Introduction to the Special Issue on Girls From Outer Space: Emerging Girl Subjectivities and Reterritorializing Girlhood

During the 21st century, the discourse of contemporary girl agency and empowerment in a neoliberal, global, capitalist society greatly contributes to our ability to (re)theorize and (re)write girl subjectivity and culture as it probes porous and leaky boundaries between Ophelia and Girl Power discourses to expand the terrain of girlhood (Aapola, Gonick, & Harris, 2005; Bae & Ivashkevich, 2012; Harris, 2004a, 2004b). This recent narrative of girl studies searches for fluid and culturally intelligent girl subjectivity, while contesting the idea of doubly constructed neoliberal girl agents who are successful and self-regulated. However, current endeavors to expand the notion of girl agency and subjectivity center predominantly on White middle-class girls and their life experiences, and rely on a coherent rational subject within a dominant feminist narrative. New endeavors necessitate bringing forward emerging diverse populations of girls’ voices and movements, heretofore unheard and unspoken, from different social, economic, and cultural spaces. These girls exist among many alienated populations such as immigrants, homeless, refugee, queer, and law offended. They have the potential to sculpt a new space of affect and movement in which to share what it means to becoming a girl from outer space within a material and spatial relatedness of her. I use this term girl from outer space to reject conventional views of the term marginalized girls, which is narrowly defined as in need of help and is located in deficit models. The new term is used to locate these girls outside the grand narrative of girlhood studies; it resists a priori theoretical lenses and conceptual knowledge that restrains understanding of the girls, and often leave out their complex and multiple lived experiences and performances. (I will further discuss what girl from outer space means later in the introduction.) Thus, they bring out radical possibilities that deterritorialize and reterritorialize the landscape of girlhood. Understanding these emerging populations and their relation to cultural and social spaces calls for reframing current feminist research approaches to studies of girlhood in a way that examines the practice of subjectivization rather than the subject itself (Butler, 1999). Furthermore, we also must reconsider what constitutes method, evidence, epistemology, and activist research. Such projects strongly encourage girls’ initiatives in the creation of research contexts that are carved out from where they are situated; girls then become coresearchers and coproducers of knowledge. With such intentions, this special issue on girls from outer space invited a collection of feminist interdisciplinary works on various cultural practices, performances, and events initiated by girl populations from diverse emerging contexts, as it generates conversation on alternative qualitative research approaches to girls and girlhood. The collection of essays in this special issue responds to the aspirations of girls from outer space whose voices need to be heard. These interdisciplinary girlhood scholars dependably mediate the girls’ voices, as they disrupt the hegemonic script of girlhood.

In the search of girlhood from outer space that envisions an irreducible image of a girl, this special issue finds it important to recover and posit several overlooked areas in the conceptualization of girlhood. First, dominant studies of girlhood often overlook complex and multilayered ways and conditions where girls’ creative/critical resistance and agency are played out, which perhaps carries in a playful, ambiguous, fluid performative manner (Bae & Ivashkevich, 2012). This critical observation strongly encourages one to look closely at the theoretical chasm that requires viewing beyond semiotic associations and identity attachment. This view identifies and questions an epistemological limitation largely drawn by liberal feminists’ longing for “conscious” girl agency, which gives prominence to rational mind over bodily pleasure and is often viewed as critical. Critical consciousness is the major expected quality of rigorous feminist agency, which undermines the oppositional state marked by an acritical mind and playfulness. It is, however, undeniable that the long-held binary division between reason and emotion, critical and acritical, and mind and body is constructed from a priori notions of girlhood and girl agency, which overshadows complexity and contradiction of girls’ diverse experiences.

This limitation requires alternative methodological approaches that are sensitive to the chasm that would disclose dynamic, contradictory, and complicated ideas, voices, and values. These methodological approaches would reject positivist’s rigorous research procedures that conceal the (dis)entanglement of the girl participants’ minds and actions in diverse contexts, allow the researchers’ sovereign power over data, and limit girl participants’ involvement throughout the research process. Endeavoring to overcome positivist’s methodological/epistemological barriers suggests we position girls’ experiences prior to any set of binary conceptual frameworks or theories. Thus, the fluid, mutable, amorphous nature of girl subjectivity can deregulate the confined images of what it means to be a young (feminist) woman, as has been robustly established by some feminist predecessors.

In addition to paying attention to the complexity and fluidity of girls’ experiences, this special issue of Girls From Outer Space identifies other overlooked yet significant areas that call for a recovery from epistemological barriers within the field through devoting more attention to the absence of girls of color and to disfranchised communities. The dominant understanding of girlhood creates a hegemonic profile based on a certain demographic that is predominantly White middle-class girls. Although recent dominant scholarship has begun to realize the marginal status of the study of girls of color, and disfranchised communities, only a small number of those scholarly accounts exist. While more focus on critique of neoliberal girlhood was necessary, urgent, and significantly helped to understand girls in this new time, it distracted our attention from the lived experiences of girls of color, which are articulated and determined by a complex array of race, ethnicity, class, and age, and go beyond universalist assumptions of what it means to be a girl.

This special issue also views most scholarly theorization and accounts of girlhood based on White middle-class girls’ lives as greatly unfit for studies concerning girlhood of color and other underprivileged groups of girls, and fails to address various kinds and degrees of struggles of girls on both individual and collective levels (Brown, 2009). This hegemonic agenda and standard of what it means to be a girl often draws a distant gaze and unattainable status for minority girl communities. These girls often come from underprivileged sociocultural and economic backgrounds, which ward off their access to academic achievement, Euro-centric lifestyle, and other opulent social activities. Girlhood scholarship still envisions Western White middle-class girlhood as the “future” of all other girls—representing all other girls, and/or speaking for underprivileged ethnic minority girlhood, particularly Black/Latino girls—these girls often are treated as at-risk, “failed,” or “weak” subjects, as well as “byproducts of girl power out of control” (Harris, 2004b, p. 29). In this special issue, the racialized/classed landscape of the understanding of girlhood evokes our critical look into how new scripts of girls of color and underprivileged girls are (re)located in and redefine the “future girl” discourse.

The new script that subverts the racialized hegemonic mode of girlhood is necessary to critique the issue of “speaking for” underprivileged minority girls. Such concerns of power imbalance occur not only among White girls and underprivileged girls of color but also among researchers and girl participants. The method of “speaking-for” results in silencing the voices of girls of color and making invisible their lived body in both the research process and their daily lives. This silencing calls for epistemological/methodological interventions dealing with who speaks for whom and how they are spoken about. Spivak (1988) shares critical insight that helps us to rethink how truth is constructed pertinent to the representation of underprivileged girls of color in her prominent essay, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In her account, White colonizers speaking for the colonized ethnic women not only silenced the voice of the women but also led to questioning the “truth” of the “speak-for” that contained both ambivalently revealing and concealing truths. According to her, the colonizer’s well-intentioned intervention did not bring a transparent representation of the other, though it may have given them freedom of choice and, to some extent, perhaps saved other’s lives. Thus, the truth is never transparent and innocent because it expresses the interest of the colonizer. From this perspective, researching girlhood from outer space is aware of the ethical problems of investigating and defining the “other” girl subject based on the “universal” script of White girlhood or hegemonic girlhood studies within the field. Studies of girlhood from outer space bring forward the voices of girls of color, and girls from disenfranchised communities, rather than overly using researchers’ analyses and interpretations, which obscures the girls’ voices. This insight casts this special issue as a reliable mediator for the voices of the girls from outer space so that the girls can clearly speak. In this way, this special issue attempts to liberate and enable girls from outer space to experience and articulate those that fall outside what the dominant discourse has constituted.

Along with Spivak’s (1988) suggestion, rethinking of the multiplicity of minority girls’ lived experiences continuously focuses on the conceptual/empirical tensions between feminism and multiculturalism. Feminist desire to uncover and rail against male power is not necessarily parallel to multiculturalists’ mission of equal opportunities and respect of diverse cultures (Cohen, Howard, & Nussbaum, 1999; Okin, 1999). A group’s right to protect their ethnic cultural/racial backgrounds and values does not easily reconcile with feminists’ desire of gender equality because the ethnic group’s culture may be deeply shaped by patriarchal values; feminist intervention may threaten the group. The debate provides a venue of critical conversation on this conflict, and their argument for the necessity of prioritizing a feminist agenda on gender equality over diverse ethnic cultural differences raises numerous disputes.

I perceive that understanding girlhood of color in racially and ethnically diverse conditions encounters significant conflict and divisiveness associated with a White feminist agenda. That is, minority girls facing White feminists’ imposition of gender equality often face the necessity to rebuff the values of their own ethnic origins marked by a deeply pervasive patriarchal-driven gendered quality. This complex contradictory entanglement of ideological division should receive much closer examination of specific diverse contexts in which women of varied ethnic and cultural origins are situated. Underscoring this aspect, it is also important to note that the delivery of the voices of girls from outer space needs to include appropriate methodological intervention to recover overlooked areas in the conceptualization of girlhood. This collection of essays employs diverse qualitative methods, including ethnography, autobiography, case study, and so on, aimed at illuminating diverse girls’ “authentic” voices in a reliably mediated manner.

Last, this collection of essays on girlhood from outer space has sought a new understanding of being “outsider” or “outsideness” to relocate girls of color and girls from underprivileged backgrounds in girlhood studies. Defying the notion of outsider or outsideness as simply marginalized and victimized, I envision them as thresholds into uncharted territory breaking linguistic ties from dimensions of both indescribably limiting and expanding experiences of girls. From this perspective, girlhood from outer space relocates outsideness in the center of the girlhood studies by searching for both “joy of outsideness and loss of insideness” (Grosz, 2001). The view of this approach is that minority girls have a place outside—although it does not mean that they fully occupy outside—which allows them opportunities and possibilities to look upon and have a (critical) perspective on the inside. While being unable to experience the inside on its own terms, girls from outer space can share their observations when U.S. White mainstream girls cannot see a perspective from the inside. However, the experiences of girls from the outside would be in reference to what they never can have, which is a view from within as an insider (an inside, a within, or an interior). It means that girls from outer space are interested outsiders who are concerned about and critique the inside from the outsider’s point of view, reframing girlhood outside of mainstream culture, education, and politics.

Such a perspective of outsideness in this special issue continues to revisit the notion of minority. Minority has been predominantly perceived as subjugation to a dominant group and often measured in a quantitative manner. Moving away from this fixed, predetermined symbolic association, the alternative way of understanding minority girls embraces how we include and recognize girls of color, refugee girls, homeless girls, LGBTQ (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer) girls, incarcerated girls, and girls living with domestic violence, as equal. It seeks a diverse spectrum of qualities, conditions, and experiences of multiple girls, which eventually expands and transforms the notion of minority that has been formulated in deficit models. Here, from Deleuze and Guattari’s (1980/1987) perspective, this issue suggests that multiplicity does not refer to intentions to increase the number of girls’ cases for quantitative measurement, rather it intends to increase emergence of the diverse attributes and content of the girls’ experiences. As follows, this collection of essays contributes to highlighting creative dissenting voices of minority girls to subvert the dominant script of girlhood and girl culture.

In the first essay, drawing upon new material feminist perspectives, Trafí-Prats discusses the processual aesthetic production of girl subjectivity in/with Miyazaki’s film, which highlights relational ontology, aesthetics of existence, worldmaking, mythopoesis, queer kin, and gender/sexual difference. Such a new ecology of girl subjectivity introduces a diffractive thinking and reading within biographical writing of a young Hmong American female artist that brings her own spectatorial experience of Miyazaki’s film as creative possibility. This methodological and onto-epistemological approach reconceptualizes girl subjectivity as a discursive-material production marked by productive, multiple, contradictory, and worldly, and goes beyond both neoliberal models and idealism of girlhood.

Next, Franklin-Phipps’ work draws upon Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) concept of becoming to introduce Black girls’ narratives that demonstrate the possibilities of the shifting subjectivity of Black girls within the molar assemblage of raced and gendered bodies within the White space of schooling. Her investigation speaks to Black girls’ schooling experiences as “becoming molecular,” which points to an expanding understanding of Black girls not merely as a White hegemonic construct but also to their possible transforming quality to change the educational space.

In another article, Wozolek coauthored with two out-bisexual teens, Wootton and Demlow, from their own everyday challenging experiences of being and becoming a queer youth facing the school-to-coffin pipeline fostered by institutional homophobia and, by extension, LGBTQ ((Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer) youth suicide. Included are the two queer teen author’s counternarratives launched to interrupt the current cycle of self-inflicted violence on queer youth bodies by revealing what it means to live with/in the in-between of school rhetoric and inadequate school policy that fails to attend to life-saving efforts for queer youth.

In that vein, Pyscher’s research on a teen girl with a history of domestic violence delivers a discussion that finds the possibility to disrupt the oppressive educational space by the girls’ performative resistance. Drawing on Butler’s (1999) insight on performativity and Scott’s (1990) theory of resistance, her discussion posits the interplay of the girl’s resistive act with the hegemonic violence of an educational space, which has the possibility of rewriting agentic social moments by the girl.

Next, Ivashkevich’s article presents an examination of a homeless Black 9-year-old girl’s impromptu video narratives that disrupt a limited representation of disenfranchised girlhood, saturated in popular culture and media as well as other social worlds. She perceives that the girls’ media narrative, including daily experiences of poverty, hunger, violence, incarceration, and racism, opens a new representational landscape that draws upon the complex intersections of class, ethnicity, race, and gender.

Last, Evans-Winters’s work on Black girls’ participatory action research, guided by Critical Black Feminism, brings a significant new direction to research in which the girls as coresearchers investigate and present the oppressive policing of the school experiences of girls of color (mainly Black girls). The Black girls’ initiative revealed through a research process that documents acts and authentic voices, and highlights the girls’ agency; the research moves beyond a deficit model and takes a critical look into both the inside and the outside of the institutionalized oppressive space.

I am imbued with gratitude to the authors of this collection, who engaged with me in a lengthy yet worthwhile process. They worked to decenter a White-girl centered hegemonic notion of girlhood and provide perspectives that address complex sites of girls’ subversive narratives. Most importantly, the authors of this collection have created a significant space that implores researchers, scholars, educators, and activists to reconsider what counts as girlhood; these authors heard and presented voices of girls of color and girls from disenfranchised communities in their research and scholarly works. This special issue can open a dialogue that continually engages rewriting alternative or writing missing scripts of girlhood that brings a realistic understanding of girlhood coming of age. Such important work as Girlhood From Outer Space better meets the demands of understanding diversity and intersectionality in feminist research on girls.