Growing Up Female in Fiction and Film

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I'm teaching a course in the spring for the Women's Studies program called
"Growing Up Female".  I'm concentrating primarily on literary texts (e.g.,
Jane Eyre, The Bluest Eye, The Joy Luck Club and Floating in My Mother's
Palm), but I'd like also to do something from other disciplines such as
excerpts from Carol Gilligan's In a Different Voice, Nancy Chodorow,
Gilligan and Brown's (?) Meeting at the Crossroads and Mary Pipher's
Reviving Ophelia.  Since my background is in literature, however, I'm
wondering what on earth I can do with the last two texts, which are mostly
case studies.  Has anyone else worked with these or something like them?
What did you do?  How did students respond to them?  Are there any
pitfalls I should know about or particular excerpts you'd recommend?
Other texts I haven't thought of?
I'd really appreciate any suggestions!
Vanessa Van Ornam
vjvanorn  @  artsci.wustl.edu

For a non-heteronormative take on growing up "female," i'd highly
recommend Lesley Feinberg's Stone Butch Blues.
 
Jean Noble
Doctoral Candidate
Graduate Programme in English
York University
Toronto, Canada

Gilligan and her colleagues have just put out their new study,
Between Voice and Silence, Harvard University Press.
 
Also, you might find that using work from the field of Cultural
Studies.  Angela McRobbie is the most prominent scholar associated
with the Birmingham School, but her work is largely about British
girls.  She has done work on girls and girl's magazines like
"Jackie," for example. McRobbie recently edited the anthology _Back
To Reality_, Manchester University Press in which you'll find an
update of her earlier research as well as an article by Maria Pini,
"Women and the early British Rave Scene"  Routledge is the largest
publisher of cultural studies texts, so I'd search their website.
<http://www.thomson.com/routledge/default.html>
 
Cultural studies seems most suited to your discipline, but does draw
on emprirical research and case studies.  Still, the 'language' is
more in the mode of literary criticism, signification,
representation, etc.
 
Also, and I don't know if this is what you have
in mind, you might be interested in Susan Willis' _A Primer for Daily
Life_ which has some interested chapters.  Willis teach literature
and culture.
 
If I come across anything else, I'll be sure to send it on.
 
Kelley Crouse

I am just finishing up a similar course this semester.  I the PBS
documentary _Girls Like Us_ (which is great) to begin.  We read
Helena Viramontes' "Growing" and Jamaica Kincaid's "Girl" and then moved
to social science stuff, including selections from Margaret Mead,
_Nisa_, and all of Reviving Ophelia_. Students liked it
a lot, and our discussion of the text focused on what she sees as the
origin of the "crisis" that girls experience during adolescence
(illustrated, for example, in the drop in self-esteem documented in
_Shortchanging Girls, Shortchanging America_) and how she thinks it can be
averted.  About half of the semester was literature (including children's
literature) since I too am in English.
 
Angela E. Hubler
Assistant Professor of English and Women's Studies
lela  @  ksu.edu

Just a thought --
I recently read a brandy new book by Joan Brumberg called "The Body
Project" which I feel very effectively places the control of
adolescent girls' bodies in a historical context.  I highly recommend
it and plan to use it next year in my Feminist Anthropology course.
Kelli Costa
 
Kelli Ann Costa
Department of Behavioral Sciences
Franklin Pierce College
Rindge, NH

I used a bit of Mary Pipher's work this semester in a large (90+ students)
course on families.  I showed a video (from C-SPAN) of Pipher addressing
a group on "teenage girls and the media".  The video illustrates nicely the
perspective from which she comes.  It demonstrates her considerable skill
as a storyteller and also reveals her biases.  The video generated a lot of
discussion (more than I thought it would) as my students were not familiar
with her work and were excited to talk about it.
 
The video is available from C-SPAN ($19.95 ?) .  If you go to their web-site
you can actually listen to it before buying it.
 
-debra-
 
************************************************************
Debra Kirkley, MEd, RNC
Assistant Clinical Professor
Texas Woman's University, College of Nursing
Dallas, TX  75235
dkirkley  @  twu.edu
Doctoral Candidate, University of North Texas
iy52  @  jove.acs.unt.edu

An interesting project, to connect feminist theorizing texts with literary
text!
    It might be useful to read the books you mention in comparison to
Chodorow's thesis. She claims there's a universal phenomenon: gender
psyches are constructed by their mothers in very early childhood, such that
all mothers create their daughters' desire for intimate relationships and
impel sons to avoid intimacy as a feminine characteristic. Students might
be asked to consider whether and how the thesis is consistent with the
experience of the women in the novels read in the course, Jane Eyre, Bluest
Eye and so on - and if there's no correspondence, why not? Is the theory
wrong? different context, events emerging in the women's lives? What kind
of theory do the novelists seem to propose?
          beatrice    bkachuck  @  cuny.campus.mci.net