Girlhood Studies

Girlhood studies is a transnational interdisciplinary field of study that emerged from works taking place at the intersection of women’s, youth, and childhood studies. It takes the lives, histories, and cultures of girls and young women as its primary topic of focus and emerged as a distinct field in the 1990s alongside what has been termed as the rise of “third wave” feminism. As within third wave feminism, many emergent works within the field focused on issues related to identity, representation, rights, and intersections with other sites of oppression such as race, sexuality, class, and (dis)ability (to name a few). As a means of understanding contemporary and historical girlhoods, studies within the field often engage in relational reflections and connections with fields such as women’s studies, boyhood studies, gender studies, and feminist theory. As an academic body of study, scholars of girlhood come from a suitably diverse range of disciplines, including but not limited to cultural studies; “development” studies; education studies; history, media, and communication studies; psychology; sociology; and social work, with many working across and beyond these disciplines. In addition to scholarly outputs and research, many scholars of girlhood are also engaged in girls’ rights activism on local as well as global scales. As girlhood studies has grown as a topic of research and activism, so too has it grown as a subject taught in higher education institutions. The concept of the “girl” is also contested terrain, with different disciplines and communities invoking different meanings and materialities, with subfields such as Black girlhood studies and more recently queer girlhood studies and disabled girlhood studies in particular pushing forward the field, forcing scholars to contend with who can claim access and belonging to the term “girl.” Broadly, the “girl” has been used to describe the coalescence of youth and gender (female), and thus girlhood can be thought of as referring to a particular embodiment of youth and femininity. However, scholarly works also consider the discursive utility of the term “girl,” which can range from affectionate to belittling when used to describe older women as well as men and boys. Girlishness is therefore not an essential category and can be used differently in a range of contexts. Much research in the field of girlhood studies engages with a feminist ethics of care, engaging with girls and young women (cis, trans, and nonbinary) directly in order to develop nuanced understandings of girls’ lives and lived realities. However, girlhood studies has found itself subject to similar critiques to its parent field of women’s studies, namely the predominance of cisgender middle-class white scholars and girls within the field, and of Anglo-Western gatekeeping and the sidelining of girlhoods, ontologies, and epistemologies that sit outside of these orthodoxies. The dismantling of these structures remains a primary focus for scholars, practitioners, activists, and affiliate networks, demonstrating the political implications and opportunities for the category in the contemporary geopolitical context.