Revisiting Girls' Studies

Mazzarella, Sharon R.; Pecora, Norma

doi:10.1080/17482790701339118

Cited by 37 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 62 publications

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“…In contrast, the films offer more limited templates for girls, who are valued for their goodness and compliance, and punished for any behaviour that is considered aberrant. Certainly, the girls in eighties films do not reflect Sharon Mazzarella's assertion that 'there is no longer a single girl in Girls' Studies' 2 ; the successful version of girlhood in these types of films tend toward the singular.…”

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confidence: 90%

Dead Girl Walking: Girlhood and Happy Endings in Heathers: The Musical

Whalley,

Miller

2024

The Methuen Drama Handbook of Gender and Theatre

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This chapter considers how the 2013 musical adaptation of Heathers: The Musical (hereafter Heathers for brevity) unsettles the gendering of adolescent girls in eighties teenfilms, especially in terms of dismantling the traditional idea of the happy ending. The move from screen to stage affords a range of disparate representations not usually found in mainstream Hollywood product. Although itself a populist musical, Heathers offers a subtle radicalism in relationship to its construction of gender models for teenaged girls, and it does this through a subtle refiguring of its source material, and in the case of the 2018 West End version, a confident relationship with social media, and the attendant para-social interaction with contemporary fandom. GirlhoodsIn the opening of her book Girls: Feminine Adolescence in Popular Culture and Cultural Theory, Catherine Driscoll reflects upon being given a book by her grandmother at the onset of puberty. She remembers the book: tells me that I am now a young woman. It tells me to be proud of that in the rather ominous context of warnings about the physical and emotional distresses of being a girl-becoming-a-woman, as well as the difficulty of getting through girlhood as the right kind of woman. 1 This sense of 'girl-becoming-a-woman' being fraught with difficulty is a trope explored in a wide range of cultural products and serves as a central theme in both the cinematic and musical versions of Heathers. The complexity of social discourse, and the delicate balance .

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confidence: 90%

Dead Girl Walking: Girlhood and Happy Endings in Heathers: The Musical

Whalley,

Miller

2024

The Methuen Drama Handbook of Gender and Theatre

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“…Studies such as these raise broad questions about the representation of gender in children's television programming, but they have rarely offered much in the way of detailed analysis of the political and discursive processes that are at play in any textual representation. In exploring the construction of tween girlhood in British children's television, I am not denying the importance of listening to the voices and opinions of the tween audience (Mazzarella and Pecora 2007), nor am I attempting to efface my own position speaking as a white, middleclass, academic feminist who is no longer part of the audience to which these programs are aimed. Instead, it is an initial foray into the unmapped territory of British tween television.…”

Section: Studying British Children's Televisionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Authenticity and Aspiration

Godfrey¹

2018

Girlhood Studies

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I argue that while the tween is understood as having transnational relevance and mobility, this is often emphasized in ways that overlook the national and cultural specificities of tween culture. I argue that the distinctive context of British television history augments the connections between national and transnational paradigms of tween culture in important ways. While authenticity, friendships, and honesty remain foregrounded in a number of Children's British Broadcasting Corporation (CBBC) shows, these are constructed through a national discourse that connects to transnational models of the tween girl but also mobilizes a cultural specificity that is inextricable from the broadcasting context in which it is produced.

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“…In this way, decolonization is not a metaphor or an empty signifi er, as Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang (2012) argue; it is a practice of repatriation. If we approach girls not as problems-to-be-solved or subjects-to-be-rescued but as potential agents who face systemic barriers to their own agency and autonomy, we can stop linking them to research constructions that recolonize their subjectivities and experiences (Mazzarella and Pecora 2007). This is not the fi rst book on girlhood to study the lives of girls within the frameworks of place and geography.…”

Section: Carrie Rentschler and Claudia Mitchellmentioning

confidence: 99%