Turning sugar and spice on its head: recent research on the gendered meanings within girlhood studies

Abstract

This review focuses on two publications that foreground scholarly perspectives on "girlhood". Focusing on the inaugural issue of Girlhood Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal (Summer 2008, Berghan Books) and Methodologies for Mapping a Southern African Girlhood in the Age of AIDS (Sense Publishers, 2008), the review offer a series of ideas that motivate why these two texts are to be considered transformative in feminist articulations of "girlhood" as a field of study both for Northern and Southern Scholarship and their relevance for the meanings we attach to Northern and Southern theorising. It is suggested that the texts consider the value of girlhood as a gendered phenomenon, its varied meanings, its changing nature, and its materialist foundations through which patriarchal power is constructed issues that are central to the possibility of identity, agency and citizenship.