Reviewed by: Graphic Girlhoods: Visualizing Education and Violence by Elizabeth Marshall Colette Slagle (bio) Graphic Girlhoods: Visualizing Education and Violence, by Elizabeth Marshall. Routledge 2018. Elizabeth Marshall's Graphic Girlhoods: Visualizing Education and Violence—a recent addition to Routledge's Children's Literature and Culture series—starts with the premise that violence and trauma have long been an integral part of girls' education. In her own words, "The thesis of this book is that violence is a key element of the girl's education, and that this curriculum, and resistance to it, circulates in familiar storylines and images across visual culture, especially in texts for or about the girl" (4). Not all of the texts Marshall considers would necessarily be classified as children's literature; instead, she is more interested in exploring how girlhood is conveyed across texts that represent girls and their education. Marshall contends that education is a significant part of girlhood, and that violence is integral to this education. In other words, conceptions of girlhood are fundamentally developed through and by violence. In addition to its focus on representations of violence and trauma in girlhood, this book focuses specifically on the visual, using graphic novels, picture books, and illustrated novels as her examples for analysis. Given the history of the graphic brutalization of women's and girls' bodies—often in a sexualized fashion or otherwise conveyed through the male gaze—particularly in film, television, and comics, an attention to texts that account for the visual is a particularly apt choice for this project. Marshall states, "How visual artists represent the schoolgirl amplifies or contains certain forms of violence, and, in turn, understandings of that violence" (7). Marshall's own interests are not these hypersexualized, brutalized images of girls, but rather the ways many kinds of violence are depicted graphically in texts about [End Page 216] girlhood. While this does sometimes include the sexualization of girls (discussed particularly in chapter 3), her selection does not focus on texts that glorify violence against girls; instead, her examples point to the ubiquitous nature of violence in girlhood, emphasizing the girls' own perspectives toward this violence. Graphic Girlhoods is divided into two parts. Part 1, "Cultural Pedagogies of Girlhood," includes the first three chapters and works to establish how violence is an essential part of girls' education, both inside and outside the school. Part 2, "Resistant Schoolgirls," includes chapters 4–7, which each feature examples of subversive feminist texts that re-frame girlhood by overturning many of the violent cultural pedagogies discussed in part 1. The first chapter, "Recess Queens: Mean Girls in Graphic Texts of Girlhood," begins with the pervasive presence of the mean girl archetype/trope in popular culture, especially beginning in the early 2000s with the 2004 release of the immensely popular film Mean Girls. In this chapter, Marshall analyzes a variety of graphic texts that depict the mean girl archetype. She states that "[i]n the mean girl discourse boys are defined as physical and girls as relational aggressors" and that "[t]his gendered framework normalizes indirect meanness as girlish behavior and simultaneously pathologizes girls' physical violence and anger … as deviant femininity" (19). This chapter features multiple examples of the "relational aggressor" mean girl, as well as one example of a picture book that deviates from this trope, The Recess Queen by Alexis O'Neill, illustrated by Laura Huliska-Beith. O'Neill's book, however, proves rather than contradicts the rule, as the bully Mean Jean must learn kindness in order to stop her physically aggressive behaviors. As Marshall explains, "Mean Jean has been disciplined through and into kindness" (18). Bullies in the mean girl narrative are often redeemed through friendship, kindness, and forgiveness (on the part of the victim), and as such they tend to individualize the violence rather than recognizing it as a systemic issue. Ultimately, Marshall contends, this has the effect of demonizing the girl rather than the behavior: "Adult writers, teachers, and others use the picture book and the graphic novel to represent the mean schoolgirl, and even though the intention is to stop bullying, the end result is that the aberrant girl (rather than bullying) becomes the curriculum" (32; emphasis in original...