Theorizing the Political Potentials of the Girl

by Jacqueline Ristola

This was written in response to a recent thinkpiece in The Cut which argued that the embrace of the girl is fundamentally regressive, or at least, politically stultifying. This is an unabridged version of a comment I have left on that article.

The scholarship and political writing on the figure of the young girl and girlhood as a whole varies. While there are differing interpretations on what girlhood can offer, I will argue that girlhood offers a radical space to break away from toxic patriarchal norms and instead embraces alternative aesthetic expression and community.

Scholars like Catherine Driscoll and Heather Warren-Crow identify how girlhood is socially envisioned as a site of transformation and plasticity. Girls as a social construct are always already becoming. For Warren-Crow, such becoming entangled with digital images; thus, digital images are girlish in their plasticity. There is a tension between whether such malleability of girlhood is liberatory, or merely makes us more supple to capitalism’s demands. Warren-Crow argues that that such plastic girlhood has the capacity for both. Certainly this article embraces the negative, somewhat akin’s to political collective Tiqqun’s analysis of girlhood. Working a negative and arguably girl-phobic vein, Tiqqun’s Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl argues that the young-girl is the ultimate figure of a good capitalist consumer. For Tiqqun, the figure of the young-girl operations as as “molecular diffusion of constraint into everyday life” (2012, p. 11).

I would emphasize the liberatory aspects of reclaiming girlhood. Girlhood is a space for what Kathryn Bond Stockton calls “growing sideways,” a means of growth outside the typical patriarchy norms. Girlhood is a kind of free space that enables an escape from the toxic norms of patriarchal adulthood, or at least a reprieve. We can see the political capacities of girlhood by looking at one of the ultimate girl media: magical girl anime. Magical girls fight with their femininity, adorned in all the trappings of girlhood, including bows, skirts, sparkles, and more.

In Kumiko Saito’s analysis of magical girl anime, she examines how Japanese gender roles are reflected in the magical girl genre across the decades. In the most recent iteration of magical girl works, Saito finds that girlhood is embraced as a means to resist and delay adulthood in all its constricting gender norms. While Saito, in my view, leans a bit negative in her analysis, nonetheless, she finds there is some kind of critical capacity in girlhood for resisting normative conceptions of maturity.

By contrast, Kevin Cooley examines the magical girl anime Madoka Magica for how magical girl anime in its very construction (empowered girl heroes decked out in girlish decor) centers power in the feminine. For Cooley, the trappings of conventional femininity (narrative and visual) are inverted to make these series always already queer. In other words, the girlish aesthetics produce radical political potential in envisioning queer forms of life, and I would add more broadly, femme agency and power.

The crucial thing we must resist is framing the embrace of girl aesthetics as regressive, that to be girly is to regress in terms of maturity and growth. Again, rather than framing this as a kind of failure, instead, following Stockton, we can think of this in terms of finding alternatives to regressive and restrictive social norms. I think Barbie, among other girl media, have reinvigorated this search for alternative ways of being. We can see such in the work of Andi Schwartz, who examines how new expressions of femme identities emphasize girly aesthetics. Such aesthetics embrace softness, tendering, and radical vulnerability, producing emphasis on communities of care. Rhea Ashley Hoskin similarly finds power in the femme, arguing that the soft can be made powerful. Softness, the pliability assessed by Warren-Crow that has the potential for compliance under capitalism, is positioned as a crucial element for producing new communities of care.

Do not fear the girl; instead, embrace her with open arms. While we can remain critical of capitalism’s capacity to commodify and undermine political work, we can also that offer (aesthetic) alternatives in political agency and expression.