Principal Investigator:

Holly Blackford, PhD, Assistant Professor of English.

This pilot study is partially funded by the Center for Children and Childhood Studies

Dr. Holly Blackford presented the preliminary findings of her recently completed study of girls' reading practices, "Beyond Identity Politics: How Girls Produce Meaning from Stories," to associates of the Center for Children and Childhood Studies. Although she expected the reader responses to focus on issues of female development, she was astonished to find that formal rather than sociological characteristics of literary texts take precedence in the girls' accounts of reading stories and seeing films. While girls deny identification with male or female (human) characters, they voice sophisticated identifications with the omniscient narrator/spectator, genre, narrative structure, and thematic unities of texts.

Blackford uses the girls' responses to critique the assumptions of identity politics criticism, which framed her initial research questions and which remain the cornerstone of many feminist, multicultural, psychoanalytic, and cultural critics. The assumption of identity politics critics is that a reader will identify with a character that shares his/her identity category; this assumptions shapes the common logic that girls need strong female role models. While girls self-consciously speak of real women and female characters in non-literary stories as role models, they eschew a role model approach to literature and define literary texts as aesthetic spaces through which they can transcend the female-identified person that they are in life. While girls define stories in books, films, and plays as aesthetic spaces through which they can encounter a radical experience and a social world distinct from their own, they do, however, identify with animal characters in both literary and non-literary texts.

In her presentation, Blackford demonstrated the ways in which girls feel a dispersal of self when reading literature about human social worlds, yet embrace an embodied identification with animal characters in both literary and non-literary narratives. Girls stress the body, movement, defense mechanisms, and violence of the animals that they imagine becoming, providing an absolute contrast to their preference for aesthetic form over identification with human character(s) when they read literature representing human worlds.

For more information, please contact Dr. Holly Blackford at blackfor@camden.rutgers.edu