Introduction to the Special Issue on Girls From Outer Space: Emerging Girl Subjectivities and Reterritorializing Girlhood

Abstract

With an overview of the authors’ contributions, this introduction to the special issue on girls from outer space provides a conceptual framework for bringing counter-narratives of girls from the margins, where unheard voices and movements have emerged, developed, and expanded as a way of talking back to the dominant girlhood space and discourse as well as society. Moving away from both binary and canonical lenses of girlhood that center on White middle-class girlhood, this special issue focuses on lived experiences of girls of color who exist among socio-economically alienated spaces such as immigrant, homeless, queer, and domestically violent spaces, etc. Most of all, it delineates a conceptual revision of the notion of outsideness by shifting from simply victimized, within a deficit model, to a complex dimension of girl agency that demonstrates both limiting and expanding experiences of the girls. Drawing upon feminist insights, this conceptual work attempts to relocate outsideness in the center of girlhood studies, which pays attention to alternative methodological approaches that recover epistemological barriers of girlhood by addressing (dis)entanglement of the girl participants’ minds and actions in diverse research contexts, and by disclosing the dynamic, contradictory, and complicated ideas, voices, and values from the girls’ perspectives.