Girls: Feminine Adolescence in Popular Culture and Cultural Theory

by Catherine Driscoll

Overview

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."

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780231119122
Publisher:	Columbia University Press
Publication date:	08/21/2002
Pages:	352
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.20(h) x 1.00(d)
Lexile:	1590L (what's this?)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Catherine Driscoll is Senior Lecturer in the Department of English at the University of Adelaide, Australia. She has published essays in various scholarly journals and books, most recently Deleuze and Feminism and South Atlantic Quarterly.

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

What People are Saying About This

Jennifer Wicke

Catherine Driscoll's book is a truly enlightening foray into a complex cultural thicket, rife with mystification, ignorance, and special pleading. Girls and girlhood become the locus for an extraordinary tour de force in Girls, a primer of modern thought, a contribution to cultural theory, and an explication of the cultural practices which have located that evanescent, ineffable creation -- the Girl -- at the heart of both public and private spheres.

— Jennifer Wicke, University of Virginia

Editorial Reviews

The result is an erudite and crisp exegesis of many contemporary theorists, interspersed with readings of popular culture itself.... it is a smart and suggestive intellectual montage.

Jane H. Huntern Studies

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.'

Family Therapy

A lucid and original study of girl culture... both challenging and rewarding.

Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory - Emma Liggins

The result is an erudite and crisp exegesis of many contemporary theorists, interspersed with readings of popular culture itself.... it is a smart and suggestive intellectual montage.

American Studies - Jane H. Hunter

A lucid and original study of girl culture... both challenging and rewarding.

— Emma Liggins

Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory

The result is an erudite and crisp exegesis of many contemporary theorists, interspersed with readings of popular culture itself.... it is a smart and suggestive intellectual montage.

— Jane H. Hunter

American Studies