Imagining womanhood: psychodynamic processes in the ‘textual’ and discursive formation of girls’ subjectivities and desires for the future

Abstract

This article emerged in the course of a doctoral study that focused on the role of literary and filmic texts in constructing adolescent girls’ subjectivities and desires for womanhood. Analysing data drawn from both text and subject, the study focused on the discursive choreography of girls’ imaginary constructions of their mature adult selves. Aspects of the research data, however, were not so readily understood in terms of discourse, prompting the need for alternative explications of subjectification from a psychoanalytic perspective. Drawing on the recent work of Nancy Chodorow to analyse girls’ descriptions of their favourite texts and imagined futures, I demonstrate how subjectivity is a personal as well as cultural construction. Girls’ experience of themselves as gendered subjects is not simply a direct internalisation of stories and characters but a complex psychodynamic process whereby texts and other cultural and discursive phenomena are given emotional tonality and personal meaning. These personal meanings are just as powerful in the formation of subjective gender as are discourse and culture.

Keywords:

• gendered identity development
• adolescent girls
• cultural texts
• psychoanalytic theory
• feminist theory

Notes

1. I use the term ‘substanceless’ here to refer to those theories of the subject that focus on a split subjectivity, fragmentation, partiality, alienation, and cultural and discursive constructions of the self.

2. There was a parallel between Lacan’s complex narrative of mirror relations and the girls’ deliberate and conscious acts of imagining their futures. By asking the girls to imagine their adult selves, I was facilitating a process that involved them in holding up a ‘metaphorical mirror’. The act of imagining provoked the girls to view themselves as a reflection of themselves – a self that is embodied, perceived, and lived and as a self that is ‘other’ to themselves – a potential self created in and through desires and fantasies about how they would like their lives to be. Like the child who contemplates itself in the mirror, each girl was impelled to see herself as a whole and lived self, and as a fragmented and potential self – an ‘other’ self.

3. I frequently refer to the girls’ imaginary constructions of their future selves as ‘narrative’. I do this in order to emphasise the story‐like quality of these descriptions and the fact that they are ‘fictions’ drawn from and created through a range of ‘lived’ experiences.