When girls (and boys) just want to have fun

Abstract

When Girls (and Boys) Just Want to Have Fun Naomi J. Wood (bio) Angela McRobbie. Feminism and Youth Culture: From “Jackie” to “Just Seventeen.” Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1991. Susan Willis. A Primer for Daily Life. Studies in Culture and Communication. London and New York: Routledge, 1991. In S. E. Hinton’s 1968 novel The Outsiders, adolescent struggle is divided into “Greasers” and “Socs,” the “have-nots” and the “haves” of class society. On the margins of the sympathetically portrayed Greasers’ world are the “greasy girls”; they are forever banned from the romantic discourse of heroic rebellion—associated in the novel with the southern gentlemen who ride bravely into certain death in Gone With the Wind—by their gender. All males in The Outsiders want “nice” girls, who are, by definition, Socs. Hinton’s narrator, Ponyboy, does not question the values that make Soc girls the prize in romantic sweepstakes, values that relegate Greaser girls to the also-rans; nor, until recently, have the many social and cultural critics questioned these values. In the 25 years since Hinton published her novel, definitions of adolescence itself remain masculine, with girls tacked on as an afterthought. In 1991, however, two books were published that examine the social construction of childhood and adolescence as intimately informed by class and gender. Both Angela McRobbie’s Feminism and Youth Culture: From “Jackie” to “Just Seventeen” and Susan Willis’s A Primer for Daily Life focus on the ways cultural texts and their consumers both support and subvert the hegemonies that produce them. Both books provide important questions for critics and teachers of children’s literature to ask themselves about their field. Sociologist McRobbie’s book is a collection of landmark essays on [End Page 123] English working-class female adolescence. It grows out of her association with the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham, but also poses questions that her colleagues had not thought to ask about what adolescence means for girls. Following a roughly chronological arrangement, the chapters reflect the growth and change of methodology of cultural studies over the last 18 years. The early essays, “Girls and Subcultures” (1978), “Settling Accounts with Subcultures” (1980), “The Culture of Working-Class Girls” (1979), and “The Politics of Feminist Research: Between Talk, Text, and Action” (1982), provide an overview and critique of ostensibly radical sociological analyses that treat adolescent girls as uninteresting adjuncts to the real business of youth culture. McRobbie’s implicit point is that no sociological study can be complete without understanding the roles girls play in culture. Like other feminist scholars in the early 1980s, McRobbie is concerned with the silencing of female voices, with the absence of femininity as an object of study in male-dominated academic work. McRobbie wants to “combine a clear commitment to the analysis of girls’ culture with a direct engagement with youth culture as it is constructed in sociological and cultural studies” (17). For her, any real feminist intervention in culture must take place with understanding and dialogue between the objects and the subjects of study. The last, and most metacritical essay in this group concludes by criticizing the position of the researcher in relation to her subjects and by discussing the pros and cons of less “objectively scientific” and more participatory research. The crucial question for McRobbie is: “How can we make talk walk?” (79); she answers it by urging feminists to engage both in intellectual and political work, while “recognising both the value and the limitations of the kind of work we do” (79). McRobbie grounds the study of adolescent female culture by posing questions that need to be asked. She demonstrates how simplistic notions of class fail to consider the specificity of gender. In the second group of chapters, McRobbie focuses on literary texts as a way of understanding teenage socialization. This section reflects most clearly the revolution in popular culture study that the work of Cora Kaplan, Dave Morley, Janice Radway and others in the middle-1980s made in the understanding of the relationship between texts and readers. While “Jackie Magazine: Romantic Individualism and the Teenage Girl” (n.d., late 1970s) analyzes various codes of the teen magazine and suggests possible results of...