Canadian females grow up in a sociocultural environment full of contradictory discourses that rarely reflect the social reality they experience. Adolescent girls face abject forms of objectification, sexualization, unequal power relations and high levels of violence in their communities, yet these experiences remain largely unexamined with adolescent girls themselves. In the following thesis I describe a research project I undertook with seven girls between the ages of twelve and fifteen. Using the method biomythography, I ask the girls to tell me who they are in an attempt to determine how these girls relate their social environment to their identity. An analysis of the discourses emerging in the biomythographies as well as in discussion in the research space demonstrates that the girls recognize links with sociocultural environment, yet they do not highlight the effects of this culture on their identity in their biomythographies. Instead, they used the space of the biomythographies to resist, dream, and focus on the best aspects of themselves and those in their social world. At the same time, the physical creation space became an important secondary site of analysis. The analysis of both the biomythographies and the project space demonstrates the importance of girl-only space in the community. Such space allows girls to come together as girls to critique and analyse what it means to grow up female in Canadian society. This space must also provide opportunities for girls to self-reflect on their own social position and identity. / Graduate

Certain unique sights and sounds of video games from the 1980s and 1990s have been codified as a retro game style, celebrated by collectors, historians, and game developers alike. In this report, I argue that this nostalgic celebration has escaped critical scrutiny and in particular omits the diverse experiences of girls and women who may have been alienated by the tough, intimidating nature of a twentieth-century video-game culture that was primarily created by and for boys. Indeed, attempts to attract girls to gaming, such as the 1990s girls' game movement, are usually criticized in or absent from mainstream video-game histories, and girly video games are rarely viewed with the same nostalgic fondness as games like Super Mario Bros. This condition points to a larger cultural practice of trivializing media for girls and, by extension, girlhood and girls themselves. My critical design response to this condition has been twofold. First, I have recuperated and resituated twentieth-century girly games as collectible, valuable, and nostalgic, thereby subverting conventional historical narratives and suggesting that these games have inherent cultural value. Second, I have created new works that reimagine 8-bit style as an expression of nostalgia for twentieth-century girlhood rather than for twentieth-century boyhood. This report contains documentation of some relevant projects I have undertaken, such as the creation of a video-game museum and an 8-bit video game called Electronic Sweet-N Fun Fortune Teller. In these projects and in future works, I hope to disrupt dominant narratives about video game history and nostalgia that continue to marginalize and trivialize girls' and women's experiences and participation in contemporary game cultures. / text

The institution of schooling is one of the most formative spaces in which young people learn about gender norms and expectations. Rather than being a biological given, gender identity is achieved through gender practices and gender achievements (Butler, 1990/1999; Nayak & Kehily, 2008). This study was a year-long ethnography during which I observed an all girls’ after-school club. The club included 15 girls who were in sixth, seventh, and eighth grade. The majority of the club’s participants were African American girls. This ethnography utilized participant observation and interviews. Club documents were also analyzed during data analysis. My primary research question was: How was girlness conceptualized, perpetuated, and performed in an after-school club for middle school girls? Using critical theory and feminist poststructuralism, I investigated the work that goes into creating and maintaining current binary gender formations, and how this is related to race, class, and sexuality.

This study investigates preadolescent girls’ interpretations of images of and messages about women’s bodies presented in both traditional and online media in the American cultural context. Using qualitative methods including in-depth interviews, email diaries, and digital photo collages, this study gives voice to girls aged nine to eleven from diverse racial and socioeconomic backgrounds so that they might tell their stories about interacting with media that is relevant to their relationships with their bodies. Employing objectification theory as well as concepts from the cultural studies tradition, the findings suggest that the process of becoming a female body in the 21st-century American media environment is far more complex than a simple linear, cause-effect equation can express. Differences among girls in terms of media use, degree of media criticism, age, and interpersonal discursive environments moderate their relationships to mediated imagery and to their bodies. The findings also describe the mediated bodily ideal that is most relevant to preadolescent girls, the celebrity girls who embody this ideal, the ways in which girls experience self-objectification and body surveillance, and the nature of girls’ conversations with friends and family members about body-related topics. The study concludes by providing recommendations to concerned researchers, educators, and parents.

This thesis looks at how a contemporary notion of successful girlhood is negotiated in the social text of Seventeen magazine. Moreover, it demonstrates the ways in which Seventeen’s representations of successful and ideal girls reflect and mediate timely values of postfeminism and neoliberalism. This thesis will also make visible how race, class, ability, and sexuality are negotiated within Seventeen’s “success” framework, in order to illuminate intersectional issues implicit in conceptualizing ideal girlhood. The method for this research is a semiotic discourse analysis, looking at the visual and linguistic signs within the text in order to connect them with broader ideologies and themes surrounding contemporary ideal girlhood. Drawing on girls’ studies and feminist cultural studies literature, the discourse of ideal girlhood is situated in a so-called “postfeminist” moment, in which girls, as popular, highly visible subjects in contemporary society, are perceived to be poised for achievement and social ascension, all while being closely surveilled. These expectations of postfeminism intersect with current neoliberal principles of individualized success; analysis is therefore connected with and contextualized by discussion of late modern principles of neoliberalism and its economic, social, and political logic.

This thesis looks at how a contemporary notion of successful girlhood is negotiated in the social text of Seventeen magazine. Moreover, it demonstrates the ways in which Seventeen’s representations of successful and ideal girls reflect and mediate timely values of postfeminism and neoliberalism. This thesis will also make visible how race, class, ability, and sexuality are negotiated within Seventeen’s “success” framework, in order to illuminate intersectional issues implicit in conceptualizing ideal girlhood. The method for this research is a semiotic discourse analysis, looking at the visual and linguistic signs within the text in order to connect them with broader ideologies and themes surrounding contemporary ideal girlhood. Drawing on girls’ studies and feminist cultural studies literature, the discourse of ideal girlhood is situated in a so-called “postfeminist” moment, in which girls, as popular, highly visible subjects in contemporary society, are perceived to be poised for achievement and social ascension, all while being closely surveilled. These expectations of postfeminism intersect with current neoliberal principles of individualized success; analysis is therefore connected with and contextualized by discussion of late modern principles of neoliberalism and its economic, social, and political logic.

This thesis looks at how a contemporary notion of successful girlhood is negotiated in the social text of Seventeen magazine. Moreover, it demonstrates the ways in which Seventeen’s representations of successful and ideal girls reflect and mediate timely values of postfeminism and neoliberalism. This thesis will also make visible how race, class, ability, and sexuality are negotiated within Seventeen’s “success” framework, in order to illuminate intersectional issues implicit in conceptualizing ideal girlhood. The method for this research is a semiotic discourse analysis, looking at the visual and linguistic signs within the text in order to connect them with broader ideologies and themes surrounding contemporary ideal girlhood. Drawing on girls’ studies and feminist cultural studies literature, the discourse of ideal girlhood is situated in a so-called “postfeminist” moment, in which girls, as popular, highly visible subjects in contemporary society, are perceived to be poised for achievement and social ascension, all while being closely surveilled. These expectations of postfeminism intersect with current neoliberal principles of individualized success; analysis is therefore connected with and contextualized by discussion of late modern principles of neoliberalism and its economic, social, and political logic.

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This dissertation project seeks to address the sociological processes, dynamics, and mechanisms inflecting how and why U.S. society reproduces a sexually dimorphic, binary gender structure. The project builds upon the work of sociologists of gender on the doing gender framework, intersectional feminist approaches to identity formation, and hegemonic masculinity and relational theories of gender. In a 2012 article in Social Science and Medicine presenting contemporary concepts in gender theory to the health-oriented readers of the journal, R. W. Connell argues that much public policy on gender and health relies on categorical understandings of gender that are now inadequate. Connell contends that poststructuralist theories highlighting the performativity of gender improve on the assumption of a categorical binary typical in public policy, but they ignore the insights of sociological theories emphasizing gender as a structure comprising emotional and material constraints of the complex inter-relations among social institutions in which performances of gender are embedded. According to Connell, it is the task of social scientists to uncover “the processes by which social worlds are brought into being through time – the ontoformativity, not just the performativity, of gender.” This project explores the ontoformativity of gender in consideration of Patricia Hill Collins’ concept of the four domains of power. According to Collins, matrices of domination are intersecting and interlocking axes of oppression including but not limited to race/ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, nation, age, ability, place, and religion that reproduce social inequalities through their interoperation in the cultural, interpersonal, structural, and disciplinary domains of power. West and Zimmerman contrast gender as an axis in the matrix of oppression with site-specific roles, arguing that gender is a master status that is omnirelevant to all situations such that a person is assessed in terms of their competences in performing activities as a man or a woman. The doing gender approach has been accused of theorizing gender as an immutably monolithic social inequality. This project seeks to explicate the dynamics of gender ideology by probing its weaknesses in the interpersonal and cultural domains of power. As Collins and coauthor Sirma Bilge posit, for people oppressed along axes of gender, race/ethnicity, class, age, place, ability, and other binaries that constrain their actions in the structural and disciplinary domains of power, “the music, dance, poetry, and art of the cultural domain of power and personal politics of the interpersonal domain grow in significance.” Each of the three components of the dissertation project addresses a facet of mechanisms and processes of the interpersonal and cultural domains of power in (re)producing the binary gender structure in U.S. society. Paper #1, titled, “Integrating Black Feminist Thought into Canonical Social Change Theory,” explicates how people in marginalized social locations mount definitional challenges to their received classifications in the cultural domain of power by rejecting the consciousness of the oppressor and wielding rearticulated collective identity-based standpoints as contextually attuned technologies of power to recast historical narratives. Paper #2, with teenaged co-researcher Emma Draper, titled “Ordering Gender: Interactional Accountability and the Social Accomplishment of Gender Among Adolescents in the U.S. South,” maps how youth theorize interactional accountability processes to binary gender expectations in the interlocking social institutions of medicine, the family, schools, and peer social networks. Paper #3 is a book proposal comprising an introductory chapter. The book will tell the story of how young feminist arts-activists challenge the binary gender structure through resistance in the cultural and interpersonal domains.

This dissertation reveals that the various, often conflicting media representations of cheerleaders are responsible for the many ways gender and power are refracted through the lens of American popular culture and on the bodies of American youth. Beginning in the circumscribed nineteenth century world of elite male privilege, the history of cheerleading is intimately connected to the discourse of masculinity in America. It is not until almost one hundred years after the activity’s birth that its primary narrative changes from one of masculinity to one of power. This project calls attention to the ways in which sociohistoric context impacts representations of cheerleaders. My interdisciplinary project draws on sources from the popular press; children’s, adult, and mainstream literature, film, and television; material culture; and interviews with cheerleaders themselves; and engages with existing cheerleading scholarship as well as literary criticism and feminist scholarship. Each chapter interrogates a different, related trend in the cultural representation of cheerleaders, including: competing narratives of victimization, im/perfection, and popularity; a third wave feminist vision of gendered superpower; prescriptions of beauty and behavior; pornography and its connection to the professionalization of cheer; and the performance of representation by actual cheerleaders. Taken together, these chapters trace patterns of representation, fraught with nuance and complexity, to provide a picture of a shifting cultural icon whose relationship to larger social movements is often reciprocal and who challenges societal expectations of gender and generation over three centuries. / text