READING ADOLESCENT GIRLS: EXCURSIONS INTO FEMININE SUBJECTIVITY Kathy Esson Faculty of Education UNIVERSITY OF SYDNEY Paper presented at the 25th annual conference of the Australian Association for Research in Education, Hobart, Tasmania, 26 - 30 November 1995 PLEASE DO NOT QUOTE OR REPRODUCE MATERIAL FROM THIS DOCUMENT WITHOUT AUTHOR'S PERMISSION What do you most worry about? . . . I mainly worry about what I look like when I'm going out and if I'm going to be with boys and things like that. I never eat in front of boys because I get embarrassed. You don't eat in front of boys? No. Why not? I don't know, just in case, you know, something gets left on the side of my mouth or something - I just get embarrassed. What happens if you're really hungry? Oh, I don't eat like - if we go to McDonalds, I might eat, um, a junior burger or something, whereas with my family I'd eat a quarter pounder or something like that. I won't eat as big or as much of things. What is it that you don't want boys to see - how much you're eating, or just the way you're eating, or what? Oh I don't know, I think it's - I don't know, I don't think they'd really care, I think it's just me thinking that, you know, they're going to say "oh God, look at that pig!", or something, so I don't know, it's really just me - I think. Sally, 14. (O/H) ________________________ . . . I've got a really loud laugh so [my mother] said to keep that really quiet when I'm around, you know, people that could like look at me from the outside and say, oh, you know "she's a (you know), real sleaze", or something like - something stupid like that, you know, so I've got to keep my laugh down. Do you agree with that advice? I suppose it's pretty logic [sic] but um, I'd go along with it, but like it's hard to keep your, ah, laugh down, so yeah. Janey, 14 (O/H) _________________________ So were you very upset when he rejected you? Um, oh, not that upset because aah, not really because, I was upset but then I thought "um I've got enough friends anyway so he can do what he wants, I don't really care - it's his life, he can choose". What about your choice? What did you want? Well, I don't know - I was just - um - I wouldn't know - I wouldn't? Ah, I don't care, so he broke up, he can still be my friend. He can still be your friend? Yeah, I don't - I would-I wouldn't have the choice, like I don't know anything about it, so I - . Sarah, 12. (O/H) Introduction Much has been written about the limitations of empiricism in understanding human social behaviour. This has included the rejection of objectivity and value-neutrality in favour of acknowledging the vested nature of all knowledges, and the recognition of the need to move beyond purely positivist notions of validity, reliability and replicability (Crawford and Marecek, 1989; Gavey, 1989; Miles and Huberman, 1994; Henwood and Pidgeon, 1995). I am thinking here of constructivist, deconstructive and feminist approaches to research, amongst others. My own work is similarly informed. My current research is with adolescent girls, whom I am interviewing one on one, once a year for three years. In these interviews I ask about friendships and family, self-expressiveness and sense of self, and perspectives on womanhood and the future. The girls in my sample vary in terms of age, social background and ethnicity; while not part of this paper, exploring the nature of these differences is a key aspect of my investigation. In broad terms, my research questions are as follows (O/H): . How is feminine subjectivity negotiated/performed as an ongoing iterative practice? . Through what regulatory norms - at the level of micro-practices - is feminine subjectivity enabled and constrained (ie disciplined)? . In what ways do individuals contest/resist/exceed these norms? These are not neutral questions! They contain a range of assumptions, both at the level of the individual and of society. For example: . that we live in a gendered society, one in which it makes sense to speak of "feminine" subjectivity - or perhaps, subjectivities; . that subjectivity - what in more structuralist terms might be called identity - is an ongoing process rather than a stable state; one in which the individual plays an active role; . that we are produced through a variety of regulatory norms which are evident in, or at least deducible from narratives of day to day life; and . that individuals may be able to resist some of these forces at the same time as they are constituted by them. My assumptions reflect influences of post-structuralism, cultural theory and feminism. As a feminist researcher I am interested in the effects of discursive and material practices on girls and women, in subject positions available to women and in the relative power attaching to these positions (Henriques et. al., 1984; Henwood and Pidgeon, 1995). My aim is to contribute to the elimination of oppressive gender relations (Gavey, 1989). What I want to do today is to present a taste, a peak at some ways I am reading material from adolescent girls - ways which far from claiming objectivity, draw on my own experience as a woman in this society, as well as on technical and other literature, on philosophy, on feminist theory and on methods of textual analysis. Through the totality of my personal and professional experience, I want to claim "theoretical sensitivity", in Strauss and Corbin's (1990) sense - sensitivity which contributes to credible meaning-making. I am also indebted in this talk to the work of the Harvard Project on Women's Psychology and Girls' Development, in which some of these approaches have evolved. (Brown et. al., 1988; Brown and Gilligan, 1990; Debold, 1991). Sally Briefly, what is a non-feminist approach to reading adolescent girls, and how might it differ from a feminist one? I want to illustrate this with the example of Sally above (O/H). A non-feminist, normative reading of this 14 year old girl's responses would be something like the following: . (early) adolescents are uncomfortable with the opposite sex, concerned about their bodies and self-conscious in general. This is normal in adolescents of both sexes. Adolescents exhibit adolescent egocentrism - a "heightened self-consciousness . . . reflected in their belief that others are as interested in them as they themselves are . ." (Santrock, 1993, p 134). Girls may be more self-conscious than boys; this can be attributed primarily to girls' accelerated sex-role socialisation (Steinberg, 1993). This reading reflects dominant discourses in developmental psychology which construct adolescence as a more or less universal stage, with definable characteristics, many of which are transitory. Such a reading down-plays differences associated with gender, race, class and other variables. In relation to gender, it fails to acknowledge the cultural and socio-political factors which are involved in the production of femininity - or masculinity; and is blind to associated power (and other material) differences. In interpreting Sally's sensitivity as a stage through which she'll pass (see, for example, the gender role intensification hypothesis, Santrock, 1993), this reading also discounts the constitutive character of life experiences and evidence of significant levels of concern about weight, eating and appearance in adult women (Bordo, 1993; Orenstein, 1993). (1) Through what other lenses might one read this material? While there is significant debate about whether feminist methodologies share unique characteristics, or whether all methods can be used to both undermine and support feminism (Henwood and Pidgeon, 1995), feminist/ deconstructive approaches to interpretation are usually considered to consist - minimally - of the following (Crawford and Marecek, 1989; Peplau and Conrad, 1989; Flax, 1990; Crawford et. al., 1992): . a respect for the words and experiences of research participants, including possibly, using them as co-researchers and interpreters; . an emphasis on the effects of social and cultural contexts, including a focus on everyday life; . a recognition of the difference gender makes, and a sensitivity to other differences such as race, class and sexual preference; . a recognition of the interconnection between theory and method; . a rejection of universal facts and laws; . a refusal to take the status quo for granted, especially as it affects girls and women; and . a search for what has been suppressed in a story, beyond its manifest content. Brown and Gilligan (1990), of the Harvard Project mentioned above, take up some of these points in what they call their responsive/resisting reader's guide to narrative analysis. In this literary and clinical method, the reader is asked to make multiple readings of a narrative, each one amplifying a different voice. This manoeuvre recognises the complexity of psychic life and the multiple subject positions an individual can embrace, and enables attentiveness to voice, body, relationships and cultural context. The responsive reader focuses on the narrator's story and sense of self, and also on her reactions to them. But this responsiveness is combined with a resisting questioning of conventions of behaviour and with the identification of vulnerabilities inherent in dominant subject positions. Let's have a look at how this might work. First, we need to understand the content of Sally's narrative in its own terms. What is the story, or the action sequence that Sally describes? I'll read those parts of the text which tell the story: When I'm going out . . I never eat in front of boys . . if we go to McDonalds I might eat, um, a junior burger . . whereas with my family I'd eat a quarter pounder . . I won't eat as big or as much of things. Apparently, how much Sally eats, depends on who she is with rather than on her level of hunger. But this is not straightforward. Listen to her story about herself, which we can hear by following the "speaking I" in the narrative, which is Sally's representation of her self: - I mainly worry about what I look like when I'm going out and if I'm going to be with boys . . I never eat in front of boys because I get embarrassed. . . I don't know, just in case . . something gets left on the side of my mouth . . I just get embarrassed . . I don't eat . . I might eat . . I'd eat . . I won't eat as big or as much of things . . I don't know, I think . . I don't know, I don't think they'd really care, I think it's just me thinking . . I don't know . . I think. Here, Sally's main worry is "what I look like" and being "embarrassed" in front of boys. Perhaps eating, then, is only one activity reflecting these concerns. In not eating "as big or as much of things" when she's with boys, however, Sally is unsure about whether it's the boys thinking or saying negative things; when asked, she says she doesn't think "they'd really care" but that "it's just me thinking . . . `oh God, look at that pig!'". For Sally, a normal activity such as eating is complicated by seemingly punitive self-assessments. A responsive reading of Sally's story would also acknowledge the reader's reactions. As a woman who was once a girl, I have three. First, I experience a profound sadness that this girl, who is not at all fat, can eat normally with her family but says that with boys, even when she's really hungry, she'd eat a junior burger - something I would order for my two year-old. Second, I recall the crippling self-consciousness of my own adolescence, remember for how many years its vestiges stayed with me, and sense its role in constituting me to this day as someone with a marked sensitivity to the reactions of others - to say nothing of a critical attitude vis a vis myself. Third, just recently I found myself trying to manage a particularly lavish piece of mud cake in public, and despite wanting to eat it all, limited myself to modest mouthfuls. I was hungry, but I didn't want to look like a pig either. While Sally and I are different people, from different generations and social backgrounds, I feel a connection with her and her lived experience. A resisting, feminist reading, as advocated by Brown and Gilligan (1990) can take us further. It would move beyond an individualistic focus on the interview's content and note that Sally's embarrassment at eating in public sounds - at least in part - gendered. By broadening the interpretation to include cultural context, we can link Sally's concern and embarrassment at how she looks, with feminist analyses of the ways in which female bodies are disciplined more generally - in terms of the control of desire (in Sally's case, not eating "as big or as much of things", not having "something" on the side of her mouth); thinness, with its implications for how one looks, and which itself assumes a controlled approach to hunger and eating; and appearance generally, as a major indicator of both self-worth and value to others. In this reading, Sally's narrative gains its meaning in part from its embeddedness in dominant cultural discourses about the female body as a commodity (Bordo, 1993). As a resisting, feminist reader, I can go even more deeply into the text and make some additional comments which may verge on the subversive. . First, I wonder how embodied Sally can be - how in touch with her visceral experience of hunger, or of anything else - if her focus is on how she appears on the outside. How does Sally experience her hunger and other bodily needs? And where is the locus of her self - in her body; in her head, monitoring her body; or outside somewhere, watching "what I look like" (Debold 1991)? . Second, when Sally says, "I think it's just me thinking that, you know, they're going to say `oh God, look at that pig'", she seems to have incorporated, almost literally, some of society's dicta about appropriate feminine behaviour, so that it's no longer necessary for any boy - or anyone else - to actually disapprove. Sally is being her own keeper. At what cost is this, I wonder, to her spontaneity, her sense of self-efficacy, and her vitality? . Finally, in locating the problem in herself - "I think it's just me" - Sally ignores the fact that many girls are sensitive about appearance, eating and weight (Orenstein, 1994), which suggests that it's not just her problem. Why does she see the problem as a personal one rather than as cultural or socio-political, and what interests might this serve (Foucault, 1980)? These latter questions address what is suppressed in Sally's story - her physicality and the ways in which she seems to be being produced as a "normal" female in our society. Branching Out What can I hypothesise about femininity on the basis of this and other examples, and more generally, how justified am I in "reading" Sally's experience in these ways? In listening to Sally and many other girls like Janey and Sarah above, I have tentatively proposed a notion of normalised femininity (Esson, 1995), which refers to my current thinking about one way in which female bodies are disciplined or produced within patriarchal, hetero-sexist society. Normalised femininity represents an idealised and over-determined subject position. While no girl aligns only with this position, I would argue that most girls confront it and must come to terms with its strictures, such that their subjectivity - their sense of themselves - is to some degree constituted by it. Normalised femininity is a template with three overlapping axes: . the body-as-project, in which ideal femininity is associated with a certain kind of bodily appearance and stance - the thin, softly spoken, well-groomed and hyper-sexualised body (hence Sally's concern with eating, and Janey's (see O/H) with her "loud laugh" which may draw to her the reputation of being "a sleaze"); . control of the lived self/psyche, in which femininity is associated with emotional control and behavioural moderation, and which includes the disavowal - the knowing and then not knowing - of one's reactions, emotions and needs; suppression of vitality; and the taking of an almost moral stance vis a vis the self (so Sally doesn't acknowledge her hunger; Janey is trying to tone down her loud laugh, while also seeing the issue as "stupid"; and Sarah doesn't really care that the boy dumped her - she wasn't really upset - in fact she's not sure what she feels). . alertness to the reactions and needs of others, in which femininity involves a focus on the nurture of others, and which includes privileging others over the self; making allowances for their at times damaging behaviour (girls will say "that's just my dad - he only means it as a joke"); and being hyper-alert to their reactions (so, Sarah attends to her ex-boyfriend's needs - "it's his life, he can choose" - over and above her own feelings of upset; Sally is attentive to what others - might - think). While the embrace by girls of aspects of normalised femininity sometimes sounds like progress towards so-called "maturity", involving a more rational and "adult" way of being - and indeed that's how some girls interpret it - it also seems to involve a suppression and/or denial of the lived self. Such a position prepares girls admirably to become the carers of others, ie m/others. Of course there are other subject positions with which girls align, some strongly, and these are not infrequently in contradiction with normalised femininity. How justified am I in interpreting narratives of girls' lives in these ways? It should be obvious from my foregoing comments that I am comfortable in the realm of multiple meanings rather than absolute truths. But if there are no truths, and the views and experiences of researchers are admitted into the research process, how do we avoid unconditional subjectivity and relativism - in other words, how do we justify the interpretations we make? I want very briefly to explore two possible mechanisms for achieving this. The first approach is represented by the work of Tappan and Brown (1991), also of the Harvard Project, who in an elegantly argued article entitled "Hermeneutics and developmental psychology: toward an ethic of interpretation", draw on the literary notion of an interpretive community to justify meaning claims based on multiple textual readings. Members of an interpretive community share common reading strategies and systems of intelligibility. If one accepts this analysis, the meanings conferred on a text are rarely idiosyncratic but have their source in the interpretive community in which the reader/researcher is embedded. The second is the perhaps more familiar idea of triangulation, from social science, where a range of studies, approaches and theories are drawn on to add weight to a particular interpretation. There are at least five possible bases of triangulation: of data sources, of data types, of methods, of analysts and of theoretical perspectives (Miles and Huberman, 1994). In terms of an interpretive community, at this stage in my own work, I can only say that I believe there is such a community - of feminist scholars - to whom I and my conclusions are accountable; and I would cite the Harvard research on girls, and other similar studies, in this context (Haug, 1987; Gilligan et. al., 1990; Gilbert and Taylor, 1991; Brown and Gilligan, 1992; Crawford et. al., 1992; Orenstein, 1994). In terms of triangulation, many of these studies also lend independent theoretical and evidentiary credibility to my own work. But no method for justifying interpretations is problem free. The notions of an interpretive community and triangulation can be used to bolster rather than challenge the status quo, by privileging some meanings over others, and by not acknowledging feminist and other hitherto marginalised approaches as constituting either meaningful readings or "real" research. Who holds power in the world of meaning-making can determine which meanings are heard or recognised. Girls, Boys and Education I said in my abstract that I'd link these ideas to girls' and boys' education. This was rash, as that could be the substance of a whole paper in itself, and the time given for this paper was very short! Briefly, some very preliminary thoughts on this issue. I find myself wondering whether attempts to change girls' (or boys') subject preferences or career orientations through the provision of what is essentially encouragement - in the form of information, better timetabling, more gender-sensitive teaching and so on - under-estimate the sense in which such choices are, in our highly gendered society, inevitably linked with certain subjectivities - or ways of being. This approach also assumes that students are free to choose any available subject position(s), and are rational beings in control of their decision making. In other words, it assumes the classical liberal individual. This view ignores the productive power of normalising discourses and of those subjectivities sanctioned in our society as appropriate for girls or boys (or for those of different social and ethnic backgrounds). My own research suggests that in a significant number of girls, aspects of normalised femininity are uncontested. This is not surprising, as Foucault (1980) and others have pointed to the ways in which normalising processes themselves become submerged, so that we are often unaware of their effects. In my albeit small sample, then, many girls assert that "girls can do anything" and should be free to choose any subjects or career; but in practice their own choices tend to be fairly traditionally feminine. Unless we begin to deconstruct the ways in which subjectivities are produced, we will continue, I believe, to see relatively small changes in the ways in which the majority of girls and boys behave in the education system. Conclusion There are a number of ways in which data generated from interviews with adolescent girls can be read, some of which are explicitly and unapologetically feminist. These may be useful in generating new meanings, new hypotheses about development and socialisation, and new educational policies and practices. Note 1. To be fair, in the two major adolescent texts I consulted, one contained a chapter on gender which included a brief outline of the "feminist" approach (Santrock, 1993); the other included a series of boxes in which sex differences or the lack of them were presented (Steinberg, 1993). In both texts, concern about weight and actual eating disorders were recognised as more prevalent in females, and as perhaps having cultural causes, but these were only superficially examined. ___________ REFERENCES Bordo, S. 1993. Unbearable Weight. Berkeley: University of California Press. Brown, L.M. and Gilligan, C. 1990. "Listening for Self and Relational Voices: A Responsive/Resisting Reader's Guide". In Franklin M. (Chair) Literary Theory as a Guide to Psychological Analysis. Symposium conducted at the annual meeting of the American Psychological Association, Boston, MA, August 1990. Brown, L.M. and Gilligan, C. 1992. Meeting at the Crossroads: Women's Psychology and Girls' Development. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Brown, L.M., Argyris, D., Attanucci, J., Bardige, B., Gilligan, C., Johnston, D.K., Miller, B., Osborne, R., Tappan, M., Ward, J., Wiggins, G., and Wilcox, D. 1988. A guide to reading narratives of conflict and choice for self and relational voice (Monograph no. 1). Cambridge, MA: Project on the Psychology of Women and the Development of Girls, Harvard Graduate School of Education. Crawford, M. and Marecek, J. 1989. "Psychology Reconstructs the Female: 1968-1988". Psychology of Women Quarterly, 13, 147-165. Crawford, J., Kippax, S., Onyx, J., Gault, U., and Benton, P. 1992. Emotion and Gender: Constructing Meaning from Memory. London: Sage Publications. Debold, E. 1991. "The body at play." In Gilligan, C., Rogers, A., and Tolman, D., eds. Women, girls and psychotherapy: Reframing Resistance. Binghamton, NY: Haworth Press. Esson, K. M. 1995. "Normalised Femininity: Disciplined Subjectivity and the Performative Self". Paper presented to the Diverse Feminisms Symposium: Contemporary Postgraduate Research, organised by the Interdisciplinary Feminist Studies Network, University of Sydney, 4 November 1995. Flax, J. Thinking Fragments: Psychoanalysis, Feminism and Postmodernism in the Contemporary West. Berkeley: University of California Press. Foucault, M. 1980. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews & Other Writings 1972 - 1977. Edited by Colin Gordon. London: The Harvester Press. Gavey, N. 1989. "Feminist Poststructuralism and Discourse Analysis: Contributions to Feminist Psychology". Psychology of Women Quarterly, 13, 459-475. Gilbert, P. and Taylor, S. 1991. Fashioning the Feminine: Girls, Popular Culture and Schooling. Sydney: Allen & Unwin. Gilligan, C. Lyons, N.P., and Hanmer, T.J. 1990. Making Connections: The Relational Worlds of Adolescent Girls at Emma Willard School. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Haug, F. and others. 1987. Female Sexualisation: A Collective Work of Memory. Tr. Erica Carter. London: Verso. Henriques, J., Hollway, W., Urwin, C., Venn, C., and Walkerdine, V. 1984. Changing the Subject: Psychology, Social Relations and Subjectivity. London: Methuen. Henwood, K. and Pidgeon, N. 1995. "Remaking the Link: Qualitative Research and Feminist Standpoint Theory". Feminism and Psychology, Vol 5(1), 7-30. Miles, M. and Huberman, A.M. 1994. Qualitative data analysis. An Expanded Sourcebook. (Second edition). Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications. Orenstein, P. 1994. Schoolgirls: Young Women, Self-Esteem and the Confidence Gap. New York: Doubleday. Peplau, L.A. and Conrad, E. 1989. "Beyond Nonsexist Research". Psychology of Women Quarterly, 13, 379-400. Santrock, J. W. 1993. Adolescence: An Introduction (Fifth edition). Madison, Wisconsin: WCB Brown & Benchmark. Steinberg, L. 1993. Adolescence (Third edition). New York, McGraw-Hill, Inc. Strauss, A. and Corbin, J. 1990. Basics of Qualitative Research: Grounded Theory Procedures and Techniques, Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Tappan, M.B. and Brown, L.M. 1991. "Hermeneutics and Developmental Psychology: Toward an Ethic of Interpretation." In Azmitia, M., Kurtines, W., & Gewirtz, J. (Eds.) The role of values in psychology and human development. New York: John Wiley and Sons.