Stories Of Girls Research Articles

“Flights for Freedom With Her Words”: Black, Latinx, and Polynesian Girls Co-Conspiring Against Misogynoir Through Love

I examine how youth racialized and gendered as Black girls co-conspired to challenge misogynoir with their peers racialized and gendered as Latina/x and Polynesian girls. I investigate how they did so within an after-school space at a public charter high school that came to be known as the “Critical Feminisms Club.” Thinking about the space alongside the girls in the club, I reveal how they politically and pedagogically engaged love to (a) (re)author the stories of Black girls and (b) challenge the material and ideological misogynoir that circumscribed Black girls’ lives, possibilities, and futurities within their lives and schooling. They (re)narrated how they should be in relation with and responsible to each other as collective, co-relational, and interdependent beings, recognizing how Black womanness/girlness was a genre of being human that was specifically targeted for enclosure, exploitation, and elimination. Their love-politics engaged pedagogy to remake the world such that the safety and protection of Black girls and gender-nonconforming youth was a necessity and priority, which they saw in turn as bound to the safety and protection of the non-Black identified Latina/x and Polynesian girls who accepted this interdependence and mutual responsibility.

‘After All the Years of Separation’: Musically Representing Author L.M. Montgomery’s Suspended Romances

Canadian author L.M. Montgomery did not set out to write stories about romance. As she indicated in her journals, she wrote character-driven stories of young girls navigating their way through girlhood. However, she understood that the public, and her publishers, expected these girls to experience romance that culminated in marriage, following the societal traditions of the time. Montgomery managed this dichotomy by having many characters experience a suspended romance, delaying the romantic aspect of the relationship for as long as possible. Arts-based practice is a mode of analysis and offers the opportunity to find a new way of understanding and communicating Montgomery’s type of suspended romance. Music is, in many ways, considered romantic, so it is an appropriate medium to communicate Montgomery’s romantic narrative structures. This paper investigates Montgomery’s use of suspended romance in her novels and how this delay provided her characters with time to develop other areas of their lives. An arts-based methodology was used to identify and analyse recurring themes in Montgomery’s work, as the question is not can Montgomery’s theme of romance be musically represented but how. The result of this creative experimentation is a new musical composition that articulates these suspended romances using six different musical devices. This creative work exemplifies the intertextual link that exists between Montgomery’s work and new musical compositions.

Queen Rania’s English Speech as a Practical Argument on Educating Women

The recent study throws light on Queen Rania’s Speech, which emphasizes the value of education for the Middle Eastern girls. The current study seeks to identify the Queen’s rhetorical strategies in order to address the research question; “why is Queen Rania’s speech reasonable, justified, and persuasive?” To answer this question the researchers examine the speech’s discourse using Toulmin’s (2003) model of argument which comprises six layouts: ground, claim, qualifier, warrant, backing, and Rebuttal. It is discovered that Queen Rania employs Toulmin’s model although with slight modification in the order of these layouts. She intends for her speech to be a massive appeal to the entire globe to raise their voices and help the unfortunate girls get better life. Her speech is composed of introduction part that sets time and place, four justified claims within the same theme beginning with showing the importance of education for girls, moving on to mention a number of sample stories of poor girls around the world and how they become successful when given the opportunity to be educated, and finally inviting the entire world to prioritize the education of girls.

Politics of Being Loving, Vulnerable, and Present

As feminist faculty we assess our use of testimonios by employing testimonio to share our experiences and Chicana feminist pedagogy praxis, which challenge the structure of the traditional canon and offer alternative classroom practices. As Chicana feminist faculty we appraise the use of testimonios as feminist pedagogy to contest the structure of the conventional canon and fashion and provide alternative classroom practices. We explore how we view our courses as a medium through which students’ lives can be transformed, inspiring them to become active thinkers and active citizens, to participate in the life of the university, and most important, to become agents for social change. As faculty from different disciplines and generations, we examine the use of testimonio in our Chicana/o studies classes by centering the voices and stories of girls, women, and immigrants in a variety of fields, in particular psychology and public health. The stories shared challenge their invisibility, invalidation, and marginalization in academia and in an array of fields. Their testimonios expose brutality, disrupt silencing, and build solidarity among mujeres.

Sino-Japanese Cultural Diplomacy in the 1950s: The Making and Reception of the Matsuyama Ballet’s The White-Haired Girl

In 1955, Japan’s Matsuyama Ballet staged the first ballet adaptation of the Chinese land reform drama The White-Haired Girl in Tokyo, laying the foundation for Chinese revolutionary ballet. This is the first study in English to explore the Matsuyama Ballet production in detail. Employing Chinese-language sources from the production’s 1958 tour to China, this article explores the historical making, performance, and reception of the Matsuyama Ballet’s The White-Haired Girl and situates it in the context of Sino-Japanese relations during the 1950s. The article argues that the production resulted from a longer history of interactions between Japan, China, and the Soviet Union and that its interpretation of The White-Haired Girl story served as a bridge between the 1950 Chinese feature film and the 1971 Chinese ballet film. It also argues that Chinese responses to the production demonstrate significant differences between Japanese and Chinese discourses about Sino-Japanese friendship in the 1950s.

Om å benevne det unevnelige – Sommeren 58 av Annie Ernaux og psykoanalytisk traumeteori

A fundamental concern in understanding and treating trauma-related disorders is that such experiences – due to dissociation or displacement – are not integrated in ordinary memory systems and thus appear and operate beyond words. Through its indirect, experimental, and often surprising depictions, fiction approaches the gap between experience and survival and can shed light on the complexities of trauma. Here, Annie Ernaux's depictions of the narrativization process in her novel A girl's story (2020) are used as a point of departure for reflections on how and under what circumstances it might be possible to find words for experiences that have neither been recognized by the person implied nor talked about before. Through close reading, and in dialog with psychoanalytic trauma theory, I discuss how we might understand the possibility of representing trauma symbolically and the different modes of such representation. The movement between an experiential and a more reflective mode is discussed as a feature of Ernaux's narrative that might have enabled the integration of experiences in consciousness. I discuss how Ernaux's literary project described as “making the personal universal” can be understood as a process aimed at constituting a reality that had been cut off from history: directed towards the possibility of establishing a present external, and hence more authentic internal, witness to the events in the present. Keywords: Annie Ernaux, A girl’s story, trauma, symbolization, psychoanalysis, testimony

The digital storytelling of feminist foreign policy: Sweden’s state feminism in digital diplomacy

This article interrogates the digital storytelling of Sweden’s feminist foreign policy. Drawing on scholarship on state feminism and digital diplomacy, it shows how digital platforms offer opportunities to reproduce narratives of state feminism through storytelling. We propose that digital diplomacy is used to advance feminist foreign policy through emotional sense-making that requires the telling of personal stories. The article provides a narrative analysis of the stories of women and girls that symbolise and embody feminist foreign policy, and the way in which they are communicated by the Swedish Ministry for Foreign Affairs. The article concludes by noting that the digital storytelling of feminist foreign policy allows the Ministry for Foreign Affairs to communicate to a wider digital audience. These stories, however, run the risk of obscuring the feminist ambitions of feminist foreign policy by insufficiently considering the gendered injustices that undergird the global gender order and by bringing together seemingly incompatible stories of feminist exceptionalism and success.

Apostate Nuns in the Later Middle Ages by Elizabeth Makowski

Reviewed by: Apostate Nuns in the Later Middle Ages by Elizabeth Makowski Sr. Nancy Bauer, OSB Apostate Nuns in the Later Middle Ages. By Elizabeth Makowski. Studies in the History of Medieval Religion. Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2019. Pp. xiv + 227; $64.00. In her first book, Canon Law and Cloistered Women: Periculoso and its Commentators, 1298–1545 (CUA Press, 1997), Elizabeth Makowski (1951–2021) made a valuable contribution to the history of canon law regarding religious life for women by providing a comprehensive study of the thirteenth century decree by which Pope Boniface VIII inaugurated what came to be known as papal enclosure for nuns. M., a historian who focused on medieval monastic women, made another contribution to the history of canon law and female religious life in her final book, Apostate Nuns in the Later Middle Ages. The title might suggest that this is just another bawdy recounting of misdeeds of medieval nuns, but such is not the case. This is a scholarly but very readable account of the canonical fates of specific women who attempted to escape a [End Page 212] monastic life for which they were perhaps never suited and often never chose for themselves. M. selected cases that date from 1300 to 1540. The beginning date is significant because by then most of the major ecclesiastical legislation on religious life that remained in effect into the twentieth century had been promulgated. The end date coincides with the dissolution of monasteries under Henry VIII. During this period, the term "apostate" applied canonically to several categories of Catholics, including vowed women and men who, without dispensations, abandoned the religious state to return to secular society. Authorities, ecclesiastical and civil, were expected to capture apostate nuns and monks, who also incurred the penalty of excommunication, and forcibly return them to their monasteries where they endured severe punishment for the crime of running away. The only reprieve from this fate was to prove that one's vows had been coerced and were therefore invalid. Thus, M. devotes the first chapter to the canon law on validity of profession. In the next three chapters, she addresses specific cases of runaway nuns. Chapter 2 deals with nuns who fled their monasteries and then petitioned to have their vows declared null based on vim et metum (force and fear), that is, on having been compelled to enter religious life and make profession. It was not uncommon in the Middle Ages that "the summons to religious life came not from God but from parents, relatives, or other interested parties" (45). For those with a genuine vocation, the monastery was a "safe haven," but for those who were forced into it, "the monastery became a prison" (45). M. uncovers the stories of girls as young as four years old given to monasteries by their parents and coerced to make profession before the canonically recognized minimum age of thirteen, often to exclude them from family inheritance. Chapter 3 deals with nuns who made valid professions, but later fled monastic life "motivated by love, whether of landed wealth or of the opposite sex" (22). In other words, they succumbed to "temptations against the vows of poverty and chastity" (78). Nuns who apostatized for these reasons, even those who married and bore children, were expected to return to monastic life unless they were able to acquire dispensations from their vows. Chapter 4 focuses on nuns who were, with or without permission, away from their monasteries for "diversions" such as pilgrimages and family visits or "disasters" such as war and pestilence, but who failed to return. It was war in the French countryside surrounding their monastery that prompted a group of Cistercian nuns to scatter to safe places in 1368. When they chose to remain in secular life at the end of the war, Pope Urban V ordered their capture and forcible return to their monastery. Chapters 5 and 6 describe the penalties, chilly reception, and difficult reintegration that often awaited apostate nuns who returned to their monasteries, [End Page 213] whether willingly and repentant or forcibly and unrepentant. Historians of canon law will appreciate M.'s review in chapter 5 of commentary by medieval decretists and decretalists...

Violence against Women and Girls: Female Filmmakers Critique the Menace

Violence against Women and Girls: Female Filmmakers Critique the Menace

Contributors

Contributors

Rereading Orphanhood: Texts, Inheritance, Kin, edited by Diane Warren and Laura Peters

Reviewed by: Rereading Orphanhood: Texts, Inheritance, Kin ed. by Diane Warren and Laura Peters Kimberly Reynolds (bio) Rereading Orphanhood: Texts, Inheritance, Kin, edited by Diane Warren and Laura Peters; pp. x + 276. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020, £80.00, £24.99 paper, $105.00, $29.95 paper. Orphans were so plentiful in Victorian Britain that Mr. Bumble, the Parish Beadle in Charles Dickens's Oliver Twist (1837–39), created an alphabetical system for new arrivals at the foundling home: "The last was a S,—Swubble, I named him. This was a T,—Twist, I named him. The next one comes will be Unwin, and the next Vilkins. I have got names ready made to the end of the alphabet, and all the way through it again, when we come to Z" (Oliver Twist, edited by Kathleen Tillotson [Clarendon Press, 1966], 7). The twelve lively and well-written essays in Rereading Orphanhood: Texts, Inheritance, Kin, edited by Diane Warren and Laura Peters, venture into royal archives and the records of charitable institutions; they also explore periodical publication, a great many genres, and Philip Pullman's neo-Victorian novels about the female detective, Sally Lockhart, to give some sense of the abundance and variety of real and literary nineteenth-century orphans. And yet there is a notable absence of orphans such as Somalian-born Jaesell Macalonzie, who, in 1892, aged sixteen, was taken in by the charity Barnardo's. Jaesell's family was murdered during the siege of Khartoum (1884–5), and he was sold into slavery before finding safety in England. His is one of many accounts of Black and mixed-heritage children in the Barnardo's archives. Since October 2017, to mark Black History Month, the charity has published material about the Black children and teenagers cared for since its first children's home opened in 1870. The backgrounds of at least twenty Victorian orphans of color have been made available in this way, and they feature in published work such as Caroline Bressey's "Forgotten Histories: Three Stories of Black Girls from Barnardo's Victorian Archive" in Women's History Review (2007). The Barnardo's homes are discussed at length in Joey Kinglsey's essay for this collection, but his focus is on the staged nature of photographic images used to attract charitable donations, and all of the children in these images were white. Information about other Black orphans from the nineteenth century and earlier has been brought to light elsewhere, too. For instance, there are several books about Sarah Forbes Bonetta Davies. Rescued during a slave-hunt in which her parents were killed, she was subsequently presented as a gift to Queen Victoria when she was five years old. The Queen financed her education and maintained a relationship with her. I mention these examples because, in a collection that sets out to reread orphanhood, I hoped to see attention paid to orphans whose stories have largely been ignored or suppressed. [End Page 568] Instead, the kinds of orphans featured in the book are likely to be familiar to most readers of Victorian Studies. We have, for example, Fanny Price (not a genuine orphan but positioned as such in the Bertram household, Cheryl L. Nixon explains), Oliver Twist, Jane Eyre, Esther Summerson, Sara Crewe, and the many waifs and "Street Arabs" found in popular evangelical children's novels (61). There are exceptions: as well as considering the life of Charlotte Smith Richardson, who was well cared for the by charitable organizations in York, Kevin Binfold's chapter discusses her poem "Stanzas on the Decease of Margaret Russell" (1829). Russell was a mixed-race girl who was looked after by some of the institutions known to Richardson during the Regency years. Laura Peters, whose Orphan Texts: Victorians, Orphans, Culture and Empire (2000) was one of the first attempts to understand Victorian families and culture through the experience of orphans, also looks beyond the orphans of Britain. Her chapter illustrates what she describes as the "unique position the orphan occupies at the intersection of contemporary discourses on race, science, childhood and visual culture" in relation to a small group of orphans who featured in travelling exhibitions during the Victorian era (143...

„One Day he Will Find me and Save me”. The Dream for Prince Known from the Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault and Brothers Grimm and the Accompanying Illustrations

Magic stories are extremely difficult to analyze, as they have both folklore (oral) and literary (written) existence, they are oriented towards the little ones, but at the same time they send messages to the adults and last but not least – they are almost always accompanied by illustrations, which further complicate and expand the meaning of the written. Artists become "translators" who have to adapt the content to the specific needs of the particular audience and the peculiarities of its time. Millions of children around the world have shaped their understanding of the roles of man and woman and the relationship between gender and behavior based on the well-known stories of ordinary girls rescued by princes, unusually appeared in their lives. This article will analyze the verbal and pictorial representation of the main characters in two of the most famous fairytales – "Cinderella" and "The Sleeping Beauty". The aim is to highlight certain patterns that have an important contribution to the formation of gender stereotypes in children and their dreams of happy and successful life.

Child Labour, Seasonal Migration and School Exclusion: A Sad Story of Tribal Girls in Rural India

The present study explores school exclusion among the migrant tribal girls at the elementary education level in the selected tribal-dominated areas of Odisha, India. The major objective of the study is to examine how social capital theory explains the patterns of girls’ schooling among the seasonal migrants, which consequently leads to child labour and finally their premature withdrawal from school. In the given socio-cultural contexts, the impact of the process of enculturation on the schooling of girl children in rural India restricts their social mobility and equal opportunity. By using the theoretical framework of ‘social capital’, the study also explores the life experiences of tribal migrant girls to understand the phenomenon of school exclusion in Mayurbhanj district of Odisha.

When the Schools Shut Down: A Young Girl's Story of Virginia's "Lost Generation" and the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka Decision by Yolanda Gladden

When the Schools Shut Down: A Young Girl's Story of Virginia's "Lost Generation" and the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka Decision by Yolanda Gladden

An Outline of the Story of Girls in Control and its Success in Motivating Girls Internationally

Gender stereotypes often deter women from pursuing STEM-related studies at secondary and tertiary levels of education. Control engineering in particular is an example of a discipline where women are underrepresented in all stages of academia; from undergraduate students through to faculty and technical board members. The Girls in Control workshop targets 10-to-15-year-old girls and aims to educate them about control engineering at a level that is understandable and engaging to stimulate an interest in STEM. Moreover, the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic resulted in new and innovative ways of collaborating and designing outreach programs. The Girls in Control workshop uses online platforms to provide accessibility to girls worldwide by removing language barriers. The workshop runs in almost 20 different languages and the materials are openly available online. The Girls in Control workshop ran successfully at the 21st World Congress of the International Federation of Automatic Control 2020, the IEEE Conference on Decision and Control 2020, the 2021 American control conference, and the 29th Mediterranean Conference on Control and Automation 2021; all of which ran on virtual platforms. Overall, over 500 girls have participated in the Girls in Control workshops in 19 languages with a large amount of positive feedback. A more advanced, follow-up workshop is being tested where girls are challenged further by tackling problems with disturbances and requiring complex control solutions.

Child Sexual Abuse as a Serious Issue in Reference with a Novel, Living Dead Girl by Elizabeth Scott

Living Dead Girl story follows a prepubescent girl named Alice, who has been kidnapped by a pedophile named Ray. The novel takes place 5 years after Alice’s abduction when she was 15 years old. They pose as father and daughter, though they have no connections to anyone in the outside world. During the time they were inside home, he deprived her of food in order to retain her body as a child itself and he dresses her like a child and then he will rape her everyday. Alice refers to herself as a Living Dead Girl she is numb on the inside and is looking forward to the day when Ray will finally kill her, like before, Ray lived with the first Alice until she reach the age fifteen and her body had begun to mature, so he killed her, but he had never been suspected. As there are many types of sexual abuse, most dreadful abuse is child sexual abuse, where it is recognized as a serious violation of human well-being. CSA is unacceptable international problem that can affect children of both the gender.

The world is ours: mapping identity with Black Girl Cartography

ABSTRACT In this article, we offer Black Girl Cartography as a practice that centers the lives of Black girls and women and the mapping of ‘black girl stories’ as an educative tool. To illustrate the utility of Black girl Cartography in our work, we used an autoethnographic approach to draw upon our experiences in a graduate level English course centered around Black women’s autobiographies and activism (Butler, T. T. 2018b. ENG 826 [Course Syllabus]. Michigan State University). In doing so, we asked the following research question: How can Black Girl Cartography be used as an educative tool for Black girls and Black girl researchers?

Romance comics, dangerous girls, and the importance of fathers

ABSTRACT This article aims to demonstrate that throughout the 1950s, popular teenage romance comics reflected dominant discourses concerning the teenage girl, her sexuality and mental health, and her relationship with her father in the immediate post-war era. A range of publishers contributed multiple comic book lines to the teenage romance comic subgenre. Due to their popularity and saturation of the consumer market, these comics serve as a valuable index as to how teen girls were educated in ideas concerning sexuality, psychological wellbeing, and their relationships with their fathers through mass media. Analysis focuses exclusively on those teenage romance comics published during the 1950s, since it was during this decade that psychoanalysts and psychiatrists enjoyed a general prestige and recognition by popular media and its consumers. These comics featured stories of teenage girls who, according to post-war society’s strictures, went sexually and morally astray, with detrimental effects to their mental stability. Positioned as their gatekeepers in the stories, fathers were responsible for teen girls’ sexual development and mental wellbeing. It is in the absence of fatherly love that girls became mentally unhinged and delinquent, especially in the areas of love and romance.

Why Girls Run Away to Marry Adolescent Realities and Socio-Legal Responses in India

Based on stories of girls from three cities, this study introduces the issue of self-arranged marriages into the debate on child and early marriage in India. It provides qualitative insights into the contexts within which young relationships develop and are compelled into elopements, and to show how punitive legal responses cause harm on young lives.

Parachutes by Kelly Yang

Reviewed by: Parachutes by Kelly Yang Deborah Stevenson, Editor Yang, Kelly Parachutes. Tegen/HarperCollins, 2020 [496p] Trade ed. ISBN 978-0-06-294108-4 $18.99 E-book ed. ISBN 978-0-06-294113-8 $10.99 Reviewed from galleys Ad Gr. 9-12 Claire’s poor exam results in China lead to her being sent to an LA-area prep school, which courts wealthy Chinese “parachutes,” teens who get dropped in the U.S. without their parents. Filipino-American Dani, a scholarship student at American Prep, and her mother host Claire for a fee. The two girls take turns narrating as [End Page 453] Dani marvels at Claire’s privilege and aims for college via debate-team glory, and Claire negotiates the complex expectations of her strained family. Then Dani hits a roadblock when her debate coach sexually harasses her and then begins to retaliate as she resists and reports him; Claire’s über-rich boyfriend rapes her, and due to the prestige of his family, her parents encourage her to stay silent and remain with him. Yang (Front Desk, BCCB 5/18) writes astutely about the destabilizing combination of family expectations, copious wealth, and absence of adult supervision for Claire and her fellow parachutes, who lead a seemingly heady but ultimately emotionally precarious existence. She’s also sharply perceptive about the class and race complexities of a community that contains rich Asian visitors and American-born Asians, great wealth and straitened circumstances. The plotting is less effective, though, with rambling that slows the pace and an ambiguous moral position about luxury; the harassment and rape plots don’t get enough air among other points competing for attention, and their resolutions are oversimplified. However, it’s still a spirited slice of cultural life and story of girls facing cruel inequities, and Yang’s compelling author’s note about parachutes and her own experience of being sexually assaulted adds another poignant facet. [End Page 454] Copyright © 2020 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois