Review(s) of: The Aftermath of Feminism: Gender, Culture and Social Change, by McRobbie, Angela, Sage, London, 2009, ISBN 9 7807 6197 0620, vi + 184 pp., A$49.95, Distributor: Footprint Books.

The Aftermath of Feminism: Gender, Culture and Social Change [Book Review]

Girls: Feminine Adolescence in Popular Culture and Cultural Theory. Catherine Driscoll. New York: Columbia University Press. 2002. 377 pp. ISBN 0-231-11913-5. $19.50 (paper). ISBN 0-231-11912-7. $52.50 (cloth). As Driscoll and others note, the notion of "self" as the knowing center of the world has become a critical point of introspection for theorists-including feminist theorists-during the past several decades. And yet, despite intense scrutiny about what makes knowing subjects possible, little of this work helps us understand the current state of "girlhood." This lack of scholarly attention to girls stands in contrast to their increasing visibility in popular culture. Girls is an attempt to remedy this invisibility of girls in cultural studies as the discourse most likely to consider their involvement in the production of the world that defines them (p. 3). It provides a history of "feminine adolescence" as the category through which we understand girls today, and by extension, through which girls understand themselves and their lives. Girls is no conventional history, however, no discovery of an adolescence that was "always there." Employing Foucault's notion of genealogy, Driscoll's study focuses on how the idea of "feminine adolescence" works and what it has been used to say. The intent of Girls thus is not to deliver new knowledge about girls, nor to document new forms of girlhood; rather, Driscoll wants to show how knowledge about girls has shaped what it means to be a girl and how girls experience their own positions in the world in relation to diverse ways of talking about and understanding girls. In other words, her genealogy asks how knowledges and their objects work in historically specific sites, including legislation, developmental and popular psychology, educational curricula, girls' magazines, anthropology and sociology, cultural studies, feminism, and popular music. Given this diverse range of discursive sites implicated in the construction of feminine adolescence, Girls is organized into a tripartite structure. Part 1, "Becoming a Girl," begins Driscoll's genealogical inquiry through an examination of the public redefinition of Victorian girlhood in Renaissance literature as a venue popularizing the concepts of the human subject and the child (p. 17). Also important is Freud's transhistorical narrative about desire, agency, and familial relations, a narrative that reinforces assumptions that feminine adolescence was always there, waiting to be discovered or understood. Following from these beginnings, the recognizable figure of feminine adolescence as a discursive formation flourished through "a systematic dispersion of statements about girls and girlhood across various fields" that include newspapers, legislation, parliamentary debate, literary and visual representation, guidance manuals, and the popularization of developmental psychology. These venues opened a speaking position for the girl. At the same time, although adolescence was given shape as a necessary crisis in the formation of Selfhood, feminine adolescence failed to progress to subjectivity as the marker of adulthood. Instead, feminine adolescents were characterized as awaiting the transformation from girl to woman. This characterization is especially evident in the discourses of puberty that naturalize the category of feminine adolescence while denying girls both desire and activity (p. 84). While Part 1 thus interrogates what kind of developmental stage the idea of girlhood provides, Part 2, "Becoming a Woman," considers how feminine adolescence works; in other words, how the discourse surrounding feminine adolescence sustains the narrative of "girls becoming women." Not surprisingly, the discursive sites explored in this section concern girls as daughters and brides. More surprising, perhaps, is Driscoll's inclusion of feminism. As she notes, while "feminine adolescence emerged at a nexus of various late modern discourses" (p. …

Girls: Feminine Adolescence in Popular Culture and Cultural Theory

Reviewed Medium: book
 Authors: Jack Zipes
 Year: 2006
 Pages: 272
 Publisher: Routledge
 ISBN: 9780415976701 (soft cover). Prices: £15.99(soft cover).

Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion: The Classical Genre for Children and the Process of Civilization

This book is a must-read for all who are interested in gender studies as well as for economists, sociologists, and people from social sciences who are interested in the social and political effects...

Gendering the Recession: Media and Culture in an Age of Austerity

The new girl: girls' culture in england, 1880-1915

Introduction 1. Irish Bodyscapes 2. Submerged Histories: Eilis Ni Dhuibhne's The Bray House and The Dancers Dancing 3. Corporeal Genealogies: Colum McCann's Songdogs and This Side of Brightness 4. Bodily Doubles and Dislocations: Anne Enright's The Wig My Father Wore and What Are You Like? 5. Embodied Histories: Colum McCann's Dancer and Let the Great World Spin, and Anne Enright's The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch 6. Celtic Tiger Bodies: Eilis Ni Dhuibhne's Fox, Swallow, Scarecrow and Anne Enright's The Gathering Conclusion: Bodies and Futures Bibliography Index.

Irish Literature in the Celtic Tiger Years 1990 to 2008: Gender, Bodies, Memory

In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman Rises toward her day after day like a terrible fish. - Sylvia Plath, "Mirror" In the conclusion of the 2007 film Enchanted, a gently parodie and self-referential retake of Disney animated fairy tales, Giselle must make a choice between contemporary Manhattan and the animated fairy-tale world of Andalasia. Although she chooses Manhattan, the film makes clear that the influence of the Disney fairy tale has pervaded the contemporary world.1 The film attempts to outline a clear distinction between the two until Giselle's influence begins to be felt. In an early scene immediately before their meeting with Giselle, Robert (solicitor and love interest) informs his six-year-old daughter, Morgan, of his decision to propose to his current girlfriend, Nancy. In order to soften the blow of the announcement, Robert gives Morgan a present of a book titled Important Women of Our Time, which Morgan does not appear to be overly impressed with - she had wanted a book of fairy tales. Robert states that Nancy, his prospective fiancee, is a lot like the women in the book. However, it is a woman from a different type of narrative that instead prevails in the life of Robert and Morgan: Giselle, the fairy-tale heroine. As domestic ultra-innocent child- woman (several references are made to her ignorance of sex), Giselle is positioned as the ideal wife and mother for this family. Although we later see Giselle reading Important Women in a scene that could suggest the book's influence on her later heroic action in dispatching the evil Queen Narissa, the tension between the "important women" and the world of Disney fairy tale is ultimately resolved in favor of the latter. Career-woman Nancy and the "important women" of the book are, in the overall logic of the film, deemed unimportant. Nancy abandons her job and Manhattan for the animated fairy-tale world to become Prince Edward's bride. The evil Queen Narissa is defeated. The world of the Disney fairy tale wins out against cynicism, "important women," and the wicked queen. It is the tension between older "important women" and the youthful heroine that I want to explore in this article in relation to two films, The Brothers Gnmm (2005) and Stardust (2007), which, like Enchanted, initially appear to challenge fairy-tale conventions but ultimately revolve around conflict between female representatives of age and youth. In Stardust and The Brothers Gnmm, these confrontations are staged explicitly in terms of the visual and its emphasis on female beauty. Jack Zipes contends in Why Fairy Tales Stick that "we use the classical fairy tales in mutated forms through new technologies to discuss and debate urgent issues that concern our social lives and the very survival of the human species" (xiii). If these films suggest anything about contemporary concerns, they point to an abiding anxiety in relation to regulating the spectacle of the aging female body. The relationship between telling fairy tales and inculcating obethent behavior, particularly gendered behavior, through inciting fear has a long history. Critics such as Zipes and Marina Warner have explored the role of fairy tales as socializing narratives that inculcate adherence to contemporaneous gender roles.2 However, it is also true that women writers such as Angela Carter, Margaret Atwood, and A. S. Byatt, among others, have used the fairy-tale genre to engage with and uproot patriarchal representations of femininity and sexuality. The fairy tale thus offers a potent space in which to negotiate questions of gender and gendered representations.3 It is this tension between the conservative/patriarchal impulses of the fairy tale and the subversive potentials that the genre can also offer that this article examines, with specific focus on two recent films. Stardust and The Brothers Gnmm both play with the fairy-tale genre and gender and exhibit various similarities in their themes, their reuse of particular fairy-tale tropes, and their positioning of female protagonists. …

Through the Looking Glass: Fairy-Tale Cinema and the Spectacle of Femininity in Stardust and The Brothers Grimm

On 28 August 2016, the courtyard of the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA) hosted the culminating performance of the School for Revolutionary Girls, an exciting ten-day project co-ordinated by artis

A Girl is a Half-formed Thing?: Girlhood, Trauma, and Resistance in Post-Tiger Irish Literature

In a 1905 novel by Irish novelist Rosa Mulholland, A Girl’s Ideal, an ideal garden is described: 
Here the flowers overran every space in a happy profusion, encouraged to enjoy their liberty, and to feel themselves old-established inhabitants, not afraid of a chopping spade, ruthless or careless, or of a notice to quit just when they had thought to make themselves a lasting dwelling. Yet there was no ragged disorder; all irregularities were trained into loveliness and allowed to make beauty after their own wayward fashion.1

Making Space for the Irish Girl

Le second roman de Colum McCann, This Side of Brightness, est le premier recit qui se deroule entierement aux Etats-Unis, plus precisement a New York. A travers une exploration poussee des liens, symboliques et reels, qui s'etablissent entre le corps et son environnement, le roman depeint les efforts d'un jeune homme pour parvenir a assumer son histoire personnelle. Le texte se concentre specifiquement sur le rapport du corps et du metro new-yorkais, qui devient de ce fait un moyen puissant de relier entre elles les generations, bien que cette Filiation demeure exclusivement masculine. Le domaine du corporel se projette dans les connections qu'il opere avec le cadre de vie, revelant ainsi les liens a l'espace et la confrontation du sujet avec des representations corporelles.

Susan Cahill

Papers

Irish Literature in the Celtic Tiger Years 1990 to 2008: Gender, Bodies, Memory

Through the Looking Glass: Fairy-Tale Cinema and the Spectacle of Femininity in Stardust and The Brothers Grimm

A Girl is a Half-formed Thing?: Girlhood, Trauma, and Resistance in Post-Tiger Irish Literature

Making Space for the Irish Girl

Corporeal Architecture : Body and City in Colum McCann's This Side of Brightness