This contribution to feminism and critical studies has three goals: to “create a space” for girls who have not had a chance to speak; to adopt a cross-cultural perspective; and to explain “how girls negotiate mass culture and how girls can be active agents and creators of their self-identities” (as an antidote to viewing girls as “pawns of media culture”).

Unfortunately, these goals are not attained. First, the voices given space here are primarily those of the twelve authors (seven professors, five graduate students); even in the six studies that involve interviews or case studies of girls, little material is quoted or even summarized. Further, there is little that could count as cultural description or cross-cultural comparison. (To grasp the difficulty of doing sound interpretive anthropology, see Shweder on unpacking the cultural context of interview responses, and Sperber or Little on the philosophy of social science.) One contributor (Lemish) alludes to the difficulties in interview method and interpretation, but the majority, by omitting methodological details, show an astonishing naïveté. Exceptions are Schaffner on delinquent girls and Sato’s content-analysis of U.S. and Japanese advertisements. In general we learn little about the data collected for the non-descriptive studies—the authors, in true cultural-studies mode, jump from a few anecdotes to very abstract, sweeping conclusions.

The third goal, understanding how girls can be active agents in responding to mass culture (rather than passive dupes of the media), is likewise hardly achieved. For anyone aware of the past forty years of research in psychology, the findings presented here are unsurprising: girls do not parrot back media messages, but they do mostly adopt their cultures’ views of desirable women’s social roles. Unfortunately, several authors tend to overstate the “active” nature of girls’ responses. Herrman, e.g., states that German girls’ “engagement” with the magazine Bravo “can be seen as an act of resistance against the often stifling aspects of their realities”, even though Bravo is portrayed as promoting traditional gender roles, and most of the interviewees seem to buy into them.

These difficulties aside, I learned interesting things from half the articles. Ige’s and Levine’s studies describe details of the daily lives of Mexican migrant workers in the U.S. and of Hasidics in Brooklyn. Vered describes girls’ interactions with computers, arguing that gender stereotyping by software makers leads them to misunderstand what girls enjoy. Suzuki relates the history of the Japanese Yaoi magazine phenomenon regarding girls’ concepts of love. Schaffner reports why some adolescent girls in the U.S. become “bad”, and ways they are shortchanged by the legal system.

Problems with many of the remaining studies make it hard to find them worthwhile. First, some authors evidently felt that the simple repetition of their initial assumptions (e.g., that girls are “active agents”) would establish their validity as conclusions. Kendall’s article concerning a Zulu ceremony is so chaotically organized that it is hard for the reader to distinguish between the interviewer and the interviewed. McCarthy’s article begins promisingly as a tightly argued criticism of the well-known work of Mary Pipher, but loses logic and interest when it becomes a cinematic analysis of Luc Besson’s The Professional. For as MacCarthy herself says of the character she analyzes, she “is no more an accurate reflection of the way girls actually are than Pipher’s empirical reflections”.

In sum, I would recommend this book only to persons who are interested specifically in the topics of individual articles and who can tolerate pervasive critical-studies jargon. Readers won’t learn much about differences/similarities in the lives of girls across cultures.

As a social scientist who values both experimental and interpretive methods in studying mind and culture, I am suspicious of the disinterest in methodology and the paranoia about science exhibited by proponents of cultural studies. While one rationale is that technical knowledge and formalization lead to intellectual narrowness and a blindness to political realities (see Giroux), the result seems to be confusion about how to justify empirical claims.

References

Henry Giroux, David Shumway, Paul Smith, and James Sosnoski (no date) “The Need for Cultural Studies”.

Daniel Little (1991) Varieties of Social Explanation, Westview.

Richard Shweder with Nancy Much (1987) “Determinations of Meaning”, reprinted in Shweder’s Thinking Through Cultures (Harvard, 1991).

Dan Sperber (1996) Explaining Culture, Basil Blackwell.

Julia Jorgensen is a cognitive psychologist and psycholinguist (PhD, Princeton) with a background in anthropology (MA, U. Texas). She has taught on all three coasts (California, Illinois, New York), receiving and then abandoning tenure for adventure, love, warm weather, and an obsession with black and white photography. Her next teaching venues will be the University of Houston and Rice University.

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