Becoming Girl: Collective Biography and the Production of Girlhood

Abstract

The edited volume “Becoming Girlâ€, published in 2014 by Marnina Gonick and Susanne Gannon, sets out to further knowledge on young women’s lives and identities through the method of collective biography. The book situates itself in the field of “girlhood studies,†which encompasses scholarship from a range of disciplines such as history, sociology, ethnography or media studies. As a subfield of women’s and gender studies, girlhood studies seeks to elucidate the social realities and discursive production of young women’s lives at the intersection of multiple forms of dominance. It aims to generate knowledge about girls’ life-worlds as well as destabilize taken for granted beliefs about what it means to be “a girl.†Becoming Girl partakes in this academic endeavour by presenting outcomes of collective memory sessions conducted by groups of feminist scholars and students connected to the editors. As Gonick and Gannon state in the introduction...