Girls, Style, and School Identities
Subtitle: Dressing the Part
Contributors: Bronwyn Davies (Foreword)
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Published: May 27, 2008
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 224
ISBN-13: 9781403982063
Subjects: Anthropology - Cultural; Women's Studies - General; Social Science / Gender Studies; Social Science; Gender Studies; British Columbia; Case studies; Clothing; Education (Secondary); Girls; Schoolgirls; Social conditions; Vancouver; Sociology
Description: Writing against the grain of popular perception and moral panic, Shauna Pomerantz offers a fascinating look at the importance of style for girls in school. Fighting assumptions that girls today are dupes of media and capitalism, Pomerantz skillfully argues that style is a significant cultural practice that demands to be taken seriously in the lives of girls. By exploring style as social skin or a necessary condition of subjectivity, Pomerantz is able to get to the heart of the way girls negotiate a recognizable identity for themselves. Based on a year long ethnography at an urban, multicultural high school in Vancouver's east side, Pomerantz contextualizes style as a form of expression that enables girls to produce fluid and multiple identities, social networks, individual images, expressions of agency and power, and cultural affiliations.