The Stories of Girls
Growing up, we are told stories. Dozens
of stories, perhaps hundreds of stories. Stories about love, about hope, about
happiness. About funny and fantastical characters, places, and situations that
always seemed just out of reach of reality. As girls, we hear
these stories in a certain way, through certain lenses, with certain voices.
What do we focus on? What is focused on for us? And who is doing the focusing?
Although my parents read to my sister and me on a daily basis when we were
children, I find it both curious and unsurprising that most of the stories that
first come to my mind are from movies and television shows that I watched when
I was little. VHS tapes of Disney movies were a staple in my household. My
sister and I never grew tired of the characters, the storylines, or the
original musical scores in The Little Mermaid, Cinderella, or Sleeping Beauty.
I do not recall ever regarding these female characters as role models
necessarily, but these fictional women most definitely played a substantial part
in formulating my conceptions of beauty, happiness, whiteness, and
heteronormativity. Now, fast forward twenty years…
I saw Jean Kilbourne’s film, Killing
Us Softly, for the first time when I was a sophomore in college. It changed
my life. Call me dramatic, but it really did. In her presentation, Kilbourne
examines a multitude of images and messages from print and television
advertisements that have conveyed distorted and destructive ideals of
femininity for more than a century. She challenges the audience to think more
critically about popular culture and its relationship to sexism, racism, eating
disorders, and gender violence. I left class that day with mixed emotions—I was
enraged to find that such advertising practices and behaviors had become so engrained
in our society; exhilarated by the possibility of analyzing and questioning the
media we consume; and frustrated that these ideas were just being called to my
attention.
Concurrent to discovering media
literacy, I read Peggy McIntosh’s (1988) essay, “Unpacking the Invisible
Knapsack,” about white privilege, as well as Kimberlé Crenshaw’s (1989) and
Patricia Hill Collins’ (2000) scholarship on intersectionality, the ways in
which socially constructed concepts such as race, class, and gender interact and
affect one’s access, opportunities, and life experiences. It was at this time
in my academic career and young adulthood that I began to explore the
intersections of my own race, class, and gender and the role that my resultant
sociocultural location has played in my experiences, interactions, and
observations as a white female. I knew I had been exposed to hypersexualized
and hyperracialized images and messages of women on a daily basis for years,
but when I learned that I had the ability and agency to speak out against these
injustices, my relationship with the media changed. I began to see emerging
patterns of damaging stereotypes that reinforced unrealistic and unhealthy
perceptions of beauty, perfection, and sexuality of women. Soon after, I was unable to leaf through a
magazine or watch a television commercial without scrutinizing the images,
implicit and explicit messages, and language used to grab audience attention
and influence their decisions and perceptions.
I unwittingly began conducting ethnographic
research on the intersectionality of gender, race, and class, as well as the
media’s influence on girls, at the age of 14 upon entering the 9th grade
at a private, all-girls K-12 school on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. The
school’s mission was to empower girls with the self-confidence, intellectual
curiosity, and independence needed to lead successful and happy lives through a
rigorous, but well-balanced education. Yet, when girls are seen at lunch or in
the hallways reading about how to lose weight or look sexy, and idolizing the
emaciated models showcasing the hottest fashion trends in magazines like Cosmopolitan,
Vogue and Seventeen, the school’s mission statement
becomes little more than a formal technicality of the institution’s creed. It
was not only the media texts that had a powerful hold on girls’ perceptions of
themselves and others. The inhabitants of the school and the atmosphere of the
institution and its surrounding community also generated a corresponding system
of implicit expectations and definitions of what happiness, beauty, and
normality looked like predominantly based on certain social, racial, and
cultural constructions.
The resounding message coming from both
popular culture and the school culture was that to be thin, white, and
constantly concerned about appearance and material possessions was normative
and everything else was “other.” Although I embodied a “typical” girl at the
school in many ways—I fit the bill in terms of my race and socioeconomic
status, was heavily involved in athletics and extracurriculars, and elected
student body president in my senior year—I often found it difficult to relate
to the conversations, attitudes and lifestyles of the majority of girls due to
my penchant for leadership, not being easily influenced to follow the crowd,
and dedication to talking about issues of diversity and intolerance within and
beyond school boundaries. Looking back, it is evident that I spent my formative
adolescence collecting field notes and gathering data on a variety of topics
that would develop into a passion in college, evolve into a specialized area of
study in my master’s program, and ultimately lead to my pursuit of a doctoral
degree.
On occasion I imagine (and truth be
told, sometimes become concerned about) the kinds of stories I will want my
children to hear, and wonder what stories I will want to tell. The last thing
that current media literacy educators advocate is protection from the media,
and yet, it is sometimes impossible not to want to shelter
young and malleable minds from the power and influence of media images and
messages, particularly those that reinforce and perpetuate gender binaries and
stereotypes in such incredibly rigid ways. I do not anticipate the first few
years of my future children’s (and husband’s) lives to be easy, due in large
part to my hyperawareness and sensitivity about these issues, and that I will
most likely have a very hard time detaching from my personal life. But I am
determined to raise my children with the media literacy and 21st century
competencies that they will need to prepare them to be lifelong learners and
global citizens and there is no way that I will ever apologize for
that.
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