i am a girl essay

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Being A Girl- Descriptive Essay

Being a girl can become a difficult life style. Between our stages in life, staggering attitudes and emotions… I don’t know how we would get through it.

I myself am a girl, born and raised as one; so I know first hand that I can be very frail and take many chances. I’m also the target for a lot of people, for emotional support and other things. My parents depend a lot on me to take care of things when they can’t, especially because I'm the only girl.

I recall my 5 th grade classroom, the desks were set up in rows of six, and I sat in the middle row, of a large room filled with an average sized class. And that’s where he sat, right there in front of me; now being a female in a male bias world I found that most guys don’t expect you to know how to fight. And that’s where he made his mistake. His name was Tommy and he tried to take my pencil, this might not seem like a big deal now but ever since I was younger, I had an “obsessive compulsive disorder” type of thing; I absolutely positively could not stand to have people touching my things, or things that I had previously touched. So I asked him kindly to please not touch my things…he didn’t quite listen. He continued to grab for my book bag when I told him again “DO NOT TOUCH MY THINGS” I was getting madder and he didn’t seem to comprehend the level of seriousness displayed in my threatening tone. “Shut up” he snapped back at me “don’t be a tattle tale”. “I wont,” I said through my teeth “but stop touching my things” with an angry shove, he pushed me. In rebuttal, I shoved him back.

Ever since my early days of childhood, I had always been a fighter. I had to fight to get where I was going, and I learned that a lot of people are really big bullies and if you don’t do what they tell you, they tend to get really pissed. Following his shove, he attempted to hit me; When I noticed what he was about to do I ducked and hit him where my mom told me to hit any guy who tried to put their hands on me. I threw my leg back and in one full-fledged kick, my foot met him in a not so pleasant place and he instantly hit the ground. He didn’t seem so tough now as he lay curled up on the floor sobbing. That was the earliest experience I can recall where someone made me feel puny because of my gender.

Ever since I was younger, this problem frustrated me, the problem of male bias that seemed so prominent in the world and especially in my life. Just because I’m a dress wearing, pony tailed, doll playing human doesn’t mean I’m not as tough as anyone else in this world. I believe that since girls have a different in sight look of things, people think we’re weak, and powerless.

Fathers always expect their sons to be the tough ones, while the girls are supposed to be the sensitive ones, the ones who cry when they fall not the boys. Mothers always teach their daughters to clean and cook before they grow older. Girls are taught to be mothers of animals-09 and baby dolls while boys are being taught to be Harley riders and wrestlers. Girls are taught that in a dress you’re a princess and no one could change that. Boys are taught that the more muscles you have the more people like you.

Girls walking around in short skirts, short shorts and tight clothes just to get the attention of another person. To me people aren’t important id much rather go outside feeling comfortable then to go out wondering “does this shirt look right?” or “is this the right fit?”. I clearly don’t care what people think of me, people have their own opinions and thoughts of what a girl is supposedly supposed to say, wear and look.

My older cousin thinks that every girl is suppose to be mega skinny, always dress nice, and have long hair. Every time I go around him he makes the choice to piss me off, and say stuff like why don’t you ever have your hair done and what happen to your nice clothes and you really go outside like that. This would piss me off a lot if I cared what he really thought. I don’t I think if I accept the way I am, headstrong and beautiful, then I should not listen to how someone else thoughts about me is. Yeah I know a lot of people worry that this wont happen that wont happen. I am still a girl, but I rather go by it the way I think everything should fall into place. Easily and comfortably, just like I have been. I like playing football, I like running around, I like wrestling, and doing my make-up. Everything is even out for me. Just because I like doing things like a boy doesn’t mean I’m not a girl. Just because I dress and look a certain way doesn’t mean people wont like me because I have a boyfriend, and he loves me the way I am.

My mom expects me to be that girly girl she had always wanted, but I’m not. I love being the hard worker I am. I work to succeed in life not to impress others. I want to go to culinary school, not because I’m expected to cook but because I love making people surprised and happy in what I make for them.

By being a girl I am setting a line. Yes I will do my hair, yes I like dressing nicely, and yes I do wear make-up. I will not be criticized by what I want to do and what I like to do. I may be girly but I can still roughhouse, fight, and play rough. Yes I am a girl and I will still cook, not because you want me to but because I love to cook for others and myself. Yes I am a girl so I will settle down one day, but with someone who see’s me as a person not as a play toy. Someone who understands, that I am as much as a person as they are. Someone who believes love doesn’t come from the outside of your body but from the inside of your soul, someone who understands me, cares for me, and respects me.

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A National Journal of Literature & Discussion

My Life as a Girl

By stephanie burt.

I’m a man, but I like dressing up as a woman, in women’s clothes, wearing lipstick and bracelets and bright rings and women’s shoes.

Maybe I just want to be pretty.

Maybe I just want to feel pretty, or to look pretty. Some of those goals seem impossible, or incompatible, or prohibitively difficult; not worth what I would have to sacrifice. I’m a man, but I like dressing up as a woman, in women’s clothes, wearing lipstick and bracelets and bright rings and women’s shoes. Given my tastes, at the moment, it might be better to say that I like dressing up as a girl. I like to wear costume jewelry, and pastel nail polish, and I do that all the time. I like to wear skirts and tights, or dresses, too, in private sometimes, in public fewer times, and in company when I can find an appropriate occasion, which I rarely can.

That’s been the case for a while. In my twenties I found the perfect social circle, and the perfect set of dance parties and rock clubs, where I could dress up like a girl and my friends didn’t mind—or found it charming. Then my favorite club closed. Then Jessie and I got married and moved to Minnesota, and my space for cross-dressing dried up. I minded, but not very much, because I liked the rest of my life. I even stopped wearing nail polish and sparkly rings for a while, though the poetry I published made its commitment to girlish identities, feminine alternate selves, all but unmistakable.

And now I have started dressing up again, every so often—I think all I want is every so often—and I’m ready to write about it in disjunctive and maybe all too self-conscious prose.

What follows are tentative answers to persistent questions about how I look, how I want to look, why I often think that I would rather have been a woman, and why I’m sure I won’t try to become one. It has to do with sexual feeling, but it says almost nothing about sexual acts. It’s no substitute for queer theory, nor for a cultural history of cross-dressing and other trans life-ways, nor for the book-length memoirs by trans people and their loved ones (one of my topics here is resistance to memoir, to narrative, to identifying your true self with one story that can be told), though all those forms of writing have helped me, and I refer to them. I also refer to poetry, since I care far more about poems—and think more often about them—than about how I look. I am a literary critic and a writer of verse, a parent and husband and friend, before and after I am a guy in a skirt, or a guy in blue jeans, or a fictional girl. I have tried to have as little concern for my own privacy as I can—I’m tired of keeping secrets and don’t want more. I have, on the other hand, tried to have as much concern as I can for Jessie’s privacy. I’ve chosen to share these parts of my life with you, if you stay with me; Jessie has chosen to share the whole of our life, not necessarily with readers, but with me.

People who know my name but haven’t met me usually know I’m a poetry critic and a book reviewer. In one important model of poetry-in-general, the poet constructs a persona (Greek poiein = to make; Latin persona = actors’ mask), a stylized mask made of words that replaces the poet’s physical, literal body, and provides a better fit for the soul. My own first published poems spoke of wanting to be a girl, or a woman, dramatically and tautologically: “If I were a girl, I would be a girl,” one said. Later I published poems in girl personae , such as “Self-Portrait as Kitty Pryde,” about the teenage genius from the X-Men who has the power to walk through walls.

This essay is a substitute, not so much for a memoir, but for an unwritten, overlong, awkward, over-literal poem.

Recently I went shopping for a denim skirt that I could wear to an open house for trans people and cross-dressers, the venerable Tiffany Club in suburban Boston. I’ve now gone to two open houses, and I’ll go to more, though I don’t know how often, since we have a two-year-old and a six-year-old, and the open house events conflict with both of their bedtimes. It’s astonishingly helpful to find a space where trans people can meet one another without being expected to date, or to dance on stage, or to seek medical attention. Also, it turns out, I like being addressed as Stephanie. Some of the folks I met there are learning to live full-time in their preferred gender (with or sans surgeries). Others are more like me; they enjoy dressing up.

I found almost exactly the skirt I envisioned at the Gap: a thin blue-jean fabric, knee-length and slightly flouncy, with double rose thread near the hem. On my way to the cash register I also saw a pair of shorts, for men, in a color somewhere between bronze and mustard. I picked them out and tried them on and liked how they looked on me and bought them too.

Other prized girly possessions, recently acquired: opaque white tights; opaque bright blue tights; a micro-thin blue belt (it goes only with shorts or skirts); a black Maidenform padded bra, which converts a 36AA like me to a 36C; a cotton white-and-magenta circle skirt, which I have worn around Harvard Square; a sleeveless black top with small ruffles and white polka dots, which I have as yet had no occasion to wear. Ten years ago I lost, among other girl clothes, a pair of black and silver opaque tights. I still miss them.

But if I had them, I would only rarely wear them. I’m reasonably comfortable in T-shirts and jeans, most days, especially if I can wear something feminine as an accessory, because these are butch or androgynous (as well as supposedly youthful) ways to dress. Wearing a suit and tie, on the other hand, can make me feel as if I were a Disney World employee stuck wearing a Goofy head.

According to current medical criteria, trans people have gender dysphoria: our gender does not match our biological sex, and the mismatch makes us unhappy. Several therapists have now agreed that I have gender dysphoria, but how badly do I have it? Not so badly, as these things can go. The stories transsexuals tell about life pre-transition, in which they are discontented to the extent of becoming suicidal, because they are biologically male or female and feel they should not be, do not describe my life at all.

If I were a historian or a journalist writing a book about trans culture, I’d take a few years and attend more Tiffany Club meetings, and more than a few dance-club nights, before calling this essay, or that manuscript, complete. It’s a bigger culture than you might think. And I’d profile people I’ve met. I’d write at some length about the life of M., a high-powered software-company employee just back from reassignment surgery, who looked fabulous in a strapless blue summer dress that showed off her brand-new breasts. I’d certainly write about L., now in her eighties, who served in the US military and then served, for decades, as an officer of the club. L. shares military stories with others her age, and defends her politically conservative views on questions unrelated to gender. L. also tried and failed to teach me how someone like me—who has a five o’clock shadow five minutes after a close shave—should use beard cover and foundation. At least two folks I met at Tiffany Club are undergoing divorces. L., on the other hand, likes to say (and why shouldn’t she?) that she and her wife, who prefers her in male garb, have been together for decades, and remain close to their kids and grandkids. L. used to organize annual outings to Provincetown, where club members could spend the weekend en femme ; L.’s wife came along, and when they went out as a couple, in deference to her, L. dressed as a man.

But I’m not writing that book. I’m writing this essay, half about me and half about other books, and all about where I stand now, at the margin of these grownups’ gender-variant world. I am, to quote Helen Vendler, a critic I trust completely, “incorrigibly unhappy without a text to dwell on,” for reasons not entirely unrelated to the distance I feel from my physical body. Yet in order to think about that body, about that distance, I keep going back to some books.

The single best book that I’ve read, not about “who I am” (I am many things, and so are you, by the way) but about my own experience of sex and gender, has to be Jennifer Finney Boylan’s memoir, She’s Not There . When I first read it in 2011, this book lit up my sense of myself both when I saw myself in her and when I did not. Boylan writes that while she was still James, she considered “being a man … the second best life I can live,” and so she tried to “learn how to be happy with this second best life … I don’t think this is so crazy, even now. If I could have pulled this off, I would have.” I put a check mark on that page.

Like almost every trans writer, Boylan remembers feeling awkward, wrongly placed, in the body with which she grew up. Me too, but I’m not sure how much of that feeling comes from having the body of a man, and how much of it comes from having a body at all. For instance, I used to love hosting college radio: on the radio I was not a body, but an expression of musical taste, words, and a voice.

Like many folks about my age, I first learned about trans people from television, from the episode of St. Elsewhere , first aired in 1983, in which Dr. Craig’s best friend from college pops up as a candidate for sex reassignment surgery. Dr. Craig remembers the fraternity-style drag show where both men performed: His friend, he learns, “never took off that dress.” I was like that. But not that. Not close.

In the first job that gave me any independence, I worked as a researcher for Let’s Go , the travel guides written and edited by Harvard students. I roamed the mid-Atlantic and the Upper South, from Kentucky’s horse country to the beaches of Delaware. My strangest and loneliest hours arrived in Charleston, West Virginia, where I knew no one and there were no tourist attractions (we ended up leaving it out of the book). Asking about entertainment in a coffee shop, I found alterna-teens who spirited me off to my first drag show: a bar shaped like a shoebox diorama, with dim lights, high heels, curly wigs, and what were likely the Mountain State’s most energetic lip-synchers. I was like that, but not that. Not close.

Most of my favorite music during the 1990s was called indie-pop, or “twee,” a mostly British genre derived from the do-it-yourself spirit of punk, the timbres of Phil Spector’s girl groups, and the attitudes in playground chants. Melody was esteemed; virtuosity was downplayed even for bands that possessed it. “Twee” is also an insult in British English, meaning childishly old-fashioned, over-fussy, comically “English,” and ultimately un-masculine.

When we were twee we were all of those things: The styles were girly-girl for the girls, with sparkly barrettes, Swiss dot, large prints from thrift-store expeditions, and Hello Kitty additions. For the cross-over boys, epicene or fade-out-of-sight wear was the way, along with striped T-shirts or T-shirts with names of bands. Not all the pop groups involved were overtly feminist, though the best were. But nobody wanted, or tried, to be a real man. Without twee pop and the social circles it built, I would certainly never have met Jessie. We were at the same shows, the same clubs.

One of my favorite indie-pop groups was Blueboy, named either for a song by the proto-twee group Orange Juice or for a gay porn mag. Most of their music came out on the leading twee label, Sarah Records, of Bristol, England. Blueboy specialized in melancholy, mostly acoustic songs, more than a few about being gay or queer, including a crisp ballad with this beautiful chorus: “A girl alone / is just the same as / a boy alone / sadness is unisex.”

I never dressed up as a girl, in public, when I was an undergraduate. Why the heck not, since I moved in queer-positive circles? Fear, or awkwardness, or just confusion, in those days when “transgender” was not a well-known word, but also my sense that I wasn’t a grand performer, in contrast to the handful of biological men I knew who came to class, and to parties, loudly and confidently wearing dresses. (At least one of those men dated women, though others were gay.) Nor did I belong anywhere near the old-school wigs-and-flounces drag of the Hasty Pudding Show, with its all-male company. Nor, certainly, could I pull off anything like the immaculate and masterful drag of Thomas Lauderdale, now the leader of the band Pink Martini, with his perfect black cocktail gown. What’s wrong, exactly, with being a man in a dress?

What’s wrong with being a man who looks bad or sloppy or underprepared or like a mannish, fake girl in a dress? Why are other people shocked, or distressed, when they see femininity poorly, or inexpertly, performed? And why do I care—since I do care—about what they see?

How much work does it take to look real, and—if I don’t want to pass full-time as a woman—where’s the point of diminishing returns? Are costume jewelry and nail polish, accessories and ornaments, a skirt and tights here and there on a weekday afternoon, a sustainable compromise, or a way station of some sort?

I don’t feel that I am a girl, or a woman, “inside,” much less that I have always been one. Sometimes I feel I should have been one—or wish that I were one. I fall somewhere between the consistent deep-rooted mismatch that transsexual adults and teens (like the wonderfully articulate Nicole Maines) describe, or something like Anglophilia: wanting to be what you aren’t. Either way, you don’t belong, because you’re attracted to the stereotype, but discontent with what you have.

How different is that wish from other escapist wishes, such as a trip to Japan, or a Karmann Ghia?

Who wouldn’t want to become someone else, every so often, to take a break from the self with its irrevocable responsibilities and its body that won’t improve again, “tied to me as to a dog’s tail,” as W. B. Yeats put it, or with me (as Delmore Schwartz’s poem says) like a heavy bear?

The trans writer and performer S. Bear Bergman, who looks like a friendly, chubby man and prefers the pronouns “ze” and “hir,” asks “how much we would cheerfully pay to get a few days off to go somewhere nobody knows us and indulge in all our unsanctioned realness without anyone there to drag us back to reality.” Quite a lot, I’d say. But where would we go?

In August 2012 the New York Times Magazine ran a beautiful cover story on “pink boys,” who want to dress up in girls’ clothes for preschool or grade school.

”No, I don’t want to be a girl,” one of them told the reporter, Ruth Padawer. “I just want to wear girl stuff.”

”Why do you want to be a boy and not a girl?” she probed, and the eight-year-old answered: “Because I want to be who I am!”

Some of these boys can wear girls’ shoes and accessories to school, but the dresses stay home. Those boys are me, as I told several of my friends, except that I’m not eight.

The same issue ran Lindsay Morris’s photo feature on a weekend camp for gender variant kids, where pink boys can dress as they want, and feel pretty, for forty-eight hours before they go back to school: without therapists, without teachers (but with supervision), without lessons on how to pass or look more feminine (but with a fashion show, and dress-up bins). Are there such camps for adults? If there were, would I go there?

I have no desire to write a straightforward memoir about my gender and my wardrobe. For one thing, there would not be enough to report. I want instead to find a way to think about gender and appearance that accounts for my body, my emotions, and my images of my body—as it is, as it can be, as I wish it could be.

My body feels unfinished, undeveloped, more often than it feels like a real woman or a real man. It feels, sometimes, as if it wanted to become a woman, whether or not it will get the chance. That feeling itself hasn’t changed since my teens.

What article of clothing demonstrates that feeling best? I’m afraid it’s a training bra. I may be wearing one now, as you read this.

W. H. Auden used to say that he always imagined he was the youngest person in any room. I have often felt the same way, and still have dreams in which I fear that my colleagues and friends will learn that I am really sixteen … or twelve … or fourteen.

At fourteen I wanted to live in a world where girls would like me, where I could take part in girls’ lives, become at least a confidante. Within a few years, I had most of what I wanted. All I had to do, I thought, was to pretend I did not have a body, to leave my own body behind. Most of my college-age romances, such as they were, got stuck at a point where I asked to try on a girl’s bra. I wanted breasts, or the promise of breasts.

”I’d discovered the nature of my desire,” the great trans writer Kate Bornstein recalls in her autobiography: ”I wanted to be the kind of girl I was attracted to.”

The strictly erotic aspect of cross-dressing, including my own—the turn-on aspect—can’t be disentangled from the rest of it. But it’s very hard to talk about directly unless you have a particular talent for erotic writing in prose, which I believe I don’t possess. I can, though, repeat the trans slogan that being transgender is about who you want to go to bed as, not who you want to go to bed with. I can say now that when I am erotically excited, most of the time, I experience my own body as a woman’s, or a girl’s.

I first met people who had been genderqueer (as we say now), the cross-dressers and postpunk post-gender folks, when they were not long out of their teens, and I was not long out of mine, when I saw rock shows and read fanzines and wrote, a bit, on the far fringes of the Riot Grrrl phenomenon, in 1991–94. Had I been a few years younger back then, who would I be now? Would I go by Stephanie regularly? Or by ze? It seems unlikely, but who knows? I’m pretty sure I’d be no happier than I am now. So much has gone right with the rest of my life.

I remember discovering in grade school that some boys “liked” some girls, and some girls also “liked” some boys, and that “like” in such constructions had a special meaning, different from and more important than “I like ice cream”: I wanted a girl to like me, I liked a girl, I liked girls, I wanted to be like a girl. Did I want to be a girl, or just to be like one?

The trans writer Julia Serano remembers an epiphany outside a high school baseball game: “a group of neighborhood girls walked by and some of my flirtier guy friends started teasing… . Both groups struck up a conversation but I just sort of sat there and stared. It seemed so obvious to me that I should be one of those girls rather than one of those boys. It was so sad because nobody could see it but me. So I decided to get a sex change operation.” I love that sequence, with its one-two logic: I have felt exactly as she felt in the antecedent, though the consequent never followed for me.

Gender, we hear from various intellectuals (Judith Butler, for example), must be a performance: Some performances announce themselves as such, while others disappear.

If gender in all its permutations is an acknowledged or unacknowledged—consciously or unconsciously learned—performance, no wonder that some of the most insightful people on trans experience have been actors, directors, performers: Bornstein, Bergman, Daphne, Gottlieb—or the stand-up comedian Eddie Izzard, surely the most famous male-to-female cross-dresser. Izzard explains in his show Dress to Kill : “If you’re a transvestite, you’re actually a male tomboy, that’s where the sexuality is… . ‘Cause most transvestites fancy girls, fancy women. So that’s where it is. So it’s ‘running, jumping, climbing trees, putting on makeup when you’re up there.’”

Treehouses seem important to trans self-conception; they are fake houses, pretend and private houses, where children can be themselves, but almost nobody sees them. “When I was growing up on the Jersey Shore,” Bornstein recalls, “there were small forests on every block … A lone tall birch stood high above the woods, and I taught myself to climb it. Springtime and summer I’d spend hours in the top branches and I’d be a princess locked away in a tower waiting for another princess to come rescue me. But all the time up in that tree, I never looked down.”

Why am I so, so much more comfortable—and frankly more fluent—writing about the lives and the art and the words of other people than writing about myself? Have I just had more practice? Or does my attraction to other lives, to relatively self-contained works of art, have something to do with my sense that I don’t quite live in my own body, in my own physical life?

As much as I want to be pretty, I want more often—and more often get—to live in a world of sounds and words. No wonder, then, that I can say more about what I want, who I am when I am a fake girl, by looking at a book of poems that embodies that self surprisingly, completely, a book that embarrasses me because it records, at times, just what I want.

That book is The Haunted House , by Marisa Crawford, in whose poems I see an almost scary reflection of the girl that I would be, or would have been. Even more than other recent poetry about appearance and feminine style, about girlhood or youth (some of it technically superior, and of broader aesthetic interest, as I’ve explained in less personal lit-crit elsewhere), The Haunted House seems addressed to me, about me. It’s even dedicated to “all the girls, real and make-believe,” a rubric that presumably includes the poet and some of her friends, and Maggie Tulliver, and me, and Kitty Pryde.

Crawford sees some poems as ghost stories, tales of buried selves, which Crawford imagines that she can resurrect. These plural alternate selves are eyelashes, are birds, are

you tugging at my eyeliner, all the black birds lined up on a telephone wire. Hello? I’d like to thank the seeds, all the seeds that turned into trees after everyone said they’d never grow.

Crawford allows the inchoate energy of her sentences to spill over into the energetic bodies of the girls and the young women who float through the poems, and it makes them disturbing and pretty and frankly sexy, as in “What Happened in the Pool”:

I could see everything through your bathing suit, everything. Guilt as solitary, a kickboard, a mishap, a sky. I laid my body on top of the water, floating . The sky is made of Lycra. Chocolate-syrup solar eclipse, maraschino cherry, hole in the ozone. I could touch the bottom. I could lick the spoon.

There’s something hard to defend about the poems. It’s something that’s attractive because it is awkward; something for which I feel compelled to apologize. (I feel the same way about dressing up as a girl.)

Crawford’s poems say no to aesthetic distance. They ask you—and me—to jump into the pool with them, to join them up in the attic, and not to climb out. Their performance of girlhood seems, to them and to me, an amazed alternative to the compromises and the logical consequence of any well-ordered, decorous, appropriately attired adult world. The poems are like temporary, miniature, wilder alternatives to that world, “like an entire town underneath the Christmas tree, if you think about it” (which also works as a figure for poetry in general). The poems are like Christmas-tree miniatures, but they are also like erotic fantasies, envisioning impossible transformations, such as Emily Dickinson as a high school swimmer, or myself as a woman, a girl. “She rammed her head into my mouth, in the pool. I hid her letters in my bra. There’s a part of my brain that’s like the zipper on a sleeping bag, a cluster of pine trees, a telephone cord,” she writes.

I can’t make an argument for the aesthetic merits of that writing. But I love it.

Whether or not your own art depicts adolescence, whether or not it depicts (as Ovid, the great trans poet of antiquity, put it) bodies taking new shapes, artistic development is always like adolescent development. We discover, awkwardly, the powers we have and the powers we cannot have, the shapes that our bodies of work will eventually take.

For an artist like Crawford, neither development has an “endpoint”; the point is what you do now, while you’re not fully formed. (Why would I want to be fully formed?) You get power from who you are, not from who you will be, and power comes when you decide not to go all the way. “Hurricane Gloria tore out the lilacs with her fingers, snapped my bra strap. She was a phantom, a direct descendent. I spent Christmas upstairs, painting candy cane stripes on my nails.” I would have done that too.

When I’m dressed informally, as I often am, with girly accessories (nail polish, candy-bright rings) and a T-shirt and jeans, and I’m walking around outdoors, I sometimes feel that I look wrong, I should go home and change. When I’m fully dressed up as a girl I can feel the same way. It’s a voice in my head, a critical friend or frenemy; sometimes it gives me helpful tips (that green doesn’t work with this blue; you should shave again first) and sometimes it says I should give up and look like a man.

But when I look entirely gender-appropriate, with nothing sparkly, lacy, or violet, I hear or feel a grinding basso continuo of inward sadness, saying, “This doesn’t quite work, and it doesn’t represent you.” I can put up with that, ignore it, for days, but it gets to me. It sets my teeth on edge.

The truth is that I’m going to feel slightly wrong, slightly out of alignment with my own body, no matter what I wear or what I do. So why not feel pretty? Why not try to like how I look?

Drag queens and other cross-dressers who make dressing up and acting as a girl or a woman central to their lives take hours and hours before they go out. They are like classical musicians, practicing and perfecting their craft in order to perform. I play the piano, too, but I’m an amateur: I can play Debussy’s pieces for children, Scarlatti’s sonatas, W. C. Handy’s blues hits, and other easy pieces, at home or for friends. I dress up like that too. I could use some practice, some technique, to expand my repertoire. I’d like to become more expressive, and more versatile, but I can’t let either dressing up or playing the piano become the center of my life.

But I do want more sheet music. And one or two more pretty skirts, and maybe a gown.

I used to wonder whether I had the right, or the obligation, to call myself trans, given how much I am not like Boylan or Bergman. Now I do say I am trans, when it comes up, and yet I don’t like the way that the word so often implies transport or transition , implies that I am moving from one gender or one life to another. I’ll take instead the “trans” in D. W. Winnicott’s term “transitional objects,” by which the psychoanalyst meant the not-quite-animate, not-quite-inanimate things (such as stuffed animals) with which children mediate between themselves and everything else. Transitional objects, Winnicott often wrote, are neither assigned exclusively to the self, nor relegated to the outside world; it’s important that adults not ask.

Is it even possible to be who you really are, to show your inward self? John Ashbery’s great long poem “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” considers our desire to look at a face or a body and see the soul “inside”; its trigger, or subject, is the distorted self-portrait that the painter Parmigianino created by looking at his own face in a mirrored ball, where

The soul establishes itself. But how far can it swim out through the eyes And still return safely to its nest? The surface Of the mirror being convex, the distance increases Significantly; that is, enough to make the point That the soul is a captive, treated humanely, kept In suspension, unable to advance much farther Than your look.

Do we have inner cores, selves that cannot be seen? So Ashbery’s poem suggests. On the other hand, “your eyes proclaim / That everything is surface. The surface is what’s there / And nothing can exist except what’s there.” If I am a girl or a woman only when I am by myself, unseen, then I was never a girl.

”You want something; that’s the pretext,” begins Rae Armantrout’s poem “Birthmark: The Pretext,” which explores the idea—associated with Jacques Lacan—that your sense of who you are grows from your sense of what you want, what you lack, so that in order to keep being the person you recognize as yourself, you have to keep wanting something you cannot have.

I am revising this essay in my green cotton dress with its grey hip-hugging sash and its odd elastic gathering at the knees—it’s a dress designed to emphasize, or to build, hips. I think Kitty would wear it, and I think it goes with white tights. I’m sure that it works well with my enhanced Maidenform bra. When I’m done, at the end of my writing day, I will change back into my mustard-colored shorts and my button-down short-sleeved shirt and go home, and enjoy the evening with my family, far more than I would enjoy it if I spent the whole day, or the evening, in a dress.

My sons, who are now two and six, see that I like to wear nail polish, sparkly rings and bracelets, and pink or violet sneakers. I wear such things in and out of the house on most days. They haven’t, so far as I know, seen me in a dress; at some point they will, if only in pictures, and I intend to let them know what’s coming so they won’t be too surprised. I hope and expect that they’ll see it as continuous with other forms of dress-up, kinds of acting and pretending, by kids and by adults: it’s self-expression, it’s a craft, it can be amateur or professional, it should be fun.

An earlier draft of this essay provoked some trustworthy readers to ask for more about Jessie: her life, her psychology, her attitudes toward my gender and my wardrobe. She knows about all of it, we’re happy together, and it’s important to me that my wardrobe not become the center of our lives. It’s also important to me that as I write about my intimate or hard-to-acknowledge emotions, I respect Jessie’s privacy too.

I possess tenure now. So why don’t I teach in a dress? That’s what the law professor Kenji Yoshino (whose book Covering stands behind a slice of this essay) would call a demand for reverse-covering: asking that I make my gender identity visible and unmistakable, like it or not. (“Covering” plain and simple involves a demand that members of a minority avoid expressing their minority status, their distinctive identities: “Just don’t flaunt it.” Yoshino wants us to recognize, and to reject, both kinds of demand.)

The truth is that I don’t want to teach in a dress, because at this point in my life, and perhaps at all points, I’d be too distracted, and so would my students. I’d be making it harder for them to learn. I would be distracted by wondering what my students were thinking, distracted by thinking about how I look, and who I am rather than thinking about the text I’m teaching; distracted by wondering whether I’m doing it right. On the other hand, I wear nail polish to class, and I would resent a demand that I stop.

And yet I’m unsatisfied. But who is entirely satisfied? Who gets to be seen by others just as she wants to see herself, as ze or he wants to see himself or herself? And how often? And how much work does being seen that way take, where it’s even possible? How many people want to be seen, or wonder if they can be seen, as thinner, taller, stronger, more delicate, more confident, more sophisticated, more Southern, less Southern, less exotic, more exotic, more grownup?

I want a social space in which I can wear a skirt and tights and be seen as a woman, if not as a girl. I want a space where I might be addressed as “Stephanie.” I don’t want that space to take over the rest of my life. I think I have several such spaces, intermittent and Brigadoon-like as they are.

I also want—and now I have—a life where the people I see and know intimately see something in me that’s girly, that’s not quite a man, that aspires to femininity.

When I next teach a text, or give a reading, where gender variation, or fabulous gender nonconformity, are relevant to the text (so it’s not a distraction), I probably will wear a dress, or a skirt and tights. On the other hand, I might chicken out; I might wait for a suitable party, that night, or next month.

I am all too aware that this essay can come across as precious, evasive, dependent, and inconclusive: That’s how I experience my body, too. If I cannot tell the truth about myself, about these parts of my self, in this precious and inconclusive and quotation-dependent way, then I cannot tell it at all.

This week I got new glasses. Jessie helped me pick them out. Their rims are translucent, off-white, and go with anything. Their transition lenses turn a violet-grey in sunlight. Their end-piece, when it casts a shadow, makes lavender shade. A bit of silver glitter runs in one thin go-faster stripe from earpiece to temple.

The new specs can go with girl clothes, or guy clothes, with formality (a blazer, a little black dress) or extreme informality (T-shirt, jeans), or something midway (a white button-down shirt, a striped blouse). They do not, I think, look especially youthful, but neither do they exert any formal authority. They suggest patience, a good mood, a cat’s glad reserve; they might read as queer . They are the most expensive thing I own, a step up from the thin black frames I had last year, and from the ultramarine rectangles that came before that. I do not know, and do not want to know, whether a stylish, well-informed observer, seeing my new glasses without their owner, would think that they were made for women, or for men.

Stephanie Burt

Stephanie Burt is Professor of English at Harvard. Her books include The Art of the Sonnet , with David Mikics (Harvard, 2010), Close Calls with Nonsense: Reading New Poetry (Graywolf, 2009), Parallel Play: Poems (Graywolf, 2006), and Randall Jarrell and His Age (Columbia, 2002).

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This is almost exactly how I feel although I don't quite share your love of pastels and sparkly rings. I really appreciate that you took the time to write all that down. I'm a documentary filmmaker and I came out as transgender during the making of our film, and even commited to the word transgender in said film! However, it's never quite perfectly fit as a descriptor of me. Im happy getting dolled up but I'm pretty damn happy to wear jeans and play monster in the blanket with my 4 year old daughter too. Anyway, thanks!

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What is a girl? What is girlhood? The answers to these questions are not as straightforward as they might first appear. The word girl appeared in the Middle Age more than 700 years ago. At that time it was written as “gyrle,” meaning a child or a young person of either sex. Since then, the word has taken many forms such as “girle,” “gerle,” and “gurl.” During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the word girl started to refer specifically to a female child, or a young, unmarried woman. From the 1640s, “girl” could also mean “sweetheart.” Stemmed from the word “girl,” girlhood as a word appeared later in the mid-eighteenth century. Since the beginning, it was coined with the reference to the state of being a girl or the childhood of a girl. 

Then, what exactly is the state of being a girl? How do we define it? Definitions of girlhood change and vary widely than ever in nowadays society. We often think of age as the key determinant of girlhood, but even this is more complicated than one might think. When does girlhood end? Does it end with adolescence? When one turns eighteen? Does girlhood extend even until one is in their mid-twenties? Part of what makes defining girlhood so challenging is that age is not the only factor that defines girlhood. It is also a social and cultural construct, meaning that different societies often construct their own unique meaning of girlhood. 

In this exhibit, we worked with girl studies scholars and self-identified girls/women to explore various historical and modern definitions of girlhood. We also look at case studies, particularly from Asia, that are both stereotypically and subversively girl. We  chose to let contributors speak for themselves – our text is minimal and limited to introducing each section.

As you explore, ask yourself: Do you agree with how someone else defines “girl” or “girlhood?” What about your own experiences is similar to or different from experiences found throughout our museum? If you had to be interviewed like this, what would you say?

Education Guide

Use this education guide to interact with the exhibit, gain a deeper understanding of diverse girlhoods, and think about the meaning of gender identities today.  Activities in this guide are aligned to U.S. and/or U.K. educational standards. They are designed to be used by students and teachers as school lessons or enrichment opportunities.

Historically “Girl”

Different conceptions of girlhood have been constructed and changed over time and across cultures. In many cases, definitions of girlhood reflect the shifting political and cultural needs of societies. For example, at the end of the nineteenth century, Egyptian girlhood was often defined by other milestones, like first menstruation or marriage, not just a girl’s age. In early twentieth-century Europe the period of girlhood became longer, as more girls had more access to education. Even now, it becomes more difficult to draw a sharp distinction between girlhood and adulthood, in large part because girls are involved in seemingly adult experiences across the globe, from labor to sex work.

Since each culture has their own definition of girlhood, it is impossible to lump all kinds of girlhood into one definition. We highlighted key examples of both historical and contemporary definitions of girlhood across different time periods and regions for our audience to explore. As illustrated by these diverse definitions, it is clear that, in the midst of social pressures and constraints, girls are constantly developing their own culture to challenge and redefine the concept of girlhood and empower themselves. 

Ancient Greece

Confucian china.

Han Dynasty (202 BC – 220 AD)

Compared with other later dynasties in China, Han girls were relatively free in public life. Girls were welcome to engage in industries such as business, medicine, divination, and performance. Girls from royal families also could be conferred a rank of nobility. For example, Emperor Guangwu once conferred his three granddaughters as “Little State Sovereigns”. However, the Han Dynasty also witnessed that Confucianism affected the cultural construct of girlhood when Confucian moral values, which ​demanded girls to be chaste and obedient, gradually became the mainstream of society.

Ever since Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty who chose Confucianism as the mainstream philosophy of China, Confucianism-led education began to invade the construct of girlhood. The right to public education became no longer available to girls, and they could only receive family education. Confucianism advocates the idea that women as homemakers are inferior to men who are breadwinner. Therefore, the goal of female education was to instruct a girl to put her heart and soul into supporting the intellectual and professional development of their male relatives-their fathers, brothers, husbands, and sons.

In Western Han Dynasty, Lie Nu Zhuan, a collective biography of female historical figures, introduced girl readers to six types of virtues. Being loving, thoughtful, and chaste were among the most important virtues that girls were expected to possess. Another classic reading for girls was Nv Jie, written by Ban Zhao, a female scholar in the Eastern Han Dynasty. She believed that women should give priority to assisting their husbands. Girlhood became a site to instill the ideology of proper female behaviors, and these values ​​reincarnated into countless moral books and stories for girls of future generations.

Girl Apprentices

Medieval and Early Modern Europe

Girls started working as apprentices at craft workshops at the age of 10 or 11 in many medieval European towns. Especially for girls from poor families, it was typical to leave their parents and home at such an early age to look for employment. When a girl left home for work, she was also breaking the parental control that she had in the domestic space as a young girl. Loosened adult control and increased income often introduced the girl into the transition from girlhood to her adulthood.

However, girl apprentices rarely acquired complete economic independence, or fully transitioned to adulthood in reality. They remained with a special role in the world of work: girl apprentices were seen as labor with ability to learn and provide, meanwhile they were also treated as children who required adult control. For example, in Ireland, girls working in mills and factories usually got a small portion of their wage. The rest of their wage would be directly paid to their families.

Enslaved Girls

16th to 19th century Americas and Europe

In the American South in the decades before the Civil War, there were around one million enslaved girls under the age of 16. Their girlhood was a unique construction where race, age, and gender under slavery had an intertwined influnced on their everyday lives.

In her autobiography, The History of Mary Prince , British abolitionist Mary Prince talked about the hardships that she, as a young enslaved girl, suffered and the brutalities of enslavement. Enslaved girls received harsh punishments similar to those carried out to adults. If they made a mistake when working in cotton or tobacco plantations, they could be whipped brutally. Another mistreatment they frequently faced was sexual exploitation. These abuses, like Mary Prince said, were both physically and emotionally tormenting.

Escaping slavery was of course very difficult, and compared to enslaved boys, enslaved girls had even fewer opportunities to attain freedom. Instead, they learned to fake illness or work slowly to show their resistance. Stories and games also became a way for young people to resist their enslavement. Younger enslaved girls sometimes transformed old games by adding transgressive messages into them. For example, a jumping rope song from enslaved girls went, “My old mistress promised me/Before she dies she would set me free/Now she’s dead and gone to hell/I hope the devil will burn her well.”

Pre-19th century

Before the nineteenth century, girls in India, similar to girls in other parts of the world, were expected to learn and take on housework at an early age. Home school was a popular choice, and the learning content often centered mostly on domestic tasks rather than vocational skills. The definitive moment that marked the end of girlhood was not landing a job or finishing schooling. Rather, most of the time it was marriage that ended girlhood. 

Although the beginning of girls’ puberty was the ostensible milestone of girls’ eligibility to enter into marriage, child marriage was a common phenomenon before 16th century. Rig Veda , the oldest and most important of Hindu holy texts, was cited in a number of nineteenth-century texts. These texts documented that child marriage occurred and intensified with scriptural exhortations’ endorsement of pre-puberty marriage. 

In the 20th century, increased female legal age for marriage successfully expanded the length of girlhood in India. In 2006, the government of India prohibited child marriage. Girls in India are having more control over their own bodies and lives. The rate of child marriage plummeted since then,  but child marriage still exist – there are more underage brides (under 18 years old) in India than any other countries in the world.

Student Girls

18th and 19th century Europe

Should young girls learn to read? This question would generate little controversy today, but it provoked strong debates and negative reactions in Europe before the 18 th and 19 th centuries.

Young girls had access to books in many European countries in the 18th century, especially in the Netherlands, Germany, and England. While some “literary ladies,” or women authors of pedagogical books, and other educationalists encouraged young girls to read and develop their own intellectual interests, this “female curiosity” was regarded as dangerous by many authors in the 19 th century. Even for girls who wanted to read, the options were not very abundant: most books available for girl readers were advice books. 

Instead of reading and developing their intellectual interests, girls were instead encouraged to learn domestic skills. Young girls in middle- and upper-class families usually had the chance to study various academic subjects with tutors and governesses, but this education was simply meant to prepare girls for marriage.  The goal of education was to create the ideal girl who, according to the authors of advice books, would be a delightful and informed companion for her husband. 

Black Girls in Jim Crow South

Late 19th and 20th century

What was it like to grow up as a Southern Black girl under Jim Crow laws that legalized racial segregations in the Southern United States? Witnessing state-sponsored racism and white supremacy, Black girls came to develop and understand their identity under several interwinted forces: gender, race, place, and justice. 

Southern Black girls in this period were seen constantly negotiating two main influences. One was the racialized violence from Jim Crow South. Black girls often found themselves unable to protect their bodies from the violence of white men. At the same time, Black girls were told to be pure, virtuous, and dignified as a way to gain respectability. Black girls’ constant negotiation was revealed in their girlhood. For example, they were not expected to show rebelliousness as an adolescent girl. Instead, they had to learn to be respectable, protect their puriness, and defend themselves against racial violence. Growing up in Jim Crow South, many black girls were motivated to fight for their rights to their own bodies and agency. 

Girls and White Slavery

Pre-World War I in Europe and North America

In the Victorian and Edwardian period, important keywords of girlhood were purity and self-sacrifice. Girlhood was frequently associated with the color white and flowers like lilies and snowdrops. However, the development of suffrage movements in the 20th century (check out our “young suffragettes” exhibition to learn more!) challenged traditional ideas of girls as innocent and angelic. 

Guardians of this “pure, innocent girlhood”, often together with anti-suffragists, insisted on illustrating girlhood as a period where young girls needed male’s protection. They alleged that girls were at the risk of falling prey of white slavers who would force them into prostitution, human trafficking, and sexual salvery. This public anxiety on girls’ safety spread in the UK, Europe, and North America. Girls were often told to be alert to the dangers of being kidnapped by white slavers. 

For feminists, this idea of white slavery deprived young women of their agency. Feminists’ anger over the sexual oppression behind white slavery stories and a desire to remedy it was one factor motivating women to obtain vote. The Western concept of girlhood in this period was thus full of contradictions and shaped different political interests and claims.  Scholars’ studies have shown that most of these stories about white slavery were rumors, but the image of girls as sexual victims endures even to the present day. 

“It” Girl

Early 20th Century

Since the 1980s, “It” girl has been perceived as an attractive girl who flaunts her sex allure and strongly associated with celebrity, fame, and beauty. The earlier definition of an “It” girl in the early 20 th century was different. “It” girl then referred to a girl who achieved popularity and fame, but without advertising her sexuality.

The first and original “It Girl” was one of the most successful and popular silent film stars, Clara Bow. With her big eyes and babyface, Clara quickly won the love of America. For the audience, what was more engaging than her physical beauty on the screen was her non-traditional personality. She was cheerful, breezy, confident and lively. Her hit changed the previous perception of girls and girlhood: the public became not only more accustomed to modern young women having active career development outside home, but also comfortable with the increased diversity of girls’ sexual expressions. Meanwhile, early debates on girls’ acquiring sexual knowledge were also going to start.

Flappers & Ms. Modern

Between the period of the First and Second World Wars, girlhood became a site where social debates on young women’s appearance, habits, and sexualities took place. “Miss Modern”, a girl who was determined to cast  aside conventional ideas of femininity, went on the stage.

While cutting hair was seen as incredibly offensive to the established values about girlhood and femininity in the Victorian and Edwardian era, Miss Modern enthusiastically took short hair into fashion trends. They also generously brought cheap cosmetics and giddy clothes back to their home. They consumed cigarettes, music, and alcohol. They went dancing, singing, also biking and camping. They were also called flappers. Their habits – especially seeking sexual pleasure – somehow fed the imagination of the public. In turn, they were portrayed as man-hungry girls with “easy virtue”.

Through the 1920s, girl workers also occupied a large amount of newspaper coverage when they entered into new professions such as aviators and engineers. Young women, by challenging the male-dominant hierarchy in both the job market and traditional girlhood image, started to jauntily rewrite the definition of girlhood and femininity by themselves. Birth control and contraception aides became more available during the two World Wars. Easier access to them benefited girls to make decisions on their own body. Miss Modern’s girlhood might be perceived as wild, rebel, or even dangerous by some, but she was also able to keep sensible and practical.

Good-Time Girls

In the mid-1930s, “good-time girls” came into the public sight. They were described as similar girls with the earlier Miss Modern. Both good-time girls and Miss Modern were fond of cheap cosmetics, perfume and fashionable clothes. They watched a lot of Hollywood movies and often dreamed about fame and luxury. 

If Miss Modern’s pursuit for economic and personality independence somehow earned them a reputation, good-time girls became almost like a folk devil in the eyes of the public, who criticized young women for their pleasure seeking and consumption. It was a period when liberal attitudes toward female sexuality suffered backlash. The portrayals of good-time girls, often frivolous and cunning girls preying on soldiers for favors, uneased the society so much that criticism of young girls’ sexuality increased and lasted. 

From the mid-1930s, the moral panic over good-time girls and girlhood in Europe and North America continued into the post-war period. Girls’ appearance, makeup, clothing, and sexualities were carefully vetted by the public again and again. However, girls also proved that the real situation could be very different from the public imagination that they were victims of “being loose or seduced”: some of them actively sought a chance to transition the romantic experience to livelihood; some genuinely relished the lifestyle of partying.

Patriotic Girls in Arab Nationalism

circa 1900-1950, Arab countries

At the beginning of the 20th century, Arab nationalism rose with the goals of eliminating the influence of the West in the Arab world. Because Arab nationalism identified women as the “bearers of the nation”, anti-colonial movements gradually became a platform that provided girls with a potential new way of publicly expressing themselves, even though this way was limited and not free.

In traditional Islamic societies, girls only took on a reproductive role as care-takers in a family. But anti-colonial movements recognized girls as home-front warriors. In other words, girlhood somewhat broke away from the traditional hideout from public gaze, and it gained increased meaning and social value with girls in anti-colonial movements. In Iraq, the youth movement al-Futuwwa saw girls as future patriotic mothers and caregivers. Using al-Futuwwa as a public platform, more and more girls participated in national, political discussion and made their voice heard. In Egypt, the political participation of women from all walks of life had affected the changes in Egypt’s political situation to a certain extent. By participating in demonstrations, strikes and even assassinations, Egyptian girls supported the Egyptian nationalist party, the Wafd Party, and the country’s independence movement.

As the society started to support their political role, Arab girls, too, shouldered national responsibility in this time period. After having achieved independence, Arab girls would step into the next period of their journey: fighting for their rights as citizens and developing the new Islamic feminism.

College Girls

20th century

As time goes, girls have gained increased access to education. Apprenticeship and home education become less and less popular options. Instead, public schools and colleges welcomed more and more girls. With new ideas on girls’ education, girlhood also became a distinctive, separate period between childhood and adulthood with increased social publicity.

One of education’s functions in separating childhood and adulthood was extending girlhood. Although girls would still be supervised by house wardens and academic supervisors, their time spent in school, especially in colleges, has significantly prolonged the girlhood before stepping into adulthood. For many girls, the abundant academic resources that colleges offered equipped them knowledge to prepare better before stepping into the adult world. For some, entering into colleges meant delayed marital age, which, in turn, implied more independent girlhood time on their own. For example, for Dutch Afrikaner South African girls in the early 20th century, being a “college girl” promised having a carefree time to get aways with “adult responsibilities” and go for glowing college adventures.

Beatlemania

1950s and 1960s

In the 1960s, mainstream voices in the English society hoped to protect the sexual purity of young people. They constantly advocated a happy life after marriage, implying that girls should shun away from sex before getting married. However, girls at this time were far different from Victorian girls. They grew up with easy access to public secondary education. A lot of them had jobs and were financially independent. As new girls, they were also consumers with strong spending power. They were eager to break free from the shackles of society on youth’s and women’s sexuality.

During this period, pop, rock and jazz music won countless girls’ love, together with many conservatives’ aversion. While girls sought pleasure and empowerment from modern music, the latter saw them allures of leading girls to go off the rails. The Beatles took this tension to a new stage: so many girls were obsessed with this band that many of them spent money and publicly confessed to them. This intense fan frenzy, which was also called beatlemania, was actually an unprecedented open expression of desire from female groups. When society contemptuously, or aggrievedly, called these beat girls as fangirls with no brains, did it ever cross their mind that beatlemania could be an outcry from the girls who challenged societal oppression on teenage girls’ sexuality?

Nütongzhi

1960s to 1990s, Taiwan

Nütongzhi (Chinese: 女同志) is a Taiwanese term referring to lesbians. Nütongzhi were generally divided into “T” and “P”. Interestingly, this categorization of T/P was started by Taiwanese gar bar owners. Before 1985 when the first lesbian bar in Taiwan opened, gay bars were the only place where Nütongzhi could hang out with their partner without being judged for their sexual orientations. 

“T” refers to those girls who came to gay bars with short hairs and tomboyish outfits. They often have classic masculine personality traits, such as assertive and competitive. “T”’s partner, who usually seem more feminine than T, is called P or Po (Chinese: 婆, meaning wife). Before 1990s when feminism and gay movement evolved in Taiwan, T and P played a very important role to define a girl in Nütongzhi community. Apart from T and P, some Nütongzhi prefer calling themselves Bu Fen (Chinese: 不分, meaning not applicable), to claim that they identify themselves as neither T nor P. Bu Fen rejected to label themselves and fall into the traps of gender stereotypes. 

With the widespread spread of the Internet and the increasing appearance of other identity names such as transgender and bisexuality, the self-recognition of the younger generation of lesbians has become increasingly diverse. This means that they will experience more and more complex progress when establishing self-identity. Growing up, they constantly try to learn, conform to, or even deviate from diverse identity categories such as T, P, Bu Fen, Nütongzhi, etc.

How far is too far for feminism to go? When Miss Modern and flappers came on stage in the 1920s and 30s, moral panic surfaced with a blizzard of criticism that girls had gone too far. So did it happen when girls broke down more and more gender stereotypes in the 1970s. So did it happen again when girl power rose up and ladettes dominated newspaper headlines in the 1990s. 

Who were ladettes? They had many labels: noisy, confident, boyish. They drank too much. They took their clothes off without scruple. They enjoyed traditionally masculine sports. In a word, they were the girl version of “traditional” men who boozed, boasted, and sometimes behaved vulgarly. The conservatives criticized them that they strayed too far no matter from the traditional ideal of woman or from a new, independent woman. 

But has feminism, or ladettes, gone too far? Ladettes only demonstrated the flipped-over version of the old, binary gender norms where active boys lead, quiet girls follow. When girls behave completely like a lad, this became a whole new story about girlhood. Girls were making their own decisions, taking up space that was traditionally solely preserved for men, and demanding more and more true equality.

Early 2000s

Tween is a blend of between and teen , but exclusively refers to teenage girls. The age range of tween is blurry, with the common reference to 8-13 years. As an age category, tween emphasizes on the time period between a girl’s childhood and puberty. She is too old for toys and games, but too young for boys and sex. 

It’s rather easy to detect that tweenhood becomes a new idealized period of girlhood: tweens are described as (mostly) white, beautiful, and innocent. They should not be sexualized and commodified. This idealization seems like a social projection of the idea that young girls are fragile and constantly need protection. On the other hand, tweens are also a specific group of girls that corporates and consumerism often market at. Clothes, magazines, dolls often brand themselves as tween’s perfect choice to catch up with fashion trends. Such marketing reflects that tweens, as young girls, constitute consumers with spending power who make their own purchase choices. Having such a contradictory status, tween girls continue to navigate their identity under the influence of social ethos, feminism, and consumer culture.

Migrant Girls

20th and 21st century

With the advent of modern society and technological progress, migration, whether it happens voluntarily or involuntarily, has become more possible and more frequent than ever. Consequently, the group of migrated girls are growing and receiving increased attention. However, it’s impossible to generalize their experience: race, class, even familial control, so many factors can profoundly shape a migrated girl’s girlhood. If anything, the keyword of their experience might be identity negotiation. 

Many migrated girls found that the migration was such a radical change to their life that their original identity became incompatible with the new environment after moving. In order to “fit in”, or at least get used to the new life, negotiating between the old and new identities became a common theme of their girlhood. Some migrated girls negotiated “street” and “decent” cultures in a dynamic, vibrant setting. Some tried to understand the difference between a new culture and their own. For example, immigrant girls and refugee girls in Western countries are often educated based on ideas of ideal Wesetern girlhood. Representations of girlhood of their culture, or simply representation of a migrated girlhood, are not abundant.

Harajuku Girls in “Cool Japan”

2002 to Present

Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs launched their concept of “Cool Japan” in 2002, aiming to brand and export Japanese soft cultural superpower. The Cool Japan project focused specifically on youth culture where girl culture was an integral part. Typical girls in Cool Japan flyers and campaigns are easy to recognize: school girls, girls with kimono, etc. These images overlap a lot with popular girl characters in otaku culture. They conformed to conventional femininity norms with acceptive girl sexiness. 

“Harajuku style” is one of the most well-known styles that became an epitome of “Cool Japan”. Girls in Harajuku style mix traditional Japanese clothing with Western attire to create a unique, dazzling, colorful outfit. With traditional Japanese clothes, girls seem to conform to and maintain a traditional image of girlhood. But by mixing totally different styles of clothing, Harajuku style girls signal that their contempt for mainstream fashion – they dress whatever they wish and declare their self-expression and enjoy girl culture without being judged.

Indigenous Girls in the West

21st Century

Colonial practices have affected Indigneous girls for centuries–and continue to influence  their lives today. In residential schools,  white settlers tried to impose white, European, and Christian gender roles on Indigenous communities. They also imposed binary notions, such as white/others and “civilized” and /”primitive” on Indigenous society. 

Today their lives are shaped by things, such as treaty rights, colonial gender policies, and cultural and territorial decolonization. For example, in Canada, Indigenous girls suffered long-term discriminatory treatments, including the Indian Act and residential schools, and these issues are finally receiving some attention. However, compared with settler girls who frequently appear in the public eye, Indigenous girls and their experiences are not often discussed. In face of systemic racialized colonialism, Indigenous girls were constantly seen as “others” who are excluded from the Western notions of girlhood girlhood. Nowadays, Indigenous girls also have to fight against romanticization or representations that portray them as drunk, passive, or foreign. After centuries of colonization, oppression, and forced assimilation, many Indigenous girls struggle to reconnect with values and cultural practices of Indigenous communities. Their rejection of being victimized or misrepresented shapes Indigenous girlhood today.

Gender: Social Construct, Dyke March in Dolores Park. Photo by Steve Rhodes via Flickr.

“girl” as a social construct.

Who decides what a “girl” is? Generally speaking, society. But society’s definitions have varied, as we’ve already seen. So why do definitions change over time?

The social construction of gender theory is a way to research and frame these definitions. The theory emerges from social constructivism, a school of thought which proposes that everything people “know” or see as “reality” is partially, if not entirely, socially situated. This means that our definitions are based on the beliefs and reactions of those around us – people in our society. 

According to Lumen Learning , “A social constructionist view of gender looks beyond categories and examines the intersections of multiple identities and the blurring of the boundaries between essentialist categories. This is especially true with regards to categories of male and female, which are viewed typically as binary and opposite. Social constructionism seeks to blur the binary and muddle these two categories, which are so frequently presumed to be essential.”

Exploring this, we interviewed girl studies scholars about how they define and study girlhood. Click the toggles below to reveal their answers.

How would you define ‘girlhood’? Do you have any anecdotes which you believe summarize girlhood?

Linda Arnell: The word or category of ‘girl’ has various meanings, but is often related to a child of a specific gender and age, and most commonly as a term defining adolescent females. However, I also understand it as a social (western) construction, and the way in which the term girl is given meaning is also intertwined with notions of ability, ethnicity, sexuality, and class, etc. When conducting research, my perspective on the category of girl includes everyone who identifies as such, regardless of the sex assigned at birth, even though I often include an age limit related to ideas of childhood, adolescence, youth, or what it means to be a child or to be young.   The word or category of ‘girl’ has various meanings, but is often related to a child of a specific gender and age, and most commonly as a term defining adolescent females. However, I also understand it as a social (western) construction, and the way in which the term girl is given meaning is also intertwined with notions of ability, ethnicity, sexuality, and class, etc. When conducting research, my perspective on the category of girl includes everyone who identifies as such, regardless of the sex assigned at birth, even though I often include an age limit related to ideas of childhood, adolescence, youth, or what it means to be a child or to be young.

Anastasia Todd: In my work on disabled girlhood, I mostly define girlhood in terms of what it is not. Girlhood is not a “common-sense” ahistorical, static, biological “life-stage.” But rather, it is a shifting category of analysis that is constituted through and by systems and relations of power. Another way I like to think of girlhood (as I do disability) is as an assemblage, not just as an attribute of a body. Notwithstanding the academic definition, I think girlhood means many different things to many different girls. Reflecting on my own girlhood, which was very privileged in many ways, I mostly think back to feelings of anxiety, joy, discovery, desire, belonging, and exclusion. My newest streaming television obsession has been the show PEN15, which I believe does an excellent job capturing and relaying some of my own affective experiences of girlhood, as a millennial growing up in the United States.

Anghara N. Valdivia: This is a huge question. So much history and theory. At its core “girlhood” is a privilege, as very few people in the world have the luxury of living through a “girlhood.” It is a gendered category that is also age specific—somewhere after infancy through the end of adolescence. Clearly patriarchal cultures use the term “girl” to refer to a wide range of ages—sometimes even middle age or elderly women. Ideally, girlhood encompasses solidarity, mutuality, creativity, and learning to have agency in the world as a gendered, aged, racialized and classed subject. There are multiple and competing girlhoods.

Ann Smith: For me girlhood is the state of being a girl, cisgender, self-identified, trans non/binary, lesbian, queer etc.  Typically, girls are aged 18 and under.

Sneha Krishnan: Girlhood is fluid – while sociologists might define it as a time ‘before’ adulthood, ‘girl’ subjectivities have been used by women and children in various ways to play with time. Between 2012 and 2013 I did ethnographic research at a hostel – boarding house – for girls in Southern India. The young woman who lived in this hostel were all university students, roughly between the ages of eighteen and twenty-two. In legal terms they were ‘adults’. But they all called themselves ‘girls’. As I learned, being ‘girls’ allowed them to keep one foot in a child world of playfulness and fantasy: the things they did in their ‘girlhood’ didn’t really count, I was told. Nothing was serious. So ‘girlhood’ was a way of inhabiting what Saidiya Hartman has called ‘waywardness’ – openness to radical possibilities beyond the narrow horizons dictated by social circumstance.

Jennifer Helgren:   I think it is important to separate girl and girlhood, child and childhood, boy and boyhood. Girl refers to actual girl children whereas girlhood refers to the constellation of ideas that describe the expectations, norms, and attributes associated with female children in a given society. We must recognize as a girl any child who identifies as a girl even when their family and community do not accord them this recognition.  My own research has focused heavily on girls’ organizations. I see these mainstream, popular, and, in many ways, prescriptive organizations as crucial to forming modern concepts of girlhood. Their leaders develop programs that speak to the culture’s beliefs about what girls are like. Girls responded with varying degrees of receptivity, which, in turn, shaped the trajectory of the organizations.

Louise Jackson: I define ‘girlhood’ as a shared identity, culture and sense of community that is created by girls themselves – although of course it has also been created for them by others (including by adults). As a historian (of gender, youth and childhood) I love reading The Girl’s Own Paper – published in the UK from 1880 right through to 1956 – and looking for girls’ own voices. Its readers were encouraged to send in essays, letters and other contributions on topics that mattered to them. In 1882 Bertha Mary Jenkinson, aged 14 year and 7 months, was so concerned about a previous article, which described higher education as wasted on girls, that she wrote a spirited letter to the editor. She argued: ‘a woman’s education must go on all her life exactly the same as a man’s .… Unless a woman is educated she certainly cannot be his equal or companion’. Equal access to education for girls remains crucial in the world today.

Marnina Gonick: My definition of girlhood would be to resist any singular definition. Definitions can be  dangerous, because to define is to create borders around an idea. As a result, there are always exclusions. I think girlhood should be seen as an expansive category with porous boundaries. Instead of defining girlhood as a biological or temporal feature, I think it is necessary to understand it as a cultural and social phenomenon that is constantly in flux. We need to use an intersectional analysis, that is one that takes into account how gender and age intersect with other social markers such as race, class, nationality, ability, sexuality etc. Girlhood is an “idea” that has material effects on how childhood is understood and lived, how gender is created and experienced and how identities are fashioned. Each of these (childhood, gender and identity) are a relationship to the “idea” of girl, which is never fully achievable.

Mary Celeste Kearney:   I define “girlhood” in several ways: 1) as the subjective experiences of those who identify as “girls”; 2) as the period in life one identifies as “girl”; and 3) as the discursive construct used by social institutions and individuals to categorize those deemed young and female/feminine, which is commonly performed and reconstructed by those who identify as “girl.”  I tend to define “girl” via demographic categories and based on the combination of gender, age, and status of financial dependency—so, those people who identify as female/feminine and young who are still financially dependent on their parents or guardians.  Typically, this means female/feminine youth between the ages of 0-18, whether cisgender or trans. That said, historically “girl” has also been used to refer to young women older than 18, and it still is.  Indeed, the term “girl” is often used among women of all ages when they are in women-only groups, as well as by many gay and bisexual men in relation to the feminine members of their groups. The fluid use of “girl” across these various social groups points to lack of one essential meaning as well as its relationship to the social construction of identity.  As I wrote in my 2009 article, “Coalescing,” which focuses on the development of girlhood studies as an academic field: “[T]here are many ways to be a girl, and these forms depend on not only the material bodies performing girlhood, but also the specific social and historical contexts in which those bodies are located” (19).

How do you think globalization has affected how we define girlhood?

Linda Arnell: Firstly, I think that girls around the world, with the help of technology and the internet, have had the opportunity to share their experiences, opinions, and life situations with others in other parts of the world. We can also see how girls’ voices and activism have had a global impact in ways that have not been possible before, but, at the same time, girls are also affected by the negative consequences of globalization in various ways. Furthermore, I think that the effects of globalization have influenced girlhood scholars to broaden their perspectives and to look beyond their own context and understandings of girlhood. I hope that globalization, in this sense, will contribute with dialogues and knowledge that transgress national borders.

Anastasia Todd: Being attuned to globalization helps to decenter white, Western girlhood as the universal frame for studying “girlhood.” An engagement with transnational feminism allows us to think more thoroughly about how neoliberal capitalism has structured the realities of girls across the world in different and similar ways.

Angharad N. Valdivia: This is a weird question. Clearly the study of girlhood has to be specific. We cannot generalize from the US/Anglo situation to the rest of the world. Hopefully all girlhood scholars acknowledge this. Contemporarily there are such visible girls on the world arena—Malala, Greta, etc.—that we need to understand how it is that their visibility is being constructed. We also need to acknowledge that certain girls are rendered more visible than others. For example, many indigenous girls have been speaking for years about environmental degradation, yet Greta captures the global imagination. Issues of class, race and nation are important. “Globalization” means different things to different people. If we define it as the contemporary flow of people, culture, and goods across nations, we have to acknowledge uneven power distributions, enduring colonial vestiges, etc.

Ann Smith: It has broadened our understanding of what constitutes girlhood in different countries and cultures.

Sneha Krishnan: I think it would be a mistake to see the present moment of globalisation as exceptional. As above, I think the ways in which it defines girlhood (as racialised, as vulnerable, and within other geopolitical stories about modernity, civilisation and rescue) all have a much deeper history in the story of imperialism. So I think historic globalisation – in this I’m referring to imperialism that began in the late 15th century – has profoundly shaped and indeed created the conditions under which ‘girlhood’ as a category makes sense.

Jennifer Helgren: Globalization has brought increased attention and resources to girls’ education and to microeconomic projects for young women around the world. We see that, for example, in the Girl Effect—an independent nonprofit launched in September 2015 by Nike Foundation, in collaboration with the NoVo Foundation, United Nations Foundation, and others. Its goal is to end poverty globally by funding girls’ education, health, and other opportunities. It is based on a belief that girls’ successes lift their countries out of poverty. The unstated reverse, however, puts an incredible burden on girls–girls who have sex or marry early mires their countries in ongoing distress and hardship. So new attention is going to girlhood but some of our normative framings of girls as either ideal citizens and saviors or as delinquents who undermine through their sexual choices remain stuck in place.

Louise Jackson: It’s crucial to think in a global (as well as longitudinal) context and to recognise that what it means to be a girl is both geographically and historically specific. Access to rights has been structured through ideas about age as well as gender, and the age at which one is deemed to be a girl or woman depends on the contours of where and when. There is no universal experience of ‘girlhood’ given that race, ethnicity, and access to resources profoundly shape life-chances and the sharing of identity.

Marnina Gonick: I think there are two contradictory movements involved in the relationship between globalization and girlhood. On the one hand, globalization has allowed us to see how the concept of girlhood varies in different social and geographic locations. This gives weight to the idea of girlhood as something that is socially constructed in alignment with economic, cultural and regional factors. On the other hand, globalization has also brought a homogenizing factor to notions of girlhood.  With the circulation of American popular culture, through TV, movies and music there is an increasingly narrowing of discourses around girlhood which puts limitations on how the concept is understood and lived.

Mary Celeste Kearney:  Great question and one all girls’ studies scholars should think more about. I know I do!  The concept of girlhood has long been tied to capitalism, as girls are understood as a lucrative consumer market. Originally that was because girls grow into women, and the assumption was that all women become mothers who make purchases on behalf of their own families. So if advertisers and manufacturers could solidify girls’ brand loyalties early on, those companies would have assured consumers for life. Yet since the mid 1930s, in the United States at least, there’s been a recognition that girls want to consume products made just for them and their needs, and so the girl consumer market was born. This has happened at different times in different countries, but the United States has been a major player in globalization as a result of its power in the world and capitalist values, as well as its production and distribution of media.  Globalization has led to a more universal sense of girlhood, although it is one that has been based on the most privileged girls in the U.S. and other Western societies. (Check out the history of the Barbie doll made for different countries.) It remains to be seen how much other countries can resist the West’s—and more specifically, the United States’—definition of girlhood by producing their own girl-centered media and other forms of culture.  Japan comes to mind as a nation with a very strong girl culture that has impacted not only other Asian countries, but also those in the West (think of Hello Kitty, manga, anime, etc.).

Would you describe girlhood as a construct (social or other)? Please explain.

Linda Arnell: Yes, one way to understand girlhood is to approach it as a social and/or cultural construction, intertwined with notions, not only of gender and age, but also aspects like ability, ethnicity, sexuality, and class, etc. But for me it is also important to understand girlhood as a lived experience, thus affecting the lives of girls every day.

Anastasia Todd: I think that girlhood is both a construct as well as a material-affective reality. Girlhood has meant many different things in many different historical, political, social, and geographic contexts. This doesn’t mean that girlhood is not “real” per se, it just means that the way we conceptualize girlhood changes. By thinking about how girlhood is constructed, it calls attention to the fact that there is not just one universal experience of girlhood. It is important that we think intersectionally and transnationally about girlhood. Not all girls are figured as innocent or in need of protection, for example. Certain girls, by virtue of their race, class, ability, citizenship, etc. experience the world in vastly different ways than the white, Western girl that populates many of our imaginaries as “the Girl.”

Angharad N. Valdivia: Of course it’s a social construction—as is gender and this is gendered category. Nonetheless it bears actual political consequences, resource allocations, and explanatory power.

Ann Smith: In some contexts girlhood is a socially controlling construct. For example, in some cultures girlhood ends only with marriage regardless of the age of the girl or woman concerned. Thinking of an adult woman as a girl leads to treating her as a child.

Sneha Krishnan:   Yes – girlhood is a historical and social construct. Like other categories of gendered subjectivity, it is performative: in that it is produced by the repeated ‘doing’ of girlhood in the clothes girls wear, in how they hold their bodies, and how they talk, and walk and what they do with their time. All societies didn’t always have a concept of ‘girlhood’ or if they did, its meanings have varied very widely over time. For instance, in the early 20th century, the legal age of consent for married women in most parts of the world was somewhere in their mid-teens at the latest. This would be considered very young these days. Similarly, for instance, black and white girls were not attributed with the same attributes of innocence and fragility in the US in the late 19th century.  Black girls were widely seen as lacking the capacity to feel – as insensate – and hence incapable of reform and self-development. On the contrary, white girls were seen as pure and innocent: figures at the heart of national culture and the fantasy of the American family.

Jennifer Helgren: Girlhood is both a biological phenomenon and a social construct. As a historian, I see girlhood taking on different meanings at different periods. That is what a social construct does. Moreover, girlhood among different ethnic, racial, and class groups has had different associations and meanings. Therefore, girlhood is a social construct that intersects with various other identities.

Louise Jackson: Yes. ‘Girlhood’ – what it means to be a girl – is shaped through culture.

Marnina Gonick: Yes, as my answers above indicate – I think girlhood is a construct with real material effects. This idea comes from a broader field of study of the theoretical body of work that suggests that all identities are created within social contexts that shape the meanings of these identities.

Mary Celeste Kearney: Yes, that’s what I was getting to in my definitions of “girl” and “girlhood” in the prior question.

To what extent is the definition of girlhood constructed through inclusivity and plurality?

Linda Arnell:  To achieve plurality and inclusivity when defining girlhood, today’s notions of the category ‘girl’ need to be discussed, and may be also reconstructed and broadened in various ways. I hope that girlhood scholars will take the opportunity to be part of this, to advocate for greater inclusion, and discuss and question notions of, for example, femininity and age that constrain and limit people from living their lives on equal terms. I also hope for this change not only to be one of definition, but also one of social change, questioning the social, political, and power structures.

Lillemor, one of the girls participating in my research on girls’ violence, gives one example of how social norms, and notions of gender, affect the lives of girls:

Lillemor: I think it’s really sad, not because it should be okay for girls to fight, because it’s not okay to fight, but it’s stupid that it’s seen as something special, as if it’s not special if guys fight, because it’s like girls have to behave in a certain way, but guys can behave any way they want. Linda: And what’s in a certain way then? Lillemor: We shouldn’t fight, and we shouldn’t be loud, and we shouldn’t sleep around, and we shouldn’t do anything like that. Linda: How are you supposed to behave then? Lillemor: Yeah, we have to be nice and perform in school and we can’t fight. I don’t know, we should just be like this stereotypical girl, we’re not supposed to be seen or heard, and we’re not supposed to be violent, but nor should boys.

Anastasia Todd: I think for many people, girlhood is imagined in a very rigid and “common-sense” way. I would say scholars of girlhood are trying to push folks to reconsider girlhood as something that does not just signify “women in training” or is conceptualized strictly in terms of age (under 18). For many of us who do work on marginalized girlhoods, I think we attempt to conceptualize girlhood in an increasingly capacious way. In my own work, I try to attend to the materiality of the body as well as recognize how interlocking systems of oppression structure girls’ lives in asymmetrical ways.

Angharad N. Valdivia: It all depends. There is no one definition. Undoubtedly, like so many other constructs, and as is Liberal Feminism, the bulk of attention has been on white, middle class, cis-gendered girls from the Global North. However there is also great productivity in inclusive research.

Sneha Krishnan: ‘Girlhood’ has historically been a troubled category. And it has been a category riven with histories of race and class exclusion. But ‘girlhood’ has also been claimed by those on the margins of this category as a site from which to inhabit a radical politics of gender.

Jennifer Helgren: One of the expectations of mainstream educators in the twentieth-century United States was that the ideal girl citizen was tolerant and accepted inclusivity. The youth organizations that I study all offered up some version of this model, especially after World War II. Still, the clubs were set up through neighborhoods, schools, and churches, all of which were by custom or law segregated. Girls’ leaders sought to avoid controversy and played down their own political role by accepting local policies regarding segregation. This meant that they accepted the formation of groups, in most regions of the U.S., along segregated lines. At the same time, girls’ organizations regularly used a universalizing language to describe girlhood that obscured the realities of how white supremacy structured daily lives.

Louise Jackson:  As a normative goal or intervention in the world today, then yes – but we have to work hard to ensure this is always the case.  If you’re referring to ‘girlhood’ as a term that has been used to describe groups in the past (and thus as a label placed on girls by others), then we need to be attentive to the power dynamics at play. For example, preconceived assumptions about class and sexual status in nineteenth-century Britain were used to deny some girls the protection accorded to others.

Marnina Gonick: I think it depends on the context.  In some contexts there has been a lot of progress in expanding representations of girlhood.  While in others, the dominant version of white, middle class, heterosexual, cis gendered girlhood is still firmly implanted. I also see that progress is not linear. Where there are advancements there are also retreats. This is an issue that requires on-going work and effort.

Mary Celeste Kearney: That depends on who’s defining girlhood! Many white people, girls’ studies scholars, included have been remiss on not paying attention to the many categories of identity that intersect with gender with regard to both girls and girlhood. And girlhood studies has been dominated by white scholars for a long time, so we have not been as attentive to diversity, plurality, and inclusivity as we should have been.  Fortunately, more research by indigenous scholars, scholars of color, queer scholars, and disabled scholars is bringing light to the many different ways girlhood is constructed in relation to the various categories of identity that intersect with gender and age. And that work has challenged white scholars to engage in those issues as well.

Lolita dresses at New York Fashion Week 2016. Image via Vogue magazine.

Case study: lolita fashion.

Lolita fashion originated in 1970s Japan, influenced by the clothing of the late-Victorian period and having heavy elements of Rococo, Baroque, and Gothic styles. Some of the common elements consist of lace, bows, embroidery, corsets, and underskirts. Fantasy or “otherworldly” literature such as Alice in Wonderland also play a huge role in Lolita fashion. While many of its detractors say that Lolita has a direct link with the controversial 1950s novel of the same name (which details a young girl and older man’s relationship), the name itself does not have a direct link to the book and many modern Japanese are not familiar with it at all. Indeed, while Lolita subculture does emphasize kawaii  femininity and acting like a playful child, it is a genre rooted in the growing economy of Japanese society and many Japanese women participate in the subculture as more of a fashion statement.  Lolita dresses can be divided into three categories: sweet, gothic, and classic. A lot of the dresses express the aesthetic of femininity, cuteness, and refinement. Lolita culture became more widespread in Japan in the 1990s, becoming a worldwide phenomenon by the 2000s. It spread to neighboring countries like China and South Korea around 2000. In 2016, model and president of the Japan Lolita Association, Misako Aoki, appeared on stage presenting a Lolita dress during the New York Fashion Week. Increasingly, due to the internet and social media presence, Lolita “tea parties” and “dress rehearsals” are being held worldwide and attract a cult following. While Lolita dresses can be a type of “girl” expression, it is not the only reason why many Lolita enthusiasts wear them. Both men and women nowadays are using Lolita fashion to express themselves and enjoy the feeling the dresses bring to them.

Decora and Gothic Lolita Fashion

In this episode of Girlspeak , Dr. Megan C. Rose talks with guests Kurebayashi and Rei about decora and gothic Lolita fashion in Harajuku. From discussing the rise of these fashions as distinct Japanese social phenomena to building a cafe that appeals to decora and gothic Lolita audiences, our guests provide unique insights into these subcultures and how girls participate within them.

About Our Guests

  Dr. Megan C. Rose   is an Adjunct Associate Lectuerer in Sociology and Social Science and Policy at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. Her research explores the value of creativity, cute theory, critical femininities and inclusion. She is currently investigating the experiences of kawaii and gothic alternative communities in Japan, as well as marginalised groups in the Australian Higher Education system. Megan is currently developing a new portfolio of postdoctoral research that involves collaboration and co-authorship with stakeholders in kawaii and gothic alternative communities, as well as a study of feminist activism that uses kawaii imagery to mobilize political actors.

Haruka Kurebayashi is an internationally known model and mentor for Decora-chan girls via her   blog ,   Instagram ,   Twitter , and   YouTube . Originally from Shizuoka prefecture, Kurebayashi launched her brand 90884 in 2013 and is a frequent model for fashion magazine KERA .

Rei Saionji   is a Tokyo native and explorer of Japanese culture and tradition. She is the author of 2 Hours Drive from Tokyo .

Case Study: Chinese Girl Groups

The Chinese music industry in the 2000s saw an increase of girl groups. One of the most prominent groups of the genre, S.H.E, formed in 2001 in Taiwan. They quickly gained popularity with the release of their first album, Girl’s Dorm.  In the next decade, they became an iconic girl group with a huge fanbase in Taiwan and mainland China. S.H.E consists of three singers: Selina Jen, Hebe Tian, and Ella Chen. Their personalities are distinct and many audiences find their mannerisms very natural. Their songs talk about different experiences and emotions that girls will face in their lifetime, as such the majority of their fans are girls because their songs are so relatable. A lot of their songs, such as “Are You Alright,” “Magical Journey,” and “Keep Smiling” talk about the friendships between females. Others, such as “Shero” and “A Girl Striving to be Independent” encourage girls to be strong and independent. Due to S.H.E.’s influence, many other girl groups formed around this time. For example, Twins is a Hong Kongese girl group created in 2001 consisting of Gillian Chung and Charlene Choi. Because many of their notable songs deal with school life, they became the representative for all female students dealing with certain issues.

S.H.E. is a Taiwan group formed by three girls with their first debuted album “Girls Dorm” 女生宿舍 in September 2001

Gender today.

For this exhibit, we chose a broad definition of “girl” that attempts to include both modern and historical definitions of childhood: “self-identifying females under the age of 21.” It is the same definition that Tiffany uses in her edited volume, A Girl Can Do: Recognizing and Representing Girlhood (Vernon Press, 2022) . Open the toggle below for her explanation.

Our Definition, Explained

First, the girl must self-identify as female – embracing historical and modern girls whose sex may not be naturally female. This opens doors to viewing “girl” as a self-defined category, in part influenced by cultures in which “girl” is applied to adult females who embrace the term as their own as well as emerging realizations of gender fluidity and multiplicity. […]

Complicating this gendered experience is our second factor: age. For this volume, I define girlhood as the period of life from birth to age 21, in order to prioritize the early life experiences of girl culture. This is a chronological category…. The use of chronological age is a modern phenomenon, emerging in seventeenth century Europe to define who bore political rights and who did not. […] Prior to the imposition of chronological age, the category was measured in milestones defined by cultural – not political – tradition. Such milestones are also flexible. […] The imposition of Western age norms has disrupted these cultural systems, imposing a chronological age system that seeks to show maturity – and imposes power imbalances by dictating that some people (women, people of color, colonized peoples) never mature. […]

For girls, their gender and youth combine into double discrimination (termed gendered ageism ) that is then compounded by other demographic categories into an intersectional system of oppression.

For this exhibit, we chose to look beyond academia and out into the real world. What do girls living the experience of girlhood today feel about their social category? What does being a girl mean in the 21st century? What makes girlhood unique, special, and memorable?

Special thanks to Genisus Holland and the Girls for A Change participants who took our survey and whose answers are featured below.

What does being a “girl” mean to you?

What is your favorite thing about being a “girl”?

What is something about being a “girl” that you wish more people knew about?

How would you say society views girlhood in your country?

Can you think of and describe a defining moment of your girlhood? Perhaps a time when you felt a strong connection to being a “girl” or when you felt distanced from the way society expects “girls” to be.

Exploring Girlhood as Curators

In this episode of GirlSpeak, Girl Museum’s curatorial and education interns Asha and Yuwen talk about their experiences in preparing for this exhibition and how they came to view “girls” and “girlhood” through their work with us.

This exhibition was curated by Yuwen Zhang, Asha Hall-Jones, and Tiffany R. Isselhardt with assistance from Josie Evans and Dr. Elizabeth Dillenburg. Graphic design by Janey Robideau. Special thanks to our contributors, who provided key insights on girlhood and its meanings.

Recommended Reading

The titles below are recommended by our curatorial team for their exemplary explorations of gender and girlhood. Click the picture to be taken to Bookshop.org, where you can buy the book while supporting indie bookstores and Girl Museum.

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Exploring the World of Being a Girl: How Gender Shapes Life

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