The Media(ted) Girl: Creating (feminist) Spaces
Open Access
- Author:
- Rattner, Laura Esther
- Graduate Program:
- Curriculum and Instruction
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- September 16, 2015
- Committee Members:
- Booker Stephen Carpenter Ii, Dissertation Advisor/Co-Advisor
Patrick Willard Shannon, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Stephanie Cayot Serriere, Committee Member
Michelle Rodino Colocino, Committee Member - Keywords:
- girls' studies
feminism
media literacy - Abstract:
- American popular culture perpetuates sexist and repressive myths of dominant femininity and heteronormative relations that flatten the experiences and complexities of girls and women in raced and classed ways (Kearney, 2006; Sweeney, 2008, Zaslow, 2009). While our sexist society often presents messages that can feel limiting for all citizens, for girls and women these messages can be particularly problematic. In the highly digitized public spaces girls traverse, how do girls seek to mediate, combat and/or inform messages of who they are (or not)? The purpose of this study is to explore the ways Reel Grrls, an after school media literacy/technology film program with a feminist culture, offers a counterbalance to repressive and limiting messages for and about girls in mainstream media culture. This work highlights the official and unofficial curricula of the Reel Grrls program and the experiences these girls encounter to create personal narratives as they move from roles as cultural consumers to cultural producers. The girls’ stories, “the ones that only they can tell,” transcend those told by conventional media as they highlight issues of race, class, gender and other differences, in interesting and poignant ways. Girls, then, are not mere sideline characters or ‘tokens, but rather are the protagonists of their films just as they author the stories of their lives. This feminist ethnographic study reveals what I call an enmeshed feminist curriculum, a positive normative feminist praxis, visible throughout the Reel Grrls program and in the finished films the girls produce. Reel Grrls provides possibilities of how feminist pedagogy and feminist activism might be practiced with youth engaged in contemporary media production.