Plastic Visibility, Visible Plasticity: On the Sexualization of Girlhood

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The Centre for Feminist Research, The Children’s Studies Program, Dept. of Humanities 
and Vanier College 
Present:

“Plastic Visibility, Visible Plasticity: 
On the Sexualization of Girlhood”
 with Catherine Driscoll, Associate Professor (University of Sydney)

Wednesday, October 17, 2012

3:00 p.m. – 5:00 p.m.

Vanier College (Senior Common Room)

York University, Toronto, ON

The emergence of modern girlhood can be mapped onto changing ideas about sex. These changes are certainly always relative to new distinctions demarcating sexual difference and gender roles, but the modern idea of girlhood is not only a set of ideas about how one becomes a woman. And, as with girlhood’s legislative, pedagogical and psychological formations, girlhood as a popular cultural formation is very often centered on sex. This talk explores some fraught current public debates about the idea of girl sexuality and its developmental periodization.

Catherine Driscoll is Associate Professor of Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney. She is the author of Girls (Columbia UP 2002), Modernist Cultural Studies (UP Florida 2010), Teen Film: A Critical Introduction (Berg 2011), and The Australian Country Girl: Image, History, Experience (Ashgate 2012) as well as numerous essays in journals and collections. Her research interests include modernity and modernism, cultural theory, popular culture, girls studies and youth culture, ethnography, and rural cultural studies.

Questions? cfr@yorku.ca