Getting Girls and Teens into the Vocabularies of Citizenship

Abstract

This article addresses the invisibility of teenage girls within and outside of feminist theory and citizenship studies from the perspective of girlhood studies. Most often addressed as individuals in need of protection, girls and adolescent females are seldom considered political citizen-subjects. In addition, because they do not fit within existing frameworks of analysis, some of their citizenship practices, including mediamaking, are not acknowledged as forms of political agentivity or political participation. Drawing on my past and current research with Francophone teenage girls in Canada, I highlight and problematize this denial in a way that underlines the need for girlhood studies to politicize its vocabulary so that teenage girls can become part of us rather than women-to-become in feminist citizenship studies and others areas of inquiry in which youth citizenship is being re-theorized. I argue that such politicization broadens what girls' health entails to include their political healthiness.