"So Powerful a Form": Rethinking Girls' Sexuality Público
Ball, Kelly Hudgins (2014)
Abstract
Contemporary debates in feminist psychology situate girls' sexuality as a point of both vulnerability and empowerment. This project uses queer and feminist theory to examine the concepts of girls' sexuality that drive feminist psychologies of girlhood and the multi-disciplinary field of girls' studies. Focusing on the girl as a liminal figure, my analysis revolves around what I refer to as the paradox of girlhood: in Western modernity, girlhood is imagined as being a pre-sexual developmental age of innocence that needs to be protected and, at the same time, a period of intense sexual desire that needs to be expressed. My dissertation contests this overly reductive picture of girlhood as a split between freedom and constraint, agency and victimization. In doing so, it complicates accepted understandings of girlhood across disciplines and within queer and feminist theories specifically, and reveals previously unrecognized assumptions about the relationship between sexuality and subjectivity more broadly. My dissertation explores the epistemic power the paradox of girlhood generates and the limits of the binarisms it exposes by examining how this paradox informs feminist scholarship on girls, and more generally, feminist and queer theories of sexuality. To accomplish this, I employ philosophical research methods, combined with secondary source analysis of scientific literature, to examine the overlapping histories of childhood, sexuality, and psychology. "So Powerful a Form" thus investigates the figure of the girl, locating her at the beginnings of developmental psychology and the proliferation of sexological categories during the late 19th century. My dissertation establishes a queer-feminist analytic lens to problematize cultural citations of sexuality as a source of girlhood empowerment. As I contend, the figure of the girl resists a simple teleological reading as always already on the way to womanhood and the concomitant promise of becoming a stable, psychosexual subject. Moreover, building upon the insights of queer theory, I read the girl as a figure whose precarious position as no longer a child and not yet a woman opens new possibilities for theorizing the relationships among subjectivity, sexuality, and girlhood.
Table of Contents
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments....................................................................................................1
Introduction...........................................................................................................2
Chapter 1:
Conceptual Problems in the Field of Girls' Studies: Girls, Sexuality, and Agency..................28
Chapter 2:
The Development of the Psychological Sciences and Girlhood.........................................62
Chapter 3:
The Sexualization and Sexual Empowerment of Girls: Contemporary Feminist Debates.........95
Chapter 4:
From Instinct to Agency: Foucault, Causality, and Feminist Critiques of Sexual Violence....133
Conclusion..........................................................................................................159
Bibliography........................................................................................................162
List of Tables
Table 1...............................................................................................................37
Table 2...............................................................................................................41
About this Dissertation
| School | |
|---|---|
| Department | |
| Degree | |
| Submission | |
| Language |
|
| Research Field | |
| Palabra Clave | |
| Committee Chair / Thesis Advisor | |
| Committee Members |
Primary PDF
| Thumbnail | Title | Date Uploaded | Actions |
|---|---|---|---|
|
|
"So Powerful a Form": Rethinking Girls' Sexuality () | 2018-08-28 12:42:04 -0400 |
|
Supplemental Files
| Thumbnail | Title | Date Uploaded | Actions |
|---|