Between femininities: ambivalence, identity, and the education of girls
2004; Association of College and Research Libraries; Volume: 41; Issue: 08 Linguagem: Inglês
10.5860/choice.41-4794
ISSN1943-5975
Autores Tópico(s)Gender Roles and Identity Studies
ResumoBETWEEN FEMININITIES: Ambivalence, Identity and Education of Girls Marnina Gonick Albany: State University of New York, 2003; 225 pp. The 1990s signalled international decade on girl child. The decade also marked a renewed and revitalized interest in girl resulting in a profusion of scholarly research on girls and young women. While earlier research tended to be traditionally anchored in adolescent studies, rooted within a psychological paradigm, more recent research incorporates feminist, postmodernist and postcolonial critiques. These latter critiques have been particularly effective in challenging and rupturing binaries entrenched in essentialist divisions between victimized girls of South and liberated girls of North, as well as binary constructions of femininity as virgin or vamp. Marnina Gonick's Between Femininities constitutes one such refreshingly innovative and contemporary approach to researching girls' lives and realities. Between Femininities can be situated within that discursive space between post-structuralist theorizing pertaining to influence of institutional and normative structures and postmodernist privileging of girls' voices, resistance and agency. Written in almost poetic prose, Gonick traces her ethnographic journey as she works with a group of young girls on a mandated school project. The point of departure for her analysis lies in discursively reconstituting, tracing and rendering intelligible different constructive and constitutive ways in which femininities are understood, articulated, and practised in daily life. Through collective process of making a video entitled About By Us, focusing on narratives of fictionalized girls, she recaptures and represents oftentimes contradictory and ambivalent discursive strategies that are used by girls participating in this collective project as they negotiate and articulate different constructions of femininities. Gonick skilfully confronts epistemological and methodological problems that confound and compound ethnographic inquiry. Disrupting any notion of innocence, she clearly and sometimes painfully articulates yawning gaps and desires that puncture assumptions of ideal ethnographer as s/he attempts to reach across and bridge chasm between researcher and researched. In her analysis, Gonick recounts her slippage into categories of mentor, companion and confidante, blurring distances between these categories and, in process, herself occupying a liminal space; latter being accentuated by longevity of project, her growing familiarity with girls, and lapsed time between data gathering and analytical writing of their stories. Rather than presenting us with a concise map of ethnographic journey, culminating in a defined range of discursive strategies that result in whole and distinct femininities, Gonick interrupts and punctuates her journey with theoretical asides that complement and inform inserted extracts from transcriptions bearing girls' voices. As she attests, the result is a map of bits and pieces, of paths begun and than abandoned, of enticing trails that lead nowhere and of completely contradictory coordinates (pp. 15-16). Nevertheless, not all discursive threads in this book are rendered incoherent by their seeming lack of closure. On contrary, it is this very lack of closure that provides a rich description of layered, interwoven and emergent discourses that are constitutive of gendered, raced, and classed locations of these girls. …
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