Girls - Catherine Driscoll

The Spice Girls, Tank Girl comicbooks, Sailor Moon, Courtney Love, Grrl Power: do such things really constitute a unique "girl culture?" Catherine Driscoll begins by identifying a genealogy of "girlhood" or "feminine adolescence," and then argues that both "girls" and "culture" as ideas are too problematic to fulfill any useful role in theorizing about the emergence of feminine adolescence in popular culture. She relates the increasing public visibility of girls in western and westernized cultures to the evolution and expansion of theories about feminine adolescence in fields such as psychoanalysis, sociology, anthropology, history, and politics. Presenting her argument as a Foucauldian genealogy, Driscoll discusses the ways in which young women have been involved in the production and consumption of theories and representations of girls, feminine adolescence, and the "girl market."

Catherine Driscoll is Senior Lecturer in the Department of English at the University of Adelaide, Australia. She has published essays in various scholarly journals and books, most recently Deleuze and Feminism and South Atlantic Quarterly.

Driscoll discusses the ways in which young women have been involved in the production and consumption of theories and representations of girls, feminine adolescence, and the 'girl market.'
Family Therapy

The result is an erudite and crisp exegesis of many contemporary theorists, interspersed with readings of popular culture itself.... it is a smart and suggestive intellectual montage.
American Studies - Jane H. Hunter

A lucid and original study of girl culture... both challenging and rewarding.
Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory - Emma Liggins