The Mundanity of Girlhood: Pleasure, Play, & the Everyday

From Megan Thee Stallion coining “hot girl summer” in 2019, to the release of the internationally acclaimed film Barbie in 2023, the “girl” is trending across all social media platforms. From “girl walk,” “girl dinner,” and “girl economy,” to various “____ girl” aesthetics (e.g., “soft girl,” “VSCO girl,” “clean girl”), “girl” has become a playful attachment to the mundanity of the everyday. In a moment where seemingly everything can be “girl’d,” to much internet delight, the category is opening capacious spaces for pleasure and play, in ways that are deeply entangled with—and potentially resistant to—capitalism. What do these playful and pleasurable engagements with “girl” make possible for critically interrogating the boundaries of girlhood? And with what repercussions?

In The Black Girlhood Studies Collection, Aria Halliday highlights the “slippage” surrounding age-based conceptions of girlhood, as seen not only in harmful stereotypes conflating Black women and girls, but also in Black women’s colloquial and affirming appeals to each other as “girl.” As the boundaries of girlhood are policed in anti-Black, transphobic, ableist, and xenophobic rhetoric and policy discourse, we build on Halliday’s provocation to consider how the playful use of “girl” in everyday vernacular gestures toward the category’s elusive nature and expansive potential. This symposium takes this cultural moment as an invitation to consider how playful, everyday articulations of “girl” push the field of girlhood studies to critically reexamine how the “girl” comes into being.

Some possible sites for engagement include:

* The politics of girls’ play and pleasure
* Playful encounters in and with girls in the archive
* Literary, cultural, and mediated representations of girls, girlhoods, play, and pleasure
* Girls in/on social media and digital spaces
* Ethnographies of girls’ culture
* Critical inquiries into “girl” as a category, label, or identity
* Practices of girls’ playful and pleasurable resistance
* Girlhood’s playful semiotics, affects, and aesthetics