Performing Disidentifications: Girls "in Trouble" Experiment with Digital Narratives to Remake Self-Representations.

Introductory TaleFor the past few years, I have had the opportunity to work with several groups of adolescent girls (both African American and Caucasian from working-class backgrounds) who have been charged with various law violations such as drug possession, battery, and shoplifting. As an art educator, I became involved with this project through my university's women's and gender studies program, which holds a wide-ranging community initiative for underprivileged women and girls from local communities.1 The program's partnership with local juvenile arbitration has been well established and viewed as an alternative opportunity for teenage law offenders2 to reflect on their own lives and the issues of gender and justice. Apart from a rather overwhelming tour of juvenile prison that serves as a sound reminder for what they might need to prepare themselves for upon their second law violation, the local juvenile justice office has held a few educational and community service workshops aimed to prevent girls'further crime record, with our art and writing sessions among them.Due to the complex junction of contested ideas such as institutional/societal labeling and stigmatizing of the girls as law offenders on one hand, and the fantasy of their empowerment via educational intervention on another- both of which are problematic when working with underprivileged populations-reflecting on and theorizing this teaching experience has been a significant challenge. My teaching position in-between these public discourses- serving both the institutional needs of juvenile arbitration and the feminist community initiative-has been a continuous balancing act that requires an awareness of these discourses'functions, tensions, and limitations. Furthermore, as a White, college-educated woman who has never been in trouble with the law (although, having grown up in the Soviet Union, I do come from a modest economic background), my subjective experiences have differed vastly from the subjectivities of girls whom I encounter in this program. Thus, understanding and empathizing with girl participants' subject positions, as well as critically reflecting upon the pedagogical idea of empowerment and societal representations of bad3 girls (or girls in trouble) has constituted an important part of my work.As required by the juvenile arbitration, the projects that girls produced during our workshops cannot reveal their identities; that is, all recognizable identity markers (particularly girls' faces) must be carefully masked and concealed. This led me to search for spaces of ambiguous and often indirect visibility where the girl participants could openly speak about the issues that affect their lives while remaining anonymous. Initially, I focused on the production of multimedia collages that allowed them to use images of other women and girls from printed media as primary material to sort through and use to articulate their personal roadblocks, which, year after year, revolved around the issues of domestic violence, peer pressure, drug abuse, and body image (Ivashkevich, 2013). While these art projects were quite successful and generated a powerful community response when exhibited on the university campus, they had a notable limitation: the girls were not given a chance to work with their own images to talk back to their public stigma and reframe the layers of institutional and cultural perceptions and labels inscribed firmly on their bodies. The girls'voices (and bodies) seemed to be situated under the layers of other women and girls' representations. To overcome this expressive barrier, I decided to expand my search for spaces of their visibility into the realm of digital video and animation performances through which they could access and construct their self-representations and where their anonymity could be used as a metaphor or a deliberate artistic method rather than an expressive limitation.In the remainder of this article, I first examine the pervasive public discourses of bad girls (or girls in trouble) and a pedagogical fantasy of empowerment in order to situate and reposition my own teaching stance. …