Girl Culture

Bloustien, Gerry. Girl Making: A Cross-Cultural Ethnography on the Processes of Growing Up Female
New York, Oxford: Berghahn, 2003.

Reviewed by Margaret Henderson

Gerry Bloustien’s Girl Making joins a growing list of Australian feminist research into adolescent girls and their cultures, for instance, work by Catherine Driscoll, Susan Hopkins, Chilla Bulbeck, and Anita Harris, with Bloustien’s ethnography complementing these more sociological or cultural studies approaches. [1] As such, this research contests the residual gender blindness of youth studies and, as Bloustien’s title suggests, add to feminist understandings of just how one becomes a (young) woman in supposedly post-feminist times. Girl Making is based upon Bloustien’s doctoral research - a longitudinal anthropological study of a group of ten Adelaide girls, aged between 13 and 16 years - so it is something of an academic revisiting of the territory of Gillian Armstrong’s documentary, Bingo, Bridesmaids and Braces . Bloustien aims to explore the processes of gendered selfhood, particularly in the transition stage of moving from childhood to adulthood. To ameliorate, if not overcome, some of the ethical and intellectual limitations of ethnography, specifically, the academic observer trying to enter and observe ‘other’ cultures, Bloustien uses an innovative research technique of giving each of her subjects a video camera with which they record their everyday lives. The result is a detailed, sympathetic, and highly readable study that locates the key sites where girls become young women: the body, private space, public spaces, friendship groups at school, and popular music. Further, Girl Making gives voice (or is it the power of image making?) to the young women themselves, and thus ‘fleshes out’ and hence corrects or complicates popular notions of teenage girls. Which is not to say that the news is all good. But more of this later.

I read this book as a feminist working in literary and cultural studies, not anthropology, though the limitations of textual based studies have become obvious to me at various times. Indeed, the cultural studies type approach to youth cultures comes in for some deserved criticism from Bloustien. She is critical of cultural studies’ overemphasis on cultural texts, its conflation of text and everyday life - particularly apparent in its focus on the consumer as maker of meanings and identity from texts - and a concomitant lack of empirical evidence to support these readings (17-18). She also takes issue with cultural studies’ early tendency to see youth cultures as almost intrinsically resistant to, if not subversive of, the dominant culture, something her findings will dispute. It is not that Bloustien is insensitive to cultural texts or their role in making identity (as her study shows), rather, she argues for a distinction between texts and lived experience, so that “The question should be: How do texts emerge from everyday life to become so meaningful? What exactly is the relationship between texts and lived reality?” (18). Accordingly, Bloustien’s ethnographic focus is on ‘how subjectivity is negotiated, reflected upon and constituted through everyday social practices’, with the textual form of the amateur video tape an intrinsic and unique feature of this project (18).

Girl Making’s theoretical framework draws heavily upon Bourdieu’s work on social fields and habitus, Michael Taussig’s notions of mimesis and mimetic excess and, to a lesser extent, Derrida’s concept of différance. Linking these is Bloustien’s emphasis on play and bodily praxis as making identity. Bloustien argues that play, whether serious or fantasy, is the process in which the individual tries on various identities during adolescence. Play denotes a bodily technique whereby the individual’s habitus negotiates various social fields and their differing constellations of power relations. Taussig’s work on mimesis, or, ‘embodied mimicry’, is used to explain some of the varieties of play enacted during the videos, and their relationship with the broader contemporary culture of media and performance. For these girls, certain forms of play are a strategy to incorporate the dominant culture’s representations of them, that is, to make the other into the self, and thus to seemingly control the other. As Bloustien argues, ‘Their play, their image-making, their use of fantasy highlighted a simultaneous testing, stretching and affirming of the symbolic and structural boundaries circumscribing and constraining them’ (51).

While Taussig and Bourdieu offered powerful insights, I am less convinced by Bloustien’s use of Derridean différance, which she tends to use as synonymous with difference. I am not sure that différance, a concept denoting the specific operations of language (namely, the endless deferral of meaning and hence instability of language), can easily be applied to identity, as when Bloustien suggests that ‘It is Derrida’s concept of différance, being a separate ‘individual,’ who requires an ‘otherness’ for its emergence’ (68). Of course language is fundamental to identity, but theories of language may not be analogous with processes of identity formation.

Bloustien is interested in locating shared processes, but also individual differences, of girl making within a group of young women, therefore she selects a diverse range of participants from the Adelaide area in terms of class, ethnicity, and lifestyles/interests. Apart from the desire for a less exploitative way of doing ethnographic research, Bloustien finds that the video camera gives her a much easier entrée into these girls’ lives and families than do the standard research tools of interviews, surveys, and the academic observer. In an inadvertent comment on the role of media and technology in our culture, and something that the producers of reality TV shows have known for years, sceptical or unwilling participants and their parents become enthusiastic and open; personal spaces and experiences become accessible. The participants are asked to tape (or to get friends to tape) any aspects of their lives, so that the camera moves from personal spaces to social spaces. Instead of giving them instructions as to what kind of video to make, the girls are encouraged to ‘play’ with the camera. In a way, the video functions as a visual diary. During the fieldwork stage, Bloustien regularly visits each of the girls to discuss the contents of their videos: why they filmed and edited out what they did, and what they didn’t film. At the end of the project all the participants contributed material to one final collaborative video.

Bloustien is under no illusions that the video camera is giving her access to the unmediated real. She is deeply aware that the camera, its techniques, and the participants are enmeshed in the images, poses, conceptualisations, and narratives of the wider culture which will inevitably frame the self-narratives. In fact, one of her strongest chapters is the one that discusses ‘camera power’. Nevertheless, Bloustien’s approach allows her to position the individual subjects in their wider social networks and contexts, and to locate the sayable and the unsayable for adolescent girls and contemporary culture (plus the girls get to keep the camera). The only unavoidable and ironic drawback is that the reader does not get to see the videos, and must rely on written synopses.

Girl Making’s chapters are organised into a spiral shape, beginning with the intensely personal sites of subject formation, that is, the body and the bedroom, then moving outwards to public spaces, friendship groups, and music. What Bloustien tracks is not the rebellion of girls, but rather, their quest to be ‘normal’. Bloustien notes the girls’ hyperawareness of their bodies, clothes and skin, and the physical intimacy between friends (though their terror of being labelled ‘lesbians’). In a surprising finding, she argues that the girls’ bedrooms are not some space of retreat or rebellion; instead, ‘each girl’s creation of ‘the real me’ expressed through the ambience and style of the room itself, were very much in keeping with her wider social and familial values’ (113). Bloustien’s observations of the girls’ use of public spaces, including toilets, raves, and shrines, showed the role gender, ethnicity and class plays in determining how much public space can be appropriated for identity play. One of the best sections of the book is the description of our anthropologist as a volunteer at a Blue Light Disco which, while really funny, was sad too. Throughout the night the adults were in a barely suppressed state of moral panic, the children and teenagers just wanted a bit of fun, and the music sounded plain awful.

The chapter on friendship groups similarly demolished some myths. Bloustien gives a nuanced account of the importance of friends to girl making, defines ‘coolness’, and reveals just how hierarchical friendship circles are—replicating the value systems of the adult world. Music is the final site of girl making, and arguably, the most critical. The chapter begins with an interesting theoretical discussion of music and dance, and their relation to bodily praxis. And then our anthropologist is off to some raves and a Madonna concert (an improvement on the Blue Light disco). The final chapter provides the cross-cultural analysis, in which Bloustien details her fieldwork with six girls in the United States and Britain. Although the book’s subtitle suggests the centrality of a cross-cultural orientation, it is actually quite a minor focus. This chapter is somewhat perfunctory, and does not really fit with the rest of the book’s exhaustive detail.

When teaching first year university students, I am always struck by the passivity and reserve of the young women compared to the young men’s energy and confidence. Bloustien’s Girl Making goes a long way towards explaining that foreign country young women have to inhabit, which is really about learning the codes of the dominant ‘country’. She does so in a respectful and self-reflexive manner, being very aware of her own positioning in the study (and sometimes, humorously so). My only concerns are that at times it seemed that class as determinant of identity was downplayed, and that there was a related shying away from making generalisations about the processes and ‘forms’ of being young women. (It is notable that ‘ideology’ is not listed in the index.) Instead, identity is seen as processual, and comprised of the shifting relations among class, ethnicity, and family background. This reticence might be an unintended result of using Bourdieu, and of the contemporary feminist emphasis on ‘difference’ (which can end up as individualism). Nevertheless, Girl Making is an exhaustive study, theoretically sophisticated, beautifully written, and an enlightening read. And I will now be less impatient with groups of young women in public toilets, as there is girl making underway.