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.’
Table of Content
Acknowledgments
List of Illustrations
Introduction: Towards a Genealogy of Girlhood
Part I. Becoming a Girl
1. The Girl of the Period
2. Feminine Adolescence
3. Puberty
Part II. Becoming a Woman
4. Daughters: Theories of Girlhood
5. Sex and the Single Girl: Studies in Girlhood
6. Becoming Bride: Girls and Cultural Studies
Part III. Girls and Cultural Production
7. Distraction: Girls and Mass Culture
8. In Visible Bodies
9. The Girl Market and Girl Culture
Conclusion: The Girl of the Century
Notes
Bibliography
Index
About the author
Catherine Driscoll is Senior Lecturer in the Department of English at the University of Adelaide, Australia. She has published essays in various scholarly journals and books, most recently
Deleuze and Feminism and
South Atlantic Quarterly.
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