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How are girls represented in written and graphic texts, and how do these representations inform our understanding of girlhood? In this volume, contributors examine the girl in the text in order to explore a range of perspectives on girlhood across borders and in relation to their positionality. In literary and transactional texts, girls are presented as heroes who empower themselves and others with lasting effect, as figures of liberating pedagogical practice and educational activism, and as catalysts for discussions of the relationship between desire and ethics. In these varied chapters, a new notion of transnationalism emerges, one rooted not only in the process through which borders between nation-states become more porous, but through which cultural and ethnic imperatives become permeable.
“Ann Smith’s collection provides both inspiration and a challenge to readers, writers, and researchers of girls and girls themselves to transverse physical and conceptual borders critically to write their own transnational girl into lived and textual existence.” • Girlhood Studies
“The anthology brings forward important voices and perspectives to the field of Girlhood Studies, by raising some pertinent questions about textual interactions. Most significantly, it elucidates the importance of textual reading in a predominantly social science-oriented field like Girlhood Studies.” • Children and Society
Ann Smith has been the managing editor of Girlhood Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal since its inception. Formerly a lecturer in the Department of English, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa, where she specialized in literary theory with a particular focus on feminism and queer theory, she is now an adjunct professor in the Department of Integrated Studies in Education at McGill University, Montreal. Her publications include Was it Something I Wore? Dress, Identity, Materiality (2012) with Relebohile Moletsane and Claudia Mitchell (eds), and Picturing Research: Drawing as Visual Methodology (2011) with Linda Theron, Claudia Mitchell, and Jean Stuart (eds).
Introduction: The Girl in the Text: Representations, Positions, and Perspectives
Ann Smith
Chapter 1. Naughtiest Girls, Go Girls, and Glitterbombs: Exploding Schoolgirl Fictions
Lucinda McKnight
Chapter 2. “This Is My Story”: The Reclaiming of Girls’ Education Discourses in Malala Yousafzai’s Autobiography
Rosie Walters
Chapter 3. The Girl: Dead 39
Fiona Nelson
Chapter 4. Girl Constructed in Two Nonfiction Texts: Sexual Subject? Desired Object?
Mary Ann Harlan
Chapter 5. Perfect Love in a Better World: Same-Sex Attraction between Girls
Wendy L. Rouse
Chapter 6. Narrating Muslim Girlhood in the Pakistani Cityscape of Graphic Narratives
Tehmina Pirzada
Chapter 7. Confronting Girl-bullying and Gaining Voice in Two Novels by Nicholasa Mohr
Barbara Roche Rico
Chapter 8. “Like Alice, I was Brave”: The Girl in the Text in Olemaun’s Residential School Narratives
Roxanne Harde
Chapter 9. Girl, Interrupted and Continued: Rethinking the Influence of Elena Fortún's Celia
Ana Puchau de Lecea
Chapter 10. Lolita Speaks: Disrupting Nabokov’s “Aesthetic Bliss”
Michele Meek
Chapter 11. Hope Chest: Demythologizing Girlhood in Kate Bernheimer’s Trilogy
Catriona McAra
Chapter 12. The Girl in the GIF: Reading the Self into Girlfriendship
Akane Kanai
Chapter 13. Girls’ Perspectives on (Mis)Representations of Girlhood in Hegemonic Media Texts
Paula MacDowell
Chapter 14. Using Fiction, Autoethnography, and Girls’ Lived Experience in Preparation for Playwriting
Genna Gardini