This issue of Girlhood Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal is the second of two Special Issues on the ways in which marriage and pregnancy continue to intervene in the lives of girls and young women. Part One (18:2), a Special Issue on early pregnancy and young motherhood, guest edited by Doris Kakaru and Grace Bantebya Kyomuhendo, focusses mostly on Uganda but also ranges from Kenya and Tanzania to 18th Century London, United Kingdom. Issue 18: 3, guest edited by Boroka Godley and Lisa Wiebesiek, takes up Child, Early and Forced Marriages and Unions (CEFMU) across Zimbabwe, South Africa, Turkey, Venezuela, Indonesia, Nepal, Iran, and Brazil. Coinciding with the recent commemoration of the 30th anniversary of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, the publishing of these two issues offers an impressive collection of new scholarship about pregnancy, young motherhood, and forced and early marriage, coming at a time when governments around the world are recognizing the gains and the ongoing challenges in the struggle to achieve gender equality, and when evidence through scholarly research is so needed in the area of Sexual and Reproductive Health Rights. These two Special Issues align with the official theme of the 2025 International Day of the Girl, celebrated on 11 October, as does the title of this editorial—“The Girl I Am, The Change I Lead: Girls on the Frontlines of Crisis.” Furthermore, Plan International, as one of the key NGOs working on girls’ education, is taking as its focus for the 2025 International Day of the Girl the ending of child marriage.

Child, Early and Forced Marriage, and Unions (CEFMU) can perhaps most usefully be thought of as an umbrella term for a variety of practices related to formal and/or informal unions in which at least one member of the couple is under the age of 18. CEFMU is recognised widely as a violation of human rights and a significant public health issue and has long been a focus of international development.

In this article, we explore the sociocultural constraints that undermine rural adolescent girls’ agency in resisting early child marriage in a gender-unequal context in Zimbabwe. Drawing on interviews with 20 rural high school girls aged 14 to 17, we analyze how intersecting forces—patriarchal authority, family control, economic precarity, and institutional complicity curtail girls’ autonomy. Findings reveal how fear of familial rejection, the lack of safe spaces, the silencing of girls’ voices, and the normalization of early child marriage converge to limit resistance. The involvement of authority figures in abuse, cultural responses to early pregnancy, and limited access to information further intensify girls’ vulnerability. Dismantling early child marriage requires transformative interventions that challenge patriarchal norms and foster collective empowerment in structurally marginalized rural sub-Saharan Africa.

Drawing on data generated during my doctoral study that involved using participatory visual methodology to work with 15 girls in a rural community in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, I describe and discuss a cellphilm produced by them that focuses on early and forced marriage in their community. I demonstrate how such methodology can enable girls and young women to communicate effectively their complex and nuanced understandings of such marriage and the social and material factors that influence continued support for it. I identify three key learnings drawn from the cellphilm and argue that learning about this practice from those affected by it is invaluable to the design of policy and programming that addresses early and forced marriage in ways that are responsive, relevant, sustainable, and effective.

The Turkish legal system stipulates that people under 18 are children and prohibits what is called child marriage. For decades the Turkish state has been striving to eliminate early marriages, whether forced or voluntary. Mainstream media labels underage girls who marry unofficially as child brides, a term that evokes negative associations including child abuse, backwardness, and pathologized sexuality. A group of underage girls, however, claim to have married of their own volition and call themselves Early Marriage Sufferers since they suffer because of the existing legislation regulating the age of marriage. I explore the topography of early marriages in Turkey through the media coverage of this movement in relation to the role it plays in the political antagonisms between secularists and conservationists in this society.

There is limited understanding of the underlying contributing factors to child marriage and the unique challenges faced by girls affected in the context of Venezuela's ongoing geopolitical and economic crisis. To bridge this knowledge gap, we employed an inductive approach to identify themes derived from 89 first and third person narratives, collected in 2022, about female Venezuelan migrants/refugees in child marriages/informal unions in Brazil, Ecuador, and Peru. Prominent themes included insecurity—pre-, during and post-migration—as well as the loss of support networks that contributed to their forming informal unions, experiencing intimate partner violence, and enduring multifaceted challenges related to motherhood and migration for economic purposes. Understanding the experiences of early marriage/unions during migration is critical to preventing child marriage and better supporting affected girls.

Legislating the minimum marriage age is promoted globally to address the disproportionate impact of child marriage on girls. This strategy, pursued in Indonesia since the 1920s, culminated in the 2019 law legislating the same minimum age for girls and boys. The existing literature establishing that this reform has not been fully effective overlooks the extent to which unresolved challenges from previous law reform attempts have contributed to this ineffectiveness. Demonstrated from a historical perspective, I argue that reform attempts, even the revolutionary ones, have failed to overcome the intersection of child marriage with religious beliefs. Consequently, complex dilemmas in addressing child marriage, arising from this intersection, are inevitable. Developing and implementing law reform strategies without engaging with the relevant historical context may prove particularly challenging.

Marriage in which one or both partners are under 20 years of age is considered child marriage in Nepal. In rural villages here, parents are the primary decision-makers behind their children's marriage. I conducted a qualitative study in the central-southern region of Nepal in which I explored the factors that drive parents to marry off their daughters whether they are underage or not. I conducted 25 focus group discussions and an equal number of key informant interviews with parents of girls aged 15 to 18. My findings demonstrate that parents view ensuring a daughter's marriage as their parental duty that is essential to maintaining their social reputation and is also the solution to their fear of a daughter self-initiating her marriage.

Globally, Iran ranks tenth in the prevalence of female child marriage. Using quantitative secondary analysis of vital statistics data, I examine the role of ethnicity, religion, and development in this phenomenon from 2013 to 2021 since 1,199,271 child marriages were registered during this period. Although religion and development are linked to child marriage, the association is not definitive; some developed provinces show high rates, while less developed western areas have the lowest and the prevalence varies in Sunni and Shiite regions. Ethnicity appears to be the most consistent factor. Ethnic groups of Baluch, Turk, Arab, Turkman, and Persian in Khorasan have the highest ratios. This suggests that development alone cannot reduce child marriage; social, cultural, and religious dynamics need to be considered.

In this review I examine existing international research on Child, Early, and Forced Marriage and Unions. Through a review of 21 academic research articles based on quantitative and qualitative studies published between 2000 and 2025, I consider the extent to which feminist approaches such as intersectionality, reflexivity, gender transformation, and interdisciplinarity operate in the examination of this harmful practice. I argue for the value of explicitly feminist approaches to further inquiry into this issue that place those affected by the practice at the center of the research and resituate them as experts on the subject matter and active agents of social change who may contribute to the eradication of this practice.

The premier at the Cannes Film Festival in January 2025, of the film Young Mothers drew, according to the reviews, a ten-minute standing ovation. It was awarded the prize for Best Screenplay along with the prize of the Ecumenical Jury. Written and directed by Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardennes, well known for their films depicting social realism, Young Mothers takes us into a group home in Belgium where we follow, up close, the lives of four young mothers. The film, released for public distribution in May 2025, is one that is likely to spark critical discussions in many different discourse communities for its coverage of such a critical area of social policy and, simultaneously, its treatment of stories of the personal in the lives of girls and young women. The timing of this this Special Issue of Girlhood Studies, guest edited by Doris Kakuru and Grace Bantebya Kyomuhendo, is particularly appropriate given the release of Young Mothers.

This Special Issue of Girlhood Studies emerges from an urgent and critical need to reframe the dominant narratives surrounding adolescent girls’ pregnancy and parenting and to center their lived realities. Too often, these girls are marginalized in research and policy and framed in relation to deficit-based perspectives that neither address adequately the systemic inequities that shape their lives nor recognize their capabilities and agency. This Special Issue foregrounds perspectives that acknowledge young mothers not merely as subjects of intervention, but as knowledge holders and change agents.

In Uganda, COVID-19 fueled a surge in teenage pregnancies and motherhood, a phenomenon widely described as the shadow pandemic. Prolonged school closures (2020 to 2021) intensified gender-based adultification—the premature burdening of girls with adult responsibilities. Deep-seated cultural perceptions of adolescent girls as mature women heightened their risk of exploitation, early pregnancy, and forced motherhood. Drawing on a Feminist Participatory Action Research project that engaged adolescent mothers to understand the support they need to rebuild their lives after the pandemic, we examine how adultification shaped their pathways to pregnancy and motherhood, consequently reinforcing cycles of gendered oppression and systemic neglect. By centering Ugandan girls’ experiences, we expand on the adultification discourse, stressing the need for institutional reforms and community support to protect their childhood.

In this article, I explore how pregnant and parenting Maasai schoolgirls in rural Kenya inhabit emotions like regret, anger, and hope, and how these feelings act as social forces that shape perception, relationships, and action. Centering the narrative of a schoolgirl named Namelok, I examine schoolgirlhood as an affective orientation lived within and against Girls in Development discourse that links empowerment to delayed fertility and school completion. Namelok's story illustrates how Maasai girls navigate cultural expectations, structural inequality, and intimate relations from their position as daughters. Drawing on cultural theories of emotion, I offer a relational account of agency grounded in gendered and generational social worlds and argue for placing affect at the center of scholarship on adolescent pregnancy, schoolgirl motherhood, and African girlhood.

There are knowledge gaps regarding the wellbeing of adolescent parents in humanitarian settings, particularly in relation to HIV vulnerabilities. We estimated associations between parenthood and sexual and mental health outcomes using baseline study data among refugee youth aged 16 to 24 in Bidi Bidi Refugee Settlement, Uganda. We conducted unadjusted and adjusted logistic and linear regression analyses to examine associations between parenthood and sexual health, mental health, and protective factors. A third of the participants were pregnant and/or had at least one child. Mental health (depression, suicidal ideation, stigma) was lower among pregnant/parenting young mothers (vs. non-pregnant/parenting women). Condom use was significantly lower among pregnant/parenting youth. Tailored interventions are required to address these social and health disparities, particularly for refugee young mothers in humanitarian settings.

I analyze, in terms of contemporaneous notions of politeness, the expressions of guilt and the excuses for being pregnant in petitions signed by girls and young women that were addressed to the Governors of the Foundling Hospital, the first home in London for babies whose mothers could not look after them. My findings indicate that over half the petitions from these servants include excuses, but less than a fifth contain confessions of guilt, while a few combine both. This suggests that admitting guilt was harder than providing excuses probably because this threatened their reputation, but both may have been a guarantee of achieving their goals despite being contrary to what counted as politeness.

Previous research has examined sexual violence among pregnant girls primarily from the perspective of adults or by using quantitative data. In this article, we refer to survivors’ narratives to illustrate how systemic structures and cultural frameworks perpetuate sexual violence that condemns girls to suffer in silence. The data was collected using photo voice and the life history interviews with young pregnant women and girls. Our findings show that weak child protection structures and, at the intersection of male dominance, adultism, and economic precarity, cultural norms that prioritize family honour over reproductive justice perpetuate sexual violence against girls.

Teenage motherhood in Tanzania remains a critical socio-economic and public health challenge, exacerbated by gender inequality, limited education, and systemic barriers. In this study, applying a feminist intersectional lens and ecological systems framework, we explored the experiences, choices, and childcare struggles of teenage mothers (13 to18 years of age) in Kilimanjaro, Mwanza, Morogoro, and Shinyanga. Through 12 Focus Group Discussions and 115 interviews with stakeholders, including young mothers, our findings highlighted educational exclusion, employment barriers, social stigma, and inadequate childcare. However, despite hardships, young mothers adapted through peer support and informal work. We call for gender-responsive policies to promote education reintegration, economic opportunities, and accessible childcare to address these structural inequities and improve outcomes for teenage mothers.

In this article, I examine how young mothers navigate urban precarity and the interconnected vulnerabilities imbued in the poor urban space. I used collaborative ethnography and worked with young mothers as youth peer researchers to co-create knowledge. Data revealed that young mothers in poor urban locales experience multifaceted vulnerabilities which constrain and limit their choices. They navigate them through an agentic practice called hustling. While I have discussed hustling as a form of agency, I caution against the risk of burdened agency that might ensue and argue, rather, that agency should be understood as a process.

Despite the existing international policy frameworks that protect the rights and well-being of young mothers and pregnant girls, they continue to be stigmatized and face several barriers every day. However, they exercise agency. In this article, I discuss, from a critical feminist perspective, a photovoice exhibition by young mothers in Nairobi who were working to recover their agency, and I discuss their interview transcripts. Contextualizing it is key to acknowledging agency among these girls and young women, especially those in non-western contexts like sub-Saharan African countries. The findings from this study reveal that pregnant adolescents and young mothers live and express their agency in ways that are determined by their physical and social environments.

Uganda was hosting 1,741,331 refugees and asylum seekers as of April 2025, with youth (15 to 24) comprising 25 percent and those under 18 years accounting for 55 percent according to local sources. Refugee youth have remained vulnerable to negative health outcomes because of limited service provision, and the effects of gender norms and contextual challenges. Adolescents and young women who become mothers face challenges including social stigma, psychological stress, and mental ill-health, and especially the unmarried young mothers who single-handedly struggle to balance their responsibilities. The contextual social norms, values, and practices shape the perceptions and experiences of young refugee mothers and affect their choices and decisions although they do use their agency to navigate the various structural challenges in refugee settings.

In this, the first issue, an unthemed one, of Girlhood Studies of the new quarter-century, there is a beautiful lining up of what must surely be regarded as evidence of transnationalism in that although each author is from a different country—Canada, Ghana, Indonesia, Japan, Israel, the United States, and Australia—the concerns are relevant internationally: the privileging of white heterosexual girls; the imposition of cultural taboos and rules on menstruating girls; the frequent failure to understand the differing realities of girls; the subversive potential of girls to undermine sexist privilege; the need for empowered girls still having to navigate disciplinary practices; and the ways in which changing social conditions govern the treatment of even pre-school-age girls. Appropriately enough, we end this issue with a review of one of the books, Girls in Global Development: Figurations of Gendered Power (2023), in the Berghahn series, Transnational Girlhoods. This range, which might, on the one hand, seem accidental, suggests, on the other, the rich body of feminist work that is inspired by girls’ successes as well as by daunting needs that result from inequalities.

In Western society, girlhood and girl power are constructed largely in terms of white heteronormativity. Correspondingly, American television neglects to portray diverse girlhoods and modes of empowerment realistically, privileging white, cis-hetero representations. However, the teen drama series The Wilds offers a somewhat nuanced portrayal of girls, racial diversity, and queerness. We apply intersectional feminist critiques of girlhood and girl power to assess how The Wilds challenges US media industry norms by centering young, empowered Indigenous and queer girls, as well as to examine how the series represents feminism. We argue that more diverse portrayals of girlhood and empowerment in the media are needed as these may promote greater self-acceptance amongst BIPOC and 2SLGBTQIA+ girls.

Menstrual taboos, despite their varying manifestations across cultures, remain a universal phenomenon that profoundly affects the lives of women and girls worldwide. In this article, I draw on data collected in 2021 as part of an ongoing study in rural Ghana that focuses on girls’ experiences of imposed rules, specifically a ban believed to have been enforced by a deity that prohibits them from crossing a sacred river during menstruation. I demonstrate how girls are subjected to structural violence and perpetual discrimination because of the widespread belief that menstrual blood renders them impure. The narratives shared by the participants highlight the complex interplay between tradition, social norms, and individual agency in revealing the deep-rooted fears and beliefs that underpin adherence to these cultural prohibitions.

In this article we examine the discourse surrounding girlhood in Indonesia through a scoping review of research and gray literature from 2013 to 2022, alongside reference to a workshop with researchers and advocates. Themes related to sexuality and reproduction are dominant in our findings. We argue that the scholarly and civic engagements with knowledge about girls and young women in Indonesia limit the modality of knowledge production and change. We propose a shift towards critical approaches in the investigation of girlhood in Indonesia and the Global South that involves a commitment to epistemic gathering to develop methodologies that include interrogating our assumptions, contextualizing girlhood, and fostering interdisciplinary collaborations to better understand the diverse realities of girls and young women in Indonesia and beyond.

In this article, I demonstrate how schoolgirls not only undermined the demands of the government's educational policy through the acts of cooking and eating but also recreated the meaning of the mouth as an organ for eating and speaking; they turned this orifice into a tool to carve out a new space in and against the patriarchal society that imposed strictures on them and silenced them. I track traces of the ideology and performance of cooking, eating, and talking that unfolded beyond the classroom by examining a diverse set of representations of schoolgirls in girls’ magazines that depicted the mouth as an iconic, if hitherto unacknowledged, symbol of modern Japanese schoolgirls.

Studies note that feminism promotes women's and girls’ empowerment, and online feminist activity has become a central area of feminist socialization because of its growing popularity. In this study, we explore the lived experiences of Israeli girls aged 16 to 19 who self-identified as feminists and focus on their encounters on an online feminist intra-generational platform. Drawing on these interviews, we discuss the role that social media played in their feminist development. We highlight two contradictory experiences in that while the girls describe their online activities as empowering, they also had to navigate the disciplining practices and power relations on these feminist platforms.

For over a century, Girl Scouts of the United States of America (GSUSA) has shaped the experiences of American girls with a curriculum crafted in response to changing social conditions. In this article, I examine how the contemporary GSUSA organization seeks to develop the youngest Girl Scouts. Through an analysis of the Daisy and Brownie curriculum and the skill development encouraged by activity options, I demonstrate how GSUSA produces the neoliberal girl subject via the program pillars of STEM, Entrepreneurship, and Life Skills. Starting in kindergarten, Girl Scouts are encouraged to become can-do girls or future girls prepared for the global economy. I provide further evidence of the production of neoliberal girlhood and highlight how these efforts have extended to early elementary school.

Children's understandings of society, and the possibilities of their personal trajectories in it, are heavily influenced by narratives with which they have been raised. Ways of doing gender are learned, and they proliferate, via children's literature. By focusing on three key series by Anh Do, I examine how girlhoods are constructed in Australian children's literature. In Do's series WeirDo, Hotdog, and Wolf Girl, girls take on a diversity of roles from tertiary love interest to protagonist, and forms from anthropomorphic animal to the dubiously human. Deploying post-coding analysis, I explore the imaginative possibilities of doing girlhood by examining the appearances, behaviors, and relationships of female characters in these texts and question if the three series can—or should—be upheld to the same standards.

Melanie Kennedy. 2018. Tweenhood: Femininity and Celebrity in Tween Popular Culture. London, UK: I.B. Tauris.

Heather Switzer, Karishma Desai and Emily Bent (Eds.). 2023. Girls in Global Development: Figurations of Gendered Power. New York: Berghahn Books.

In recent years, the scope of girlhood studies has included the investigation of a wide range of cultural artifacts and media that shape, reflect, and challenge society's prescriptive notions of girlhood. These artifacts include podcasts, girlfestos, fan fiction and, as this special issue highlights, comics. As Nicoletta Mandolini, Lisa Maya Quaianni Manuzzato, and Eva Van de Wiele, the guest editors of this special issue demonstrate, comics have emerged as a particularly rich and multifaceted medium in which to explore the complexities of girl culture, identity formation, and representation. In this special issue of Girlhood Studies Mel Gibson from the United Kingdom focuses on New Zealand, Lan Dong from the United States considers the work of a first-generation Filipino Egyptian American, Italian Simona di Martino looks at an Italian franchise while American Brianna Anderson focuses on Vietnamese graphic novels and Katlin Sweeney Romero from the United States considers the work of a Latina born in America. Then Charlotte Fabricius from Denmark looks at Danish publishing while Italian Nicoletta Mandolini interviews a Portuguese author. Also from Portugal, Ana Matilde Sousa focuses on girls in general in her visual essay while Eva Van de Wiele from Belgium considers the work of a German comics author.

As the guest editors of this special issue of Girlhood Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal we invited comics and media scholars to discuss girlhood from the perspective of transnational and/or transmedia practices. These investigations avoid the trap Anita Harris warned us about in All about the Girl (2004) since they approach girlhood as a “constantly shifting” category, to use the words of Kristine Moruzi (2012: 191) rather than as a natural fixed state of being. Neither do they repeat the earlier tendency to conflate girlhood with womanhood (as can be seen, for instance, in Trina Robbins's From Girls to Grrlz (1999) and in Mike Madrid's The Supergirls (2009)). This special issue aligns with the work of scholars who study comics and girlhood with a focus on different publication formats (Gibson 2023), an international approach (Marshall 2018), and a transmedia interest (Hains 2012). The authors represented here consider girlhood as produced and negotiated; they recognize that girlhood implies a multiplicity of ages, social classes, ethnicities, and religions (as did, for instance, Marla Jaksch, Catherine Cymone Fourshey, and Relebohile Moletsane (2023) who edited Girlhood Studies 16:1: Reframing African Girlhood and Salsabel Almanssori and Muna Saleh whose Hijabi Girlhood in the Intersections: Violence, Resistance, Reclamation appeared later in 2023).

In this article, I explore the significance of transmedia to contemporary independent comics through analyzing aspects of production, engagement, and content in a small-scale fantasy-based franchise, The Tea Dragon Society, that celebrates diversity and interconnectedness. This transmedia franchise centers predominantly on girl characters and is aimed mainly at 8–12-year-olds. The depiction of girlhood in the storyworld can be seen to be linked to how the overall franchise works and I argue that both can be seen as being in flux and potentially boundless, yet also bounded. The franchise also intertwines girlhood and craft cultures in the storyworld, modeling activity with which the creator hopes the target audience will engage in the real world and reflecting the franchise itself as it, too, represents crafting.

I examine how Malaka Gharib's I Was Their American Dream and It Won't Always Be Like This frame, embody, and reimagine girlhood through a multicultural transnational lens. Born in California, Gharib grew up with Filipino and Egyptian heritage. Taking advantage of the formal properties of comics, her work situates her memories and experiences at the intersection of ethnicity, gender, and transnational encounters. I interrogate how these books visualize the connection between girlhood and mixed heritage through the artist-narrator's interactions with and observation of her Filipino mother and relatives in the United States and her father, stepmother, half-siblings, and neighbors in Egypt. I also examine how the multimodality of comics draws on tropes of girlhood to enable representation through the depiction and layering of different selves.

The Italian-made comics series W.I.T.C.H. and the homonymous magazine enjoyed global success. The series tells the story of five girls who discover they have magical powers and are called on to save the universe from evil forces. I investigate this transnational and transmedia series and explore how girls’ empowerment is pursued through the trope of the teenage witch in the comics’ storyline, revealing the hybridization of manga, European, and Disney graphic styles and themes, and in the magazine itself where the editors use techniques of engagement with readers (surveys and quizzes, problem pages and letters from readers, DIY pieces, and diary-like pages). This analysis involves scholarship on Girlhood and Cultural Studies and serves as a springboard for further investigation.

Girl activism takes center stage in Trang Nguyễn and Jeet Zdung's comics Saving Sorya: Chang and the Sun Bear and Saving H'Non: Chang and the Elephant. The narratives follow Chang, a young conservationist, as she rehabilitates an orphaned sun bear and an abused elephant. The series diverts from conventional depictions of exceptional girl eco-heroes by emphasizing the importance of collaboration, grassroots initiatives, and environmental education. Moreover, the comics promote ecofeminist perspectives by highlighting the connections between environmental degradation, gendered violence, and social inequities. I explore how Nguyễn and Zdung use the multimodal comics form to promote ecofeminist values and educate young readers about global environmental issues. I also analyze how the comics invite readers to engage in transnational advocacy by modeling youth activism and providing resources.

Latinx comics creators publish on social media to connect with a global audience and perform digital self-mediation that enhances the self-reflexive themes in their work. Among these creators is Chicana artist, Daisy Ruiz, known as Draizys, whose auto-bio comic Gordita: Built Like This showcases this approach. Its narrative contents, publication trajectory, and digital promotion exemplify how Ruiz as protagonist and author uses digital tools to produce and share her creative work. Her depictions of adolescent internet use, along with the behind-the-scenes content she posts to Instagram and TikTok, underscore how she uses medium-specific affordances to produce sequential autobiographical narratives in her comics and social media posts that, in both content and form, nuance how Latinas are mediated to the public.

In this article I investigate the transformation of transnational girlhood in a recent imprint of comics for young readers published by Danish comics publisher Forlaget Cobolt. Launched in 2021, the imprint encompasses a range of mostly translated comics, including Anglophone graphic novels, a number of Francophone series, and comics from other Scandinavian countries. Many of the titles seem to target an audience of girl readers. However, based on interviews conducted with the acquisitions editor responsible for the line and two translators, I demonstrate that the work of bringing the titles to a Danish audience was guided by attempts to provide quality reading for a range of genders. In this process, transnational girlhood is imagined as non-gender-specific, reflecting contemporary discussions of gender politics and comics reading.

Joana Estrela, born in Penafiel in 1990, is a Portuguese illustrator and comics artist whose short but rich career path intersects significantly with the concerns of girlhood and the dynamics of the transnational creation and circulation of graphic narratives. In 2013, she self-published the zine, Os vestidos do Tiago, which was later re-published by the independent Luso-Brazilian publisher Sapata Press in 2018 and is now available in English with the title James's Dresses (2019). The zine is a short immersion into the fictional, though quite realistic, world of Tiago, a boy who loves wearing feminine dresses and is not scared of experimenting with them. Despite having a boy as protagonist, Os vestidos do Tiago can be looked at as Estrela's first attempt at representing girlhood, given the presence, in the publication, of crucial aesthetic references to the realm of childhood and femininity.

Schrödinger's Grrrl

By Hetamoé

‘Girlhood’ Exists in A Quantum State.

She Possesses Different Atributes or Identities

Until Observed or Interacted with.

Thomas Wellmann. 2017. Nika, Lotte, Mangold! Kassel: Rotopol.

Thomas Wellmann. 2021. Nika, Lotte, Mangold! Weiter geht's. Kassel: Rotopol.

Thomas Wellmann. 2023. Nika, Lotte, Mangold! Immer was los! Kassel: Rotopol.

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.

In the evolving discourse of contemporary feminism, a critical intersection at the nexus of girlhood studies and the experiences of refugee and displaced girls is evident. We are witnessing unprecedented levels of such displacement because of conflict and climate change among other causes of instability, and this brings the challenges and the triumphs of girls on the move into sharp focus in feminist advocacy and scholarship. This Special Issue, Girls on the Move: Girlhood and Forced Displacement, Migration, and (Re)settlement, guest edited by Rosemary Carleton and Nesa Bandarchian Rashti explores some of the intricacies of this intersection and the articles as a whole advocate for a nuanced feminist response centered on the rights, needs, and voices of refugee and displaced girls.

As we write these words to introduce this Special Issue, scores of girls and young women around the world are facing a myriad of challenges as they are forced to flee their homes, leaving behind friends, family, communities, and being propelled into uncertain and very often precarious migratory journeys. Without a doubt, we live in deeply troubling times. While numbers provide a mere glimpse into the devastating humanitarian crisis of forced displacement, they are shocking. Forced displacement, migration, and (re)settlement following conflict, violence, human rights violations, persecution, disasters, and the impacts of climate change, both in nations and across borders, is an ever-escalating crisis affecting tens of millions of people worldwide. Acknowledging that these numbers are unprecedented, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (2023a) reported that by the end of June 2023, over 110 million people were forcibly displaced worldwide and projected that this number would increase to 130 million by the end of 2024. This projected increase takes into account the mass displacement caused by the war between Israel and Hamas as well as ongoing and escalating conflicts in Sudan, Ukraine, and Afghanistan. While current headlines focus principally on the continuing crises in the Middle East and Ukraine, we cannot lose sight of the millions of forcibly displaced persons elsewhere in the world, including those in Eritrea, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Somalia, Syria, Türkiye, Myanmar, India, Venezuela, and Haiti. Recognizing regional diversity in the staggering numbers serves to underscore forced displacement as a transnational issue that requires urgent global attention.

Against the background of recent extraordinary narratives of displaced girls, I consider two accounts of refugee girls in Britain at earlier historical moments: Lore Segal's Other People's Houses ([1964] 2018) about her memories of being a Kindertransportee in the late 1930s, and Vesna Maric's Bluebird (2009), a memoir of her journey into refugeehood as a teenage girl following the outbreak of the war in Bosnia in the early 1990s. I read their framing of the refugee experience as interventions into hegemonic scripts of displaced girlhood that ultimately destabilize the wider stories of nationhood that such narratives often uphold. Read through the frames of girlhood and refugeetude, these narratives point to alternative modes of imagining refugee girls and their position in and beyond the nation.

In exploring the figuration and physical presence of Little Amal, a 12-foot Syrian girl puppet and main character in a moving piece of epic public theater titled The Walk, I consider the dueling realities of welcomeness and unwantedness, hypervisibility and invisibility, spatial dignity and spatial denial faced by refugee girls, real and represented. Accessing a feminist refugee epistemology, I position Amal in contrast to yet another symbol of refugee girlhood—popstar M.I.A.—to move away from the typical simultaneously superfluous and stunted representations of sanctuary-seeking girls and toward a provocation that accepts their creative and complex lifeworlds.

Arts-based programs can provide space for forcibly displaced youth to process pre-migration and resettlement experiences creatively. While these programs can facilitate growth and healing, limited research addresses forcibly displaced girls’ perceived benefits of engaging in arts-based programs. Through in-depth interviews with 20 high school girls who resettled in a Midwest City in the United States, I explore this group's motivation to engage in arts-based activities like dance, drama, and theater. My findings suggest that participants engaged in arts-based programs to explore their artistic interests, connect with other girls with similar cultural identities, and manage feelings of homesickness and loss. I discuss how schools and community organizations can tailor arts-based programs to help forcibly displaced girls manage socio-emotional and educational needs.

For refugees, the experience of displacement does not always end with resettlement. Multidisciplinary research with educators and refugee students at a Tennessee high school demonstrates how some school personnel prioritized the alienating concept of so-called paperwork selves when talking about their refugee students, highlighting exotic stereotypes of innocence, ignorance, and a lack of educational history. I focus here on educators’ perceptions of Arabic-speaking refugee girl students, and contrast these with the girls’ own words about their experiences and self-understanding. The girls’ narratives demonstrate their keen sense of identity as young women connected to real places, remembered histories, and imaginaries of a future as transnational young women with global possibilities.

We conducted a qualitative study among Eritrean refugees residing in Israel to explore the impact of armed conflict and displacement on adolescent girls’ transition to adulthood. We conducted 19 interviews with young Eritrean refugee women who, as girls and young women, escaped conflict-affected Eritrea and made their way on foot, through Sudan, the Sinai desert, and Egypt to Israel. Our findings reveal how structural and symbolic violence shaped the gendered realities of these Eritrean girls throughout their migration journey. In Israel, while such violence in the forms of precarious immigration status and intimate partner violence were embedded in their everyday lives, participants also drew actively on creative strategies to resist and contest violence.

We based this article on a qualitative study that focuses on barriers to the integration of Somali Muslim urban refugee girls in Uganda. We were interested in how different ethnic and gender identities influence Somali refugee girls’ access to education and participation in society. Based on 75 semi-structured interviews with refugee children between 10 and 16 years of age in Kampala, we used constant comparative analysis to explore the intersectional experiences of Somali refugee girls. We found that they face specific gender-based discrimination and temporal and spatial restraints. This plays a key role in their ability to integrate into society. We conclude that it is important to avoid homogenizing refugee children's experiences and to incorporate intersectional analysis in studying integration.

In this article, I explore Sibirskiy dnevnik (henceforth Siberian Diary) of Arpenik Aleksanyan, a Soviet student of Armenian origin who, together with her family, was exiled to Siberia in one of the late Stalinist deportations of ethnic minorities. Arpenik's diary provides a unique perspective on forced displacement and exile through the eyes of a young woman. I treat the diary both as an historical source revealing gendered experiences of forced displacement and as autobiographical writing that provides a glimpse into late Stalinist girlhood and young women's subjectivity. I provide a reading of Siberian Diary that reveals Arpenik's seemingly contradictory integration of Stalinist ideologies of the so-called new woman and nationalities as a foundation for self-construction as well as individual resistance to persecution.

Growing up in Aleppo, Syria, for the first twenty years of my life, I listened to my grandparents’ stories of their experiences and their survival of the Armenian Genocide (1915 to 1916) alongside the stories of my parents growing up as refugees in Syria. Approaching the 100th anniversary of the Genocide when I was 18, I did not ever expect to relive the suffering and challenges faced by my grandparents and parents let alone end up with the status of refugee. At the time of my graduation from high school, the war hit Syria. Everything that had been beautiful was annihilated or destroyed and happiness turned into profound suffering. In front of me was evidence of the terrible experiences that I had heard about only in the stories of my parents and grandparents. In addition to this, I saw my opportunity and my right to higher education vanish.

For me, a border is not passing

It is not to pass from one country

If you are not allowed

to take part in life.

     – Parwana Amiri

The image of a young girl wearing a hijab can be seen to be an iconic representation of the complex intersection between feminism on the one hand, and religion and culture on the other. While the hijab is a visible marker of traditional gender norms in some Islamic communities, many modern Muslim women and girls have reclaimed it as a symbol of faith, identity, and choice. In keeping with contemporary feminist dialogue, we seek to understand and respect these nuanced perspectives.

Although hijab has long been a subject of fascination in western¹ culture for some time, in the last several years the girl in hijab has been in the sociopolitical spotlight. As Katherine Bullock and Gul Jafri (2000) noted over twenty years ago, “Because of this Western cultural fixation on Muslim women's dress as a symbol of oppression, Muslim women often have to focus on that aspect of their identity as well, even if they would rather talk of something else” (37). With hijab being the most visible way to identify and be identified as Muslim as Wahiba Abu-Ras and Zulema Suarez (2009 along with Hodan Mohamed (2017) remind us, those who observe hijab with their dress experience the world in unique ways. The experiences of girls and young women in hijab are undoubtedly shaped by what Kimberlé Crenshaw (1989) and Patricia Hill Collins (2015) call intersectionality and under bell hooks's (2013) conceptualization of interlocking systems of domination. Central to these systems of oppression that shape the lives of Muslim girls and women are Edward Said's (1978) concept of Orientalism and what Jasmin Zine (2006) terms gendered Islamophobia as Lila Abo-Lughod's (2013) discussion of dominant narratives of Muslim women as oppressed clearly demonstrates.

In this article, I analyze the American flag as hijab both in the infamous “We the People” (2017) campaign poster by Shepard Fairey and its adaptation by Muslim girls and young women during protests against President Trump's inauguration and subsequent immigration policies (including the infamous Muslim Ban). Despite critical acclaim that hailed the American flag hijab largely as revolutionary, I argue that it embodies a symbolic visualization of a liberated Muslim woman figure that is central to the survival of American imperialism. Using frameworks that understand freedom shaped by neoliberal interests and interrogating the histories of the flag in both American immigration and colonial contexts, I demonstrate that the American flag as hijab for girls and women reinforces the larger constructs it seeks to resist.

I use the narrative method, The Listening Guide, to investigate Hijabi girlhood on YouTube through the girl-created trend #MyHijabStory that emerged in response to public misunderstanding of Hijab. The voice analysis examines how gendered subjectivities of Hijabi girlhood are constructed among narratives of piety, culture, fashion, community, and marginalization. I identified three voices: the convicted voice; the conflicted voice; and the critical voice. The first two involve looking inward and realizing multifaceted stories of coming to Hijab while the third involves looking outward to trouble the social world in which Hijabi girlhood is constituted through dominant discourses. I illustrate that #MyHijabStory vlogs are forms of narrative resistance by girls who seek to produce a public pedagogy of Hijab that is complex and embodied.

In this article, I use data from a Critical Participatory Action Research (CPAR) conducted in a high school in Salt Lake City, Utah to understand how racialization influences the sense of belonging for Muslim girls who veil. Using data collected through high school students’ questionnaires, Muslim girls’ personal experiences, and interviews with administration and faculty, I investigate how non-Muslim peers and school staff perceive Muslim girls at Mount Top High, a suburban high school. These perceptions shape the way members of the school community interact with Muslim girls and have a great impact on students’ sense of belonging and academic achievement.

Through collaborative autoethnography, a mother and a daughter with shared and diverging identities examine the hijab as a radical practice of feminist resistance in our lives. Our lived experiences as Indo-Caribbean social workers and university educators at a predominantly white institution offer a unique point of departure from normative narratives of hijabi girls and women. Using a critical feminist analysis, we chronicle our journey through more than 60 years of patriarchal oppression and white supremacy. Our stories reveal a complicated relationship with the hijab as an important faith practice which also functions as a marker of otherness that signals unbelonging in all spheres of our lives including the academy and social work practice.

We examine the emerging meanings of hijab practice as feminist strategy, and as a symbol of visibility for young Muslim women and girls in India. Through digital ethnography based on Instagram pages of selected retailers of hijabs, we explore the possibility of hijab as a costume of insubordination, and Islamic fashion as a critical practice against the backdrop of the 2022 Karnataka hijab row. We employ an analysis of Instagram posts to mark the intersecting points of faith, fashion media, and market in framing aesthetics for clothing practices among young Indian Muslim women. We also explore new contours of feminist assertions in the Muslim community, and how the digitally mediated visibility of Muslim women and girls contests the notion of Islamic fashion as oxymoronic.

In this article, I look at the perceptions, practices, and politics of donning the hijab in the lives of young Muslim women and girls in Kashmir. I conducted narrative analysis on observations and unstructured interviews that asked for young women's descriptions about the happenings, relationships, emotions, actions, and choices related to the donning of hijab with a recognition of the historical, cultural, and social context shaping them. My analysis departs from the binaries of oppression vs. resistance and personal vs. political to underscore the spatiotemporal everyday lived realities of hijabi girls and young women in locating the practice at the confluence of religion, militarization, and digitalization, tracing both the disjunctions and convergence in participants’ hijab narratives, thereby reconceptualizing the notion of agency.

Since 9/11 and the Global War on Terror, the West has fixated policy on the hijab, framing it as oppressive and as a threat to women's rights. This entrenched colonial perspective affects Muslim girl athletes globally. Public discourse on hijabs in sports often overlooks their complex symbolism and the athletes’ choices. Drawing on Indigenous, postcolonial, and critical feminist theories, we explore in this article how Muslim girl athletes navigate hijab politics, expressing their agency through refusal and resistance.

It all began when I was twelve

When I decided to wear my hijab

Inspired by the brave and resilient women who came before me

The hardships they had to go through

Not knowing that a simple cloth

Can start a riot

There are days I feel invisible, and days I wish I were. As a Brown Shia woman in hijab, I often feel as though people fail to see me, or do not care to. My experiences as a hijabi woman had me feeling simultaneously visible and invisible as those around me tried to decide which version of the Muslim girl I was—the oppressed Muslim girl who needed to be saved, the radical, or for those within my community, the good Muslim girl. The reality is I am none of these. In re/telling my stories, I explore how misrepresentations in the media made me question aspects of my identity and created feelings of (in)visibility, had me striving to be the model minority, and finally, how the hijab became a source of pride and a tool of resistance.

Studying the textual spaces of girlhood is a complex task for we have to consider the textual readings derived through literary and document analysis along with producer texts as read through the experiences of girls themselves. Studying textual spaces can extend even into a consideration of material space and how we might engage in decolonizing practices that attend to the dynamics of power and colonial violence. This investigation into a broad range of textualities serves as a reminder of the past, a consideration of the present, and a looking towards imagined futures. It also helps us to appreciate the interrelatedness of textual spaces so that that it is possible to consider what might be regarded as classics of colonial literature for girls alongside new platforms for addressing social justice and how they might inform each other. It is only in an unthemed issue of Girlhood Studies that addressing such a wide range of texts and textualities is possible.

Published 70 years apart and adopting contrasting approaches to real-world detail, Lewis Carroll's Alice books and Noel Streatfeild's Ballet Shoes bear a number of affinities. Both portray dynamic, creative, and skillful girls whose dreams and destinies they probe. In this article, I highlight Alice's inventiveness and the curtailment of her dreams, then examine Streatfeild's employment of a production of Alice in Wonderland to delineate two distinct modes of female creativity. While the endings of the two works seem distinct, offering far greater possibilities of self-fulfilment for Streatfeild's heroines, neither is unproblematic. If Streatfeild has no time for the interpersonal relationships and domesticity imposed upon Alice, she nevertheless insists upon a hierarchized value system that downgrades the very creativity it purportedly celebrates.

The power of imagination and the capacity for storytelling can mirror creation and God-like capabilities: anything can occur if one can imagine it. Observing this connection between narrator and God, in this article I analyze the representation of girlhood in British author Dodie Smith's I Capture the Castle (1948). I show how protagonist and narrator Cassandra uses the framework of her girlhood to narrate and create the lives of those around her and examine the ways in which her power alters as she begins to enter the stage of grown womanhood. With a close reading that understands Cassandra's storytelling powers as Biblically structured, I consider the narratorial possibilities of girlish fantasy and father-daughter dynamics.

Although young women claim sexual freedom and purport to re-signify the word slut as being a positive definition of sexual agency, sexuality studies show that they often lose control of this signification in the broader community, and the social consequences remain detrimental. In this article, I trace the feminist project of re-signification of the slut back to Judith Butler and apply it to Kody Keplinger's contemporary young adult novel The DUFF. I show that this novel illustrates what can be a hard truth for feminists and feminism to accept—the tension between the feminist imperative to re-signify discourse as a sign of personal empowerment, and the reality that changing discourse relies on others (particularly men) to become allies.

In this article, I focus on the contexts in which the Brontë juvenilia and Riot Grrrl zines were created, rather than offering a literary study of them. My focus is on how the different creators produced their texts. I explore the theoretical approach of feminist media studies with particular attention to its notions of identity formation as foundation for the comparison of these texts. I outline the Brontë juvenilia and provide a brief history and background of Riot Grrrl zines and offer a comparative analysis of the two media. I conclude by identifying the importance of studying girls’ engagement with the practice of writing in terms of identity formation and expression, and suggest ways that this study can be applied to future critical work.

In this article, we examine how postfeminist Girl Effect discourse is deployed and extended in Plan International's Digital Empowerment for Girls campaign. Based on critical discourse analysis of campaign texts, we outline how the campaign situates digital empowerment as a way of building girls’ capacity to overcome barriers of poverty and gender equality by allowing them to pursue careers, manage their health, and advocate for governmental change. Drawing on the theory of healthism, we argue that the campaign's discourses of economic empowerment are intertwined with, and scaffolded upon, girls’ perceived ability to manage their reproduction. We problematize how these constructions responsibilize girls for solving social and economic problems, even as the campaign acknowledges ongoing systems of oppression.

Recent research on systems of social control demonstrates how young men experience surveillance and the harmful effects of these types of practices. However, missing from this discourse is the understanding of how girls experience these practices and the gendered challenges associated with surveillance. In this article, we discuss the experiences of 12 Latina girls who were interviewed inside a juvenile detention center in California. Drawing from semi-structured interviews with them and extensive ethnographic fieldnotes, we examine the perceptions of surveillance experienced by this group of girls. Our findings suggest that girls struggled with the lack of privacy and felt that surveillance practices were degrading. We also discuss how the criminalization of girls through constant surveillance influenced their behavior negatively.

In this article, I explore girlhood pedagogies embodied and enacted by girls of color who participated in a social justice leadership program. I facilitated dialogues with these girls that unearthed how white supremacy and heteropatriarchy shape their sociopolitical realities. Drawing on the insights the girls offered and scholarship from women of color feminists theorizing and enacting solidarity, I define and illustrate critical and coalitional girlhood pedagogies. I evidence how girls of color embodied this praxis by engaging in dialogue in spaces that welcome the gravity, vulnerability, and divergent perspectives that emerged through examinations and reflections on their encounters with oppression and argue that spaces that center critical and coalitional girlhood pedagogies engender criticality, compassionate understanding, and coalitional thinking and acting.

We examine the possibilities for Indigenization afforded by a visit from the girls’ group, Young Indigenous Women's Utopia (YIWU), to York University. Through classroom presentations, workshops, and a book launch, the girls shared their knowledge, perspectives, culture, and art, challenged stereotypes, and inspired university community members. The visit encouraged local students and faculty to find innovative ways to disrupt prevailing colonial norms by employing strategies such as public workshops, the Alternative Campus Tour and curating exhibits so as to integrate Indigenous knowledge, histories, and epistemologies. In this article, we explore the transformative potential of such encounters and emphasize the imperative to prioritize Indigenous knowledge systems and empower Indigenous girls in educational realms.

Field, Corinne T., and LaKisha Michelle Simmons (eds.). 2022. The Global History of Black Girlhood. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press

This Special Issue on African Girlhoods is long overdue for many reasons, not least of which is its recognition, as guest editors Marla L. Jaksch, Catherine Cymone Fourshey, and Relebohile Moletsane point out, of the somewhat vexed history of the discourse of the African girl-child that dates back to the global development literature of the early 1990s attached to the Fourth World Conference on Women: Action for Equality, Development and Peace, held in Beijing in September, 1995—typically referred to just as Beijing. This, and the many country and regional conferences leading up it were (and still are) game-changers in so many ways when it comes to the lives of girls and women. It would be remiss of me not to acknowledge that I participated readily in the early days of defining the girl-child when I was working as a short-term UNICEF consultant in Zambia to develop an agenda for the Ministry of Education and other policy actors for research about education for girls in Zambia. One of the events in which I participated in Lusaka in October 1994 as part of my fact-finding and local consulting was a meeting of 80 or more local NGO members and other Zambian women who were planning their submissions to the November 1994 African Platform for Action: Fifth African Regional Conference (Dakar) on Women preparatory to Beijing. As an observer at this meeting, I heard a presenter talk about the fact that she was one of the first women (if not the first) in Zambia to graduate from university. This was in 1994 and at the time I could see that giving any recognition and support to ordinary girls and their education was full of possibilities, if very complicated. But I regard all this as just as much a part of the development of Girlhood Studies as was the work in North America on girls and science in the late 1980s. As I note elsewhere on charting girlhood studies (Mitchell 2016) we now know that just getting more girls into science was equally complicated.

Over the last century, girls in Africa, long ignored as sources of knowledge, have, nevertheless, engaged vocally and publicly in activism and artistic endeavors to express their visions and aspirations for a future society inclusive of their needs. Only recently have scholars begun to examine the complicated nature of girlhood in relation to capacity, competence, and knowledge layered with vulnerability and inexperience. In the last decade, the flourishing of girls’ inventive acts of agency and their use of their own incisive voices have given impetus to the growing scholarship on girls’ vibrant historical and current political, economic, creative, and cultural pursuits.

Expanded feminist narratives on the girl child have paid little attention to how young girls have become agents of their own change and sharers of their own knowledge. In this study, we spotlight girls’ agency reinforced by institutions that transform them from recipient to agents of change and resilience. In this qualitative study, we deploy critical analysis and reflective argumentation to underscore how Women's Research and Documentation Center (WORDOC) of the Institute of African Studies University of Ibadan provided Do-It-Yourself (DIY) tactics to girls aged 10 to 18 between 2018 and 2019 at its annual WORDOC Girls’ Summit. We explore a version of African girlhood aimed at presenting institutional impacts that offer platforms for girls’ self-empowerment and girl-agency in Nigeria.

In this article, I draw on experiences of a collaborative ethnographic study conducted with young mothers as peer researchers in a poor urban locale in Kampala-Uganda. Young motherhood has been researched on and about, but not often with women who live the reality of early reproduction. They are frequently left out of the research process as knowledge co-creators and co-interpreters irrespective of the consensus that girls’ and women's agency and voice must be acknowledged. I weave together a collaborative approach with polyphony to reveal innovative ways of knowledge co-creation. I call for centering young mothers as people with a specific embodied experience in order to include their perspectives in research, empower them to tell their stories, and question and challenge the dominant discourses.

In this article, I track the contribution of Tanganyikan girls to the big push for schooling that characterized the country, and the whole of Africa, from the 1940s to the late 1970s. So doing, I bring together two historiographies—works that document nationalist discourses that promoted this quick expansion of the schooling system and those that underline the agency of African girls in shaping their lives and education. Reading together girls’ writings in the press, archival documentation, and interviews with adult women, I propose a nuanced analysis of girls’ stances towards a public discourse that made their schooling a significant asset for nation-building.

In this article, I examine critically the framing of the African girl child in international development discourse on menstruation and menstrual activism and address the question, “What influence have African girls had on policy or programs and to what extent have they been mere targets and objects of such policies and programs?” I analyze baseline interviews I carried out at the inception of a Zimbabwean sanitary wear intervention and shine a light on African girls as potential guides and consultants in constructing policy and programs. I show how the communitarian, Ubuntu-centred family values of rural Ndebele people provide a counterpoint to colonial and neoliberal Western-centred development approaches in addressing challenges girls face in relation to menstrual preparation and early unintended pregnancy.

Girls from single-parent households in South Africa (90 percent of whom are Black African or coloured) have significantly lower educational outcomes than other demographics. Through a methodology of life-history interviews, we explore the experiences of 30 women in single-headed households who have been successful in their educational endeavours as university students or graduates. Results show that pressures on girls from single-headed households to look after the family and domestic sphere and to protect their bodies from sexual abuse leave many girls depleted of the time, energy, and mental capacity required to study. Despite these challenges, these participants have escaped the perceived weight of their female burden in a post-apartheid, patriarchal society and reclaim their bodies and sense of agency through educational success.

In this article, the data for which I acquired through a systematic review of articles published over three years, focusing on analyzing the evolution of the situation over these past years, I discuss school-based gender violence in Cameroon. Considering the complexity of Cameroonian society and its responses to violence against girls and women, we need to establish that violence can be addressed, and we have to suggest how this can be done. From one region to another, a girl being denied access to education, being trafficked, or being forced into early marriage constitutes an experience of violence. Even though the government has been fighting these ills for the past twenty years the results show that girls are still highly vulnerable in the education system.

In this article, we use data generated through photovoice and focus group discussions to examine how primary school girls from two resource-poor and high-risk rural communities in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, negotiate their safety on the dangerous journey to and from school. Our findings show that girls actively identify and apply specific safe-seeking strategies by drawing on available community and interpersonal resources as they navigate their way to school. These strategies moderate risk exposure and are perceived to reduce girls’ vulnerability to victimization. While the sustainability of these strategies remains in question, it is essential to note that girls can exercise their agency in providing safety in sociocultural and geographic contexts that expose them to risk.

i am a child of stories. i live in stories. stories carried by the water and told by the drums.

based on Dear Ijeawele, or a Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (2017)

DaMaris Hill. 2022. Breath Better Spent: Living Black Girlhood. New York: Bloomsbury

A dream, dating back to 2001 when the late Jackie Kirk, Jacqui Reid-Wash, and I passed through a section labelled Girls Studies in Foyles Books on Charing Cross Rd., London, UK, was that someday there would not only be a journal devoted to girlhood studies but also a whole interdisciplinary teaching area. We talked about how students of youth studies, or childhood studies, or what was then called women's studies might consider girlhood studies as an option in their programs or as a whole area of specialization. The dream of the journal was realized seven years later with the first issue of Girlhood Studies in 2008. Since then, as the guest editors of this Special Issue on Teaching Girlhood Studies highlight, there have been many initiatives including the development of courses on Girlhood Studies, and community/university activist projects. And now, finally, we have a whole issue devoted to teaching, curricula, and pedagogies of Girlhood Studies.

Girlhood Studies, as an academic discipline, is continually growing. Since some educational institutions include girls’ studies as part of a special curriculum, an academic program, a certificate course, a minor, or as part of Women's Studies or Gender Studies, Girlhood Studies has a presence in academia although at this stage rarely in an autonomous department. This interest in the pedagogies and practices of teaching Girlhood Studies is an important aspect of its growth as a field of study not only at the university level but also in other academic settings and outside of them, be they workshops, special programs for girls, and summer camps, among others. Depending on these formal and informal educational contexts, the discussion of approaches to teaching Girlhood Studies ranges from the theoretical to those that outline hands-on projects that invite and promote the discussion of girlhood. As Claudia Mitchell (2021) states in her editorial “What can Girlhood Studies be?” the research and scholarly work in Girlhood Studies “stands as its own theoretical and practical area” (vi) that warrants its study and teaching and that prompted the production of this special issue on teaching Girlhood Studies.

Covid-19 signalled rapid, near-wholesale shifts to the online world, yet how this affected the establishment of supportive, safe spaces for activism has received scant attention. Based on ongoing work with young women and girls in Malaysia, we discuss the pedagogic processes of feminist consciousness-raising as an informal mode of Girlhood Studies education and how online spaces might be reconfigured to enhance the virtual experience through hybrid workshops. Theorized from a feminist new materialist perspective and guided by the principles that feminism is an everyday practice, and feminism is for everybody, we argue that the hybrid space introduced material and sensory elements, facilitated feelings of connectedness, and helped establish a safe space for participants to engage with feminism and girls’ rights in meaningful ways.

Black girls have long created their own subversive and creative forms of curriculum and pedagogy. I explore adolescent Black girls’ suggestions for teaching and learning about Black girlhood online based on a virtual summer arts program called Black Girls S.O.A.R. Through performance ethnography, we contended with our conceptualizations of Black girlhood and identity sense-making. The co-researchers suggested that storytelling, learner-centered pedagogy, and intentional community-building must be central in virtual pedagogy and saw reclaiming girlhood and self-care as two essential topics for teaching Black girlhood content. I also reflect on the tensions and possibilities of co-constructing participatory learning environments with Black girls, particularly as it relates to disrupting power and adultism.

While Girlhood Studies is an emerging field of academic study, knowledge about how to work with girls in the community has long been evolving. As community social workers doing critical, gender-transformative work with girls, we trained adult women volunteers in gender-specific girls’ programs. Pedagogically rooted in popular education, our training approach, in drawing on volunteers’ own memories of girlhood, evoked a diversity of stories, lived experiences, and understandings of how their lives were affected by systemic forces. In this article, we illustrate how explicating the temporality of girlhood with women can facilitate the interrogation of their own internalized sexism and adultism, and how building intergenerational empathy serves as a tool for reshaping adult women's ability to work collaboratively with and build relationships with girls.

What is the relationship between Black Girlhood Studies and Black Motherhood Studies? In this article I answer this question by considering the ways in which these subjects can be explored together or in relation to each other. Using autoethnography, I describe the process of teaching Black Girlhood Studies with Black Motherhood Studies. Specifically, through narrative and performative writing, I draw upon my own personal experience of using research and scholarship associated with Black Girlhood Studies to inform and provide a foundation for the exploration of Black Motherhood Studies in an effort to promote a fuller, more complete and nuanced understanding of both social positions.

Black Girlhood Studies provide an authentic vantage point for the narratives and experiences of young Black girls today. Black women working alongside Black girls play a central role in the development of the field, yet their narratives and experiences as former Black girls remain decentered. Using autoethnography, we describe the experiences of seven community-engaged Black women scholars, including one professor who teaches Black Girlhood Studies courses and is the co-creator of a virtual space for middle school Black girls called Black Girl Magic (BGM), and six undergraduate students who are enrolled in the course and/or serve as BGM co-facilitators. We discuss how teaching, learning, and practicing Black Girlhood Studies shapes a collective rememorying process for Black women seeking to make their girlhood experiences legible.

It has been a hard-fought battle to secure Black Girlhood Studies as an essential college course that examines Black experiences of American childhood. To ensure its survivability, I argue that scholars must establish many homes for Black Girlhood Studies beyond Gender Studies and Black Studies departments. Further, given the illegibility of Black girls as youthful or innocent children, scholars must advocate for Black Girlhood Studies as a college course in academic departments or programs in which Black girls are potentially subjects of faculty or student research. I draw on my experiences teaching Black Girlhood Studies as a Black woman professor and ground my analysis in Black feminist conversations that emerged during the twentieth century to solidify Black Women's Studies in the academy.

While general education (gen ed) courses are commonly created as overviews of disciplines, a girlhood-centric approach celebrates a tightly focused introduction to girl identities as an entry point to critical analysis of gender and associated systems of oppression. I offer a rationale for my Cultural Constructions of Girlhood course and discuss specific assignments and strategies for introducing girlhood as a field of study for university students. This course offers grounding in how important childhood literature is in shaping our concepts of who we are and are allowed to be as well as indicating ways in which the idea of literature may be expanded and updated to include many modes and styles of text by attending to the artifacts of everyday girlhood.

Since 2008 I have had the pleasure of teaching Girl Culture at California College of the Arts (CCA), a private art/design college located in the San Francisco Bay Area. This article features student zines from Girl Culture at this college.

Girl Culture is part of the school's general studies curriculum in the Humanities and Sciences at the upper division (junior and senior) level. The course title comes from Sherrie Inness's foundational anthology defining American Girlhood Studies in the twentieth century, Delinquents and Debutantes (1998), in which she notes,

Too often girls’ culture is shunted aside by scholars as less significant or less important than the study of adult women's issues, but girls’ culture is what helps to create not just an individual woman but all women in our society. (11, emphasis in original)

Girl Culture explores the myriad forces that have an impact on American girls’ lives today and seeks to identify the places where artists and designers can best advocate for girl-centric liberation, autonomy, and joy.

Ann Smith (ed.) 2019. The Girl in the Text. New York: Berghahn Books.

Battle, Nishaun. Black Girlhood, Punishment, and Resistance: Reimagining Justice for Black Girls in Virginia. New York: Routledge, 2020.

This issue of Girlhood Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, while unthemed in the sense that it comes out of an Open Call, reminds us that a foundational principle of Girlhood Studies remains one of contesting and challenging inequities. Furthermore, how girls themselves might, under some circumstances, take up critical issues in their lives is evident in these contributions. Each of the contributors has placed front and centre the idea of contesting. Recently in a publications panel at a graduate student conference, participants, eager to get their work published, wanted to know more about this journal. Two of their questions stand out. “May the articles be quantitative as well as qualitative?” and “Is it enough that at least half of my participants are girls?” This collection of articles responds beautifully to these questions in offering an affirmative to the question about quantitative and qualitive data when the point is to use appropriate evidence to contest gender norms, and a negative to being about representation in terms of simply including girls.

While the Indigenous youth suicide crisis in Canada is widely acknowledged, there is little scholarly attention given to writers who reflect on this from the perspective of being suicide survivors. In this article, I consider the play, And She Split the Sky in Two, by Aleria McKay, a youth survivor from Six Nations. I explore how her work functions as an anti-colonial text that re-envisions the suicide crisis at Six Nations through mourning the gendered, affective, systemic, and spatial legacies of colonial violence. McKay's characters are learning to tell their own stories to completion, depathologizing experiences of despair and entrapment. This work provides a girl's perspective on the long slow process of staying alive to create a different future.

Using data collected as part of a larger qualitative study, I attend to the presence of two seemingly opposing narratives shaped by neoliberal and postfeminist attitudes—a gloomy one in which girls are thought to be at risk of experiencing poor life outcomes and an optimistic one that claims ubiquitous opportunity for all girls regardless of circumstance or experience. I suggest that both narratives combine to contribute to girls’ responsibilization for their future successes (and failures). I consider the potential cruelty of optimistic child protection practices grounded in a fantasy of future success as self-determined and accessible to those sexually abused teenage girls willing to work hard.

Greta Thunberg's prominence in the climate justice movement symbolically positions girls at the epicenter of geopolitical resistance, but, while she is given immediate authority across media outlets, other girls’ visions of a more equitable future are often disregarded; this demands our careful attention. We discuss the work of five New York City-based girl activists of color engaged in this movement. We explore the ways in which their intersectional identities and social positions shape their mobilization strategies and draw connections to other popular social justice movements; their activist playbook reveals the transformative potential of intersectional feminist politics in the hands of Generation Z. These girl activists of color generate sophisticated, relational platforms for climate justice informed by the interconnected issues of racial and economic injustice.

We add to the scholarship on young women's online activism using a Baradian framework to explore the material-discursive contexts that co-create the meanings and possibilities of their activism. Through a diffractive methodology, we delve into key moments from blogs and interviews with bloggers to discuss two emerging themes. First, we offer an understanding of activist girl blogger subjectivities as intra-actively embedded and remade in material-discursive contexts of girlhood, artist, and celebrity in a neoliberal digital culture that valorizes social media influencers. Second, we examine the related entanglements of discourses-materialities-time-space-bodies, and the human and non-human agencies that co-constitute young women's activist blogging. Overall, we illustrate the potential of a Baradian approach for understanding the human and more-than-human complexities of young women's activist blogging and activist subjectivities.

Popular culture and media often portray school balls and proms as romantic spaces and having a date is perceived as the norm. While gender(ed) and heterosexual discourses continue to shape young people's experiences, girls’ understandings of the school ball do not necessarily conform to dominant ideas. In this article, I draw on a new materialist ontology of sexuality to explore the relations in-between girls, dates, and the school ball. I examine ball-girl-date encounters as sexuality-assemblages comprising bodies, spatial-material arrangements, practices, and imaginings. In this frame, sexuality is conceptualized as becoming via an array of material-discursive, human, and more-than-human forces. I consider how ball-girl capacities and desires become emergent and contingent, opening up ways of thinking about girls and the school ball beyond popular cultural constructions.

The Anthology of Chinese Fictions on Adolescent Girls’ Psychology (2016) is one of the most renowned collections of girls’ stories in Chinese children's literature. Authored by Qin Wenjun, Cheng Wei, and Chen Danyan, it is often associated with the rise of shaonǚ xiaoshuo (girls’ fiction) in China. In this article, I evaluate the collective writing practices of the women authors mentioned above, focusing, in particular, on how their featured stories address intergenerational dissent and explore models of communication between adolescent girls and women. Highlighting how The Anthology traverses the age divide in a time during which both children's literature and the lives of teenagers underwent significant shifts, I intend to further scholarly understandings of Chinese girls’ fiction as a unique literary phenomenon.

Despite the encouragement of women's and girls’ curiosity in matriarchal and oral fairy tale traditions, their patriarchal print production in Western Europe reframed this trait as undesirable. Fairy tale print productions also troubled the tales’ transformative and communal form in establishing versions that would receive ongoing duplication by attaching prominent authorial figures. In this article, I investigate the teen girl detective game as a format that reflects upon and updates these values. Taking Mografi's Jenny LeClue: Detectivú as my case study, I interpret the text as a postmodern fairy tale revision that unsettles the master narrative and the notion of the singular authorial figure. The game encourages the player's active investigatory participation while presenting a narrative that invites collaboration and a critique of the conservative author.

Since sport extends well beyond the routine of practice and competition and leads to the development of skills that affect other areas of life, my study explored whether girl athletes experience greater voice empowerment as a result of playing sport. The term voice empowerment is unique to traditional leadership and character programming; it emerged from recent scholarship in the fields of education, sport, and psychology. In this study, 30 Ethiopian girl athletes aged 13 to 18 completed a 24-item questionnaire that focused on the constructs of sport, voice, and gender equity. My findings suggest that sport along with emotional and academic support, coupled with an effective life skills program, does affect voice empowerment.

Kathryn Moeller. 2018. The Gender Effect: Capitalism, Feminism, and the Corporate Politics of Development. Oakland, CA. University of California Press.

We begin by paying tribute to feminist Black scholar, bell hooks, who died 15 December 2021. As the numerous citations in just this issue alone bear witness, she has had a huge influence on feminist ways of thinking particularly in relation to how race, gender, and capitalism intersect. In her well-known essay, “In Our Glory” on Black girlhood and visual culture (hooks 1994), she offers a memory of losing a photograph of herself as a young girl in the 1950s masquerading, as she called it, in full cowgirl regalia.

When society invokes Cashawn Thompson's hashtag phrase, “Black Girl Magic,” we laud the accomplishments of Black women and girls as if those triumphs are innate. In this article, I suggest that Black girls participate in a process that I call light making, or embodying that which is lighthearted, encouraging, and self-preserving. In exploring this particular ontology, I deconstruct Black Girl Magic by focusing on contemporary examples of light making as a way of understanding the critical role that Black girls play in Black cultural formation. By focusing on Black girl joy and play in social media, I stress light making as an ontology located in Black girlhood.

The rampant murder of Black women and girls in the United States proves that this place is not safe for them. In fact, it is questionable whether any space currently known can be safe when antiblackness and misogynoir are interwoven into the fabric of our world. For this reason, researchers must explore the unbound landscapes Black girls create for themselves in fantastic narratives. In this article, I examine the fantasy short stories of two Black middle school girls who participated in a writing workshop to explore how they resisted spatial control by creating new worlds they had the power to construct and dismantle.

In this article, I engage in a parallel reading of the consumption of Black girlhood in speculative fiction in the television series The Passage, and the film The Girl with All the Gifts, and in the classroom. In these texts are nonconsensual attempts to harvest biological materials from Black girls, exhibiting the belief that Black bodies are utilitarian, at best, and meant for consumption. Like these narratives, the classroom consumes Black girls physically along with their futures. I explore how Black girl resistance disrupts such consumption and interrogate texts in which Black girls create narratives for themselves. In these narratives, so-called disposable Black girls map out new cartographies of narrative resistance and new liberatory geographies for their future.

In this article, I explore how ethnopoetics can be a profound research methodology and can also offer a pathway to self-actualization. When ethnopoetics is combined with a Black feminist/womanist theoretical framework, it allows for Black girls to self-define and self-validate their existence. The verse novel provides an opportunity to communicate Black girls’ and women's feelings and experiences to researchers and educators in accessible ways. It also serves as a platform to grieve, praise, love, and grow. Such work stands in marked contrast to dominant narratives of Black girlhood.

In this article, I use data collected as part of my dissertation (Newhouse 2020) to inquire into how one participant, Joanna, who self-identifies as a Black girl, described her lived experiences while attending the Voices alternative-to-detention program. I use the theoretical framework of disability studies in education and critical race theory (DisCrit) with critical spatial theory to analyze collected ethnographic data, such as in-depth field notes, audio-recorded informal conversations, and semi-structured interviews, to show the space Joanna co-created with adult facilitators to center her lived experiences. An attention to the spatial dimension shows how spaces are agentive and has important implications for developing and sustaining educational spaces that cultivate an understanding of the geographies that draw from and center Black girls’ lived experiences.

In this article, I begin by taking seriously the cultural contributions that Black women and girls make to hip-hop, thereby shifting the sociocultural and political landscape. Black girls and women do this in a variety of ways, but here I focus on how Black women rappers model and perform multiple embodied refusals that expand the possibilities for Black girls. Inspired by the cultural force of the current moment in hip-hop that is increasingly dominated by young Black women, I reflect on how Black women rappers reconstitute space through performance, music, and performances rooted in practices of refusal.

Drawing on interviews with Black women who sang in all-female vocal groups during the late 1950s and early 1960s, I examine the important role played by integrated public and private schools in the formation of the 1960s girl group phenomenon. From talent shows to choir practice, locker rooms to hallways, Black girls took up audible space in institutions of higher learning whenever they harmonized with friends or acquaintances. The collective identities Black girls created in their vocal groups allowed them to challenge racial and gender stereotypes in the civil rights era while also modeling sisterhood and friendship for subsequent generations of girls.

Sometimes the evolution of an open call issue of Girlhood Studies results in something of a girls studies reader unto itself. Since this issue is packed full of criss-crossing themes based on work in several countries—Canada, Iceland, India and the US—there is just no room for editorial commentary. In its inclusion of works on intersectional feminisms and feminist and Indigenous-led critique to school-based and intergenerational interventions and the power of the visual, this issue is something of such a reader.

In this article, I report on a mapping project of the methods used in articles in Girlhood Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal since its inception. By reviewing all articles published in this journal from June 2008 to December 2020, I investigate and visually map the methodological tools used in the production of knowledge with, for, and about girls and girlhood. Alongside visual representations of this data, I also seek to reinvigorate conversations about the importance of epistemological and methodological rigor in studies of girls and girlhood.

In settler states, Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) girls and young women are targeted for specific kinds of social service interventions embedded in the gendered genocidal logics of colonial ideologies. Interlocking forms of violent carceral capture operate across settler institutions such as child welfare, immigration, and justice systems that are tasked with policing and criminalizing nonwhite girls. Conceptualizing these interconnected systems as a transcarceral pipeline, we examine their inner workings and impacts on Indigenous girls and BIPOC refugee girls in Canada through two sites of inquiry: child welfare systems targeting Indigenous girls and young mothers; and the immigration-child-welfare pipeline for refugee girls of color. Our analysis stresses the urgency of anticolonial systems of care grounded in sovereignty-making collective relations.

In this article, we argue that Teen Vogue has evolved to encompass aspects of intersectional, feminist activism that is particularly evident in the 2017 “Voices” section of the magazine. This evolution challenges previous research that has found that, historically, teen magazines focus heavily on heteronormativity, ideals of beauty, and consumerism. Our analysis of the content of this section of Teen Vogue in 2017 demonstrates that teen magazines can be reimagined as legitimate sources of intersectional activist feminist information for readers. Despite these positive changes, however, Teen Vogue continues to advertise clothing brands that many adolescent girl readers are likely unable to afford, thereby reinforcing superficial postfeminist notions of empowerment.

In this article, I examine the discursive portrayals of gendered experience and subject positions through Sarjita Jain's “Girliyapa,” an online entertainment channel (on YouTube) for female-oriented content in India. I demonstrate how the question of female pleasure that the channel repeatedly foregrounds by way of introducing relatively censored topics of discussion (such as girls buying condoms or articulating their orientation toward same-sex love) is inextricably intertwined with a gender politics that never turns a blind eye to the existing conventions, stereotypes, or structural inequalities that precipitate gender-based violence and discrimination throughout the country. The widespread prevalence of marital rape, color prejudice, and workplace sexism which, in turn, does not allow for a straightforward valorization of girl power is thus satirically interrogated by “Girliyapa.”

In this article we offer curricular suggestions for teaching Elana K. Arnold's young adult title Damsel, a subverted fairytale rewrite, using a critical literacy framework. In doing so, we outline how English curriculum has often upheld oppressive systems that harm women, and how our teaching can challenge such systems. We situate this work through the retelling of a fairytale trope given the ubiquity of such stories in secondary students’ lives. Our writings have teaching implications for both secondary English language arts classrooms and higher education fields such as English, folklore, mythology, and gender studies. We end by noting the limitations of such teaching.

In this article, we consider how girls are positioned in school by what we have chosen to call the discourse of drama. The widely held notion that Nordic girls have it all along with this drama discourse are seen to be the key narratives that reinforce a hegemonic form of girlhood. This ethnographic study focuses on the relations of students between the ages of 13 and 15 in the light of uninformed school staff-member practices. Our findings suggest that girls, despite living in what is seen to be a country that upholds gender equality, are silenced through this discourse of drama. We suggest that teacher education should lead to the facilitation of a gender-inclusive school environment free of stereotypical ideas of gender as a fixed binary.

By embodying movement vocabulary and physical culture drills drawn from a 1911 textbook of physical exercises, in this girl-centred research project we examined how Alberta girls (aged 7 to 22) during the COVID-19 pandemic challenged ideas about Alberta settler girls who lived 100 years ago. Using performance-based historiography as a methodology, participants explored what embodying physical culture movement vocabulary could reveal about archives, past girls, and themselves. Debriefing led to insights concerning relevant social issues, such as gender equity, and current experiences like a growing appreciation for pre-pandemic community-oriented life. In asking provocative questions about the past, these girls demonstrated their potential to shift perceptions of how historically located and contemporary girls are imagined.

The American high school seniors I discuss in this article graduated between 1915 and 1922, tumultuous years that included World War I, the influenza pandemic of 1918 to 1919, and the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment. During such extraordinary times, these girls did a most ordinary thing; they made scrapbooks to commemorate their high school years.

The bus was full of excited chatter as it pulled up in front of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (known universally as The Met) on Fifth Avenue on a cold morning in January. Thirteen girls, along with invited loved ones, had traveled for nine-and-a-half hours from Durham, NC, to view their art displayed in the exhibit, “Pens, Lens, and Soul: The Story of The Beautiful Project” (hereafter, “Pens, Lens, and Soul”). First, the girls filed off the bus to take a photograph on the steps of The Met. As their family and friends waited to disembark, they laughed and shivered while posing for numerous photographs and videos on the cold steps. As they stood at the bottom of the steps of the grand prestigious museum, the impressiveness of their accomplishment was just beginning to dawn on many of them. As she walked around the exhibit one of the artists would comment, “I feel surprised because I didn't realize it was this big of a thing and I was here and it's a thing, it's a big thing … we are capable of doing anything.”

Kristine Blair. 2019. Technofeminist Storiographies: Women, Information Technology, and Cultural Representation. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.

Nicholls, Emily. 2019. Negotiating Femininities in the Neoliberal Night-Time Economy: Too Much of a Girl? London: Palgrave Macmillan.

This Special Issue of Girlhood Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal represents another milestone in the history of the journal, coming, as it does, out of the second international conference of the International Girls’ Studies Association (IGSA) that was hosted by Notre Dame University, South Bend, Indiana, in 2019. As the guest editors, Angeletta Gourdine, Mary Celeste Kearney, and Shauna Pomerantz highlight in their introduction, the conference itself and the Special Issue set in motion the type of dialogue and conversation that is crucial to challenging and changing the world of inequities and disparities experienced by girls. For a relatively new area of study that has roots in feminism and social change, critical dialogue about inclusion and exclusion and about ongoing reflexivity and questioning must surely be at the heart of girls studies. The guest editors capture this admirably when they replace the question “What is girlhood studies?” with the provocative and generative question, “What can girlhood studies be?” The articles and book reviews in this Special Issue tackle what girls studies could be in so many different ways, ranging from broadening and deepening notions of intersectionality and interdisciplinarity to ensuring a place for the article, “Where are all the Girls and Indigenous People at IGSA@ND?” co-authored by the girls who belong to the Young Indigenous Women's Utopia group. Such an account offers a meta-analysis of the field of girlhood studies, but so did the call for the Special Issue as a whole. It is commendable that this team of co-editors assembled and curated a series of articles that reveal the very essence of the problematic that girlhood studies seeks to address.

We are proud to introduce this special issue that was inspired by the 2019 International Girlhood Studies Association (IGSA) conference at the University of Notre Dame (IGSA@ND). At that time, we were not yet acquainted with each other beyond exchanging pleasantries and knowing of each other's academic profiles. Yet we came together as three co-editors and scholars committed not only to the diversification of girlhood studies but also to the larger project of social justice for all. We want to promote such work through this special issue and, in the process, expand perspectives and practices within the field of girlhood studies, as many before us have done.

This is a performative engagement with the theory and practice of Black girlhood. I begin with an excerpt from my play-in-process, crushed little stars, which is itself a meditation on the sad Black girl. I share this process of play not only to present play making as a powerful epistemological tool, but also to blur the boundaries between what constitutes theory as opposed to practice. I (re)imagine Black girl sociality as a site of restoration and healing against the racist, sexist, and ageist world with which Black girls are forced to contend. Accordingly, this project contributes to the diversification of girlhood studies, challenging the disciplinarity of the field by extending ethnographic and sociological perspectives to include the vantage point of performance and creative practice.

Bringing together discourses of Latina girlhood and ambiguity, in this article I interrogate Disney Junior's specific and ambiguous Latinidad in three key episodes from the first season of Elena of Avalor. This type of intersectional analysis is seldom found in Disney scholarship, despite the relative abundance of existing work on Disney-generated cultural production. By analyzing the ambiguity (Joseph 2018) and unambivalent structure of ambivalence (Valdivia 2020) present in Disney's deployment of animated Latina can-do girlhood (Harris 2004), in this article, I provide an intersectional approach to the study of Disney Junior animated content and Latina girlhood in contemporary popular culture. I argue that Elena of Avalor is the result of Disney's avowed and disavowed dedication to the construction of Latinidad and can-do girlhood. The result of this is a fluctuation and flexible navigation between specificity and ambiguity within one narrative franchise.

While fandom is a dominant girlhood trope, few accounts examine faith in the context of girls’ fandom. Addressing this gap, using a feminist poststructural analysis, I draw on interviews and participant observation to locate fan communities as a space in which Muslim girls can enact citizenship. Combining youth cultural studies, girlhood studies, and fan studies, I explore how Muslim fangirls of the Norwegian teen web-drama Skam (2015–2017) draw on their desire for recognition and their creativity as cultural producers to engage in participatory storytelling that challenges popular representations of Muslim girls. This process enables the production of communities rooted in shared interests, experiences, and identities. I suggest that fandom should be recognized for its capacity to generate new meanings of citizenship for minority youth.

During the early part of the twentieth century, Black girls in the United States attended Young Women's Christian Associations (YWCAs) where they received instruction in sports and physical activity. Using archival research, in this article I examine the role of swimming in Black girls’ sports and physical activity practices in Northern YWCAs. With a focus on the construction of Black girlhood, health, and embodiment, I trace how girls navigated spatial segregation, beauty ideals, and athleticism. I highlight the experiences of Black girl swimmers—subjects who have often been rendered invisible in the historical and contemporary sporting landscape.

Historically, the regulation of girls through institutionalization has been guided by bourgeois norms of femininity, including virtue, domesticity, and motherhood. Using a Foucauldian perspective on the production of subjects in Swedish secure care, I investigate whether or not middle-class norms of femininity, centered today around self-regulation, still guide the regulation of working-class girls. By analyzing data from an ethnographic study, I show that even though secure care is repressive, it is also permeated with the aim of producing self-regulating subjects corresponding with discourses on ideal girlhood. However, since working-class girls are rarely made intelligible within such discourses, thereby making the position of self-regulatory subject inaccessible, the care system leaves them to shoulder the responsibility for resolving a situation that is shaped by structures beyond their control.

We adopt an autoethnographic approach to share critical reflections from the Young Indigenous Women's Utopia girls’ group about our experiences attending the 2019 International Girlhood Studies Association conference at the University of Notre Dame (IGSA@ND). Moments of inspiration included sharing our work and connecting with local Indigenous youth. Challenging moments included feeling isolated and excluded since the only girls present at the conference were Indigenous people in colonial spaces. We conclude with reflection questions and recommendations to help future conference organizers and participants think through the politics and possibilities of meaningful expanded stakeholder inclusion at academic meetings.

Where are the girls who made history? What evidence have they left behind? Are there places and spaces that bear witness to their memory?

Girl Museum was founded in 2009 to address these questions, among many others. Established by art historian Ashley E. Remer, whose work revealed that most, if not all, museums never explicitly discuss or center girls and girlhood, Girl Museum was envisioned as a virtual space dedicated to researching, analyzing, and interpreting girl culture across time and space. Over its first ten years, we produced a wide range of art in historical and cultural exhibitions that explored conceptions of girlhood and the direct experiences of girls in the past and present. Led by an Advisory Board of scholars and entirely reliant on volunteers and donations, we grew from a small website into a complex virtual museum of exhibitions, projects, and programs that welcomes an average 50,000 visitors per year from around the world.

Marcia Chatelain. 2015. Southside Girls: Growing Up in the Great Migration. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Ashwini Tambe. 2019. Defining Girlhood in India: A Transnational History of Sexuality Maturity Laws. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Heather D. Switzer. 2018. When the Light Is Fire: Maasai Schoolgirls in Contemporary Kenya. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press.

Aria S. Halliday (ed.). 2019. The Black Girlhood Studies Collection. Toronto: Women's Press.

I met Roxanne Harde, the guest editor of this Special Issue, at the Second International Girls Studies Association conference in 2019 when I attended the panel discussion, “Representations of Rape in Young Adult Fiction.” I recall Roxanne's passion vividly and, indeed, the enthusiasm of all three presenters as they discussed a variety of texts in superb presentations that aligned well with Ann Smith's notion of feminism in action in their seeing “a fictional text not only as a literary investigation into issues of concern to its author but also as the site of educational research” (2000: 245). Their papers pointed to the ways in which the analysis of how rape culture is treated in Young Adult (YA) literature, film, and the print media can take scholars and activists so much further into the issues, and, at the same time, noted the ways in which rape culture in all its manifestations as a global phenomenon has inevitably led to its becoming an everyday topic of YA fiction.

In 1983, Andrea Dworkin addressed the Midwest Men's Conference in Minneapolis. She discussed the rape culture in which we live, noted the similarities between rape and war, and, following the title of her talk, asked for a “24-hour truce in which there is no rape.” And she asked why men and boys are so slow to understand that women and girls “are human to precisely the degree and quality that [they] are” (n.p.). Every sexual assault begins with the dehumanization of the victim. And sometimes, after the violation, after the pain and the fear, comes the institutional dehumanization visited upon the victim who seeks medical or legal help. Two recent memoirs bring to the surface rape culture, evident in the young men who raped these girls and the systemic dehumanization they suffered when they sought justice. Chanel Miller's Know My Name (2019) describes the aftermath of being sexually assaulted, when she was just out of college and still living at home, by someone she met at a fraternity party. Although the case against her rapist was as strong as possiblethere were eyewitnesses and physical evidence was collected immediatelyhe was sentenced to only six months in the county jail, and she was repeatedly shamed, her humanity denied by the judicial system. Lacy Crawford's Notes on a Silencing (2020) describes the aftermath of being sexually assaulted, when she was 15, by two boys, students at her New England boarding school, including an account of how school officials refused to do anything other than label her promiscuous and protect the boys. The ways in which she was silenced by St. Paul's, which disregarded her health and future, and denied her humanity because she was only a girl, were profound. In both cases, the promising future of the perpetrators was prioritized over the humanity of the girls by many institutions, including the judiciary and the press. Crawford was raped just seven years after Dworkin made her plea to that men's conference, but Miller was assaulted twenty-five years after, making perfectly clear that rape culture has become only more entrenched.

In this article, I report on an action project undertaken by a group of young women (aged 18 to 20) to foster public discussions about the prevalence of rape culture on their university's campus. Students proposed this action project during a book study of a young adult (YA) novel that focused on rape culture and sexual violence. Discussions during the book study resulted in the women creating a video designed for university orientation events that addressed common misconceptions about issues such as consent, relationship violence, sexual coercion, and victimhood. Using case study and narrative methods, I recount my experience of witnessing unexpected activism in my classroom. Framed within critical literacy research, I consider the outcomes of making space for student activism and I discuss implications for practitioners.

Reflecting on our work with girls, we discuss what we have learned about how they experience rape culture and engage in activism to confront it. We explore how rape culture manifests in the lives of adolescent girls who are between 10 and 15 years of age in Calgary, Canada. We then demonstrate how groups of girls have moved from awareness to collective action meant to challenge rape culture and consider the impact that this action has had on them. Our aim is to show how popular education and feminist methodologies are effective in supporting girls’ activism on issues like rape culture so that others working in community with girls may gain new tools that might aid their work.

In this article, I analyze certain ideas circulating in early twentieth-century Mexico about the sexual abuse of young and adolescent girls, and how ideas about the prohibited, permitted, or legitimate uses of their bodies were sustained by complex webs of corruption and injustice. Not only criminals but also families, lawyers, judges, and police officers commonly considered the bodies of young girls from working-class families as legitimate spaces of sexual violence. Some newspapers also propagated this idea. Prevailing notions about the gender and sexuality of young and adolescent girls fed into family-based concepts of honor and chastity that were reproduced in practices and narratives related to the abuse of children's bodies, and this contributed to the perpetuation of a rape culture among Mexicans.

In September 2013 student leaders at Saint Mary's University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, used a chant about the rape of underage girls as part of an Orientation Week activity for new students. The incident garnered national and international media coverage. In this article, we analyze and critique a selection of Canadian media articles published in the weeks after the rape chant was used. We draw on feminist analysis of post-feminism and the sexualization of youth cultures to show how, in their struggle to make sense of the incident, the media critique reiterates harmful discourses of youth, gender and sexuality while undermining deeper understanding of rape culture.

Contemporary Young Adult literature is a favored genre for exploring sexual assault, yet rarely interrogates the social structures underpinning rape culture. In its representation of heterosexual relationships, Young Adult paranormal romance offers insight into the processes and structures that uphold rape culture. Genre tropes normalize abusive behavior and gender ideals, demonstrating the explicit and implicit construction of rape culture, culminating in the depiction of supernatural possession analogous to rape. Here, I reflect on power, control, rape culture, and girlhood in a textual analysis of Nina Malkin's Swoon, Becca Fitzpatrick's Hush, Hush, and Sarah Rees Brennan's The Demon's Covenant. A constructive reading reflects implicit cultural discourses presented to the girl reader, who can apply this to her own negotiation of girlhood.

Using Lauren Berlant's concept of cruel optimism, we address the ways in which rape culture, as depicted in Jay Asher's 13 Reasons Why and the first two seasons of the Netflix adaptation, shapes girls’ agency and attachment to possible futures. We take seriously the ways in which social and institutional structures in 13 Reasons Why produce girls’ livability as tied to everyday forms of sexist violence, which supposedly grant them access to what they think of as the good life. Bound up in these cruel attachments is a more limited set of options than may appear available: girls are called upon to endure daily violence in hopes of achieving this fantasy or to choose alternative paths, such as slow death or even suicide.

The discursive shift during the twenty-first century from “no means no” to “yes means yes” clearly had an impact on contemporary American teen films. While teen films of the 1970s and 1980s often epitomized rape culture, teen films of the 2010s and later adopted consent culture actively. Such films now routinely highlight how obtaining a girl's “yes” is equally important to respecting her “no.” However, the framework of affirmative consent is not without its flaws. In this article, I highlight how recent teen movies expose some of these shortcomings, in particular how affirmative consent remains a highly gendered discourse that prioritizes verbal consent over desire.

Rape culture is a provocative topic in Malaysia; the public discourse on it is plagued by gender stereotyping, sexism, misogyny, and rape myths. Recent literary works aimed at Malaysian adolescent girls have interrogated rape culture more pointedly as a means of addressing gender-based violence through activism and education. In this article, I discuss two short stories, “The Girl on the Mountain” and “Gamble” as retellings of Malaysian legends and feminist responses to the normalization and perpetuation of rape culture in this society. Through the emphasis on female agency, consent, and gender equality, these two stories reflect the subversive power of Malaysian young adult literature in dismantling rape culture, while affirming the significance of the folktale as an empowering tool for community engagement and feminist activism.

Gilmore, Leigh, and Elizabeth Marshall. 2019. Witnessing Girlhood: Toward an Intersectional Tradition of Life Writing. New York: Fordham University Press.

Gay, Roxane, ed. 2018. Not that Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture. New York: Harper.

As with Zika, Ebola, HIV and AIDS, and other pandemics in recent history, girls and young women are particularly vulnerable to COVID-19 socially and emotionally if not medically. Some observers have referred to the current crisis as a tale of two pandemics in reference to both the obvious health issues and the pervasive gender inequalities that have become exacerbated, and others have referred to it as “the shadow pandemic” (UN Women 2020: n.p.) in highlighting the negative impact that physical distancing and social isolation are having on already vulnerable girls and young women experiencing sex- and gender-based violence. All over the world girls and young women are facing increasing levels of precariousness as a direct result of the health measures being taken to curb the global transmission of COVID-19. The increasing lack of privacy in the home furthers the practice of cultural forms of patriarchy that lead to violence.

In this article we analyse ten structured interviews with girls aged 15 to 19 from Moscow and St. Petersburg. We look at how the girls are dealing with the fundamentally new and dangerous situation created by the coronavirus pandemic and note that they are looking for a social and psychological space for themselves in which they can create and experience stability and safety. They are more concerned about security than ever before, while being, at the same time, very sensitive to restrictions on their freedom and agency. Girls’ clear desire for privacy, fuelled by the pandemic's increasingly rapid invasion of their digital space, reinforces their urge towards agency and their understanding of freedom as autonomy.

“Left-behind” children in rural China are those whose parents seek work in urban areas and leave them behind in their hometowns. In this article, I focus on the experiences of five young “left-behind” girls who were socially isolated because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Based on the Chinese authorities’ instruction to schools to “Stop classes, but don't stop learning,” I examine micro-level data on the tensions and challenges experienced by these girls during the COVID-19 lockdown. I look at how the pandemic has affected these girls in relation to school and family life and suggest that it has exposed and magnified gender inequalities, particularly those related to the maltreatment exerted by their guardians and/or brothers, that have left them even further behind.

The Girlhood Project (TGP) is a community based, service-learning/research program that is part of the undergraduate course at Lesley University called “Girlhood, Identity and Girl Culture.” TGP works with community partners to bring middle and high school girls to Lesley's campus for nine weeks as part of intergenerational girls’ groups that are co-facilitated by Lesley students (also referred to as TGP students). TGP fosters the development of feminist leadership, critical consciousness, voice, and community action, and activism in all participants. In this article, we describe how we adapted TGP's model to a virtual and synchronous platform for students during COVID-19 and supported their learning competencies. We reflect critically on this experience by centering the voices and perspectives of girls, students, and professors.

In this article, we feature photographs and cellphilms produced by 13 girls and young women (aged 13 to 19) from urban, rural, and Indigenous areas of Quebec, Canada during the COVID-19 pandemic. Framed within girls’ studies, we present girls’ and young women's creations and co-analysis about wellbeing during a period of lockdown. We explore how girls and young women restructured their routines at home as well as negotiated motivation and the pressure to be productive. We note that girls had more time than usual for creative activities and self-discovery and that they engaged with the politics of the pandemic and advocated for collective forms of wellbeing. Importantly, girls reported that participating in this research improved their wellbeing during this lockdown.

We conducted three online focus groups [n = 25] with teen girls in Canada in May and June 2020 to explore their dating and relationship experiences during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic. Given the strict public health measures limiting physical contact, participants reported connecting primarily online with possible dating partners and others. While facilitating platforms, like Snapchat, were already part of these teen girls’ dating and relationships repertoire, many participants reflected on the limitations and drawbacks of being able to connect only virtually. Results suggest the need to better attend to the impacts that COVID-19 restrictions are having on teen girls’ dating relationships, as well as to the larger impacts that the deterioration of these relationships might be having on their mental and emotional health.

Meet Lily: Hi! I'm Lily. I'm 12 years old and I'm going into junior high school next year. I have curly black hair like my dad and green eyes like my mom. It's been 170 days since school and life and shops and stuff all shut down and my little sister Chloe and I really REALLY want COVID to be over. We play dolls and read and go for walks but I also spend a lot of time online texting and stuff with my friends.

The COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent lockdown has shattered the everyday lives of young people, limiting peer interactions and disrupting privacy, with potential for long-term detrimental impacts. This study uses rapid virtual quantitative and qualitative surveys undertaken from April to July 2020 with over 4,800 adolescents affected by displacement in Bangladesh and Jordan to explore adolescent girls’ experiences of social isolation and lack of privacy. Our mixed-methods findings suggest that the pandemic and policy response has caused sharp restrictions on privacy and substantially limited interactions with peers, with larger impacts on girls, particularly those with disabilities. For girls, digital exclusion exacerbates these gender differences. Given that privacy and peer interactions are paramount during adolescence, age-, gender-, and disability-responsive programming is essential to ensure future wellbeing.

The national COVID-19 pandemic response presents a sharp contrast to the matrilineal social kinship and knowledge exchange systems that Métis women and girls rely on for safety, security, and wellbeing. In this article, we demonstrate that while Métis women and girls have been left out of the national pandemic response, they continue to carry intergenerational healing knowledges that have been passed down from the kokums (grandmas) to the iskwêsisisak (girls). We show how urban Métis girls and women are both managing and tackling COVID-19 through innovative and community-based initiatives like Well Living House and the Call Auntie Hotline.

COVID-19 containment measures have left adolescent girls in Nairobi, Kenya vulnerable to negative educational, economic, and secondary health outcomes that threaten their safe transitions into adulthood. In June 2020, the Population Council conducted phone-based surveys with 856 girls aged between 10 and 19 in 5 informal settlements who had been surveyed prior to COVID-19 as part of five longitudinal studies. We performed bivariate and multivariable logistic regression analyses to assess the relationship between COVID-19 outcomes and potential protective or risk factors. We found that younger girls are experiencing high levels of food insecurity and difficulty learning from home during school closures, while many older girls face the immediate risk of dropping out of school permanently and have been forgoing needed health services.

Equitable access to adequate housing has increasingly been recognized as a matter of life and death during the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite this, there has been limited gendered analysis of how COVID-19 has shaped girls’ access to housing. In this article we analyze how the socio-economic exclusion of girls who are homeless is likely to increase during the COVID-19 pandemic in Canada. We suggest that three structural inequities will deepen this exclusion: the disproportionate burden of poverty faced by women; the inequitible childcare responsibilities women bear; and the proliferation of violence against women. We argue for the development of a research agenda that can address the structural conditions that foster pathways into homelessness for low-income and marginalized girls in the context of COVID-19 and beyond.

Girls and women are the first victims of any calamity, pandemic, or disaster in developing countries like Bangladesh. As it is, they are very often denied health care, are forced to endure child marriage and early motherhood, and are frequently subjected to violence. Given this unprecedented COVID-19 pandemic they are now suffering immensely. COVID-19 threatens girls’ rights in countries around the world and will have far-reaching impacts on their health and wellbeing, education, and protection. Self-isolation has increased the rates of gender-based violence. Early marriage and pregnancy are among the drastic effects of school closures and many parents have married off their underage daughters or sold them off to rich families as domestic workers to reduce their economic burden.

There has been a notable increase in the public visibility of girl activists in the past ten years. In this article, I analyze media narratives about several individual girl activists to highlight key components of the newly desirable figure of the girl activist. After tracing the expansion of girl power discourses from an emphasis on individual empowerment to the invocation of girls as global saviors, I argue that girls are particularly desirable figures for public consumption because the encoding of girls as symbols of hope helps to resolve public anxieties about the future, while their more radical political views are managed through girlhood's association with harmlessness. Ultimately, the figure of the hopeful and harmless girl activist hero is simultaneously inspirational and demobilizing.

Increasingly, researchers and policymakers recognize the ability of girls to effect social change in their daily lives. Scholars working across diverse settings also acknowledge the key influence of individual, family, and societal structures on such activism. Drawing on our work with girls in a participatory visual research project in a rural community in South Africa, we consider examples of partnership and collaboration between the adult research team and the young participants. We highlight their agency in mobilizing adults to partner and support community and policy change to address traditional practices of early and forced marriage in this setting. We conclude that collaborative engagement with adults as partners can support activism and advocacy led by girls in contexts of traditional leadership.

Stories about girl activism circulate as exceptional narratives of individual girl power causing intergenerational partnerships and community collaborations to become invisible and apparently unnecessary to girl activist efforts. At the same time, practitioner-scholars attest that sharing authentic stories about intergenerational feminist praxis is difficult to do since it requires us to write with intentional vulnerability exposing the failures and tensions inherent to girl activism networks. In this article, I provide an autoethnographic exploration of the intergenerational processes involved with organizing Girls Speak Out for the International Day of the Girl at the United Nations. I draw inspiration from Lauren J. Silver's methodological remix of youth-centered activism, and in doing so, reassess the impact and experience of leveraging girls’ political voices in spaces of normative power.

In the study on which this article is based, I examine the correlation between the number of Black girls in leadership programs and the number of Black female leaders in nonprofit organizations. I carried out research on Black girl leadership to understand the shortcomings of programs meant to teach Black girls appropriate leadership skills and I conducted interviews with female leaders to determine the hurdles faced by Black women trying to obtain leadership roles in the nonprofit sector. My findings show that there is a disconnect between Black and white women in leadership roles and that impediments for Black women affect leadership prospects for Black girls. This article is a call to create an activist model that supports the professional trajectories of Black girls.

In this article, I discuss the experiences of young undocumented Latinas, aged between 19 and 22, in a university support and advocacy group for undocumented students. While recent research has investigated the advocacy of undocumented youth, there is a lack of attention on the experiences of undocumented women who advocate. To address this gap, I center the testimonios (testimonies) of five young undocumented women to examine their advocacy experiences. As a result of advocacy, the young women gained visibility as immigrant youth leaders, created a pipeline of support for other young undocumented women leaders, and faced disapproval from educators. I conclude by suggesting that schools and educators can foster the leadership of young undocumented women and acknowledge advocacy as a legitimate tool for social justice in education settings.

In the call for proposals for this special issue, activist networks were defined as virtual or in person communities devoted to social change. The impact for girls active in these networks has been shown to promote identity development and de-marginalization/empowerment/reclamation of political spaces where girls are marginalized, intergenerational collaboration among women, and community building among feminists. In this study, we seek to explore how women at different generational points reflect on and remember their engagement in social activism. Understanding how these generational shifts affect the impact of social capital on the lives of these women and the changes we might see as they mature into leaders will provide a platform to better understand the influence of belonging to such networks during girlhood.

In this article, I profile the activism of 18-year-old Sakai Magara (1903–1985). I focus in particular on her role in the Sekirankai (Red Wave Society), which was a short-lived women's political organization formed in April 1921 and aligned directly with socialist and anti-capitalist worker issues. My discussion draws on three principal sources: contemporaneous accounts of the Society; writings by women with whom Magara collaborated; and the words of Magara herself. I pay attention to Magara's contribution to Sekirankai, the influences on the development of her activism, and the barriers to political participation by girls and women in Japan.

The Chalk Back movement that started in March 2016 is a rapidly growing collective of over 150 young activists from around the world. As part of a university class project, Sophie decided to collect experiences of street harassment, write them out verbatim with chalk on the streets where they occurred alongside the hashtag #stopstreetharassment, and post them on the Instagram account @catcallsofnyc. Two years later, the account gained popularity. Other catcallsof accounts opened in London, Amsterdam, Ottawa, Dhaka, Nairobi, Cairo, and Sydney. These accounts, discussed below, are just a few of those spanning 150 cities in 49 countries in 6 continents. We are two Chalk Back members—Natasha from Ottawa and Sophie from New York City—highlighting the risk, empowerment, and power dynamics of what we call chalking back by amplifying the voices of those doing this work around the world.

Aimee Meredith Cox. 2015. Can Citizenship Care? Black Girls Reimagining Citizenship. Durham, NC, Duke University Press.

Young Indigenous Women's Utopia. 2019. Treaty 6 Traditional Homeland of the Metis People (Saskatoon, SK): Self-published with support from York University, McGill University, and Networks for Change and Well-being: Girl-led ‘from the ground up’ Policy Making to Address Sexual Violence in Canada and South Africa. To order a copy email yiwutopia@gmail.com

In this article, I look at how comics aimed at young readers can serve to disrupt normative notions, gendered binaries, and fixed designations through featuring, or focusing on, queer girlhoods. In doing so I consider two contemporary series, Ms. Marvel and Lumberjanes. I contextualize these titles against aspects of the publishing of comics, before analyzing some of the narratives and characters in the texts in relation to queer girlhoods. I conclude that the comics offer different approaches and, therefore, differentiated reading experiences for the young readers who engage with them, but that they also form part of a wider grouping of titles that offer diverse images of young people embracing affiliations going beyond family and nation.

Anne Boleyn has been narrativized in Young Adult (YA) historical fiction since the nineteenth century. Since the popular Showtime series The Tudors (2007–2010) aired, teenage girls have shown increased interest in the story of Anne Boleyn, Henry VIII's second and most infamous queen. This construction of Boleyn suggests that she was both celebrated and punished for her proto-feminist agency and forthright sexuality. A new subgenre of Boleyn historical fiction has also recently emerged—YA novels in which her story is rewritten as a contemporary high school drama. In this article, I consider several YA novels about Anne Boleyn in order to explore the relevance to contemporary teenage girls of a woman who lived and died 500 years ago.

In this article, we seek to articulate a genre theory-centered definition of girls’ literature, and interrogate its subgenre, the girl's bildungsroman, as contextual, cultural sites of rhetoric regarding girls and girlhood. By exploring English-language North American girls’ literature, we identify it within a framework of genre as social action, tracing the protagonists’ maturation into the socially determined roles of wife and mother. We explore the ways in which the girl's bildungsroman follows a home-away-home model, but with the end result of socially acceptable community integration, rather than the boy's bildungsroman's culmination in heroic independent identity via quests and adventures.

In this article I discuss girls’ and non-binary young people's experiences of unwelcome intergenerational encounters in the Helsinki metro underground transport network. I foreground a theoretical conception of the metro as an urban space in which the material is deeply intertwined with the political and as a space with its own racialized, gendered, and age-based hierarchies. Calling on the work of Sara Ahmed, I investigate how girls and non-binary young people make meaning of unwanted emotional encounters in the metro space and how they use and adopt certain material and digital strategies that Helena Saarikoski calls young feminine choreographies, to cope in these situations. This article is based on interviews with girls and non-binary young people who were then between 16 and 17 years of age.

In this article we examine the influence of rurality on the construction of masculinity and femininity for, and by, pupils in a rural secondary school in Scotland. Using data from semi-structured interviews with male and female pupils and a teacher, as well as observations of classroom interactions over a period of 12 months, we highlight how girls take up multiple and complex gendered identities in a rural context and we emphasize the tensions they experience as they negotiate a feminine identity in a rural space constructed and described as masculine. Findings suggest that this construction is, at times, supported by teachers’ practices and their interactions with pupils. We conclude by discussing the implications for teachers in rural schools and point to the need to support girls to ensure that their educational opportunities are not limited by the deep-rooted associations that exist between rurality and masculinity.

In this article, we examine the case history of a young multi-ethnic Norwegian girl, whom we call Anna, from the age of 15 to 17 to show how her self-understanding of positionings within her educational transitions illustrates how gendered expectations in a Norwegian context influence girls’ future trajectories. We use the concepts of social positional identities in figured worlds and performativity to explore self-understanding. Anna's case history illustrates how gender performativity comes about out of a complex web of family, school, and societal expectations. We discuss the tensions Anna experienced in her educational trajectory and the changes in her performative positioning when she entered upper secondary school. We consider the ways in which this had implications for her future life trajectory and offer suggestions to educators on how to understand and support the different learning trajectories of multi-ethnic students.

In this article I explore the highly problematic but wildly acclaimed romantic relationship between Aria Montgomery, a high school junior, and her English teacher Ezra Fitz in the television series Pretty Little Liars. This partnership normalizes gendered power imbalances often common to heterosexual partnerships, yet fervent fans have supported the duo enthusiastically, dubbing the couple #Ezria in blogs and social media. As we know, much research shows that along with unintended pregnancy, young girls who are victims of child sexual abuse by adult males suffer from depression. These outcomes are not shown in Pretty Little Liars: the series ends with Aria marrying her teacher in an example of a happily-ever-after ending, thereby reinforcing postfeminist ideas that Aria's self-efficacy has never been compromised. I argue that in the era of #Metoo, the exploration of power in heterosexual romantic relationships on television shows aimed at adolescent girl audiences is a site for critical analysis.

In this article, I explore the use of space in Andrea Arnold's Fish Tank and Céline Sciamma's Bande de Filles, two films that depict the experiences of 15-year-old girls in a British housing estate and a Parisian banlieue respectively. The spatial motifs related to identity that circulate throughout the films establish a regime of flux, ambiguity, and reversibility that contributes to a depiction of female adolescence as unfixed and unsettled. I argue that both films, in their focus on the lived experience of their protagonists, investigate the landscape of economically and socially peripheral spaces to develop a specifically female approach to contemporary coming-of-age narratives that takes into account the difference that gender makes.

The concerns addressed by the authors in this issue point to the need for a reimagining of girlhood as it is currently framed by settler and carceral states. To quote the guest editors, Sandrina de Finney, Patricia Krueger-Henney, and Lena Palacios, “The very notions of girl and girlhood are embedded in a colonial privileging of white, cis-heteropatriarchal, ableist constructs of femininity bolstered by Euro-Western theories of normative child development that were—and still are—violently imposed on othered, non-white girls, queer, and gender-nonconforming bodies.” Indigenous-led initiatives in Canada, such as the Networks for Change: Girl-led ‘from the Ground up’ Policy-making to Address Sexual Violence in Canada and South Africa project,¹ highlighted in four of the eight articles in this issue, along with the insights and recommendations offered in the articles that deal with the various positionalities and contexts of Latinx and Black girls, can be described as creating a new trail. In using the term trail, here, I am guided by the voices of the Indigenous researchers, activists, elders, and community scholars who participated in the conference called More Than Words in Addressing Sexual and Gender-based Violence: A Dialogue on the Impact of Indigenous-focused, Youth-led Engagement Through the Arts on Families and Communities held in Montreal.² Their use of the term trail suggests a new order, one that is balanced between the ancestors and spiritual teachings on the one hand, and contemporary spaces that need to be decolonized on the other with this initiative being guided by intergenerationality and a constant interrogation of language. The guest editors of this special issue and all the contributors have gone a long way on this newly named trail.

We are deeply honored to have been given the opportunity to edit this special issue of Girlhood Studies, given that it is dedicated to rethinking girlhood in the context of the adaptive, always-evolving conditions of white settler regimes. The contributions to this issue address the need to theorize girlhood—and critiques of girlhood—across the shifting forces of subjecthood, community, land, nation, and borders in the Western settler states of North America. As white settler states, Canada and the United States are predicated on the ongoing spatial colonial occupation of Indigenous homelands. In settler states, as Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang remind us, “the settler never left” (2012: 20) and colonial domination is reasserted every day of active occupation. White settler colonialism functions through the continued control of land, resources, and racialized bodies, and is amalgamated through a historical commitment to slavery, genocide, and the extermination of Indigenous nationhood and worldviews. Under settler colonial regimes, criminal justice, education, immigration, and child welfare systems represent overlapping sites of transcarceral power that amplify intersecting racialized, gendered, sexualized, and what Tanja Aho and colleagues call “carceral ableist” violence (2017: 291). This transcarceral power is enacted through institutional and bureaucratic warfare such as, for example, the Indian Act, the school-to-prison pipeline, and the child welfare system to deny, strategically, Indigenous claims to land and the citizenship of racial others.

Scholars of the welfare system have explored the racialized criminalization of mothers of color who are punished by the foster care system, through control of their children, when they are unable to meet the ideals of middle-class motherhood but have yet to fully articulate a language to understand the ways in which this criminalization and punishment extends to youth once they are placed in the foster care system. Using ethnographic interviews with agents of the care system, I explore the ways in which the system pathologizes Latinas’ quotidian acts of resistance and survival like their use of silences through the behavioral diagnosis of Oppositional Defiant Disorder (ODD). I argue that California's foster care system is an arm of the transcarceral continuum, marking girls of color and their strategies of resistance as pathological, thereby criminalizing them through the diagnosis of behavioral disorders.

In this article I examine my lived experience as a Black girl in a white settler state using an autoethnographic approach within the framework of critical race and feminist theory to unpack the deleteriousness of existing as a Black female in a white educational settler state. Drawing on my doctoral research, I conclude that greater attention, in terms of theory and praxis as well as compassion, needs to be applied to the educational journeys of Black girls in white settler states, particularly in predominantly white schools.

I position critical ethnographic researcher field notes as an opportunity to document the physical and ideological violence that white settler states and institutions on the school-prison nexus inflict on the lives of girls of color generally and Black girls specifically. By drawing on my own field notes, I argue that critical social science researchers have an ethical duty to move their inquiries beyond conventions of settler colonial empirical science when they are wanting to create knowledges that transcend traditions of body counts and classification systems of human lives. As first responders to the social emergencies in girls’ lives, researchers can make palpable spatialization of institutionalized forms of settler epistemologies to convey more girl-centered ways of speaking against quantifiable hierarchies of human life.

Blackgirls have a long subaltern legacy of being geographers. We have complicated the settler-colonial project of cartography uniquely through our radical placemaking efforts towards achieving safety, inclusion, and liberation. In this autoethnographic article, I trace my own socio-spatial-sensory reflections that I experienced during my visit to Harriet Tubman's Homeplace, Senior Home, and Grave Site in Auburn, New York. I attempt to unsettle the undertheorized renderings of Tubman by interrogating her personal freedom dreams, liberation geography, and womanist cartography. I then map the intergenerational solidarity that Blackgirls have forged with Tubman more contemporarily through their own space making. I conclude by unpacking what ontological lessons both knowledge producers and organizers can glean from Tubman's geographic sacredness and savvy.

A small group of Indigenous girls and their allies came together to make ribbon skirts to reclaim teachings, resist gender-based and colonial violence, and re-imagine our collective futures. Based on the personal reflections of the organizers and the girls involved gathered through individual semi-structured interviews and directed journal writing, we share lessons about the process and outcomes. Learning about the historical and cultural significance of ribbon skirts gave these girls a stronger connection to their culture, community, and each other. Wearing their ribbon skirts became an embodied act of resistance to violence in promoting resilience and self-determination. This case study illustrates how Indigenous girls and their allies can engage in resurgence practices to challenge gender-based violence through reclaiming and adapting cultural teachings and practices.

“Sisters Rising” is an Indigenous-led research project that centers the gender knowledge of Indigenous youth and communities. In this article, members of “Sisters Rising” build on the notion of kinscapes to propose renegade stewardship as a generative concept through which to consider what kinds of responses are required at the community-scholarly-activist level to disrupt conditions of gender-based and sexual violence and racialized poverty that strip Indigenous bodies of sovereignty, land, and cultural connections while targeting us for genocide. Operating from a multimethod research standpoint that is land- and arts-based, community-rooted, and action-oriented, that engages youth of all genders, and that links body sovereignty to decolonization, this work seeks to build political, theoretical, ceremonial, and interpersonal channels that are crucial to restoring dignity with advocacy for and by Indigenous communities.

“Sisters Rising” is an Indigenous-led, community-based research study focused on Indigenous teachings related to sovereignty and gender wellbeing. In this article, I reflect on the outcomes of re-searching sexualized violence with Indigenous girls involved with “Sisters Rising” in remote communities in northern British Columbia, Canada. Through an emergent methodology that draws from Indigenous and borderland feminisms to conduct arts- and land-based workshops with girls and community members, I seek to unsettle my relationships to the communities with which I work, and the land on which I work. I look to arts-based methods and witnessing to disrupt traditional hegemonic discourses of settler colonialism. I reflect on how (re)storying spaces requires witnessing that incorporates (self-)critical engagement that destabilizes certainty. This position is a critical space in which to unsettle conceptual and physical geographies and envision alternative spaces where Indigenous girls are seen and heard with dignity and respect.

In this article, I weave together connections between notions of decoloniality and love while considering implications for decolonial praxis by racialized people settled on Indigenous lands. Through a community-based research project exploring land and body sovereignty in settler contexts, I engaged with Indigenous and racialized girls, young women, 2-Spirit, and queer-identified young adults to create artwork and land-based expressions of resistance, resurgence, and wellbeing focusing on decolonial love. Building on literature from Indigenous, decolonizing, feminist, and post-colonial studies, I unpack the ways in which decolonial love is constructed and engaged in by young Indigenous and racialized people as they navigate experiences of racism, sexism, cultural assimilation, and other intersecting forms of marginalization inherent in colonial rule. I uphold these diverse perspectives as integral components in developing more nuanced and situated understandings of the power of decolonial love in the everyday lives of Indigenous and racialized young peoples and communities.

As this issue of Girlhood Studies went to press, two very dramatic moments in the history of girls and young women were in the public eye. One was the large 8000-strong gathering of NGOs, researchers, politicians, and activists from 165 countries at the Women Deliver Global Summit on gender equality that took place in Vancouver, Canada, from 3 to 6 June 2019. There, according the program, the focus was on how power can both hinder and drive progress and change for a world that is more gender equal. On 3 June, the long-awaited report of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWG) in Canada was released, with its 231 recommendations or calls for social justice to address what is now acknowledged as being part of what was (and continues to be) cultural genocide. Both the Global Summit and the report on MMIWG are reminders of the need for the blend of scholarship and activism that is so critical to advancing issues of equity and to implementing recommendations to achieve this. This unthemed issue with its broad range of geographic locations, concerns, and methods and its attention to activism, along with scholarship that features work from both the humanities and social sciences, is key in relation to mobilizing a social justice agenda.

Bringing rape stories into popular discussion was a crucial success of the Second Wave Women's Liberation movement. Popular culture is now inundated with rape stories. However, the repetitive scripts and schemas that dominate these are often informed by neoliberal individualism that is antithetical to feminism. The contradictions that characterize the tensions between feminism and neoliberalism in these texts are typically postfeminist, combining often inconsistent feminist rhetoric with neoliberal ideology. By examining the use of the silent victim script in young adult rape fiction, in this article I argue that most young adult rape fiction presents rape as an individual, pathological defect and a precondition to be managed by girls on an individual basis, rather than an act of violence committed against them.

The controversies triggered by the Netflix adaptation of Jay Asher's young adult novel Thirteen Reasons Why (2007) have focused on suicide and downplayed discussions of rape as a central plot device. Making use of stereotypical characters (such as the cheerleader and the jock) and archetypal setting (including the high school), 13 Reasons Why delves into the reassuring world of the suburban town; it deals ambiguously with the entwined notions of gender and power encapsulated in the teenpic genre. A detailed analysis of the series indeed reveals that its causative narrative reinforces the rape myth by putting the blame on girls for events that happen to them. In this article I explore the tensions of a TV series that endorses the rape myth through the entertaining frame of the teenpic.

In this article I examine the performances of black girlhood in two texts by Ntozake Shange—the choreopoem “for colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf” (1977) and the novel Sassafras, Cypress and Indigo (1982). The black girls whom Shange portrays navigate anti-black racism in their communities, domestic violence in their homes, and explore their connections with spirit worlds. In both these works, Shange stages black girls who make decisions based on their understanding of the spheres of influence that their race, gender, and age afford them in an anti-black patriarchal world dominated by adults. I draw, too, from Patricia Hill Collins's work on feminist standpoint theory and black feminist thought to introduce the term black girl thought as a theoretical framework to offer insights into the complex lives of black girls who live in the post-civil rights era in the United States.

Doll play is critical in the formation of young black girls’ gender, race, and class identities. In this article, I use textual analysis that emphasizes how physical changes in dolls correspond to contextual shifts in society over the last seven decades, and qualitative research with ten Afro-Caribbean girls and young women in Toronto to reveal the racial and cultural meanings of dolls in young people's everyday lives and how doll play is complicated by racist and classist representations of dolls. By exploring what doll play meant to them, I show how it helps black girls understand racial and gendered norms. Through doll play, girls reveal an understanding of their racialized identities and marginalization as they demonstrate unacknowledged skills in their ability to navigate barriers that reinforce racial inequalities and social hierarchies in girls’ material culture in a multicultural Toronto.

In 1988, Michelle Fine explored the ways in which damaging patriarchal discourses about sexuality affect adolescent girls, and hinder their development of sexual desire, subjectivities, and responsibility. In this article, I emphasize the durability and pliability of those discourses three decades later. While they have endured, they shift depending on context and the intersections of girls’ race, class, and gender identities. Calling on ethnographic research, I analyze the intersectional nuances in these sexual lessons for Latina girls in one (New) Latinx Diaspora town.

In this article I focus on the narratives of girls who describe the events that shape their lives and get them into trouble. The narratives are explored against Darrell Steffensmeier and Emilie Allan's (1996) proffered Gender Theory, to consider whether it offers an adequate explanatory framework. The article adds to the body of knowledge about girlhood, gender norms, and transgression and provides fresh insight into the relevance of physical strength to girls’ violence. I conclude that girls are defining girlhood as they live it and it is the disjuncture with normative concepts that leads them into conflict with institutions of social control.

In this article we focus on sixty South African primary schoolgirls’ experiences of male violence and bullying. Rejecting outmoded constructions of schoolgirls as passive, we examine how girls draw on different forms of femininity to manage and address violence at school. These femininities are non-normative in their advancing of violence to stop violence but are also imbued with culturally relevant meanings about care, forgiveness, and humanity based on the African principle of ubuntu. Moving away from the discursive production of girls’ victimhood, we show how girls construct their own agency as they actively participate in multiple forms of femininity advocating both violence and forgiveness. Given the absence of teacher and parental support for girls’ safety, we conclude with a call to address interventions contextually, from schoolgirls’ own perspectives.

In this article, I join a conversation about the definition and value of the term transnational girlhood. After surveying the fields of transnationalism, transnational feminism, and girlhood studies, I reflect on the representation of girls who act or are discussed as transnational figures. I critique the use of the term, analyze movements that connect girls across borders, and close by identifying four features of transnational girlhood: cross-border connections based on girls’ localized lived experiences; intersectional analysis that prioritizes the voices of girls from the Global South who, traditionally, have had fewer opportunities to speak than their Global North counterparts; recognition of girls’ agency and the structural constraints, including global structures such as colonialism, international development, and transnational capitalism, in which they operate; and a global agenda for change.

Nazera Sadiq Wright. 2016. Black Girlhood in the Nineteenth Century. Urbana, University of Illinois Press.

Black girls have a history of resilience. Nazera Sadiq Wright, in Black Girlhood in the Nineteenth Century (2016), analyzes accounts of the experiences of black girls from what she refers to as “youthful” girlhood to the conscious or “prematurely knowing” (44) age of 18. Setting out to recover overlooked accounts of black girlhood during the nineteenth century, a tumultuous epoch of transition for the black community, Wright uses contemporaneous literary and visual texts such as black newspapers, novels, poetry, and journals to reconstruct this lost narrative. By engaging in a close reading of these texts, in which black people, emerging from slavery, communicated with each other about personal and community goals, Wright examines the ways in which the instruction of black girls operated in between the lines of literature to convey codes of conduct to the black community. She argues that with the emergence of literature written by and for black women, the role of the black girl morphed from docile homemaker to resilient heroine for herself and her people. In discussing this more complex role, Wright does not deny that black girls were vulnerable to multiple forms of violence and hurt, but does point to a more nuanced experience. Black Girlhood in the Nineteenth Century is an intervention into the African American literary canon, filling in many of the gaps in the lost history of black girlhood, making it an essential text for those “who care” (22) about black girls as they engage in the process of rewriting and redeeming the narratives of an often-forgotten population.

S. E. Duff. 2015. Changing Childhoods in the Cape Colony: Dutch Reformed Church Evangelicalism and Colonial Childhoods, 1860–1895. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.

In Changing Childhoods in the Cape Colony: Dutch Reformed Church Evangelicalism and Colonial Childhoods, 1860–1895 (hereafter Changing Childhoods), S. E. Duff explores shifting notions of childhood and, more specifically, the emergence of new ideas about white childhood in the Cape Colony, South Africa, during the late nineteenth century by examining various efforts to convert and educate children, especially poor white children, and improve their welfare. As indicated in the title, Changing Childhoods draws attention to the multiplicity of experiences of children who existed alongside each other in the Cape Colony and how they were shaped by a variety of factors, including religion, location, class, race, and gender. While many histories of childhood elide the experiences of boys and girls, Duff pays careful attention to the different constructions of girlhood and boyhood and how gender shaped the lives of boys and girls, men and women. Throughout the book, girls appear not as passive observers but as complex agents shaping and participating in broader social, political, cultural, and economic transformations in the Cape.

I am very grateful to Barbara Brickman, the guest editor of this Special Issue of Girlhood Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal for her term “dislodging girlhood” in the context of heteronormativity. Repeatedly in this issue Marnina Gonick's pivotal question, “Are queer girls, girls?” (2006: 122) is cited. In the 13 years since she posed this question, we have not seen enough attempts made to address it. To mix my metaphors I see this issue of Girlhood Studies as helping to break the silence and simultaneously to open the floodgates to a ground-breaking collection of responses to Gonick's question. Given the rise of the right in the US and in so many other countries, queer girls—trans, lesbian, gender non-conforming, non-binary to mention just a few possibilities—are at even greater risk than before. Girlhood Studies has always been concerned with social justice, so this special issue is a particularly important one in our history. It is also worth noting that many of the articles are written or co-authored by new scholars, signaling an encouraging trend in academic work that has social justice at its core. I thank Barbara Brickman, the authors, and the reviewers for their history-making contributions to the radical act of dislodging girlhood.

In their new groundbreaking study reviewed in this special issue, The Trans Generation: How Trans Kids (and Their Parents) are Creating a Gender Revolution (2018), sociologist Ann Travers details the experiences of transgender children in the US and Canada, some as young as four years of age, who participated in research interviews over a five-year period. Establishing a unique picture of what it means to grow up as a trans child, Travers offers numerous examples of daily life and challenges for children like, for example, Martine and Esme, both of whom sought to determine their own gender at an early age: Martine and her family recount how at the age of seven she responded to her upcoming appointment at a gender clinic by asking if the doctor would have “the machine where you walk in as a boy and walk out as a girl,” while Esme's story begins in preschool and leads to the care of a “trans-affirmative doctor” (168) from the age of six and the promise of hormone blockers and estrogen at the onset of puberty. Although Travers's work is devoted to and advocates for trans children as a whole, its implications for our understanding of and research into girls and girlhood cannot be understated. What does it mean to “walk out” of that machine in the doctor's office “as a girl?” What happens when you displace the seemingly monumental onset of puberty from its previous biological imperatives and reproductive futures? How might feminist work on girlhoods, which has sought to challenge sexual and gender binaries for so long, approach an encounter with what Travers calls “binary-conforming” or “binary-identifying” (169) trans girls or with the transgender boys in their study who, at first, respond to the conforming pressures of adolescence very similarly to cisgender girls who will not ultimately transition away from a female identity?

Literary fiction is a widely popular arena in which discourse on sexuality and queerness is produced and disseminated. The Gothic is an especially crucial mode in literary fiction that has a historically intimate relationship with queer subjectivity. Observing this relationship between Gothic fiction and queer subjectivity, in this article I analyze the representation of queer Gothic girlhood in contemporary fiction, taking as my focus John Harding's 2010 reworking of the Henry James classic, The Turn of the Screw (1898). I show how Florence and Giles develops familiar tropes attached to the figure of the queer child and look specifically at how readings of the parent text implicate contemporary readings of this figure. With close readings that draw on the queer feminist ethics of Lynne Huffer, I consider what seems to be happening to the figure of the queer Gothic girl in contemporary fiction.

Drawing on letters and essays written by teenage girls in the 1970s and early 1980s, and building on my historical research on same-sex desiring girls and girlhoods in the postwar United States, I ask how teenage girls in the 1970s and early 1980s pursued answers to questions about their feelings, practices, and identities and expressed their subjectivities as young lesbian feminists. These young writers, I argue, recognized that they benefitted from more resources and role models than did earlier generations, but they objected to what they saw as adult lesbians’ ageism, caution, and neglect. In reaching out to sympathetic straight and lesbian public figures and publications, girls found new ways to combat the persistent isolation and oppression faced by youth whose autonomy remained severely restricted by familial, educational, and legal structures.

In this article, I focus on the childhood and adolescent life experiences of dansō (female-to-male crossdressers) who work as escorts in contemporary Japan, and on the process that led to their presentation of self as gendered masculine in their private and working lives. During their childhood and adolescence, dansō have to negotiate their identity and self-presentation to adhere to the gendered pressures of Japanese society. Through an analysis of interviews undertaken with 14 dansō informants, I explore dansō's construction of a male identity before adulthood, highlighting the societal impositions they experienced and the coping strategies to which they resorted in order to create and maintain a space in which to express their queer selves.

Like other fangirls, fans of former boyband One Direction (“Directioners”) have often been represented in media discourse as obsessive and hysterical, with fan behaviour interpreted as longing for heterosexual intimacy with band members. Subverting this heteronormative framing, a group of Directioners known as “Larries” have built a sub-fandom around imagining a relationship (“ship”) between two of the band members, Harry Styles and Louis Tomlinson. Representation of the Larry fandom has gone beyond pathologizing fangirls to framing their shipping practice in terms of “fake news.” The conspiracy theory panic around Larries misses the complex ways that subtext and queer reading are mobilized within the fandom to invoke feelings of queer intimacy and belonging. Drawing on a digital ethnography conducted on Twitter with Larries, we argue that these fans engage in queer reading strategies to explicitly imagine and interrupt dominant heterosexual narratives, and thus queer the figure of the fangirl.

DC Super Hero Girls (DCSHG) is a trans-media franchise that includes not just screen media texts but a wide array of themed merchandise aimed at a multi-generational market. I argue here that key components of the franchise present a queered version of girlhood that critiques femininity as a gender role while presenting femaleness as encompassing a variety of signifiers, acts, and presentations that can be read as queer (particularly by the so-called big girls in the audience). This is evident in the representation of queer relationships that exist in the sexualized zone of the canonical material, allowing the DCSHG characters to inhabit a liminal proto-queer space between homosocial/gender non-conforming and lesbian that is considered more appropriate for young girls. I examine the way in which the DC Super Hero Girls franchise rejects and reforms familiar elements of comics, super heroism, and princess culture to create that space for girls.

In this article we consider the absence of queer female protagonists in dystopian Young Adult (YA) fiction and examine how texts with queer protagonists rely on heteronormative frameworks. Often seen as progressive, dystopian YA fiction features rebellious teen girls resisting the restrictive norms of their societies, but it frequently sidelines queerness in favor of heteronormative romance for its predominantly white, able-bodied protagonists. We analyze The Scorpion Rules (2015) and Love in the Time of Global Warming (2013), both of which feature queer girl protagonists, and conclude that these texts ultimately marginalize that queerness. While they offer readers queer female protagonists, they also equate queerness with non-normative bodies and reaffirm heteronormativity. The rebellion of both protagonists effectively distances them from the queer agency they have developed throughout the narratives.

In this article, I seek to interrogate the visibility of queer girls in contemporary cinema. I demonstrate how queerness has long been associated with a passing phase of adolescent development in the teen media sphere. I reflect on the nuanced relationships between queerness and girlhood in four contemporary US independent queer films, arguing that Pariah (2011), Mosquita y Mari (2012), First Girl I Loved (2016), and Princess Cyd (2017) are representative of a new wave of queer girlhood on screen. Rejecting the pervasive tropes of coming out as coming of age and just a phase, these films use queer girlhood to challenge linear models of girlhood.

Fairy Tales Film Festival 2018, Calgary Queer Arts Society, Youth Queer Media Program

For the study of youth in cinema, we, as scholars, must always remind ourselves that most images we analyze are created by adults representing youth, not by youth representing themselves. As such, they represent an idea of youth—a memory, a trauma, a wish. They are stories these adults tell themselves about what they need youth to be in that moment. Coming out becomes the singular narrative of queer youth, and positions adulthood as a safe and stable destination after escaping the traumatic space of adolescence. The stories in these films provide important moments for adult queers to “feel backward” (2009: 7) as Heather Love says, and to process the pain of a queer childhood. And for young people exploring their sexuality, these stories are essential for at-risk youth who feel hopeless, trapped, or alone.

BOOK REVIEW

Ann Travers. 2018. The Trans Generation: How Trans Kids (and Their Parents) Are Creating a Gender Revolution. New York: New York University Press.

Ann Travers's new book, The Trans Generation: How Trans Kids (and Their Parents) Are Creating a Gender Revolution (hereafter The Trans Generation) is a highly persuasive investigation that sheds much-needed scholarly light on a grossly marginalized, precarious community. Travers interviewed 36 transgender children, and many of their parents, to reveal the challenges they face in everyday use of bathrooms, locker rooms, and other rigidly gendered spaces, as well as in interactions with friends, parents, and siblings, as well as schools, and local and state or provincial governments. Apart from the scope of this study, what is remarkable about The Trans Generation is its accessibility. Instead of presenting a quantitative analysis, which can be alienating to readers outside academia, Travers offers an exhaustive qualitative study parsed in highly thoughtful, eloquent, and open terms—one that prizes the individuality, indeed the knowableness, of each child interviewed. And, although The Trans Generation is not explicitly dedicated to discussions of girlhood, the focus of this journal, it nonetheless offers, I argue, valuable new paradigms or strategies for thinking about girls’ lives and identities.

In this article I examine the potential of the Femorabilia Collection of Women’s and Girls’ Twentieth Century Periodicals for the study of girlhood in Britain and the Commonwealth of Nations and I explain why the collection was originally created and describe its current purpose and policy to promote future research. I consider the importance of material and reading cultures as well as approaches to understanding the content of these varied publications and discuss the difficulties of working with mass culture, ephemeral texts, and the problem of obtaining examples, and I consider the collection’s particular focus on popular fiction. I consider the development of the collection, examples of methodology and practice, and its use in pedagogy, research, and public engagement.

In this article I explore the production of teen girl comics such as Marilyn, Mirabelle, Roxy and Valentine in the promotion of pop music and pop stars from 1955 to 1960. These comics developed alongside early pop music and consisted of serial and self-contained picture stories, beauty and pop music articles, advice columns, and horoscopes. Materiality is a key component of the importance of comics in the promotional culture in a media landscape in which pop music was difficult to access for teenage girls. I analyze the comics within their historical and cultural framework and show how early British pop stars were constructed through paradoxical discourses such as religion, consumerism, and national identity to make them safe for teen girl consumption. The promotion of these star images formed the foundation for later pop music promotion and girl fan practices.

In this article I analyze the production of disabled girlhood on YouTube. Examining the YouTube channel of Rikki Poynter, a deaf vlogger, I show how YouTube is an affective spotlight through which exceptional disabled young women and girls are insidiously called to participate in a project of able-nationalism. I trace how Poynter’s channel, as an affective conduit of benevolence, participates in a project of ablebodied rehabilitation. Paradoxically, as Poynter is incorporated into the nation through the resignification of her corporeality as a disabled young woman, (dis)orienting affects that reverberate from her #NoMoreVoicing—A Challenge Video + Closed Captioning Campaign | ASL vlog pose the potential for a collective crip reimagining of the virtual.

An emerging genre across literature, screen, and digital media is beginning to articulate profound dissatisfaction with postfeminist social norms and scripts. In this article, I explore how American comedian Grace Helbig exploits and reworks classic postfeminist self-improvement genres through her parodying of the YouTube how-to video. Using Helbig’s video as an illustrative case study, my analysis demonstrates that affect theory has the capacity to make a vital contribution to current postfeminist debates. Recent research finds postfeminist analysis lacks the facility to fully comprehend the complexity of contemporary femininities, suggesting that postfeminist media studies as a genre of scholarship has reached a critical impasse. Drawing on Lauren Berlant’s (2008, 2011, 2015) work, I examine how Helbig affectively deflates popular postfeminist fantasies of fun-loving confident girlhood. More widely, I argue that affective approaches offer feminist scholars a dynamic framework to make sense of the continuing impact and legacies of postfeminist media culture.

Images on popular social media platforms like Instagram and Twitter that are the most entertaining are loaded with memetic power because their value is based on cultural attitudes that already constitute our lives in the everyday. Focusing on memes appropriating the artwork from Nicki Minaj’s single, Anaconda, I explore how popular memetic culture is fueled by Black women’s creativity yet positions Black women’s bodies as the fodder for potent viral images on social media platforms and in everyday experiences; Black girlhoods, at this level of representation and in lived experiences, are rarely awarded the distinction from womanhood that many other girlhoods enjoy. Thus, Black feminist discourses of desire which speak to both girlhoods and womanhoods inform my argument that social media has become a site of reproduction and consumption—a technological auction block where Black women’s bodies, aesthetics, and experiences are vilified for viral enjoyment.

In this article I explore the Half the Sky (HTS) phenomenon, including the documentary shown on the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) network in 2014. I explore how the girls in whose name the HTS movement exists are represented in relation to Nicholas Kristoff and six celebrity advocates. This analysis foregrounds Global North philanthropy’s discursive use of Global South girls to advance a neoliberal approach that ignores structural forces that account for Global South poverty. The upbeat use of the concept of opportunities interpellates the audience into participating in individualized approaches to rescuing girls. Ultimately girls are spoken for while celebrities gain more exposure and therefore increase their brand recognition.

Child marriage affects many young girls and women all over the world, and yet, while the number of cases is extremely alarming, there appears to be hardly any awareness of the subject, never mind public visibility. The consequences of forced marriage are dire with severe psychological, physical, and social impact on girls and women. If we are to raise awareness, the silence surrounding forced child marriage needs to be broken. In her documentary film Growing Up Married (2016), feminist media scholar Eylem Atakav faces the issue head-on. Her film brings to the screen four women from Turkey who were forced into marriage as children; as adults, they recollect their memories, on camera, for the first time. Growing Up Married—a milestone of feminist filmmaking in its celebration of women’s narratives of survival—foregrounds their voices as they tell their stories of having been child brides.

Nova Scotia’s Guide for Girls and Manitoba’s 4 Girls Only! represent recent shifts in policy that aim to include and empower young women vis-a-vis public policy. In this article, we analyze these manuals, illuminating the ways in which young women are configured as subjects in late modern capitalist societies such as Canada. We show that, as neoliberal subjects, young women are increasingly expected to be autonomous and self-governing yet appear to require guidance to follow the right path towards future ideal neoliberal citizenship. Thus, despite their notable intentions, the manuals identify and target certain forms of conduct as problematic, eschewing a broader discussion of the structural causes of a variety of social problems such as poverty, unemployment, poor health, sexual violence, and stress, thus raising important questions regarding policy by, for, and about young women.

The use of helplines to deliver sexual and reproductive health (SRH) education to girls seeking such information and services can break down barriers created by low access and top-down approaches. However, it is important to interrogate their effectiveness in addressing the SRH needs of girls, particularly in contexts in which hierarchical social relations prevail and conservative religious and cultural norms dictate appropriate expressions and experiences of sexuality for girls and young women. In this article I use data drawn from a qualitative case study of a children’s helpline in Kenya to interrogate the interplay of power and culture in the delivery of SRH information to girls. The findings reveal that while this particular communication technology presents, potentially, a revolution in such delivery, power dynamics and cultural norms still pose barriers.

In this article, we discuss a case study of a feminist society in a girls’ secondary school in England, highlighting how teenage girls use social media to combat sexism. Considering the recent growth of feminist societies in UK schools, there is still a lack of research documenting how young feminists use social media’s feminist content and connections. Addressing this gap, we draw on interviews and social media analyses to examine how girls navigate feminisms online and in school. Despite their multifaceted use of social media, the girls in our research undervalued digital feminism as valid or valued, in large part because of dismissive teacher and peer responses. We conclude by suggesting that schools need to cultivate social media as a legitimate pedagogical space by developing informed adult support for youth engagement with social justice-oriented online content.

There are increasing demands that scholars of girlhood studies pay attention to the ways in which girls of color challenge the powerful discourses that work to constrain them. I take up this call to action through an analysis of the spoken word poetry of black, brown, and mixed-race high school girls in New Orleans, Louisiana. I discuss varying levels of consciousness about these discourses as represented in the poems of three girls aged 14, 15, and 16 that offer nuanced entry into the ambiguous process of their developing identities. I link instances of disruption highlighted through their poetry to aspects of their day-to-day experience to present a theoretical intervention that I call cultivated disruption that points to the ways in which girls of color are already practicing poetry as pleasurable and creative survival.

In this article, I explore how the beliefs of preschool teachers that equality is the norm in their classrooms shape play periods in ways that may work to disadvantage girls. I argue that equality discourses mask the gender power children must negotiate in their play and that this leaves girls with fewer choices when they are accessing the play environment. With research grounded in fieldwork carried out in four public schools in a Canadian metropolis, I illustrate how liberal notions of equality reinforced the traditional gender binary in children’s play. Moreover, drawing on the work of Jane Roland Martin, I show that liberal understandings of equality work to sustain a male-centered education for all students in preschool. To explore ways to attend to such gender inequalities, I turn to Nel Noddings’s concept of an ethics of care and point to the need to challenge the gender binary in early learning.

In this article I explore the meaning of work for girls in rural northeastern Argentina as formative experience that forges their identity as peasants in the contemporary world. Based on ethnographic research conducted from 2008 to the present in rural areas of San Ignacio (Misiones), I examine, from the perspective of regulatory definitions regarding children’s work, the ways in which young girls gradually participate in the social reproduction of families. Girls’ participation in these activities should not be romanticized as part of a socialization process, but, rather, critically considered as formative experience in which class, age, gender, and ethnic distinctions define certain tasks as girls’ peasant skills. Using data from participant observations made on three farms, I show how girls have an active role in the appropriation of knowledge through shared activities with boys, although such learning is overshadowed by the prevailing socio-historic construct of male dominance.

In this article, we explore how young women in Sweden negotiate their gendered subject positions in relation to psychiatric diagnoses, particularly Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), and the meanings of their own violent acts. The data consists of transcripts of face-to-face interviews with young women who have experienced using aggressive and violent acts. Given that the analysis is informed by ideas developed in discursive psychology, we identified the centrality of the concepts of responsibility and self-management. In this study responsibility is connected to gendered notions of passivity and activity. What we call the ordinary girl is neither too active nor too passive, and the extraordinary girl is either too active or too passive in the managing of herself. Similar to those of a troublesome past, the narratives of ADHD enable the understanding of an intelligible violent self, and therefore make female externalized violence what we describe as narrative-able.

We reflect on the media coverage of Amy “Dolly” Everett’s death by suicide to highlight the continued spectacularization of tweenhood as an idealized form of white feminine beauty tied to consumer culture, and one that shores up contradictory notions of the can-do/at-risk girl binary. We consider contemporary tweenhood’s continuities with the visibility and concerns of girlhood from the 1990s while questioning what a definition of tweenhood in the age of digital media and beyond the boundaries of whiteness, heteronormativity, able-bodiedness, and the Global North might look like. Calling for a discursive approach to understandings and conceptualizations of tweens, we introduce the eight articles in this special issue that range from media representations of the tween to lived experiences of actual tween girls.

In this article, I argue that while the tween is understood as having transnational relevance and mobility, this is often emphasized in ways that overlook the national and cultural specificities of tween culture. I argue that the distinctive context of British television history augments the connections between national and transnational paradigms of tween culture in important ways. While authenticity, friendships, and honesty remain foregrounded in a number of Children’s British Broadcasting Corporation (CBBC) shows, these are constructed through a national discourse that connects to transnational models of the tween girl but also mobilizes a cultural specificity that is inextricable from the broadcasting context in which it is produced.

Tween girls spend a significant amount of time with peers both in and out of school. Little research has examined and theorized tween friendship culture, particularly as it relates to tween media culture. Drawing on qualitative data gathered on four tween girls, three of whom I discuss in this article, I explore the role of media in friendship negotiations occurring within the home. I argue that a televisual lexicon helps girls negotiate friendship in informal settings, participating in what I term friendship work to establish their own status within the group through intimate conversations about television. As a framework, friendship work situates tweens’ engagement with media as a social tool.

In this article I attempt to contribute to the debates on sexualization, and on tweens’ sexual agency and choice by reporting on a qualitative study of how 53 tween girls self-presented in discourse in the context of sexting (sending sexually explicit text messages and pictures to others). More specifically, the study aims to interrogate tweens’ sexual agency and the complexity of girls’ choices by analyzing their evaluative beliefs about, and motivations for, sexting. I argue that the contradictory discursive constructions of multiple femininities not only illustrate issues of regulation and resistance, but also highlight the blurred boundaries between dominant culture and agency. My findings suggest that the sexual agency implied in sexting shows the tension between the reproduction of dominant culture and hegemony and the presence of a feminine discourse of empowerment.

Over the last 10 years, girls on YouTube have been creating stop-motion videos with their American Girl dolls. Many of these girls began producing videos when they were tweens and have continued participating in the American Girl YouTube (AGTube) community into their late adolescence and early adulthood. In this article, I explore the intertextuality of tween girl culture as it is performed and reflected on by teen (13 to 18) and young adult (19 to 24) girls in their online doll videos. Through an examination of their AGTube channels, I show how girl producers negotiate their experiences and desires as teens and young adults within the tween culture of American Girl. I argue that AGTube functions as an audience-generated paratext of American Girl, and demonstrate how teen and young adult girls interact with and challenge the marketplace boundaries of tween girl culture in digital spaces.

In this article we discuss how the Girlhood Remixed Technology Camp (GRTC) empowers tween girls to challenge sexist and misogynistic media portrayals of girlhood by constructing their own digital identities. Drawing from campers’ projects and blogs, we foreground two important outcomes of the camp: the development of technological, critical, and rhetorical literacies as girls pursued their own technology-related goals; and the crafting of powerful, positive articulations of girlhood through girls’ production of new media and technologies. We conclude with further considerations for the development of girls’ technology camps.

In this article I use four middle-grade novels to query the relationship between gendered forms of childhood and gender nonconformity in tweens. For the young characters in these novels, objects and spaces of gender enfranchisement—including gendered forms of childhood—are often out of reach. Using conceptual tools such as the orientation of objects, queer futures, and the transgender gaze, this work examines the ways in which these novels narrate their main characters’ yearning for things that will make their gender identities legible, and how they, as agentic subjects, attempt to take revenge on the rules and structures of gender normativity.

In this article, I consider middle-grade tween literature through a Black Girl Magic framework that creates space and visibility for girls of color in postfeminist America. I read two works of fiction by middle-grade author Sherri Winston through such a lens. By locating girls’ tweenhood as a space of developmental continuity, and by claiming an aesthetic of sparkle, Black Girl Magic readings can re-situate dominant interpretations of the tween literary hero and provide exciting new methods for reading middle-grade fiction.

Thebes Troutman in Miriam Toews’s The Flying Troutmans (2008) is a quirky eleven-year-old Canadian tween. In this article I argue that Thebes’s body, skin, and movement offer a textual counterpoint to the rigidity of the story of the nuclear family as it is conventionally told. Aligning the deterritorialization of the family with that of the nation, I argue that Thebes’s marking of her body in an engagingly bizarre tween performance proclaims her separation from the conventional family road trip and story, promoting new iterations of family, home, belonging, and origins. It is Thebes as tween who, through creating a zany, sometimes disturbing, but articulate identity and culture on her own skin, raises new possibilities of the tween’s role in breaking down borders. Thebes Troutman as a twenty-first-century fictional tween carves out space for new directions and a more fluid Canadian family.

In this article I consider the white British and Australian schoolgirl through a notionally comparative study of Enid Blyton’s The Naughtiest Girl in the School (1940–1952) series and the contemporary Go Girl (2005–2012) series, texts spanning my lived experience as girl, mother, and teacher. Through incendiary fragments of memory and media, I, as researcher and writer, seek the girl addressed by these texts and consider the struggles, denials, and ambivalences that produce and are produced by reading the schoolgirl. This girl resists historical determinism, coalescing as contemporaneous past, present, and future as the reader performs her own girlhood through reading and writing. This creative analytical article notices the visual and physical manifestations of texts, as well as their linguistic discourses. Through this work, we perceive postfeminist entanglement in the ongoing re-configuration of the schoolgirl, with implications for policy and practice in education and for cultural and girlhood studies.

The cause of girls’ education in developing countries has received unprecedented attention from international organizations, politicians, transnational corporations, and the media in recent years. Much has been written about the ways in which these seemingly emancipatory campaigns reproduce historical discourses that portray women in former colonies as in need of rescue by the West. However, to date little has been written about the ways in which young women’s and girls’ education activists represent themselves. In this article I analyze I Am Malala, the autobiography of Pakistani girls’ education activist Malala Yousafzai, written for her own age group. Using a feminist, poststructuralist approach to discourse analysis, it considers the way in which Yousafzai negotiates and challenges discourses around young women, Pakistan, and Islam. I conclude that a truly emancipatory understanding of girls’ rights would look not to the words and policies of powerful organizations but, rather, to young women themselves.

The dead girl genre of Young Adult (YA) literature is characterized by dying or recently deceased female narrators and/or central characters who embark on exciting new adventures once dying or dead, often find that they are now listened to and taken seriously, and generally find true love and satisfying sexual experiences. My concern is with these books as artifacts of a culture that allows little to no sexual agency or subjectivity for (living) teenaged girls and young women. In addition, we increasingly hear of cases of young women being harassed and bullied for their sexual activity, sometimes to the point of suicide. Based on a content analysis of these books, I consider the questions of how it is that dead has come to be promoted as a viable sexual subject position for young women, and how these books might actually nurture a culture of bullying and suicide.

In 2016 two nonfiction titles exploring girls and sexuality and presentations of the sexual self received extensive media attention, thus shaping a construction of girl in popular media. In this article I examine how Nancy Jo Sales’s American Girls: Social Media and the Secret Lives of Teenagers and Peggy Orenstein’s Girls and Sex: Navigating the Complicated New Landscape construct girls as sexual subjects and desired objects. In a close reading of the texts I consider how the authors constitute girl and the ways in which girls navigate society’s expectations and constructions of them as sexual subjects. I use the words of girls themselves to examine the dissonance between authorial constructions and the post-feminist culture that emerges in the texts on the one hand, and the girls’ language on the other.

Victorian notions of the passionless female allowed for a wide latitude of socially acceptable relationships between girls in the nineteenth century that included crushes, romantic friendships, and, for women, Boston marriages. However, textual depictions of female sexuality were rapidly shifting in the early twentieth century. As sexologists’ writings moved toward a medical model focused on the prevention and treatment of homosexuality, the literature created and consumed by parents and school officials reflected growing anxiety about the potential sexual undertones of female friendships. The story of two women coming of age during this cultural shift humanizes the impact of shifting cultural norms on the lives of individuals and reveals the tragic consequences for those who resisted efforts to conform to heteronormative expectations regarding their future.

In this article I focus on the graphic narratives Gogi (1970–the present) by Nigar Nazar and Haroon Rashid’s Burka Avenger (2013–the present) in particular to examine the empowering portrayal of Muslim girlhood that these works offer in addition to advocating for the rights of Muslim girls. I emphasize that graphic narratives have become a powerful medium that represents the resistance of Muslim girlhood both in the context of local patriarchies and as a tool to challenge the stereotypical representation of Muslim identities globally. By focusing on the depiction of the girl protagonists in these graphic narratives, I analyze how these artists rework the western superhero trope to foreground the girls’ everyday heroism. Moreover, by situating the interaction of the girls with Pakistani cityscapes, I argue, in terms of De Certeau’s concept of tactics, that the protagonists navigate the Pakistani cities as familiar places rather than as othered spaces.

In this article I examine the representation of bullying in Felita (1979) and Going Home (1986), two novels by Nicholasa Mohr, an important but critically overlooked author of the Puerto Rican Diaspora. Using material from current research in the social sciences as well as a close reading of the texts, I explore the emergence of the female subject from behind her self-definition as a victim of girl-bullying. The girl’s involvement with art enables her to move from the role of object to that of subject. That involvement not only counteracts the negative effects of bullying but also brings the girl to a deeper understanding of her culture and herself. That the author would then reengage bullying episodes from these novels in a memoir written later provides a powerful example of the author’s writing back to the tween whose experiences inspired her work.

In the genre of residential school narratives for children, Not My Girl (2014) stands out for the determination, courage, and resilience of its narrator, a young girl who chooses to go to a Catholic boarding school, and then draws on both her culture and a British novel, Alice in Wonderland, about a brave girl for strength and resilience. This article traces Olemaun’s journey as she follows Alice into literacy but finds her own methods of resisting colonial oppression and asserting Indigenous agency.

In this article I consider the characterization of Celia, the protagonist in Elena Fortún’s “Celia and Her World” series (1929–1952), and the role of Fortún as a forerunner of women writers in the 1950s. I explore the ways in which Fortún presented herself as a female author offering alternative models of femininity to her readers through the character Celia and the social context of the series. In addition, I examine Fortún’s shifting representation of Celia as a subversive character, and Fortún’s ideological influence on female writers who used similar literary strategies. Using the point of view of the girl in her texts as an insurgent protagonist to reflect different sociohistorical moments in Spain suggests a continuity in Spanish narrative instead of an abrupt change after the Civil War.

Since Vladimir Nabokov’s 1955 publication of Lolita, numerous feminist scholars have argued for rereading the novel from the girl’s point of view to understand Lolita not as a sexual agent, but as an incest victim. In this article, I examine how revisionary texts like Roger Fishbite (1999), Lo’s Diary (1999), and Poems for Men Who Dream of Lolita (1992) give voice to the girl in the text, disrupting Nabokov’s “aesthetic bliss” and emphasizing aspects of Lolita’s victimization. Ultimately, I discuss how a contemporary analytical shift from valuing the aesthetics to a consideration of the ethics of the novel has led to restricted critical readings of the narrative, which, nevertheless, remain open through the acknowledgement of the girl’s sexual desire and agency within these female authors’ revisionary texts.

In this article I position the metaphor of the hope chest at the heart of a trilogy of fairy tale novels, The Complete Tales of Ketzia (2001), The Complete Tales of Merry (2006a) and The Complete Tales of Lucy Gold (2011), by Kate Bernheimer that explore traditions of American girlhood. Deploying psychoanalytic interpretative readings, I investigate the characterization of each of the three sisters. My use of the hope chest (as both a toy and a cultural repository) enables me to offer a fuller picture of the social transition depicted in these novels from childhood into womanhood, and is thus conflated with the idea of the child-woman—a hinge-like cultural figure whom Bernheimer represents metaphorically through boxes of accoutrements containing memories and prophecies. With reference to unpublished interviews with Bernheimer, I support my interpretative reading of her trilogy by invoking and explaining the relevance of literary theories related to caskets.

In this article, I explore the practice of reading as a form of social participation in girlhood in digital spaces. Positioning girlhood as the circulation of particular discourses and affects, I consider a set of six self-representative blogs authored by young women on the microblogging platform Tumblr, and the affective and discursive positions they invite through their address to readers. Adapted from a central blog named WhatShouldWeCallMe, these blogs use GIFs (looping, animated images) and captions to articulate feelings and reactions relating to everyday situations that readers, addressed as girlfriends, are expected to recognize and relate to as common experience. I suggest that readers’ aesthetic and social participation in the circulation of these texts is key to the formation of digital publics in which readers come to recognize themselves as girls through calls to common feeling.

Films, television series, music videos, computer games, social media networks, web pages, newspapers, magazine covers, digital signage, and other pervasive media texts are constantly projecting a barrage of conflicting and influential messages about who girls are, what they should be, and how they should act. In this article, I discuss my work with 10 girl coresearchers (aged between 10 and 13) to analyze media as texts with taken-for-granted meanings that need to be understood, questioned, interrupted, and transformed. I report on how the coresearchers produced a Public Service Announcement (PSA) to represent how girls and girlhood are (mis)represented in well-established and hegemonic media discourses. Findings underscore the importance of providing opportunities for girls to be media creators (not merely consumers or child users) so that the girl in the text can be heard and can express herself in her own ways, on her own terms, and for her own purposes.

This article explores the efforts of two girls to use STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) knowledge and practice to empower themselves and their peers amid threats of sexual violence against them. Drawing on the feminist construct of intersectionality and social practice theory, we examine how these girls called on intersecting knowledge, practices, people, and scales of activity (different scopes of action) to reclaim space, voice, and peace in the face of violence and fear, scaffolded by adults who became their partners for change.

Sexual violence continues to be normalized in modern society through heterosexist jokes and problematic portrayals of female sexuality. A number of young female activists use YouTube as a technology of nonviolence to share their thoughts about rape culture and how it can be transformed. We performed a thematic analysis of 10 videos produced by young women and girls to investigate what they identify as rape culture and how they use videos to communicate their messages. We argue that they offer meaningful insight into the institutions that contribute to the normalization of sexual violence, including schools and universities, the media, and legal and political systems. We believe that stakeholders interested in dismantling rape culture can use these videos to educate themselves and others about the concerns voiced by women and girls, who are, arguably, the population most affected by sexual violence.

Rapid developments in digital technologies have sparked revolutionary shifts in participatory research. Emerging tools such as digital stories and cellphilms offer participants opportunities to engage actively in research and to produce media about their everyday lives. Yet, while these may enable such engagement, researchers need to ensure that the very tools meant as technologies of nonviolence are not in and of themselves violent. This article uses a technology-based, participatory visual methods workshop conducted with girls and young women as part of addressing sexual violence in a rural community in South Africa as a case study. We identify and reflect on some of the ethical issues that arose during the workshop and how we addressed them. Our aim is always to locate our work on addressing sexual violence with young rural women within an ethics of nonviolence rooted in and responsive to the context in which we work.

Effectively engaging with technologies of nonviolence for girls and young women requires attention to systemic, symbolic, and everyday forms of violence online and offline, as well as to how power is broadly manifest. We draw from three different interdisciplinary perspectives and critical reflections to consider networked technologies and online communities in relation to nonviolence. We explore mentorship and subversive education through Neal Stephenson’s 1995 novel, The Diamond Age: Or, A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer, identity politics on Facebook in a reflective study of digital citizenship for queer girl visibility, and online grassroots community solutions in considering the social potential of online forums and solutions for online harassment. Our varied perspectives encounter contradictions, such as the need for access to and protection from diverse online communities, as a necessary consideration for developing policy and creating networked and community-based technologies of nonviolence. We conclude with five recommendations in a call to action.

Girls do not need merely to be empowered with technological know-how in order to engage fully online. While girls use digital and social media for self-expression, activism, and identity experimentation, their engagement is too often interfered with by online gender policing and by being attacked for daring to challenge conventional stereotypes. Reshaping the online environment in ways that address this discrimination meaningfully requires a multifaceted approach that includes transparent, responsive, and accessible redress through both social media platforms and, where necessary, law enforcement agencies. Unfortunately, these institutions all too often fail to respond adequately when girls report acts of cyberviolence committed against them. This article illustrates this failure by drawing on lessons learned from coauthor Julie S. Lalonde’s experiences in advocating online for gender equality. It also raises the troubling concern of law enforcement deference to corporate terms of service rather than to Canadian law.

In this article, based on research I conducted in Western Canada, I discuss the significance of the emerging influence of social media on the overrepresentation of Indigenous girls in sexually exploitative situations. In interviews I conducted with Indigenous sexual exploitation survivors and intervention staff I found that social media is being used to recruit Indigenous girls and keep them exploited in three distinct ways: targeting girls in reserve communities and luring them to the city; setting up so-called dates to keep them off the streets; and facilitating constant communication between the victim and victimizer, thus ensuring that girls are perpetually active and reachable. I respond to these by outlining educational possibilities in order to combat the exposure of these girls to predators on social media sites.

Recently, the field of girlhood studies has witnessed a growing body of research into girls’ self-representation practices, but disabled girls are largely absent from this work. In this article, I intervene in this area by asserting the need to explore how disabled girls represent themselves online in order to consider the intersections between girlhood and disability. I attempt to move away from discourses of risk that circulate around girls’ digital self-representation practices by demonstrating how these practices provide disabled girls with visibility in a postfeminist mediascape that renders them invisible, and also act as a form of social advocacy and awareness raising. I then explore how disabled girls represent themselves online in a postfeminist cultural landscape through a case study of a severely sight-impaired blogger, looking at how they must be seen as both motivated and motivational.

In this article I examine how a new immigrant girl from Jamaica participated in Abstinence Only Until Marriage (AOUM) classes at her school in New York City, and how her interpretation of the values taught in the classes shaped her aspirations for her future as well as the meaning of her past pregnancy. AOUM was a site in which the indirect and seductive power of the state motivated her to align her aspirations and method of attaining them with the neoliberal notion of success, and the neoconservative Christian notions related to family and sexuality in which, essentially, she did not believe. The finding shows that teaching sexuality as a personal matter only and separate from economic equality, and sexuality and reproductive rights does not contribute to the empowerment of girls. I conclude by suggesting that teaching sexuality as a public and political issue is an alternative method of empowerment.

In 2010, media outlets began to buzz about a trend among young conservative Christian women—a rise in at-home daughterhood, a practice in which women forgo college and paid work in favor of staying at home and honing their homemaking skills until marriage. These reports suggested that the practice was out to “turn back the clock on gender equality” and declare, “In your face, feminism!” While these accounts frame at-home daughterhood as a rejection of feminism, I suggest that advocates actually employ postfeminist strategies to make the practice palatable to contemporary women. My argument uses critiques of postfeminism to advance historical and sociological debates about the complicated role of feminism in conservative Christianity. Analyzing texts from parenting workshops and promotional materials, I find proponents acknowledge social progress on gender equity issues, but dismiss feminist politics through tactics of humor and depoliticization.

This article explores the graphic representation of queer adolescent sexuality on offer in the coming-of-age graphic novel Blue is the Warmest Color. This representation, read alongside object relations psychoanalysis and in terms of feminist sexuality education theorizing, invites adult readers to reconsider the ways in which we think of the relationship between girls, risk, and sexuality. I propose that in order to honor girls’ sexual subjectivity, we must treat romantic risk-taking as an ordinary, healthy and essential aspect of growing up.

In this article, based on an ethnographic study conducted at a New York City public middle school during the 2013 to 2014 school year, I examine gender relations between early adolescent girls and boys, and between them and their teachers. The data—interviews and focus groups with girls, as well as observations—reveals girls’ perceptions of the boys’ dominance in the school and the ways in which boys used symbolic violence and sexual harassment to maintain their social, emotional, and physical power over the girls. Also, I discuss teacher denial of, and complicity in, these structures of power between students. Teachers normalized the hegemonic masculine practices as typical adolescent behavior and the school was deemed to be a gender equitable site by students and teachers. Furthermore, I consider questions regarding the role of teachers in this institutional violence against girls, as well as in relation to my role as researcher.

Black females achieve high standards of success yet their lived experiences are frequently absent from educational literature in Canada. This article documents the navigational strategies adopted by four Jamaican-Canadian girls to achieve academic success and discusses how they conceptualized their identity and the role(s) their identity played in their schooling experiences. In contrast to the deficiencies that are often highlighted in studies on the schooling experiences of black students, we draw on critical theories to shed light on the positive aspects of these black females’ schooling experiences. Such an approach disrupts negative views of black students as lagging behind in education and provides examples for other students on how to excel in the face of educational barriers. These narratives provide education policy makers with current perspectives on how students struggle to overcome obstacles to achieve academic success in a system that promises to be accessible to all students.

Prior research has illustrated the benefits of media literacy and production programs for girls’ self-expression and civic engagement. This study examines whether formal high school journalism programs can be similarly beneficial. A survey of 461 high school journalists shows that girls want to use student media to address serious topics that can contribute to their civic development. But school employees also tell girls more often than boys not to cover sensitive issues in the student media, and girls are more likely than boys to acquiesce to such requests. Girls will not glean the full benefits of journalism education until such disparate treatment is addressed. Journalism educators and school administrators may profit from the feminist pedagogical approaches developed in out-of-school media-focused programs in which girls have demonstrated significant willingness to express themselves and are unencumbered to do so.

There is increased consensus on the role of adolescent girls in reaching development goals but few programs for girls have been rigorously evaluated. In Ethiopia, Biruh Tesfa (Bright Future, in Amharic) mobilizes out-of-school girls into safe space groups led by mentors. Girls receive training in literacy and life skills, and they are given vouchers for medical services. A longitudinal study was conducted to measure changes in girls’ learning outcomes and their use of health services. After adjusting for background factors, we found that girls who had never attended school in the project site had significantly higher literacy scores than did control girls. At endline, girls in the project site were 1.6 times more likely to have used a health service in the past six months than those in the control site. Girls-only safe spaces programs can be effective at improving literacy and health-seeking behavior among the most marginalized girls who otherwise lack educational opportunities and access to services.

In our article we consider the ethical challenges engendered by participatory visual research with girls. Drawing on photographs taken by and of girls we explore how to reconcile the challenges generated by disseminating images of girls while supporting them to have a voice in research. Our concerns are focused on how to maintain the integrity of girls’ visual voices while protecting them from any harm that may result from revealing visual information about them. This issue has become increasingly germane for visual sociology since developments in digital technology and visual culture mean that images can circulate instantaneously and in perpetuity, potentially stripping them of their creators’ intentions and infusing them with new and unintended meanings. We consider different approaches to resolving our ongoing ethical dilemma and examine their potential for honoring the flesh-and-blood girl’s right to be heard amidst concerns about her digital visibility.

Our concern is with the ethical issues related to girlhood and bodily integrity—the right to be free from physical harm and harassment and to experience freedom and security in relation to the body. We defend agency, positive self-relations, and health as basic elements of bodily integrity and we advocate that this normative concept be used as a conceptual tool for the protection of the rights of girls. We assume the capability approach developed by Martha Nussbaum as an ethical framework that enables us to evaluate girls’ well-being and well-becoming in relation to the potential, and often subtle, threats they face. The capability approach can be understood as a theory of justice, and, therefore, as an ethical and political approach. An enriched concept of bodily integrity can help in the design of better policies to address gender biases against girls because it could contribute to seeing them as active agents and valid participants.

In this article, we examine the ethical realities that emerged from a qualitative study with adolescent girls on sexual exploitation. We outline and articulate the importance of moving beyond the inclusion of girls’ voices in research to discussing the ethical and practical implications of doing so. We consider the notions of power, victimization, and agency and highlight the ethical dilemma of doing research with girls in the sex trade, particularly in a context in which participants’ narratives are characterized by profound ambivalence, as seen in their frequent oscillation between narratives of victimization on the one hand, and of agency and power on the other. The nexus between girlhood studies and ethics provides us with a valuable opportunity to analyze, and thus highlight, the importance of social context in understanding these adolescent girls’ narratives and self-representations.

The use of digital technology, particularly cell phones, is growing as a medium for data collection in social research. However, there remains concern about our implementing appropriate ethical practice when we are conducting digital research with people, including girls, who are considered vulnerable. In this article, I will discuss some of the ethical considerations that emerged during an action research project I undertook with a community of secondary school girls in Nairobi, Kenya. These considerations are related to privacy in connection with surveillance as a means of cell phone-based data collection. My aim is to initiate a scholarly dialogue on creating a framework of ethical practice for digital research with girls—particularly those who are infrequently given a voice in the literature on girlhood studies.

In this article I apply policy frame and visual analysis to explore UNICEF’s advocacy for girls’ education on Instagram. I consider a purposefully selected sample of photos and captions instagrammed from UNICEF’s official account so as to describe the policy framing of girls’ education policy, and population targeting. A parallel goal of this article is to interrogate the ethics of using image-intensive new media data in education policy research. My findings expose the ways in which girls’ images and experiences are used to promote UNICEF’s agenda and advocacy for girls’ education. I show the need for adapting protocols for working ethically with publicly available social media data in education policy research.

In this article I consider the ethical boundaries of intergenerational activism for the feminist researcher conducting research in pre-existing activist networks. Drawing on a decade of involvement with girl-activists at the United Nations, I revisit key moments that challenged me to re-think the ethical, discursive, and relational conditions of girls’ political empowerment. Intergenerational activism creates relational messiness between adults and girls since effectively partnering with girls requires disruptions of generational power with practitioner-scholars learning to make it up as they go along. This article illustrates the complex and contested ways in which girls and adults build activist partnerships in adult-centered and sometimes politically hostile settings. In exploring the environment within which North American girls experience political (dis)empowerment, I question the ethics of empowering girls under current spectacular discursive conditions.

In this article I explore the implications and challenges of applying the tenets of twenty-first century, girl-centered ethical research methodologies to a study of archived diaries, letters, and cultural ephemera made by Victorian girls. Archives of the words of young people can be augmented by the judicious application of knowledge that Victorian girls could not have had, and by using the ways in which contemporary young people theorize their own lived experiences. I suggest that the words of twenty-first century young people who participate in qualitative research studies may be used to speak to without speaking for historically located girls. In seeking an ethical girl-centered approach to learning about these long-deceased girls I call on aspects of Victorian studies and on studies that focus on youth and girlhood, as well as on contemporary drama in education within an overarching framework of ideas about the porosity of time and space.

For nearly two hundred years, Indigenous girls and young women were at the heart of Canada’s fur trade. As wives to British fur traders and as daughters of these unions, they liaised with traders and tribes. Although wives and daughters were viewed initially from an Indigenous perspective they gradually lost their separate identities as traders increasingly held them up to European ideals. Simultaneously, England’s fascination with girls and girlhood fluctuated between seeing girlhood as a gendered life-stage leading to matrimony on the one hand, and girlhood as a rhetorical device unhindered by biology or chronology on the other. In my article I link these two contexts so as to interpret Pauline Johnson’s essay, A Strong Race Opinion. Her essay criticizes contemporaneous Anglo-Canadian authors for depicting Indian heroines in an artificial light rather than as flesh-and-blood girls. My interpretation considers girlhood from an Indigenous perspective as a unique, distinct, and natural identity.

Statistical representation of young Indigenous women in Canada presents an alarming picture of adversity characterized by addiction, pregnancy, and academic underachievement. Using Photovoice as a vehicle for community dialogue and education, the goal of this project was not to further the literature that examines the limitations of young Indigenous women, but to examine their strengths and their resilience. The project intended to document the lived experiences of young Indigenous women and comment on youth-identified issues and responses to the challenges experienced by Indigenous girls residing in urban centres. The level of insight and maturity demonstrated by the photographers was astounding; these young girls were able to consider their own circumstances within the broader context of family and community. Further, they examined their circumstances critically in relation to the historical consequences of past generations. In doing this, the photographers, rather than getting trapped in a cycle of negativity reminiscing about past wrongs, created opportunity for positive change and raised hope for this generation.

In this article I will centre the historic and ongoing resistance of Indigenous girls to violence through colonial policies and practices. I challenge conventional intersectionality scholarship by foregrounding anti-colonialism and Indigenous sovereignty/nationhood. Using examples from my own work, I illustrate the manifestation of colonial power and persistent resistance in the lives of Indigenous girls. Through these stories, I will discuss the everyday practices of witnessing and resisting the discourses of risk. Red intersectionality will be offered as one way forward in relation to my ongoing work on violence.

For as long as national records have been kept, Indigenous rural girls in Mexico have spent the least amount of time in school (aside from some people with disabilities). An innovative social program was designed in the 1990s that aimed to stop the intergenerational transmission of poverty through the provision of cash transfers (higher for girls than for boys) to families, conditional upon their children’s attendance at school and health clinics. We set out to assess whether or not the program had closed these gender and ethnicity gaps and found that it did narrow substantially pre-existing inequalities among rural indigenous poor girls and their families and, in some instances, reversed them. We recognize that the program does not eliminate other structural forces discriminating against indigenous Mexican girls and that prolonged education is an instrument for mobility only if these other forces are counterbalanced by more comprehensive social strategies.

The teen horror film The Craft (1996) has remained a cult classic with girl audiences for two decades. Scholarship about the film has focused on its negative representation of girls’ friendships, sexuality, and desire for power. In this article, I honor the significance of girl culture by accounting for The Craft’s appeal to girl audiences. I argue that The Craft’s relevance to girls arises from its subversion of teen film tropes. The Craft explores adolescent girls’ fear of isolation by depicting a mentally ill teenager who draws strength and happiness from the company of her friends, and becomes depressed when they oust her. By flouting the imperative for adolescent girl protagonists to be white, middle-class, mentally healthy, and normatively bodied, The Craft portrays girls’ desire for understanding over the pursuit of so-called popularity, girls’ anger arising from marginalization, and girls’ exploiting of friendship as a weapon.

In order to explore the adultification of tween girls in Singapore through the way they dress, I begin this article by taking stock of the arguments in the discourse of sexualization. In further elucidating the cultural specificities of girlhood, I point out how tween girls’ fashioning of themselves after adults in Singapore presents some challenges to the ways that the adultification of tween girls’ dressing has been commonly theorized. I show that although the adultification of tween girls’ dressing forms a large part of the debate in the discourse of sexualization, tween girls’ fashioning of themselves after adults should not be assumed to be an exclusive outcome and process of improper and premature sexualization in culturally-specific contexts like Singapore. This article, therefore, explores a different way of thinking about tween girls who are dressing up in more adult-like ways, and suggests the need to be careful about extrapolating from arguments made in the (Western) discourse of sexualisation about this phenomenon.

In this article, I analyze critically Miss You Can Do It, an HBO documentary that follows the contestants and their families in a pageant for disabled girls. I explore disabled girls’ affective labor as happy objects and trace how certain exceptional, disabled girls are, in Puar’s sense, recapacitated and enfolded into the national imaginary. Through an analysis of the storyline of Alina Hollis’s adoption as a disabled foreign child, I illustrate how her transnational adoptee status functions in the service of a new, flexible family structure—one that is benevolent, recapacitated by its valuation of disability, and unwaveringly American.

American Girl is a multi-product brand that is marketed transnationally through discourses of gendered empowerment and education. While previous scholarship has commented on how American Girl encourages normative gender roles, consumerism, and limited notions of diversity, no scholars, to my knowledge, have discussed disability in relation to the brand. This article explores the representation of disability in the American Girl contemporary line through an analysis of books and doll accessories. Unlike issues of gender, race and class, which appear central to American Girl’s depiction of contemporary girlhood, disability is a literal and metaphoric accessory in the brand. I contend that this representation of disability as supplementary is a prime example of ablenationalism explicitly targeted at girls.

In this article I describe how participatory visual methodologies can be used to construct knowledge on inclusion and exclusion with girls with disabilities in Vietnam. I suggest that this approach can shape knowledge on inclusion in relation to disability and girlhood through its engagement with the voices of girls with disabilities. This case study represents a decolonizing approach for understanding the experiences of disabled girls in the Global South in ways that challenge the Western framing of disability and girlhood.

In this analysis of Cece Bell’s El Deafo, a graphic novel for children, we examine the tension between representations of able-bodiedness and disability in Bell’s narrative of a young girl negotiating family and friendships while experiencing hearing loss. Drawing on recent scholarship in disability studies and feminism, we demonstrate that ability is a characteristic that is not static; it circulates among a number of characters and bodies in the novel. Characters who match normatively abled bodies are at times unable to achieve their goals, while Cece, the protagonist, deploys a range of strategies to negotiate her social world, at times to great effect. El Deafo, in this way, neither idealizes disability nor represents it as something to be overcome. Instead, the novel opens up a space for alternative notions of embodiment.

In this article I will explore the repeated depiction of freak show performers and their relation to adolescent, tomboyish female protagonists in the novels of Carson McCullers. In a surprisingly recurrent trope across McCullers’s work, young girls believe that they will grow uncontrollably, as tall as the “nine foot tall” woman at the fair on the outskirts of town. Serving as a link between their rapidly developing bodies and their emergent sense of their own queerness, freakishness threatens to divert them from the normative futures of womanhood. I investigate this intersection of freak studies, a sub-discipline of disability studies, and queer theories of temporality, arguing for an extension of queer time through crip time, one which is necessitated by a consideration of freakishness in relation to youth and development. The figure of the freak across McCullers’s work calls for a reassessment of girlhood’s complex relationship to embodiment, place, sexuality, and temporality.

Adolescent girls with disabilities face multiple intersecting and often mutually reinforcing forms of discrimination and oppression, which are exacerbated in situations of crisis. Gender norms that define how women and men should act are socially constructed and learned; they vary across contexts, and interact with other factors, including socioeconomic status, ethnic group, age, and disability. In crisis situations, family and community structures break down, while traditional and social norms disintegrate, all of which affect adolescent girls with disabilities in unique and devastating ways. Drawing on the Women’s Refugee Commission’s work, including personal narratives collected from girls with disabilities, in this report we review how age, gender, and disability influence identity and power in relationships, households, and communities affected by crisis. This report outlines principles for including girls with disabilities in adolescent girls’ programming, promoting safe access to humanitarian assistance, and mitigating the risk of violence, abuse, and exploitation.

Collection is an important activity and marker of childhood. In this article I will discuss Pinterest as an online iteration of the collection process. Through Pinterest, users amass bits of information online, known as pins, to display on virtual bulletin boards. My project positions Pinterest as an influential text and literacy practice related to identity production with particular impact on girls. With obvious parallels to the keeping of commonplace books, Pinterest is an act of virtual curation that shapes a pinner's present and future identities. In the Pinterest space, girls see and collect ideals of femininity (displayed in recipes, fantasy weddings, and parenting tips) and in so doing create their own online avatars. This practice requires a critical awareness as users reinscribe, resist, or reinforce cultural norms of femininity. This article offers a conceptual base for future systematic study of Pinterest as a text and practice of girlhood.

In this article we examine the production and operation of the character, Kamala Khan, a Muslim American-Pakistani superheroine of the Ms. Marvel comic series, to glean what this reveals about Islam and Muslims, with particular attention to representations of Muslim masculinities. We argue that Ms. Marvel's invitation to visualize Muslim girls as superheroes is framed by a desire to interrupt rampant Islamophobia and xenophobia, yet, in order to produce such a disruption it relies on, and (re)produces, stereotypical conceptualizations of Muslim masculinities as mirrored in men who are conservative, prone to irrational rage, pre-modern, anachronistic, and even bestial. However, as the series progresses we notice the emergence of representations of complex and complicated Muslim masculinities that cast doubt on these tired, hackneyed ones, thus making way for a comic to undertake the pedagogical work of resistance. We see this graphic novel, like the shape-shifting Kamala herself, as wielding potentially dynamic and transformative power in social imaginaries.

In this article I explore how mythopoeic Young Adult (YA) fantasy offers examples of living and being an adolescent female body that challenge the dominant, hegemonic discourses dictating the adolescent girl's appearance in the West's imagesaturated culture. I begin by establishing the features of mythopoeic YA fantasy, before looking at Daine in Tamora Pierce's Immortals quartet and Cinder(ella) in Marissa Meyer's The Lunar Chronicles. Daine's shape-shifting body and Cinder's cybernetic one offer bodily change as an integral part of the (adolescent female) body, as opposed to the fixed perfection required by the fantasy femininity on offer in popular culture, including print, televisual, and social media. Employing a reading of touch in order to explore the multiplicity that is available on, and through, these bodies, I question the representational economy dominating the hegemonic discursive construction of the adolescent girl.

Today's girls have become spectacles of modern progress and the representation of social desires for success. What has been remarkably unclear in this imagination, visualization, representation, and investment of modern girlhood is what knowledge and what attachments mobilize girls towards their desires for success. In this article I will examine school knowledge and the seduction of rationality and certainty about female futures. I trace some of the effects and affects of curricular knowledge. I examine how girls move ambivalently towards objects of desire, like prestigious colleges, through their desire for recognition, difference, and being exceptional. Using qualitative data collected in a private all-girls school, in this article I bring together feminist poststructuralist theory, curriculum theory, and girlhood studies to attend to affective intensities of spiciness, happiness, and shame and analyze how these disrupt the visualizations of the girls' seemingly unambiguous notions of female success.

At a time when individualized narratives have replaced structural explanations like social class to account for inequality, girls who are on the urban fringe are not only made invisible but are under-valued as contributing members to a future, individually oriented society. This article offers a visual disruption in order to re-value the stigmatized, working-class girl by applying the concept of use-value to identify the girls' redemption narratives as an agentic process that is expressed affectively. Drawing from an ethnography of urban, working-class girls who utilize social services, this article reveals how class as culture operated along with other classification systems to inscribe the girls as a problem. Recognizing this, each girl had a redemption tale to tell so as to recover a sense of self; the self-narratives revealed alternative value systems that provided collective and practical value to them.

Sara Ahmed. 2014. Willful Subjects. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Henriette Gunkel, Chrysanthi Nigianni and Fanny Sönderbäck (eds.) 2012. Undutiful Daughters: New Directions in Feminist Thought and Practice. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

In this article I analyze various representations of the Victorian girl's experiences with the bedroom in order to illuminate how the Victorian ideal often erased for girls the distinction between public and private that the bedroom created in the home, even as this room became more and more common as a private space allocated to girls. Though it offered girls opportunities to pursue their own interests and desires, the sanctuary of the bedroom also proved to be complicated and compromised by the familial responsibilities that followed girls there. I argue that Victorian portrayals of the girl's relationship with her bedroom reflect the unique tensions between public and private that girls of the period experienced as they navigated the variety of socio-cultural expectations placed upon them.

Building on research about sexualization in media, body image, and its impact on the development of girls of color, we present a discourse analysis of what the members of three focus groups of teen girls of color, primarily daughters of immigrants, said when asked to talk about what it means to them to be sexy, and about their perceptions of media influence. We focus on interpretive repertoires, contradictions, and discursive strategies regarding race, body image, and perceptions about sexiness.

In this article I draw from the Imani Nailah Project, a participatory action research initiative with a group of African refugee girls living in the US. I examine a particular fusion of racialized, gendered, and nationalized narratives that discursively construct the refugee girl. I interrogate this discursively produced refugee girl construct and highlight how actual refugee girls interact with this discourse with a focus on resistance strategies and emergent counter narratives of citizenship. Throughout the article, I use italics when I am referring to the refugee girl construct in order to maintain a central focus on interrogating a sociopolitical discourse—the refugee girl—as a construct distinct from actual refugee girls. My central aim is to highlight spaces and moments when actual refugee girls are in conversation with this imposed refugee girl discourse.

Girl Scouts of the USA is the largest organization for girls in the world, with 2.8 million members and more than 50 million American women as alumnae since the first troop was organized in 1912. Although the organization's mission statement has evolved over the years, Girl Scouts has always been focused on training girls to be responsible and resourceful citizens, and, for the past ten years, there has been a renewed focus on leadership development and the empowerment of girls. Through content analysis of the National Leadership Journey books for each program level of Girl Scouting, I explore three specific themes that are emphasized in this new curriculum. Since National Leadership Journey books are now part of the Girl Scout experience from elementary to high school, these messages concerning leadership development could have an impact on millions of girls across the United States.

Jessica Ringrose. 2013. Postfeminist Education? Girls and the Sexual Politics of Schooling. London: Routledge

In this article, I explore how post-Communist teenagers are represented in cinema, especially in relation to consumption, by examining the Serbian film, Klip and the Romanian film, Ryna. In so doing, I analyze the representation of fatherhood in relation to these teenagers, and the representation of teenage sexuality. I examine these teenage bodies in transition within the broader scenario of countries in transition, thus making a comparison between the relationship to the West of the individual and of the region.

In this article we present the results of research on children's fashion in contemporary Russia. Our premise is that what is known as individual taste and universal traditions are determined socially. The ways in which parents dress their daughters convey messages about girlhood. Short dresses for girls in so-called Soviet taste can still be seen in Russia nowadays, along with examples of a new Western trend of apparently protecting girls by dressing them in long dresses, skorts (hybrids that combine the features of skirts and shorts), swimsuits, and leggings worn under skirts. In this article we discuss two trends in girls' wear that reflect two different conceptions of what counts as girls' innocence. We suggest that these are tied to societal changes in the country.

The rapid political and social changes in Russia in the 1990s contributed to the circulation of many new ideas about what might count as the successful start of adulthood and also about gender norms for young people. My aim in this article is to explore the normativity of girlhood in contemporary Russia by focusing on the Nordic-Russian cooperation project that runs group workshops for girls and by looking, in particular, at a special program that was carried out in the Kaliningrad region. I show that in spite of the special and unique character of the project, the realization of the program in the Russian context partly recalls some other projects in which the general perception of heteronormativity, and the opposition of male/female as natural is left untouched.

In this article, I analyze 30 biographical interviews with women who had given birth to a child before they turned 18. I discuss the discursive work that these girls do to develop their maternal practices as good and correct, and to normalize early motherhood in their biography in general. The informants see having a child as a line of discontinuity between their disadvantaged childhood and their self-reliant autonomous adulthood. At the same time, they define the idea of good motherhood not only through the internalization of, and compliance with, the dominant cultural codes, but also by relying on the biographical experience they have had.

In this article I deal with interpretations of sexuality that are typical of Russian girls who are learning to become blue-collar or pink-collar professionals such as, for example, public health nurses, social workers, tourism and hospitality industry workers, fashion designers, and those training for employment in services like cooking, hairdressing, and tailoring. The empirical base of this article is a set of in-depth semi-structured interviews with young women and men concerning their individual sexual experiences. I examine scenarios of feminine subjectivity within the context of discussing a first sexual experience. I look, too, at how girls exercise girl-power within the framework of communication and intimacy with a partner.

One of the issues of girls' security in urban space is defense against physical assault. Some forms of self-defense by girls and young women are marginalized by gender discourse. I examine, in this article, the example of the use of physical force as a bodily resource in girls' and young women's fights as a normalization by participants of their experience. I analyze the narratives of young women through their conception of the image of the body. My research shows that the girls' experience does not contradict their femininity, but neither does it correspond to the image of the defenseless body. Its reproduction contributes to the cementing of the concept of vulnerability in relation to girls' positioning in urban space. Inevitably, then, the girl herself in urban space remains vulnerable.

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.

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.

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.

This article calls for a reconceptualization of Indigenous girlhoods as they are shaped under a western neocolonial state and in the midst of overlapping forms of colonial violence targeting Indigenous girls. By disrupting the persistent construction of Indigenous girl bodies as insignificant and dispensable, I explore alternative conceptualizations of trauma, place, and girlhood that might enact a more critical, politicized girlhood studies. I link this analysis to Leanne Simpson's (2011) notion of “presence” as a form of decolonizing resurgence. Drawing from participatory research studies and community-change projects conducted with and by Indigenous girls between the ages of 12 and 19 years in western British Columbia, Canada, girls' everyday processes of resurgence and presencing are highlighted in the hope of expanding understandings of their cumulative effects as decolonizing forces.

This article focuses on the coverage of the murders of the young Shafia women. Based on an analysis of the coverage published in The Globe and Mail (July 2009 to March 2012), I argue that the young women were constructed as exceptional and worthy victims of a particularly heinous crime—honor killing—allegedly imported from Afghanistan by the Shafia patriarch. I interrogate the different threads that were interwoven to construct these young women's representations to make them intelligible as girls and young women. Within the coverage, the trope of culture clash anchored in an Orientalist framing worked to consolidate their representations as worthy victims and re-inscribe the national imaginary of Canadian society as egalitarian, tolerant and beyond gender violence. These different maneuvers served to accomplish a kind of posthumous rescue in a domestic context akin to the strategies of rescue implemented by Western powers in the War on Terror to save Afghan women.

This article explores the figure of the bored country girl that appears widely in popular culture but also in girls studies and rural studies through ethnographic research in Australian country towns. While the presumption that country girls lack resources and opportunities for entertainment and leisure is in many ways empirically valid, this problem's articulation in girls' lives also offers an important perspective from which to ask what boredom and cultural needs mean, relative to each other, for both rural studies and girls studies. This article suggests that girlhood's relation to policy discourse and urbanized modernity can be productively reconsidered through the lived experience of country girls.

On 11 October 2012, the Institute of Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies (IGSFS) of McGill University, Montreal, hosted an international research symposium to coincide with the first International Day of the Girl Child. The symposium, Girlhood Studies and the Politics of Place: New Paradigms of Research, exhibited HearSay, HereSay, HerSay, a photovoice project from the Girls’ Multimedia Club afterschool program for girls. Delivered by the Girls Action Foundation, this program, now in its third year, offers multimedia skill-building for girls as a tool for personal growth and social change. The fifth and sixth grade girls (aged between 10 and 13 years) in the HearSay, HereSay, HerSay project explored the theme of safety, doing so through their photos of the places and spaces they navigate every day around their school. Their photos and corresponding captions tell stories about friendship, loss, and aspiration that shed light on their day-to-day realities and experiences. The combination of image and text presented in this photo-essay chronicles the process involved in creating a space where this kind of media-enabled exploration for girls is possible.

This special issue of Girlhood Studies is the first one to have been devoted to the study of girls living in a specific geographical region. Here we focus on girls in the Nordic countries. What makes this set of essays particularly fascinating is that they address issues concerning girls who are located in countries whose advanced social services and democratic beliefs and practices are admired around the world. The rest of the world believes that the Nordic countries, Sweden, Iceland, Norway, Finland and Denmark, have achieved much of what girls in other countries in both the Global North and Global South are still working and fighting for. Interestingly, in their call for papers the guest editors Bodil Formark and Annelie Bränström Öhman, both located at Umeå University in Sweden, cite Finish sociologist Elina Oinas (2011) who queries whether Nordic girls do in fact belong to that exclusive group of “girls who won the lottery.” In the articles in this issue, the contributors interrogate some of the assumptions the rest of the world makes about the lives of girls living in Nordic countries, and the different notions of freedom that have an impact on them.

This article elaborates on discursive constructions of girls-only settings through the spatial metaphor of a room of one's own, as articulated in round-table discussions among staff and participants from girl-centered music programs in Sweden. The idea of a separate room refers to spaces for collective female empowerment as well as for individual knowledge acquisition and creativity. These spaces are constructed so as to provide the possibility for exploration, subjectivity, and focus, by offering (partial and temporary) escape from competition and control, from a gendered and gendering gaze, and from distraction. Girl-centered programs are also discussed as paradoxical because they function as gender-neutral when seen from the inside, but gender-specific when seen from the outside.

This article is based on ethnographic fieldwork done with a group of 14 to 16 year-old girls in a medium sized Swedish town. The study aimed to investigate the relationship between everyday music use and gender, ethnicity and sexuality. The question posed here is: "What negotiations take place when the girls discuss their favorite music and artists?" Research in response to this question shows that the identity work of negotiating how to be a teenage girl often relates to popular culture. The sample focuses on girls from Swedish, Bosnian, Turkish and Syrian backgrounds. In this article I report on the local ideas about gender and ethnicity claimed by the girls to influence their discussion of music, dress and behavior, as well as the desires that I argue structure such discussion. This research supports contemporary findings that mainstream popular music has cultural and social significance in young girls' lives.

The sick girl was a popular stereotype in Swedish medical discourse around 1900. It was established by medical authorities at the time that a substantial number of Swedish girls suffered from various diseases and ailments. However, at the beginning of the twentieth century, at a time when the welfare state was gradually evolving in the Nordic countries, the scientific opinion of girls changed. The new girl was represented as healthy and active. This article examines the medical discourse on girls, and their activity and health in Sweden during circa 1880 to 1930. It reveals patterns of the medicalization of girls as well as categorizations and constructions of girlhood that corresponded with contemporaneous notions of gender. It reveals a recurring, if inconstant, problematization of girls' illness and lack of adequate physical activity. In this article I will show how the discussions about girls around 1900 share several similarities with current ones.

This article examines four works of contemporary Finnish girls' literature. The main focus is on the analysis of various aspects of sexuality represented in the novels in relation to these two questions: How do they depict adolescent female sexuality in comparison to the generic conventions and the history of girls' literature? Do the representations expand, change, preserve and/or challenge the genre? The noticeable change is that the desire and love depicted in contemporary Finnish girls' literature can be lesbian and bisexual. However, although these representations of sexuality challenge some generic limits, the genre characteristics of girls' literature seem to have remained relatively unchanged.

In June 2011, seven feminist academics gathered to spend a week working together on a collective biography workshop in a small resort town, called Hawk’s Nest, in New South Wales, Australia. Some of us were senior faculty with prior experience with the methodology of collective biography, others were freshly minted or about to be minted PhDs who were totally new to the research methodology. Some of us knew each other from other contexts, and others were meeting for the first time. We were from five different university institutions, working in a range of fields in schools of Education.

Through stories of young girls at play produced in a collective biography workshop we trace flows of desire and excesses of joy, and bring recent feminist work on positive affect into our analysis of girlhood becomings. Ringrose (2011, 2013) argues that the concept of the “affective assemblage“ brings together affect, embodiment, and relationality in powerful ways to enable a mapping of how desire moves through the social. She suggests that the affective capacities of assemblages can be “life affirming or life destroying“ (2011: 602). In this article we are interested in mapping flows of desire, moments of joy and possibility in moments of girlhood, and in the limitations and contingencies within these moments that shut down these possibilities. We suggest that the methodology of collective biography (Davies and Gannon 2006, 2009, 2013) offers potential for tracing the microparticulars of girlhood becomings.

Using a collective biography method informed by a Deleuzian theoretical approach (Davies and Gannon 2009, 2012), this article analyses embodied memories of girlhood becomings through affective engagements with resonating images in media and popular culture. In this approach to analysis we move beyond the impasse in some feminist cultural studies where studies of popular culture have been understood through theories of representation and reception that retain a sense of discrete subjectivity and linear effects. In these approaches, analysis focuses respectively on decoding and deciphering images in terms of their normative and ideological baggage, and, particularly with moving images, on psychological readings. Understanding bodies and popular culture through Deleuzian notions of “becoming“ and “assemblage“ opens possibilities for feminist researchers to consider the ways in which bodies are not separate from images but are, rather, becomings that are known, felt, materialized and mobilized with/through images (Coleman 2008a, 2008b, 2008c, 2009, 2011; Ringrose and Coleman 2013). We tease out the implications of this new approach to media affects through three memories of girls' engagements with media images, reconceived as moments of embodied being within affective flows of popular culture that might momentarily extend upon ways of being and doing girlhood.

This article analyses a set of stories and artworks that were produced in the context of a collective biography workshop. A Deleuzian framework is used to explore the entanglements that are produced through a cross-reading of different kinds of texts, each taking up the question of girlhood subjectivities. The analysis focuses on the contradiction and indeterminacy of meaning-making in the research process. The aim is to investigate how different kind of knowing and a different kind of knowledge(s) are produced in the movements between texts, sensation and affect.

Photographic self-study can promote professional growth and deepen analysis of how girlhood experiences such as those related to ability, class, gender, and race are conditioned by and inform our multiple, shifting identities as women. This article presents excerpts from three women's experiences of photographic self-study, highlighting the possibilities of this method as a malleable, feminist approach to critical reflexive practice. Our stories demonstrate how a creative process of self-interpretation, self-representation, and self-knowing can draw oppressive categories of self-identification-carried from girlhood-to the surface and expose them to critique and deconstruction.

The teen-targeted website gURL. com is committed to providing educational information about sexuality and sexual health to young girls. In this article, I analyze girls' conversations posted on the site to explore how girls mediate the factual information presented, and how they challenge the borders of the scientific discourse on adolescent sexuality. Without overvaluing the freedom of online environments, I assume that the relatively unregulated space of the Internet encourages young women to create their narratives about sexuality and to imagine themselves as sexual beings. My assumptions are informed by the analyses of Susan Driver (2005), Barclay Barrios (2004) and Susannah Stern (2002): in contrast to the disempowering and alienating effects of institutional policies, I call for the recognition of less regulated sites, which imagine youth not as passive recipients but as active agents who strategically work on developing their understanding of sexuality, and on exploring their sexual selves.

Angels & Tomboys: Girlhood in 19th-Century American Art

Newark Museum, 12 September 2012–6 January 2013 Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, 16 February 2013–12 May 2013 Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, 28 June 2013–30 September 2013

When we are growing up, how might the narrative practices of our family members shape our understanding of the world we are coming to know? How might narrative desires and allegiances to formal storytelling conventions affect how individuals are represented and positioned within family discourse? In this paper, I analyze the narrative practices of characters in Alice Munro's Lives of Girls and Women (1971); specifically, I turn to Del Jordan's first encounter with a family member's death and to her tentative understanding of the body's aberrations and complexities, which bumps up against, competes with, and is ultimately overwhelmed by, the narrative practices of the adults in her life. When considered in relation to the bourgeoning field of narrative ethics, Lives of Girls and Women provides a compelling avenue for a rich understanding of how narrative privilege can have an impact on adult-youth relations in general, and the female coming-of-age experience in particular.

In 1692, the Salem witch trials introduced perhaps the most famous early American girls-girls notoriously lambasted for instigating the death of twenty people. During that same year, Cotton Mather published Ornaments for the Daughters of Zion (hereafter referred to as Ornaments) and A Brand Pluck'd Out of the Burning (hereafter referred to as Brand). Ornaments served as a moral guidebook for Puritan girls to follow, while Brand details the possession of Mercy Short, an adolescent not directly involved with the witch trials but whose story represents the most thorough recorded account of possession that we have. These two works document the pressure exerted on colonial girls to remain silent, and help to reveal how possession gave them an outlet for the expression of their feelings. In examining them, it becomes possible to ascertain how the Puritan roots of girls' coerced silence and repressed aggression have endured into contemporary America.

A perceived rise in girls' physical aggression is alarming the public as it collides with dominant views of femininity. Existing research focuses on either boys' violence or girls' non-physical aggression, leaving the realm of girls' physical aggression relatively unexplored. Using data from ethnographic observations and interviews, this study examines young adolescent girls' experience of their and their peers' fighting. Findings indicate that girls participate in fights to stand up for themselves and others, to show they are not afraid, and for fun. This study calls for continued in-depth research into girls' perspectives on aggression and violence in order to provide insight into how gendered, raced, and classed structures affect girls. It seeks, too, to address the problems that arise from girls fighting.

Girls who use violence are marginalized as the worst of the mean girls, disrupting conventional femininity codes and causing panic in the streets. Twenty two girls participated in a qualitative study in Nova Scotia about what it means to be a girl and use violence. Interpretations presented here suggest that their reasoning can be contextualized through an analysis of neoliberalism, racism, heterosexism and classism, as they navigate discourses of choice and experiences of constraint.

The tradition of religious clothing for children is relatively unexplored: this article develops the premise that debates about the links between the sacred and the market go deeper than concern about consumption, and bring to the surface issues of identity. Through exploring the historical development of the First Communion, not as religious ritual but as Catholic consumer culture, the article turns to analyse girls' communicant dress in Spain between the 1940s and 1960s which were the early decades of a dictatorial Regime (1939 to 1975) marked by an ideology of National-Catholicism. General Francisco Franco y Bahamonde, leader of the military rebellion against the elected government in 1936, ruled Spain until his death. One of my aims is to correct a tendency to make the little girl dressed in bridal wear the most visible sign because to do so disregards the cultural practice of wearing clothing to perform piety, signal a vocation or express gratitude for religious intercession.

Abject female intergenerational poverty is a systemic issue which denies girls the opportunity to access a higher quality of life because of poor health that results in under-development. The article focuses on the root cause-gender inequality-that is responsible for their inability to access adequate nutrition, particularly during their critical period of physical and intellectual growth and development. Their resulting sub-standard health has a bad impact on their school attendance. This article follows the lives of a group of ten girls between the ages of ten and fourteen years living in a peri-urban community outside Maputo. It outlines the importance of engaging girls, through participatory methodologies, and giving them the opportunity to express themselves, their challenges, strengths and ideas for possible resolution of the problem.

Most young females, particularly in Western contexts, are all too familiar with the traditional structure of the love story: the female protagonist embarks on a journey that ultimately leads her to fulfil her romantic goal of uniting with the male object of her desire. Throughout the history of Western society and beyond, this discourse has been prevalent in many mass media outlets, pervading the content of movies, television, and novels aimed at entertaining young adult females. In this classic narrative, women are presented as being dependent on males for their personal happiness. Whether this narrative is explicitly presented or camouflaged by an intricate storyline involving a seemingly strong and independent female character, this ubiquitous depiction of women in the mainstream media cannot be ignored.

Beatrice C. Mosionier. 1983. In Search of April Raintree. Winnipeg: Pemmican Publications.

The articles in this issue demonstrate that dolls are ubiquitous cultural forms central to girlhood and young womanhood. Yet understanding the historical and contemporary significance of dolls is a relatively recent development. Th e age-old trivialization of girls and devaluation of youth cultures led to the customary disregard of dolls as legitimate sources of documentary evidence even among scholars. It was not until the late nineteenth century that changing notions of childhood first gave rise to research on children, and a new appreciation of the meanings of play. In 1896, G. Stanley Hall, the founder of the child-study movement, a professor of psychology, and president of Clark University, co-authored with A.C. Ellis the pioneering, “A Study of Dolls,” in which he argued that doll play taught girls key lessons in femininity and maternity. Although Hall argued that “the educational value of toys was enormous” (160), dolls once again lapsed into scholarly obscurity. It was during the late 1930s that Mamie Phipps Clark, then a Master’s student in psychology, used dolls to study the self-esteem of African American children. Th e subsequent doll studies she conducted with her husband, Kenneth Clark, played a role in the 1954 landmark desegregation decision, yet failed to perpetuate doll research. It was on the (high) heels of Barbie who debuted a few years after Brown v. Board of Education, that dolls became the focus of a lively (and still on-going) discourse among parents and pundits but not among academics about their social meanings in the lives of girls.

The launching of a Jewish American Girl doll in 2009 provides an occasion for exploring the fictions of Jewish American girlhood constructed and consumed in the twenty-first century. Though the Rebecca Rubin doll seemed to herald a progressive version of Jewish American girlhood, Rebecca and the box-set of books that accompany her repackage a nostalgic and triumphalist narrative in which America figures as a benevolent sanctuary and the Holocaust, American anti-Semitism, and the costs of assimilation are elided and smoothed away. This is a narrative we've seen before—most notably in the importing and Americanizing of Anne Frank as an icon of Jewish girlhood, and in Sydney Taylor's beloved All Of A Kind Family series of children's books. These dolled-up versions of history stand in stark contrast to the darker, more complex visions of childhood and history seen in the work of Adrienne Rich, which reminds us to be wary of buying into such nostalgic icons of girlhood.

Early in the nineteenth century the London publishers and printsellers, S. and J. Fuller, packaged paper dolls and storybooks together in their Temple of Fancy paper doll books. This article examines the tension between the narratives of these works—typically moral tales for children in which a love of clothing is punished—and the accompanying paper dolls, which celebrate costume and dressing up. The textual morals against love of clothing are gendered in problematic ways, with female characters mortified for this flaw more readily than male characters. However, the variety of potential reading experiences offered by the form of the paper doll book, in which picture and word are separate, is viewed as a challenge to the gendered moral content of the stories. Ultimately this article argues that the form of the paper doll book sheds new light on D. F. McKenzie's (1986) ideas about how readers make meaning from texts.

The American Girl brand of historical dolls and books celebrated its twenty-fifth anniversary in 2011. The girls who first played with American Girl dolls in the 1980s and 1990s are now grown women; their nostalgia for the brand is passionate and complicated, and reminiscences from nineteen such women are the focus of this study. Their nostalgic responses are thoughtful and reflective, at turns unabashedly admiring and astutely critical. The women fondly recall American Girl whilst simultaneously criticizing the company for its consumerism and its representations of American history and American girlhood. Their memories show how nostalgia can be ambivalent and contradictory, and how adults can use childhood nostalgia to reinforce and construct identity narratives.

This article examines the connection between two discrete areas of inquiry—the study of dolls as it relates to the identity of young girls, and the contemporary DIY (do-it-yourself) craft movement. I identify how the activity of DIY doll-making might be useful for thinking about what it means to be a girl in relation to its offering a departure from the hyper-commercialized, ready-made dolls of the twenty-first century. The commercial doll has existed alongside its counterpart, the homemade doll, since the beginning of industrialization. In different ways both forms of the doll have played a significant role in the lives of young girls and they continue to shape both collective and individual identities associated with what we think of as being a girl. Tracing the act of doll-making and the residual influence of craft movements in my own childhood, I explore this notion of dynamic identity formation: I examine doll-making as a medium for artistic creation and narrative development with the potential to transform girlhood identities.

Bratz dolls, popular among pre-adolescent girls, have been the subject of widespread criticism. Many scholars, activists, educators, and parents have argued that the scantily clad fashion dolls contribute to the sexualization of girls that has been decried by the American Psychological Association, among others. As is often the case in studies of girls' popular culture, however, these conversations about the problems with Bratz have rarely incorporated the voices of girls in the brand's target audience. To address this gap, this article analyzes an afternoon of Bratz doll play by a small group of African-American girls, aged between 8 and 10 years. This article suggests that although critical concerns about Bratz' sexualization are warranted, the dolls' racial diversity may benefit some girls' play, enabling them to productively negotiate complex issues of racial identity, racism, and history while paying little attention to the dolls' sexualized traits.

This article explores the public persona of hip hop artist Nicki Minaj, and her appropriation of the iconic Barbie doll. Minaj's image has drawn criticism from pundits and peers alike, but, nonetheless, it has inspired a creative fan following. With reference to feminist theory and recent trends in poststructuralist thought, this article suggests the ways in which Minaj and her fans pluralize how we think about Barbie, race and idealized femininity in the West.

Robin Bernstein. 2011. Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights. New York: NY University Press.

Strategies designed to address community health needs, and those of disadvantaged girls in particular, are more likely to be successful in supporting health and wellbeing if a humanistic perspective is taken. A humanistic health perspective should consider broader participant concerns, including those that are socially informed. A feminist perspective on knowledge production and a corresponding narrative approach—digital storytelling—has the potential for doing so in the field of community health and in social research efforts. We begin by reviewing a feminist perspective on knowledge development and present digital storytelling as an approach undergirded by this perspective. We then present examples of two digital stories produced by adolescent girls during a pilot community-based participatory project called A Girl in the World which focused on what it actually means to be girls in the world, and conclude that digital storytelling has the potential to provide a more holistic research platform for investigating girls' health.

SPARK, Sexualization Protest Action Resistance Knowledge, is an intergenerational movement that raises awareness about, and pushes back against, the sexualization of women and girls in the media to create room for whole girls. In this article, I document the ways in which the SPARKTeam, a diverse collection of young feminist bloggers, contributes to the creation of conditions that enable healthy sexuality by using their blogs to reclaim what it means to be sexy, and to invite creative forms of resistance to media sexualization.

In sub-Saharan Africa, girls' daily household chores often involve fetching water for their households. This article addresses the impact of uncertain water access in semi-urban Cameroon given the problems of rapid urbanization and increasing demands for water. A school competition engaged youth and key water sector actors in a dialogue about the water crisis in Buea town, and this resulted in the publication of the water distribution schedule. The event also drew attention to the gendered implications of the crisis in relation to girls' sexual health. Our analysis suggests that girls fetching water face multiple layers of risk that include gender-based violence and blame resulting from the gendered stigma attached to young people's behavior—particularly that of girls. All this serves to increase the moral panic surrounding youth sexualities. We explicitly use the term sexualities (plural) here to recognize the multiple ways in which sexualities may be expressed, constructed and experienced (Arnfred 2005). This research points to the dire need to better understand and consider within water management strategies how girls cope with and confront these risks.

Girls' reproductive health matters are an important factor in their equal participation in educational settings. However, many girls worldwide still face challenges to participating fully in education because of the lack of supportive structures for their health needs. This paper uses autoethnographic writing to highlight some of the challenges that girls meet in school because of menstruation. It also discusses how a teacher's lived experiences of girlhood can change how she practises her teacher-hood in relation to girls' reproductive health. I argue that teachers' lived experiences are an invaluable resource in curricula- and policy-making procedures that are formulated to better recognize the particular concerns of girls and young women.

Arts-based approaches have been used to engage youth in health promotion activism and research in both local and international contexts. The application of art to research as a mode of inquiry has been a means of actively engaging marginalized communities such as youth in the research process in a way that allows them to creatively represent their thoughts and lives, while negotiating their power within the research environment (Wright et al. 2010). In representing their lived experiences, youth are able to name their worlds and challenge dominant culture (including the ways the media represents them) and its inherent power relations (Barndt 2008; Bagnoli 2009). Using art to do this becomes a catalyst for diff erent kinds of knowledge and knowing (Barndt 2008).

This article examines sixteen works of girls' literature published in Germany, Great Britain, the United States and Canada during or immediately after the First World War. When examined together, these books reveal much about expectations and opportunities for girls at a time when gender roles were in flux. Their overriding message, however, is contradictory, for even as a girl is exhorted to serve her country, her gender places clear limits on what she can achieve.

This article explores the construction of female adolescence in the first three texts of the Nancy Drew Mystery series: The Secret of the Old Clock (1930), The Hidden Staircase (1930), and The Bungalow Mystery (1930). It reviews, briefly, the development of the concept of adolescence and its gendered implications, particularly the association of female adolescent sexuality with delinquency. I argue that the Nancy Drew series rejects the construction of adolescence as a period of turmoil and emotional instability, as well as the prescription of constant adult supervision. The character of Nancy Drew also captures the contradictory messages of female adolescence in the 1930s when girls were represented as sexually attractive and aggressive but were denied sexual desire.

What brand of heroine can be found in the Twilight series? What discernible characteristics of a heroine can be found in gothic fiction and do these characteristics contribute to a social definition of girlhood/womanhood? In an analysis of the Twilight series' protagonist as a gothic heroine in contrast to Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, I claim that the author, Stephenie Meyer, constructs a particular category of contemporary gothic heroine. Drawing on the statement made by the novel's leading male character, Edward, to Bella that she is his “brand of heroin,“ this article plays with the idea that Meyer merged elements of the bildungsroman and the Female Gothic to create her brand. This brand of heroine fulfills the three distinct categories of girlhood/womanhood that characterize both the Gothic novel and the bildungsroman: a dependent stage, a caretaker stage, and a wife stage.

This article explores the ways in which words and images work together to portray the life of a teenage girl in the Canadian graphic novel Skim (2008). The interdependent nature of the words and images calls for non-linear ways of reading. At the same time, Skim creates a rich representation of girls attending a private high school in the 1990s.

Although representations of second-wave feminism in adult-oriented TV shows have received considerable scholarly attention, little has been written about feminist representations in 1970s television programs aimed at girls. To help address this gap, this article explores how ABC Afterschool Specials circulated ideas about feminism and femininity to young viewers. A close analysis of several episodes featuring tomboys demonstrates how Specials targeted girls through images of female progress and independence while simultaneously cautioning them about the dangers of women's liberation. Connecting the series' trend toward taming tomboys to the backlash against the women's and gay liberation movements, the analysis ultimately reveals textual patterns that convey both excitement and anxiety about the rising power of women and girls.

The Warner Brothers animated film Quest for Camelot (1998), which is set in the age of King Arthur, tells the story of Kayley, a brave, resolute, intelligent and peaceful teenage girl who rescues Camelot and is rewarded for her heroism by being made a Knight of the Round Table. The film presents viewers with a feminist hero, but does so without apology or self-congratulation. Kayley carves out a new space for girl heroes in mainstream film production in which a girl can become a hero without being weighed down by expectations of stereotyped gendered behavior and without virilizing herself by narrowly defining a hero as an aggressive warrior. She escapes the sexual pressures that complicate Buffy the Vampire Slayer's life and the submissive acceptance of the violent warrior ethic that defines Mulan. Kayley is an unusual girl hero who celebrates Girl Power as an uncommonly innocent and positive character.

In this article I discuss a theoretical intervention—feminist pedagogical media literacy (FPML)—that has practical application. I argue for the advancement of this multi-faceted media and new literacies form as a mode of empowerment for girls and young women. Using examples from feminist theoretical scholarship; DIY media and other new literacies frames; classroom examples and anecdotes; and educational perspectives on curriculum and policy, I advocate for a feminist pedagogical media literacy that enables critique and/or action stances.

This article addresses the growing concern with youth civic engagement by asking how contemporary U.S. girls' organizations envision girls' civic identities. Recent years have seen the growth of girls' organizations that aim to involve girls in their communities. Based on extensive document research and two ethnographic case studies, my analysis distinguishes between this emergent transformative approach and a more widespread, normative model. Transformative organizations engage girls in a sociological analysis of the conditions of their lives, believe that girls should have public authority, and encourage girls' involvement in social change projects. Normative organizations rely upon a psychological understanding of girls' problems, imagine the public as a space of threat and as being full of barriers girls that must learn to overcome, and emphasize service over political action. By comparing these two approaches, this article suggests that scholars and practitioners should carefully consider the implications of organizations for girls' relationship to the public sphere.

This article explores the immigrant journeys of Mexican immigrant adolescent girls raised in transnational families. Based on interviews conducted with this young cohort I examine how they experienced migration long before they neared the United States-Mexico border. Using a transnational approach to migration and the intersections of gender and age as analytical categories, I highlight how Mexican immigrant adolescent girls are uniquely situated within their families so as to have a different set of experiences from men, women, and adolescent boys. Their stories reveal that before migration their lives were saturated, because of their parents' departures and visits, with anticipation and imaginings about Napa Valley, California, and with interruptions of migration. Their lives always seemed to be on the brink of migration. This also means that the very reason for their parents' migration—to better provide for their children—placed the children en route, as it were, to the United States.

This article examines how working-class mothers influence their daughters' aspirations. Data was gathered from focus groups and interviews with twenty-one white and African American working-class girls and fifteen of their mothers from Southwestern Pennsylvania, United States. Research revealed that the mothers' advice is gendered, class-based, and racialized, and that it emphasizes the importance of caregiving, living near family, and financial independence and security. Qualitatively examining the messages related to work and family that working-class mothers relay to their daughters and how daughters take in these messages shows the contradictions that emerge when working-class mothers support aspiration formation.

This article discusses problems of childbearing as experienced in rural Kenya by girls in their adolescence—a powerfully formative time of transition to adulthood. Findings reveal that girls face unique challenges and harsh choices when they are faced with pre-marital pregnancy such as emotional violence and abuse, early marriage, expulsion from school, unsafe abortion and poverty. Many Kenyans are calling on the government and communities to put into place policies and programs necessary for empowering girls with enough information to make a healthy and safe transition to adulthood.

If we took the time to listen attentively and carefully to pregnant teenagers and teen mothers what would we hear? If we invited them to articulate their messages to the adults who interact with them, speak to those who judge them, and give advice to their peers, what would they say? Th is photo-essay addresses these related questions by presenting some of the findings of an arts-based activist research project called TEEN M.O.M. (Mirrors of Motherhood). One of the goals of the project was to examine how a media production program, implemented within the context of an existing community organization, can empower teenage girls in diffi cult circumstances to share their views. In a series of workshops, the participants were invited, off ered guidance, and equipped to produce their own images—digital photographs, drawings, and collage work—so as to make visible their views on the personal and social issues that aff ect them directly. (In this photo-essay we concentrate on their photographs and off er comments taken from their writing and from video-taped interviews.) For two hours each week for thirteen weeks, the project gave these young mothers time away from their daily responsibilities and provided them with a safe space in which to focus single-mindedly on creating their images. Th e project culminated in an exhibition in which their work was shown to members of the community, policy makers, family and friends.

Girl Museum is a virtual art and social history museum dedicated to researching the unique experience of growing up female, and documenting this through telling stories and exhibiting historic and contemporary images and material culture related to this experience. At Girl Museum, we want to raise global awareness about the issues and realities of both nature and nurture that face girls today and will face them tomorrow, via the lessons of yesterday. To achieve this, we are doing original research, producing exhibitions, building an archive, and partnering with individuals who are already out there doing good work and with organizations that support them, as well as providing venues in which girls themselves can have a voice.

Review of Norma Mendoza-Denton’s Homegirls: Language and Cultural Practice among Latina Youth Gangs

In September, 2008, a month after Jackie Kirk’s untimely death in Afghanistan, Claudia organized a special gathering of her class on Women, Education and Development at McGill University. The gathering was made up of Claudia’s graduate students, a group of scholars, friends of Jackie’s, her parents and other relatives. The seminar was dedicated to Jackie—looking back, but also looking ahead to what could be done to keep alive the spirit and energy of her work across so many different aspects of education in post-conflict settings, women teachers as peacebuilders and girls’ education. Similarly, this issue offers a remembrance, a celebration, and a moving forward in relation her life and work.

In this article we discuss the ways in which images of girls are understood to represent broader international development discourses related to girls' education. This piece was originally written for the United Nations Girls' Education Initiative (UNGEI), conceived with UNICEF out of their interest in determining whether images they produce accurately represent policies and processes they engage in on behalf of girls' education; that report was UNICEF's contribution to the UNGEI partnership. The premise that visual analysis contributes to the study of girlhood was reified in this study which revealed the many deep and sometimes conflicting meanings that diverse viewers place on images.

This paper examines how specific femininities have been constructed in Palestinian refugee camps in south Lebanon through the intersecting discourses of gender and nation. Through these discourses, Palestinian girls and women have been positioned largely as biological reproducers, gatekeepers, metaphors, ideological reproducers and cultural transmitters of the nation. This has worked to shape Palestinian girls' upbringing in the home and in the community and presented them with limited gender scripts from which to construct their identities and imagine their futures. However, Palestinian females have also exercised agency to gain the most advantageous position available to them at any given time in Palestinian society. Although structural, legal and cultural barriers have severely limited their participation in political activism, education and paid work, Palestinian females in Lebanon have constructed their identities through Islamic feminism, and to a lesser extent, secularism. Moreover, these identities are continually being transformed through the processes of resistance, negotiation and accommodation.

Post-conflict settings often contain high levels of risk for war-affected girls, yet these same settings also support hope for them. In such contexts, what risks exist for girls and how do they construct responses to these risks? is article is based on an ethnographic study which included a cohort of fifteen girls who had been caught up in the decade-long war in Sierra Leone, a war noted for its gender-based viciousness. Having lived through horrific situations, a major task of these girls has been to make meaning of, and respond to, the risks existing within their post-conflict environments. Following an analysis of the current context of the lives of these girls, this article examines the risks the girls face in their daily lives and the strategies they employ as strength-based responses to these risks.

This paper reports on an evaluation of a program in Sierra Leone that sought to support the community reintegration of young women and girls formerly associated with armed groups and forces. In the absence of baseline data, we used locally-derived indicators of reintegration and village timelines to conduct a retrospective cohort study of the progress of 142 girls and young women towards achievement of community reintegration following their experience of abduction. Although girls and young women in both intervention and comparison communities had made progress towards integration, the intervention was associated with improved mental health outcomes and higher ratings on some aspects of marriage quality. For those who had found the greatest challenges in reintegrating, the intervention additionally appeared to support community acceptance and inclusion in women's bondo activities.

Conflict affects girls differently from boys—their rights are ignored, their responsibilities changed, and their lives altered forever by war. Girls face discrimination on at least two counts: because they are young and because they are female. We focus here on the changing nature of war and conflict and what this means for girls' health, economic well-being, physical security and protection, and also for their resilience and empowerment. We examine how girls are uniquely affected by, and respond to, conflict, its build-up and its aftermath. We assess the role of the institutions that have a duty to protect and support girls in conflict-affected states, and explore the reasons why policy actors do not take girls into account in their responses to violent conflict. We outline recommendations for action in terms of girls' education, harnessing girls' resilience and encouraging their empowerment.

The experience of girlhood is shifting in Tanzania as family structure is altered by economic migration and the impact of HIV/AIDS. Also significant is the influence of globalization and global imagery, which are shaping the nature of girlhood and the experience of transitioning to young womanhood. A deeper understanding of how globalizing influences are changing girls' growing up experiences, from the perspectives of the girls themselves and the adults who intersect with them in their daily lives is essential. A rural versus urban comparative case study was conducted in the Kilimanjaro region of northern Tanzania, which explored the perspectives of girls and adults through a range of methodologies. Both adults and girls expressed concerns that globalization is negatively influencing the transition to young womanhood, with girls feeling much more appreciative of the new gendered opportunities provided by the influx of external influences.

This article examines the practical construction and effects of the schoolgirl as an emergent social category in contemporary Kenyan Maasai society against mainstream development's figuring of the girl-child. The paper relies upon ninety-eight interviews with schoolgirls between the ages of ten and seventeen in nine primary schools in Kajiado District, Kenya. A contradictory resistance to traditional gender norms and social forms characterizes the schoolgirls' narratives of education and development in their daily lives. These narratives are embedded in larger questions regarding the transnational intersections of ethnicity and gender in the formation of local identities in marginalized indigenous communities in postcolonial Kenya. Without disputing the practical necessities of educating girls, I problematize the seamless rhetoric concerning formal schooling as a neutral public good in order to open up the complex conversation about educational access and attainment in the global south today.

Poem by Charlotte Hussey

Jackie Kirk’s death is an unspeakable loss to all of us, to the field of education and to the communities who will continue to benefit from her tremendous intellectual and personal contributions. We at UNESCO’s International Institute for Educational Planning (IIEP) continue to honour her memory through our commitment to education for children and communities aff ected by conflict.

Although I am the 2009 Jackie Kirk Fellow, it was only through her words and her work that I had the privilege of getting to know Dr Jackie Kirk so I feel a sense of loss in not having had the opportunity to hold dialogues and debate with someone who had accomplished so much good in the world in such a short time. I know I would have learned even more from her in person. In her writing, it is evident that Jackie’s happiness and joy arose from ensuring that all those who were marginalized were not forgotten, and, more importantly, were equipped with the tools to begin the process of accessing a better life. We can only hope to carry on the tremendous work that had already been undertaken by Jackie in order to pay tribute to her life, her spirit and her passion. She will be equally missed by those who were fortunate enough to have worked with her and those who come to know her through her work.

This piece was written shortly after Jackie Kirk’s death. At that time, I was a student in a Master’s course on Women, Education and Development at McGill University. I am now about to begin my PhD at McGill University.

With the current proliferation of images and narratives of girls and girlhood in popular culture, many ‘truths’ about girls circulate with certainty. Amongst the aims of this Special Issue is to examine critically these ‘confi dent characterizations’ (Trinh 1989), to trace the social conditions which produce these ‘truths’ along with the public fascination with girls and to analyze critically the eff ects of these ‘truths’ in the lives of young girls. Th e concepts of resistance and agency have been critical to the field of youth studies, sociology of education and school ethnographies (Hall and Jeff erson 1976; McRobbie 1978; Willis 1978) for conceptualizing the relationships between young people and their social worlds. Ground breaking scholarship by McRobbie (2000) challenges the gendered assumptions of political agency articulated in previous theories of subcultures developed in the 1970s and 80s. While feminist poststructuralist work in the 1990s has re-conceptualized agency in ways that are markedly diff erent to humanist notions of rational actors with free-will (Butler 2006; Davies 2000), feminist researchers have also shown the importance of a classed, raced and sexed analysis of agency. For example, scholarship by feminists of color have shown how girls of color challenge and defy dominant stereotypes of girlhood in culturally specifi c ways such as participating in spokenword contests, rap and hip hop, and ‘beauty contests’ (Hernandez and Rehman 2002; Gaunt 2006). In the changing social, economic, political and globalizing context of the new millennium, where ‘girl power’ has become a marketing tool and a branding (Klein 2000) of girlhood, it is important to look anew at the relations between girlhood, power, agency and resistance.

This article questions Angela McRobbie's recent text The Aftermath of Feminism: Gender, Culture and Social Change because it creates some interesting new vocabulary for understanding late modernity's revised sexual and cultural politics. Whilst acknowledging the sophistication of its cultural studies-inspired argument, I consider some consequences of this reading. If theory also performs as a politics of representation, I ask what happens if, in accounting for post-feminism, the theoretical status of class as an antagonistic relation is diminished. I suggest what gender and education discourses can add to a reading of 'new times'.

The focus of the essay is the well known (and worn) stereotype of the Jewish American Princess or JAP. Spoiled, frigid, loud, defiant, the JAP refuses to behave in civilized ways even as she constantly transgresses the boundaries of civilized social spaces. Both an intimate insider, and an eternal outsider, the JAP is a boundary figure whose presence draws and redraws myths of assimilative ideals and citizenship rights in American culture. The complexity of these social relations, their apparent contradictions, and the possibilities they may offer for agency and resistance in both 'real' and fictive contexts are explored through close examinations of four high profile JAPS—Cher Horowitz of the film Clueless, Monica Lewinsky, Jessica Stein of the film Kissing Jessica Stein, and Lizzie Grubman.

In this article I explore the performance art of international hip-hop artist M.I.A. to interrogate the problematic of girls' resistance and agency within a global youthscape. Using a feminist transnational framework, I analyze how her music and celebrity persona may be considered gendered post-colonial cultural productions that highlight issues of inequality, violence and domination. I argue that M.I.A.'s cultural productions serve as pedagogical symbolic resources for theorizing girlhood in post-colonial contexts specifically around issues of sexuality. As a symbolic resource, M.I.A.'s work is pedagogical in the larger global youthscape as well as in scholarship on girls in post-colonial contexts. Specifically, M.I.A. (in her music and interviews) openly wrestles with the embodied tensions between complicity and possibility in post-colonial girlhood. Consistent with a feminist transnational framework, I argue that the identities of “Third World” girls are discursively produced as innocent yet hypersexualized exotic Others in the service and/or mercy of “First World” colonial men and women. However, M.I.A. makes explicit that within the context of globalization, the cultural politics of gender and sexuality take place on/through/with brown female bodies—whether it is in the battlefield, the street or in the bedroom. A close analysis M.I.A.'s song 10 Dollar illustrates how Third World girls exercise resistance and agency in negotiating imperialist and nationalist heteropatriarchy.

What are the contours of cultural stories that explain how a girl becomes a girl? Girlhood is an identity position often taken for granted in the social world. Yet how girls learn to construct normalized gender identities can reveal important shifts in changing cultural ideas about societal expectations for female youth. Utilizing a cross-disciplinary approach, the basis for this discussion are individual interviews with preadolescent girls. Interpretive discoveries focus on how girls in their meaning-making and decision-making contribute to diverse cultural constructions of female subjectivity. This research pertains specifically to a small sample of girls from a large ethnically diverse city in the Northeast United States. The thematic patterns that emerge, nonetheless, offer broader insight into the diverse ways that girls fuse aspects of 'femininity' and 'masculinity' in establishing complex subjectivities. This practice of reimagining cultural conceptions of 'femininity' indicates girls' innovative contributions to the co-creation of culture in their acts of establishing subjectivity through agentive and alternative uses of discourse.

This article explores female representation in mainstream hip hop culture in Cuba as a case study for analyzing how the presence of a commercial recording industry affects girls' participation as artists at the community level. The author raises questions about the role of a commercial recording industry, within a neoliberal political culture, in skewing youth culture from its underground roots, and about how young women navigate and resist such challenges in order to participate in hip hop culture.

ARTIST EXPOSÉ Peaches (Merrill Nisker)

Authentik: Th e voice of real girls—a for-girls-and-by-girls Quebec-based English magazine—has just released its first issue. Th e publication, which is distributed across the province,1 a joint initiative of Maison des Jeunes Bordeax-Cartierville and Laval Liberty Community Learning Centre, is funded in part by Canadian Department of Heritage, Th e Solstice Foundation and Caisse Desjardins de Chomedy. Th e English edition follows in the footsteps of the award winning French language publication—Magazine Authentik—which is now in its third year.2 Th e goal of the magazine is to encourage critical thinking, selfesteem and creative expression among girls between 12 and 17 years of age. Th is youth-based, participatory publication focuses on creating a platform from which girls can work together as agents of change and create something that can have a positive infl uence in their lives and in the lives of other girls. “We all did bits and pieces and we took all the pictures,” said 17 year-old Joanne.

The article explores representations of "realistic" teen girlhood in popular culture in order to examine the current constructions of power made available to girls. Specifically, it focuses on three recent popular and critically acclaimed films: Mean Girls, Thirteen and Ghost World. The dominant discourses put forward in these films—girls as mean, as wild, and as alienated—naturalize negative behavior as a normal part of girlhood. In the terrain where these distinct, yet overlapping and reinforcing discourses on girlhood operate, postfeminism is taken for granted. Girls are portrayed as facing only individual concerns rather than any group-based injustices and, therefore, as not needing collective deliberation, evaluation, or action to solve their problems. The resulting discursive formation works to limit access to feminist and other oppositional discourses that name girls' experiences and link their feelings to the ongoing quest for gender justice.

This article raises issues related to the gendered representation in the print media, particularly English-language newspapers, of girls who use MySpace as foolish innocents who invite sexual predation. It examines the ways in which the stereotyped representation of girls and boys promotes the hegemonic discourses that construct girlhood as a time of helplessness and lack of control, and that blame the technology itself, in this case MySpace, for a multitude of cultural problems. Ultimately, these discourses portray MySpace as a dangerous place where adolescent girls flaunt sexuality, where sexual predators lurk, and where boys commit violence, thus creating and reinforcing a moral panic and extending stereotypes about girls and boys, and about technology.

This article examines the prominent romantic and sexual scripts—the most common being that of a "prince charming" waiting for a girl—found on the "being single" message board of gURL.com. A discourse and textual analysis of the message board is conducted in order to analyze how girls are performing their (hetero)sexual identities. This provides insight into current notions of contemporary girlhood and romantic/sexual expectations. Findings suggest that girls believe that being single is "caused" by something—most often that a girl is not pretty enough or not outgoing enough—so singledom is "blamed" on a lack of (appropriate) femininity. Also, if a girl fails at femininity then it is assumed that she might also be failing at heterosexuality. Girls seem to believe that by becoming more conventionally feminine (outgoing and attractive), singledom can be "fixed" and thus heteronormativity and femininity are reaffirmed.

This article examines the impact of women's studies on at-risk high school girls. This analysis was conducted within a larger intervention study examining the effect of women's studies on levels of sexual harassment within the school. As a teacher researcher, I observed that students were embracing terms traditionally degrading to women so I then began to study the language usage of the students in the course as a separate study. I assessed changes in the language usage of students and observed the evolution of their language. It became, as the course progressed, more egalitarian and em powered as they embraced feminist principles.

Drawing on a theoretical framework that combines Media Studies, Latina/o Studies, and Girls Studies with the concept of hybridity, I explore American Girl, Dora the Explorer, and Bratz—three mediated doll lines—as manifestations of an ethnic identity crisis that in turns generates a moral panic that seeks to return whiteness and conventional femininity to its normalized mainstream standing. Issues of production, representation, and reception of mediated doll lines illuminate both a synergistic marketing strategy and a contested reception of hybrid mediated dolls. As such, mediated doll lines can be productively examined as they are an excellent vehicle for understanding contemporary agendas over gender, age, class, and ethnicity.

This article offers a textual analysis of how the American Girl corporation markets and sells particular ideas about girlhood to its consumers. Focusing on the historical fictions, catalogues, and website, the author discusses the ways in which the corporation brands girlhood as a set of ideas to purchase. This reading of the American Girl texts is supported with data from a semi-structured interview with eight undergraduate women enrolled in a pre-service education course who read and played with American Girl materials as children. Young women who intend to work as elementary school teachers offer a unique demographic for theorizing American Girl and its role in the everyday lives of girls. The author concludes that for the young women in this study, American Girl materials offered salient lessons in girlhood consumption.

Drawing on ethnographic research with a diverse group of teen girls, this article asks how play with style is understood and enacted. By positioning girls' everyday transactions with style beside their engagement with style in media, this article demonstrates that girls live with a cultural discordance between the girl power media discourse of style as choice, power, and resistance, and the reality of their own, often disempowered, experiences with style. Bound by the promise of upward social mobility, the fear of losing status, and the risk of remaining in the low income and middle class communities in which they were raised, the girls in this study feel regulated and, at times, hurt by the required performance of the clothed body.

This article argues that a long-standing critique of female adolescents is the source of everyday complaints about ordinary babysitters. The author traces the origins of adults' anxieties to the birth of babysitting and the advent of the modern American teenage girl in interwar America. The development of teenage girls' culture that generated conflict between grownups and girls with competing needs and notions of girlhood found expression in the condemnation of babysitters. Although experts and educators sought to curb girls' subcultural practices and principles by instructing babysitters during the Great Depression and World War II, their advice and training proved to be as ineffective at stemming the tide of girls' culture as halting the decline of babysitting. The expanding wartime economy that broadened the economic and social autonomy of teenage girls led many to turn their backs on babysitting.

In Alpha Girls: Understanding the New American Girl and How She is Changing the World, psychologist Dan Kindlon (2006) claims that the new psychology of girls has produced a dramatically different kind of girl from her 1990s girl-in-crisis predecessor. He proposes that this new type of girl is a hybrid, personifying the best traits of masculinity and femininity. The Alpha Girl represents a new form of girlhood in which girls are seen as the economic, social, and cultural winners in the twenty first century because they are risk takers, competitive, and collaborative. How does cheerleading, one of the most female-identified and sexualized cultures of adolescent life, coexist with this seemingly new discourse of empowering girlhood? We argue that cheerleading provides a rich space for Girls Studies scholars to analyze how modes of femininity play out in the social practices that girls themselves deem important.

This article examines the concept of female adolescence and the idea of coming of age by five Canadian women artists. Marisa Portolese, Angela Grossmann, Natalka Husar, Fiona Smyth and Susan Scott were asked to explain their understanding of coming of age in relation to works they considered most representative of this phase. For each artist there is a summary of the interview and an analysis of the pictures singled out for discussion. The findings suggest no easy definition of coming of age. The images created by these women are based on autobiographical sources, their experiences as a young person, and present life circumstances as a mother, daughter or teacher. The works assert a girl's identity and search for bodily knowledge, and affirm female puberty as an intellectual and emotional reaction to physical changes.

Puberty and her first period are among the most important rites of passage in a girl's life. Cashing in on this, transnational corporate giant Proctor & Gamble created the website beinggirl.com in 2000, to provide “a forum for girls to explore their collective interests and receive guidance in choosing the right feminine protection products provided by Tampax and Always at the very start of their cycles.” Featuring podcasts, polls, quizzes, an advice column, games, downloads, and a discussion board, beinggirl.com looks like many other commercially-created online spaces for girls. Employing an “experiential analysis” methodology, this article deconstructs beinggirl.com as a site that has both a corporate imperative as well as the self-proclaimed intention of providing a space for girls.

This article critically explores the seduction of contemporary tomboyism for young tweenage girls within neo-liberal postfeminist times and an increasingly commodified (hetero)sexualised girlhood culture. A central aim of the article is to contextualize the persistence of the tomboy discourse and girls' appropriation of tomboyism within competing schizoid discourses of presumed innocence and compulsory normative (hetero)sexuality. Drawing on past and current predominantly UK based ethnographic research mapping girls' relationship to tomboyism, the first half of the article considers how to theorise girls' fluid appropriation of 'being a bit tomboy' within a discursive terrain of multiple femininities and fashion feminism. The second half of the article revisits a case study of one eleven-year-old self-identified tomboy, Eric/a, to re-think conceptualisations of girls' sustained appropriation of 'tomboy' as more than some licensed mimicry of masculinity when it is taken-up as a performative politics of subverting emphasized (hetero)sexualized femininities. The article concludes with a call for future theorizations of girlhood (for example, tomboyism) that foreground the intersection of gender, sex, sexuality, age and time and their socio-cultural and contextual contingency.

The Canadian Women’s Foundation, a national public foundation dedicated to improving the lives of women and girls, has become increasingly aware of the changed and changing environment for girls in Canada. From the Foundation’s experience in Violence Prevention programs with teens, we knew that girls’ lives are complex and we were aware of a need for a broader range of support programs.

Shayla Theil Stern, Instant Identity: Adolescent Girls and the World of Instant Messaging. Mediated Youth Series. New York: Peter Lang Publishers.

It is a moment of collective memory work. The three of us—Claudia, Jacqui and Jackie—try to remember when and where the idea for a Girlhood Studies journal came from in the first place. We think that probably the precise moment (or event) was the “A New Girl Order: Young Women and the Future of Feminist Inquiry” Conference convened by Anita Harris and colleagues at Monash University and held at King’s College, London, from November 14 to 16 2001. Although we had individually attended conferences related to girls and girlhood, it was for the three of us the first time that we had been to an event that focused on girlhood in ways that went beyond disciplinary boundaries of, say, girls in science or girls in development. There was something quite different emerging—a new area that combined advocacy, interdisciplinarity, and of course the voices of girls themselves—and it somehow gave a new imperative to exploring girlhood in all its possible manifestations. That was 2001 and now it is 2008. It has taken us seven years to make Girlhood Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal a reality with this inaugural issue. Now we try to remember why it took us so long, or what it was that gave us the kickstart to finally do it!

In this paper I explore the themes of heterosexualized competition and aggression in Avril Lavigne's music video Girlfriend (2007) as representative of the violent heterosexualized politics within which girls are incited to compete in contemporary schooling and popular culture. I argue that psycho-educational discourses attempting to explain girls' aggression and bullying fail to account for the heterosexualized, classed or racialized power dynamics of social competition that organize heteronormative femininity. Then I elaborate a psychosocial approach using psychoanalytic concepts to trace how teen girls negotiate contemporary discourses of sexual aggression and competition. Drawing on findings from a study with racially and economically marginalized girls aged thirteen to fourteen attending an innercity school in South Wales, I suggest that the girls enact regulatory, classed discourses like slut to manage performances of heterosexualized aggression. However, alongside their demonstration of the impetus toward sexual regulation of one another, I show how the girls in my study are also attempting to challenge heteronormative formations of performing sexy-aggressive. Moments of critical resistance in their narratives, when they refuse to pathologize aggressive girls as mean and/or bullies, and in their fantasies, when they reject heterosexual relationships like marriage are explored.

Since the late 1990s, "girl power" programs featuring girl heroes have emerged as an important new trend in children's television. However, girl heroes are not as new as they seem. Producers of mass media texts created many girl heroes in the 1930s, before the adoption of television as a mainstream medium, but the scholarly literature on today's girl heroes rarely acknowledges these pre-television predecessors. To address this gap, this paper presents research on the depictions of the strong orphan girls portrayed by Shirley Temple, positioned as cultural girl heroes in the 1930s. It explores the commercial contexts in which films starring Shirley Temple were produced and offers an analytical discussion of the positive and problematic features of these stories and the product lines associated with them. By understanding the themes, commercial contexts, and controversial aspects of Shirley Temple's on-screen stories as marketplace commodities, scholars can better study the relevance and importance of the girl heroes who are so popular in today's marketplace.

Leadership training is often described as an important component and goal of girls' secondary education and also a crucial step for realizing gender equality. This paper explores the possibilities for and barriers to effective leadership training in one "Spring Bud" girls' education project conducted in a poverty-stricken area of Shaanxi Province since 2001. Following a review of the Chinese and international literature on girls' secondary education and leadership training, the authors explore different understandings of "leadership" (and empowerment) among various project stakeholders and indicate the urgency of a mutual understanding of "leadership" and how it might be mentored in girls in formal educational settings. Authors draw upon interviews, observations, student writing, as well as the results of a 2006 survey of nearly 1,000 participating girls and their homeroom teachers, in their discussion of how to connect the concept of "leadership training" with the resources and constraints that shape girls' lives and future educational and career expectations and aspirations. The paper concludes with policy implications.

Learning Together Project

Th e photographs in this essay were taken by grade eight and nine girls in one rural school in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa in response to the question: What is the face of stigma in our community in the context of HIV and Aids? Th e girls used inexpensive point-and-shoot cameras to document the issues on location at their school, staging scenes that tell critical stories of the impact of stigma on the community. Once they had taken the photographs they developed captions which speak to the issues that they were working to represent. Some wrote in isiZulu while others chose to write in English. Th e isiZulu captions were translated into English. The images in this photovoice project help to identify, understand and interpret incidents related to stigma and discrimination against people living with, and aff ected by, HIV and AIDS.

In May 2007, the Women’s Commission for Refugee Women and Children traveled to the Acholi districts of northern Uganda and met with more than 100 young women, aged from ten to thirty years, to gather their views, opinions and perceptions.

Review of Ilana Nash, American Sweethearts: Teenage Girls in Twentieth-Century Popular Culture