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All About the Girl: Culture, Power, and Identity » (1st Edition)

Book cover image of All About the Girl: Culture, Power, and Identity by Anita Harris

Authors: Anita Harris, Michelle Fine, Michelle Fine
ISBN-13: 9780415947008, ISBN-10: 0415947006
Format: Paperback
Publisher: Routledge
Date Published: May 2004
Edition: 1st Edition

Author Biography: Anita Harris

Anita Harris is Lecturer in Sociology at Monash University in Victoria, Australia. In 2000-2001, she was a Visiting Scholar at the City University of New York and an invited speaker at Birmingham University.

Book Synopsis

This groundbreaking collection offers a complicated portrait of girls in the 21st Century. These are the riot grrls and the Spice Girls, the good girls and the bad girls who are creating their own "girl" culture and giving a whole new meaning to "grrl" power. Featuring provocative essays from leaders in the field like Michelle Fine, Angela McRobbie, Valerie Walkerdine, Nancy Lesko, Niobe Way and Deborah Tolman, this work brings to life the ever-changing identities of today's young women. The contributors cover all aspects of girlhood from around the world and strike upon such key areas as schooling, sexuality, popular culture and identity. This is new scholarship at its best.

	Foreword
	Introduction
1	Notes on postfeminism and popular culture : Bridget Jones and the new gender regime	3
2	Women, girls, and the unfinished work of connection : a critical review of American girls' studies	15
3	Good girls, bad girls : Anglocentrism and diversity in the constitution of contemporary girlhood	29
4	From badness to meanness : popular constructions of contemporary girlhood	45
5	Feminism and femininity : or how we learned to stop worrying and love the thong	59
6	Girl power politics : pop-culture barriers and organizational resistance	69
7	Mythic figures and lived identities : locating the "girl" in feminist discourse	79
8	"I don't see feminists as you see feminists" : young women negotiating feminism in contemporary Britain	91
9	Pretty in pink : young women presenting mature sexual identities	103
10	Talking sexuality through an insider's lens : the Samoan experience	115
11	Shifting desires : discourses of accountability in abstinence-only education in the United States	127
12	Where my girls at? : black girls and the construction of the sexual	141
13	Spicy strategies : pop feminist and other empowerments in girl culture	155
14	Jamming girl culture : young women and consumer citizenship	163
15	Girls' Web sites : a virtual "room of one's own"?	173
16	Pleasures within reason : teaching feminism and education	185
17	Girls, schooling, and the discourse of self-change : negotiating meanings of the high school prom	195
18	Gender and sexuality : continuities and change for girls in school	205
19	Colluding in "compulsory heterosexuality"? : doing research with young women at school	219
20	Speaking back : voices of young urban womyn of color using participatory action research to challenge and complicate representations of young women	231
21	Beneath the surface of voice and silence : researching the home front	243
22	Possible selves and pasteles : how a group of mothers and daughters took a London conference by storm