Deleuze and the girl

Abstract

In this article, I seek to represent something that must be lived. It feels impossible to represent that which is described by Deleuze and Guattari as movement that is simultaneous, asymmetrical, instantaneous, unfinalized, zig‐zag. This movement is Deleuze and Guattari's concept of difference, that which they name becoming. To put this concept of becoming to work, I use three texts. One is chapter 10 of A Thousand Plateaus, the second is Brian Massumi's book A User's Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia, and the last is a short excerpt from my fieldnotes taken during my ethnographic research on the subject formation of adolescent girls. Specifically, the girl is Jesse, a senior cheerleader whose daily school life involved seeking and expressing her difference, or her becoming. She struggled against the over‐coded, essentialized category of cheerleader and the discursive and material expectations of that category at her high school. Deleuze and Guattari's concept of becoming allows me to explore Jesse's unique difference, to privilege her specificity. So rather than looking on the surface to ‘see’ the uniforms and uniformity of Jesse (or try to ascertain how she is ‘like’ a cheerleader, or ‘fits into’ the category), my task here is to work with the girl as an event, to represent how Jesse unfolds herself through micro‐particular movements with her others. Her specificities were single, concrete instances of how she dressed, how she behaved during practice, how she moved her body, how she expressed her desires. These ‘singular and concrete forms’ make up the activity of her becoming.

Keywords:

• Deleuze
• feminism
• girls’ studies

Notes

1. All people and place names are pseudonyms.

2. Observation in fieldwork has been described in qualitative texts as taking place in the natural field setting and as producing a first‐hand account of the object of knowledge (e.g., see Robert and Biklen 1998). More specifically, participant observation: ‘provides the opportunity for acquiring the status of “trusted person”. Through being a part of the social setting, you learn firsthand how the actions of research participants correspond to their words [or not, I would add]; see patterns of behavior; experience the unexpected, as well as the expected; and develop a quality of trust with your others that motivates them to tell you what otherwise they might not’ (Glesne 1999, 43).

3. Wolcott (1995) makes an important distinction between fieldwork and ‘(just) being in the field’. Fieldwork is different from ‘just being there’ in its intent; ‘fieldwork is a form of inquiry in which one is immersed personally in the ongoing social activities of some individual or group for the purposes of research. Fieldwork is characterized by personal involvement to achieve some level of understanding that will be shared by others’ (65).

4. I am indebted to Hillevi Lenz Taguchi for making this point during a presentation at the 2010 annual conference of the American Educational Research Association in Denver, Colorado.

5. Lisa Mazzei and I have written elsewhere about the assumptions of a centered, privileged ‘I’, one that is overburdened with narrating unproblematized truths from a coherent, grounding presence (Jackson and Mazzei 2008).

6. Massumi 1992, 93.

7. Massumi 1992, 97.

8. Massumi 1992, 106.

9. Massumi 1992, 104.

10. Massumi 1992, 104.

11. Massumi 1992, 106.

12. Massumi 1992, 105.

13. Massumi 1992, 101.

14. Massumi 1992, 106.

15. Massumi 1992, 106.

16. Massumi 1992, 106.