Black and Latina Adolescent Girls’ Readings of Femininity In
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“WE FLAWLESS”: BLACK AND LATINA ADOLESCENT GIRLS’ READINGS OF FEMININITY IN POP CULTURE by Mia Elizabeth Hood Dissertation Committee: Professor Marjorie Siegel, Sponsor Professor Daniel Friedrich Approved by the Committee on the Degree of Doctor of Education Date 16 May 2018 Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Education in Teachers College, Columbia University 2018 ABSTRACT “WE FLAWLESS”: BLACK AND LATINA ADOLESCENT GIRLS’ READINGS OF FEMININITY IN POP CULTURE Mia Elizabeth Hood This study discusses how adolescent Black and Latina girls read the femininities made available in pop culture texts and how they take up those femininities when they narrate personal experiences. The purpose of the study is to explore how girls engage in pop culture on an ongoing basis, how these everyday engagements shape their understandings of themselves as girls, and how these engagements are themselves performances that both maintain and threaten the boundaries between boy and girl. In addition, this study witnesses the deconstruction of those meanings (Derrida, 1967/1997), exploring how attempts to make femininity mean something ultimately undermines itself. As pop culture has come to saturate everyday life, American schools, following the Common Core State Standards’ (NGA, 2010) mandate for curriculum driven by “sufficiently complex,” canonical texts, have narrowed the scope and purposes of literacy instruction in schools. This research serves as a starting point for curricula that support young people in making sense of pop culture and their relationship to it. Situated within a poststructural feminist theoretical framework, this study uses qualitative methods to make the literacy processes through which girls make sense of pop culture texts visible and to elicit narrations of the personal experiences in which girls take up the femininities made available pop culture texts. The findings suggested that girls make sense of these femininities by reading both in-narrative and out-of-narrative— standing back from the text and treating it as a text. In their readings and discussions of pop culture texts, the girls cited and inscribed discourses of femininity, constituting themselves as respectable girls by deliberately making judgments about women’s physical appearance on screen. Specifically, they acted to draw a line between what they saw as appropriate and what they saw as inappropriate. This repetitive act was one way they performed respectable femininity, stabilizing discursive meanings of gender and also holding open the possibility of the line being placed differently. The findings also suggested that storytelling as a site of discursive agency as the distance between the moment of experience and the moment of narration held open the possibility of reformulation and renegotiation of meanings. © Copyright Mia Elizabeth Hood 2018 All Rights Reserved ii DEDICATION To Harper and Perrine— and to A., B., D., J., and K.— the next generation of yellow lemons iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This dissertation is an artifact of many arguments I’ve started—arguments in which all parties participated with the sort of righteous passion characteristic of people who care about ideas, arguments my mother would euphemistically describe as robust. And so I’m relieved to have this opportunity, at long last, to acknowledge and thank those who have argued with me, challenged me, supported me, and put up with me. First among this group, of course, is my advisor Dr. Marjorie Siegel. A decade ago, she saw something special in a couple of pages I wrote about making pancakes and, in telling me so, breathed possibility into my dream of being a scholar. Marjorie helped me find a place for humor, self-indulgence, and my own particularly obnoxious brand of contrariness in my academic work. She created space for me first and then taught me how to think more expansively about literacy, curriculum, and sites of education, as well as how to use the work of those who came before me to open rather than close possibilities. And it must be noted that, in the course of our time together, she never looked away when she came upon me in a state of disrepair—whether it was my heart, my spirit, my bank account, or my body that was broken. Marjorie, your kindness exceeds rational explanation. I would also like to thank my dissertation committee. I am indebted to Dr. Daniel Friedrich, my second committee member, for explaining Foucault to me with insight and humanity, for moving me along when I didn’t want to be moved along, and for making his every comment on every draft feel somehow…existential. I am grateful that he let me get away with merely dropping in a handful of appositive phrases by way of addressing his comments. Dani, expect a knock on your door in two months and a robust discussion iv of language, rationality, and affective attachments. Many thanks are owed to Dr. Sherry Deckman, my third committee member, who saved my life a few times over and then, in her spare time, gave what is, to me, the greatest gift: new ideas and possibilities for action. Finally, I would like to acknowledge and thank Dr. Herve Varenne for bringing a dash of humor and a dash of the unexpected to our proceedings. Thanks to his comments, I have resolved to fully examine and account for my attachments to my theoretical fathers. Much gratitude goes to many faculty members in the Department of Curriculum and Teaching, who have shaped this work but who also gave me more to think about than I can possibly manage in this lifetime. Dr. Nancy Lesko, in particular, unraveled my sense of everything. Dr. Michelle Knight taught me how to research, Dr. Maria Paula Ghiso taught me how to listen generously, and Dr. Lucy Calkins taught me how to lift the level of all I do. I would like to also express a deep and complicated gratitude to my cohort—by all accounts, a cohort for the ages. You questioned me, challenged me, gave me a hard time, and showed up with kindness and love whenever things started to fall completely apart. To the reader of these acknowledgements, whoever you are, wherever you are, at whichever point you find yourself in this journey called life, please know that there is a human person named Tran Nguyen Templeton, who walks this earth and who has made it her business to keep us all alive. She is the nicest self-identified misanthrope one could ever hope to meet. As of this writing, in fact, TNT is nice to me more than half of the time despite having spent seven years traveling into the depths of my pettiness and v selfishness. I was serious when I said I’d quit those ten or eleven times, but I’m grateful to you for not taking me seriously and for the lessons you taught me in doing so. I would like to acknowledge and sincerely thank my family, including my chosen sister Rachel, for doing what the best, most loving families do: never asking me what my dissertation is about. While I worked, they kept an eye on my dating prospects, all of the designer sales, and the news of former classmates getting divorced. I owe them a debt of gratitude—and also, in the case of my parents, a not insignificant debt of money. I am grateful for the long-time support of my friends. I am grateful to Sunjay for calling me a wunderkind on our first date and also for breaking up with me over our paradigmatic incompatibility. He helped me find in my paradigm what every good story needs: stakes. One of the great honors of my life is to be a friend of Dr. Chantal Francois. Many thanks are owed to her for letting me wear her down all those years ago and, nowadays, for not letting me get away with anything. To Jessica, who lets me get away with everything. To Diana and Vanessa, who never let me get out of a conversation without a reading assignment. To Annie for teaching me how to get work done, and to Cole, a real positivist son of a gun, who has always been there, whether to fix my broken codes or, putting his theoretical inclinations aside, to fix my data analysis. Finally, to my team and family at that little school in the corner of a strip mall in South Dallas, the one right next to the Fiesta. You trained me up right. It doesn’t much look like it, I know, but I do remember where I came from, and I came from you. I would like to take this opportunity to acknowledge the objects and entities that made this work possible. The good seat at Toby’s Estate on 7th Avenue offered comfort, work space, and an unobstructed view of my ex-boyfriend’s neighborhood. Without the vi snow day on March 21, 2018, I would not have been able to submit this manuscript to my committee in time to graduate. I would also like to acknowledge and thank the internet. And many thanks are owed to those objects and entities that have broken, grown, or become lodged inside me—namely, my third rib, a cluster of cancerous cells, and a woodchip. They have been there to remind me that I live in a body, after all. Finally, I would like to acknowledge the TV shows that have sung me to sleep over the past two years, shows that tell stories about characters who fundamentally like each other, who fully experience and successfully manage conflict, who become something and then finish becoming something: Parks and Recreation, Gilmore Girls, The West Wing, and Jane the Virgin.