This review, based on analysis of the abstracts of 271 academic publications, critically examines the development of girlhood studies within a specific sociocultural context – Israeli society. By examining one particular context the authors hope to contribute to the discourse on the worldwide evolution of girlhood studies. The following research questions were posed: How did the body of literature on Israeli girls develop over time? What is the distribution of disciplines and topics represented? Who are the (...) girls at the focus of the writing? What are the methodological and paradigmatic approaches adopted? The findings point to the tentative development of a girlhood studies perspective that began in the 1980s and expanded over time, revealing the spread and reclaiming of feminist theoretical tenets as embodied in the study of girls. The review both sheds light on the pace and the manner in which Western feminist ideas spread to a specific local arena, and identifies unique local influences impacting this process. (shrink)

Despite the growing literature on childhood obesity and lifestyle intervention programmes focusing on weight loss, few studies have examined young persons’ experiences of being identified as candidates for such programmes and of participating in them. This paper does so. Juxtaposing insights from phenomenology with an approach inspired by Foucault, the paper shows how teenage girls’ bodily self-perception and bodily self-awareness are shaped in intercorporeal assemblages comprising other people and specific features or elements of the lifestyle programme. Inspired by van (...) Manen’s hermeneutic-phenomenological approach, with its point of departure in lived experience, this paper draws on interviews with Norwegian teenage girls participating in the same lifestyle programme and identifies three core thematic aspects of the girls’ experiences: being identified as a candidate for a lifestyle programme and not wanting this; negotiating the lack of weight loss and the scales; and bodily situated agency – feeling good and being able. Permeating all three themes are two central, interrelated phenomena: agency and resistance. Furthermore, the paper shows how a combination of Foucauldian insights and a phenomenological understanding of intercorporeality can help to shed light on the power, affective, material and temporal dimensions of dys-appearance, as well as those of eu-appearance, and thus contribute to the understanding of the girls’ narrated lived experiences. On the basis of these findings, we argue that weight-related treatment goals are not necessarily compatible with the strengthening of adolescents’ body images and self-esteem. However, whilst being obliged to attend to their bodies while in the programme, the girls also encountered unexpected, positive bodily feelings and experiences. Such events, we suggest, offer a means of resisting the more troubling dys-appearing bodily situations our participants described so powerfully. (shrink)

Placing the discursive psychological analysis of sexuality at its centre, this article considers a number of overlapping fields of linguistics: women’s language, construction of gender identities and language and sexuality. By encompassing these fields, in spite of potential differences in terms of theoretical stance and foci of analysis, the present study suggests a wider stance in the analysis of language, gender and sexuality. The study considers two important post-structuralist concepts: performativity and heteronormativity. More precisely, the analysis shows how the sexual (...) identities of British heterosexual female teenagers are discursively constructed and regulated via language use when aggressively relating to other girls in Facebook. The analysis is based on the assumption that sexuality is but one aspect of identity. Although on the surface these British teenagers’ constructions present masculine ‘negative’ mean girls, a closer analysis reveals that more subversive and challenging interpretations can be applied. (shrink)

Our concern is with the ethical issues related to girlhood and bodily integrity—the right to be free from physical harm and harassment and to experience freedom and security in relation to the body. We defend agency, positive self-relations, and health as basic elements of bodily integrity and we advocate that this normative concept be used as a conceptual tool for the protection of the rights of girls. We assume the capability approach developed by Martha Nussbaum as an ethical framework (...) that enables us to evaluate girls’ well-being and well-becoming in relation to the potential, and often subtle, threats they face. The capability approach can be understood as a theory of justice, and, therefore, as an ethical and political approach. An enriched concept of bodily integrity can help in the design of better policies to address gender biases against girls because it could contribute to seeing them as active agents and valid participants. (shrink)

Up until the end of the twentieth century, the dystopia was a practically nonexistent genre in Finnish literature. However, since the turn of the century, there has been a marked dystopian turn. In addition to the anxieties associated with the passing of the millennium, emerging global issues such as digital development, environmental problems, and terrorism have contributed to the ongoing popularity of dystopian fiction.1 At the same time, Finnish literature has been strongly influenced by the trends of international book markets. (...) For example, the unprecedented popularity of dystopian young adult literature has inspired Finnish authors. In the past ten years, a number of writers have published... (shrink)

This article argues that postwar Seventeen magazine, a publication deeply invested in enforcing heteronormativity and conventional models of girlhood and womanhood, was in fact a more complex and multivocal serial text whose editors actively sought out, cultivated, and published girls’ creative and intellectual work. Seventeen's teen-authored “Curl Up and Read” book review columns, published from 1958 through 1969, are examples of girls’ creative intellectual labor, introducing Seventeen's readers to fiction and nonfiction which ranged beyond the emerging “young-adult” literature of (...) the period. Written by young people – including thirteen-year-old Eve Kosofsky (later Sedgwick) – who perceived Seventeen to be an important publication venue for critical work, the “Curl Up and Read” columns are literary products in their own right, not simply juvenilia. Seventeen provided these young authors the opportunity to publish their work in a forum which offered girl readers and writers opportunities for intellectual development and community. (shrink)

In the past ten years, work by K€olbel, MacFarlane, Richard and others has rekindled old debates on relativism. In this important contribution to those debates, the authors defend a ‘mainstream’ view about the contents of thought and talk that they call Simplicity against the assaults from such ‘analytic relativists’.

In her Dinny Gordon series (1958–1965), junior novelist Anne Emery’s heroine manifests intellectual desire, a passionate engagement in the life of the mind along with the desire to connect with like-minded others. Within a genre which focused on socialization and dating, in Dinny, Emery normalizes a studious, inner-directed, yet feminine heroine, passionate about ancient history rather than football captains. Emery’s endorsement of the pleasure Dinny takes in intellectual work, and the friends and boyfriends Dinny collects, challenge stereotypes of intellectual girls (...) as dateless isolates while suggesting an alternative model of girlhood operating within apparent conformism to postwar “good girl” standards. (shrink)

Swiss and Japanese villagers have learned the relative benefi ts and costs of privateproperty and communal-property institutions related to various types of land and uses of land. The villagers in both settings have chosen to retain the institution of communal property as the foundation for land use and similar important aspects of village economies.1..

Dieser Buchtitel ist Teil des Digitalisierungsprojekts Springer Book Archives mit Publikationen, die seit den Anfängen des Verlags von 1842 erschienen sind. Der Verlag stellt mit diesem Archiv Quellen für die historische wie auch die disziplingeschichtliche Forschung zur Verfügung, die jeweils im historischen Kontext betrachtet werden müssen. Dieser Titel erschien in der Zeit vor 1945 und wird daher in seiner zeittypischen politisch-ideologischen Ausrichtung vom Verlag nicht beworben.

We would like to open some questions here about the institutional and cultural conditions of anything that might be called cultural studies or multiculturalism. By introducing cultural studies and multiculturalism many intellectuals aim at a more democratic culture. We share this aim. In this essay, however, we would like to argue that the projects of cultural studies and multiculturalism require: a more international model of cultural studies than the dominant Anglo-American versions; renewed attention to the institutional (...) environments of cultural studies; and a questioning of the relations between multiculturalism and identity politics. We seek less to “fix” these problems than to provide a critical analysis of the languages, the methods of criticism, and the assumptions about identity, culture, and politics that present the problems to us. Because the thickets entangling what our group calls cultural studies are so deeply rooted in Western academia, which to a large degree constitutes our own group, the counterexample of cultural criticism in other contexts can be more than usually instructive. We begin by considering the position of cultural studies in China, since our group includes a number of Chinese intellectuals, on whose experience the following section is largely based. The Chicago Cultural Studies Group began meeting in June 1990. It includes Lauren Berlant, David Bunn, Vinay Dharwadker, Norma Field, Dilip Gaonkar, Marilyn Ivy, Benjamin Lee, Leo Ou-fan Lee, Xinmin Liu, Mathew Roberts, Sharon Stephens, Katie Trumpener, Greg Urban, Michael Warner, Jianyang Zha, and Jueliang Zhou. (shrink)

Biology is seen not merely as a privileged oppressor of women but as a co-victim of masculinist social assumptions. We see feminist critique as one of the normative controls that any scientist must perform whenever analyzing data, and we seek to demonstrate what has happened when this control has not been utilized. Narratives of fertilization and sex determination traditionally have been modeled on the cultural patterns of male/female interaction, leading to gender associations being placed on cells and their components. We (...) also find that when gender biases are controlled, new perceptions of these intracellular and extracellular relationships emerge. (shrink)

Ernest Gellner's final book, first published in 1998, is a synoptic interpretation of the thought of Wittgenstein and Malinowski.

The Russian philosopher and cultural theorist Mikhail Bakhtin has traditionally been seen as the leading figure in the group of intellectuals known as the Bakhtin Circle. The writings of other members of the Circle are considered much less important than his work, while Bakhtin's achievement has been exaggerated in proportion to the downgrading of the thinkers with whom he associated in the 1920s. This volume, which includes new translations and studies of the work of the most important members of (...) the Circle, sets out to correct the distortions in the established representations of its activity. The original contributions to literary and linguistic theory made by Valentin Voloshinov and Pavel Medvedev (but frequently credited to Bakhtin) are assessed, and the distinctiveness of their approaches is highlighted. (shrink)

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