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Girl Power!
Summer 2001
by Jennifer L. Holley Sociology 184a
Girls’ Culture and Contemporary Society
Faculty: Sharon Kinsella, Assistant Professor, Sociology Picture a young woman, an international pop star making millions of dollars—who still puts up her hair in ponytails and wears pink baby-doll dresses. Is this the vision of an empowered—or disempowered—woman? The modern day paradox of “girl power” (a phrase made internationally known by the British pop group The Spice Girls) is explored in Sharon Kinsella’s sociology course, “Girls’ Culture and Contemporary Society.”
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The class questions whether being a new style “babe” amounts to passivity.
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Kinsella defines “girls’ culture” as an area of contemporary life that either features girls as idols or is made by girls. In girls’ culture, many female experiences of life have moved from the margins to the center of society. The class questions whether being a new style “babe”—even if it is coupled with power—amounts to passivity. “The studies I have done and my interest in teaching ‘Girls’ Culture,’” Kinsella says, “are in some ways inspired by the research about young girls who have formed some of the networks in my life.” After completing her undergraduate studies at the London School of Economics, Kinsella worked as a civil servant in Japan. Her formative friendships with young Japanese women inspired her, as a graduate student at Oxford, to study infantilism as a dominant feature of Japanese pop culture, especially in regard to “cuteness” and the fashion industry. Kinsella uses case studies from Japan, as well as some from Europe and the United States. “We look at a special type of girl identity as formed by society, and particularly the media,” says Kinsella. Also explored is the rise of “girlish professionalism,” the phenomenom in which typically feminine characteristics, such as flexibility and high “emotional IQ,” have become highly valued in the corporate environment. Students’ enthusiasm for the course was apparent from the first day of class, when over 200 people showed up. Most students in the class, Kinsella notes, exuded the “babe power” under discussion; they were by and large self-confident, funky, stylish, and leaders on campus. “The students appeared stimulated,” says Kinsella, “when they realized I was speaking directly to them.”  |
