Introduction to Focus: Girlhood

Abstract

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...