Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Although boys engage in more fights than girls, there has been a growing amount of research devoted to understanding the aggressive and antisocial behavior of girls. Unlike boys, girls tend to engage in relational aggression, which includes anything from name-calling to spreading rumors to violent threats. Because of the elusive nature of this type of aggression, it may be less easily quantifiable. This paper interrogates girl fighting from a qualitative approach to help better understand the meaning of girl violence in public high schools, and to examine the perception that (despite statistics) “girls are worse.” This research reveals how fighting among girls can sometimes be a site for reinforcing a normative feminine role of the overly “emotional” girl, at the same time it can be constructed as a transgression of such ideals, where girl fighters are “tomboys” and “tough girls.” This is often intricately connected to sexuality, where girls who fight are sometimes perceived to be “gay girls.” This kind of homophobic name-calling may in turn work to reinforce heterosexism and homophobia in schools. This paper also examines how fights are tied to race, where the construction of “ghetto girls” can work to reinforce racist ideologies about violence in schools. Finally, this paper suggests that girl fighting can also be a site of situated agency, where girls fight to gain a sense of power and respect among their cohorts.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: The purpose of this study was to discover whether teenage girls act as gendered beings online –or in other words, are they embodied while online? The proponents of disembodiment assert that cyberspace is an emancipatory sphere for women because gender does not exist online, while the proponents of embodiment assert that “the new cyberspaces may in fact be gendered spaces” because the internet “is reflective of our social values as a whole, and since gender bias exists in the broader culture, it surely exists in cyberspace” (Gurak “On Bob” 12).

Informed by the feminist paradigm, participant observation of an online bulletin and message board was conducted --each of the boards are on an online girls’ magazine web site. It was assumed here that because such magazines are the most popular web sites among teenage girls, they would be the best type of online content in which gendered behavior can be observed (jmm.com).

During the data collection period, the users of the bulletin and message board under study acted as gendered beings. This finding supports research started in the early 1990s by Herring, and radical cyberfeminism, according to which embodiment, or gendered behavior, online is natural. Radical cyberfeminism asserts that the internet merely reflects current social values as a whole. On a larger scale, the finding of this study supports the feminist belief that gender is socially constructed.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Proponents of female responsive services for juvenile female offenders have long asserted the benefits of women working with girls, preferably in all female environments, but are there unidentified implications of such an environment for both the girls and the women? Using results from a case study of specialized juvenile probation, this paper examines parallel issues faced by female delinquents and their female staff when working in an all female environment and the implications these issues have for the creation of effective services for this population.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: While video games are an important site to consider for increasing gender equality in computer programming, most available research focuses on girls’ consumption of video games, rather than their participation as video game designers. In this paper, I report findings from my participant-observation of a video game design workshop for adolescent girls hosted by the Girl Scouts in Austin, Texas. These findings are part of a larger project about girls and technological literacy. In my analysis, I draw from a situated learning perspective, which sees individual development as influenced by cultural factors A situated approach looks at the context of girls’ technological learning and asks how girls’ engagement in cultural practices allow them to take on different types of technological identities, such as computer programmers, Web designers, or videographers. Construction of “tech-savvy” identities is especially important for understanding gender equality and technological literacy because girls often report that they are disenchanted with the culture of technology. In my analysis of the workshop, I consider the context of girls’ learning, including how the Girl Scouts created a culture of game design and how girls took on different identities as game designers through their participation. While my analysis is limited to one instance of girls’ learning video game design, I argue that a situated approach, which looks at the range of ways that girls identify as game designers, can complement available research on gender and video games

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Pornography has been the subject of multiple academic discourses (Wicke, 1993). Studies range from the effects of porn on sexual violence (for a review of these studies see Segal, 1993) to assessments of the relationship between porn and culture/society (see for example Kipnis, 1996). Lesbian porn is a particularly interesting subgenre that has received some, though the Internet version less (one exception being Balderson, 2004), academic attention. Images of lesbians in porn have been created and used by both lesbian/bisexual female audiences and heterosexual male audiences. Porn featuring lesbian sexuality, therefore, lends itself to diametric readings, purposes and implications for minority representation. For example, the lesbian produced porn magazine on our backs “brings lesbian desire above ground, affirming its legitimacy and encouraging lesbian women to find and embrace what pleases them sexually” (Henderson, 1999, p. 509). The “girl-on-girl” scenes produced in pornography for male audiences, on the other hand “raise questions of authenticity in a community whose members are wary of images- particularly sexual ones- that somehow refer to us but which we perceive to be unintended for our pleasure” (Henderson, 1999, p. 508). How images of lesbians in pornography are situated as either for straight male audiences or lesbian audiences has not been thoroughly investigated, particularly in the realm of internet pornography. To that end, this study analyzes the visual and textual content of 2 meta-porn sites, Penisbot and Cyberdyke, and six sites each of those aimed at a lesbian/bisexual female audience or a heterosexual male audience.