geographies of girlhood

[...]... hallways to the Internet to discourses of cheerleading, race, sexuality, and ablebodiness These are the geographies of girlhood, the important sites of identity construction for girls and young women, and we situate this collection of studies within the fledgling field of Girls Studies Because Geographies of Girlhood is about the various spaces in which girls construct who they are, we thought it appropriate... gender might be, a tentative feminist pedagogy of place Our thinking here was to draw from all of the studies presented and construct a vision of what school life could be if the words of the girls and young women in these pages were taken seriously All of these chapters unsettle the easy characterization of girlhood and womanhood They undo the simplicity of characterizing girls as sluts, lesbians, Preps,... construction of girlhood found in the Girl Power movement In '"I Am a Woman Now!' Rewriting Cartographies of Girlhood From the Critical Standpoint of Disability," Erevelles and Mutua highlight their participant's assertion that she is a sexual being amid the denials and interruptions of her mother and society at large Finally, we present a concluding chapter that imagines what a pedagogy of place and... the "vibrancy of the 'in-between' " of adolescent lives It is the in-between spaces and places found within and outside the formal domain of schools that we believe to be central to how girls make sense of themselves We want to nest our discussion of girl's identity at thejuncture of place and this "in-between" vibrancy These theoretical interests deposited us at the conceptual door of liminality 6... Adolescence, as a period of time distinct from childhood and adulthood, has been the subject of much research and theorizing Its unquestioned existence, developmental traits, and characteristics are deemed a necessary part of most teacher education programs, and this is typically what preservice teachers and graduate students are offered to understand the lives of adolescents Much of this type of literature emanates... concept of adolescence is not necessarily fixed in the academic community Several scholars have questioned the very nature of the adolescent period, arguing that the concept is a social construction and more of a reflection of the time period in which it was conceived rather than a "natural" phenomenon of life (Lesko, 1996; Walkerdine, 1990) Their argument points to the turbulence of the turn of 8 BETTIS... critiques, the concept of adolescence is in somewhat of a liminal state itself, between being fixed and "scientific" and being deconstructed and found lifeless Moreover, some of the fundamental characteristics of the concept as rooted in the biological realm are in flux With the average age of the onset of menarche dropping, and that age variable by race and ethnicity, the markers of entrance into adolescence... the approach of Walkerdine and others who assert that scholars studying girlhood need to understand that girlhood is a construction made and remade through the material realities and discursive practices of the society As many scholars of girlhood have documented (Adams, 1999; Budgeon, 1998; Inness, 1998; McRobbie, 1993; Mitchell, 1995; Nelson &Vallone, 1994; Walkerdine, 1993), ideal girlhood is constantly... demure, attractive, soft-spoken, fifteen pounds underweight, and deferential to men" (p 21) Thus, contemporary meanings of ideal girlhood have changed to accommodate shifting expectations about normative femininity and the role of women in the 21st century Normative femininity is in a liminal state with the old markers of normative girlhood such as prettiness alongside the new markers of assertiveness... The result of such regulatory practices in our society is the production of 1 LANDSCAPES OF GIRLHOOD 11 "docile" bodies Bartky (1990) describes how these regulatory practices function in school: The student, then, is enclosed within a classroom and assigned to a desk he cannot leave; his ranking in the class can be read off the position of his desk in the serially ordered and segmented space of the classroom . and Lapan, Eds. • Foundations of Research: Methods of Inquiry in Education and the Social Sciences Bettis and Adams, Eds. • Geographies of Girlhood: Identities In-Between Tutwiler . hallways to the Internet to discourses of cheerleading, race, sexuality, and ablebodiness. These are the geographies of girlhood, the important sites of identity construction for girls . and young women, and we situate this collection of studies within the fledgling field of Girls Studies. Because Geographies of Girlhood is about the various spaces in which