This dissertation examines the question of girlhood as a social and legal category, within contemporary feminist frameworks. Turning to Jamaica today, girls are disproportionately apprehended by the law and sentenced to prison for a range of so-called deviant behaviors. Colloquially, they are known as uncontrollable girls, and the law that incarcerates them, the uncontrollable law. This dissertation examines how girlhood has long been a site of Jamaican governance. I argue that the figure of the uncontrollable girl and the uncontrollable law must be analyzed as a project of state building, revealing carceral and colonial logics from chattel slavery into the present. Further, I examine the perceived deviance or vulnerability that girlhood elicits—as a dissident body that transgresses, or an innocent class in need of legal protection. Drawing across multiple discursive domains—from archival travelogues, colonial acts and amendments, to contemporary newspapers, legal documents, Jamaican literature, and ethnographic fieldwork—the dissertation situates girlhood as an analytic lens through which we might better understand how Jamaican citizenship, rights, and political futures are forestalled or qualified. The historical particularity of Jamaica exemplifies the role the state plays in discursively producing and surveilling the domestic—from the intimate register of the family to the everyday lives of girls.

This study addresses the academic, social, and self-image self-concepts of females ages 13-17 who are labeled emotionally and behaviorally disordered by their public school systems and are in residential treatment, and females ages 13-17 who are adjudicated, or labeled “juvenile offenders” and are involved with the juvenile justice system. The purpose of this study is to examine and compare the self-concepts of these populations of adolescent females. Research questions focus on whether or not there is a difference in the confidence scores of self-image, academic, and social self-concepts, the importance scores of self-image, academic, and social self-concepts, and the confidence composite and outcome composite scores among female adolescents according to whether or not the female is adjudicated. Results show no statistically significant differences on seven of the eight measures. On the eighth measure, a statistically significant difference was found, with the non-offenders having a higher Outcome Confidence Composite score than the offenders.