Girls' Studies

This week's readings on girls' studies were really interesting.  Though I haven't read a lot of girls' studies theory, I have actually been studying this topic for years--ever since reading and loving Mary Pipher's "Reviving Ophelia" as a junior in high school.  I now have a five-year-old daughter so I have spent a lot of time thinking about the way socio-cultural forces seek to construct girls in very specific ways.  I've been paying attention to the messages my daughter absorbs and doing my best to mitigate the ones that I find to be harmful.

I think this passage from the Kearney article best illustrates the approach that I've taken in the past when trying to understand the social construction of girlhood and think about how to resist it:



"Although many journalists explored the “girlification” of mid-twentiethcentury
consumer culture, contemporaneous academic analyses of that
phenomenon did not appear. (Youth research was still boy-centered, and
feminist scholarship had yet to emerge.) With more rigorous manufacture
and promotion of products made for and about girls in recent years, contemporary
popular culture’s girl-centeredness has ensured greater attention to
female youth by both journalists and scholars. With McRobbie and Garber’s
(1976) groundbreaking work to guide them, numerous feminist researchers
are attempting to understand how the culture, fashion, and beauty industries
create commodities for and about girls, how girlhood is represented
in such products, and how female youth consume them."


Though I see many structures and institutions that seek to define (and in my mind, severely limit) my daughter's conception of what it means to be a girl, one of the most concerning structures is advertising.  Marketers seem to be single-mindedly interested in selling my daughter a particular self-concept, one that is rooted in stereotypical femininity, overt domestication, and chronic consumption.  There are so many great blogs that deal with this issue and the commodification of girlhood (among other important issues, of course).  A few that I like are Feminist Frequency, Pigtail Pals, and one of my favorite organizations, Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood.

Here's an example of a great video from Feminist Frequency that introduces the gender-marketing complex by tackling the marketing strategies used by Lego: