I'm Gonna Make You Look Weird: Preteen Girls' Subversive Gender Play

Abstract

Despite widespread argument that contemporary girls are limited by the boundaries of normative femininity and negatively influenced by patriarchal and overly sexualized images of females in Western cultures, a growing number of ethnographic accounts of girl culture suggest that girls often subvert, resist, and transgress normative/iconic femininity and undo gender limitations and taboos. These observations, which are supported by Judith Butler’s theory of gender as performance and her concept of gender parody in particular, frame my exploration of preadolescent girls’ subversive gender play as manifested through caricature drawing2 and consuming alternative products that enable the crossing of gender boundaries. These girls’ cultural productions and participation offer localized and nuanced understandings of how dominant gender ideas are challenged and disrupted, and how such disruption blurs the boundaries between the personal and the political.