A New Wave of Girl Power
When I first heard that Girl’s Studies was being offered at UCF, I honestly believed that it was a class created specifically for our University. I assumed that we would be studying an array of issues currently affecting young girls – the influence of pop culture and mass media, body image, sexual autonomy, familial and friendly relationships, etc. – but I had no idea that Girl’s Studies was an established field of scientific and scholarly research until cracking open the books for this week’s reading. Upon finishing “Young Femininity,” I began to realize that the Girl’s Studies movement is very similar to that of the feminist Women’s movement. There have been eras, or waves, of study within the Girl’s movement that differ in the ways research has been conducted, and in the proposed methods with which to tackle and define the issues girls face on an everyday basis. According to “Young Femininity,” for example, the early Girl’s Studies researchers focused on girlhood as
More recent methods of defining and constructing girlhood, however, parallel the Women’s Studies’ Third Wave movement, in that they are beginning to include concepts of intersectionality within the identities of girls. These researchers “draw attention to the social, cultural, historical, and political dimensions of how we define youth” (Aapola 5). Likewise, this wave of Girl’s Studies recognizes that despite all of the outstanding advancements made for girls over the last few decades, “these opportunities are not available to all young women in the same way or to the same extent” (Aapola 6). The Girl’s Studies movement has thus been taken from a level of understanding all girls as a singular creature to recognizing their individuality, autonomy, and voices from the social, political, and cultural contexts in which they are growing and developing. This is extremely important in valuing each and every girl, and making sure that she is welcome and heard within the struggle for gender equality.
After reading “All About the Girl,” I was amused to find myself in a women’s bathroom at the UCF football game, debating whether or not I believed Michelle Fine’s depiction of it as a space for “radical possibility” among women and girls (xii). After letting an older woman and a young girl jump ahead of me in line, I couldn’t help but smile to myself as the three of us began to share stories of small bladders, embarrassing bathroom incidents, and an actual sense of shared understanding about these experiences based on what Fine calls our “thin reed of biology (Fine xii). It was in this instant that I began to understand what I hope to achieve through a Girl’s Studies course – connection, consciousness raising, and real change. Through our future studies as a class, I am excited to learn from the readings, and each other, about other’s experiences, as well as our own, and to then use these personal sources to turn Girl’s Studies into a political movement which will benefit women and girls of all ages.
“simply a physical and emotional stage of development along the linear path to female adulthood that all young women experience in more or less the same ways… experiences of growing up girl are supposed to transcend the individual and the specific” (Aapola 5).
More recent methods of defining and constructing girlhood, however, parallel the Women’s Studies’ Third Wave movement, in that they are beginning to include concepts of intersectionality within the identities of girls. These researchers “draw attention to the social, cultural, historical, and political dimensions of how we define youth” (Aapola 5). Likewise, this wave of Girl’s Studies recognizes that despite all of the outstanding advancements made for girls over the last few decades, “these opportunities are not available to all young women in the same way or to the same extent” (Aapola 6). The Girl’s Studies movement has thus been taken from a level of understanding all girls as a singular creature to recognizing their individuality, autonomy, and voices from the social, political, and cultural contexts in which they are growing and developing. This is extremely important in valuing each and every girl, and making sure that she is welcome and heard within the struggle for gender equality.
After reading “All About the Girl,” I was amused to find myself in a women’s bathroom at the UCF football game, debating whether or not I believed Michelle Fine’s depiction of it as a space for “radical possibility” among women and girls (xii). After letting an older woman and a young girl jump ahead of me in line, I couldn’t help but smile to myself as the three of us began to share stories of small bladders, embarrassing bathroom incidents, and an actual sense of shared understanding about these experiences based on what Fine calls our “thin reed of biology (Fine xii). It was in this instant that I began to understand what I hope to achieve through a Girl’s Studies course – connection, consciousness raising, and real change. Through our future studies as a class, I am excited to learn from the readings, and each other, about other’s experiences, as well as our own, and to then use these personal sources to turn Girl’s Studies into a political movement which will benefit women and girls of all ages.
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