Abstract
Rebel Girls, Jessica K. Taft’s ethnography of girl activists, is an important account not only of the lives of teenage girls but of the scope of activism and activist identity in the twenty-first century. Based on in-depth interviews with 75 girls in Buenos Aires, Mexico City, Caracas, Vancouver, and the San Francisco Bay Area coupled with some participant observation in each site, Taft highlights, in their own words, the young women’s identities as activists and the activism in which they engage.
All of the young women Taft interviewed were teenagers, between the ages of 15 and 18. As is the case with all teenagers, young women have been viewed by researchers, activists, and cultural critics as apathetic. Using social movement scholarship as the backdrop for her analysis, Taft provides a compelling argument for a clear distinction of the use of the word “youth” in our discussion of youth and social movement. She argues that the concept of youth in social movements is often college and university students. More important, popular and academic discourse understands and treats young women as passive vessels, ready to be consumed. Recent scholarship by Mary Celeste Kearney and others who have pioneered “girls’ studies” has begun to challenge this discourse by emphasizing the agency of girls in their actions and their own self-definition. Taft’s book fits squarely within this scholarship. In chapters titled “We Are Not Ophelia,” “We Are Not the Future,” and “We Are Not Girls,” we find that the best challenge to traditional understandings of young femalehood is from the girls themselves. Taft sets out to show that teenage girls determine and name their own fate and fit squarely within activist models, but also argues that adult activists should follow their lead.
The first half of the book is dedicated to the construction of a girl activist identity, which Taft relies on the girls themselves to define. One of the most important moments in this half is their struggle, not to define themselves as activists, which was one of the prerequisites for being included in the study, but rather to define themselves as female. What unfolds is a compelling account of the sexism and ageism related to the word “activism.” Young women are expected to move away from the label of girl as they take on “adult” concerns, such as activism. This is a powerful reminder that we continue to think of popular culture and other aspects of girl culture as illegitimate. However, these young women don’t adhere to this logic and, instead, complicate the discussion further by pushing the boundaries around youth and adulthood. For instance, for one of the respondents, Manuela, whose bedroom was peppered with posters of Lindsay Lohan and books on Marx and Lenin, her activist identity exists alongside her girlhood identity. Each, it seems, informs the other.
Interestingly, her discussion of hope is one way that Taft’s work aligns with more traditional studies on girls and young women. The last chapter documents how hope is one of the key organizing frames for social justice and social change among the young women. Hopefulness, optimism, and a positive outlook are central to girl activists’ political identities and political activities, including school reform, student-led walkouts against the war in Iraq, popular education, and consciousness raising collectives. Reminiscent of Black feminist and sociologist Anna Julia Cooper’s discussion of courteousness and the role of (Black) women in social change at the turn of the twentieth century, Taft’s informants used hope as a central aspect of social change. As Cooper argued in A Voice of the South (1990: Oxford), Taft similarly argues that girl activists have much to teach to adult activists, particularly in redesigning their social movement frames. Along with her challenge to dominant understandings of teenage girls as empty vessels, this is the most significant contribution of her work—directing readers’ attention to the ways that adultism structures the way we understand youth and, ultimately, social movements.
However, Taft’s argument would be strengthened by a deeper analysis of race, class, gender, and transnationalism, given the comparative nature of this project. There is much more to explore about the role of the United States in transnational politics and organizing, not to mention the differences in girl and youth culture throughout her study sites.