Girls: Feminine Adolescence in Popular Culture & Cultural Theory

Front Cover
Columbia University Press, 2002 - Family & Relationships - 377 pages

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."

 

Contents

The Girl of the Period
15
Feminine Adolescence
47
Puberty
79
Becoming a Woman
105
Daughters Theories of Girlhood
107
Sex and the Single Girl Studies in Girlhood
139
Becoming Bride Girls and Cultural Studies
171
Girls and Cultural Production
201
Distraction Girls and Mass Culture
203
In Visible Bodies
235
The Girl Market and Girl Culture
265
The Girl of the Century
303
Notes
307
Bibliography
345
Index
371
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About the author (2002)

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.