Girlhood Schools And Media

This book explores the circulation and reception of popular discourses of achieving girlhood, and the ways in which girls themselves participate in such circulation. It examines the figure of the achieving girl within wider discourses of neoliberal self-management and post-feminist possibility, considering the tensions involved in being both successful and successfully feminine and the strategies and negotiations girls undertake to manage these tensions. The work is grounded in an understanding of media, educational, and peer contexts for the production of the successful girl. It traces narratives across school, television and online in texts produced for and by girls, drawing on interviews with girls in schools, online forum participation (within the purpose-built site www.smartgirls.tv), and girls’ discussions of a range of teen dramas.

Examining context-specific conditions in which girls live, learn, work, play, and organize deepens the understanding of place-making practices of girls and young women worldwide. Focusing on place across health, literary and historical studies, art history, communications, media studies, sociology, and education allows for investigations of how girlhood is positioned in relation to interdisciplinary and transnational research methodologies, media environments, geographic locations, history, and social spaces. This book offers a comprehensive reading on how girlhood scholars construct and deploy research frameworks that directly engage girls in the research process.

Mediated Girlhoods, Volume 2 is an anthology devoted to scholarship on girls' media culture. Taking a cultural studies approach, it includes studies of girls' media representations, girls' media consumption, and girls' media production. In an attempt to push research on girls' media culture in new directions, it responds to criticisms of previous research in this field by including studies of girls who are not white, middle-class, heterosexual, cisgender, or Western. Approaching girlhood, media, and methodology broadly, Mediated Girlhoods includes studies of such previously unexplored topics as girls' mimetic communication via Tumblr, the girlyboy in independent Filipino cinema, Qatari girls' film production, trans girlhood in advertising, Canadian girls' feminist activism, and the new girl subject imagined in Disney's Cinderella (2015). Mediated Girlhoods, Volume 2 is appropriate for undergraduate- and graduate-level courses, particularly graduate seminars exploring girlhood, media, and culture; youth media; youth cultures; and gender and media; and undergraduate courses housed within the following departments: media studies, communication studies, cultural studies, women's and gender studies, sociology, literature, history, education, and psychology.

One of the first volumes dedicated to exploring and developing theories of Black girls and girlhoods, The Black Girlhood Studies Collection foregrounds the experiences of Black girls in Canada, the US, the Caribbean, and the African continent. This timely contributed volume brings together emerging and established scholars to discuss what Black girlhood means historically and in the 21st century, and how concepts of race, gender, sexuality, class, and nationality inform or affect identities of Black girls. From self-care and fan activism to political role models and new media, this interdisciplinary collection engages with Black feminist and womanist theory, hip-hop pedagogy, resistance theory, and ethnography. Featuring chapter overviews, glossaries, and discussion questions, this vital resource will evoke meaningful conversation and provide the theoretical, practical, and pedagogical tools necessary for the advancement of the field and the imagining of new worlds for Black girls.

What does a teenage girl dream about in Nigeria or New York? How does she spend her days in Mongolia, the Midwest, and the Middle East? All around the world, girls are going to school, working, dreaming up big futures—they are soccer players and surfers, ballerinas and chess champions. Yet we know so little about their daily lives. We often hear about challenges and catastrophes in the news, and about exceptional girls who make headlines. But even though the health, education, and success of girls so often determines the future of a community, we don’t know more about what life is like for the ordinary girls, the ones living outside the headlines. From the Americas to Europe to Africa to Asia to the South Pacific, the thirty teens from twenty-seven countries in Girlhood share their own stories of growing up through diary entries and photographs, and the girls’ stories are put in context with reporting and research that helps us understand the circumstances and communities they live in. This full-color, exuberantly designed volume is a portrait of ordinary girlhood around the world, and of the world, as seen through girls’ eyes.

In this timely collection, contributors from a number of disciplines discuss neoliberal visions of success, and the subsequent effects they have on the construction of the lifecycle. Frequently mentioned in popular political discourse, the notion of neoliberalism is often deployed as shorthand for the consensus that austerity is necessary and the hard-working individual can survive it. This volume unpicks and interrogates the term by engaging with the interface between the political ubiquity of neoliberal forms and its lived experience in neoliberal societies, cutting across a multiplicity of factors including gender, age, and access to education. Impressive in its wide scope and analysis, Interrogating the Neoliberal Lifecycle presents an informed discussion not only of the limits of the neoliberal paradigm but also of possible alternatives.

The stereotype-laden message, delivered through clothes, music, books, and TV, is essentially a continuous plea for girls to put their energies into beauty products, shopping, fashion, and boys. This constant marketing, cheapening of relationships, absence of good women role models, and stereotyping and sexualization of girls is something that parents need to first understand before they can take action. Lamb and Brown teach parents how to understand these influences, give them guidance on how to talk to their daughters about these negative images, and provide the tools to help girls make positive choices about the way they are in the world. In the tradition of books like Reviving Ophelia, Odd Girl Out, Queen Bees and Wannabees that examine the world of girls, this book promises to not only spark debate but help parents to help their daughters.

Across the British Empire and the world, the 1920s and 1930s were a time of unprecedented social and cultural change. Girls and young women were at the heart of many of these shifts. Out of this milieu, the Girl Guide movement emerged as a response to modern concerns about gender, race, class, and social instability. In this book, Kristine Alexander analyzes the ways in which Guiding sought to mould young people in England, Canada, and India. It is a fascinating account that connects the histories of girlhood, internationalism, and empire, while asking how girls and young women understood and responded to Guiding’s attempts to lead them toward a “useful” feminine future.