Girlhood Studies

We open this issue with Sigal Oppenhaim-Shachar's article, “‘My Body Speaks My Ideology’”: Israeli Adolescent Girls’ Activism 2023–2024” in which, in “conceptualizing the body as a palimpsest [she] theorizes activism as a multilayered accumulation in which agency and rage coexist without erasing prior inscriptions.”

I examine the activism of Jewish Israeli adolescent girls during Israel's 2023–2024 protests against the judicial overhaul and the post-7 October war. Situated in debates on democratic erosion, gendered citizenship, and feminist protest, I explore how girls embodied agency amid contested dissent. Interviews revealed that early protests functioned as safer spaces that fostered leadership, hope, and embodied exploration, while later sociopolitical shifts rendered these spaces more fragile, reshaping adolescent girls’ bodily presence, emotions, and forms of engagement. Conceptualizing the body as a palimpsest, I theorize activism as a multilayered accumulation in which agency and rage coexist without erasing prior inscriptions. Contributing to global discussions on youth activism and gendered citizenship in times of crisis, I show how shifting perceptions of safety reconfigured embodied resistance.

In African societies, given existing social norms, teenage pregnancy transforms the life of the unmarried girl in undesirable ways. In this article, I interrogate representations of this phenomenon in francophone African film. In particular, I analyse the status of the pregnant girl through Patrick Martinet's narrative in Dia, à qui la faute, a Burkinabe film that chronicles the imagined life of a young girl. Framing the study in feminist theory, I center on how the cinematic representations of pregnant girlhood mirror the misogyny of patriarchy in African society.

Uganda's 2020 Education Re-entry Policy supports teenage mothers to resume schooling after pregnancy, yet re-enrollment remains low. In a qualitative case study in two public secondary schools in Arua District, we identified key barriers to be inadequate guidance, stigma, discrimination, irregular attendance, limited knowledge and resources, and forced marriage. We recommend boosting teen mothers’ self-esteem through personalized counseling, mental health support, and community awareness of the value of education. Strengthening these areas can enhance policy implementation and help policymakers and practitioners improve monitoring and educational reintegration for teenage mothers.

Drawing on Jessica Taft's figuration of the girl activist in media, I explore how Black girls navigate their identities as activists in contemporary American children's literature. Through a comparative study of six middle-grade and young-adult novels that feature the Black Lives Matter movement, I analyze how race, desire for justice, and affect propel Black girls into activism. In doing so, I argue that Black girls become desirable symbols of rage, resistance, and rebellion, while their hopeful, harmless, and heroic white counterparts are configured as the antiheroes in the contemporary fight for Black civil rights.

The young adult literary genre, the principal source of fiction for many teenagers, has become pedagogically useful in its covering of rape and rape culture in recent years. Here, I examine how Courtney Summers's All the Rage, Amy Reed's The Nowhere Girls, and Laurie Halse Anderson's Speak, along with other similar novels and Chanel Miller's memoir, Know My Name, can be used in secondary school and university classrooms to teach students about sexual violence in general and rape culture in particular. I suggest that doing so in relation to Kate Manne's notions of himpathy and herasure should be encouraged.

Black girls often face derogatory comments about their natural hair and discrimination based on it. While many authors have published books for children that present a positive image of natural hair and that seek to empower young Black girls to accept, love, and care for their hair and themselves, here I analyze how Hair Love (2019) by Matthew Cherry and Onyeka and the Academy of the Sun (2022) by Tolá Okogwu teach Black feminist principles and encourage Black girls to embrace their natural hair. I explore how Black feminist theory and praxis informs the lessons in these books so that Black girls receive education in self-love along with the tenets of Black feminism.

When she graduated in June 1937, Edith Renfrow became Grinnell College's first Black alumna. While such groundbreaking may seem like an early 20th century example of Black Girl Magic, I argue for the concept of Black Girl Mattering. Turning to life history interviews and a set of family and school photos from Renfrow's girlhood, I find evidence of an upbringing shaped through familial—and especially maternal—investments in her ease, confidence, joy, and quiet defiance. I read these as signs of Black Girl Mattering, which is, I suggest, the backstory to observed instances of Black Girl Magic and which I offer as an important reminder of our collective responsibility to empower Black girls to feel significant enough to exhibit their magic.

This study is situated in an independent UK girls’ school using data from focus group interviews with Year 9 girls. Taking Judith Butler's view on gender, I discuss how white, elite femininity is performed, rehearsed, and reproduced on the schoolgirl body through uniform regulation. Elite femininity is not a stable attribute that is secured by class position but is a fragile construct that requires relentless maintenance. Beginning with Beverley Skeggs's notion of respectability, I argue that middle-class girls also have to labor to regulate and maintain respectability through the strict policing of the school skirt. Ultimately, I suggest that elite status does not free individuals from regulation but, rather, intensifies it, producing the simultaneous but contradictory forces of privilege and precarity.

Catherine Vanner (Ed). 2025. Girls Take Action: Activism Networks by, for, and with Girls and Young Women. New York: Berghahn Books.