already well into adulthood; illustrating once again that the categorization is indeed a slippery one.
Last year, Melinda Mattos and Nicole Cohen founded Shameless magazine: "Canada's independent [English language] voice for smart, strong, sassy young women." Proudly independent, Shameless is a grassroots glossy produced by a team of volunteer staff members, with content spanning the arts, culture and politics, all guided by a teen advisory board and feminist perspectives.
@Body Text tgt = In November 2003, Transforming Spaces: Girlhood, Agency and Power, the first international conference on girlhoods was held at Concordia University in Montréal. The overwhelming success of the event prompted a report that captured snapshots of the conference--as well as the reactions of participants to the unique and often-challenging assemblage of academics, grassroots activists, youth advocates and girls and young women--in a multi-voiced document (Steenbergen, 2004). The conference and its retreat component were both facilitated and attended by organizations in Canada with girls as their primary concern, including its host, POWER Camp National/Filles d'Action, GirlSpoken: Creative Voices for Change, New Opportunities for exploring Values and self-Awareness, The Ontario Young People's Alliance and the Real POWER Youth Society. Other organizations have been established across the nation over the last decade as well, corresponding with the growth and breadth of girlhood studies as a field. For instance, the Centre d'encadrement pour jeunes filles immigrantes works to improve the social, cultural, economic and civic lives of immigrant girls and young women, and GirlSpace's student volunteers facilitate girls' free expression through a variety of workshops. WAVES (Women Active Vocal Effective and Strong, with multiple chapters) promotes feminist politics with an anti-racist, queer positive and transpositive agenda, running camps and workshops. What is unique about these particular organizations is that they were created and exist principally for girls and young women and not as off-shoots or sub-groups of larger women- or youth-focused associations, illustrating the viability and necessity of separating and focusing on issues of special significance to girls as a distinct, albeit diverse, group.
In conceptualizing this terrain, it becomes clear that mediating the various realms of inquiry and their thematic points of concern--at the level of lived realities as well as institutional forces--are factors that both enable and constrain constructions of "girl" and girlhood. These include hegemonic femininities as articulated through preferences which are race, class, ability and sexuality-based.
Balancing and negotiating competing demands is a hallmark of contemporary girlhood. Whether this involves balancing school and home, diverse cultural discourses or peer cultures organized around sexuality, race, and ability, this act of balancing--of finding momentary spaces through lasting connections--is itself an expression of the agentic capacity of girls; of utilizing available resources, making investments, and charting directions that allow for an articulation of a sense of self that speaks to their own truths and that resonates with experience.
Yet, and in spite of these agentic capacities, the weight of structural considerations cannot be under-estimated. Constructions of femininities are not only mediated by but also determined by issues of race, class, ability and sexuality. In that sense, femininities which are raced are contingent on the processes of racialization inherent in society. How racism mediates expressions of girlhood depends then on the constructions of raced girlhood that are available, acceptable and sanctioned in the larger society. These might take the form of the dependent girl from a war-torn country seeking refuge in the West or the "oppressed" Muslim girl typically shown shrouded in a burqa. Such a construction not only permits for a degree of benevolence and pity on the part of the dominant society, which in turn reinforces national mythologies (Razack, 1998) but also allows for the reassertion of similar power relations as inscribed in our colonial history. Similarly, a raced construction of girlhood that depends on the exoticization of difference is also rendered acceptable and available as a script, given that it resonates with the bedrock of historical associations rooted in colonial encounters.
What is allowed and disallowed in prevailing and dominant constructions of girlhood then serves to demarcate the boundaries of this terrain at the socio-cultural and political levels. For girls who are presented with these dominant scripts, the task becomes one of negotiating and navigating this terrain, its various cul-de-sacs and spaces of safety, and its hyphenated third spaces. What we have said of race here could easily be applied to issues of sexuality and class, albeit not as separate and mutually exclusive categories, but rather as experiences articulated through a framework of patriarchal and capitalist structures of power. Underpinning all of these hegemonic ideals are ambivalences which once again border on and define the acceptable and unacceptable. But between these bordered edges of dominant ideals lies a nebulous, fluid and dynamic landscape, one marked by complex layers, intersecting and interlocking mediations with their variegated outcomes: the girlhoods of today.
This volume captures some of these shifting, fluid and dynamic realities; locating them, in a rather momentary way under an analytic gaze so that we can interrogate, disrupt and re-examine the depth of these negotiated realities in transition.
Organizing Girlhood: Redefining the Limits
This anthology focuses on diverse yet connected issues confronting girls today: the construction of girlhood and communities of girls; encounters with violence; agency, resistance and articulation; narratives of sexuality and the body; identity formation and popular culture; and more. Our subtitle, "Redefining the Limits," allows us--as editors and contributors--to interrogate the very categories that have strategically limited, contained and defined girlhood in highly specific and ideological ways. To us, the space of girlhood is one of contestation; marked by conflict, resistance and change.
A collection like this could be organized in several ways, and we oscillated between various possible permutations that clustered chapters around common sites (technology, popular culture, school), shared methodologies (ethnography, textual analysis, narrative), and recurrent themes (racism, identity, violence, sexuality). However, this rather artificial "framing" into neat sections with definite titles seemed to do an injustice to the very notion of 'redefining limits'; confining the pieces under hard-and-fast headings and categorically constricting their movement. While the ordering we eventually selected reveals a certain thematic coherence, currents of similarity run throughout, enabling a play of resonance between the various chapters and revealing the complexities of "girlhood" in ways that we couldn't have predicted.
As fitting reminders of historic instances of violence marked by uprooting and displacement, we begin with chapters by Pamela J. Downe, and Hourig Attarian and Hermig Yogurtian that poignantly capture the legacies of colonialism/imperialism and exile. Haunting and painful memories constitute a well-spring through which identity is recreated and reproduced anew at each location of migration both temporally and spatially. Though creative in its process of renewal, revival and recuperation, the task of identity formation through a prism of violence can also be devastating. But rather than portray girlhoods as quintessential sites of victimization, these chapters demonstrate the individual and collective resilience and strength of girls, and reflect on the myriad ways in which memory can be invoked to restore and re-invigorate a sense of self-determination.
A number of chapters target and ask difficult questions of the multivariate discourses that work to construct girls and that have helped shape the emerging field of girlhood studies in the Canadian context. Rachel Gouin and Fathiya Wais note that the field has thus far only minimally included Francophone girls and their perspectives, and even then much of this research is confined to French texts dealing specifically with Quebec. English texts, on the other hand, have tended to exclude references to the French experience and failed to consider the realities and experiences of French speaking girls living outside of Quebec. They take a much-needed first step here by calling linguistic categories into question and proposing a more equitable framework for future research.
Yasmin Hussein, Helene Berman, Romy Poletti, Rian Lougheed-Smith, Azmina Ladha, Ashley Ward, and Barb MacQuarrie chart the language of gendered violence, examining its expression, impact and outcome in the lives of girls and young women. They ask: What does it mean to "do" participatory action research with girls and young women? Why is girl-centred research important? And what is accomplished or gained by engaging girls in the research process? Their chapter outlines some of the issues they have encountered in presenting their work to diverse audiences, working with girls who are differently situated, and the experiences of violence that mark their own lives. In a self-critical and insightful manner, their voices weave through the text, punctuating a discussion on girl-centred research with personal reflections.
Yasmin Jiwani and Jo-Anne Lee specifically address racialized violence against girls. Jiwani focuses on the violence of racism as experienced by girls and young women of colour. Drawing on a study conducted in Vancouver, she argues that racism as a form of violence tends to be erased, trivialized or dismissed by those in positions of power. The violence of racism also tends to be internalized and over time and is reproduced through the naturalized hierarchies of power that prevail in schools and peer groups. While Lee makes a similar argument in her study of girls and young women of colour in Victoria, she underscores issues of citizenship and locality. Through an analysis of the community development/participatory action research paradigms, she outlines the ways in which exclusion is mediated in the dominant white landscape of Victoria. Here whiteness becomes both a physical feature of the environment and the dominant gaze under which girls and young women of colour live their lives, mediating different realities and worlds, and navigating between the corrosive effects of denial and dismissal and the affirming yet problematic dynamics of a participatory process.
Tatiana Fraser and Sarah Mangle also cast a critical eye on the spaces in which they work and the methods used to fulfill their organizational mandates. Using their involvement with/in a national non-profit organization whose goal is to raise awareness and mobilize around the elimination of violence and discrimination for girls and young women (and organizations working with them), they illuminate the challenges that emerge in attempting to bridge multiple strategies for change. Sharing examples, they discuss the creative possibilities that emerge from such tensions, and offer useful tactics for identifying, articulating and dealing with conflict.
Are queer girls, girls? Marnina Gonick argues that if we understand "girl" as a category which is socially produced rather than simply a naturally occurring biological and developmental phase in the life course, we can better appreciate the restrictions that limit the diverse reality of girlhood. Her question suggests that even more may be involved than the already complicated project of creating more inclusive categories. It demands that we look again at the intersecting discourses of femininity, age, agency and sexuality and the social and cultural practices that constitute "girl" as category, and consider the institutionalized norms that regulate the boundaries of the category as well as girls' responses to them. In documenting the various ways in which queer youth are vulnerable to violence, Gonick also problematizes the discourse of risk and considers the numerous ways in which queer youth manifest agency and activism, sometimes using queer identity strategically to obtain much needed resources and services.
While the concept of resistance has been much celebrated in recent academic and popular writing, few have undertaken to interrogate this concept critically. Rebecca Raby provides a nuanced analysis of the differences between modernist and postmodernist constructions of resistance. Resistance, she argues, can include subtle and often covert acts as well as larger more pronounced oppositional actions against structural forces. Among girls, acts of resistance tend to be confined to the day to day interactions with peers and those in positions of authority. Similarly, resistance is often expressed through the language of style--reflecting girls' agency, but one that is undoubtedly delimited by the latitude that girls are afforded through gendered scripts and prescriptive guidelines.
Is meanness a form of resistance? Dawn Currie and Deirdre Kelly's provocative chapter explores the economy and currency of meanness between and among girls in the context of the school. Commonly understood as "relational aggression" or "lateral violence," they argue that meanness is a direct outcome of the dominant constructions of femininity that are articulated within the hierarchical structures inherent in peer groups and within the larger school culture. More importantly, such meanness reflects the agency of girls as they strive to navigate between competing constructions of "good girls" and "bad girls" and attempt to gain a level of popularity and inclusion in the economy of peer cultures. Meanness, they contend, becomes a currency through which such inclusion is obtained and maintained.
Based on an ethnographic study of girls at "East Side High" in Vancouver, Shauna Pomerantz explores style in relation to girls' identity construction; offering an alternative reading to both the "Ophelia genre" and moral panics surrounding girls, their bodies, and their clothes. Framing clothes as "social skin," Pomerantz argues that style "functions as a significant form of embodied subjectivity for girls" that locates power within the body. It also draws attention to the complex social processes that girls negotiate on an everyday basis, highlighting the multiple ways in which they carefully and creatively make meaning out of their complicated lives. Through their construction and articulation of stylized identities that purposefully challenge traditional femininity, the ethos of popularity, and their sense of disenfranchisement, girls express their own individuality and agency.
Issues surrounding girls' bodies is a theme further explored in the next few chapters. Using the dominant North American narratives of menstruation sites of inquiry, Michele Polak examines the secrecy, fear, discretion and embarrassment typically associated with the onset of menses and its perpetuation by the feminine hygiene industry. Based on an extensive study of girls' personal web pages, Polak moves from history to corporate advertising to the online world and discovers that a considerable rewriting of that narrative has been taking place, one that is "unflinchingly descriptive and seethingly honest." She argues that online space has provided a place where traditional menstruation narratives are not only being disrupted, but reimagined.
Prompted by her own visceral reaction to her "discovery" of the online world of preteen modeling websites, Sophie Wertheimer examines the construction of the North American girl as simultaneously embodying asexual innocence and the erotic. Situating preteen modeling websites within the often-contradictory and always-constructed social, cultural and discursive framework of "childhood," Wertheimer argues that dominant discourses render girls as passive objects--not as agents in their own right. In an attempt to move beyond this narrow construction, she offers ways to read these spaces--and girls' participation in them--as more complex and nuanced, reflecting their agency and complicity in the consumerist ethos of contemporary society.
Taking the theme of representation further, Michele Byers explores Canadian television programming in terms of how girls are positioned within the national imaginary. Byers argues that while much of teen programming is constrained by the commercialized format of the genre, Canadian programs such as Degrassi Jr. High and Renegade.com make a concerted effort to produce programming that is girl-centred and which speaks to a specifically Canadian audience. Drawing examples from these two popular series, she demonstrates how the series differ from their American counterparts, and how in fact--despite its limitations--Canadian programming remains quite faithful to Canadian girls and their varied realities.
Individually, each chapter interrogates "girlhood" as a site of resistance, complicity, survival and celebration. Taken as a group, they point to the inherent inter- disciplinarity of girlhood studies, highlighting the necessity of including multiple perspectives and multifaceted analyses of an area of inquiry. They also underscore the need to see all borders (both geographic as well as conceptual) as constructions that need to be interrogated, scrutinized and negotiated in the interests of improving the lives of girls and young women.
Girlhood: Redefining the Limits offers a panoramic view of a largely un-mined and very rich emerging area--namely, girlhood studies in Canada. We recognize that the collection is far from complete, given the complexity of issues that exist within our national framework. At the same time, it strikes us that this is precisely the time that girlhood studies in Canada might serve as a much-needed catalyst to the feminist community and society at large to see age, across the life span of girls and women, as a broad category for analysis and activism.