Dawn H. Currie

Skater girlhood and emphasized femininity: ‘you can't land an ollie properly in heels’

This study draws from interviews with 20 girls in British Columbia, Canada who participated to varying degrees in skateboarding culture. We found that skater girls saw themselves as participating in an ‘alternative’ girlhood. Becoming skater girls involved the work and play of producing themselves in relation to alternative images found among peers at school, at skate parks, online and in music videos. The alternative authority of skater girl discourse gave the girls room to manoeuvre within and against the culturally valued discourse of emphasized femininity. A subgroup of middle class skater girls, the ‘in‐betweeners’, used skater girl discourse as a way of distancing themselves from the sexism evident in skater culture as well as emphasized femininity. They used one discourse against another and took advantage of contradictions within skater discourse to forge a positive identity for themselves.

DECODING FEMININITY Advertisements and Their Teenage Readers

The author explores how the discursive practices of social texts relate to the subjectivities of readers. Employing Dorothy Smiths notion of femininity as textually mediated discourse, the author analyzes how teenage girls read the depictions of femininity in the glossy advertisements of fashion magazines. Through interviews with 48 girls aged 13 to 17 years, she explores both why and how young girls negotiate “what it means to be a woman.” Most young girls in her study draw on stereotypical meanings of adult femininity. By giving these stereotypes truth status, these readers valorize not only patriarchal meanings of womanhood but also naturalize associations between femininity and the commodities through which this femininity is expressed as the everyday doing of gender. The author concludes by discussing implications of this study for both a feminist theory and a feminist politics of culture.

‘The power to squash people’: understanding girls’ relational aggression

While researchers and concerned adults alike draw attention to relational aggression among girls, how this aggression is associated with girls’ agency remains a matter of debate. In this paper we explore relational aggression among girls designated by their peers as ‘popular’ in order to understand how social power constructs girls’ agency as aggression. We locate this power, hence girls’ agency, in contradictory messages about girlhood that, although ever‐present ‘in girls heads,’ are typically absent in adult panic about girls’ aggression. Within peer culture, power comes from the ability to invoke the unspoken ‘rules’ that police the boundaries of acceptable femininity. We thus challenge the notion advanced by Pipher and others that girls’ empowerment entails (re)gaining an ‘authentic voice.’ In contrast, we suggest that such projects must be informed by an interrogation of how girls are positioned as speaking subjects.

‘The geeks shall inherit the earth’: Girls’ Agency, Subjectivity and Empowerment

This paper is located in a larger study of girls’ empowerment within the everyday context of school cultures. While much feminist research has focused on the ‘perils’ of feminine adolescence, we are interested in how girls successfully navigate the transition from girlhood to adult womanhood. Thus the sample for this paper includes girls who consciously positioned themselves against an ‘emphasized femininity’ that made their classmates popular, but that has been blamed for girls’ lowered self-esteem, dissatisfaction with their bodies, and disordered eating. Because their self-positioning carried the risk of marginalization within peer cultures, we ask ‘What makes their alternative self-representations possible?’ We are particularly interested in whether their transgressive identities signal a rewriting of girlhood as a social rather than personal project, and how feminism might operate to support girls’ empowerment.

PROMOTING WOMEN'S HEALTH-SEEKING BEHAVIOR: RESEARCH AND THE EMPOWERMENT OF WOMEN

Despite advances in medical knowledge, commentators agree that the greatest gains in health will come through behavioral change. Women must change their health-seeking behavior; worldwide, health advocates find that even though services may be provided for women, it does not guarantee that women use them. The purpose of this article is to help researchers, as womens advocates, understand why. Specifically, we present a tool that helps identify barriers to, as well as facilitators of, womens health seeking. Unlike conventional approaches that focus on psychological or personal facilitators of health seeking, we use a method that locates the individual within her sociocultural context. Such an approach helps us differentiate womens practical needs for health care from their strategic interest in gender equity; in doing so, we advance a distinctly feminist approach to womens health promotion.

“No Boundaries”? Girls’ Interactive, Online Learning About Femininities:

This article explores girls’ learning about issues of femininity that takes place in the presence of others online, connected through chat rooms, instant messaging, and role-playing games. Informed by critical and poststructuralist feminist theorizing of gendered subjectivity, agency, and power, the article draws from qualitative interviews with 16 girls in Vancouver, Canada. Girls reported that online activities allowed them to rehearse different ways of being before trying them out offline, where they might have been reined in for going against perceived expectations for their gender. The article shows that girls enjoyed playing with gender and being gender rebellious. They practiced taking more initiative in heterosexual relationships than is currently authorized in prevailing rules of romance. Without necessarily challenging the underlying gendered power inequalities, some battled back in cyberspace against sexual harassment. In the conclusion, the authors reflect on the implications for girls’ individual and collective empowerment and for transformative pedagogy.

Dear Abby Advice pages as a site for the operation of power

This article explores how textual analysis can help us understand subjectivity as an empirical, rather than purely theoretical, phenomenon. The texts discussed here are advice columns in adolescent magazines; the analysis takes as its starting point girls’ accounts of magazine reading. Drawing on focus group discussions and interviews with 48 girls between the ages of 13 and 17 years, I explore how the accomplishment of ‘individuality’– as a culturally and historically-specific task of adolescence – is mediated by advice texts. Because my analysis directs us to the existence of embodied subjects, I employ the notion of ‘Subject-ivity’. As a concept, ‘Subject-ivity’ reminds the analyst of the presence of an embodied, rather than theoretically constructed Self, brought into existence as a practical mode of consciousness. It thus provides a potential bridge between the sociological world of social subjects and highly theoretical work on subjectivity.

Listening to girls: discursive positioning and the construction of self

Recent decades have seen a proliferation of books that ‘listen in’ on the everyday lives of girls. In their research the authors maintain that ‘listening’ to girls in order to make claims about what they ‘heard’ is a theoretically mediated process, and therefore it is not as straightforward as many authors imply. The purpose of this paper is to explore what they call the ‘symptomatic reading’ of interview transcripts. While attending to the contradiction and inconsistencies that characterize interview texts, they also recognize stabilizing strategies—what they call ‘trump discourses’—that make social life possible. Such a way of working enables us to see how power works through discourse. It helps us understand why many girls express a feminist Subjectivity, while distancing themselves from the identity as ‘feminist.’

Battered women and the state: From the failure of theory to a theory of failure

Within the context of legal reform, the Battered Wife Movement has divided feminists on the question of criminal justice as a desirable component of a feminist agenda. Thus it provides a good example of the dilemmas of developing a feminist theory about the state as the basis for informed practice. In this paper, Currie overviews the way in which the BWM has been transformed from a radical demand for the redistribution of social power into an expansion of current patriarchal institutions. As an example of the institutionalization of feminist issues, however, she rejects explanations of this transformation as simply ideological revision by the state. Rather, Currie notes that it occurs through and not against feminist discourse, meaning that we must acknowledge theory as practice if we are to develop a truly subversive and liberatory discourse within feminist scholarship.

“Going Green” Mythologies of Consumption in Adolescent Magazines

In general, sociologists neglect the ways that mass media operate to construct the worldview of adolescents. Although cultural studies tend to celebrate youth culture as expressing resistance to the dominant order, this article draws on textual analysis to explore how the progressive impetus of popular social movements is redefined in adolescent magazines to create mythologies of consumption. Using content and textual analysis of Seventeen magazine published between 1951 and 1991, the author explores the emergence and transformation of environmental discourse as a case in point. This analysis shows that although the current format, which presents readers with endless facts and information about environmental degradation, gives this medium the appearance of a potentially politicizing discourse, it may in fact provide a basis for the “depoliticized speech” described by Barthes.