The Importance of Studying "Girlhood"

Girlhood studies are important not just for parents of little girls but for parents of boys, and for humans—as inherently social, “classifying animals”. Girlhood studies is anything but a “special” (now I’m poking fun of the term “special topics” for which our course is considered) narrowly defined field of study. In our study, we learn how ideologies of race, class, sexuality, and gender are integral to our ontological and epistemological understandings of “girlhood”.

In Chesney-Lind and Irwin’s article we saw how media representations of “bad girls” and news stories fixated on school violence may have led to the “relabeling” and “up-criming” criminal measures that went into effect in the late nineties and early years of the twenty-first century. Such measures—brought on by media hype—had an especially profound effect on girls of color whose families were not financially equipped to offer the support that White families were for their daughters’ legal fees. In essence—zero tolerance policies that went into effect after a string of violent school episodes perpetrated mostly by boys and media sensationalism surrounding middle class White girl bullies—caused not boys or White girls, but girls of color to suffer the most. Such careful examination of “girlhood” violence allows us to better understand the cultural assumptions at play in mediated representations. Our study, moreover, helps us identify and articulate the powerful socializing influence of media in American culture. Therefore, we learn to resist popularizations and analyze the consequences that such representations hold for individuals and groups.

Our study of girlhood enables us to pull down the blinders, so to speak, and to examine social constructions of “femininity”. “Femininity” which we see assumes too much of a common sense status (of privilege) in American culture. The Pink Think chapter really explores the historicity of this powerful “common sense”—femininity. Thus delineating “femininity” during the Pink Think era, whose remnants remain with us today in various cultural forms as seen in Victoria’s Secret’s “Pink” line and in countless other gendered advertisements that persuade women to buy otherwise genderless items. “Femininity” takes on an awesome cultural power that informs our ways of judging and classifying both ourselves and others. Those who don’t fit—or do not desperately try to fit—within the rigid limits of this cultured “femininity” are seen as outsiders relegated to the status of “the other.” Such ideals marginalize women of color, lesbians, transsexual women, women of lower socio-economic class, and women with “un-ideal” body types as their representations are habitually excluded from this so called “feminine” ideal.

Robyn