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This article investigates two of the discourses currently organizing meanings of girls and girlhood. These are the multi-stranded "Girl Power" and "Reviving Ophelia," which both emerged in the early 1990s. I argue that "Girl Power" and "Reviving Ophelia" set up an intriguing illustration of not only competing definitions of femininity but also how discourses may interpellate feminine/feminist subjects in a non-unitary way. At first glance, the two discourses seem to offer opposing significations of femininity. On the one hand, "Girl Power" represents a "new girl," assertive, dynamic, and unbound from the constraints of femininity. On the other hand," Reviving Ophelia" presents girls as vulnerable, passive, voiceless, and fragile. However, this article demonstrates that it is also possible to view the two discourses as other than opposing, competing, and contradictory. Rather, this article investigates how the two discourses position girls in varying ways in relation to the emerging configurations of subjectification demanded by shifting relations of production, globalizing economies, and redefined relationships between governments and citizens related to the rise of neoliberal policy and practice.
Keywords: girls / discourse analysis / popular culture / femininity / subjectivity
Since the early 1990s, the popular media, popular literature, television, films, academic conferences, and special issues of feminist journals have been participants in an incredible proliferation of images, texts, and discourses around girls and girlhood in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. From one perspective, this proliferation is an exciting corrective to the virtual absence of girls in each of these spheres. Not only have girls become a public presence and interest, but there also is an increasing range of representations of them, their lives, and concerns. However, a close examination of this amassing of images and discourses also raises some critical questions, opening up further perspectives on what they may mean about changing constructions of girlhood, shifting subjectivities for girls, and their relationship to modernity. In this article, I identify two of the discourses' currently organizing this profusion of interest in girls. These are the multi-stranded "Girl Power" and "Reviving Ophelia," named for the phenomenon made popular in the international best-selling book by U.S. psychologist Mary Pipher entitled, Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls. Girl Power and Reviving Ophelia appear to set up an...