1st Edition

All About the Girl Culture, Power, and Identity

Edited By Anita Harris Copyright 2005
    306 Pages 5 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    312 Pages 5 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    This groundbreaking collection offers a complicated portrait of girls in the 21st Century. These are the riot grrls and the Spice Girls, the good girls and the bad girls who are creating their own "girl" culture and giving a whole new meaning to "grrl" power. Featuring provocative essays from leaders in the field like Michelle Fine, Angela McRobbie, Valerie Walkerdine, Nancy Lesko, Niobe Way and Deborah Tolman, this work brings to life the ever-changing identities of today's young women. The contributors cover all aspects of girlhood from around the world and strike upon such key areas as schooling, sexuality, popular culture and identity. This is new scholarship at its best.

    Acknowledgements Foreword: Michelle Fine Introduction: Anita Harris Part 1: Constructing Girlhoods in the Twenty-First Century: Chapter 1: Notes on Post Feminism and Popular Culture: Bridget Jones and the New Gender Regime, Angela McRobbie Chapter 2: Women, Girls, and the Unfinished Work of Connection: A Critical Review of American Girls' Studies, Janie Victoria Ward and Beth Cooper Benjamin Chapter 3: Good Girls, Bad girls: Anglo-centrism and Diversity in the Constitution of Contemporary Girlhood, Christine Griffin Chapter 4: From Badness to Meanness: Popular Constructions of Contemporary Girlhood, Meda Chesney-Lind and Katherine Irwin Part 2: Feminism for Girls Chapter 5: Feminism and Femininity: Or How We Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Thong, Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards Chapter 6: Girl Power Politics: Pop-Culture Barriers and Organizational Resistance, Jessica Taft Chapter 7: Mythic Figures and Lived Identities: Locating the Girl in Feminist Discourse, Jennifer Eisenhauer Chapter 8: I Don't See Feminists as You See Feminists: Young Women Negotiating Feminism in Contemporary Britain, Madeleine Jowett Part 3: Sexualities Chapter 9: Pretty in Pink: Young Women Presenting Mature Sexual Identities, Kate Gleeson and Hannah Frith Chapter 10: Talking Sexuality Through an Insider's Lens: The Samoan Experience, Anne Marie Tupuola Chapter 11: Shifting Desires: Discourses of Accountability in Abstinence-Only Education in the US, April Burns and Mar #237;a Elena Torre Part 4: Popular and Virtual Cultures Chapter 12: Where My Girls At? Black Girls and the Construction of the Sexual, Debbie Weekes Chapter 13: Spicy Strategies: Pop Feminist and Other Empowerments in Girl Culture, Bettina Fritzsche Chapter 14: Jamming Girl Culture: Young Women and Consumer Citizenship, Anita Harris Chapter 15: Girls' Web Sites: A Virtual Room of One's Own? Jacqueline Reid-Walsh and Claudia Mitchell Part 5: Schooling Chapter 16: Pleasures Within Reason: Teaching Feminism and Education, Nancy Lesko and Antoinette Quarshie Chapter 17: Girls, Schooling and the Discourse of Self-Change: Negotiating Meanings of the High School Prom, Amy L. Best Chapter 18: Gender and Sexuality: Continuities and Change for Girls in School, Mary Jane Kehily Part 6: Research With and By Young Women Chapter 19: Colluding in Compulsory Heterosexuality? Doing Research With Young Women at School, Kathryn Morris-Roberts Chapter 20: Speaking Back: Voices of Young Urban Woman of Color Using Participatory Action Research to Challenge and Complicate Representations of Young Women, Caitlin Cahill and the Fed Up Honeys: Erica Arenas, Jennifer Contreras, Jiang Na, Indra Rios-Moore, and Tiffany Threatts Chapter 21: Beneath the Surface of Voice and Silence: Researching the Home Front, Adreanne Ormond Chapter 22: Possible Selves and Pasteles: How a Group of Mothers and Daughters Took a London Conference by Storm, Lori Lobenstine, Yasmin Pereira, Jenny Whitley, Jessica Robles, Yaraliz Soto, Jeanette Sergeant, Daisy Jimenez, Emily Jimenez, Jessenia Ortiz, and Sasha Cirino Contributor Biographies Index

    Biography

    Anita Harris is Lecturer in Sociology at Monash University in Victoria, Australia. In 2000-2001, she was a Visiting Scholar at the City University of New York and an invited speaker at Birmingham University.

    "This irreverent, deliciously varied, full-bodied collection marks a coming of age for Girls' Studies. A wonderfully diverse array of scholar/activists interrogate the stuff of everyday life--from proms and thongs to girl power politics and all waves of feminism--to theorize contemporary girlhood as a transnational conversation. Most important, girls live and breathe in these pages. They create, research, analyze, consume, challenge, desire, complicate, resist, laugh, collude, and talk back. This, above all else, makes All About the Girl a gritty, intimate, unsettling, and deeply satisfying book." -- Lyn Mikel Brown, author of Raising Their Voices and Girlfighting