Pictures of Girlhood

Pictures of Girlhood PDF

Author: Sarah Hentges

Publisher: McFarland

Published: 2005-11-18

Total Pages: 267

ISBN-13: 0786424028

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Although the "coming of age" story has been a popular film plot for decades, producers have only recently realized the commercial potential of targeting films to adolescent girls. Movies like Clueless, Legally Blonde and Mean Girls have been successfully marketed to teenage girls, as have several well-known independent films. Important as both cultural indicators and catalysts, these films simultaneously demonstrate pop culture's influence on girls' films, and the ability of girls' films to affect pop culture and perceptions of girlhood. This critical survey of film and the modern girl concentrates largely on films of the last two decades, addressing key themes for girls within "coming of age" films, the changing (but not always improving) young feminine paradigm, and the ways these films can be powerful determinants of culture. The first chapter explores the ways in which girls' films construct, reinforce, challenge and dismantle mainstream conceptualizations of sexuality, race and power. The second chapter discusses mainstream limitations of "coming of age" narratives, including recycled plots and stars, treatments of parental and male authority, and adult conceptualizations of adolescence. The third chapter describes girls' experiences within these narratives through such conventions as attitude, teen fashion, music and dance, unsanctioned rites of passage, and race. The fourth chapter covers the negotiation of sex and sexuality, virginity and sexual empowerment. Instructors considering this book for use in a course may request an examination copy here.

Girlhood

Girlhood PDF

Author: Melissa Febos

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2021-03-30

Total Pages: 337

ISBN-13: 1635572533

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National Book Critics Circle Award Winner National Bestseller Lambda Literary Award Finalist NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY TIME * NPR * The Washington Post * Kirkus Reviews * Washington Independent Review of Books * The Millions * Electric Literature * Ms Magazine * Entropy Magazine * Largehearted Boy * Passerbuys “Irreverent and original.” –New York Times “Magisterial.” –The New Yorker “An intoxicating writer.” –The Atlantic “A classic!” –Mary Karr “A true light in the dark.” –Stephanie Danler “An essential, heartbreaking project.” –Carmen Maria Machado A gripping set of stories about the forces that shape girls and the adults they become. A wise and brilliant guide to transforming the self and our society. In her powerful new book, critically acclaimed author Melissa Febos examines the narratives women are told about what it means to be female and what it takes to free oneself from them. When her body began to change at eleven years old, Febos understood immediately that her meaning to other people had changed with it. By her teens, she defined herself based on these perceptions and by the romantic relationships she threw herself into headlong. Over time, Febos increasingly questioned the stories she'd been told about herself and the habits and defenses she'd developed over years of trying to meet others' expectations. The values she and so many other women had learned in girlhood did not prioritize their personal safety, happiness, or freedom, and she set out to reframe those values and beliefs. Blending investigative reporting, memoir, and scholarship, Febos charts how she and others like her have reimagined relationships and made room for the anger, grief, power, and pleasure women have long been taught to deny. Written with Febos' characteristic precision, lyricism, and insight, Girlhood is a philosophical treatise, an anthem for women, and a searing study of the transitions into and away from girlhood, toward a chosen self.

Girlhood: Teens around the World in Their Own Voices

Girlhood: Teens around the World in Their Own Voices PDF

Author: Masuma Ahuja

Publisher: Algonquin Young Readers

Published: 2021-02-09

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 1643750119

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What does a teenage girl dream about in Nigeria or New York? How does she spend her days in Mongolia, the Midwest, and the Middle East? All around the world, girls are going to school, working, dreaming up big futures—they are soccer players and surfers, ballerinas and chess champions. Yet we know so little about their daily lives. We often hear about challenges and catastrophes in the news, and about exceptional girls who make headlines. But even though the health, education, and success of girls so often determines the future of a community, we don’t know more about what life is like for the ordinary girls, the ones living outside the headlines. From the Americas to Europe to Africa to Asia to the South Pacific, the thirty teens from twenty-seven countries in Girlhood share their own stories of growing up through diary entries and photographs, and the girls’ stories are put in context with reporting and research that helps us understand the circumstances and communities they live in. This full-color, exuberantly designed volume is a portrait of ordinary girlhood around the world, and of the world, as seen through girls’ eyes.

Justine Kurland: Girl Pictures (Signed Edition)

Justine Kurland: Girl Pictures (Signed Edition) PDF

Author:

Publisher: Aperture Direct

Published: 2020-05-26

Total Pages:

ISBN-13: 9781683952183

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The North American frontier is an enduring symbol of romance, rebellion, escape, and freedom. At the same time, it's a profoundly masculine myth--cowboys, outlaws, Beat poets. Photographer Justine Kurland reclaimed this space in her now-iconic series of images of teenage girls, taken between 1997 and 2002 on the road in the American wilderness. "I staged the girls as a standing army of teenaged runaways in resistance to patriarchal ideals," says Kurland. She portrays the girls as fearless and free, tender and fierce. They hunt and explore, braid each other's hair, and swim in sun-dappled watering holes--paying no mind to the camera (or the viewer). Their world is at once lawless and utopian, a frontier Eden in the wild spaces just outside of suburban infrastructure and ideas. Twenty years on, the series still resonates, published here in its entirety and including newly discovered, unpublished images.

International Cinema and the Girl

International Cinema and the Girl PDF

Author: Fiona Handyside

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2016-04-29

Total Pages: 219

ISBN-13: 1137388927

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From the precocious charms of Shirley Temple to the box-office behemoth Frozen and its two young female leads, Anna and Elsa, the girl has long been a figure of fascination for cinema. The symbol of (imagined) childhood innocence, the site of intrigue and nostalgia for adults, a metaphor for the precarious nature of subjectivity itself, the girl is caught between infancy and adulthood, between objectification and power. She speaks to many strands of interest for film studies: feminist questions of cinematic representation of female subjects; historical accounts of shifting images of girls and childhood in the cinema; and philosophical engagements with the possibilities for the subject in film. This collection considers the specificity of girls' experiences and their cinematic articulation through a multicultural feminist lens which cuts across the divides of popular/art-house, Western/non Western, and north/south. Drawing on examples from North and South America, Asia, Africa, and Europe, the contributors bring a new understanding of the global/local nature of girlhood and its relation to contemporary phenomena such as post-feminism, neoliberalism and queer subcultures. Containing work by established and emerging scholars, this volume explodes the narrow post-feminist canon and expands existing geographical, ethnic, and historical accounts of cinematic cultures and girlhood.

Girls on Fire

Girls on Fire PDF

Author: Sarah Hentges

Publisher: McFarland

Published: 2018-04-04

Total Pages: 290

ISBN-13: 1476631441

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 Under the threat of climate change, corruption, inequality and injustice, Americans may feel they are living in a dystopian novel come to life. Like many American narratives, dystopian stories often focus on males as the agents of social change. With a focus on the intersections of race, gender, class, sexuality and power, the author analyzes the themes, issues and characters in young adult (YA) dystopian fiction featuring female protagonists—the Girls on Fire who inspire progressive transformation for the future.

Queer Girls, Temporality and Screen Media

Queer Girls, Temporality and Screen Media PDF

Author: Whitney Monaghan

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2016-04-20

Total Pages: 192

ISBN-13: 113755598X

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This book takes up the queer girl as a represented and rhetorical figure within film, television and video. In 1987, Canada’s Degrassi Junior High featured one of TV’s first queer teen storylines. Contained to a single episode, it was promptly forgotten within both the series and popular culture more generally. Cut to 2016 – queer girls are now major characters in films and television series around the globe. No longer represented as subsidiary characters within forgettable storylines, queer girls are a regular feature of contemporary screen media. Analysing the terms of this newfound visibility, Whitney Monaghan provides a critical perspective on this, arguing that a temporal logic underpins many representations of queer girlhood. Examining an archive of screen texts that includes teen television series and teenpics, art-house, queer and independent cinemas as well as new forms of digital video, she expands current discourse on both queer representation and girls’ studies by looking at sexuality through themes of temporality. This book, the first full-length study of its kind, draws on concepts of boredom, nostalgia and transience to offer a new perspective on queer representation in contemporary screen media.

The Australian Country Girl: History, Image, Experience

The Australian Country Girl: History, Image, Experience PDF

Author: Catherine Driscoll

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-03-23

Total Pages: 201

ISBN-13: 1317040899

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The Australian Country Girl: History, Image, Experience offers a detailed analysis of the experience and the image of Australian country girlhood. In Australia, 'country girl' names a field of experiences and life-stories by girls and women who have grown up outside of the demographically dominant urban centres. But it also names a set of ideas about Australia that is surprisingly consistent across the long twentieth century despite also working as an index of changing times. For a long period in Australian history, well before Federation and long after it, public and popular culture openly equated 'Australian character' with rural life. This image of Australian-ness sometimes went by the name of the 'bush man', now a staple of Australian history. This has been counterbalanced post World War II and increased immigration, by an image of sophisticated Australian modernity located in multicultural cities. These images of Australia balance rather than contradict one another in many ways and the more cosmopolitan image of Australia is often in dialogue with that preceding image of 'the bush'. This book does not offer a corrective to the story of Australian national identity but rather a fresh perspective on this history and a new focus on the ever-changing experience of Australian rural life. It argues that the country girl has not only been a long-standing counterpart to the Australian bush man she has, more importantly, figured as a point of dialogue between the country and the city for popular culture and for public sphere narratives about Australian society and identity.

The Bricks before Brown

The Bricks before Brown PDF

Author: Marisela Martinez-Cola

Publisher: University of Georgia Press

Published: 2022-08-01

Total Pages: 227

ISBN-13: 0820362042

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In 1954 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that state laws establishing racial segregation are unconstitutional, declaring “separate is inherently unequal.” Known as a seminal Supreme Court case and civil rights victory, Brown v. Board of Education resulted from many legal battles that predicated its existence. Marisela Martinez-Cola writes about the many important cases that led to the culmination of Brown. She reveals that the road to Brown is lined with “bricks” representing at least one hundred other families who legally challenged segregated schooling in state and federal courts across the country, eleven of which involved Chinese American, Native American, and Mexican American plaintiffs. By revealing the significance of Chinese American, Native American, and Mexican American segregation cases, Martinez-Cola provides an opportunity for an increasingly diverse America to be fully invested in the complete grand narrative of the civil rights movement. To illustrate the evolution of these cases, she focuses on three court cases from California, including these stories as part of the “long civil rights movement,” and thus expands our understanding of the scope of that movement along racial, gender, and class lines. Comparing and discussing the meaning of the other court cases that led to the Brown decision strengthens the standing of Brown while revealing all the twists and turns inherent in the struggle for equality.

Crisis Cinema in the Middle East

Crisis Cinema in the Middle East PDF

Author: Shohini Chaudhuri

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2022-06-16

Total Pages: 329

ISBN-13: 1350190527

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In recent years, the Arab world and Iran have been afflicted by cataclysmic events, among them brutal state crackdowns of revolutions. Yet, filmmakers have persisted in their desire to tell their stories, against the odds, in creative acts that attest to their imagination, courage and resilience. In this book, Shohini Chaudhuri examines a broad range of films made during the tumultuous period since 2009, ranging from internationally award-winning festival favourites, such as For Sama (2019), Capernaum (2018) and Taxi Tehran (2015), to lesser-known films from the region. While freedom of expression is often understood through the lens of state censorship, she reveals the different types of obstacles that filmmakers face and their strategies for overcoming them so that those constraints are transformed into creative opportunities. Using her original interviews with filmmakers such as Waad al-Kateab, Yasmin Fedda, Larissa Sansour, Mani Haghighi and Ossama Mohammed, she identifies nine creative strategies for producing work under conditions of crisis. Chaudhuri argues that creativity is indelibly shaped by constraints, whether these are externally imposed by existing materials, funding and socio-political conditions, or self-imposed constraints, through choices of genre or acceptance of rules and responsibilities.She shows that the range of creative strategies emanating from the region is much wider than allegory and becoming ever more direct. She thus opens up new lines of inquiry into cinematic creativity in sites of conflict and crisis in the Middle East and beyond.