Marnina Gonick

VII. The Mean Girl Crisis: Problematizing Representations of Girls Friendships

If the 1990s ‘girl’ was represented by Ophelia and the call for her rescue (Pipher, 1994), the 2000s have seen the rise of a new ‘it girl’ who, like Ophelia, is also used to mark a perceived crisis of girlhood. The vulnerable girl has recently been replaced by the ‘mean girl’ in public consciousness. Nowhere is this concern more visible than in the proliferation of best-selling books such as Rachel Simmond’s Odd Girl Out: The Hidden Aggression in Girls (2003), Rosalind Wiseman’s Queen Bees and Wannabees (2002), Emily White’s Fast Girls: Teenage Tribes and the Myth of the Slut (2002), and Sharon Lamb’s The Secret Lives of Girls: What Good Girls Really Do – Sex Play, Aggression, and their Guilt (2002). Each of these books is a consideration of the trials and tribulations of relationships between girls – their friendships, fights and foes. In this article, I pose a series of questions about the links between the explosion of popular, professional and academic interest in, and concern about, ‘the mean girl’ to a public anxiety and cultural fascination with girls and girlhood more generally. These questions are meant to trouble common sense understandings of girls and the current media fascination with, and representation of, their relationships, and to reveal an intriguing contradiction in its discursive construction and deployment. On the one hand, discussions about the ‘problem’ of young women’s relationships gone-wrong are used in the media as a cultural symbol of disorder, moral decay, and social instability in North American society more broadly. Yet at the same time, the treatment and resolution of the problem is almost always articulated in individualized and individualizing terms. This ambivalence about young women and the contradictory uses of the ‘mean girl’ offer critical insights into new discursive constructions of femininity in a time where, as McRobbie has suggested, girls have replaced youth as the metaphor for social change (2000: 201).

Old Plots and New Identities: Ambivalent femininities in late modernity

This paper investigates changing modes of femininity. It asks: What are the discourses and discursive practices within which new femininities are constructed? What are the social conditions in which they emerge? How are these negotiated and lived by girls? What do these stories tell us about the complications of subject formation and what it means to be a “girl” in “global times”. Drawing on a school-community project with a racially diverse group of girls, aged 12–14 years, the paper analyses a series of fictional stories that the girls wrote for the characters of a collaboratively produced video. It is my argument that girls live the effects of neoliberal discourses of individuality in particularly complicated ways. This is due to the ways in which “woman” and “individual” have historically been constituted through a series of binary oppositions including those of: femininity and masculinity, girlhood and adolescence, womanhood and personhood and femininity and rationality. I suggest that while traditional femininity is being undone through its inclusion in discourses of individualism, rationality and adulthood, it is also reinscribed through an ever increasing array of contradictions, the juggling of which have always constituted femininity.

Collective Biography and the Question of Difference

This article engages with the research method of collective biography. We are particularly interested in what the question of difference brings to bear on the collective biography process. The aim of embodied writing in the collective biography process is “to tell the memory in such a way that it is vividly imaginable by others, such that those others can extend their own imaginable experience of being in the world through knowing the particularity of another” (Davies & Gannon). However, our own attempt to work with the method had us grappling with how to engage with a story that did not elicit understanding and identification but rather evoked, for some, a sense of incommensurable difference. By bringing together a poststructural concern with power relationships and a Deleuzian interest in engendering new synergies and possibilities, the article makes a theoretical contribution to new conceptual repertoires on the question of difference and its implications for feminist research.

Who Are the Participants? Rethinking Representational Practices and Writing with Heterotopic Possibility in Qualitative Inquiry.

This paper draws on Foucaults notion of heterotopia to ask a series of questions about the important link between the crisis of representation in qualitative research and new theorizations of the ‘subject’ within poststructural feminist research. Reiterating Foucaults question, ‘what is it impossible to think and what kind of impossibility are we faced with here,’ the authors wonder how naming practices that mobilize social categories determine what is visible and thus analyzable to educational researchers. How might research writing understood as a representational practice be made to perform as a heterotopic space: a reflection on writing practices and representation itself? In engaging with these questions, the paper juxtaposes two different research projects in an attempt to set in motion readings that are—for the authors as well as for readers—self and cross‐interrogating. Each project engenders different problematizations of the ways in which identity categories are represented in research.

Indigenizing girl power

This article considers the intersection of girlhood, agency, and indigenousness through a reading of the internationally renowned film Whale Rider. I suggest that Whale Rider presents a double project that resymbolizes girlhood as it also produces a “decolonizing of the screen.” On the one hand the film resonates with what emerged in the 1990s as the assertion of “girl power” and the notion of a new, active, powerful and agentic femininity. On the other hand, the film mobilizes a re-articulation of these discourses of “new femininities” by “indigenizing the image” of the empowered girl.

IV. What is the ‘Problem’ with these Girls? Youth and Feminist Pedagogy

The opportunity to work with a group of girls as part of a school–community initiative materialized at a good time for me. Recently returned to graduate school, I was in search of a research project that I might eventually turn into a dissertation. I was excited about the prospect of putting into practice some of the feminist theory I had been immersed in at school and relished the idea of helping to shape a generation of future feminists. The programme was initiated by the teaching staff at an inner-city elementary and middle school whose student population was largely immigrant, refugee and working-class. Students came from families that were originally from Portugal, Vietnam, China, Hong Kong, the Caribbean, Latin America and Eastern Europe. The staff were concerned about the girls’ lack of participation in extra-curricular programmes offered by the school. They believed that if girls were included in the process of designing a programme, the chances of their participation in it might be greater. I was recruited to perform this task – a task that proved to be more complicated than either they or I fully realized at the time. My experience speaks to the apparent discord between feminist intentions in working with girls and the willingness of some girls to embrace these feminist goals. Recent discussions of critical feminist pedagogy highlight the difficulties involved in challenging gender relations (Davies, 1989; Gilbert and Taylor, 1991; Harper, 1995; Kenway et al., 1998; Walkerdine, 1990). Given the complexities involved in the construction of femininity and the power and pervasiveness of gender ideologies at personal and social levels, it is not surprising that effective challenges are difficult to identify and put into practice. Reconstructing femininity in new ways is difficult because it involves not only deconstructing dominant ideologies, but also confronting investments in normative discourses of femininity.

Old-Fashioned and Forward-Looking: Neo-Liberalism and Nostalgia in the Daring Books for Girls

This paper interogates the international bestselling series, The Daring Books for Girls (Buchanan & Peskowitz, 2007, 2008), asking what kinds of girls are produced through these texts.