Women's & Gender Studies

Instagram. Whisper. Yik Yak. Vine. YouTube. Kik. Ask.fm. Tinder. The dominant force in the lives of girls coming of age in America today is social media. What it is doing to an entire generation of young women is the subject of award-winning Vanity Fair writer Nancy Jo Sales's riveting and explosive American Girls. With extraordinary intimacy and precision, Sales captures what it feels like to be a girl in America today. From Montclair to Manhattan and Los Angeles, from Florida and Arizona to Texas and Kentucky, Sales crisscrossed the country, speaking to more than two hundred girls, ages thirteen to nineteen, and documenting a massive change in the way girls are growing up, a phenomenon that transcends race, geography, and household income. American Girls provides a disturbing portrait of the end of childhood as we know it and of the inexorable and ubiquitous experience of a new kind of adolescence-one dominated by new social and sexual norms, where a girl's first crushes and experiences of longing and romance occur in an accelerated electronic environment; where issues of identity and self-esteem are magnified and transformed by social platforms that provide instantaneous judgment. What does it mean to be a girl in America in 2016? It means coming of age online in a hypersexualized culture that has normalized extreme behavior, from pornography to the casual exchange of nude photographs; a culture rife with a virulent new strain of sexism and a sometimes self-undermining notion of feminist empowerment; a culture in which teenagers are spending so much time on technology and social media that they are not developing basic communication skills. From beauty gurus to slut-shaming to a disconcerting trend of exhibitionism, Nancy Jo Sales provides a shocking window into the troubling world of today's teenage girls. Provocative and urgent, American Girls is destined to ignite a much-needed conversation about how we can help our daughters and sons negotiate unprecedented new challenges.

A lot of women remember having had tomboy girlhoods. Some recall it as a time of gender-bending freedom and rowdy pleasures. Others feel the word is used to limit girls by suggesting such behavior is atypical. In American Tomboys, Renée M. Sentilles explores how the concept of the tomboy developed in the turbulent years after the Civil War, and she argues that the tomboy grew into an accepted and even vital transitional figure. In this period, cultural critics, writers, and educators came to imagine that white middle-class tomboys could transform themselves into the vigorous mothers of America's burgeoning empire. In addition to the familiar heroines of literature, Sentilles delves into a wealth of newly uncovered primary sources that manifest tomboys' lived experience, and she asks critical questions about gender, family, race, and nation. Beautifully written and exhaustively researched, American Tomboys explores the cultural history of girls who, for a time, whistled, got into scrapes, and struggled against convention.

Black Girlhood, Punishment, and Resistance: Reimagining Justice for Black Girls in Virginia provides a historical comprehensive examination of racialized, classed, and gendered punishment of Black girls in Virginia during the early twentieth century. It looks at the ways in which the court system punished Black girls based upon societal accepted norms of punishment, hinged on a notion that they were to be viewed and treated as adults within the criminal legal system.

\ Introduction -- Power! Not programs! -- Theorizing narrative discrepancies of black girlhood -- Saving our lives hear our truths/we are SOLHOT! -- Little Sally Walker -- Our words, our voice -- Toward a critical hip-hop feminist pedagogy

Long portrayed as a masculine endeavor, the African American struggle for progress often found expression through an unlikely literary figure: the black girl. Nazera Sadiq Wright uses heavy archival research on a wide range of texts about African American girls to explore this understudied phenomenon. As Wright shows, the figure of the black girl in African American literature provided a powerful avenue for exploring issues like domesticity, femininity, and proper conduct. The characters' actions, however fictional, became a rubric for African American citizenship and racial progress.

Foreword : Fire with light / Ruth Nicole Brown -- Introduction / Aria S. Halliday -- Theorizing Black girlhood / Ashley L. Smith -- Contesting Black girlhood(s) beyond northern borders : exploring a Black African girl approach / Jen Katshunga -- The politics of Black girlhood and a ratchet imaginary / Amoni Thompson-Jones -- Ah suh yuh bad? : how bad gyals are revolutionizing how Black girls resist and transcend toxicity during girlhood / Kimberley Moore -- Role models matter : Black girls and political leadership possibilities / Wendy Smooth and Elaine Richardson -- Pushing the limits in Black girl-centred research : exploring the methodological possibilities of Melt magazine / Sheri K. Lewis -- Self-care and community : Black girls saving themselves / Caroline K. Kaltefleiter and Karmelisha M. Alexander -- "Take the kinks out your mind, not your hair" : the politics of Black Canadian girls' hair and self-love / Shaunasea Brown -- "We need a sear at the table" : Black girls using new media to construct Black identity / Kisha McPherson -- "Canon : brown eyes, frizzy hair and very clever" : fan art, fan activism, and Black Hermione Granger / Megan Connor -- Afterword : A meditation on (re)imagining a world with Black girls / Claudine "Candy" Taaffe

Hashtag or trademark, personal or collective expression, #BlackGirlMagic is an articulation of the resolve of Black women and girls to triumph in the face of structural oppressions. The online life of #BlackGirlMagic insists on the visibility of Black women and girls as aspirational figures. But while the notion of Black girl magic spreads in cyberspace, the question remains: how is Black girl magic experienced offline? The essays in this volume move us beyond social media. They offer critical analyses and representations of the multiplicities of Black femmes', girls', and women's lived experiences. Together the chapters demonstrate how Black girl magic is embodied by four elements enacted both on- and offline: building community, challenging dehumanizing representations, increasing visibility, and offering restorative justice for violence. Black Girl Magic Beyond the Hashtag shows how Black girls and women foster community, counter invisibility, engage in restorative acts, and create spaces for freedom. Intersectional and interdisciplinary, the contributions in this volume bridge generations and collectively push the boundaries of Black feminist thought.

Introduces new conceptual frameworks for girls' studies.

Geographies of Girlhood: Identities In-Between explores how adolescent girls come to understand themselves as female in this culture, particularly during a time when they are learning what it means to be a woman and their identities are in-between that of child and adult, girl and woman. It illuminates the everyday realities of adolescent girls and the real issues that concern them, rather than what adult researchers think is important to adolescent girls.

Girlhood, interdisciplinary and global in source, scope, and methodology, examines the centrality of girlhood in shaping women's lives. Scholars study how age and gender, along with a multitude of other identities, work together to influence the historical experience. Spanning a broad time frame from 1750 to the present, essays illuminate the various continuities and differences in girls' lives across culture and region--girls on all continents except Antarctica are represented. Case studies and essays are arranged thematically to encourage comparisons between girls' experiences in diverse locales, and to assess how girls were affected by historical developments such as colonialism, political repression, war, modernization, shifts in labor markets, migrations, and the rise of consumer culture.

Examining context-specific conditions in which girls live, learn, work, play, and organize deepens the understanding of place-making practices of girls and young women worldwide. Focusing on place across health, literary and historical studies, art history, communications, media studies, sociology, and education allows for investigations of how girlhood is positioned in relation to interdisciplinary and transnational research methodologies, media environments, geographic locations, history, and social spaces. This book offers a comprehensive reading on how girlhood scholars construct and deploy research frameworks that directly engage girls in the research process.

The Spice Girls, Tank Girl comicbooks, Sailor Moon, Courtney Love, Grrl Power: do such things really constitute a unique "girl culture?" Catherine Driscoll begins by identifying a genealogy of "girlhood" or "feminine adolescence," and then argues that both "girls" and "culture" as ideas are too problematic to fulfill any useful role in theorizing about the emergence of feminine adolescence in popular culture. She relates the increasing public visibility of girls in western and westernized cultures to the evolution and expansion of theories about feminine adolescence in fields such as psychoanalysis, sociology, anthropology, history, and politics. Presenting her argument as a Foucauldian genealogy, Driscoll discusses the ways in which young women have been involved in the production and consumption of theories and representations of girls, feminine adolescence, and the "girl market."

This volume examines how Saving Our Lives Hear Our Truths, or SOLHOT, a radical youth intervention, provides a space for the creative performance and expression of Black girlhood and how this creativity informs other realizations about Black girlhood and womanhood. Founded in 2006 and co-organized by the author, SOLHOT is an intergenerational collective organizing effort that celebrates and recognizes Black girls as producers of culture and knowledge. Girls discuss diverse expressions of Black girlhood, critique the issues that are important to them, and create art that keeps their lived experiences at its center.   Drawing directly from her experiences in SOLHOT, Ruth Nicole Brown argues that when Black girls reflect on their own lives, they articulate radically unique ideas about their lived experiences.

The tween is the «new girl on the block» in girlhood studies. Although the study of tween life may have derived from a particular marketing orientation at the end of the twentieth century, it is not limited by it. On the contrary, this collection of essays shows that «tween» is not a simple or unified concept, nor is it limited to a certain class of girls in a few countries. This collection by an international group of authors highlights specific methodologies for working with (and studying) tween-age girls, provides challenges to the presumed innocence of girlhood, and engages in an analysis of marketing in relation to girlhood. In so doing, this book offers a reading on these three or four years in a girl's life that suggests that this period is as fascinating as the teen years, and as generative in its implications for girlhood studies as studies of both younger and adolescent girls.

A gripping set of stories about the forces that shape girls and the adults they become. A wise and brilliant guide to transforming the self and our society. In her powerful new book, critically acclaimed author Melissa Febos examines the narratives women are told about what it means to be female and what it takes to free oneself from them. When her body began to change at eleven years old, Febos understood immediately that her meaning to other people had changed with it. By her teens, she defined herself based on these perceptions and by the romantic relationships she threw herself into headlong. Over time, Febos increasingly questioned the stories she'd been told about herself and the habits and defenses she'd developed over years of trying to meet others' expectations. The values she and so many other women had learned in girlhood did not prioritize their personal safety, happiness, or freedom, and she set out to reframe those values and beliefs. Blending investigative reporting, memoir, and scholarship, Febos charts how she and others like her have reimagined relationships and made room for the anger, grief, power, and pleasure women have long been taught to deny. Written with Febos' characteristic precision, lyricism, and insight, Girlhood is a philosophical treatise, an anthem for women, and a searing study of the transitions into and away from girlhood, toward a chosen self.