Significance of the Study

In this dissertation, I sought to fill existing gaps in knowledge about girls’ agency and their sense of embodied control over who they are, as well as to provide information and analysis that could be used to improve the effectiveness of the Girls Program for the community agency.

As in much feminist work, I wanted to connect the theory to the praxis (Iverson & James 2014), to imbed my work in community, to leverage the privileges associated with working in academia towards advancing the goals of non-profit violence against women community work. While I cannot claim to have fully succeeded at this balance, there are nevertheless important findings that arise out of this research both for the

interdisciplinary field of girlhood studies and for community programming engaging young women.

Rather than a focus on girls as victims, the goal of this research was to identify instances of girls’ agency. I wanted to illuminate the conditions of possibility, what might enable girls’ exercise of power and agency. I wanted to examine how girls’ engagement in community anti-violence based programs impacted their sense of themselves as agential, as actors rather than victims in their own lives, and as capable of exerting agency in their subjectivization. Which conceptions of agency do girls mobilize, and how do certain identity categories come to bear on how the girls understand their agency and self- constitution as agential subjects? I understood that “while there is knowledge available about girls and on girls, the current landscape still does not provide substantial

opportunities for girls to be a part of the production of knowledge regarding their own lives” (Hussain et al. 2006). As such, my methodology centered on girls’ voices, on their own understandings of agency, on their own indicators and sense of what agency ‘felt like’ and hence on building knowledge about these girls’ understanding of their self- constitution as gendered subjects. This was a study about girls who took part in a community anti-violence program, through four focus groups with 13 girls ranging in age from 16-21. While I did not set out to specifically study the experiences of teen mothers, it became an important focus of the data analysis as five of the girls were teen mothers. Their voices were employed to further draw attention to how they very

intentionally exerted resistant agency through their refusal to frame their experiences of mothering as being ‘at-risk’ or ‘bad mothers’ and to subvert the unrestricted effects of these discourses. In so doing, as Butler (2004) iterates, they were “able to do something with what is done with [them]” (3).

One significant finding from this research was that the girls experienced agency as a negotiation of existing discourses and power lines; “The power to tell a story, or indeed not to tell a story, under the conditions of one’s own choosing, is part of the political process” (Plummer 1995). This was exemplified, for example, in the girls’ maneuverings through the discourse of ‘skinny’ vs. healthy femininity, their assembling of their own cribs, their dream to go into carpentry, their pushback around the possibility of being

lesbians and slut-shaming. We saw them tell their own stories through self-identification, as pansexual or non-gendered, as ‘good mothers’ who are also teen mothers.

Throughout our conversations, there was a great deal of focus on embodied

subjectivities, on the girls’ experiences of their gendered and sexual subjectification. This is unsurprising, given the topics covered in the Girls Program. When discussing subjectification the girls demonstrated remarkable criticality in their understanding of how power operated upon their processes of their subjectification. Many were able to understand themselves as specific sorts of gendered subjects in relation to specific norms that had come to govern their self-understanding. They could “use some of the

understandings of poststructuralist theory itself to regain another kind of agency. [They could] move within and between discourses, c[ould] see precisely how they subject her, use the terms of one discourse to counteract, modify, refuse or go beyond the other” (Davies 1991:46).

As discussed in the dissertation, agential critical analysis is not a state a girl arrives at; she is not ‘raised in to consciousness’, a light switch is not simply flicked on. Her agency is always in reference to the presence of power. But there is the possibility of its being a sustained skill that is developed and honed, a way of critically “self-fashion[ing] in terms of the norm, com[ing] to inhabit and incorporate the norm” (Butler 2001:4). Her agential critical analytic agency means that she understands herself as a subject always in relation to specific norms that govern her self-understanding. What this research demonstrated was that girls are capable of mobilizing critical reflexivity in such a way as to create a sustained agentic practice, particularly with regards to negotiating and refusing specific normative injunctions to think and act in a specific way. As Ringrose (2013) has argued:

rather than always searching for easily discernable resistant acts (or revolts) through our research narratives, we need to track the regulative rhythm of the normative to find some spaces where gender ‘undoings’ emerge, and other understandings and convictions jostle for authenticity (Butler, 1997, Renold & Ringrose 2008). We also need to explore how girls’ experiences and narratives are plugged into wider popular culture and where counter-narratives […] make new spaces for thinking and going ‘girl’ (147).

In this sense, my research contributes to our understandings of how girls experience subjectivizing power, and has created space for locating ways in which girls are doing

‘girl’, how they are thinking about and engaging with the discourses on girl, and how this feels agential.