Master of Arts / Department of History / Bonnie Lynn-Sherow / At the conclusion of the first decade of the twentieth century, 60 percent of high school graduates were women. They were also the first generation of young women to be labeled as “adolescents” by psychologists. By 1950, the word “teenager” had not only been coined; it was part of everyday vernacular. Historians now recognize that adolescence — as a common set of ideas about how young people behave and interact with society — is a cultural construction that has changed over time. Using a combination of scholarly literature on the subject as well as primary sources to demonstrate and interpret the interplay between the exterior forces that shaped the cultural construction of adolescence and the interior forces that shaped young women's identities, this report addresses both how a collective memory of female adolescent identity arose and how individual memory operated in the context of this collective identity. Applying theories of collective memory to the individual diaries of six young women who came of age between 1870 and 1940, this analysis represents a departure from the traditional use of diaries in historical scholarship and provides a fresh approach to the analysis of collective memory.

Working within the filmic fairy tale adaptation cycle that emerged between 2005 and 2015, this thesis investigates how girlhood is cinematically constructed through the lens of fantasy, in relation to gendered representation in media. The relationship between femininity and fairy tales is well-established. By reading contemporary filmic adaptations of the tales, the thesis deconstructs gendered myth-making and reveals the extent to which fairy tale imagery and plot continue to inform cultural constructions of girlhood. It argues that by centring upon young female protagonists and often targeting a young female audience, this cycle constitutes a newly emerging young woman’s cinema. In doing so, the thesis relates the contemporary fairy tale adaptation cycle back to gendered histories of media and genres traditionally associated with female audiences (such as the Female Gothic, the Melodrama, the Costume Drama and so on). The thesis analyses their similar narrative strategies of using iconographical objects, haunted spaces and evocative settings. The cycle’s cultural denigration is critiqued for its association with mainstream and primarily female audiences. The act of adapting fairy tales to construct girlhood through fantasy thus necessitates exploring the ideological implications of gendered genres, their narrative strategies as well as complex processes of adaptation, from tale to screen. How these films, by centralising girlhood, explore female fantasies and desires, trauma, gendered violence and coming of age, is explored throughout. The thesis argues that a highly specific mode of girlhood comes to the fore in this cycle, within particular cultural (social, racial and narrative) parameters. This mode of fairy tale girlhood is imperilled, spectacular and exclusionary, generating disturbing implications of how young women are represented and addressed in popular media. As in women’s films of previous eras in film history, however, the fairy tale adaptation cycle both reinforces and challenges the rigid parameters in which girlhood is cinematically imagined.

The historic portrayal of the teenage girl in cinema as a mythical, sexual, hyper feminine and contemporary creature makes way for a specific but fairly common trope. Namely a trope where the teenage girl is used to elicit nostalgia and romance for the male protagonist, specifically because of her trauma and pain. The connection between the youth, femininity, pain and her status as contemporary is what makes the teenage girl an especially nostalgic object. Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides is a film that perfectly highlights and exaggerates this trope. By analyzing this film as well as comparing it to earlier examples, this essay will problematize this portrayal and locate its roots. This essay will analyze these examples and compare them to the general portrayal of the teenage girl in cinema during the twentieth century. By looking at The Virgin Suicides through the theory of the male gaze and the female spectacle, Coppola’s highlighting of this trope becomes clear. This essay concludes that it is unclear if Coppola subverts or simply leans into this trope, but it becomes evident that it is a trope built on the fact that pain and deadness is the height of perfect femininity. Perfect femininity in turn can only be achieved during adolescence, and therefore, the trauma of female adolescence becomes nostalgic.

Submitted by Johnny Rodrigues (johnnyrodrigues@ufcg.edu.br) on 2018-08-30T17:22:31Z No. of bitstreams: 1 VIRGÍNIA PALMEIRA MOREIRA - PPGCS DISSERTAÇÃO 2013..pdf: 32184499 bytes, checksum: cf95a28542a239477b565da8675ef9ee (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2018-08-30T17:22:31Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 VIRGÍNIA PALMEIRA MOREIRA - PPGCS DISSERTAÇÃO 2013..pdf: 32184499 bytes, checksum: cf95a28542a239477b565da8675ef9ee (MD5) Previous issue date: 2013-08-29 / Capes / O interior do corpo feminino tem sido ao longo do tempo submetido a imagens e representações, que buscam dar significado a eventos que, se iniciando dentro do organismo da mulher, geram comportamentos e condutas que respondem mais a uma dinâmica sociocultural do que propriamente, biológica. Entre estes eventos, nos detemos mais detalhadamente nesta dissertação sobre a menstruação, cuja experiência permeada por múltiplas influências de ordem social, cultural e econômica, as quais se expressam em aspectos como crenças e valores, fazendo daquela, um momento marcante para pensar sobre a dimensão simbólica que envolve o corpo feminino e suas singularidades. Nesta pesquisa temos como objetivo principal analisar as práticas e discursos referentes à menstruação a partir de um conjunto de mulheres pertencentes a diferentes grupos etários, enxergando o contexto social em que estas mulheres estão inseridas, percebendo como suas falas estão organizadas dentro de uma lógica cultural em que as transformações do corpo feminino são marcadas por sentimentos e emoções resultantes da intersecção entre natureza e cultura. / The interior of the female body has been over time subjected to images and representations that seek to give meaning to events, even if starting inside the woman's body, generate behaviors and behaviors that respond more to a socio-cultural dynamics, than, properly, biological. Among these events, we pause in more detail in this dissertation about menstruation, as an axis to reflect on how the menstrual experience is permeated by multiple influences of social, cultural, economic, to express themselves in what looks like beliefs and values, making this, a remarkable moment to think about the symbolic dimension that involves the female body and its singularities. In this research, our main goal, to analyze the practices and discourses of menstruation in a group of women belonging to different age groups, seeing the social context in which these women are embedded realizing how these lines are organized within a cultural logic in that the transformation of the female body are marked by feelings and emotions that make this experience one variable relevant to discuss the body as a space of intersection between nature and culture.