“Go! Become Women Without Me!”: Young Girls Rescripting and Restaging Relational Understandings and Beliefs of Girlhood, Puberty, and Menstruation
Open Access
- Author:
- Snyder, Julie
- Graduate Program:
- Curriculum and Instruction
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- October 08, 2024
- Committee Members:
- Kimberly Powell, Professor in Charge/Director of Graduate Studies
Lauren Miller, Special Member
Kimberly Powell, Chair & Dissertation Advisor
Linda Thornton, Outside Unit & Field Member
Gail Boldt, Major Field Member
Jacqueline Reid-Walsh, Major & Minor Field Member - Keywords:
- performing arts
dance
theatre
ethnography
early childhood
performance anthropology
Deleuze and Guattari
assemblage theory
critical menstrual studies
feminist research
puberty and mensturation - Abstract:
- This dissertation aims to center and legitimize young girls' subjective experiences, understandings, and differences as they collaboratively explore assumptions of girlhood and the production of the taboo perspectives of menstruation and puberty within performing arts workshops. These experiences, understandings, and differences do not arise from an individual, autonomous, or predetermined subjectivity, but subjectivities that occur within the relational collaboration of our workshops. This project builds upon existing research and ethnographic practices that examine immanent and collaborative classroom and research interactions as emerging instances of embodied, relational, material, affective, and verbal empirical data. In other words, my contribution to ethnographic research is to consider the collaborative creation process within our ensemble-based dance and theatre workshops as a method of ethnographic research. Through theatre-making and scripting practices, participants come together to create counter-narratives that prompt dialogue about taboo topics and create new imaginaries amongst participants. As they collaboratively re-envision an allegorical story of puberty, menstruation, and girlhood through staging, choreography, scripting, and creating costumes, props, and sets, they concurrently build a world amongst themselves to openly critique, challenge, and emulate the normative social and cultural structures that frame their workshop experiences and daily lives.