The Pennsylvania State University The Graduate School Special Individualized Interdisciplinary Doctoral Major GIRLING THE GIRL: VISUAL CULTURE AND GIRL STUDIES A Dissertation in Women’s Studies and Visual Culture by Leisha Jones 2008 Leisha Jones Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy May 2008 The dissertation of Leisha Jones was reviewed and approved* by the following: Janet Lyon Associate Professor of English , Women’s Studies, and Science, Technology, and Society Chair of Committee, Dissertation Advisor Richard Doyle Professor of English/Science, Technology, and Society/Information Science and Technology Yvonne Gaudelius Professor of Art Education and Women’s Studies Assistant Vice President and Associate Dean for Undergraduate Education Susan Squier Brill Professor of Women's Studies, English, and Science, Technology, and Society Vincent Colapietro Professor of Philosophy Mark Wardell Associate Professor of Labor Studies and Industrial Relations and Sociology Associate Dean of Graduate Student Affairs and Director of the Special Individualized Interdisciplinary Doctoral Major *Signatures are on file in the Graduate School iii ABSTRACT Caught between lipstick and a field hockey stick, girls invent tactics for assembling themselves as performative multiplicities, individual hordes of desire that mutate as often as they change shoes. This dissertation offers a research model for feminism that addresses girls as positive categories of possibility, that revalues the status of girls as to- be subjects, and that develops a synthesis between Visual Culture, Women’s Studies, and the emerging field of Girl Studies. The analyses produced by this model are deliberately unhinged from the kind of psychological moorings that predetermine girl as a marker for woman-in-training. I explore and map the intensities of becoming-girl through performatives and events of gender as they appear in visual art, film, the internet, school, home, and the street, in order to demonstrate the pervasive effects girls have on the same impermeable culture that is supposedly killing them. Girl begins as someone in the middle, the consummate apprentice, a liminal figure crossbreeding the innocence of childhood with the pollutants of womanhood. She bears a mark of the feminine that is not biologically determined. Girl as a sociological category is relatively new, following the birth of childhood itself in the eighteenth century and coming to life in the mid-twentieth century as a breakaway subset of the “teenager.” She occupies the odd position of being the most desirable of objects and being the most invisible of subjects. Girl is in fact not a Subject at all. She is locatable through the marks she makes. The girl marks with an X – whatever cultural signage that may be – and thus, a territory is established. This dissertation claims neither to define nor to transubstantiate girl as a modal Subject. Girl here functions as a conceptual persona, and as such is not necessarily a correlative or representative of actual girls. She coheres as a brand, a loose site of identity managed through others’ desires. I argue that girls can and do actively manage their own brands, and that Brand X has more to teach us than we have to teach her. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS LIST OF FIGURES................................................................................................. v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS..................................................................................... vii CHAPTER 1. Introduction....................................................................................... 1 CHAPTER 2. Becoming-Rhythm: A Rhizomatics of the Girl .................................. 10 CHAPTER 3. Mirrored Refrains and Ekphrastic Intonations: The Paintings of Su- en Wong........................................................................................................... 36 CHAPTER 4. Girls on Film..................................................................................... 54 CHAPTER 5. Scenes from the X Box...................................................................... 83 CHAPTER 6. I Am Not What You Want: Gender Performativity, Untitled Film Stills, and Experiments in Girl Branding........................................................... 118 WORKS CITED...................................................................................................... 180 APPENDIX A. Syllabus Example ........................................................................... 186 APPENDIX B. Cindy Sherman Film Stills Catalogue.............................................. 192 APPENDIX C. Student Film Stills Catalogue.......................................................... 195 v LIST OF FIGURES Chapter Three 1. Su-en Wong, Buttercup, 1999 40 2. Su-en Wong, Perky Peach, 2001 41 3. Su-en Wong, Fairy Gold, 2000 42 4. Su-en Wong, Galaxy, 1999 43 5. Su-en Wong, Ballet Pink, 2000 44 6. Su-en Wong, Lime Sorbet, 2001 45 7. Su-en Wong, Carrot Stick, 2002 46 8. Su-en Wong, Empire Yellow, 1999 47 9. Su-en Wong, Hale Navy, 2000 48 10. Su-en Wong, Bunny Nose Pink, 2002 49 11. Su-en Wong, Mellow Yellow/American Cheese, 2001 50 12. Su-en Wong, Butter-and-Egg, 2000 51 13. Su-en Wong, Tulsa Twilight, 2000 52 14. Su-en Wong, Twilight Chimes, 2002 53 Chapter Five 1. Still from student film, Screen, No Outlet, 2002 93 2. Still from student film, Street, No Outlet, 2002 94 3. Still from student film, Sign, No Outlet, 2002 95 4. Still from student film, Flyer, Escaped, True Stories, 2002 104 5. Still from student film, Shoe, Escaped, True Stories, 2002 103 6. Still from student film, Laundromat, Escaped, True Stories, 2002 105 7. Still from student film, Bulletin Board, Escaped, True Stories, 2002 107 8. Still from student film, Back, Underneath It All, 2003 112 9. Still from student film, Bound, Underneath It All, 2003 114 10. Still from student film, Middle Finger, Underneath It All, 2003 115 11. Still from student film, Lipstick, Underneath It All, 2003 117 Chapter Six 1. Cindy Sherman, Still #4, 1978 131 2. Cindy Sherman, Still #58, 1980 133 3. Still from The Mary Tyler Moore Show, 1970 134 4.Cindy Sherman, Still #10, 1978 135 5. Cindy Sherman, Still #56, 1980 137 6. Cindy Sherman, Still #27, 1979 138 7. Student film still, Shoe Envy, 2006 146 8. Student film still, Striking Midnight in Daylight, 2006 148 9. Student film still, Divots, 2006 149 10. Student film still, Blinded by the Light, 2006 152 11. Student film still, Faced, 2006 153 12. Student film still, Smash, 2006 154 vi 13. Student film still, Gag, 2006 156 14. Student film still, Tile, 2006 159 15. Student film still, Grass, 2006 160 16. Student film still, Fiberglass, 2006 161 17. Student film still, Wave, 2006 164 18. Student film still, Vestige, 2006 165 19. Student film still, Copy, 2006 166 20.Student film still, Betty, 2006 172 21. Student film still, Wilma, 2006 173 22. Student film still, Maggie, 2006 175 23. Student film still, Lulu, 2006 177 24. Student film still, Grace, 2006 178 vii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I wish to acknowledge and thank the chair of my doctoral committee, Janet Lyon, for taking the project on, careful feedback throughout, and especially for the facilitation of its completion with the warmth of a little “tea and sympathy.” I am also grateful to my doctoral committee members, Yvonne Gaudelius, Susan Squier, Vincent Colapietro, and Richard Doyle for their stick-to-it generosities and provocative insights. Thanks to Richard Doyle, in particular, for providing muse-ical inspiration, disciplinary inoculations, and an enduring refrain of friendship. I am indebted to the students in my undergraduate introductory Women’s Studies courses who greeted our Girl experiments with candor and verve. Thanks for permission to share and reproduce your works. This dissertation is in many ways a celebration of you, for you. I would also like to acknowledge the support and feedback I received from members of the National Women’s Studies Association-- the Girls and Their Allies Caucus and Girl’s Studies Interest Group in particular. I especially want to acknowledge and thank Bonnie MacDonald, the co-curator of our virtual girl gallery the Doll Revolt, for unwavering support, encouragement, friendship, and deep-cover girly experiments. On a personal note, the project began after the birth of my first son Bram and closes just after the birth of my second son Dashiell. This dissertation would not be possible without the support from babysitters and friends who continue to demonstrate the abundance of a “sisterhood” I had not believed could exist. To Kate Kegarise, Barbara Voight, Elizabeth Mazzolini, Melissa “Frog” Lintinger, Meredith Shubin, Jennifer Mensch, Bonnie MacDonald again, and my mother, Janell Jones, I am happily viii beholden. To Jeff Nealon, mapmaker and agent provocateur, I owe the greatest of debts. It is through his brute elegance and unflagging generosity that Girlness, for us, abounds. ix To the extent that the naming of the “girl” is transitive, that is, initiates the process by which a certain “girling” is compelled, the term or, rather, its symbolic power, governs the formation of a corporeally enacted femininity that never fully approximates the norm. This is a “girl,” however, who is compelled to “cite” the norm in order to qualify and remain a viable subject. Femininity is thus not the product of a choice, but the forcible citation of a norm, one whose complex historicity is dissociable from relations of discipline, regulation, punishment. --Judith