Becoming Girl : Collective Biography and the Production of Girlhood

Located within the interdisciplinary field of girlhood studies, this collection demonstrates how memories can be used to investigate the ways in which girlhood is culturally, historically, and socially constructed. Narrative vignettes of memory are produced and investigated to explore relations of power, longing, and belonging, and to critically examine the ways in which girlhood is constituted.

Becoming Girl interrogates the everyday of girlhood through the collaborative feminist methodology of collective biography. Located within the emergent interdisciplinary field of girlhood studies, this scholarly collection demonstrates how memories can be used to investigate the ways in which girlhood is culturally, historically, and socially constructed. Narrative vignettes of memory are produced and collaboratively investigated to explore relations of power, longing, and belonging, and to critically examine the ways in which girlhood is constituted. These are snapshot moments that, when analyzed, expose the social, embodied, and affective processes of “becoming girl,” making them visible in new ways. Incorporating the concepts of Gilles Deleuze, Judith Butler, and Michel Foucault, the authors investigate food, popular culture, sexuality, difference, literacy, family photographs, and trauma.

Bringing together international and interdisciplinary girlhood scholars, this volume provides an innovative, inclusive, and collaborative method for understanding the relationship between the individual and the collective.