Girls' Literature and Culture

Stepping Back in Time: Reviewing Caitlin Flanagan's Girl Land

2012-02-12T00:45:00.000-08:00

The first I knew about Girl Land was a parody produced by Bitch magazine to mimic LOLcats. A series of cat photographs were overlaid with old-fashioned quotations about how girls should be. This sounded intriguing. First: here was a book about the history of girlhood. Second: feminists hated it.

Caitlin Flanagan’s Girl Land will not be released in Australia until April, but I bought an ebook and started reading on my laptop straight away. Part of the criticism levelled at Flanagan is that she has not talked to any actual girls in order to write her book. As I work on girlhood in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, I think a lot can be gained by understanding how girlhood was culturally constructed in the past and by comparing how these constructions have changed. A book on how girlhood has transformed in the United States from the 1920s could be extremely valuable, but, sadly, Flanagan has not fully exploited the potential of the histories of girlhood to help us think about contemporary girlhood.

It seems it is something a sport to tear the book to shreds, but I must join the chorus of critique, even if I did find some sections of the book illuminating. To begin with the obvious, the very title and concept of female adolescence as “Girl Land” is a bit twee, suggesting it is an almost “magical” state that is lost through sexual maturity. Boys don’t feel the same way, it seems. They don’t even care about their old toys, unlike girls who feel emotionally connected to them because they mourn the loss of their childhood. Flanagan must have watched Toy Story to gain this information.

One of the central premises of Girl Land is that a girl is “a creature designed for a richly lived interior life…in a way most boys are not” (6). This means that girls like to spend time alone in their room pondering, writing in diaries and reading. Flanagan hit a raw nerve when she jumped from this nostalgic idea of diaries with little metal locks and keys, to suggesting that girls should not have computers with access to the internet in their rooms.

I agree with Flanagan’s suggestion that how girls choose to record their interior lives has changed, and that through using the internet they both reflect “on their emotional lives" and "broadcast the ephemeral enthusiasms of their Girl Land" (61). Well, I don’t know about the “Girl Land” bit, but there is indeed pressure to keep up another kind of online identity, composed of Facebook photos, carefully worded profiles and suitably up-to-date references and memes. We have seen problems with cyberbullying, in that young people no longer come home and escape from schoolyard problems. Harassment can continue at any time of the week online via email or on social networks, or via text messages.

Yet Flanagan does not fully draw out what being part of the first generation raised from birth with computers and the internet is like. I’m quite amazed to see the kinds of websites girls now code and design in a way that I could not manage as an adult, as well as the online comics and stories they create. What might be the positive and empowering aspects of access to the internet for girls? Instead of considering the answer to this question, Flanagan recalls her own girlhood periods of respite in her bedroom in her “forest green tracksuit” (it sums up the lack of social pressure within the sanctuary of a girl’s bedroom) and suggests that the internet “violates” the sacred space of the room “and robs [girls] of the essential requirements of keeping a diary” (62).

I think this is where we find the launching pad for criticism to get ugly. Who says keeping a diary is essential to girlhood? Girls are writing blogs, making sophisticated compilations of images (some of which they have photographed themselves) on sites like tumblr, and keeping their thoughts on their own Facebook pages. If these are kinds of diaries, then it would have been useful to include more evidence about what the transformation from private to public actually means in terms of diaries. Do girls see it as a kind of “performance” as Flanagan argues (63)? And how different is it to “perform” some of the time, as she acknowledges they did in the halcyon days of the early twentieth century, versus “all the time”?

The fodder for ugliness continues in the chapter on dating, which argues that girls are extremely vulnerable to assault. This claim is borne out by Flanagan’s personal recollection of a boy who wouldn’t take no for an answer on a date until she began yelling and kicking. It is indeed true that many women are subject to sexual assault and that it is a serious and real issue for girls and women, especially in developing countries beyond the United States, which is Flanagan’s focus. Setting back the cause of feminism somewhat, Girl Land proclaims: “The father is the first line of defense between between a girl and the men who would exploit her sexually”(31). Flanagan describes the tradition of boys meeting fathers as serving as a kind of “warning” not to assault, and in her concluding section, in which she provides ham-fisted advice on how to raise today’s girls, she asserts that the number of single-mother households is to blame for an increase in date rape (132).

And it doesn’t get any better in the chapter on menstruation. Critics have seized on Flanagan’s claims that today’s girls “anticipate menstruation with excitement, as a marker of the coming glamour of the teen years” (34). Now, not that my own memories are any better evidence than Flanagan’s, but I was absolutely mortified by menarche, as I was not yet eleven, and there were very few girls who had their period in grade six. After a younger child found a used pad or tampon in one of the toilet cubicles, a special toilet was designated with a sanitary bin inside and a sign on the door that read “Grade 6 and 7 girls only”. This meant that anyone who went inside had their period. No one ever went inside that toilet in front of anyone else. As far as I know no girl ever used it. It was not a marker of pride or joy twenty years ago, but who is to say that today’s girls are not connecting painful cramping and stained underpants with boyfriends and romance as Flanagan contends?

Nevertheless, the menstruation chapter does highlight some of the achievements of the book in re-telling the social history of American girls. Girl Land provides a fascinating description of the evolution of sanitary products and how their marketing became entwined with the new world of teens in advertisements such as "The Story of Menstruation", which was funded by Kotex and animated by Disney. Sections in the dating chapter that draw together historical books and pamphlets of dating advice for girls, as well as parenting manuals, are entertaining and revealing.

However, it is just one problematic aspect of Girl Land that sources such as G. Stanley Hall’s Adolescence, Flanagan’s own memories of girlhood, The Diary of Anne Frank and fictions such as Judy Blume’s Are You There God, It’s Me Margaret? and, I kid you not, The Exorcist are treated as equivalent sources of evidence. Each of the eras considered in Girl Land ought to be grounded in a broader sense of what concepts of girlhood were like and how it was evolving in relation to social and cultural norms. More recent history suffers the worst fate by allowing Blume and the possessed Regan to explain the transition between bobby soxers and Team Edward.

The prom chapter also offers something worth the attention of girls' studies scholars, not only in the form of quotations from early guides to hosting proms, but in the actual analysis of prom that Flanagan offers up. Prom had its origins in the 1920s, and was in some ways directed by girls in a manner that debutante balls were not, but also, Flanagan argues, prom allowed parents to reel in the liberation the girls and women had fought for in the previous decade, specifically during the war. Flanagan is not sufficiently anti-feminist to deny the socially conservative origins of prom in its adult intervention into girls’ romantic life and the return of adult supervision and formal protocols of restraint. It is also useful to consider how little prom has changed, as Flanagan argues, in that superficially the traditions of boys turning up on the front porch with a corsage in hand and the strict pronouncements on how girls and boys may interact at prom remain in place. Nevertheless, Flanagan suggests that what has changed is the after-party ritual at which “Pimps and Hos” is supposedly the usual theme. Flanagan explains that this produces a contradiction: “Girls have intentionally combined two events, one composed of traditions that suggest a very formal way of being a teenager, and one composed of behaviors that suggest the exact opposite” (110).

I don’t disagree with the idea that girls and women are increasingly barraged with competing images and ideals of how to be. But many of the causes Flanagan identities for these contradictory ideals and proposed solutions for making girls’ lives better are devoid of any solid foundation. The popular media definitely encourages an “increasingly sexualized teen culture”, but Flanagan inexplicably blames rap music in particular (123), and, subsequently, the mainstreaming of pornography. She is not simple enough in her thinking to fall for the moral panics over “rainbow parties” and “oral sex crazes”, instead measuring her assessment to note “a major shift in modern sexual habits and expectations” (118). I came away from Girl Land without an understanding of what this shift entails and what it means for girls, apart from a sense that mothers and fathers need to rally to protect their children “in a kind of postapocalyptic landscape…from pornography and violent entertainment” (125).

In all this, girls are victims and girls should be, and are, afraid. Girls suffer a greater emotional drain during adolescence because “they are forced to confront the sexual attention of men” (45) while “men and boys are not as likely to be wounded, emotionally and spiritually, by early sexual experience, or by sexual experience entered into without romantic commitment” (123). It is disappointing that a woman who has spent significant time reading through many historical advice manuals to girls and parents could not see how her own claims reproduce sexist ideas about girls. Much like Bettina Arndt’s article in the Age today that argues men cannot help staring at breasts, Flanagan also reproduces sexist ideas about men.

Lego Friends Video

2012-02-01T16:16:00.000-08:00

It's heartening to see that the criticism of the Lego Friends range for girls is rolling on. The following video, produced by Feminist Frequency, draws together some intriguing Lego ads from the 1980s onward that show the company's attempts to produce a range to entice girls to enter the world of Lego. It is dispiriting to realise that the collective picture of these attempts is that girls want to make jewellery, click together simple pieces that have pre-determined outcomes and fantasise about princes.

I'm looking forward to part two of this series, which promises to take us on a historical tour of advertisements for Lego featuring boys, including Zack the Lego Maniac.

New Article on Environmentalism and Gender in Animated Film

2012-01-27T17:34:00.000-08:00

Just this week a scholarly article that I wrote with Dr Elizabeth Parsons (formerly of Deakin University) was published by Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies. It was sparked by Liz's subject "Power Politics in Children's Literature", in which we taught the films Princess Mononoke and FernGully. Liz had already given a conference paper on the topic and kindly invited me to co-write an article with her. It did feel quite strange to be writing an academic article about contemporary films, as I think the closest I'd ever gotten to the present-day before was about 1920 and, at the point of writing, I'd never written about films either. I'm grateful to Liz for showing me how to step into a new field and for the opportunity to co-write this paper with her.

If anyone is interested in this area, or perhaps the work of Hayao Miyazaki (because we all know you're not going to be interested in the saccharine-fest that is Ferngully unless you saw it as a child), here is the abstract for the paper:

Animating child activism: Environmentalism and class politics in Ghibli's Princess Mononoke (1997) and Fox's Fern Gully (1992)

Informed by ecocriticism, this article conducts a comparative examination of two contemporary animated children's films, Princess Mononoke (1997) and Fern Gully (1992). While both films advocate for the prevention of deforestation, they are, to varying degrees, antithetical to environmentalism. Both films reject the principles of deep ecology in displacing responsibility for environmental destruction on to ‘supernatural’ forces and exhibit anthropocentric concern for the survival of humans. We argue that these films constitute divergent methodological approaches for environmental consciousness-raising in children's entertainment. The western world production demonstrates marked conservatism in its depiction of identity politics and ‘cute’ feminization of nature, while Hayao Miyazaki's film renders nature sublime and invokes complex socio-cultural differences. Against FernGully's ‘othering’ of working-class and queer characters, we posit that Princess Mononoke is decidedly queer, anti-binary and ideologically bi-partisan and, in accord with the underlying principle of environmental justice, asks child audiences to consider compassion for the poor in association with care for nature.

Model Girls: Setting up Girls for Judgement

2012-01-25T20:02:00.001-08:00

Cindy Crawford’s daughter has revived discussion about the place of girls in high-fashion modelling. Ten-year-old Kaia Gerber has been chosen as the face of Young Versace and one of the launch images, in which she has been posed in a way that recalls her mother’s supermodel shots of the ‘90s, is a world apart from fleecy-clad child models grinning cheekily in the monthly Kmart catalogue.

It beggars belief that there is a Young Versace range that caters to children from newborns to twelve-years-old. I suppose there are wealthy people out there who couldn’t be seen shopping at Target for their kids, but with the scrapes that most kids get into, and their rapid growth, it’s sinfully excessive to be spending thousands on a flimsy skirt.

Yet wealthy people frittering away money is not the most significant thing to consider about Kaia’s modelling work and the visibility of young girls in the fashion industry. Unlike Thylane Blondeau's Vogue shoot last year, in which she wore a full face of make-up, leopard-print clothing and oversize heels, there is no parody of the fashion industry in Kaia’s images. This campaign is designed to appeal both to girls and their mothers (wealthy ones at least, and to foster aspirations in everyone else), and to encourage the process of girls valuing themselves according to how they look and what they buy.

Both men and women can take pleasure in aesthetic objects and the enjoyment of wearing good quality clothing, but it is women who are judged as a result of their appearance in ways that can be crippling. We know that the appearance of female politicians is far more often a subject of discussion in the media than men’s appearance— Tony Abbott’s alarming “budgie smugglers” being the exception.

A fascinating piece by Dannielle Miller at Mama Mia shows that even when women are active in areas in which their appearance should not be relevant, it is their looks that are most often attacked as a way of dragging them down and destroying their authority. Some of the female media commentators interviewed here, and in other articles on this topic, describe extremely hateful anonymous responses, not about what the substance of their opinion, but how they look. Nina Funnell, who writes about a range of women’s issues, and who has spoken out about her own horrifically violent rape, has shamefully received abusive comments suggesting that she was not attractive enough to be raped in any case.

This is what leads me to be critical of images like that of Kaia Gerber. Some might feel that the image is sexualising and is encouraging girls to “grow up too soon”. While these things might be true as well, using a young girl to advertise high fashion in the same way as women are used to advertise products begins the process of judgement even earlier. If mature women are undermined continuously because of their appearance and struggle with the results of this, then girls, who have not yet always been able to forge a self-confident identity, will not have the resources to brush such judgements aside.

Of course, for the past hundred years or more, girls have been able look to images of adult women in the media for an understanding of how they themselves should aspire to be and other girls can serve as the fashion and beauty police to ensure conformity. It is another level of pressure and expectation to have fashionable images of girls that are clothed and stylised as women, something that a 10-year-old cannot be, even if the image of Kaia from the neck-down looks as if she is a woman. The use of teen models often sells an unobtainable ideal of youth to women. However, selling womanhood to girls will surely only foster the same kind of degradation of girls' achievements in light of their looks as women already experience.

Transgendered Girls, Toys and the Great Girl Scout Cookie Boycott

2012-01-14T01:50:00.000-08:00

There have been quite a few stories about transgender girls in the news, not least of which on the controversy front has been the story of an American Girl Scout who opposes the inclusion of transgender girls within the organisation and is calling for a cookie boycott in protest.

I first began thinking about transgender girls after reading a Boston Globe article about twin boys, one of whom is now a trans girl. Without denying the existence of transgendered children and adults, I found some of the ideas presented in the article problematic. My feelings were especially pronounced in light of the recent discussion of the new Lego "Friends" range for girls and the gender segregation of toys.

The article about the Maines twins begins as follows:

Jonas was all boy. He loved Spiderman, action figures, pirates, and swords.

Wyatt favored pink tutus and beads. At 4, he insisted on a Barbie birthday cake and had a thing for mermaids. On Halloween, Jonas was Buzz Lightyear. Wyatt wanted to be a princess; his mother compromised on a prince costume.

Though Wyatt went on to express a clearer sense that he was a girl, as she identifies now as Nicole, it bothered me that toy preference was being used as a marker of gender dysphoria. While clearly identifying with the accoutrements of the gender the child feels that they truly are means feeling an affinity with the stereotypical markers of that gender, such associations suggest that there is likely something significantly unusual about a child who strays outside accepted norms with the toys or clothes that he or she likes. Though we need to support transgender children, we also don't want to encourage rigid separation of children's play according to gender by suggesting that if boys like typically "feminine" toys or girls like typically "masculine" toys that it indicates something wrong.

A 2010 research paper that sought to consider whether there is an innate preference in infants for particular colours and shapes, suggested that all children prefer dolls to cars at 12 months (this was measured by how much the infants looked at a particular toy). Once the boys in the study were about a year older, however, they seemed to prefer cars over dolls, whereas girls retained their preference for the dolls. The authors conclude that these difference "may arise from socialization or cognitive gender development rather than inborn factors." So, essentially, as boys get older they are gradually encouraged by their parents and the media they consume to ditch the dolls and start their Matchbox collection.

Clearly there is a percentage of children who have gender identity issues who need to be better accommodated and treated (some of the stories of trans boys and girls on the Mermaids website, the UK organisation for gender-variant children, are sad reflections of intolerance). Nevertheless, all children are being affected by the increasing gendering of childhood play, which seems to pathologise difference and diversity. Though Nicole's interest in Barbies and tutus was indicative of something more, it should not be a cause for alarm if a boy wishes to play with dolls or if a girl is more interested in a chemistry set than setting to work with a replica iron. UK toy store Hamley's has recently removed the "gender apartheid" of its separate boys' and girls' floors for toys (coded pink and blue) in a way that will hopefully allow children more scope to choose toys that interest them, rather than confining them to a limited selection according to what boys and girls are supposed to like.

I would suggest that the insistence of pushing children into their "right" gender also contributes to the bigoted attitudes that transgender children experience from their peers and adults. If you've not yet seen it, the video of an American Girl Scout, Taylor, expressing concern about Girl Scouts USA's decision to allow trans girls to enter the movement, shows her received ideas about the threat of transgendered people.

As a fan of Girl Guide history, I'm in support of the concept of a girls' and women's only organisation that encourages leadership and self-reliance, and, like Taylor from California, I would be disappointed to see boys being admitted. Nevertheless, Taylor is reproducing discriminatory attitudes about transgendered people that cannot see beyond strict binaries of biologically male and female. Taylor's YouTube video, which has sparked no shortage of discussion on feminist sites, is also embedded at a site called Honest Girl Scouts.

The site is purportedly run by current and former women of Scouting who disagree with the organisation's apparent conduct of sex education and support of a woman's right to choose (or pushing "pro-lesbian, pro-abortion role models"). In some ways the site is laughable ("FACTOID: Did you know that radical feminist Betty Friedan, founder of NOW (National Organization for Women) and NARAL (National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League) was on the National Board of GSUSA for 12 years?") but in others, especially the use, and perhaps production, of Taylor's video, it is disturbing. Specifically, it appears as if they have used a girl as a conduit for their discriminatory views.

On the Bitch magazine Facebook page, where the cookie boycott story was posted, Taylor was quite often attacked and was labelled a "creep". I would argue that the real creeps are those who are behind these campaigns to discriminate against gays and lesbians and transgender men and women in Scouting. It is a shame that such an articulate and intelligent girl has been encouraged to put forward these views, and that an organisation that is attempting to be progressive is being fractured by those who cannot fathom why reducing discrimination for this minority of children is a good thing.

Scouting was originally founded to accept children of all religious persuasions, so, despite some worrying statements at time from founder Robert Baden-Powell, at heart the aim was to be open to all kinds of young people. Perhaps girls might have even remained part of the original Scouting scheme in England if Edwardian social norms had not been so concerned about girls being too "boyish" and the presence of girls "softening" boys. I would hope that the society in which we live - a century after Scouting began in America in 1912 - will not reproduce outdated notions of what each gender should be by supporting the opposition to trans girls being part of Girl Scouts America.

Lego Makes Sure That Boys Will Be Boys and Girls Will Be Girls

2011-12-26T15:31:00.000-08:00

I have an opinion piece in today's Age newspaper on the new Lego 'Friends' range for girls, which was produced in order to attract girls to the Lego brand.

Understandably, there is some debate on the issue in the comments already. Authors do not choose article titles in newspapers, so this would not have been my choice for a headline, but they are written to invite readers in with a bit of controversy. I guess the point of the article is that what we think girls and boys are is really a bit of a fiction.

Maybe a little girl is the best authority on the subject. And this girl's toy store complaints sum it up quite simply.

Childhood and World War One Symposium: Sydney, 1-2 December

2011-12-06T16:47:00.000-08:00

When we think of the things that we wish to shield children from, war has to be one of the most concealed topics, right up there with sex. While many boys, in particular, may revel in playing war-based games on computers and in reality, the actual substance of war is something that parents fret about. Especially after 9/11, which was the catalyst for the ongoing "war on terror", there was frequent discussion on talk shows about how to explain or conceal the situation from children, who may be frightened by a world in which people wish to kill others mercilessly.

Yet there is no ability to entirely conceal the reality from children who are located in places of conflict. While most of these war zones today are not within view of children in the West, children in the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Australia and other countries were once very much aware of and encouraged to participate in war. If we look to World War One, children's books, magazines and organisations across the British Empire were saturated with the influence of war in a way that did not seek to conceal its horrors, but to use them to bolster children's ideological and practical participation in the war effort.

Last week I attended 'A Game that Calls up Love and Hatred Both: The Child, the First World War and the Global South', a symposium that forms part of a major research project, 'Approaching War: Childhood, Culture and the First World War', involving scholars in Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia.

I co-wrote a paper with my colleague Kristine Moruzi on the war-time trilogies of Ethel Turner and Mary Grant Bruce. The illustration above is from Turner's novel Captain Cub and shows the kind of universal admiration for boys and young men who voluntarily enlisted in the war present in texts for young people at the time. We set our discussion of the novels against the Victorian School Paper, which was a monthly magazine that all children in the state were required to purchase and read from the late nineteenth century.

The cover from the February 1916 edition shows not only the way in which the war and Australia's necessary contribution to it where placed at the forefront of children's educational materials, but also how a role was figured for all kinds of people, including women as nurses and maintainers of the home front. It was important to generate a sense that all Australians were contributing to the war effort, even if children could only sacrifice treats and trips to the movies to contribute small amounts of money to various Education Department sanctioned appeals.

Other papers at the symposium showed just how diverse the contributions encouraged from children during World War One were. Branden Little from Weber State University spoke about the Junior Red Cross in the United States, which was so successfully promoted that eleven million American children enrolled during the War. The children not only made and gathered supplies for war victims and hospitals, but worked in 'Victory Gardens' to contribute to the food supply and raised funds to assist Red Cross efforts overseas. (The Junior Red Cross raised almost four million dollars at the time, which constituted 10 per cent of the total of Red Cross funds in the period).

While the Junior Red Cross proved popular with both boys and girls, there were also numerous organisations targetted specifically at each sex that supported particular war-time roles for each gender. The Girl Guides were a standout in this regard, with an international network of girls already in place across the Empire, which Mary Claire Martin from the University of Greenwich discussed. Though in places such as Australia, where Guiding was still establishing itself, the organisation did devolve somewhat into the Junior Red Cross, those groups of girls who did remain as Guides set about working to raise funds for the war effort. Girl Guide training at the time was very much concerned with nursing, and girls supplemented their community work with practice in bandaging the wounded and carrying imagined victims on stretchers to safety.

Christeen Schoepf from the University of New England spoke about the South Australian Children's Patriotic Fund, which, like the Junior Red Cross and the Girl Guides, actually raised quite a substantial amount for the war effort. What was particularly striking, apart from the quirky beauty of some of the events organised by the Fund, such as an Alice in Wonderland themed fair complete with giant mushroom, was the immersion of entire country towns in the war. When the Children's Patriotic Fund held an event or parade, people came from miles to support it. Whether their motivation was strictly related to the war or not, I can't say, but war certainly permeated community life. During talks from representatives from the Australian War Memorial and National Library we heard excerpts of songs sung by young girls who would situate themselves outside the prime location of the town pub to raise funds for the war.

As papers by Kim Reynolds (University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne) and Jessica Gerrard (UTS) on pacifist movements for children, including socialist Sunday schools, noted, however, there were voices who opposed the war and sought to send children a different message to the mass of war-time propaganda. Nevertheless, their papers largely related to the UK, so how much these alternate voices permeated Australian culture during the war remains uncertain.

What seemed to come out across the papers was the sense of duty associated with the war. It is hard to conceive of children having any sense of nationhood beyond sporting events today and the concept of owing a duty to that nation seems so far removed from the ideas circulated during World War One that encouraged every child to "do their bit". Obviously, Australia is not as fixated on its relationship with Britain today, and we see war in a different light after the horrors of both world wars, Vietnam and endless fighting in the Middle East. So, in one way, the distancing of children from our involvement in war partially reflects our changing idea of conflict and greater reluctance to participate. But, also, we can see a sharp change in childhood expectations and the dissipation of the idea that children need to be part of important social changes and causes. While people do suggest that children are "losing their innocence" in the internet age, when it comes to war, children in the West are definitely more oblivious and shielded than they were a century ago.

Women in Australia's Military: On the Front Line of the Gender War

2011-11-11T18:49:00.000-08:00

I had an article published at The Conversation to coincide with Remembrance Day. It's called "Women in Australia's Military: On the Frontline of the Gender War", and was inspired by the news that women will be permitted to serve in armed combat roles in the future.

In response to the article, I received a lovely email from a woman who has served in the defence force, but who was prevented from pursuing her preference to be a helicopter pilot because she was a woman. Her daughter also wishes to enter the military- in the SAS, no less. Regardless of what some of us might think of military campaigns, I am please that this young girl will not be told that there is something she cannot do simply because she is female.

Our Australian Girl: Imagining Colonial Girls

2011-11-07T02:13:00.000-08:00

At the moment I'm preoccupied with colonial girls, or at least I should be. I'm currently reading some novels published by Ethel Turner and Mary Grant Bruce for an upcoming conference, 'A Game That Calls Up Love and Hatred Both', about childhood and World War I. On a related note, I've been trying to think about why Australia does not have an equivalent of Little Women, Anne of Green Gables or The Secret Garden. There are not really any Australian girls' books from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that have achieved "classic" status, or which even remain in print. My Brilliant Career, perhaps, but it is not really read by today's girls in way that these canonical American, Canadian and English novels might be.

What today's Australian girls might read is a new series from Penguin, 'Our Australian Girl', which assembles a range of authors to imagine the lives of historical girls. Five years ago, an equivalent series, 'Our Canadian Girl', began publication in Canada, following the 'Dear Canada' series by Scholastic in 2001 for older readers. (Let us not even ponder the significance of the girls' series title evoking the idea of girls writing a letter to their nation, while the 2010 series for boys is titled 'I Am Canada'.). All of these books perhaps owe something to the success of American Girl merchandise. In 1986, the blandly named Pleasant Company began manufacturing dolls inspired by historical events, and in the ensuing decades, the cross-media franchise, which includes multiple books depicting the life of each historical doll, has become a phenomenon (albeit one in which the historical aspect has been somewhat subsumed by 'My American Girl' dolls that are contemporary in their dress and stories).

Both the Australian and Canadian series are aimed at girls from 8-11 and seek to bring "history to life". To support its take-up in schools, both series are supported by teachers' guides. For the Australian series, these classroom guides were prepared by Dr Pam Macintyre in the Education Faculty at my own university. The academic seal of approval and connection with "real" aspects of history were obviously important to Penguin.

Marnina Gonick has already researched the Canadian series and its representation of Canadian national identity, especially how the historical girl is used to consider contemporary questions of gender and nationality. (Her paper on this topic will hopefully be part of the Girls, Texts, Cultures anthology being edited by Mavis Reimer and Clare Bradford for Wilfrid Laurier University Press.) I am keen to find out how the Australian equivalent represents colonial girls in comparison with their representation in colonial books- though I'll need a cool $250 to buy all the books to date.

While Scholastic has published My Australian Story since 2000 (with a similar connection to the classroom and some high-profile children's authors), Our Australian Girl seems to be the first gender-based historical series of this type to appear in Australia. I first saw it in a bookstore in a large purpose-built display with all four volumes of each characters' story available. The cover artwork is very appealing, and avoids the obvious "this is a book intended to teach me something" look of the Scholastic titles, especially its use of a different charm bracelet motif on each of the characters' titles. The Grace books are about a London orphan who is transported to Australia in 1808 for stealing apples; the Letty books about a free settler who travels to Australia with her sister in 1841; the Poppy books about a girl with Indigenous and Chinese heritage living in a mission during the goldrush in the 1860s; and the Rose books are situated in the early 20th century and focus on the restrictions on girls and women (brought to a head by Rose's suffragette Aunt moving in with the family in Melbourne).

The series website encourages girls to document their own stories of becoming an Australian girl, to fashion their own book cover and learn to do activities enjoyed by the characters (including drawing horses and baking damper). The site recently held a competition where girl readers were invited to describe the kinds of charm they'd like to put on their own charm bracelet. The winning entry is not too far from the kinds of aspirations to be found in girls' magazines of a century ago, including to travel, care for animals, take care of babies and to knit and make things (with an aspiration toward lace making).

Like The Daring Book for Girls there could be an element of parental and grandparental nostalgia here hoping to inculcate old-fashioned values about femininity. Though there's still an element of heroism in the extracts published on the site, with Grace unperturbed when attacked by rats and lice while shackled to the convict ship, the initial signs are that these contemporary versions of colonial Australian girls might just be a little less adventurous than those in the stories real colonial girls read.

The Diva Controversy: Binning the Playboy Bunny for Girls

2011-11-01T00:08:00.000-07:00

What is wrong with a store selling Playboy merchandise? I’ve seen Playboy car seat covers in auto stores and lighters and keyrings in novelty stores for years. The world’s biggest adult entertainment/porn brand has well and truly emerged from magazine racks and sex shop DVD displays. Diva, a chain of Australian budget jewellery stores, took the prevalence of Playboy accessories to what they thought was its logical conclusion by stocking a range of Playboy jewellery, including the iconic “bunny”, a plastic bow-tie necklace, and pendants proclaiming the wearer to be “Miss February”.

What Diva failed to consider was their responsibility to their customer base, which includes a significant proportion of pre-teen and young teen girls. If we’re in any doubt that the chain markets its accessories to girls, consider the following points. The chain’s logo is a pink heart. They stock Twilight jewellery (including an “I Heart Vampires” rubber bracelet). They also sell replicas of celebrity engagement rings, such as the “Katy Perry” for $7.50. This is an affordable store, selling accessories that are appealing to, and within the budgetary reach, of girls aged from 9-13. The following photograph shows the Playboy range shelved immediately next to the “Young Divas” range of plastic colourful accessories for girls.

The range was heavily promoted by the store, including large “Diva for Playboy” banners displayed in store. A campaign led by Collective Shout mobilised hundreds of Facebook users to complain on the store’s official Facebook page. Sadly, many older girls expressed their upset at their discussion of accessories being interrupted by concerned parents, to the point where a number proclaimed their love for the Playboy merchandise and others abused concerned women as sexless, ugly hags. Diva was oddly silent as the war played out in social media, but were busy behind the scenes deleting comments with which they did not agree, especially those who posted a clever ad parody featuring a girl wearing rabbit ears with the caption “When I grow up I want to be a porn star”.

A petition with over 6,000 signatures calling on Diva to remove the Playboy line from its stores was variously rejected when presented in person to several outlets. Diva really did not want to publicly engage with parents who were labelling their store as an aid to paedophiles and facilitator of the sexualisation of children in the name of greed. Instead, it seems that the chain has silently conceded that despite their claims that Playboy was a ‘fashion’ brand with no connection to porn, that the thousands of parents and concerned adults pounding their Facebook page with comments could not be entirely ignored.

Remaining stock has been removed from display, and according to reports on the Collective Shout Facebook page, boxed up for return to head office. The Diva website has removed all but one item from the Playboy range: the diamante bunny head ring that is “a must for all Playmates”. If the range has been such a good seller, as has been variously claimed, then one would expect the stores to be ordering in more products and new stock, rather than returning them to headquarters. Clearly public pressure has made it untenable for the store to continue to sell the Playboy range.

The Diva controversy is an intriguing example of contemporary corporate attitudes to public opinion in which businesses invite comments, feedback and interactivity, but only wish to preserve a culture of compliments and remove any trace of criticism. It also shows the utter failure of such businesses to practice corporate responsibility when their livelihood depends on the spending of children. Perhaps McDonald’s could make a few extra bucks if they installed a bar adjoining the playground at each restaurant? Heaven knows most parents being nagged into eating there could do with a drink. But perhaps, despite their unhealthy options that are marketed to children, McDonald’s has to draw some kind of line because of their major appeal to
children and young adults.

In addition to these things, Diva’s attempts to justify Playboy jewellery as appropriate for marketing to a primary audience of girls under 16 is a further demonstration of the creep of pornified expectations of women to a younger and younger audience. Whether or not we believe these expectations are harmful to women, it is harder to make the case that a 12-year-old should have the freedom to publicly declare herself a “Playmate”. There was a report of one girl of this age purchasing a bunny necklace because she simply liked the look of the rabbit. While this girl was clearly not ready to know about the Playboy empire and what it means for women, the adult world around her would take very different meanings from her display of this symbol. (Thankfully, she never got the chance to find out what the reaction might have been when her parents saw what she had bought at the mall that day.)

The ideal Playmate focuses on making her appearance pleasing to men. She is readily sexually available and happy to not only put herself on display, but to meet any request that a male might have, including to share a man with a bevy of other attractive women. After all, this is the fantasy of the Playboy Mansion, in which the now elderly Hugh Hefner maintains an entourage of young women ready to meet his sexual needs (even if they must be in decline these days). The very thought that girls who are still forming their identities would feel these pressures is disturbing and shameful when peddled by retailers who rely on girls for their business.

That Diva could not even make a simple public admission that marketing Playboy merchandise alongside Winnie the Pooh jewellery was wrong is a sad sign that businesses are not concerned about the exploitation of girls, but merely their bottom lines. While this is seemingly one battle won, the overwhelming force of sexualised images impacting on girls is a much larger war with no sign of a truce in sight.

The Girl Museum: The World's Only Museum About Girls

2011-09-24T23:55:00.000-07:00

It's been heartening to see so much interest in girlhood lately. The 'Colonial Girlhood/Colonial Girls' conference call for papers had a massive response from scholars around the world to the point where the event will be larger than we anticipated, even when trying to restrain its size as much as we can. It will be intriguing to see what the blend of literature scholars, cultural historians, art historians, garden variety historians and even anthropologists will produce.

In the course of organising the conference, I was alerted to the existence of the Girl Museum, which will now contribute to an exciting (and, as yet, secret) event at the conference that will relate to our theme. The virtual museum resembles a traditional museum in that, alongside research, it focuses on preparing exhibitions. Visitors can browse exhibitions on Girlhood in Art (currently featuring Girl Saints and Across Time and Space, a collection of images of girlhood from the beginnings of civilisation) and the Art of Girlhood (which concentrates on material culture, and at present reveals the fascinating customs associated with Hina Matsuri- Girls' Day- in Japan).

These more traditional exhibitions are complemented with unique ways of representing contemporary girlhood. For instance, the Girl for Sale exhibit examines the disturbing subject of trafficking in girls, combining poetry, some written by survivors of trafficking, historical and contemporary art images, and resources for learning more about the facts of trafficking. In its collaborative, interactive spaces at the moment you will find the Heroines Quilt, composed of images of 31 diverse girlhood heroines submitted by members of the public (each was accompanied by a short essay on the Girl Museum's blog), and Becoming Girl, which collects together visual art by Chaya Avramov (complete with an article from the Museum curators that gives a Deleuzian perspective on the Museum and its work).

More news about the collaboration with this unique site soon!

Why Bert and Ernie Should Come out of Sesame Street's Closet

2011-08-19T05:04:00.001-07:00

I had an article published in The Age and Sydney Morning Herald newspapers today responding to the debate that has ensued about Lair Scott's petition for Bert and Ernie to get married on Sesame Street. While almost 10,000 people have signed the petition to date, the very concept of gay characters on a children's TV show has sparked tens of thousands more to express their opposition to the idea of "inserting sexuality" into children's viewing time. Even some gay commentators think the whole concept is misguided.

Nevertheless, I thought the reactions that this little petition provoked were a good chance to think about why the representation of gays and lesbians in children's books and television is still considered so problematic.

Thylane Blondeau and the Ideal Woman as Girl

2011-08-13T21:19:00.000-07:00

Do you know of Thylane Lena-Rose Blondeau? She’s not an arthouse film actress, as her name might inspire in your mind, but a 10-year-old fashion model. She’s also not the kind of girl you would find wearing a tracksuit in a Kmart catalogue or even sashaying on a catwalk in a glitzy beauty pageant wearing a taffeta dress with enough puff to envelop those in the front-row in a cloud of gauzy pink. Thylane has appeared in the pages of Vogue Paris with the make-up, clothing, hair and provocative pose of a woman. Photographs of her draped over animal-print throws and cushions wearing stilettos that most women would struggle to walk in have drawn so much attention some months after the magazine was originally published that Thylane’s mother has closed the girl’s small Facebook group.

As Jezebel has pointed out, the offending photos probably owe more to a parody of the fashion industry than any actual attempt to market clothing to women. Magazines such as Vogue exist because of the advertising of fashion houses that is designed to appeal to women readers. Most women would not be enticed to buy dresses and heels after viewing them draped around a child. And Thylane, despite the lipstick, is very much a child. The low-cut gold lame top she wears in one photograph is cut down to her navel and reveals her flat chest. That we have not seen other examples as extreme in terms of the girl’s age and sophistication of her dress suggests that there is no broader trend to use pre-teen girls to market clothing to women.

Lauren Rosewarne, a fellow University of Melbourne lecturer, wrote on ABC’s The Drum about the Thylane debate. (I’ve just realised Thylane would be a great name for a patent medicine.) In part, I agree with her perspective that part of what makes us uncomfortable about the Vogue images of Thylane is that they remind us that children do possess a sexuality. Nevertheless, I would make some distinctions from Rosewarne’s dismissal of opponents of these photographs as “twin-set, crucifix-wearing mothers”. She writes:

“The girl is 10. Ten years old today means something substantially different than it did when the Mothers Union folk were making daisy chains and singing What a Friend We Have in Jesus in their youth.

Like it or not, Blondeau is either menstruating or will start pretty soon. With puberty comes all those things we're culturally so reluctant to think about, let alone talk about: arousal and sexual activity and condom vending machines in schools.”

The lives of girls do indeed change over time. Girls might once have been married off as soon as they reached menarche, and, indeed, they still are in some parts of the world. The culturally accepted view in the West, however, is that pre-teen girls still occupy some form of childhood, rather than adolescence. Debates about the sexualisation of childhood do not tend to centre on adolescents, who we accept will begin to experiment sexually. One prominent view of the history of childhood, espoused by Phillipe Aries, is that children were once seen as miniature adults and that the kinds of beliefs we have about childhood as a separate stage did not come into being until the seventeenth century. While the construction of childhood as a place of ‘innocence’ and freedom from work and adult concerns is a cultural creation, I don’t believe it has yet been dismantled by the superficial differences of the 'information age'.

I am not sure why a desire to shield girls from a consumer culture that is infused with sex need be equated with some kind of Christian naivete, as Rosewarne seems to do. I am an atheist (who admittedly did make the odd daisy chain in the playground) and I am not under any pretensions about the fact that many children masturbate, but I am still opposed to the use of girls to advertise products in a way that sexualises them. A girl getting a crush on a boy is not the same as adults posing the girl topless, pouting into a mirror. Similarly, puberty does not necessarily equate to sexual readiness. Indeed, first menstruation is often dreaded as girls experience the more uncomfortable and painful aspects of the process of sexual maturation without full development or understanding of sexual desire.

Yet I am not under the assumption that Thylane represents an actual transformation in the fashion industry, even though some of her other shoots similarly see her seduce the camera with 'come hither' looks, tousled hair and in poses that would be at home in a Playboy feature. What is prevalent, however, is young teenage girls modelling women’s clothing. Girls between thirteen and fifteen are often the much-vaunted future faces and bodies that women should learn to admire. Of course, it is impossible for a woman to maintain her teen figure, and especially to retain an unlined and unmarked face. While one in a million women might look like Claudia Schiffer, not one adult woman can look like a fourteen-year-old girl. We can argue, perhaps, who would want to? But if it is possible to worship youth to the point where a young teen girl is the ideal then women will never be satisfied with their appearance. It truly is an impossible goal. Even endless surgery cannot bring back youth, where it may be able to recreate a simulation of beautiful woman’s face.

As Zygmunt Bauman describes in 'Consumers in Liquid Modern Society', consumerism is not about satisfying desires for goods, but arousing desire for more and more desires. The most preferable desires of all to awake in the consumer is one that cannot be fulfilled. For instance, he mentions the concept of 'fitness', whereby you can achieve ‘health’ but you could always be ‘fitter’ than you are currently, leaving your desires perpetually unsatisfied. Marketing young teenagers as the ultimate examples of what is attractive about women similarly create a desire that can never be satiated, fuelling an endless quest for beauty and fashion in a fruitless attempt at satisfaction. In addition to avoiding the sexualisation of young girls in advertising, we should also be thinking about the well-being of women. While we can tell that ten-year-old Thylane sprawled on a tiger’s skin is wrong, albeit an isolated example, the cult of girl as ideal woman remains normalised and prolific.

Call for Papers: Colonial Girlhood/Colonial Girls

2011-08-08T22:29:00.001-07:00

Colonial Girlhood/Colonial Girls Conference
13-15 June 2012, The University of Melbourne, Australia
(PDF of Call for Papers poster)

Settler colonies and colonies of occupation, such as Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India, Ireland, South Africa, and the Caribbean, held out the possibility for girls to experience freedom from, and the potential to reconfigure, British norms of femininity. ‘Colonial Girlhood/Colonial Girls’ seeks to draw together international scholars for a multi-disciplinary examination of how colonial girlhood was constructed, and redefined, in both British and colonial texts and cultures. Since girlhood in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries extends from childhood to the age of marriage, it represents a complex category encompassing various life stages and kinds of femininity, as well as differences based on class and race.

Colonial girls occupy an ambivalent and sometimes contested position in British and settler societies, They are sometimes seen as a destabilizing force that challenges conventional expectations of girls or as a disruption that can, and must, be contained. The emergent writings of British-born settlers about and for girls, which were usually published in England, contribute a further degree of complexity to the developing picture of the colonial girl. These texts both perpetuate and occasionally challenge British imperial and gender ideologies, reflecting loyalties torn between “home” and new dominions.

Across national boundaries, the malleability of colonial girlhoods is evident. In British print culture, Indian girls were often represented as victims of an unenlightened culture that offered poor educational opportunities, and Irish girls were frequently ‘hot-headed’ and untamed. In each national context, the workings of colonialism produced different models of idealised girlhood, from which Indigenous girlhoods were often marginalised.

Crucially, the Empire itself was in a state of dramatic flux across what is often called Britain’s “imperial century”. The Empire grew substantially in size and in population in the nineteenth century and its expansion was integral to eventual movements toward independence for white settler societies. Imaginings of Empire and girlhood are both subject to radical change across the century, and reading the intersections and synergies in these transformations will prove mutually illuminating

Scholars from Art History, English, Cultural Studies, History, Indigenous Studies, Education and cognate fields are invited to submit proposals that engage with any aspect of the intersection of British colonialism and girlhood in the period 1815-1930. Papers may be inspired by, but are certainly not limited to, the following themes:

• colonial girls as representative of British imperial ideals
• tensions between imperial and national/colonial identities
• the circulation of feminine ideals between colonies
• print culture and the development of gendered colonial ideals
• Indigenous girlhoods
• coming of age in the colonies
• colonial life as a threat to girlhood
• girlhoods and evolving nationalisms
• British representations of colonial femininity
• class and labour in the colonies
• the imagined role of colonial girls in the British Empire

Please submit a 250-word abstract and a brief biographical statement to Dr Michelle Smith: msmith@unimelb.edu.au and Dr. Kristine Moruzi: moruzi@ualberta.ca by 15 September.

WWII Motorbike Daredevils

2011-07-06T05:46:00.000-07:00

British Pathé has an amazing collection of film footage from the 1890s onward online and available to view free of charge. There is not much present from before the turn of the century, which is both logical and sad, yet there is a real treasure trove of newsreel footage that brings the period to life in a way that printed sources can't quite achieve. The clip above from 1944 shows girls training for the National Fire Service as despatch riders. Of course, they're not usurping male roles because it's war time, and they're still feminine because they don't neglect the styling of their hair.

British Library Rare Book Finds

2011-06-28T22:55:00.000-07:00

I've just returned from a 3-week long jaunt around the world that included stops in Frankfurt, London, Winnipeg, Leipzig and Munich. In that order too, which meant a crazy loop of the globe in the middle of the already unbearable Australia to Northern Hemisphere journey.

In London, I had a brief stint at the British Library, a wonderland for researchers interested in somewhat ephemeral texts like Victorian girls' books. As the BL was a copyright library, the odds are that they hold one of every book commercially published in the United Kingdom. So where that frivolous, childish book of no account was thrown out, read to ruin or simply deemed unworthy of archiving elsewhere, one, usually-untouched copy, is usually hidden away in the St Pancras vaults.

For my current project on colonial girlhood, I wanted to see if I could find any books and magazines for British children about the colonies. I was congratulating myself for my sheer awesomeness in merely typing some terms into the catalogue when it returned the result, "The Child's Empire Annual" (1912). When I opened the book, I saw the amazing frontispiece pictured above. We have drovers running sheep in Australia, snow capped peaks in Canada, the astonishing Taj Mahal and an African tribe glancing out at the reader, prefiguring The Gods Must Be Crazy by 70 years. This was going to be it in showing British attitudes to Empire for children. Strangely, the volume, and the subsequent ones I looked at, made nary a mention of the countries of Empire. There were a few token references in the first volume, so as to live up to the title, but it seemed that the idea of an Empire annual was more important than the practice. Unless the idea was that the children of the Empire should read the annual?

The story was the same for The Empire Annual for Girls (1909), whose cover featuring heart-shaped topiary intimated how little rough-and-ready content the book would contain.

The Girl's Realm was an amazing magazine for girls that was published from 1898 (you can read a whole article about it in relation to the Boer War here). In comparison with the Girl's Own Paper, it is so much more progressive and interested in girls' lives beyond the home. Perhaps, as my scholarly friend and author of the above article, Kristine Moruzi, suggested, this is explained by the 18-year distance in its debut in comparison with the first edition of the GOP, but it was exciting to come upon lengthy articles with photographs of girls in New Zealand and Australia from 1899/1900. Not only that, but they included Aboriginal and Maori girls within them!

There's also room in the magazine for a story by boys' adventure fiction writer G.A. Henty in 1901 called "A Frontier Girl: A Tale of the Backwood Settlement". It features two illustrations of the heroine, Mary, boldly wielding a rifle. She can shoot "with a skill equal" to her father, and no wonder that's she's perfected her aim with all the "Indian attacks" that are crammed into the tale's five pages.

Child Beauty Pageants Down Under

2011-05-20T04:42:00.000-07:00

I had an article published in The Age yesterday about the ways in which women are judged on their appearance. I aimed to connect two superficially unrelated things, SlutWalks and the upcoming protests about American-style child beauty pageants arriving in Australia.

After I'd finished the initial draft of the piece, an item kept popping up on the news about a woman in the United States who had apparently injected her 8-year-old daughter with Botox. It seemed like a perfect, though rare, example of actual physical abuse related to pageants, like the videos that had been circulating of a woman waxing her young daughter's eyebrows for a pageant.

The next development reported on Good Morning America was that the girl's mother, "Kerry Campbell", was being investigated for cruel treatment of her daughter, Britney, and that the child had been removed from the family home. Recalling such fame-seeking lows as the "balloon boy" hoax, "Kerry" is actually Sheena Upton, a woman who claims not to know what Botox is.

The revised story has it that Sheena was paid by the tabloid The Sun to fabricate her tale of taking to her daughter's "wrinkles" with Botox. For what ended up being a fairly extensive media blitz, she received a paltry $200 from the paper, but I believe far more from the television programs who eagerly interviewed her, curious to speak with a mother who caused pain to her daughter in the pursuit of beauty.

In response, Jezebel suggests that our instincts should have told us that no mother would really have hurt her child in this way. It should, perhaps, have been obvious that this was a hoax. If it is the case that The Sun has a recent history of fabricating other stories along these lines, I wonder why this is. What kind of popular desire are these invented tall-tales about syringe-wielding mothers filling?

Though the landscape changes with this particular story with each day, making it hard to attempt any kind of analysis, it seems much like we want to believe that pageant mothers will go to any lengths to have their daughters be recognised as winners. The Sun, which is alleged to have staged the hoax, is a British tabloid. Perhaps both Britons and Australians are eager for stories that provide support to their scepticism about American-style child beauty pageants and fabricated stories like this are seen to meet a desire to tar pageant mothers as so competitive that there is no line that they will not cross?

It does not seem too far-fetched to imagine that if a mother is willing to spend thousands of dollars on a pageant dress, insert false teeth into her daughter's mouth, wax her legs, have her photos retouched and perhaps most offensively of all, have her learn a song like "Cutie Patootie" that she might go one step further and inject her with Botox. It seems patently ridiculous that an 8-year-old would have any discernible "wrinkles" to speak of, but so many other standard elements of American beauty pageants for girls seem similarly unthinkable to me that it is indeed hard to know when you're being taken for a ride.

The Royal Wedding and the Princess Myth

2011-04-28T17:51:00.000-07:00

I've been a one-woman media blitz today commenting on the Royal Wedding and princess culture for girls. The video above is from a TV spot on ABC's News Breakfast program. And here is an article in The Conversation that allows me to say what I really mean without the pressure of live-to-air television.

Yesterday I did an interview on Life Matters for ABC Radio and you can hear the audio at this link. It's a shame there's not a Royal wedding more often as I'm finally getting the hang of talking about it. I'm actually amazed that Australians are so interested in it, given our usual blase attitude to the monarchy. Then again, we have wrangled Fitzy and Dame Edna into the commentary so it's not exactly reverent adoration.

Because I am a Girl

2011-04-23T22:36:00.000-07:00

It's ANZAC day here in Australia. I do tear up a little thinking of the boys and young men who volunteered to fight without really knowing what they had gotten themselves into, or of those who were conscripted and had no say in the matter at all. It's worthwhile to have a day to reflect on the horrors of war and on the impact it has made on each individual who chose to participate or who were forced to take part. I always find the day to provide the perfect answer to why we should avoid armed conflict, rather than finding that it glorifies the concept of war, though I know the ANZAC mythology has been misused at times.

Plan International has been running a major international campaign, "Because I am Girl", for several years now and they're currently lobbying the United Nations to make 22 September International Day of the Girl. While women have aided in armed conflicts as nurses and combatants, ANZAC day is largely about men's involvement in war. International Women's Day is cause for us to reflect on what women have achieved in fighting for equal rights to vote and to work, and on the continued struggle for broader equality. A day to reflect on what it means to grow up as a girl in the developing world seems like a real priority at this moment. The struggle for girls' and women's welfare is more urgent in the developing countries where they are more likely to be malnourished, uneducated, afflicted with HIV, married young or sexually exploited.

The 2010 Plan report on the state of the world's girls reminds us that the problem is not only confined to rural communities. Cities are also inhospitable places to girls and the cities of the developing world see five million more people added to them each month. While this rapid growth means the threat of violence in the street and slums increases, it also holds out some hope for improvement as city girls are more likely to attend school, have better access to health care, and to be able to enjoy their girlhood for a longer period without being married before they have had the chance to mature.

Astonishly, during the 2010 Street Child World Cup girls who had lived in shelters and on the streets in the UK, Tanzania, South Africa, the Philippines, Brazil and Nicaragua developed their own manifesto to lobby those in power. All seem like reasonable demands that we should feel more global responsibility to ensure:

"We the street girls have the following rights and we want them respected:
The Right to live in a shelter and home
The Right to have a family
The Right to be safe
The Right to be protected from sexual abuse
The Right to go to school and get free education
The Right to good health and access to free health services
The Right to be heard
The Right to belong
The Right to be treated with respect and decency
The Right to be treated as equal to boys
The Right to be allowed to grow normally."

So many girls have seen and endured things that rival the sufferings of soldiers in combat. Why don't we remember them too?

Glamour: Women, History, Feminism by Carol Dyhouse

2011-04-11T05:03:00.000-07:00

There are two kinds of academic book. The kind you borrow from the library because you are researching a topic and just have to have some kind of authoritative quotation on ‘x’, for which you trawl the index, find your relevant term, persevere with the whole chapter to understand the context, and then move on. And then there is the kind that you willingly spend your own money on, with the express intent of reading it from cover to cover for *gasp* enjoyment. I’m guessing most people find the majority of academic monographs to fall into the first category. I’ve had a good run lately of two books read from beginning to end for leisure, Carol Dyhouse’s history of glamour and Marah Gubar’s history of children’s literature. I’ll leave Gubar for a subsequent post.

Carol Dyhouse was unfairly reduced to a name in my dissertation bibliography until I saw Glamour: Women, History and Feminism in a Zed Books catalogue. She has published several books on women and education, as well as the must-cite-in-literature-review Girls Growing Up in Late Victorian and Edwardian England, Feminism and the Family in England, 1890-1939.

Dyhouse teases out what glamour encompasses, which she argues is not simply beauty or what is fashionable. Glamour speaks “of power, sexuality and transgression” (3). The fascinating first chapter on the origins of glamour shows its movement from a term referring to witchery to draw in ideas of the exotic. Advertisements from 1920s periodicals beautifully complement Dyhouse’s narrative, showing the allure of the orient. For instance, Shem-el-Nessim (The Scent of Araby) suggests “Oriental luxury”, while Wana-Ranee (The Purfume of Ceylon) “distinguishes the woman of taste”. The opening chapter also introduces one the central threads of the story of glamour: the rise and fall of women’s obsession with fur as a sign of luxury.

Glamour then zooms in on the popularisation of glamour on the silver screen, noting a return to shapely figures in the 1930s “with three sets of twin heart-shaped curves: lips, bosom, behind” (38). Cosmetics, and even cosmetic surgery, were integral to carefully constructing the illusion of glamour, along with an attitude of sexual confidence. Dyhouse also considers how British girls and young women were influenced by movie star fashion and lifestyle in magazines such as Girl’s Cinema, Women’s Filmfair, Film Fashionland and Picturegoer. And who said the obsession with the lives of celebrities was a recent phenomenon?

The book reads changes in perceptions of glamour alongside major historical transformations, such as that provoked by the Second World War with the emergence of the “New Look” (“a last look at a vanishing conception of femininity” (83). She also brings class differences to bear in her analysis, especially in considering the differences in how girls would be introduced into society and groomed for womanhood. Dress showed class credentials and gradually the dissolution of formal, matronly dress at the end of the 1950s (formerly a marker of appropriate class membership) allowed girls to wear more youthful clothing.

The sweep through the second half of the twentieth century is equally grounded in social change from beauty pageants to women in the boardroom and grunge. Perhaps revealing my own “period bias”, I was most intrigued by the first two chapters grounded in the 1920s and 1930s, yet the story that Dyhouse has to tell is a must-read from beginning to end in the same way as a gripping novel.

Sometimes popular reads dispense with scholarly rigour, but Dyhouse’s meticulous research is thoroughly detailed in her extensive notes and is evident in the wonderful examples she teases out. I was compelled to look up Evening in Paris perfume, created in 1929 by Bourjois, after reading that it still evokes vivid memories in the women who once wore it as young glamorous things, especially during World War Two. The sites that sell rare, unopened bottles of the scent show that one generation’s concept of glamour remains with them forever, even while ideals of femininity shift around them. Should we be stashing away Jean Paul Gaultier’s “Classique” in its corseted female torso bottles now in preparation for 2070?

Article at The Conversation on Bad Girls and Tricky Women

2011-03-23T20:58:00.000-07:00

The new website The Conversation has launched today. It's a collaborative venture by the Group of Eight universities to deliver "an independent source of information, analysis and commentary from the university and research sector." The debut collection of articles looks more interesting than the vision that this description might suggest.

I was asked to write an article inspired by the recent St Kilda schoolgirl scandal about bad girls and tricky women throughout history and literature.

My Sexy Pony

2011-03-16T04:48:00.000-07:00

This is a chance for another materially deprived childhood recollection. I had always wanted a My Little Pony, which was quite the trend in the 1980s for girls, right up there with Cabbage Patch Kids. While it was only the outright spoiled girl who would tote more than one of those ugly dolls (the same kind who owned the Barbie Ferrari), many a girl had enough ponies to open their own horse stud. I did receive some kind of cheap imitation at one point, whose mane and tail I still brushed and combed, but my heart just wasn't in it, as it didn't have all the signs of authenticity like a cute little symbol on its rump.

I also recall a miniature explosion of outrage by a writer in Bitch magazine a few years ago, in response to the redesigned version of the Pony. The new Pony was much more sophisticated in its look compared with the shy, dumpy original. The author went as far as to say that the new My Little Pony was extremely sexualised, especially as it seemed to be "assuming the position" in the presentation of its rear end. The following edition included a number of letters from readers who accused the author of "reading too much into it"- the common accusation levelled at most people working on deconstructing children's literature.

If My Little Pony for the new millenium was debatable as to its sexualisation, there is no room for doubt with a new horse toy for girls called Struts. With their high heels and excessive jewellery, the name does leave the toy open to an unfortunate rhyme. What is perhaps most disturbing about the Struts is that they no longer only represent a horse, but seem caught midway between animal and human. It's a horse-girl hybrid, with ultra-long legs in gigantic platform heels and the impossibly large eyes of a Bratz doll. Psychologist Dale Atkins calls the Struts' eyelashes "flirtatious".

Unlike My Little Pony, which seemed tailored to the masses of girls who had fantasies of owning and grooming horses, the Struts seem more about mimicking the process of women dressing up in heels, make-up and ultra-feminine pink and lacy clothing. I am not opposed to girls dressing up or playing with make-up, but the Struts seem part of the ongoing reinforcement of girls' need to be sexual, or to learn to be sexually attractive (not just pretty), at a young age. It no longer seems like fun for a five-year-old when even a horse toy has to be sexy.

Fairy Tales Re-Imagined at ACMI

2011-03-09T23:23:00.000-08:00

Today was the first day of the Fairy Tales Re-Imagined symposium at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image. This morning I was surprised to find a cinema full of several hundred eager participants.

The first session described a spectacular online documentary project from the ABC called Re-Enchantment. There were two sessions involving the author and director Sarah Gibson- also a Jungian analyst (can't say I've met one before)- who brings amazing psychological insight to readings of fairy tales. I'm now keen to see her three-part documentary series Myths of Childhood.

The second session focussed on the Little Red Riding Hood story, particularly wolves and the idea of devouring and being devoured. I was spellbound by the artwork and history presented by printmaker Jazmina Cininas, who undertook the Girlie Werewolf Project as part of her PhD at RMIT. Her striking images appear in this blog post.

According to Jazmina's research, there were numerous girls and women who rode wolves from the 16th century, which was a crime when practiced by females. These records flowed through to some lesser known examples of purported female werewolves, with Jazmina's own works taking much from the historical circumstances of women's imagined devious relationships with magic (for instance, imagery of particular plants and flowers, such as hemlock, associated with she-wolves and witches). It was a revelation to find girl werewolves almost five centures before the Ginger Snaps films.

The final session concentrated on the Cinderella story and its place in contemporary culture. Meredith Jones from The University of Technololgy Sydney read the tale into contemporary makeover culture, from reality television trainwrecks like The Swan to Michael Jackson and Lad Gaga. I was intrigued by the connection between Meredith's argument that makeovers foreground the process of becoming, just as fairy tales give us pleasure through the process of the heroine becoming the princess (rather than how wonderful the prince might be as a husband, the children that may issue as a result etc.). What happens during "ever after" is not important.

This session also included an absolutely fascinating and rich paper by Peter Mitchell (also from UTS) on the significance of the "light shoe" for women, to shed light on ubiquitous glass slipper. I haven't spared much thought about the evolution and importance of footwear, apart from footbinding and the repercussions of high heels on poor feet and the ability to remain upright, but I was humbled into the realisation that the history of dress has major implications for the construction of gender. I really had no idea that men also wore high heels at court, and that they did symbolise power in terms of adding height to the wearer.

Tomorrow promises sessions on the use of fairy tales in creative works and the enticingly titled "The Forbidden Room: From Bluebeard to CSI". It was suggested today that the contemporary crime drama is a modern way of confronting death in the same way as the fairy tale did in the past, so I'm keen to hear Catherine Cole's paper "Death as Entertainment". I think my enthusiasm perhaps proves the point already.

Stifling High School English Class

2011-02-17T14:58:00.000-08:00

I have an article in today's Age newpaper in response to a piece that appeared yesterday. I appreciate that teen suicide is a serious and sensitive issue, but I am very troubled by suggestions that the already small pool of literature that is deemed acceptable for teaching in high schools would have to be vetted by people who aren't education professionals. The obviousness of why this is troubling is indicated by the child psychologist in the original article proposing that Phillip Gwynne's Deadly, Unna? (a Children's Book Council of Australia award winner) wouldn't make his cut because of the sexism depicted. Yes, let's remove all books from the curriculum with anything to say, or critique to make about society (because there is a lot wrong with the world, isn't there?) and watch kids become disinterested in reading as they are only allowed to read "acceptable" and potentially bland young adult literature that meets the expectations of a committee, then a psychologist.

Royal Girls and the Line of Succession

2011-02-09T23:03:00.000-08:00

We probably don't look to the British Royal Family for progressive attitudes on anything, let alone the idea of girls taking up the throne. If a Royal marries a Catholic, or indeed anyone who is not a Protestant (but it seems a special mention of Catholics need be made), then he or she forfeits a place in line to the throne. With the upcoming marriage of Prince William to Kate Middleton, which is taken as a gateway to imminent reproduction, the discrimination against Royal daughers has come into focus again.

As it currently stands, if William and Kate should have a daughter first and subsequently a son, the daughter would have to become accustomed to the little brother they've been pushing around becoming the British monarch in the future. I hadn't thought too much about the rules of succession because recent British history is dominated is dominated by the rule of strong, publicly admired Queens. We've had Elizabeth II on the throne since 1952 and Queen Victoria was an adored monarch from the age of 18 until her death in 1901. They are really only accidental rulers in that no male sons stood ahead of them in the line of successtion. Though both had highs and lows during their reigns, there doesn't seem to be any case to suggest that the nation or the Commonwealth is subject to any detriment in having a Queen instead of a King in place.

Of course, we can argue that the British monarchy is a redundant institution in any case. In Commonwealth nations especially, the impact of the British Royal Family is ever declining, with the backs of coins and the annual Queen's birthday holiday constituting the majority of our interaction with the monarchy. Though there might be some formal effects on our political system, such as the Governor-General as the Queen's representative, our lived experience is such that we could easily forget we even have a Queen.

Perhaps for this reason it might never be possible to change the rule of succession to eliminate discrimination on religious and gender grounds. According to recent news stories, such a change would require all fifteen independent Commonwealth nations to agree. The question is whether all would devote the time and effort to altering rules for a monarchy that many no longer wish to be involved with.

Nevertheless, though Australia is perhaps more concerned with becoming a Republic and changing the flag to remove the Union Jack, for so long as we remain in the Commonwealth it would be nice if such blatant discrimination against daughters were removed.

Anecdotal Delusions of Gender

2011-01-19T20:25:00.000-08:00

I've begun reading Cordelia Fine's Delusions of Gender, which is an accessible critique of how the neurosciences naturalise gender norms. In the humanities, we're aware of the conception of sex as biological and gender as a cultural construct, with scholars in children's literature on the lookout for how boys and girls are socialised into their genders through books and films. I was, however, unprepared for Fine's book. It pummmels the reader with scientific or psychological study after study to show how these cultural ideas of gender norms can alter the way women perform on maths tests and change the opinions of employers as to a candidate's suitability for a job. Women sometimes have to perform harder to achieve the same thing as a man, but we rarely recognise this. As the book remarks, Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did, only backwards and in high heels.

It was strange timing that I found myself at the local cricket nets just as I was becoming righteously indignant over some of the studies described in Delusions of Gender. I witnessed my own microcosmic example of Fine's thesis in action. A small boy, of perhaps 8-years-old and with prodigious batting and bowling ability, was being coached by his father. The father was no slouch, delivering some very fast balls to the boy, including some with a real cricket ball (which is a particularly hard missile to be hit with, especially as a child). The boy's sister, who was clearly a few years younger, was the enthusiastic retriever of balls, with dedication to speeding up the flow of the practice. Nevertheless, she was repeatedly growled at for getting in the way of the serious business of turning this grade three child into the next Australian opening Test batsman.

I must admit that she was occasionally pemitted a turn to bat with a miniature bat and the odd bowl of the ball, but the attitude of the father showed that he was in no way serious about developing her skills in case he might like to fashion her in to a cricketer to fulfil his seemingly unfulfilled sporting dreams. The real attention and pressure was on the boy to do well, and the father seemed pleased when the little girl made the occasional request to play on the nearby swings instead. Now they could get on with the real business of the day.

To top it all off, and oddly enough, the little girl had thought it necessary to bring along a long blonde wig (somewhat matted) to the cricket nets. I'd seen it sitting on the ground alongside the spare balls and wondered what on earth it was doing there. At a critical point in the practice, she asked if the father might help her to put it on. You can imagine how enthused he was at this prospect, and he begrudgingly delayed the ascent of his son by one minute when he finally plonked it on her head in a haphazard way. When we left the nets as darkness fell (this practice wasn't going to end just because the sun had set), the girl was taking one of her begrudged turns with the bat, with the blonde wig on her head, making the task that little bit more difficult. She would have to do the same as her brother, in one fraction of the practice time, with little fatherly enthusiasm and encouragement and while wearing a wig that sometimes blocked her sight.

Dissing Models, Victorian Style

2011-01-11T03:24:00.000-08:00

I bought 300 pounds (in monetary terms) worth of the Girls' Friendly Society's monthly newsletter, Friendly Leaves. I'm sure the bookseller thought that he would never live to offload ten bound volumes of them from 1898-1909. Especially as it was a scientific and technical bookshop in Wales where demand for an Anglican Church girls' group's newsletter was unlikely to be raging. And extra especially because it's not a particularly exciting read. (Quite a few years are edited by Christabel Coleridge, constant reader Kris, so I'm happy to share the tedium around.)

Amidst the preaching, advertisements for workers, and marriage and death notices (it's shocking to see how regularly women died in their twenties and thirties- they have the death column in every issue of a publication for a girl's society), were a few fun gems. The best, from February 1899, begins with an explanation of why the magazine does not include fashion plates (illustrations of the latest clothing styles).

Do you know, girls, we are sometimes asked why we don't have more about 'the fashions' in Friendly Leaves ? I think that it would be a great pity to take up our tiny space with fashion plates and notes, when there are so many nice little penny magazines which give such useful ones. We have got other things to talk about. Home Notes and Home Chat and Mothers and Daughters , and many others, give really nice hints how to make one's things look pretty without too much expense, and the pictures help us to carry the directions out. But oh, my dear girls, how dreadful it would be if sweet pretty maidens really could make themselves look like fashion plates! Do you know that they are nearly all monsters? A real woman's figure ought to be seven times the height of her own head. That is the perfect proportion, but I have seen fashion figures into which you could get ten or even twelve heads without any difficulty. They would not be able to walk in at the door....Then the necks! Some of them look as if the girl's head had been cut off and sewn on again, and had to be kept in place by a tight band. And the waist! But I won't forestall what will be said about that in 'The Way to be Well'.

The description of the illustrated clothing models is none too dissimilar from how many people describe catwalk models today, or from the discussions about Barbie's body weight rendering her unable to menstruate (or walk, quite possibly). I was surprised to see this kind of recognition that the fashion world is not reality and can even be seen as grotesque in a turn-of-the-century publication. Incidentally, 'The Way to be Well' didn't have anything useful to offer about waists, but provides a solemn warning not to place 'pig-styes' and 'manure heaps' close to one's house.

Talk about Sexualised! Old Love's Baby Soft Advertisement

2011-01-07T22:42:00.000-08:00

I have no idea of the original magazine source for this ad, which appears to be from the late 1970s or early 1980s, as I discovered it during a procrastinatory exercise that rambled through photo collections of strange animals and bad celebrity plastic surgery. This was among a collection of "weird old ads".

Given the recent reports about a beautiful artistic photograph of a young boy depicted as a peacock being considered inappropriate for sale in a charity auction conducted by the Sydney Children's Hospital Foundation, it is hard to believe that an ad such as this one for Love's Baby Soft ever made it to print with its explicit connection of childhood with sexiness. Then again, we didn't have little girls in extreme beauty pageants in all their spray-tanned, be-wigged and sequinned glory at this point I'm guessing.

Disney's 'Dreams Come True' Exhibition

2011-01-07T03:50:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I visited Disney's 'Dreams Come True' exhibition at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image. It was a different experience to the recent Tim Burton exhibition in that it was not packed to the point of queueing to view display cases. In fact, I was surprised by how few people were wandering about the exhibition on the Thursday late-night opening given Disney's domination of children's entertainment in the 20th century.

I know all that is wrong with Disney, from the sweatshop clothing to the dubiousness of the race, class and gender politics of many films. And then there's the pinkified Princess commercial juggernaut. I know that traditional tales have been plundered from a range of cultural traditions and have had the complexity and challenging elements vacuumed right out of them. I know that The Little Mermaid really ends sadly with her turning to foam on the sea. I know that fairy tales are not always about dreams coming true. But in Disney animated features dreams do come true and gruesome story elements are neatly traded for anthropomorphosised animal helpers.

The exhibition focuses on the fairy tale features from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) to the most recent adaptation of Rapunzel, Tangled (whose heroine seems to take more visually from a Bratz doll than the traditional Disney princess). Despite all of the critical lenses I could wear, I was still a helpless victim of nostalgia from the first section of cels from Snow White. (I always preferred her because she was dark-haired, unlike the usual parade of fair-haired virtuous maidens.)

There were some surprising snippets of information revealed throughout the exhibit, including unused sketches of Maleficent from Sleeping Beauty with an ominous pet panther and footage of a deleted scene from Snow White in which she instructs the seven dwarfs in the most polite way to eat soup, like an animated June Dally-Watkins.

Apart from a few sections of video (such as the soup sequence and an intriguing look at the multi-plane camera used to add depth to painted backgrounds presented by Walt himself) and some maquettes, it was a largely "wall-based" exhibition. Well, apart from the welcome presence of fairy tale books sourced by Disney in Europe that were used as visual references by his animators. A broader exhibition encompassing other animated films and shorts and the Disney theme parks would no doubt have appealed to a larger audience, but perhaps it could never be contained within any viable exhibition space.

With physical progress through the exhibit, which was ordered chronologically, came a sense of declining magic in the animation process. Cels were no longer hand-inked by the 1990s and the laborious and fascinating techniques of old are gradually being superseded by computer animation. It seems telling that this change in production coincides with the decline in popularity of the Disney-fied earnest fairy tale musical. Disney has signalled its intent to leave fairy tales aside in future animated features, but perhaps rather than a turn away from these stories, Disney might be wise to return to more authentic versions of them, complete with enough shock and awe to compete with contemporary children's entertainment that does not promote the Disneyfied idea of childhood innocence, dreams always coming true, and the homogeneity of 'dreams' as simply a desire for a girl to be married.

A Belated Christmas Treat

2010-12-30T04:00:00.000-08:00

It perhaps comes as no surprise that I was a rampant certificate collector as a girl. At my Catholic primary school, some children would take it upon themselves to collect rubbish in the yard and would then inform someone in authority of their selflessness in order to receive a holy card for their good deed. (From recollection, this sometimes involved presentation of a fully-laden metal garbage bin.) I cannot say for certain that I did not jump on the bandwagon when I learned of the largesse that picking up some chip packets and balled-up Gladwrap could bring.

Certificates were seemingly valued in 1916 as much as 1986. I bought this fantastic one that was presented to the dutiful Gwendoline Hatton on eBay. Somehow it has made its way down through the family for over a century in perfect condition, showing just how important her work was in perhaps knitting some socks or bundling up some clothes to send to a soldier. If you can't make them out, there are Girl Guides and Boy Scouts spelling out the letters "A Happy Xmas" with semaphore. My mother would have said that they have taken the "Christ" out of Christmas, but there are only so many flag-bearing boys and girls that can be fit on a small piece of card.

It's a small sign of how children were inserted into both the war effort and the imagined task of maintaining the British Empire. I wonder how the current fighting in the Middle East is being presented in schools today, if at all? I remember after 9/11 there was solemn discussion about how to prevent children being afraid of terrorism if they had seen the attack on the news, yet so much print culture of the Victorian and Edwardian period deliberately exposes children to news of war, sacrifice and potential invasion. Though it's hard to be too worried by the cheerful looking soldier and sailor on this certificate who appear rosy-cheeked and well-fed.

Article at On Line Opinion About Apostrophes

2010-12-19T21:55:00.000-08:00

This piece is not girl-related, although I'm sure that Victorian girls would have been chided had they mispaced or omitted apostrophes in their writing. The Girl's Own Paper's editors certainly took correspondents to task for sloppy handwriting or poor spelling.

Where are the champions of punctuation marks now? Who is there to chide Tattslotto for their 'New Years Eve superdraw'. In this short essay at On Line Opinion, I ponder the fate of the disappearing possesive apostrophe.

T-Bag '80s TV series on DVD

2010-12-14T02:43:00.000-08:00

I'm not sure how a child of today could ever proclaim to be "bored". With TiVo or Foxtel IQ (or whatever those special boxes are that 'record' all of your favourite shows digitally), online streaming, cheap DVDs and even, dare I say it, torrents, any television show or movie is available at almost any time. Kids once had to be judicious with their television scheduling. In Australia especially, with only four channels, the TV guide had to be memorised to ensure that a favourite wasn't 'missed' (and when you missed something you really missed it, potentially for years until a repeat was scheduled without notice) and prime viewing availability wasn't squandered.

One of the first programmes in my essential schedule was the British series T-Bag. It was effectively a live-action pantomine that was filmed inside a studio- the outdoor shots resembled The Wizard of Oz on a $100 budget- and was set in a fantasy world. The fantasy world was often located within a teapot from recollection. There is very little chance that T-Bag would get a look-in with child viewers today. The first series I remember, 'Wonders in Letterland', involved the girl heroine Debbie searching for a letter of the alphabet in each episode, with the villain T-Bag seeking to foil her at every turn. T-Bag had a boy side-kick, T-Shirt, whom she had effectively enslaved: he was forced to keep brewing her tea. I am aware this plot description might sound insane to readers outside Britain and Australia. You can watch a snippet on YouTube.

The series ran for nine years. The actresses playing the girl (whose name changed) and T-Bag changed several times, but T-Shirt grew from the cute little button you see on the front of the DVD cover in this post into a lumbering man during the course of the series. Never an auspicious beginning to an adult acting career.

With the 25th anniversary of the original series, the show has finally been released on DVD after relentless petitioning by nostalgic Gen X-ers like myself. I'm about to order the first set of two series, and I'm wondering how much I'll be disappointed after twenty years of growing up since I last saw it. In retrospect, I wonder if it was the female-centredness of the show that I really liked. Both the questing character and the villain are female. It was T-Shirt who was put-upon and who made the cups of tea, not the weak and downtrodden girl. And the set budget must have been redirected to the costuming of T-Bag, who never failed to be wearing an extravagant gown or elaborate headdress. The cardboard backdrops melted into insignificance with those outfits. Now they'd use CGI and T-Shirt would have hair like Justin Bieber.

Girl Guides article in The Age

2010-12-02T03:52:00.000-08:00

I forgot to mention that I had an opinion piece published in The Age newspaper on the Girl Guides to coincide with the Centenary celebrations. Well, the Centenary that is not really the Australian Centenary if any of the historical material I've seen is anything to go by. That is, 2011 really should be the Centenary, but the stamps are issued, the coin has been struck, and it is being celebrated in Australia this year to coincide with the British anniversary of Guiding.

It was difficult to have an opinion on Girl Guiding. The piece initially began as a historical "did you know" jammed full of interesting oddities, but it was not opinionated enough for an opinion piece. This is why I inserted the slant about how Guiding might be something of a counter to all of the imagined problems with girlhood in a sexualised and consumer-culture oriented world. Oddly enough, the now former Victorian Labor government's plan for all year 9 students to attend a "boot camp" to attain life skills released about a month later seemed to share similar ideas about the potential of the outdoors to impart vital life skills. That said, engagement with a movement with a well-developed programme for young people attended weekly for several years is no doubt more successful in doing so than a potential two-week horror show of short-sheeted beds and damp clothing.

Dumb Dads in Ads

2010-11-20T20:44:00.000-08:00

If you watch free-to-air television, you will be intimately familiar with “dumb Dad”. While your mind may wander during advertisements, if you trawl through your mental archive, you’ll be able to see the quizzical look on his face as he ponders the complexity of pouring a drink or removing a stubborn stain. I could no longer ignore him after his most recent manifestation in a cordial ad. Dumb Dad is summoned to the table for dinner by the name “Elizabeth” because, as we discover, he was too domestically inept to believe that the wonders of modern science have made possible a super-concentrated version of Fruit Cup.

The question is whether “Elizabeth” is more demeaned than the hapless star of an air freshener commercial who is visibly bemused by the product’s capacity to spurt forth a chemical concoction approximating gardenias at pre-determined intervals.

What we do know is that it is time to cue a shake of the head from all-knowing Mum. Because in all of these dumb Dad advertisements it takes Mum to really know how the home should function. Sure, in reality, most of the bridges we drive over are engineered by men, almost all of the surgeons we entrust our lives to are men, and most of the CEOs of the business world are men. In ads for domestic products, though, a medical qualification or an MBA can’t help anyone with XY chromosomes work out how to add half a cup of water and a knob of butter to a packet of pasta and powdered flavouring.

We’ve always had the Tip Top Mum who could be relied upon to rustle up a wholesome sandwich after school, while Dad was conspicuously absent from snack duty. Yet it’s an entirely new development for mum transmogrify into a super-being reminiscent of a Transformer in order to shield her children from the ominous threat of household germs. Clearly she needs to take on this superhuman role against streptococci because Dad is still on the couch ruminating over the erratic behaviour of the air freshener.

Of course, in the advertising world women are often sexualised, whether draped over a pair of Windsor Smiths or clutching a Chiko roll, and men are frequently injected with a heavy dose of “bloke” that sees them get “it” lifting and shifting, as VB would have it. Now advertisers are hell bent on convincing us that men are incapable of cooking or cleaning and women are clever and heroic for taking up the slack. The reason for this trend is not male-bashing, as some would argue, but a veiled affirmation that women’s rightful place is in the home.

Part of the canny strategy of advertisers may be to appeal to mothers who perform the majority of the housework and childcare. Let’s all pretend that scouring congealed pasta sauce from around the hotplate ring is a mark of achievement that a man can’t manage, rather than contemplate that women are still doing most of the domestic chores and the child-rearing while conducting work outside the home. Perhaps we might be able to attain an honorary doctorate from Spray and Wipe College (an affiliate of the Ponds Institute) to compensate for women’s inability to break through the glass ceiling.

Advertisements, with their polite and clean children, are not reality. Yet they are symptomatic of wider trends that present men who are competent in the home as anomalies. The recent documentation for the federal government’s paid parental leave scheme that will come into effect in 2011 observes that the payment is “usually” reserved for mothers but can be “transferred” to fathers. This wording conveys that a man taking primary responsibility for the home is unusual.

The continued idea that only women are truly capable of maintaining a home that infuses many ads is a key reason why it is women’s careers that are affected by a couple’s choice to have a family. A mother needs to consider the implications of her absence from the home because in her absence her partner will be reduced to Steve Guttenberg in Three Men and a Baby. Yes, a male partner can close a million-dollar deal, but, no, he cannot work out how to affix the adhesive tabs to a nappy. Who knows what kinds of damage will be done to the child who does not have Transformer-Mum on hand to ensure that domestic order is maintained and soap pumps are safely free of germs.

It is a clever sleight of hand trick that these ads don’t seem as conservative as the stereotypical advertisements from the 1950s that showed ever-smiling, well-groomed mothers drawing forth apple pies from the oven upon father’s arrival home from work. Instead, it seems that men are now the victims. After all, they are the ones who are shown as helpless domestic imbeciles.

We must be clever enough to recognise that these ads aren’t detrimental to men, but continue to contribute toward women’s inequality. By suggesting that only women possess the innate ability to ensure cleanliness and cook dinner, the weight of caring for the family remains firmly on women’s shoulders and men escape its pressure and any impact on their own career. The idea of the men who occupy the majority of senior positions within our corporations and professional fields throwing up their hands in confusion at the prospect of removing mould from the shower is not really demeaning towards men. After all, they’ll still return to their respectable, high-paying positions once Mum has finished shaking her head knowingly. Instead dumb Dad is really an underhanded way of reaffirming that women should rightfully cook, clean and care for children and forget about work outside the home.

I Can Has Fellowship!

2010-11-16T16:00:00.000-08:00

I'm definitely going to have more time to blog next year thanks to the recent news that I have been awarded an Australian Research Council postdoctoral fellowship. This means that I have a paying job for three years and all I have to do is research.

The project is a collaborative one with Professor Clare Bradford at Deakin University and Dr Kristine Moruzi, who is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Alberta, Canada. It is snappily entitled, "From colonial to modern: transnational girlhood in Australian, New Zealand, and Canadian print cultures (1840-1940)". Translated into non-academese, this means that we'll be raiding the archives of girls' book and magazines for these three countries to uncover lots of things girls were reading that no one has yet looked at. Because there will be so much primary material, we're each responsible for trawling through one nation's libraries in the first instance. I'll be charged with the Australian books and magazines, Clare with New Zealand and Kristine with Canada (which is handy, seeing she is living there).

I'm hoping there will be lots of exciting finds in libraries across Australia to report on here. I've got conference trips planned to Adelaide in February and Brisbane in July, so I will no doubt build in some book unearthing time to these.

And, in another exciting news, I've been asked by the lovely Angie Hesson to give a lecture on childhood from 1750-1850 at the Johnston Collection of decorative arts in March next year. It will be the first lecture in a series to accompany a special exhibition called "Oh, Do Grow Up: Growing up in England 1750-1850". Time to brush up on Romantic and Regency childhood. And perhaps the person giving the talk should have grown up themselves, as I just bought a stuffed toy replica of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (from the classic stop-motion animation movie). What can I say, his nose actually does light up, and he speaks too. This is all integral to the research process.

The Mad Hatter, The Goblin King and Mr Tumnus: Girls Desiring Men

2010-10-24T16:06:00.000-07:00

After a return journey from hell, I'm now back from Canada and the girls' texts and cultures symposium in Winnipeg. As someone who studies inanimate texts that do not speak back, it was a real revelation to hear researchers who work with actual girls speaking.

One paper ended with a video edit of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe with a love song spliced over the top to suggest a kind of love plot between Lucy and Mr Tumnus. Immediately, I was reminded of the relationship between Johnny Depp's Mad Hatter and Alice in the recent Tim Burton film adaptation of Alice in Wonderland. While the film made a connection between the Hatter and Alice's deceased father through their mutual fascination with things outside the "normal" range of thought, the tension generated when Alice must decide whether to remain in Underland or return home seems much greater than that of a girl who must leave a friend behind. On the part of both the Hatter and Alice, there seemed to be a romantic interest that made the decision all the more poignant.

On the long flight from Vancouver to Sydney, the paucity of movie choices gave me the opportunity to find another filmic girl who is placed within a romantic relationship with a man. In the 80s classic Labyrinth (directed by Jim Henson), the fifteen-year-old heroine Sarah must rescue her baby brother from the goblin king, Jareth, who is disturbingly played by David Bowie, replete with backcombed hair and a codpiece. She must do this before the thirteenth hour or her brother will become a goblin, and she'll presumably be struck from babysitting club membership across the nation. As part of Jareth's attempts to prevent Sarah from reaching his castle by way of the labyrinth and rescuing her brother, he enters her hallucination of a masquerade ball (though both are unmasked). Sarah suddenly looks a lot older than she has throughout the film, with her hair elegantly styled and a face full of make-up. Jareth attempts to prevent Sarah from moving forward in her quest by dancing with her, and the scene again seems to show a girl desiring a man, or at least the idea of one, as she is temporarily transfixed by the spell of the ball and Jareth.

I'm not sure whether there are other examples, and the Lucy/Mr Tumnus one is a stretch (although I did feel a little uneasy with Mr Tumnus on first viewing the film as he seemed lecherous to me!), but with all the paranoia about paedophilia in contemporary culture it seems interesting to see at least a few very popular films that acknowledge the possibility of a girl desiring someone who is an inappropriate love interest. Perhaps it is a part of the demonstration of the girls acquiring maturity that they are shown as having the capacity for romantic interest in men, and the quick return to the normal world outside of fantasy lands leaves any conflict between social norms and the girls' feelings behind? I suppose it is an awkward reality that girls often experience sexual desires before boys their own age have matured and hence desires are projected on to much older pop culture idols, in what is usually only ever a fantasised relationship. Perhaps that's why these girl/man tensions turn up in fantasy films, as they'd be too awkward to contemplate in realist ones.

Fulla, the "Muslim Barbie"

2010-09-05T22:33:00.001-07:00

Somehow cereal lead me to Fulla. I was reading about how extruded cereals are purportedly very unhealthy (an unpublished study conducted with rats apparently showed that the creatures that ate the cereal box lived longer than those that ate the rice krispies inside), and then through the link of unhealthy foods came across a discussion of Oreo cookies. There was an ill-fated attempt to promote the cookie with an African-American "Oreo" Barbie, and finally somehow a brief update on the world of Barbie lead to my discovery of Fulla.

Fulla's occasional description as "Muslim Barbie" seems wholly inappropriate, as I can't imagine there to be an equivalent to Barbie in the Islamic world. If you mean a method of socialising girls into cultural norms, then perhaps Fulla does fulfil the same function as Barbie. Barbie's life is entwined with her boyfriend Ken's (though I never owned a Ken because it seemed a waste to get a "boring" tuxedo-clad Ken when there were more elaborately dressed Barbies to own). Her primary function is as a fashion model to be dressed and undressed in approximations of contemporary women's clothing and swimwear. On the surface of it, Barbie exists to rehearse scenes of Western dating and sexual display. While I don't have a strong knowledge of this area, clearly these aims are not central to socialisation of girls in Islamic nations.

As such, animated promotional videos of Fulla, who is described on her American site in English as "the little girl who wears modest outfits", show her inhabiting a female-centred, domestic world. In the two that were often embedded in newspaper stories in English about Fulla she is ensconced within the home. In one of these, Fulla remains in her gigantic house. She conducts her morning prayers, makes her bed, takes a phone call from her friend, fixes herself breakfast (on Fulla dinnerware, and eating what appears to be Fulla cereal- so product tie-ins transcend cultural and religious difference to some extent), welcomes her friend for a visit, whom she surprises with a cake, and then settles in to bed while looking through the happy memories in a Fulla photo album. In the other, Fulla dances around her home -which seems to occupy its own large tract of land that keeps it distant from other dwellings- magically changes outfits twice, until she is dressed in what I believe is referred to as an Abaya, which then enables her to move outdoors and pick a flower, while continuing her unstoppable dance of happiness.

Fulla's face bears quite the resemblance to Barbie's, despite the difference in eye and hair colour, and the abundance of pink and the font used to write her name also seem similar. These two videos created the perception in my mind that Fulla was entirely confined within the home, a convenient answer to problematic interactions with men in the public sphere. One more clip shows Fulla painting a picture and imagining dancing out in a field with two other girls dressed in Abayas.

Some further searching on YouTube showed that there was much more to Fulla and the range of options presented for Muslim girls than this, however, even if certain religious or cultural requirements had to be met. Like Barbie's much touted "careers" as a doctor and an astronaut, Fulla works as a dentist. You can see the dentist Fulla playset here. She rides a horse across the desert past a number of building and structures, including the Sphinx, albeit side-saddle. I'm not sure why she cries as she lays the flowers at the end of the clip, so there is something significant in there that I am not knowledgeable enough to understand. She sings, along with her sidekick dolls, in a tamer recreation of the 1980s "Barbie and the Rockers" band, though these scenes are interspersed with her reading the Koran (I think) and nurturing children. Overall the videos work against many Western norms, but other elements of Barbie culture are reinforced, such as the focus on jewellery and clothing, and references to touchstones of American culture (if not just appropriations of Barbie herself, but also Fulla clutching a Care Bear).

In another, Fulla is finally shown outside (not in a dream), riding a scooter and playing badminton with a friend. Though Fulla is often depicted with two children, I think it is clear that they are not her own children and that she is unmarried. It's consequently a little strange that we never see her parents in any of these clips, though I think Barbie's dream home is permeated by a similar uncertainty about just how she's acquired such a mansion in her own right. I did read an explanation that it would be inappropriate for Fulla to have a "boyfriend" like Ken, and as such, no male companion for Fulla would ever be manufactured. In these videos in isolation, from a cultural outsider's perspective, the absence of other people, especially men seems striking. When Fulla rides across the desert, into an amazing looking historic town, or scooters around something that looks like Munchkinland, there is not a soul to be found. At home, her female friend visits, or she cares for children. In the world at large, there are no other people, however, with the vast metropolis shown in the scooter video not offering up a single soul to invade Fulla's outdoor freedom. Is this because of restrictions on girls' free movement outside the home, or customs about their interaction with men?

There is, no doubt, much more at work to the world of Fulla than I have the ability to talk about, but I find her fascinating. I've also discovered an equivalent to Bratz dolls (Arabian Friends) and a few other attempts to combat the appeal of Barbie in Muslim countries. I might post on them separately. Some have questioned whether she is merely another ideal for girls to conform to, even if she is not parading around in swimwear and high heels. Whatever she is doing, she is certainly more successful at capturing buyers in the Middle East than previous attempts to create a modestly dressed doll rival to Barbie. Paradoxically, I think she's done it by following Western models of marketing and branding pioneered by the likes of Barbie.

Krao, The "Missing Link"

2010-08-26T19:15:00.000-07:00

I have just finished writing a draft of an essay about the first Tarzan novel. While it felt strange to be meddling in the territory of boyhood (though I had some familiar materials about Darwinism and Boy Scouting to include), I managed to cleverly generate a footnote about a girl in the process so that I did not have to totally separate myself from girlhood.

Krao was a girl from Thailand (known as Siam at the time) who was extremely hirsute. She was afflicted with hypertrichosis, a condition that most visibly results in an excess of hair on the body and face. You might have seen images of other people suffering from severe examples of the disorder, such a Lionel "the Lion Faced Man", who is also pictured here, and the present day examples of Larry and Danny Ramos Gomez (known as the "wolf boys").

Krao seems particularly interesting to me because she was "discovered" not long after the publication of Charles Darwin's famous works on evolution and sexual selection, On the Origin of Species and The Descent of Man. As the leaflet from one of her exhibitions at the Westminster Aquarium in London shows, she was touted as the "missing link" between ape and human. While Darwin said that humans had developed from an "ape-like progenitor", this did not mean we were descended from apes. (Though Darwin did say he would rather be the descendent of a clever baboon than some of the "savage" races he had seen in the wild.) Nevertheless, in popular thought, many people imagined that there had to be a being that sat mid-way between the ape and human.

There were other examples of people with disabilities exhibited as "missing links", such as the microcephalic black man, William Henry Johnson in the United States (also know as "Zip, the What is It?"). Krao seemed to be the most widely travelled and frequently exhibited, mostly because her condition meant she required little trickery to convincingly exhibit as the missing link. She spent much time in the United States of America in museums and carnivals, even purportedly ending up as a bearded lady at Coney Island. On her return exhibit at the Westminster Aquarium after some time in the US, according to an excellent article on Krao by Nadja Durbach in Victorian Freaks , Krao's bodily development into womanhood elicited some concern by scandalised members of the public. One outraged letter writer felt that Krao surely had to be the result of bestiality. Durbach describes the lengths that were gone to in order to prove that Krao had been civilised by British education and she was often dressed in fine clothing as further evidence of her transition. It is hard to believe that this constituted entertainment, but then, reality television seems to be the modern version of the freakshow diguised as "self help" in examples like The Biggest Loser.

What to do with Enid? Blyton books in the twenty-first century

2010-07-26T04:19:00.000-07:00

It is not a mark of honour to be an uncritical, unabashed Disney fan in the world of the academic study of children's literature. The "magic" of Disney is tainted once you wake to the films' gender, race and class politics. It is still acceptable to inexplicably, and guiltily, want to visit Disneyland, however (as I have done in Los Angeles and Paris). Enid Blyton occupies a slightly lesser-known rung in the world of children's texts, but seems to provoke a similar polarity between loving adoration and total hatred.

They do let children off from most crimes (well, except for the James Bulger killers, but that was murder), so you must not record a conviction for this, but my first book love was directed at Enid Blyton's Faraway Tree and Wishing Chair series. Oddly, or perhaps "queerly" as Blyton would have said, many of my students at Deakin University, when asked their favourite children's book, often mention one of Blyton's books. I was surprised that her books were still a fixture of childhood reading.

I'm not sure how much of a part the illustrations played in my enjoyment of the books. The editions I collected were the large format, hardcover, lavishly illustrated ones like the one shown in this post. I used to draw versions of the pictures for school projects. At a certain age, I believed that it was entirely possible for there to be a magic tree at the top of which different "lands" materialised each week, many of which seemed to culminate in an unending buffet of desserts with obligatory treacle puddings prior to departure. In grade one, a girl at my primary school told me that the Faraway Tree was actually situated at the end of her street. This was in Frankston, Victoria, which meant it was perhaps not too dissimilar from someone claiming that a circle of fairy folk sat at the back of their trailer park behind an old car body. If the folk of the Faraway Tree were going to choose somewhere, it would probably not be in Frankston, but a suitably English glade or perhaps a European forest in which red and white spotted toadstools grow. But I believed her. And I was very jealous.

And so, it's time for another outraged response to modernising Blyton's prose for new editions of the Famous Five novels. I remember a similar outcry several years ago when two of the protagonists of the Faraway books, Fanny and cousin Dick, were relieved of their genitalia-connoting names to be renamed Frannie and Rick. We sniggered about those names in 1986. Did it take another 20 years for publishers to catch on to this?

I feel a bit ambivalent about these changes. On the one hand, children's texts are products of their time, and historical children's literature often makes for uncomfortable reading for adults, even scholars. I wouldn't like to put one of Angela Brazil's novels in which characters sing a "coon song" into the hands of a child. And yet similar ideologies sometimes inform E. Nesbit's books, yet they still seem to get the nostalgic seal of approval. If we accept that children's books help socialise children into our world, then if a child reads a book in which girls do all the cooking, boys take care of the important work and "dirty gypsies" spew forth hordes of children and try to steal babies (cue E. Nesbit) then they won't be exposed to ideas we agree with.

Which brings me to the other hand, child readers of today will not be fully immersed in books like Blyton's or Nesbit's. Instead, such books will likely be introduced by well-meaning parents or grandparents and will form a tiny sliver of their cultural exposure. In my own childhood reading, the unfamiliar, formal British dialogue of Blyton's books seemed to render them all the more fantastic. I'm not sure that I wanted them to resonate with my contemporary reality. I did not want Jo to peer into Moonface's house only to find that Duran Duran were playing a surprise gig in there with Bubbles the chimp guesting on drums. I find it irritating when British books must be "Americanised" along the lines of Harry Potter. I suppose the question that I fixate on is, are children looking for magical fantasy in need of contemporary language use or is some of the archaic language part of the charm? Does every word need to immediately make sense? Does every saying have to reflect contemporary usage?

So I suppose I sit in the middle in that if present day child readers are going to devour Enid Blyton then any overt racism should be quietly expurgated. The quaint and unfamiliar language, and some of the unfamiliar practices (like Dame Slap, a maniacal wielder of corporal punishment, who we are positioned to dislike) is part of the appeal of the books. I know there have been abridged and altered versions of Huckleberry Finn, and its race politics has generated a lot of discussion about its appropriateness for today's child readers, but would publishers attempt to jazz up the language to make it seem more familiar? Or is the historical specificity part of what helps the reader make sense of a different world and its different conceptions of race and gender? Taking away the sense of temporal difference also takes away the context for understanding different historical worldviews.

Most posters on an Australian news item about the story seem to hold Blyton as sacred and unalterable, mentioning her in the same sentence as the Bible and Shakespeare. We know that there are various editions of these central texts of Western literature too, of course. What really seems to be being assaulted here is the childhood experiences of adult readers. I felt a similar outrage when 1970s and 1980s episodes of Sesame Street were released on DVD recently but labelled "not for children" because of particular elements that did not meet the requirements of present day educational theory (if memory serves, going home with strangers, possibly the suspicious Mr Hooper, was also part of it). I wonder then if the defence of Blyton is more about the defence of our own youth, than preserving the sanctity of some fairly ordinary prose that has just happened to sell 500 million books worldwide?

Winnipeg here I come! Girls, Texts, Cultures Symposium

2010-07-20T18:20:00.000-07:00

I have become used to "girls" being a fringe, underappreciated realm of study. I almost have responses ready when people ask "so, you teach children?" (like the airport security attendant who was rubbing my clothing and bag down for traces of explosives a fortnight ago), and I've accepted that prestigious universities will take the candidate with the publication on Henry James informed by the philosophy of Agamben rather than girls' genre fiction.

Given this acceptance, I didn't expect to be invited to a symposium at a university on the other side of the world in order to speak and listen to other scholars on the subject. I've generously been invited by Professor Clare Bradford, who is the current recipient of a prestigious Trudeau Fellowship, to attend the 'Girls, Texts, Cultures' symposium at the University of Winnipeg in October. A quick Wikipedia check (only for initial checking, not for actual "research", students) revealed I'd be heading to the coldest city in the world with a population above 600,000. So perhaps it's warmer than Siberia, then.

I know I'll be joining Dr Kristine Moruzi, who has just taken up a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Alberta (hooray!), Professor Mavis Reimer (from the University of Winnipeg) and a range of other international scholars from gender studies, education, psychology, sociology and international development.

I've put in an abstract to speak about British books and magazine stories about Australian girls. I have a list of a dozen or so such books written by British authors to confront at the State Library. But where will I find the time for that as Lindsay Lohan has just entered jail and I must maintain a candlit vigil by the television in order to await news of her potential early release.

Blog Emerges from Book-induced Coma

2010-07-19T01:19:00.000-07:00

At last the time approaches for my book manuscript to be submitted on 1 August. So guilty thoughts can now be spared for the ailing blog. As a result of one such guilty thought springing to mind as I mowed the lawn in advance of a rental inspection tomorrow, here I am reviving the poor neglected thing.

I've rejigged the title of the book, as the focus has changed somewhat from my PhD thesis, which focused on the connections between empire and mothering. The revised title is "Empire in British Girls' Literature and Culture: Imperial Girls, 1880-1915". In my mind I was hoping for "Imperial Girls" to occupy the coveted position before the colon, but the editors felt that it did not clearly indicate what the book was about. While this is true, it did make me think of Madonnna's "Material Girl" and hence that I might be staking a claim for some degree of cultural relevance for Victorian and Edwardian girlhood. But then, it's not about Madonna anymore, but Lady Gaga, so then we'd get down to something nonsensical like "Imperial Face" or "Victoriandro". I actually thought it would make a nice companion to Joseph Bristow's "Empire Boys". Nevertheless, this is my first book and I'm not a publishing expert, so this "talent" is not about to be difficult.

I'm mightily happy with the cover image, which is hopefully going to be the fine, patriotic girl you see before you in this post. The original book, A Patriotic Schoolgirl by Angela Brazil, was published after my time period, but the image was so appropriate that I had to use it. I've certainly learned a great deal about copyright law in gaining permission for images. Frustratingly, some of the illustrators I'm dealing with died less than 75 years ago, which leaves their works still in copyright. Children's books publishers have often shut up shop in the interim and the rights to old children's books that will never likely be published again are not sought after so many trails are cold and lead nowhere. It's strange to think of the rampant downloading going on with music, movies and tv shows to the point that stores are closing and labels downsizing, but the book world is still sticking with the straight and narrow in terms of permissions, the last bastion of copyright compliance.

I wonder if the eBook is going to see massive piracy and downloading impinge on sales? Not that I need to worry about my own small revenue from eBook sales, but I dread the thought of the physical bookstore going the way of the record store. I suppose it's similar to the bookless library. That said, I have been grateful for the ability to borrow an eBook at short notice rather than having to trek in to a university library to look up a small piece of information. It feels traitorous to even do so. While my interested has been sparked by the iPad, it feels like it would be joining the dark side to buy one. It seems we're still in the "early adopter" phase and, for some reason, I don't like being seen as arriving "early" to the consumer party. I'll walk in fashionably late in a few years' time when I begin to be ostracised for not owning one.

Desiring Justin Bieber, the Tween Frenzy

2010-04-27T05:50:00.000-07:00

You know you're a gulf away from youth when you not only do not understand why the latest teen singing sensation in so sensational, but you never knew he existed until he caused a public commotion involving crying girls waving meticulously hand-made banners declaring their love. (It is also a worry when a sixteen-year-old, the latest teen sensation, Justin Bieber, actually looks about twelve to you.)

I too was one of these girls in my pre-teen years. I was obsessed with the original "boy band" New Kids on the Block. I had posters covering every wall in my room, and a collection of cassettes, videos, books and whatever paltry range of merchandise was available in Australia. One item that did make it here, sold at Woolworths, strangely enough, was the New Kids on the Block doll. I bought the "Joe" doll and thus could posess my desired boy in miniature. When the band finally toured Australia in 1992, I crafted my own sign with "I Heart Joe" on it to wave at the concert. It was a marathon effort that involved copious use of glitter.

The commotion generated in the lead-up to the latest teen sensation Justin Bieber's arrival in Australia resulted in several girls fainting and a panicked crush at 2am in the morning! This is not the first time he has had to cancel a performance because of over-zealous crowds of girls. The police reported that girls had camped the night waiting, many without any parental supervision, showing their supreme dedication to the cause of catching a glimpse of their idol. The crush that ensued was partially blamed on mothers failing to control their daughters, who were repeatedly instructed to move back. David Koch, the host of the show Sunrise for which Bieber was performing, called the mayhem "extraordinary scenes, quite dangerous scenes down there".

Pre-teen and teen girl desire being described as "dangerous" and "extraordinary" seems a bit of an overstatement. I'll bet there were more girls screaming when the Beatles touched down in Australia in 1964. It is interesting to see girls injecting all their developing sexual desire into fandom for teen stars while they are waiting for the boys of their own age to mature. Before you know it Bieber will no doubt have a drug habit and will have a few children who must be concealed from fans (like New Kids of the Block, two members of which had "secret" children that fans could never know about because it would destroy the fantasy that they were available). As Bieber's interview comment when he was asked if he had a girlfriend suggests, the whole basis of this kind of teen girl fandom is the illusion that each girl has a chance to live out her dream to be with the boy hearthrob: "So all you Australians - I’m single". Don't worry about me encroaching on your territory, girls. I think I'd be doing something illegal given that I'm soon to be thirty-one.

Girl Scouts Cake Mix Advertisement

2010-04-16T18:45:00.000-07:00

I'm still buying silly amount of Girl Guide and Girl Scout paraphenalia on eBay for a potential book. Girl Guides originated in England, and the movement arose out of very British sentiments, just like the Boy Scouts. The adoption of Girl Guiding as Girl Scouting in the USA saw a few distinct differences evolve. Not only is the name and uniform different, but the Americans have unsurprisingly proven to be more effective merchandisers and promoters of their girls' movement. I have bought many UK books, badges, letters, scrapbooks etc. but it is from the US that I find annual Girl Scout calendars, most LPs of girls singing, clothing and equipment catalogues, dolls etc. Girl Scouts also regularly feature on popular magazine covers, such as the Saturday Evening Post, as symbols of American identity and innocence.

I've also found a number of American advertisements in which the wholesome connotations of Girl Scouts are used to market other products, including for Mutual Life insurance! This one for Dromedary Angel Food cake mix shows a level of commercialisation that just doesn't occur with Guiding and Scouting in the UK. I am partially annoyed at people who are tearing out advertisements from old magazines, destroying them as historical records and then charging large amounts for them on eBay. But then, without these opportunistic sellers, I'd never come across these images, so I'm not entirely innocent in the process.

Over the Shoulder Boulder Holders.. for seven year olds

2010-04-15T17:33:00.000-07:00

Controversy over underwear that replicates brassieres for girls too young to have any amount of protrustion from their chests is not new. In Australia in recent years, retailer Target attracted controversy for underwear sets for under-10s that included a bra-like top. Amid discussion of Bratz, Britney Spears and paedophilia, the sets were swiftly withdrawn from the racks in all stores.

The most recent incident of this ilk, which has generated international media interest, concerns UK clothing chain Primark, who were selling padded bikinis, seemingly sized for girls as young as seven. The image above shows the degree of padding, designed to counteract the fact that a triangle bikini just will not sit right on a flat pre-pubescent chest. While girls are reaching sexual maturity at a younger age in the the West- I think I had my first training bra at about age 10- and there may be a need for bras for "early developers", the adding of the padding in this instance seems to reach a new level of disturbing.

Online comments seem to gravitate toward polar extremes. The majority suggesting that such products are lures for paedophiles, and a minority of Mums and women noting that sometimes a small amount of padding in a bra can "smooth" budding nipples, causing less embarassment for girls as they are developing breasts. My negative opinion of this product is not based on fear of men at beaches being delighted by young girls leaping about in padded bikini tops, but rather on how it affects the girls themselves.

Girls and women learn to become acutely conscious of any perceived inadequacy in their appearance as feminine. There is an awkward point in a girls' life when other girls are shaving their legs and those with a soft layer of fluff still in place are the subject of mockery. We learn there are things we must do so that other girls will not tease us (the pressure women learn to apply to one another to push conformity to norms of feminine appearance) and so that boys might think us attractive (the pressure to be desirable to men and the learned satisfaction in achieving this goal). We learn that if we don't meet particular standards of desirability then there are things we can do and products we can apply, so that we do meet them, at least for as long as the make-up stays in place or the spray tan remains visible.

We also learn that there are particular body norms that are deemed attractive. Overweight women are rarely admired in popular culture, and most often the subject of derision. With porn not just a stash of old magazine or a few hidden VHS tapes, but ever-present online professionally produced movies and amateur videos (including those performed live for the viewer), the impossible sexual ideal of skinny woman with gigantic, implant-enhanced breasts travels much more widely and more frequently than ever before. Women who don't meet these usually artificial norms can feel inadequate, or not as sexually attractive. Padded bras usually serve the purpose of filling out a flatter chest, of adding extra bulk to fit an ideal. This may make some women feel more comfortable or feminine. They may feel that they now fit the ideal a little better.

Do we really need to start introducing another anxiety that women experience into the realm of pre-pubescent girlhood? Should seven- or eight-year-old girls be contemplating their lack of chest and thinking that they need a little padding to gain a more womanly silhouette? To introduce the idea that girls are not living up to another feminine ideal so early only further encourages feelings of inadequacy and poor body image that many women suffer from.

Mark Ryden's 'Saint Barbie' and 'Big Doll'

2010-04-05T08:25:00.001-07:00

I'm a fan of Mark Ryden's surreal artwork. I have a framed limited edition lithograph of one of his works, The Magic Circus, at home. I don't know why a tiny reproduction, little bigger than a photograph, cost as much as it did, but I do know that the full-size limited edition lithographs sell for over $1,000 and are always snapped up immediately upon release.

As a casual fan, I was surprised to see that there was a pertinent artwork for this blog that had escaped my attention. 'Saint Barbie' from 1994 puts the icon of manufactured femininity in the position of a deity, and the nostalgic innocent girl (with her puffy-sleeved dress and Alice headband) as pleading worshipper. I haven't reached a conclusion about the spotted butterfly with a man's head yet (initially I took it for Barack Obama!), but it is situated above the Barbie-goddess and the girl, at the top of the visual hierarchy. The other gaze in the image is coming from the flower in the foreground, which is a recurring motif in a later Ryden work, Big Doll.

Once you see the Barbie-esque doll at full-size, she becomes grotesque, with her receding hairline, oversized head and impossibly wide eyes. The real girl, who is miniaturised, almost becomes the doll by virtue of her size, but her realistic depiction, her plain, dark eyes, her short limbs and basic dress, make it difficult to recognise her as the giant Barbie's plaything.

I suppose the presence of the eyes in both paintings could be read as the way in which the development of girls plays out under the public gaze. The sense of always being looked at, and assessed, is an inescapable part of leaving girlhood behind.

Australia's TV girls

2010-03-26T04:24:00.000-07:00

A media frenzy worthy of a Frontline episode has accompanied the recent allegations against former Hey Dad...! actor Robert Hughes. The patriarch of the Kelly family in Australia's most successful sitcom (which ran from the late-'80s to the mid-'90s) is accused of abusing his on-screen daughter played by Sara Monahan. In the ensuing circus, a number of other women who claim to have been fondled, groped and propositioned (including fellow co-star Simone Buchanan, who was only 18 at the time) have added weight to Monahan's claims of long-term abuse.

It's prompted me to reminisce about Australian TV in the '80s, and the shows of my own childhood. When I got to thinking (after marvelling at clips of "Nudge" being dubbed in German), I realised that Sarah Monahan was one of the most recognisable girls on Australian television in the '80s and '90s. While I can think of a number of American shows where girls have taken centre stage in the "family" viewing slot, like Blossom, Moesha or Hannah Montana, it's hard to think of Australian equivalents. The first show featuring Australian kids that I remember loving was The Henderson Kids (1985-1987), which was about a brother and sister forced to move to the country from the city after their mother's sudden death. Nadine Garner played one of the leading roles and Kylie Minogue appeared as a regular supporting character. After a bit of wanton YouTube viewing of old clips, I couldn't believe the "Aussie-ness" of the show, particularly the extremely broad accents of the kids. You wouldn't catch Kylie dead speaking with that kind of twang now.

I have vague recollections of being fascinated by the film BMX Bandits (which starred a young, frizzly-haired Nicole Kidman), and engaged in a conversation to that extent while at my next door neighbour's house watching afternoon TV (I can remember that it was Wombat with the puppet Agro, as it wasn't part of my preferred viewing schedule). But apart from these early memories, Sarah Monahan's role as Jenny would have to make her the most recognisable Australian girl on television of that era. There's Kate Richie growing up as Sally on Home and Away but somehow seeing her playing the part until the age of 30 on-screen destroys the mental picture of her as a perennial child.

Apart from the clear horror involved in any instance of child molestation by an adult and a co-worker, I wonder if we're not all so fascinated by these allegations because Monahan played the quintessential Australian schoolgirl of an era that now has nostalgic associations. I saw the final part of the last episode from 1994 and it actually makes a joke about "GCodes"! With a lack of other broad-accented girls to think of (well, not any longer, with Monahan's Texan strains), the character of Jenny almost sums up the idea of genuine, unaffected Australian girlhood. The realisation that her on-screen father was violating his position as an authority on the set destroys the only long-term comedy family we've ever had on Australian screens. (Not unless you find soaps like Neighbours and Home and Away unintentionally funny.)

In a reunion special from a few years ago, where Hughes was noticeably absent, actor Chris Truswell (Nudge) described Hey Dad...! as Australia's answer to The Cosby Show in that it featured a professional father, and a slightly more upper-middle class sensibility than might have been seen on our screens previously. Ultimately, it was quite a painful show to watch, far more painful than those it supposedly emulated. God knows how it became our most popular. It seems much funnier overdubbed in German, strangely. Nevertheless, if the show was meant to represent a more sophisticated Australian family, these abuse revelations also destroy the idea of safety in the middle-class family. Hughes is accused of fondling daughters of family friends and using his own daughter as somewhat of a cover to ensure his bedroom visits during sleepovers were not seen as untoward.

With his relationship with fictional girls, the real girl who played his daughter, and real girls who were family friends, now in question, the ideal television father (who cared for his family after his wife's death) has now rendered one of the most iconic- yet tedious- Australian shows of its era unwatchable.

An Australian Alice?

2010-03-19T20:08:00.000-07:00

Last month I had the good fortune to attend the Rare Books Summer School at the State Library of Victoria. The sessions I attended focused on illustrated children's books from Australia and England. In the early Australian books, it was common to see attempts to impose British mythological creatures on the Australian landscape. Lots of dainty fairies skipping about among gum trees replicating the same stories from home with an exotic backdrop.

A very kind colleague of mine recently gave me a book called The Magic Seeds: Tessa in Termitaria, published in Sydney in 1940. It has lots of shades of Alice in Wonderland with its girl protagonist who wanders alone in the bush and swallows a fern-seed that makes her as small as a white ant. Excitement awaits as Tessa enters the ants' city, "Termitaria" and "learns all about their civilisation". The author, Keith C. McKeown, was an entomologist, so much factual information is jammed in, with flimsy framing devices like Gilbert the Cricket ("who knew everything") informing us of the meanings of terms like "ichthylogy" and "ornithology".

While he may have made a strange attempt at marrying didacticism and entomology by mimicking Alice in Wonderland, you can't accuse McKeown of total unoriginality. When Tessa arrives in Termitaria, the worker ants find her clothing irrisistably mouth-watering because it is made of cellulose. They promptly eat her "little dimity dress with the pink flowers" and she is rendered naked in the rest of the book's illustrations. (Well, at least until the small closing illustration when Tessa is returning home restored to her usual size.) It's quite entertaining to look through the whole book and spot the variant ways in which insects can be used to obscure naked Tessa's chest and genitalia.

What a Tangled Web we Weave

2010-03-17T21:59:00.000-07:00

I couldn't have asked for better inspiration to follow up my last post about the low status of girls' stories, than news about Disney's next animated feature, Tangled. The LA Times has reported on the film's title change from Rapunzel in order not to alienate boy viewers. The President of Disney and Pixar animation reportedly remarked, ""Some people might assume it's a fairy tale for girls when it's not. We make movies to be appreciated and loved by everybody." Of course, if a story is for or primarily about girls that rules out interest from boys, but stories about boys are seemingly "loved by everybody" regardless.

There are some changes to this filmic version that suggest a surface modernisation of the heroine. Much like Princess Fiona in Shrek, apparently "the demure princess is transformed into a feisty teen." Those who've given a few moments thought to analysing that film (well, at least students in a subject I teach at Deakin University have), find it easy to see the "feisty" heroine is still rendered subservient in needing to be rescued by her prince, by her natural role as the one who cooks and cares for others and her obsession with ensuring that she fits the standards of physical attraction required by her suitor.

It remains to be seen how Rapunzel fares as a heroine, but the hero "bandit" named Flynn Rider sounds like he will be injecting the right amount of masculine protection-and most importantly, action sequences- into the mix.

Scarily, this perception that "girls' stories" alienate boys is having an affect on which movies ever make it on to the screen. The complex Hans Christian Anderson story "The Snow Queen", which I loved as a child (and which includes both a strong girl and boy in its narrative), is reportedly now on the scrap heap because the studio has had "too many" girls' films in its schedule. So the simple presence of the word "queen" is too feminine? Or is it because it's about a girl who saves a boy? Would Beauty and the Beast be made today with its overt reference to a girl in the title and no action hero inserted to balance out the puffy dress quotient? Not that I'm a fan of the puffery, just irritated by the universalising of stereotypically masculine traits and the segregation of femininity.

Catmull believes that the recent Disney animated film The Princess and the Frog suffered at the box office because of its overt call to girls: "Based upon the response from fans and critics, we believe it [box office takings] would have been higher if it wasn't prejudged by its title". There are numerous other factors to consider here, including the film's use of traditional hand-drawn animation, which has clearly been struggling against CGI children's films in the past decade. On another front, The Princess and the Frog was the first to feature an African-American heroine. Already it had to challenge the perception that only girls watch girls' stories and, in addition, that white children are only interested in reading about or seeing white characters like themselves.

And so the box office takings of this film have a flow-on effect on the belief that stories about girls are only for girls, and stories about non-white characters are not for the white middle-class only serving to reinforce the homogenous norm even more rigidly than before.

Girls' Books vs Boys' Books

2010-02-28T00:13:00.000-08:00

The child_lit listserv is a place of conflicting responses: awe (when Philip Pullman casually posts), appreciation (when erudite and passionate discussions transpire), and frustration (when a well-meaning member repeatedly posts topics that no one else seems to share the same enthusiasm for ad infinitum). Many times it prompts me to think about children's reading today, in ways that I don't ordinarily do as a scholar who is more up-to-date with reading habits in the 19th century than the 21st.

A recent discussion on the list concerned the segregation of books into gender-exclusive categories. As a Victorianist, I'm familiar with the idea that girls looked for adventure in the pages of boys' magazines and novels. When there was no swashbuckling or discovery of the wilds of Africa in girls' books, girl readers were able to turn to their brothers' books to experience excitement not only vicariously, but at a remove from their intended audience. There are documented boy readers of girls magazines, such as the Girl's Own Paper, but they appear to be in the minority as compared with the reverse situation of girls escaping moralistic tales.

I'm not sure today whether you'd find more girls playing football than boys being chaffeured to ballet lessons by their parents, and similarly much about children's reading seems to be directed on gendered lines that put girls' books in no-go zone for boys. One list member discussed removing a dust jacket from a book to make it appear less "girly". The boy to who read the books enjoyed it but the marketing of the book as overtly girly was seen as putting off boys who may have enjoyed a story about a girl protagonist.

While there are reasons to be sick about the "pinkifying" of girls' culture, which are well covered by the Pink Stinks campaign, it also plays a part in situating girls' books as irrelevant to boys. As list members pointed out, to suggest that white child readers could not enjoy a book about a person of colour would be largely unthinkable (even though publishers do their best to outwardly whitewash their titles), but the perception that books about girls are unappealing to boys while the reverse is not a problem continues to undermine girls' interests, strengths and abilities as inferior to typically masculine traits. Do educators have to hide the outward signs of masculinity on books in order for girls to read them?

There is a lot more thinking I need to do about the gendering of contemporary books, but as I first see it, this continued status difference begins to instill a hierarchy of feminine and masculine culture from childhood. Women's interests are frivolous. Men's important. Football and fishing shows should occupy television schedules on Saturday, a day of rest from work, but never those about typically feminine interests (apart from cooking, which nearly always involves a man showing us how it's done, unless she's scopophilic fodder like Nigella Lawson). I'd be interested to read more about the gendering of children's books over time, particularly series fiction. While it seems there is far more literature out there that does not perpetuate some kind of artificial gendered reading distinction, it still amazes me that the gendered divide is still so prominent.

The Collector's Impulse

2010-02-10T01:03:00.000-08:00

I've got two Girl Guide projects on the boil at the moment. And for this reason I've become a somewhat compulsive eBayer, trawling for interesting ephemera that might make for good illustrations. I've now got a giant box of Guide books, photo albums, camp diaries, badges, certificates, letters, application forms, even an original belt. Here's hoping a book results or I'm going to have a busy time relisting a hundred back issues of the Waratah (New South Wales Girl Guide magazine) from the 1950s.

I've also nabbed a few fairly scare weekly issues of the Girl's Own Paper with their advertisements still intact. Anyone working in this area knows that advertisements were usually removed for libraries and binding into annuals. I've only ever seen advertisements from this magazines contained in a Library of Congress microfilm, which include issues from the early twentieth century. The copies I found are from the 1880s, the earliest years of the paper.

Some contained additional fold-out ad booklets, usually for soap, including the pictured advertisement for Brooke's Soap, which I think became well-known as Monkey Brand soap. I've been reading Anne McClintock's article on the history of soap, and she mentions mirrors, soap, light and white clothing as the four domestic fetishes of the period. In this image, we've got a kind of mirror in the form of the artist's canvas, but it's depicting a humanised monkey that the girl has proudly painted. As I'm intending to write a paper on Tarzan in light of Victorian popular understandings of social Darwinism, I'm not sure what to make of the monkey in the suit. Can he be humanised and civilised like native peoples with the influence of femininity and whiteness? But what on earth is that giant furry thing on the girls' chair? An animal skin? If so, is there a reversal of the monkey in the tuxedo with the idea of the girl in the monkey's fur? A strange one, that's for sure!

A Tribute to My Mum

2010-01-08T00:00:00.000-08:00

It has been a challenge to keep the focus of this blog on the topic of girls' literature and culture. Every day there are dozens of issues that I feel compelled to write about, but I've not made the decision to blog about "everything that bothers me and what I think of it", rather to focus on anything that relates to girls, femininity or children's books.

One thing that has been immensely challenging to the idea of regular blogging during the past 8 months has been the illness of my mother with mesothelioma. It is a rapid, debilitating disease that makes relentless progress regardless of treatment.

My mother passed away on 8 January 2010, after diagnosis in April 2009. She was only 64. She was a central part of my life. I spoke to her every day. And it is hard to adjust to knowing that she won't be there on the other end of the line when I call home.

In the shellshock of the moments after my Mum had finally gone, I wrote an opinion piece for The Age newspaper. My family had not had time to be angry about the fact she had suffered through a disease that she should never have contracted. A disease that was the result of company greed, despite the known risks of asbestos decades before she was exposed to its deadly fibres.

My mum taught me to read before I went to school. It is hard to know that the first piece I had published in a newspaper appeared because she is now gone.

The history of children’s literature and girls’ books

2009-09-06T05:51:00.000-07:00

Comment on Seth Lerer’s Children’s Literature: A Reader’s History from Aesop to Harry Potter from a girls’ literature perspective

I remember stumbling upon Seth Lerer’s at-the-time new history of children’s literature in a library catalogue search last year. I have since read critique of the book that asks why those outside the field of children’s literature feel that they possess sufficient knowledge and authority to attempt to write definitive histories. I believe Lerer is both a Medieval and Renaissance literature scholar, which cannot alone discount the value of his contribution to the field. One of the most renowned children’s literature scholars, Professor Clare Bradford, was a medievalist originally. Until children’s literature is well entrenched at undergraduate and postgraduate level at more universities, it’s going to be a common occurrence for some scholars to traverse from other areas to children's books. Professor Mavis Reimer and Professor Perry Nodelman began as scholars of the Victorian era, just as I have begun my foray in the field looking at books largely no longer read, and unaware of the wide reach of the discipline in contemporary texts.

While it is perhaps impossible to imagine a children’s literature scholar doing an about-face and setting out to write a history of Renaissance literature mid-career, some part of me was pleased that a scholar in “serious” literature would enter the realm of children’s literature. In my fantasy of it all, while there are methodological specificities to children’s literature and generic conventions to children’s texts, it should be no different to move between Romanticism and Victorianism as from Modernism to children’s literature. You’re going to be beginning behind the eight-ball with the switch, but we’re not talking a move from geology to social work.

And so I went to Lerer’s book, taking no offence that he was willing to swan in to the field and publish a history of children’s books that probably outsold the works of the best-known established children’s literature scholars.

I have spent several weeks revising a book proposal based on my PhD thesis on girlhood and the British Empire. The motivation behind this research was further galvanised upon reading Lerer’s history. In the time period relevant to my own work, he refers to boys’ periodicals, including The Boy’s Own Paper, boys’ school stories, the Boy Scouts and has a dedicated chapter on Robinsonades. None of the girls’ equivalents of these aspects of print culture are mentioned.

Actually, there was a little white lie in that last sentence, because The Girl’s Own Paper is mentioned in the chapter devoted to “female fiction”. It comes up because Harry Potter’s Hermione “owes” much to the Paper, but we’ll never now why, as we hear no more detail about what the girls’ periodical actually contained. That the chapter begins by discussing a book that celebrates male achievement is not a good start (Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban) even if Lerer uses it to make the point that Hermione is not central to the action and only becomes so in the filmic version.

The core argument of this chapter is that “girls are always on the stage; that being female is a show” (228-229) and that girlhood produces a tension between this external staging and finding “inner virtue” (229). I wouldn’t disagree with the ideas of femininity as performance, but conceptions of hegemonic masculinity no doubt identify performative aspects to masculinity as well. The feeling that some of the ideas in Lerer’s book were familiar, and have been much further developed elsewhere, came over me several times. While Lerer does cite many sources in his notes, the weight of the body of children’s literature scholarship does not seem to impact substantially on the content. He writes on fairy tales: “It is as if the girl’s body is itself a kind of forest for the fairy-tale imagination: something dark and inexplicable, something in need of management, of clearing, of cleansing”. While neither masculinities nor fairy tales are within my area of specialisation, ideas like these seemed to present well-worn ground as new observations.

I was surprised to see a book from 1851, The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines, described as the first “work of literature (not simply of advice) designed for readers in their girlhood...” Now perhaps the word “literature” is what might save this assertion, but, while it’s earlier than the period I ordinarily work in, there are definitely novels written for girls prior to 1851 that are not simply conduct manuals. The next section of the chapter is devoted to Anne of Green Gables, leaving behind the entire development of girls’ literature in the late nineteenth century in Britain, with only the abovementioned work on Shakespeare’s heroines rating a mention. While Lerer is telling a tale about performance, and selecting texts that best suit his study of girls as actors, his book seems to continue the trend of dismissing girls’ literary genres as unworthy of mention. After four pages devoted to Anne, we move to the American Little Women, and finally back to Britain with the canonical The Secret Garden. Wonderful Wizard of Oz rates a mention for the theatricality of Oz, but I find it strange that a book that has a girl protagonist but is not specifically a work of girls’ literature enters into this dedicated chapter. Oh wait, outside of fairy tales, books with male protagonists are “children’s literature” and ones with girl protagonists are “female fiction”? The history of girls’ literature is summed up in six books. The chapter closes with an analysis of Charlotte’s Web. Clearly not a lot happened in the world of girls’ reading in almost half a decade until then.

While Lerer’s book seems more useful for pleasurable reading than research purposes, I am in some ways glad that girls’ books are given short shrift once more. That there is an entire chapter on Robinsonades that does not mention girls’ versions; that boys’ adventure novels and periodicals warrant discussion while girls' equivalents or alternatives are not; that boys’ school stories are analysed in ways that make the schoolboy out to be a Crusoe-figure and we'll never know about what girls' books do beyond the six, questionably "girls'" books that are included. These omissions leave a little space for me to flesh out at least one aspect of children’s literature that is glossed over all too often.

The Embarrassment of Children's Literature

2009-07-10T21:54:00.000-07:00

We hide things because we are ashamed of them. Because we know that the norms of our culture will say that there is something embarrassing about a particular act or belief. And so it is a welcome thing that we do not have to hear about the health benefits of adopting a nudist lifestyle from the person we happen to sit next to on a long-haul flight. The bounds of the cultural norm serve some function to keep the majority comfortable. There are nonetheless areas where the cultural norm inexplicably relegates something outside the realm of acceptable adult behaviour. Neither breaking sexual, religious or political taboos, children's literature nevertheless must be discarded as we reach adulthood or our enjoyment of it concealed. Beyond the perils of the train commuter who feels compelled to buy an edition of Harry Potter with an "adult" dustjacket, in the academic realm, children's literature is flat out even convincing scholars of literature more broadly that it is a valid area of academic inquiry.

If you would accuse me of being overly-dramatic, I would direct you to an article in the English Telegraph about the release of the most recent Harry Potter film. Bryony Gordon, who has tired of the series' marketing hype, extends her criticism to adults who might enjoy reading children's books: "Anyway, it won't surprise you to learn that I don't understand grown adults who like Harry Potter, especially when there are so many other great books out there. It's a bit sinister, actually. In my mind, you may as well sit on the tube reading a Thomas the Tank Engine picture-book making choo-choo noises."

This is meant to be a blog on girls' literature and culture and Harry Potter isn't an exemplary text in its portrayal of girls, with an unattractive, annoying swot as its leading female character (in the first book especially). The assumption that Gordon makes, however, is that adults are wasting their time reading children's books because children's books cannot be "great books". While Harry Potter may not constitute the most innovative or brilliantly written series of books, it's a very wide sweep of the critical broom to discount an entire genre of literature with centuries of history as devoid of literary merit. Her final sentence touches on the perceived need to strictly separate adulthood from childhood. Any dalliance with children's books, films or games might reverse your intelligence to the point of pre-literacy. Or before you know it you'll be erecting a statue of Peter Pan in your sprawling ranch, just a moonwalk away from your replica of a Disneyland train station. The "sinister" aspect is the idea that there is indeed something perverted and warped about adults still finding entertainment in books written by adults for a child audience.

The comments in response to the article also bear out the idea that there is something wrong with adults who read children's books: "Why would an adult raed or attempt to red a book such as Lord of The Rings or Harry Potter. They are childrens' books." Ignoring the assaults on grammar in those sentences, the sentiment is clear, children's books should only be read by children. There is no benefit to be had in reading Neil Gaiman, Oscar Wilde's fairy tales, Lewis Carroll, J.M. Barrie, C.S. Lewis, Maurice Sendak or Philip Pullman. And what did anyone ever get out of young adult fiction like The Catcher in the Rye? It's clearly more adult to have a copy of a gossip magazine in hand that poses such elevated intellectual questions as "has Jordan had her breast implants downsized?" than to read works that might also be enjoyed by children. I suppose this is why all of the thirtysomething men who are obsessed with Star Wars films are also labelled "sinister"? Despite some disturbing uses of lycra on middle-aged spread, I don't see too many articles in major newspapers suggesting that men in Storm Trooper outfits are reverting to toddlerhood.

Farewell Terri, Kerry, Frances and Leigh: Trend Against Unisex Baby Names

2009-07-03T07:39:00.000-07:00

How do names suddenly catch on? Why are kindergarten teachers wiping the noses of Brittanys and Mias, Coopers and Rileys, yet nursing homes accommodate women named Mavis and Edna and men called Theodore and Cecil? I'm not sure why names fall in and out of favour so quickly. Perhaps each generation wishes to separate its identity from that of its parents, and may even seek to reclaim the identity of the generation that was cast off before that. "Old-fashioned" names can magically transform into hip originality.

A research company in Australia has released details of the top baby names in Australia in 2009. What interested me most about the results, more than the return of once-dated names like Isabella, is McCrindle Research's observation that "Australian parents are consistently registering baby names that are undoubtedly gendered." The trend they identify for "soft-sounding" girls' names, versus "firm-sounding" boys' names is I think well-known. A good example given by linguist David Crystal is the fact that "Marion Morrison" would not have made a masculine-sounding cowboy while "John Wayne" was short, sharp and strong.

What is seemingly new is the disappearance of unisex or gender-neutral names. The researchers involved have proposed that this change reflects the "conservative side" of Generation X parents. Just which names would Winona Ryder and Ethan Hawke choose for their children? Well, actually, short-haired, almost-forty Winona has yet to reproduce, and Ethan Hawke has three children, including a darling daughter, Clementine. From the researchers' assumption it seems that Australian parents wish to more firmly locate their children as feminine or masculine right from the get-go. Coupled with the proliferation of "Jacks" and "Williams" you could wonder whether we're carrying misplaced nostalgic for the gender ideals of more than a hundred years ago, when the sexes were generally confined to separate spheres of home and public work.

Is it also part of the backlash against feminism that parents feel that the blurring of gender roles- and names with blurry genders- are just too complicated? Wouldn't it be easier if lines were redrawn as they once were so everyone knew where (and how!) to stand? Mia (proud owner of the most popular female baby name in 2008) will be at her plastic replica ironing board with wrinkled clothing in hand, while Jack (similarly popular for males in 2008) will be working on a woodwork project with his miniature tool set.

The Lack of Cheer in Cheerleading

2009-05-30T00:09:00.001-07:00

There's no doubt that US cultural influences formed the bulk of my childhood entertainment. My family rarely watched Australian public broadcaster ABC, with its mix of documentaries, British dramas and newscasts that were delivered in what we (being a family in which no one had yet completed high school) perceived as "snobby" accents, but which I now recognise as the mark of education and travel. Heaven forbid someone had actually lived in another country for a year or two: we never even travelled interstate!

What I could access through our small-screen television became a cultural junk food diet of sitcoms, teen films and "dramas" such as Beverly Hills 90210. With a predominantly American intake of films and television, the figure of the cheerleader was an easily digestible sign of successful femininity. She stood in contrast to bookish and unattractive girls. Not only was the cheerleader good looking, she was athletic, popular and considered successful, but in a way that supported men, rather than overshadowing their sporting "achievements". Recent films such as Bring it On emphasise the backstabbing and bitchiness inherent in any all-female competition, and also its sexualised nature as one tag-line proves: "A Comedy About The Crazy Things Girls Do To Be On Top."

I remember an older high-school girl who travelled on my school bus. She had become a cheerleader for a new Australian Rules football team that had been established on the Gold Coast. I stared at her spiral-permed hair, heavy Cover Girl pancake makeup (masking a reasonable dose of acne) and the pom poms that she once carried on the bus in awe. She was the living embodiment of everything that I had seen via American culture. She was the peak of what a girl could achieve within that realm of thinking. Several years later, I saw her at a fleamarket stall with her friends, clearing out belongings they no longer wanted or needed, and the pom-poms were among the items for sale. I knew that I could not simply buy them and transmogrify into a cheerleader. It would take a certain type and look of girl to become one, and even possession of the coveted bunches of plastic were not going to make it happen.

These reflections were sparked by the suggestion that the National Rugby League should ban cheerleaders from its games due to numerous recent controversies relating to a sexual assault and the omnipresent objectification of women. How could football players be asked to treat women respectfully- to not abuse their position and status as the ultimate Australian male- when the very system of football itself placed women on the sidelines as entertainment based on their physical attractiveness for the enjoyment of male spectators? General opinion on discussion forums did not seem to locate a connection between women treated as entertainment (it's just for fun!) and situations that spiral out of control like the 19-year-old woman who consented to sex with two football players and wound up in a room with five times more men masturbating and rubbing their genitals in her face.

Researcher Catherine Lumby said that the problem did not lie with the cheerleaders: "I take a strong view that how women are dressed has nothing to do with it. I refuse to condemn women for cheerleading or for dancing as ballerinas in skimpy tutus for that matter." Of course, she is right that the mere presence of a scantily clad woman does not authorise sexual assault (witness a Brisbane man this week claiming he raped his 14-year-old stepdaughter because she wore shirt skirts) or even Neanderthal attitudes to women in general. The Minister for the Status of Women, Tanya Plibersek, put her suggestion for the NRL to change to alternative forms of pre-match entertainment (such as drummers) in terms of needing to please mothers to ensure that the the NRL appealed to "the next generation of football fans". So, in short, the only reason you might want to remove the barely-clad women from the football field on a winter's evening is because mothers might be upset and not want to encourage their sons to participate further in the sport. We wouldn't want to try something else for the simple reason that many women might not like or enjoy it, full stop.

The only serious calls I have seen for the banning of cheerleading are in India, where its recently developed IPL cricket series has brought Americanised cheerleading to a different cultural context. There are other faint murmurs about overly-sexualised routines in other parts of the world needing to be toned down. I'd like to hear more about how women could be recognised publicly as more than than celebrators of male achievement. It's not simply about sexualisation, but creating heroes of men and ornaments of women. So long as a school girl on a bus like my eight-year-old self might see a cheerleader as a successful woman, there is a problem with all-female cheerleaders at football matches. And the masculine terrain of football is just the place that needs to break down stereotypes about women as mere accessories to successful men.

16-year-old girl to sail around the world

2009-05-20T19:52:00.000-07:00

There are not many firsts left in this world. We've had men climb Everest. Women climb Everest. Blind men climb Everest. Blind women climb Everest. Father and son climb Everest. Mother and daughter climb Everest. If you're hankering to be the first "something" to climb Everest, your options are now rather narrow, as people of almost every background, including some who have overcome substantial physical challenges, have now forked out the dough to risk death in order to say that they "made it".

While almost anyone who can walk, abandon work for months and pay for the substantial expenses can set out to climb the world's largest mountain, not as many are able to circumnavigate the globe unassisted in a sailboat. Australian Kay Cottee became the first woman to do so in 1988. Ten years later, Jesse Martin set sail at seventeen years of age and completed his journey by the age of eighteen to become the youngest person to do so. His adventures prompted a book entitled "Lionheart", no doubt with reference to the courage and mental strength required to survive in isolation for almost a year on the sea, as well as being the name of his craft (well, minus the sponsors, Mistral who he also had to name the boat after).

With women and boys having achieved this feat, it only remains for a girl to take on the unforgiving seas. The girl who is very likely to be the one to have her name entered in the Guinness Book of Records is called Jessica Watson, and she's recently announced her intention to work towards her attempt to sail around the world non-stop without any help. Jessica has her own blog and website. As a sign of how series this attempt will be, her parents have quit their jobs in order to prepare for it. Jessica plans to begin the attempt in September, shortly after her sixteenth birthday which she celebrated this month and which finally rendered her eligible to obtain a boat license. If she completes her journey as scheduled, she'll shave a year off Jesse Martin's record and will have circled the globe by the age of seventeen.

According to a newspaper article, some have criticised Jessica's planned journey because she is too young and the trip will be dangerous. Jesse Martin was only seventeen when he began his journey, but I don't recall public concerns about him being too immature to deal with the risks. In fact, Martin has gone on to be championed as an exemplary human being by everyone from the United Nations Director to the Prime Minister and even musician Ben Harper. Bill Clinton remarked that Jesse's "courage and determination are an inspirational example".

Clearly we're not looking for these same attributes in girls, as they must be protected rather than courting danger at sea. Good luck to Jessica! I'm sure they'll be grooming a boy in utero to break her record the moment it's set.

"Up-Ageing" Girls Ditch their Dolls

2009-04-13T01:51:00.000-07:00

For a start, I feel old because I did not know there even was a "Generation Z" until I read the newspaper today. I'm also supposed to feel old because an article in it describes the way that women of my generation packed their dolls away aged about 10 or 11, while girls are now tiring of brushing knots out of polyester hair at an average age of 6 or 7. The study cited in the article suggests girls are moving on to technological play a lot earlier, preferring to spend their leisure time on gaming systems, iPods and PCs.

The researcher, Mark McCrindle, argues that "they're [girls] moving into a technological world much earlier and it's partly coming from their peers … but it's also partly coming from parents who are pushing their children towards more structured educational toys," he said. This all sounds feasible, but why is this specifically problematic for girls? It is discussed here as a sign of childhood being "eroded" and as a follow-on effect of the premature sexualisation of girls.

Strangely it seems like it's a problem for girls to move on to gaming and electronic gadgets (even an iPod is mentioned, which hardly seems gendered in that surely boys and girls enjoy music). Did the study consider at what age boys are giving up action figures and cars? Might it not be that they are similarly developing a penchant for electronic goods at an early age? And perhaps if there has been a time-lag for girls up until now it has been part of the gendering of toys and computers. Would it have been sufficiently "girly" for an eight-year-old to be into gaming ten or twenty years ago? (Not to deny any exceptions, as I was particularly enamoured of my Commodore 64 in 1987.) How is the context different now when almost every Australian home has a computer (or two), internet, and a substantial majority have a gaming console as well?

Play with dolls fulfils a kind of preparatory function for mothering. Girls toys include ovens and irons because these are jobs it is imagined that they will one day perform. For boys we manufacture imitation power tools and lawnmowers because these tough jobs are male. Mums and Dads are probably not sticking to these gendered norms as represented in the toy aisle as firmly as in the past. Maybe girls ditch dolls earlier because they see Mum taking her laptop to work and want to emulate her in the same way that girls of previous generations wanted a replica kitchen to model Mum's daily routine?

And if dolls are waning in popularity then someone better tell the people behind the new Australian Girl doll. These dolls are meant to resemble their girl owners in age and are presented as thoroughly Australian in their netball uniforms and beachwear. The creator of the doll, Helen Schofield, was also motivated by the sexualisation of girls and wanted to counter "the negative impact of popular culture on young children". I'm interested to know whether a range of non-violent boys' toys are being developed at the moment to stem the negative impact of popular culture on them. Or is that less exciting than stemming the tide of pre-teen g-strings?

Girl Scout Cookie Controversy

2009-03-14T05:49:00.000-07:00

The controversy in question is one of those not particularly controversial "controversies". It's the kind that only exists within the space of the morning talk show. The Today Show in the US has featured an enterprising young Girl Scout, Wild Freeborn, who sought to sell 12,000 boxes of cookies by channeling the power of YouTube. There are two small amusements to be taken from this before we arrive at the reason why Wild was thwarted. First, the headline on MSNBC is "Her Girl Scout Cookie-Selling Scheme Crumbled" (boom tish). Second, the child's name is among the most unusual I've ever heard. Not only is she "freeborn", she's "wild" into the bargain. Perhaps there is some etymology for this name that I'm not familiar with, but how refreshing in any case that parents would wish to name their girl "wild". It's not an attribute that has ever been desirable in a daughter. Late-Victorian stories like "Wild Kathleen" were about girls who needed to be tamed.

Now the controversy is far from one because the girl's appearance on Today came complete with a representative from the Girl Scouts of America and some artfully positioned boxes of cookies on the coffee table on-set. Wild's father assisted her in producing a video to promote her cookie sales in her home town, which she personally delivered to each customer. Selling cookies online is against Girl Scout policy and thus after hundreds of sales, poor Wild was dobbed in for her rule violation. While technically Wild was not selling online, it was nonetheless close enough for the video to be pulled. Let's not tell Girl Scouts of America that I see cookies for sale on eBay all the time! I would have bought some already if not for wondering how they'd fare on the journey half way around the world.

It was a little disappointing to hear the reasoning for the cookie promotion ban from Girl Scouts of America. Their website strikes me as heavily rule-oriented, with more sub-sections on correct use of the official logo than points in the US constitution. There's no such marketing overkill evident in the British Guides. First, the spokeswoman suggested that it was necessary for the actions of the Girl Scout to fit with her programme. Lumbering cookies around door to door: builds fitness, increases risk of abduction, gets girls out in the community. Advertising cookie sales online: frightening use of internet, potential paedophiles worldwide set to converge, not part of the programme. The spokesperson claimed all girls selling door-to-door were accompanied by adults, but although Wild was protected by her father in her online activities, she could not guarantee all parents would do this, so online selling and promotion had to be forbidden.

Strangely enough, a YouTube search reveals some TV ads from Girl Scouts Nebraska encouraging cookie sales. There are a few shorter, more positive variations, but this one lays on the guilt by showing a crying little girl who fails to sell a box of cookies to an uncaring clod. I'm guessing Wild Freeborn's approach may have been more subtle and possibly more effective at motivating sales. Perhaps they could put her on the Girl Scout marketing payroll?

Church Condemns Abortion for Nine-year-old Girl

2009-03-08T01:09:00.000-08:00

The nine-year-old Brazilian girl I last wrote about (was about to say "blogged" and didn't feel happy about "verbing" it- yes, I just "verbed" verb) has now had her twin embryos aborted. It is perhaps no surprise to hear that the Catholic church did not support the abortion. What is astounding is that the Brazilian regional archbishop, Jose Cardoso Sobrinho, has announced that the mother of the girl and the doctors who performed the procedure would be excommunicated from the church.

There are a couple of ironic aspects to this antiquated response. First, Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re, a Vatican cleric, has defended the Brazilian archbishop's decision with a statement affirming that "Life must always be protected." Does this mean, then, that the girl's life is irrelevant? Somehow worth less than the potential lives of the two embryos? Doctors warned that it was unlikely that the girl's small body could withstand the pregnancy. I suppose it only reflects the usual religious stance on abortion, even in cases of rape, but when the victim is a child, it makes the trivialising of the woman's/girl's life pointedly obvious.

The second is that the perpetrator of the rapes will not be excommunicated from the Catholic church. His acts of child rape are less heinous than that of the girl's mother and doctors (attempting to preserve the life of a girl who has been abused) in the church's eyes.

On International Women's Day, stories like this one are a timely reminder that the actions of men, such as those with authority in this major church, continue to have an extremely negative affect on women in developing countries. While there is a very real gender divide in countries like Australia, it is a sad thing to write that it would be something of an achievement if we could proclaim that all the women of the world were only subject to the kinds of discrimination and oppression that we are.

Nine-year-old Pregnant with Twins

2009-02-28T20:16:00.000-08:00

Today's news brings a sobering reminder that the evils of unrealistically buxom dolls and bras for the breastless are not the worst that could be inflicted upon girls. A nine-year-old Brazilian girl is reportedly now four-months pregnant with twins, the disturbing result of sexual abuse by her stepfather. The abuse began when the girls was only six, and the cretin saw fit to give her less than one Australian dollar (a Brazilian Real) each time he sexually assaulted her.

The major problem, apart from the psychological horror of a child raising children born as a result of sexual abuse, is that the girl's small body is likely to be unable to carry two embryos to full-term. One doctor commented: "We don't know if she will develop the pregnancy up to the end because of the structure of her body. It is a big risk for her."

Now, I understand that abortion is not commonly practiced in Brazil except for instances of rape or danger to the mother's health, but surely this case is one where both rules should come into swift effect. The tone of the responses of some of the doctors involved does not rule out that the girl might be expected to try to carry the twins to term, even though it would be an extreme risk to her survival. Surely the girl, a decided victim, too young to find any way out of her abusive family life, should be the first priority and the abortion conducted immediately before the pregnancy progresses any further?

American Girl Takes on the Aw-Sees

2009-02-28T04:47:00.001-08:00

I am totally fascinated by the idea of the American Girl dolls. Not only does the range include contemporary and historical American Girl dolls, but there also accompanying books that tell the stories of each "girl" in her relevant time period. I'm sure these books do not contain literary gold, but I'm interested to see how this large and profitable company thinks historical girls should be presented to contemporary ones. I'm also guessing that real girls are more interested in the modern dolls and that it's adult crackpots like me who are interested in the likes of "Kirsten", the Minnesota frontier settler from 1854. Then again, the recent American Girl film, Kit Kittredge (starring Abigail Breslin), was set in the Great Depression in 1934.

When playing on the American Girls site (it took me several times to get a perfect score on the pop quiz, humiliatingly), I discovered it was possible to travel (virtually, and perhaps not even necessarily since I'm already here) to Australia. I loved the facts about Australia section. I had to laugh as some slang was given a pronunciation key that would have the speaker come out with the most American-sounding accent for supposedly ocker terms like "aw-see" for Aussie (more likely "oz-ee" from Strine mouths). Others replicated the British sounds that were adopted in that bizarre Simpsons-come-to-Australia episode, such as "gid-dye mite" (g'day mate). "Lolly water" was listed as the equivalent for "soda pop". I can't say I have ever heard anyone call it anything other than "soft drink" in my life. "Lolly water" has only ever arisen in the context of someone drinking a sweet alcoholic drink (in contrast to a "man's drink", like VB!), but that may reveal some now uncommon, earlier use for sweetened carbonated drinks.

The one that surprised me most was the phrase "See you in the soup!", which apparently means "See you around!" Again, I must not be getting out enough, and I'd have thought having a father who is the embodiment of the Bruce Ruxton skit from Fast Forward and Alf Stewart from Home and Away would have qualified me to know these things. I had to do a Google search to see where I was going wrong, and most of the results for the phrase were links to travel dictionaries, explaining to poor holidaymakers what funny (both ha-ha and strange) language they might encounter on their journey to the land where the water swirled down the plug-hole the "wrong" way. What has Hugh Jackman been telling them all?

My Little Red Book (Unrelated to Mao)

2009-02-27T05:09:00.000-08:00

It can be a moment of disturbance, fear, irritation or relief. It can even be supremely terrifying if you're Carrie White, in Stephen King's first novel, who, screaming like a banshee in the school gym shower, had no idea whether it meant that she was about to die. But, regardless of the precise response, a girl's first period will always be memorable. The first brush with the inconvenience of it all, the avoidance of white shorts (perhaps a rule best followed all-month long), the sometimes excruciating cramps, and the embarrassment of family members having to be told leaves a mental imprint deeper than most other life events, particularly when stamped so close to, or often in, childhood. I was only ten, almost eleven, when my period arrived and what I was deeming an innocuous smudge on my underwear was something I hoped to write off as mistake that would correct itself and never have to be thought of again. Over two hundred cycles later, I can reflect that it was going to be a long time before this thing was resolved.

Every woman has her own story of this event, but it's not something that is ordinarily shared amidst polite inquiry about how work is, how the children are going, (how'd you get your first period), and how's your ankle holding out. In fact, it's not something I'd thought of considering until I heard about My Little Red Book. Rachel Kauder Nalebuff, who is not far out of school and is set to attend Yale, collected the stories of almost a hundred women recounting their first surf of the crimson wave (a metaphor that mistakenly attributes a sense of achievement the greater the swell). You'll even find the recollections of Cecily von Ziegesar and Erica Jong in the book. The same cannot be said for Glenn Close, who was reportedly bemused when bailed up in the street by Nalebuff and confronted with a request to disclose her own experience of menarche.

Some have suggested that the book is symptomatic of a trend for "oversharing" or girls as "gross-out merchants", catching up with men's propensity for scatalogical and any other excretable humour. As a source of supreme anxiety and often embarassment for young girls, I'm pleased if people are oversharing on the subject. For some families, menstruation is not talked about at all. My mother couldn't even discuss the subject with me, but, upon purchasing the new innovation in feminine hygiene products of the time (pads with "wings"), she left a demo model (a pair of underwear with one of the technological marvels stuck on) in the bathroom cupboard for me to discover and take the hint as to how to use them. If girls can talk about the moment or read other people's recollections of it, rather than battling to hide it from friends and the world in general, the better for it.

Hot Girls in Scary Places. Jinkies!

2009-02-13T23:16:00.001-08:00

I can't imagine ever having invented the title of this blog post myself. E! television kindly stepped in with their creative wizardry to save me from having to devise my own. They've developed a new concept for a reality TV show and we're not going to need to bring in a cryptographer to decipher the premise from the title: Hot Girls in Scary Places. At least we knew there was meant to be humour in the obviousness of Snakes on a Plane.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, the pilot of the show will star "three University of Southern California cheer squad friends challenged to spend the night in a supposedly haunted abandoned hospital and compete for a $10,000 cash prize." Now I'm guessing the girls must be enrolled at the University in order to wave pom poms in celebration of males fighting over a ball, but the show's press release stresses that the girls will not be bringing any scholarly brainpower to this mental duel with the unknown: "Most who dare take on the spirit world are experienced paranormal warriors, who have prepped, studied and armed themselves for battle with the nether world. Enter the HOT GIRLS armed with the latest in scientific paranormal equipment (and the hottest new shoes.)"

I'm not exactly sure what constitutes the "latest in paranormal equipment". Has the technology really moved on that much from the ghost-sucking vacuum cleaners that the Ghostbusters used? Anyway, how interesting to see those who have previously "battled" the supernatural are coded as male ("warriors") and used the masculine weapon of reason ("prepped, studied") to do so. The unnecessarily-capitalised "HOT GIRLS" will have this unspecified "equipment" to wield, but how on earth will they know how to use it when they're going to be preoccupied with their sexy footwear?

And the show's catchphrase? "Their mission a simple one: Investigate and look Fabulous doing it." Please bring back Scooby-Doo's Velma, her thick black glasses, and that shocking orange turtleneck sweater!

Twilight (Without the Penetrative Puns)

2009-02-13T03:05:00.000-08:00

Within the children's literature community, Stephenie Meyer's Twilight series is decidedly old news. Apart from noticing the recent film at the cinema or the unusual range of "Edward" merchandise in shops, all those who do not inhabit the body of a teenage girl, however, are probably unaware of the reading phenomenon that the series is. Given my interest in girls' books and the gothic, I had to belatedly read this bestselling account of human-vampire love. It took someone else to lend me the whole series (thanks Dr Kristine!), and lots of cryptic discussions about **spoiler alert** the violent birth of a parasitic mutant baby, to place the first book in my hands.

I was disappointed to find that I was not one of those people who was going to be able to spout the "I know it's tripe, but it's so addictive" line. I have concluded book one and I think this will be as far as I can make it. Many people deride Stephen King's writing. I think he writes very well (apart from when he produces something like the sleep-inducing Insomnia), but even he, a man who had his literary initiation via dime novels and horror magazines, has spoken publicly about Meyer's shoddy writing. Sometimes frustrating books can be enticing to read from a critical perspective, but I couldn't even drag that much from the first book.

It is fascinating to read the discussion that the books have prompted, though. Even the fans of the series who were bitterly disappointed by the final title (almost half as many as the 2,000 who have left five-star Amazon reviews) have felt sufficiently aggrieved to write thousand-word explanations expressing their disgust. Feminists have found plentiful examples of Bella's passivity to fuel dozens of blog posts and hundreds of comments. Devoted fans have jumped to Meyer's defense (King's comment provoked more than 1400 online replies, a number from outraged girl readers), and there's currently a poll on the same site with more than 5000 related remarks about whether Twilight is superior to the Harry Potter series. I'd like to champion girls' fiction and speak about how boys' books are universalised while girls' books are ghettoised, but this would be a poor example to choose to champion the merits of girls' fiction. That said, I was still aggrieved by one blog comment that remarked "these are girls' books", as if that explained the myriad gripes that critics have levelled at the series. Even Harlequin Mills and Boon novels do not necessarily have such frustratingly male-obsessed heroines.

What is interesting to me is not whether Meyer's Mormon faith is infused in her choice to depict a chaste-till-marriage turned teen-mom heroine, but why these books have had such a cultural resonance. Vampire stories have been popular at various times and for various cultural reasons throughout the past century, but in Twilight the supernatural serves as a vehicle for, as King has suggested, allowing the safe exploration of thwarted sexual feelings for girl readers. My favourite blog comment had the alias "Dubya": "Twilight is why I was president for eight years." I wonder whether there's more to be drawn out there about the American political climate during the years of Twilight's publication (one in which religious influenced abstinence-focused sexual education seemed to proliferate). This does not entirely explain Twilight's popularity outside the US, however. But something must explain it!

For anyone who has not read Twilight, I would instead recommend this 1718 word summary that is a useful substitute for the novel. The humour in it is also partial compensation for those who have suffered through the book.

"Girl Power" Turns Ugly

2009-01-22T19:43:00.000-08:00

I was never quite sure about the concept of "girl power" in any event. The only demonstration I could readily recall of any such thing was Geri Halliwell randomly yelling the phrase on stage when performing with the Spice Girls. She was always wearing the hand-towel sized Union Jack dress at the time. Books such as Ariel Levy's Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture, however, let me in on the fact that there were more pervasive examples of exploitation being cast as empowerment, sometimes under the banner of "girl power".

While the merits of pole-dancing as liberating and powerful perhaps leave some room for contestation (a brilliant PhD candidate I know currently takes pole dance classes), there is apparently a new strand to girl power that is in all respects disurbing: violence. While part of the supposed trend may well be unsubstantiated (relying on the highly reliable statistical tool of the participants on reality TV show Ladette to Lady and whatever travesty Amy Winehouse is now involved in for source material), Criminologist Paul Wilson says that about ten to twenty percent of "glassing" incidents in nightspots are now perpetrated by women. Eruptions of violent stiletto attacks (I jest not) are popping up regularly in a way that Wilson argues rarely happened four or five years ago. Part of the "trend" is wanting to fight "like a man" and also have sex "like a man". I'm just wondering precisely who is suggesting that this kind of violence is perceived as empowering in the same way that sexualised displays are being considered. If the power of these displays is in their attraction of and control of men, what power does rampant hair-pulling and eye-gouging confer?

Indigo Magazine- Adult-Approved Girls' Culture

2009-01-16T02:46:00.000-08:00

There is now an Australian magazine aimed at "tweens" that seeks to counter perceived sexualised portrayals of girls found in teen magazines. It's called Indigo. It is now in its fifth edition and it seeks to present stories and images of "everyday girls", as opposed to those disturbing skeletal giants (read: models) who are sent off to earn millions of dollars in New York upon hitting puberty. A prominent feature of the marketing associated with the magazine is that the photographs of the models are not airbrushed. One of the editors, Natalia Morelli commented: "I was seeing my daughter, Molly, in an environment where she's exposed to a lot of stimuli all at once and judging herself based on that. I felt it was really important to give her something that gave her choice and really empowered her."

It's refreshing to see a magazine that attempts to present images of girls without Jolie-esque trout-pout lips nor sporting grill marks from the solarium. Indigo's website delves beyond "does he love me or not" polls and style tips (although it does have some emphasis on fashion) to encourage girls to be creative and develop their bodies for their own health, not because they want to look good in low-rise jeans. Nevertheless items like the "10 Things I Like About You" game featured on the website-- it promises to help "jettison girls into the joy bubble of high self-esteem"-- suggest that the didactic elements of the magazine may be a little too overt to ensure the magazine's survival if much of its intended audience is beyond primary school.

And schools may be where the continued survival of Indigo resides it seems, as 450 schools already subscribe to the magazine. I'd imagine this is because they believe they are assisting in countering the pressure on girls to confirm to a particular body image. This was seen as a marked problem of girls' teen magazines during last year's government inquiry. As Professor Catherine Lumby comments, however, there is more to solving the problem of raising unrealistic expectations in girls than countering images in print magazines: "There's no question that girls were very aware of pressures on them about appearance but they felt this didn't just come from the media, it also came from things like behaviour modelled by their mothers … To isolate magazines is really to miss the broader social context: that we still live a very gendered society that puts pressure on women of all ages."

Lumby is also "with it" enough to recognise that far from being ignorant of Photoshopping in magazines, most teen girls are able to manipulate their own photographs for use on social networking sites. Whether Indigo is underestimating the capacity of its audience to navigate a real and virtual world of altered images or not remains to be seen, but will the magazine grab girls' attention sufficiently to survive amidst the flashier attractions of the sexualised culture it seeks to counter?

Facebook Breast Ban: When Does a Girls' Body Become "Indecent"?

2009-01-03T20:33:00.000-08:00

While teen girl cleavage and bathroom-mirror-pouting has been a fixture on MySpace for years now, the more "mature" social networking site Facebook has recently ruffled a few maternal feathers by removing photographs from its site that violate its terms of service. The images in question are those which show breastfeeding in which part or all of the mother's nipple or areola are revealed. While breastfeeding photographs in general are not problematic according to Facebook, those which do not have a baby neatly latched on to the breast so as to conceal any potentially offending flesh will be removed.

A spokesperson for the site, Barry Schnitt, explained that some images were removed to keep the site "safe" and "secure", including for children: "Photos containing a fully exposed breast - as defined by showing the nipple or areola - do violate those terms on obscene, pornographic or sexually explicit material and may be removed...The photos we act upon are almost exclusively brought to our attention by other users who complain."

The decision has sparked a full-scale debate not only about whether breastfeeding images are appropriate on social networking sites, but also about whether revealing the breast while feeding a child in public is appropriate and whether it constitutes "exhibitionism" on the part of the mother. The comments on one blog portray the idea that mothers who feed in public should shroud their chest and feeding baby in a blanket or trudge out to the privacy of their car. (Let's not even think about those poor mothers who don't have a car to conceal their feeding. These ones should just stay home.)

Other commentors take up the idea that Facebook spokesperson Schnitt makes: the presence of pictures of mothers feeding online where part of their areola or nipple is showing could be viewed by children. I'm not sure why the unlikely event of children seeing photographs on Facebook of mothers feeding babies is so problematic. It only becomes this way when we carry over our adult sexualisation of breasts to children themselves, bringing our own understandings of pornography and a body-obsessed popular culture to what is an essential aspect of raising a child (unless medical reasons preclude it). Still others commented on those who may find breastfeeding sexually arousing gaining pleasure from some images. I once met a man who worked at a "rehabilitation" centre for sex offenders (he incidentally said child sex offenders were never actually rehabilitated). Part of his job was to go through the TV Guide and ensure all children's programmes, including Humphrey B. Bear and Hi-Five, were struck from it and unavailable to be viewed by them because the sight of any children could be arousing to them. We cannot more broadly remove every image of children or babies that someone, somewhere may find arousing.

What intrigued me about the discussion was when a few posters, who could not see the offense in the female breast performing its essential function, homed in on the offending nipples and areolas themselves: what about the nipples of men and girls? Male nipples we know have no apparent function in the same way as female nipples do for feeding, so perhaps we can exclude them from consideration. Nevertheless, the Facebook policy appears to dwell on nipple exposure rather than the actual swell and volume of the breast which is part of what differentiates the female's chest from the male's. That aside, it was interesting to consider that the nipples of girls can be spotted on beaches and pools across Australia almost up until the point of sexual maturation. If it is female nipples themselves that are the most sexualised object in a breastfeeding photo, why do young girls swim publicly with them visible?

Now I shouldn't be trying to find logic in these ideas, so these questions may be unanswerable, and I also could not believe the way in which many posters likened public breastfeeding to public acts of defecation, urination, vomiting and sexual intercourse. These hang-ups about the female body performing its designed purpose are so deeply ingrained that is no wonder that some people reach adulthood in ignorance of the fact that breasts exist to feed babies. Also no surprise that girls themselves are getting the message that sexualised MySpace breasts show their attractiveness but breastfeeding is an abject act that will ruin her desirability. One poster discussed the "blue veiny" lactating breast with horror. The silicone breast is more natural and appealing than the reality.

How to Talk to Girls

2008-12-19T22:10:00.000-08:00

I'll admit, a little part of me is jealous of child authors. Why did no one pluck my creative writing gems from the obscurity of a Langwarrin primary school classroom, send them to HarperCollins and put me on the talk show circuit to exploit my precocity? Perhaps because it would have been an unlikely phenomenon in the '80s to place a child author through the publicity mill and because no such array of marketing opportunities exists in Australia. And also possibly because my writing was not extraordinary. In fact, the writing and ideas of each and every eight-year-old cannot fail to be ordinary, comparatively speaking. Mary Shelley began writing Frankenstein at 18, but it's a hard stretch to think of titles of literary note or longevity first begun when the writer was eight. But what the pre-teen writer can be is cute in book publicity. Cue Alex Greven.

His guide to primary school romancing apparently began as a school project, but it has now taken him to the bestseller lists. The book currently sites inside the Top 200 titles sold on Amazon.com. Well done to him for his success, but watching the promotional video from the publisher incited a disturbed twinge from my conscience, as he appears rather coached (in the bizarro Bindi Irwin way). I'm sure that he devised most of the book, but I wonder if the unintentionally comedic elements have been inserted by adults during the publication process? Or are we dealing with a special episode of "Kids Says the Darndest Things" dedicated to one child? Did he really offer the bracketed comment about sugar to the following advice?

"The right thing to do when you have a crush is:
Never show off too much
Don’t be silly and goofy
Control your hyperness (cut down on sugar if you need to)
Make sure you have good friends who won’t try to take the girl you like."

While I can only too well remember the awkwardness and pain of first crushes and rejections, the casting of the whole process as boys learning the magical secret to "winning" girls grates a little on this grizzling, overanalytic feminist:

"If you do get a girl to like you, that is victory.
Winning victory is a dream for most boys, but it is very rare.
What does it take to win victory?
Read on and find out!"

Now I know Alex is only eight and hasn't single-handedly propagated this idea, but can we lose the idea that a woman is there to be won? Sure, comb your hair and wear your best size 6 pants to increase your chances in the dating stakes, but is there not an element of medieval village conqeuring to this idea that girls are there to be "won". Will we see a book from a girl author about how to "win" the right guy? Of course, there is a fixation on appearing attractive so as to achieve the same for girls, but I don't know that the language of "victory" would ever come to the fore should a little girl ever submit a school project on the topic.

Alex remarks on the status of gender power: "You also have to be aware that girls win most of the arguments and have most of the power. If you know that now, things might be easier." Best enjoy wielding all that power on the slippery dip and monkey bars now girls, as you'll have disappointment ahead when you learn that the "king of the castle" in political and corporate terms is almost invariably a king.

Alex now has another book title out called "How to Talk to Moms", so he's got the gamut of women in a young boy's life covered. The question is, has HarperCollins got every opportunity to milk this little boy of every inch of his cuteness before, like Macauley Culkin, he starts aging and disturbs the bejesus out of everyone for resembling a malformed version of his former baby-faced self.

Purity is Back...Alright

2008-12-07T01:12:00.000-08:00

Purity is perhaps less welcome back today than even the Backstreet Boys. It is possibly as welcome as the return of New Kids on the Block. That said, NKOTB actually does have a new album out, inventively called The Block, and apparently thirtysomething women have been turning up to their concerts in screaming droves, reliving their teenage idolisation of the first superstar "boy band". But I digress.

Those au fait with contemporary children's literature will have heard of a little series called Twilight by Stephenie Meyer. I currently have the three or four Bible's worth of paper stacked at home awaiting some holiday reading, thanks to my lovely colleague Kris. Now the religious comparison there is not without reason. Today's Age is running a story about virginity being "back" in vogue, combining a few real-world examples of young people who will "save themselves" for marriage (sourced from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints) and invoking Meyer's vampire quartet of novels for girls as indicative of a turn back to purity after decades of sex obsession because of vampire Edward's refusal to have sex before marriage.

The article takes an intriguing turn when we hear from a "counsellor" who did not even kiss her husband prior to marriage: "Julieanne Laird, a counsellor with the Australian Fellowship of Evangelical Students at Melbourne University, waited until marriage before having sex. To avoid temptation, she and her husband didn't even kiss until they were engaged; pledging not to kiss or even to dance with a man other than one's father or brother is not uncommon among the more devout pledgers." Wait a minute. We hear from an eighteen-year-old man who pledges to save himself for marriage in this article, but is there any obligation on males not to even dance with another woman other than his mother or sister?

While I'm certain that Twilight and a small number of religious groups exhibiting conservative tendencies with regard to girls' sexuality are not indicative of a radical societal shift toward abstinence, both of these examples seem to allocate males with a responsibility for controlling girls' developing sexuality, even through relatively benign milestones such as school dances.

Now I gave this post a silly title because I was thinking of a Backstreet Boys' song, but I now realise I can relate these things, as boy bands show the need for girls to gradually channel their emerging sexual feelings somewhere. Even if it is by putting it into plastering their walls with posters of men pretending to be boys. To place "promise rings" on the fingers of young girls before they've even had a chance to work through the confusing trauma of teenage desire seems a recipe for certain divorce when "the one" just doesn't live up to the marketing.