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Introduction to Focus: Girlhood
American Book Review Pub Date : 2021-04-19
Christine Hume, Christina Milletti

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Introduction to Focus:Girlhood
  • Christine Hume (bio) and Christina Milletti (bio)

"All stories begin with girls," Kathy Acker once wrote. Whether the raw and rebellious agencies of girls were a source of her unconventional narratives, or Acker's experimental aesthetic required more vulnerable/less predictable characters to accompany her equally unpredictable (cut-up and play-giarized) prose, the publishing industry appears, several decades later, to have arrived at a similar conclusion. Now, a seemingly endless surge in book titles with "girled" formulations (think: Girl with the Dragon Tattoo [2005] and Gone Girl [2012] among so many others) regularly swell bookstore shelves. Who are these girls? What's their appeal? Why so many of them? Are they even girls at all? Novelist Emily St. John Mandel crunches the numbers for us. After eliminating YA and children's books from a pool of over 2000 volumes, she noted that 79% of books with "girl" in the title were written by women, and that the girl protagonist was much more likely to end up dead or missing if the author was a man: almost three times as often in fact. Curiously, though perhaps not surprisingly, St. John Mandel also learned that the showcased "girl" was usually not a girl at all—over 70% of the time she would be best described as a woman. Even when we recognize girls, it seems, we only look obliquely at them. We kill or disappear them. We look past them to the women they become.

St. John Mandel's results suggest what many of the writers in this special issue reflect on at length: that the figure of the girl is not only embedded by conflicting impulses, but that her agency is marked, even conditioned, by her simultaneous state of visibility and invisibility. Consider the early Fall 2020 controversy over Maïmouna Doucouré's 2020 film Cuties which takes up this issue directly by staging the sexualized messaging that girls—in this case a dance troupe of diverse eleven year olds—receive from their families and peers, from popular culture and social media, as they twerk and gyrate their way to the finals of a dance competition. The calls to cancel the film (and Netflix for promoting it), illuminate how unsettled we are by girl sexuality.

Cuties has us also thinking about our own girlhoods, the girls we know and the girls we mother, the girls they were or will become, the girls we think we see, the girls who struggle to be (not) nice and (not) matter, the girls who feel required to be both sex objects and sexually innocent. We think about how difficult it is to let them be free and to protect them, when we are really only protecting ourselves, pining for our own freedom. The outrage about the film arises directly from misrepresenting its critical narrative, which contextualizes girls' dance within social media culture. One thing is clear from this scandal: addressing the overwhelming pressures girls encounter is undesirable from a culture that systematically relies on those pressures to keep girls hidden, or at least in a powerless state.

In this issue of ABR, our hope is to highlight a selection of books that seek to dig into these issues: works that amplify, contest, and celebrate ideas about girlhood. The layered etymologies embedded in the word "girl" itself might offer perspective on the long history of misunderstood girlhood. The word "girl" derives from the Anglo-Saxon "gyrela," a dress worn by girls, hence the word itself is a metonynm. Also having a hymen, as in female child from birth to marriage. An unmarried woman, no longer a girl, is still a girl. A still-girl, as it were: waiting. Consider this: the Aryan root contains ghwrghw found in the Greek Parthenos—translated, "virgin"—so "girl" equals "virgin" if we incorporate the ancient growl. Taken together, the term "girl" reveals a cluster of relations and affects that re-spin narrative progression, making her uniquely transitive in scope. Judith Butler has dubbed this process of systemic indoctrination "girling" and as she reflects: "Femininity is not the product of a choice, but the forcible citation of a norm whose complex historicity is indissociable from relations...



中文翻译:

焦点介绍:少女时代

代替摘要,这里是内容的简要摘录:

  • 焦点介绍:少女时代
  • 克里斯汀·休姆(生物)和克里斯蒂娜·米莱蒂(生物)

“所有故事都始于女孩,”凯西·阿克尔(Kathy Acker)曾经写道。不管女孩的原始和叛逆的作风是她非常规叙事的源头,还是阿克的实验美学要求更脆弱/较难以预测的角色来陪伴她同样不可预测的(剪裁和戏剧化)散文,出版业出现了几十年后来,得出了类似的结论。现在,带有“女孩”字眼的书名似乎无止境地激增(想想:《龙纹身的女孩》 [2005]和《消失的女孩》[2012]等)定期扩大书店的书架。这些女孩是谁?他们的吸引力是什么?为什么这么多?他们甚至是女孩吗?小说家艾米丽·圣约翰·曼德尔(Emily St. John Mandel)为我们计算数字。从超过2000册图书中删除YA和儿童读物后,她指出,标题中带有“ girl”的书籍中有79%是女性撰写的,如果作者是个男人:实际上几乎是男人的三倍。奇怪的是,虽然也许并不奇怪,但圣约翰·曼德尔还得知,所展示的“女孩”通常根本不是女孩,在70%的时间里,她最能形容为女人。看起来,即使我们认出女孩,我们也只会斜着看着他们。我们杀死或消失它们。

圣约翰·曼德尔(St. John Mandel)的结果表明,本期特刊中的许多作家都在仔细思考:女孩的身影不仅被矛盾的冲动所嵌入,而且她的特质甚至被她同时可见的状态所标记。和隐身。考虑初秋2020争论迈穆娜杜库雷的2020年电影美眉直接通过分期性别化的消息占据了这个问题,女孩,在这种情况下,不同11年的舞蹈团,从他们的家人和同行的年轻人,接收来自流行文化和社会媒体,当他们扭动和旋转自己进入舞蹈比赛决赛的方式时。取消这部电影的电话(以及Netflix宣传这部电影的电话)说明了我们对女孩的性行为有多不安。

美眉让我们也思考自己的少女时代,我们认识的女孩和我们母亲的女孩,他们曾经或将要成为的女孩,我们认为我们看到的女孩,努力变得(不)友善和(不)重要的女孩,这些女孩觉得自己既必须是性对象又要是性纯真。我们考虑让他们自由困难保护他们,而我们实际上只是在保护自己,就追求我们自己的自由。这部电影的愤怒直接源于对关键叙事的误解,后者将社交媒体文化中的女孩舞蹈带入了情境。从这一丑闻中可以清楚地看出一件事:应对一种女孩所面临的压倒性压力,这种文化是系统地依靠这些压力使女孩隐藏或至少处于无能为力的状态所不希望的。

在本期《ABR》中,我们希望着重介绍一些旨在探究这些问题的书籍:放大,争夺和庆祝关于少女时代的作品。嵌入“女孩”一词中的分层词源可能为人们误解了少女时代的悠久历史提供了视角。“女孩”一词源于盎格鲁撒克逊人的“ gyrela”,这是女孩所穿的衣服,因此,该词本身就是一个调子。也有处女膜,如从出生到结婚的女童。一个未婚的女人,不再是一个女孩,仍然是一个女孩。仍然是一个静止的女孩:等待。考虑一下:Aryan根包含在希腊Parthenos中发现的ghwrghw-翻译,“处女”-因此,如果我们结合了古老的咆哮声,“女孩”就等于“处女”。总之,“女孩”一词揭示了一系列关系,并影响了叙事进程的重新旋转,从而使她在范围上具有独特的传递性。朱迪思·巴特勒(Judith Butler)将此过程称为“女孩灌输”,正如她所反映的那样:“女性气质不是选择的产物,而是强制引用了一种规范,其复杂的历史性与关系是不可分割的……

更新日期:2021-04-19
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