Girls, Performance, and Activism

Demanding to be Heard

Dana Edell

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367427115
• eBook ISBN: 9781000429008
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

Girls, Performance, and Activism offers artists, activists, educators, and scholars a comprehensive analysis, celebration, and critique of the ways in which teenage girls create and perform activist theater.

Girls, particularly Black and Latinx teenagers, are using the tools of performance to share their stories, devise new ones, and use the stage to advocate for social change. Interweaving interviews, poetic text, drama, and theory, this book provides readers with a comprehensive understanding of how and why this field erupted and the ways in which girls are using performance to transform themselves and enact change in their communities. As a white woman who has collaboratively created theater with hundreds of girls of color over the past 20 years, Dana Edell offers strategies for engaging with girls across difference through an intersectional lens in order to acknowledge the ways in which race, gender, age, class, ability, and sexuality influence girls' experiences and relationships with adult collaborators as they work to create meaningful, impactful, and often personal activist performances.

This is the go-to handbook for teachers, theater directors, and performance makers who want to create politically engaged work with teenage girls.

1“Under construction”

Girls, performance, and activism

Investigating the who, the how, the why, the where, and the what of girls’ activist performance triply demands an interdisciplinary approach. I use the word “girl” to refer to the teenagers that I have been collaborating with since the mid-1990s when I was myself a “girl.” This is the word they use to identify themselves. I could call them female youth or young women, but as cultural anthropologist Aimee Meredith Cox quotes one of the 16-year-old girls she writes about in Shapeshifters: Black Girls and the Choreography of Citizenship, her astounding ethnography, “young women suggests that you are trying to be polite and official, but it sounds like you have done something wrong or are in trouble with authority figures” (Cox, 2015, p. 243). When I ask the girls in our projects how they want to be identified, they have resoundingly agreed and claim the word, “girl.” When I began my work, my gender vocabulary was limited as the world was still too unsafe for young people to claim their authentic and expansive gender identities. In recent years I have included the phrase “girl-identified teenagers, gender-expansive young people, and nonbinary youth and any others who want to join a project created with and for girls.”

This book is for the activists who work with girls and want to understand how to incorporate performance into their campaigns. It’s for the youth theater artists whose girls and gender non-conforming young people have been demanding that their shows address social justice issues. It’s for the scholars and program staff and teachers and therapists and parents who lie awake at night worried about girls today. And it’s for everyone else seeking to understand this current phenomenon of girls using performance tactics to chip away at the structures that attempt to silence or simply ignore them. This chapter is a thick, curly braid. Through it, I wrap the history and theory of Girls Studies then twist with a thick strand of Girls’ Activism and wind in Theater and Performance. Though each strand might stand-alone, this work would unravel without an understanding of each of them.

Part I: surveying the field

Girls’ Studies

After more than half a century of empirical research on children, which focused mostly on middle-class white boys and the assumed generalization of this population to all young people, the 1990s ushered in a new interdisciplinary field, now generally referred to as “Girls Studies” (Aapola et al., 2005; Brown & Gilligan, 1992; Harris, 2004; Gonick, 2003; Leadbeater & Way, 1996, 2007; Lipkin, 2009; Ginsberg & Johnson, 2016). Early groundbreaking studies, including developmental psychologists Lyn Mikel Brown and Carol Gilligan’s Meeting at the Crossroads: Women’s Psychology and Girls’ Development (1992), provided evidence for the ways in which girls fear that speaking their truths could lead to emotional ruptures and broken relationships. Though these researchers were predominantly white women, they made efforts to ensure their participant pool included girls of color. This body of research showed how, in middle school, girls begin to question what they know and silence themselves. Preadolescent girl children are often seen and heard fearlessly swinging from monkey bars at the playground, splashing up to their skinned knees in muddy puddles and confidently demanding to be heard and listened to. But then, as they begin to pull tight the curtain of their childhood and tiptoe onto the stage of adolescence, they often leave the echoes of their loud voices offstage. In her book about girls and anger, Brown penetrated the silence of girls by digging more deeply into what holds their tongues and why:

Girls’ experiences, strong feelings, and opinions come up against a relational impasse that constrains possibilities and shuts down loud voices, a wall of “shoulds” in which approval is associated with silence, love with selflessness, relationship with subordination and lack of conflict, and anger or strong feelings with danger and disruption.

(Brown, 1998, p. 109)

Brown’s work outlines a crisis in adolescence for girls when they construct a chasm between what they know, and what they feel they can express. They start to see the subtle ways that girls get punished for speaking out, and get rewarded for being quiet, deferential, and demure. They notice that the toys marketed to them are the pretty princesses, the baby dolls, and the pink plastic vacuums, while the boys are encouraged to build towers, launch rockets, and fight dragons.

The timing of this influx of research related to girls makes sense. The second wave of the white feminist movement had ushered massive changes in the United States workforce for white women, including in higher education. By the 1990s, the number of women scholars and professors had increased and many of these women, influenced by the women’s rights movement, saw the need for speaking out against gender injustice where they saw it. And they saw it in the research. Additionally, young researchers who came of age in the 1980s were studying with this new generation of women professors and committing themselves to following the paths the previous generation of feminist scholars had painstakingly paved.

But yet. Even though the 1970s had brought consciousness about the hierarchical gender divide (particularly for white women), the basic paradigm hadn’t shifted. Most girls took for granted the most significant victories of the women’s movement. They assumed abortion had been and always would be their legally protected choice (though racial and economic injustices often led to decreased access to safe and affordable abortions for lower-income white girls and girls of color); they couldn’t imagine not being able to open a bank account without the “permission” of a husband or father; or that sexual harassment in the workplace was legal, expected, and omnipresent. Despite much progress, girls still notice that adult women often silence themselves and adhere to the unspoken laws that the invisible “gender police” enforce. They absorb media messages perpetuating narratives that women are meant to be desired, that being thin and pretty is the greatest aspiration, while fully clothed men in suits are the ones with the power. They hear their mothers and older sisters complain about their bodies and they witness the lengths women go to please and appease men. They internalize that one of the realities of being a woman in the world is to passively accept a second-class status.

The American Association of University Women’s study How Schools Shortchange Girls (1992), added timber to these flames by providing evidence for links between girls’ self-esteem, achievement, and career aspirations. In 2007, the American Psychological Association released the Report of the APA Task Force on the Sexualization¹ of Girls, that reviewed hundreds of empirical research studies going back decades that showed the negative impact sexualization has on girls in terms of their physical and mental health, education, relationships, and aspirations for their future. The report has been downloaded more than one million times making it the most popular report in the 130-year history of the organization. Girlhood Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal published its first peer-reviewed issue in Fall 2008, and describes its mission to “provide a forum for the critical discussion of girlhood from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, and for the dissemination of current research and reflections on girls’ lives …” (Mitchell et al., 2008).

Studies with more diverse samples including a majority of girls of color document similar evidence of this chasm between what girls feel, what girls say, and how far too many of the adults in their communities ignore their voices (Robinson & Ward, 1991; M. W. Morris, 2016, 2019; E. W. Morris, 2007; Crenshaw, 2015). In reaction, Black girls are either punished for speaking out, or they withdraw into silence. Anthropologist Signithia Fordham (1993) spent a year researching Black students at a public high school in Washington, DC and writes:

I noted that silence for the African-American female is not to be interpreted as acquiescence. Rather, … silence among the high-achieving females at the school is an act of defiance, a refusal on the part of the high-achieving females to consume the image of “nothingness” (see Christian 1990) so essential to the conception of African-American women. This intentional silence is also critical to the rejection and deflection of the attendant downward expectations so pervasive among school officials.

(p. 10)

These works look at diverse groups of girls and conclude that young women, especially those at risk of being pushed out of high school or at risk of getting pregnant, are torn between two destructive realities: they can speak out and risk getting in trouble or they can keep quiet and risk disappearing.

As abundant evidence, collected mostly by Black women researchers, has proven, when they do demand attention, Black girls, more often than white girls, are punished or treated negatively than responded to with support and encouragement. In schools, Black girls are often perceived to be taking up “too much space” and are disproportionately punished for “acting out.” Critical race theorist and legal scholar Kimberlé W. Crenshaw presents, in her impactful study of girls in Boston and New York, Black Girls Matter: Pushed Out, Overpoliced, and Underprotected (2015), documentation that Black girls are expelled from school based on their behavior ten times more often than white girls (20). She notes that this likely stems from the way Black girls are viewed by school staff:

Researchers have sought to measure the possibility that Black girls may be subject to harsher disciplinary interventions because they are perceived to be unruly, loud, and unmanageable. One study revealed that teachers sometimes exercised disciplinary measures against Black girls to encourage them to adopt more “acceptable” qualities of femininity, such as being quieter and more passive.

(p. 24)

It is this perception of Black girls, forced to deal with the intersecting injustices related to racism and sexism (Crenshaw, 1991), who are often reprimanded as “unruly,” when they are just laughing, talking, and chilling with their friends, leading to punishment or harassment. Because their contributions to public discourse are rarely listened to with the respect they deserve, they are often treated as “nuisances.” When the “choice” is between speaking out in public spaces and getting in trouble, or staying silent and risking invisibility, girls have no real options. Scholar Monique W. Morris who writes about Black girls in education, asks the crucial question, “What does it mean to adopt a pedagogical practice that rejects the notion that loud or ‘sassy’ girls are disorderly, defiant, and disposable?” (Morris, 2019, pp. 10–11). Tracy Robinson and Janie Ward (1991), developmental psychologists, who focus their research on the experiences of African-American girls, suggest a need for girls to build internal and external resources and develop more than “resistance for survival” which includes short-term survival strategies and move towards a “resistance for liberation” (p. 89) that offers opportunities to dismantle the systems of power and racism that hold them back. They write:

Adolescent African-American women can be helped to build upon this indigenous source of strength by learning to trust their own voices and perspectives and to develop what bell hooks calls the black women’s “oppositional gaze”: a way to observe the social world critically and to oppose those ideas and ways of being that are disempowering to the self.

(p. 97)

Additionally, developmental psychologists Niobe Way and Bonnie Leadbeater (1996, 2007), two white women, published Urban Girls,² two volumes of edited research written by a racially diverse group of researchers that explores the strengths and resistance to failure that girls of color possess. These collections encourage their readers to look beyond stereotypes, questioning how adolescent girl identity has been shaped throughout the twentieth century, and how this image has been destructive. In their attempts and successes at painting a multicultural, inter-class, comprehensive portrait of girls of color, these works made the case that further research needed to be done to address the deep-rooted problems of poverty, sexism, and racism that still poison the waters that young women must drink in order to survive in cities. As anti-racist, white women researchers, their access to resources and tenured positions at research universities allowed them to publish and promote this work. These early texts by both Black and white scholars highlighted the need for more research about girls of color and began to pave the way for the upcoming Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and Asian American scholars to analyze the experiences of a more racially and socioeconomically diverse subset of girls.

In the next decade, the Girls Studies field was making progress in representing the actual demographics of girls in the US and further illuminating the ways in which race and class affected girls’ lives by welcoming the emerging sub-field of Black Girlhood Studies. The first pioneering texts of this interdisciplinary field focused on the role of the arts, particularly performance in the lives of Black girls. Black feminist scholars Kyra D. Gaunt and Ruth Nicole Brown literally and figuratively set the stage in their works, Gaunt’s The Games Black Girls Play: Learning the Ropes from Double Dutch to Hip-Hop (2006) and Brown’s Black Girlhood Celebration: Toward A Hip-Hop Feminist Pedagogy (2008). As Owens et al. wrote in their article, “Towards an Interdisciplinary Field of Black Girlhood Studies”:

Ruth Nicole Brown dared to believe not only that Black girls were worthy of our intellectual artistic, and political labor, but also that they had something in turn to teach us – that they could, if we listened, change the world.

(2017, p. 117)

This new generation of girls’ researchers shared powerful research showing the specific challenges girls of color faced and the unique resilience they possessed. Black women created a new framework for understanding the lives of Black girls and actualized it as “Hip-Hop feminist pedagogy.” Ruth Nicole Brown and Chamara Jewel Kwakye (2012, p. 4) define this practice as one that:

(1) Appreciates creative production expressed through language, art, or activism, (2) privileges the in-betweenness of black girl epistemology or a black feminist standpoint, (3) values and cares about the shared knowledge produced by black women’s and black girls’ presence, (4) interrogates the limitations and possibilities of Hip-Hop feminism, and pedagogy and is, therefore, self-adjusting, (5) stages the political through performance-based cultural criticism, (6) and is located and interpreted through the community (or communities) in which it is immersed.

(Brown, 2008; Du...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Endorsements
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 “Under construction”: Girls, performance, and activism
• 2 “This is not a safe space”: Principles of theatermaking with girls
• 3 “Real im(PERFECT)ions”: Performing confidence, expressing agency
• 4 “Held momentarily”: For an audience of one … plus
• 5 “Shut up and listen!”: Performance in public spaces
• 6 “Finally someone hears us”: Considering our audiences
• Conclusion: Ripples of change
• Works cited
• Organizations, projects, and resources
• Index