Girls Who Persist and Resist: Resistance in Girlhood Studies and Girls’ Literature

As we write this introduction, we are watching a viral moment of a girl’s resistance – made even more powerful because of her personal record of persistence – unfold in real time. We are referring to Greta Thunberg. On December 27, 2022, nineteen-year-old Thunberg replied to a tweet sent to her by professional misogynist Andrew Tate. His tweet, obviously intended to mock Thunberg’s longstanding commitment to environmental activism, stated, “Please provide your email address so I can send a complete list of my car collection and their respective enormous emissions.” With his tweet, Tate included a photo of his cars. Rebecca Solnit describes the photo’s energy: “Cars are routinely tokens of virility and status for men, and the image accompanying his tweet of him pumping gas into one of his vehicles, coupled with his claims about their ‘enormous emissions,’ had unsolicited dick pic energy.” In response to Tate’s tweet, Thunberg tweeted, “yes, please do enlighten me. email me at [email protected],” which Solnit characterizes as a response that “burned the macho guy to a crisp in nine words.” As of January 1, 2023, Thunberg’s response was listed as one of the top ten tweets of all time (Solnit).¹

Since her first climate strikes at age fifteen through her addresses to the United Nations’ General Assembly and numerous national parliaments, Thunberg has been lauded for her persistence in pursuing action on climate change. Noting her influence as the “Greta Thunberg Effect,” Anandita Sabherwal et al describe her as “the most popular climate activist of our time” (330), acknowledging that “familiarity with [her] predicts collective action across all ages,” and that, furthermore, “These findings suggest that Greta Thunberg’s call to action could motivate public action across the political spectrum” (331). Despite that influence, or perhaps because Thunberg’s persistent commitment to combatting climate change has garnered the recognition and praise of world leaders, she must also deal with being publicly mocked and even attacked by individuals such as Tate and Donald Trump, along with other right-wing climate change deniers. Rather than ignoring such attacks like a “good, good girl” (Brown and St. Clair 6), Thunberg responds, and her responses demonstrate the extent to which her persistence in advocating for climate change awareness and activism has also become resistance. She exhibits the “ability to withstand,” and in so doing, she opposes “an occupying or ruling power” (“Resistance”), both of which are integral aspects of resistance. Moreover, her youth and small stature have become key components of her resistance: the title of her 2019 book, No One is Too Small to Make a Difference, emphasizes the connections between her youth and the power of her activism. Over and over, Thunberg demonstrates a persistence-cum-resistance against hegemonic power structures that both deny climate change and make it acceptable for grown men to publicly mock teenage girls.

Girl activists such as Thunberg embody the focus of this second half of our special two-part double issue: a consideration of girls’ persistence and resistance, especially in terms of connections among resistance, girlhood studies, and girls’ literature. The first half (52.5) meditated on the concept of girls’ persistence through articles whose topics ranged from affective discipline within Pollyanna, persistent girls as propaganda during the Cultural Revolution, the patriarchal values of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl, activist girls in hemispheric Latin(x) American youth literature, and the pathologized persistence of Pecola Breedlove in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye. We contextualized these articles by arguing that persistence is often valued as overtly positive and as a defining trait of normative girlhood, particularly when viewed through the lens of narratives provided to and about girls.

In this second half of the double issue, we complicate our original argument surrounding girls’ persistence by also incorporating narratives of persistent girls’ resistance. In the previous introduction, we framed our argument through the following questions: why are girls expected to persist? How are girls taught to persist? Are girls ever allowed to give up? Here, we extend those questions to include resistance, asking, for example, when does girls’ persistence become resistance? How is girls’ resistance viewed in contrast to their persistence? How is girls’ resistance presented in literature? The essays included in this second half chart the nuances between girls’ persistence and their resistance by considering the ways girls persist in resisting. Within this introduction, we argue that while girls’ persistence is often celebrated as a desirable trait of normative girlhood, girls’ resistance – which is often portrayed within non-normative girlhoods – is often viewed with suspicion and mistrust, as something that must be monitored, controlled, and even stopped or prevented. By providing overviews of how resistance has been taken up within the field of girlhood studies and girls’ literature, and by contextualizing literary girls’ resistant self-interpretations and challenges to normalizing forces, we trace what forms such persistent resistance takes and how it is presented. Our societies may want girls to persist, to be high achievers and productive societal members, but as the articles in this double issue suggest, those same societies also often distrust, question, and regularly suppress girls’ acts of resistance.

Resistance and agency

While the two concepts of persistence and resistance are often closely linked (particularly when it comes to girls, girlhood, and girls’ literature), we suggest that resistance is often perceived to encompass a greater focus on power. The New Shorter OED defines persistence as “the action or fact of persisting; firm or obstinate continuance in a particular course in spite of opposition; an instance of this” (“Persistence”). Thus, persistence may suggest power relations in its binary positioning of a girl continuing – persisting – against some sort of opposition, but the focus is often on the individual’s obstinance. The definition of resistance is subtly different: resistance is “The action or an act of resisting, opposing or withstanding; organized covert opposition to an occupying or ruling power; … Power or capacity of resisting; ability to withstand something” (“Resistance”). Thus, while persistence is often present within girls’ narratives of resistance, articles in this issue by Blessy Samjose, Jill Coste, Roxanne Harde, Celiese Lypka, Cristina Rhodes, and S.R. Toliver demonstrate the extent to which resistance is often situated as a girl’s response to broader asymmetrical power relations.

Since the late 1970s, when resistance became a leading analytical concept due in part to the work of Foucault, and again in the 1990s, when “resistance studies” emerged, resistance has come to encompass many forms. Dan Rabinowitz suggests that resistance as a concept has been subject to a “theoretical slackness” that

partly explains the tendency to depict all action on the part of disenfranchised communities and individuals as one and the same. Put crudely, the implication is that come the right moment, all downtrodden persons anywhere will find a voice, express their pent-up sensibilities, unite around new identities, discover their capacities to act and finally take action to destabilize the system that oppressed them. (62)

Rabinowitz views such an approach as essentializing and perilous, and we agree. The essays within this issue challenge any such composite approach, instead positing that the connection between persistent resistance and girlhood (particularly as demonstrated in girls’ literature) is rarely so obvious or so easily defined. These essays, which focus on girl characters in various time periods (contemporary and historical) and from various cultures (South Asian, African American, Indigenous, Latinx, etc.), refuse essentialist notions of the dominated or subaltern and of the dominant and the hegemonic. Instead, our authors’ implicit attention to the intersection of gender and youth (in addition to further intersections of race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, disability, and so on) within each of their essay contexts gestures toward a significant – if not always acknowledged – relationship between persistence, resistance, and girls’ literature.

In many narratives for girls, that relationship is a response to asymmetrical power relations. As Foucault famously states, “Where there is power, there is resistance, and yet, or rather consequently, this resistance is never in a position of exteriority in relation to power” (History 95). While Foucault implies that resistance only exists within relations of power, he also stresses the difference between power (both disciplinary power and bio-power) and domination. David Couzens Hoy summarizes this difference, observing, “Power for Foucault implies having more than one option open. Domination, in contrast, occurs when people buy into constraints that entrap them in asymmetrical relations that blind them to their real range of possibilities” (82). This separation – as well as Foucault’s sense that “In order for power relations to come into play, there must be at least a certain degree of freedom on both sides” (Ethics 292) – allows him to emphasize individual freedom and agency, an emphasis that also appears again and again within narratives of girls’ resistance. Indeed, Roxanne Harde makes this connection between power and individual freedom particularly overt in her article about young adult rape fiction (found in this issue), and she does so by demonstrating how the insistence of the protagonists “on punishing the perpetrators sees them moving into a different relationship with power, as acting subjects refusing submission,” particularly as “each victim realizes that she will likely not find justice through traditional means.” Moreover, Foucault’s sense of agency is based on the concept that we are “more” than any single, dominant interpretation of ourselves. As our essayists demonstrate in their girl protagonists’ questioning of their own seemingly principal or “natural” identities, resistance is given force by the possibility inherent to alternative self-interpretations that challenge single, dominant interpretations.

Girlhood studies and girls’ resistance

The potential of girls’ alternative, resistant self-interpretations to challenge not only normalizing forces, but sometimes even the structures of power relations, is an important concept recognized within girlhood studies and a key narrative within girls’ literature. Since not all readers of Women’s Studies may be equally familiar with girlhood studies or with girls’ literature, we begin our exploration of girls’ resistance by first providing brief overviews of this field and genre. We include an overview of girlhood studies – one that is necessarily over-simplified – to help delineate the field, to emphasize that girls’ resistance is a key concept within the field, and to demonstrate the changing ways that girlhood studies scholars have navigated resistance as a concept. Indeed, in many ways the manner in which girlhood scholars have studied girls’ resistance has directly informed and continues to influence our perception of that resistance, as well as of girls’ agency in articulating it.

In 1998, Gayle Wald defined “girls’ studies” as “a sub-genre of recent academic feminist scholarship that constructs girlhood as a separate, exceptional, and/or pivotal phase in female identity formation” (587). Lyn Mykel Brown expands on Wald’s definition, observing that early scholars sought “to interrupt the prevailing academic and public conventions that placed boyhood at the center of child and adolescent development, and provide the means for girls to give voice to their thoughts and feelings” (2). While the terms “girls’ studies” and “girlhood studies” are relatively new,² the category of girl and girls’ experiences have been of interest to historians, educators, literary scholars, activists, and policymakers, among others, for some time, as Catherine Driscoll explains in her essay “Girls today: girls, girl culture, and girl studies.” Driscoll historicizes girls and girlhood in the Global North from the late-nineteenth century through the late-twentieth century, noting that “the girl is an assemblage of social and cultural issues and questions rather than a field of physical facts, however much the girls’ empirical materiality is crucial to that assemblage” (1). By charting how girls and girl culture are socially constructed, Driscoll offers a history of the field from the late 1970s and 1980s onward, demonstrating how girlhood studies has evolved, “expand[ing] the ways in which it talks” about girls and “to girls” (4).

Girlhood studies, then, accounts for the experiences and circumstances of young women, while taking care to acknowledge that there is no universal experience of girlhood.³ Anita Harris reminds us of the “transnational and cross-disciplinary” (xviii) nature of the field. Early researchers, including Michelle Fine, accounted “for the discursive possibilities as well as safe spaces in the lives of young women” that enable their “self-expression and autonomy” (xviii). Marina Gonick, Christine Griffin, and Angela McRobbie, examined the relationship between girls’ and young women’s material circumstances (and choices) and the expectations of femininity presented within popular images (xix). Groundbreaking feminist psychologists argued against the tendency of adolescent development theory to overlook actual girls’ and young women’s lived experiences (xviii). Carol Gilligan, Lyn Mikel Brown, and Jill MacLean Taylor are among those who “researched the now popular idea that girls lose their resistant and authentic voices” (xviii) as they become adolescents and more directly experience the societal expectations of dominant, heteropatriarchal hegemonies.

Although this work greatly expanded the scope of girlhood studies, much 1990s research focused on girls’ loss of resistant voice, problematically introducing what Rebecca C. Hains terms the discourse of “the girl crisis” (2). Thus, looking back, Sharon R. Mazzarella and Norma Pecora characterize the proliferation of crisis-based research in this period as a “deluge of high-profile studies of adolescent girls’ development, most highlighting the perceived state of crisis of girls in the United States at that point in time” (105). An additional problem was that much of this early scholarly work focused on normative girls (i.e., white, middle- to upper-class, heterosexual, cis-gender, and non-disabled girls), and simultaneously pathologized those girls who exist outside these categories of privilege. As a result, work from this period often highlights girls’ commonalities rather than their differences.

Girlhood studies has widened considerably within the last fifteen years, particularly following the launch of the journal, Girlhood Studies, in 2008. As a result of work by contemporary scholars such as Heidi Safia Mriza, Valerie Walkerdine, Helen Lucy, June Melody, Sandrina de Finney, Emily Bent, Nzeera Sadiq Wright, Rosie Walters, and Tressie McMillan Cottom,⁴ the field increasingly considers girls and girlhood through an intersectional lens, accounting for (or trying to account for) diversity among girls and their experiences of being in the world. Current scholars are also more invested in considering an expanded notion of “girl” as a cultural construct rather than as a biological- or necessarily age-determined identity. As Harris observes, the “question of who is a girl is, that is, how she comes into our purview as a girl, has become part of the work” of girlhood studies (xx), and girls are often included in such discussions not only as subjects, but as researchers. While early girlhood studies focused primarily on girls and adolescent development theory, the field now includes researchers and activists from such diverse areas as education, cultural studies, literary studies, history, development studies, sexuality studies, Black studies, anthropology, Indigenous studies, and political science, among many others. Moreover, those working in girlhood studies rarely work solely within a single disciplinary area – a structural positioning that emphasizes the field’s cross-disciplinarity.

Across the myriad approaches used within the field, the concepts of girls’ agency, power, and resistance (including how girls negotiate standards of normative femininity, or the continued expectations that girls will subordinate themselves to those perceived to be in positions of power) have all been – and continue to be – central concerns within girlhood studies. In fact, a keyword search in the Girlhood Studies database reveals that the words “resist” and “resistance” appear in nearly every issue since the journal’s founding. In articles as varied as literary analyses of young adult (YA) dystopian fiction to girls negotiating COVID-19 restrictions in Quebec to analyses of Muslim girls’ experiences in online spaces, researchers, educators, and NGO administrators, among many others, examine the ways in which girls from all backgrounds and positionalities resist. Some girls, like Thunberg, resist through traditional protests, attending marches and rallies to make their voices heard; others resist by organizing spaces, both real and virtual, in which girls can share their stories with one another; still others create art in various forms that they share. As Rowena Linton and Lorna McLean assert in their work with Jamaican girls, “Resistance demonstrates how individuals negotiate and struggle with structures, and create meanings of their own from these interactions” (81). A central purpose of girlhood studies is thus to understand the various ways in which girls resist, particularly by examining how girls’ resistance is monitored and controlled, how girls understand and respond to such control, and how girls make meaning from their own diverse forms of resistance.⁵

Girls’ literature and girls’ persistent resistance

Just as resistance is an important topic of inquiry in girlhood studies, resistances (and the ways girls resist normalizing forces and power relations) are common themes in girls’ literature. As Sara K. Day et al assert, literary girls’ resistance “contradicts the common perception that girls are too young or too powerless to question the limitations placed on them” (4), or that they are similarly too young or too powerless to participate in – or lead – organized resistance movements. Indeed, girls “continue to be constructed as passive and weak within much of contemporary … culture” (4), even while there are many girls (both real and literary) who actively provide evidence to the contrary. Thus, the essays in this issue demonstrate the relationship between literary girls’ persistence and resistance, as girl characters in various genres, settings, and socio-cultural and historical contexts persist and resist. Before we discuss literary girls’ resistance, however, we offer a brief overview of “girls’ literature.”

We start with Ashley N. Reese’s helpful definition: “Girls’ literature can be defined as a book written about a girl, for a girl reader, with the targeted audience identified in its name, similar to children’s or young adult literature” (6). As Reese points out, this definition leads us to consider who girls are, how the term “girls’ literature” is defined in a given context, and what the term reveals about those who read it and those who are represented by it. For example, if we categorize girls’ literature as “texts read by self-identifying girls,” we could include everything from Little Women to Archie Comics to Romeo and Juliet to Cosmo Girl! magazine to Hunger Games fanfiction. If we classify it as “texts written for girls,” we rely on historical, socio-economic, cultural, and racialized constructs of “girl” to include texts as diverse as Anne of Green Gables; mathematics and home economics texts books; menstruation primers; the film Mean Girls; conduct manuals and self-help books; and The Gilmore Girls television series. If girls’ literature includes “texts featuring girl protagonists,” we must include examples of children’s literature such as Harriet the Spy and Stella by Starlight; YA literature, such as Forever and Legend; adult fiction, such as Pride and Prejudice or Bastard Out of Carolina; and even texts that have been described as pornographic, such as Lost Girls. If we identify girls’ literature as “texts that are distributed to girls,” which relies on many of the aforementioned constructions, we must include texts recommended by intermediaries such as parents, teachers, and librarians – all people who are typically in positions of power over girls.

Obviously, attempting to develop a singular definition of girls’ literature is difficult, and this difficulty is likely why, as Dawn Sardella-Ayres and Reese observe, “most academic classifications [of the term] have been by inference, rather than being grounded in any theoretical approaches to girls’ literature as a distinct genre” (33).⁶ Girls’ literature thus parallels the field of children’s literature, whose scholars face many of the same problems in attempting to articulate specific definitions. Marah Gubar observes how these scholars “cheerfully carry on with their scholarship on specific texts, types, and eras of children’s literature as though the lack of an overarching definition constitute[s] no real impediment to their work” (210). She argues, moreover, that the lack of a definition is fine; that children’s literature scholars “can give up on the arduous and ultimately unenlightening task of generating a definition without giving up on the idea that ‘children’s literature’ is a coherent, viable category” (210).

Following Gubar, we similarly suggest that girls’ literature is a “coherent, viable category,” but not necessarily definable solely by static tropes or even by static audiences. Instead, we recognize girls’ literature as a process. As Kim Wilkins asserts of genres more generally,

genres are not static, ahistorical categories. Rather, genres are processes. They are formed, negotiated and reformed, both tacitly and explicitly, by the interactions of authors, readers and (importantly) institutions. At work in any genre are regimes of verisimilitude: loose rules of plausibility and probability which mean that certain generic elements are expected and therefore indispensable if a genre is to be recognisable (to authors, readers, institutions) at specific times. (1)

Perhaps paradoxically, our preference is not to define girls’ literature – at least not as fully as might be expected. We prefer to present a girls’ literature that is loosely linked, that may possess certain recognizable generic elements at certain times (such as girl protagonists, romance plots, and a focus on clothing and manners during the late nineteenth century), but which otherwise avoids specific definitions in an attempt to uphold and emphasize its transformation – just as the concept of “girl” itself (and what identities it may or may not encompass) similarly changes over time.

The chronological scope of girls’ literature is relatively short within a broader history of children’s and young adult literature. Critic Gillian Avery places the gendering of children’s texts as starting with the rise of juvenile publishing as an industry in the mid-nineteenth century: “what had been unisex developed into two sharply differentiated categories. Writing for boys, and writing for girls, became professions in themselves” (190).⁷ In the US context, this early gendering was linked to the commercialization of children’s publishing. Sarah Wadsworth reveals how Louisa May Alcott, for example, was prompted to write Little Women specifically as a “girls’ story” by her publisher, Thomas Niles, who sought a girls’ correlative to Oliver Optic’s (William Taylor Adams’s) enormously profitable works of realistic fiction for boys (21). Within a British context, Kimberley Reynolds explains how the gendering of late Victorian popular texts also doubled as a class marker, in that while the “high fiction” of boys’ adventure and school stories may have been perceived as having literary merit … . The low-status or mass-circulation books and periodicals … were predominantly written for girls and working-class children, and appear to have been as much concerned with sensationalism as with didacticism” (xvi-xvii).⁸

Indeed, sensationalism may be one of the early tropes of girls’ literature that has since changed over time. Since the late 1970s, various scholars have identified a body of girls’ literature by observing both its recognizable tropes and how they change – or, again in Wilkins’s words, the “generic elements” that “are expected and therefore indispensable if a genre is to be recognisable (to authors, readers, institutions) at specific times” (1). Reese, for example, uses such “generic elements” to classify pre-1940s girls’ literature into three categories: family stories, orphan girls’ stories, and school stories (12). Such earlier examples of girls’ literature traditionally included idealized and “good girl” protagonists, their pursuit of marriage, and their final conformity to societal norms – key tropes present in the historical nineteenth-century “girls’ book,” or even in the mid-twentieth-century “junior novel.” Thus, as Joanne Brown and Nancy St. Clair assert, historically, “fiction has served to teach girls their ‘place,’ portraying them as focused on relationships with family and friends, involved with romantic or school affairs rather than pursuing adventures or ambitions” (2). There are exceptions, of course; while much of nineteenth-century girls’ fiction may seem synonymous with domestic fiction, for example, Michelle J. Smith explores how some Victorian and early Edwardian girls’ literature promotes imperialism by allowing literary girls to participate in heroic (and dangerous) activities. As Smith explains, “The movement of girls into these arenas of action and adventure owes much to imperial justification. In both fiction and non-fiction examples, girls who move beyond the domestic out of necessity or for the benefit of empire are not subject to critique but, conversely, are celebrated” (3).

With the proliferation of girls’ literature in the later twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, it is more difficult to state specific tropes. Some continue from earlier girls’ literature; Holly Virginia Blackford, for example, suggests that writers of girls’ fantasy literature from Frances Hodgson Burnett to J.K. Rowling and Stephenie Meyer “depict the complexities of female ambivalence about development by focusing on girls who descend into underworlds as consorts to Hades figures” (3). Other tropes are more specific to the development of later sub-genres, such as sick lit or dystopian young adult literature. Generally, as Shirley Foster and Judy Simons assert, “girls’ fiction prioritizes feminine experience and consequently (whether implicitly or explicitly) explores the possibilities of female self-expression and fulfillment in a male-dominated world” (2). In the most recent period, from the 1990s onward, it has increasingly featured what Brown and St. Clair call “empowered girls:” girls who grow and change, who “come to know themselves well, both their strengths and their weaknesses, and they resist letting themselves be defined by others,” often choosing instead to “defy socially approved but oppressive behaviors and values” (49). As is perhaps obvious, these empowered literary girls have become, in many ways, girls who persist and resist.

Literary girls’ persistence and resistance

As we noted in the introduction to the first half of this special issue, persistence is often perceived to be a normative trope of girlhood, and it is presented as such within much girls’ literature. Regardless of their race, ethnicity, nationality, socio-economic position, or historical context, literary girls such as Mary Lennox, Meg Murry, Claudia Kincaid, Esperanza Ortega, Davey Wexler, and Enola Holmes are expected to persist.⁹ Still, the degree to which literary girls’ persistence is celebrated remains dependent upon the norms of the time. In the nineteenth-century female bildungsroman, for example, acceptable persistence often entails a literary girl – whether she was a tomboy or a college student – molding herself into “a caretaker of others and a home, preparing for marriage and motherhood” (Reese 7). Unsurprisingly, this form of persistence is celebrated because it upholds normative standards of girlhood. A more ambiguous nineteenth-century representation of girls’ resistance appears in the character of Jo March, who is usually lauded as the most famous nineteenth-century tomboy. Jo persists in challenging traditional gender roles by working alongside her husband and teaching her sons to treat women equitably. However, Michelle Ann Abate points out that she is also a “tomboy tamed,” and her persistence shifts “her goal of being a literary spinster for one that is more selfless and feminine: teaching” (31).¹⁰ Thus, as Abate notes, “post-bellum texts such as Little Women were lengthy treatises about why such behaviors should be abandoned” (31), leaving us to wonder: is Jo celebrated more for her persistence in challenging traditional gender roles, or for her persistence in capitulating to them (and has the focus of that celebration changed over time)?

While girls’ persistence generally (particularly when it upholds norms) is considered to be a positive trope of normative girlhood, literary girls’ resistance within girls’ literature is more complicated, and may function in a similar manner to how Roberta Seelinger Trites describes adolescents’ negotiation of power within young adult literature. Trites asserts,

Although the primary purpose of the adolescent novel may appear to be the depiction of growth, growth in this genre is inevitably represented as being linked to what the adolescent has learned about power. Without experiencing gradations between power and powerlessness, the adolescent cannot grow. (x)

Replacing Trites’s “adolescents” with “girls,” we suggest that girls’ literature is similarly concerned with how girls “learn their place in the power structure[s] … They must learn to balance their power with their parents’ power and with the power of authority figures in their lives” (x). We suggest that literary girls may learn their own power by persisting, but they also learn by challenging and resisting larger power structures. Through such persistence and resistance, girl characters come to understand themselves, their desires, and the worlds in which they live.

As many of the essays in this double issue suggest, the portrayal of persistent resistance in girls’ literature is not a stark binary; it rarely amounts to placing girl protagonists into “resisting” or “unresisting” camps. Even Pollyanna – the “good girl” of normative femininity – resists, even as her name itself has “entered the lexicon as a disparaging term for a naively or ridiculously optimistic person” (Tribunella 145). Indeed, the depiction of girls’ resistance within girls’ literature is nuanced, complex, and ambiguous, often demonstrating the tensions or conflicting norms found within constructions of girlhood. Scholarship on the portrayal of girls in literature has recognized this conflict for some time; as far back as 1983, Elizabeth Abel, Marianne Hirsch, and Elizabeth Langland examined female developmental plots, observing that “The tensions that shape female development may lead to a disjunction between a surface plot, which affirms social conventions, and a submerged plot, which encodes rebellion” (12). Because resistant girls become “active, empowered subjects rather than passive subjugated objects” (Green-Barteet 37), these tensions and conflicting norms are often embedded into girls’ literature as the doubled plots that Abel et al suggest. Put simply: while our society purportedly wants strong, active, persistently successful girls, girls’ literature suggests we are more ambivalent about girls who actively resist (or who want to remake) the very power structures that control them.

The essays in this volume, along with those in its predecessor (Women’s Studies 52.5), offer a range of viewpoints on the many ways in which literary girls persist and resist. Each essay considers how such persistent resistance affects how girl characters see and define themselves. They demonstrate how literary girls’ self-representations are influenced by both their acts of persistent resistance and the ways in which those acts are subverted by normalizing forces. In the opening article, “’I want to do something with my life’: Reading Resistance in South Asian Girlhood Portrayed in Keeping Corner, Climbing the Stairs, and Neela: Victory Song,” Blessy Samjose examines three examples of South Asian American children’s and YA historical fiction that detail the Indian struggle for independence. She contends that contemporary authors, including Kashmira Sheth, Padma Venkatraman, and Chitra Banerjee, offer girl readers transformative representations of South Asian girlhoods by including intersectional perspectives. In addressing the ways colonization, patriarchy, and the caste system affect South Asian girls, these authors consider an India that promises freedom to everyone, not only upper-caste, upper-class Hindu men. Samjose draws on subaltern studies to assert that the girl protagonists skillfully negotiate existing power structures; in so doing, she reads the girls’ determination to persist within oppressive systems as an act of feminist resistance.

Jill Coste also considers the role of determination in literary girls’ persistent resistance. In “Telling New Stories: Disability and Determination in Contemporary Young Adult Fairy Tales,” Coste asserts that disabled individuals are typically dismissed in young adult fairy tales and fantasies. She identifies Peadar Ó Guilín’s The Call and Bridget Kemmerer’s A Curse So Dark and Lonely as two texts that feature disabled heroines who actively resist the stereotypes of able-bodied princesses. Using these texts as case studies, Coste demonstrates how contemporary YA fairy tales featuring disabled girl protagonists work to destabilize the status quo of the non-disabled, cis-heteronormative fairy tale heroine. These novels – and their persistently resistant girl protagonists – challenge the genre’s ableism and assert that disability is a social construct that must be deconstructed.

Taking up the theme of persistent resistance in realistic YA fiction, Roxanne Harde examines rape scripts, suggesting that YA literature often reifies rape culture as it attempts to criticize it. In “‘What about justice?’: Persisting Girls in Young Adult Rape Fiction,” Harde examines three recent YA novels (Kiersi Burkhart’s Honor Code, Nina Foxx’s And You’d Better Not Tell, and Hannah Capin’s Foul is Fair) in which girl survivors persist in seeking justice and in insisting that their assailants be punished. They do so, however, by resorting to lies and deception, prompting Harde to ponder whether they have effectively challenged rape culture. Drawing on Foucault’s work on resistance and power, Harde asserts that the girls’ persistent insistence on justice becomes a way for them to resist rape culture and the normalizing forces that both uphold it and prevent girls from pursuing justice.

Celiese Lypka similarly considers how girls resist both personal and structural violence in her article, “’No, it was a girl. A woman’: A Study of Indigenous Resilience and Girlhood in Katherena Vermette’s The Break.” The novel details an act of extreme violence involving two Métis girls. Although one girl commits violence against another, the ramifications of the historical and ongoing settler-colonial violence against Indigenous women and girls in Canada are at the center of Vermette’s novel. Lypka argues that in a settler-colonial landscape it is all but impossible for Indigenous girls to escape the cycle of violence; either violence is enacted upon their bodies, or they commit violence against others, thereby reproducing the violence that settler-colonialism continues to inflict upon Indigenous girls and women. Drawing on Sandrina de Finney’s presencing, which is “an active, politicized, decolonizing process” that creates a stronger Indigenous presence (qtd. in de Finney 23), Lypka contends that the girl protagonists of The Break seek presencing over resilience. In so doing, they persistently resist the colonial constructions that so often render Indigenous girls voiceless.

In her article “Punk Persistence: Subversive Change and Continued Resistance in Celia C. Pérez’s The First Rule of Punk,” Cristina Rhodes also considers how girl protagonists challenge normalizing constructions of girlhood. Relying on the concept of “movidas,” a term that describes the body’s physical motions and ways it moves as an act of protest, Rhodes argues that protagonist Malú feels removed from her ethnic and racial identity. Her feelings are exacerbated by her mother’s strict adherence to cultural norms and by her school’s rigid dress code. As Rhodes observes, Malú feels limited by the expectations that she be a proper Chicana girl, and she persistently resists these expectations by embracing a punk aesthetic and protesting discrimination in her school. Through punk resistance, Malú learns who she is and asserts her identity, resisting the normalizing forces that her mother and her community uphold.

Rounding out this special double issue, S.R. Toliver considers persistence and resistance in “Monstrous Others: Black Girl Refusal in Afrofuturist Young Adult Literature.” Toliver interrogates the assumptions that Black girls are monstrous and must therefore be controlled. Analyzing Namina Forna’s The Gilded Ones and Jordan Ifueko’s Raybearers, Toliver argues that the girls protagonists of the YA Afrofuturistic novels actively resist being framed as monstrous; she connects the positioning of these characters to real life Black girls, who are routinely adultified and seen as threats to both white male authority and white supremacy. Despite such positioning, the protagonists of both Forna’s and Ifueko’s books persist in a world that others them. As Toliver importantly concludes, “analyzing Black girl monstrosity in literature … can open space for readers to ask why persistence and resistance are often the only options for Black girls and offer space for them to consider what it might take to create worlds in which Black girls can rest, where they do not have to consistently fight and resist.”

From Hindu girls, fairy tale heroines with disabilities, and sexual assault survivors, to Indigenous girls in Canada’s settler-colonial landscape, punk Chicana girls, and Black girls in YA futurist literature, the articles within this second half of this two-part special issue demonstrate the myriad ways literary girls’ persistence becomes resistance, as girl protagonists attempt (with varying levels of success) to resist the normalizing forces and power structures that try to control them. While such resistance is regularly explored in the field of girlhood studies and within girls’ literature, these articles further emphasize and contextualize how literary girls, both normative and non-normative, persistently resist in their attempts to make their lives and worlds more egalitarian, more inclusive, and more just, even as their resistance may be ridiculed and thwarted. As these articles demonstrate, literary girls are faced with numerous challenges and oppressive structures; nevertheless, they persistently resist.

Notes

¹ In response to Thunberg’s tweet, Tate “tweeted out a pompous video in which he tried to reassert his masculinity and status by blathering on in a dressing gown, with a cigar and a pizza box as props” (Solnit). As a result of the picture of the pizza box, Romanian authorities were able to locate and arrest Tate “in connection with appalling allegations of sex trafficking” (Solnit). His need to assert his masculinity following what Solnit describes as “Thunberg’s takedown” led to his arrest.

² The terms have been used consistently in academia since the mid- to late-1990s.

³ As we explained in the introduction to the previous special issue (52.5), girlhood studies scholars acknowledge that there is no universal experience of girlhood. At the same time, their work also necessarily relies on generalizations of girls and girls’ experiences.

⁴ We refer to Mriza’s book Young, Female, & Black; Walkerdine, Lucy, and Melody’s book Daddy’s Girl: Young Girls and Popular Culture; de Finney’s work on Indigenous girls, specifically “Under the Shadow of Empire: Indigenous Girls’ Presencing as Decolonizing Force”; Bent’s essay “Making it UP: Intergenerational Activism and the Ethics of Empowering Girls”; Wright’s book Black Girlhood in the Nineteenth Century; Walters’ essay “’This is My Story’: The Reclaiming of Girls’ Education Discourses in Malala Yousafzai’s Autobiography”; and Cottom’s essay “Black Girlhood, Interrupted.”

⁵ We recognize that this short summary of the state of girlhood studies is reductive and potentially misleading. A truly nuanced, encompassing history is beyond the scope of this introduction, and thus our purpose here is to stress the extent to which the manner – and agenda – with which girlhood studies scholars have studied girls’ resistance directly informs and influences scholarly perception of that resistance. For a more complete history of girlhood studies, consult Driscoll’s article, “Girls today: girls, girl culture and girl studies”; Anita Harris’s edited collection, All About the Girl: Culture, Power, and Identity; and Dawn H. Currie et al’s book, “Girl Power”: Girls Reinventing Girlhood.

⁶ Sardella-Ayres and Reese provide a helpful overview of this scholarship in their own essay, “Where to from Here? Emerging Conversations on Girls’ Literature and Girlhood,” and we refer interested readers to their article for a more detailed history.

⁷ The gendering of nonfiction texts somewhat predates that of fiction, and thus conduct books such as Eliza Leslie’s edited The American Girl’s Book (1831) or Lydia Sigourney’s Letters to Young Ladies (1833) – which may also be considered an earlier form of girls’ literature – arise before the mid-nineteenth century surge in gendered realistic fiction for younger readers.

⁸ It is worth noting that the actual readership of these texts did not necessarily match this gendered status; as Wadsworth explains, “the boys’ market was seen as including girls, while the girls’ market apparently excluded boys. In fact, it was a common perception that boys required a separate body of literature” (25).

⁹ We refer to Mary Lennox of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden; Meg Murry of Madeline L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time; Claudia Kincaid of E.L. Konisburg’s From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler; Esperanza Ortega of Pam Munoz Ryan’s Esperanza Rising; Davey Wexler of Judy Blume’s Tiger Eye; and Enola Holmes of Nancy Springer’s Enola Holmes Mystery Series.

¹⁰ Abate defines “tomboy taming” as a “process [that] sought to eradicate – ideally by choice, but if necessary by force – a gender-bending girl’s iconoclastic ways and have her adopt more feminine behaviors” (31). She notes that this process was usually imposed as a girl entered adolescence, and that “Together with signaling the end of tomboyism as a lifelong mode of behavior, taming became the defining feature of literary representations of this code of conduct during the 1860s and 1870s” (31).