No abstract

No abstract

This article engages with the research method of collective biography. We are particularly interested in what the question of difference brings to bear on the collective biography process. The aim of embodied writing in the collective biography process is “to tell the memory in such a way that it is vividly imaginable by others, such that those others can extend their own imaginable experience of being in the world through knowing the particularity of another” (Davies & Gannon). However, our own attempt to work with the method had us grappling with how to engage with a story that did not elicit understanding and identification but rather evoked, for some, a sense of incommensurable difference. By bringing together a poststructural concern with power relationships and a Deleuzian interest in engendering new synergies and possibilities, the article makes a theoretical contribution to new conceptual repertoires on the question of difference and its implications for feminist research.

No abstract

If the 1990s 'girl' was represented by Ophelia and the call for her rescue (Pipher, 1994), the 2000s have seen the rise of a new 'it girl' who, like Ophelia, is also used to mark a perceived crisis of girlhood. The vulnerable girl has recently been replaced by the 'mean girl' in public consciousness. Nowhere is this concern more visible than in the proliferation of best-selling books such as Rachel Simmond's Odd Girl Out: The Hidden Aggression in Girls (2003), Rosalind Wiseman's Queen Bees and Wannabees (2002), Emily White's Fast Girls: Teenage Tribes and the Myth of the Slut (2002), and Sharon Lamb's The Secret Lives of Girls: What Good Girls Really Do -Sex Play, Aggression, and their Guilt (2002). Each of these books is a consideration of the trials and tribulations of relationships between girls -their friendships, fights and foes.In this article, I pose a series of questions about the links between the explosion of popular, professional and academic interest in, and concern about, 'the mean girl' to a public anxiety and cultural fascination with girls and girlhood more generally. These questions are meant to trouble common sense understandings of girls and the current media fascination with, and representation of, their relationships, and to reveal an intriguing contradiction in its discursive construction and deployment. On the one hand, discussions about the 'problem' of young women's relationships gone-wrong are used in the media as a cultural symbol of disorder, moral decay, and social instability in North American society more broadly. Yet at the same time, the treatment and resolution of the problem is almost always articulated in individualized and individualizing terms. This ambivalence about young women and the contradictory uses of the 'mean girl' offer critical insights into new discursive constructions of femininity in a time where, as McRobbie has suggested, girls have replaced youth as the metaphor for social change (2000: 201).