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."
- Table of Contents
- Acknowledgments
- List of Illustrations
- Introduction: Towards a Genealogy of Girlhood
- Part I. Becoming a Girl
- 1. The Girl of the Period
- 2. Feminine Adolescence
- 3. Puberty
- Part II. Becoming a Woman
- 4. Daughters: Theories of Girlhood
- 5. Sex and the Single Girl: Studies in Girlhood
- 6. Becoming Bride: Girls and Cultural Studies
- Part III. Girls and Cultural Production
- 7. Distraction: Girls and Mass Culture
- 8. In Visible Bodies
- 9. The Girl Market and Girl Culture
- Conclusion: The Girl of the Century
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
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