gURL Scenes and Grrrl Zines: The Regulation and Resistance of Girls in Late Modernity

Abstract

This article explores the images of ‘girlpower’ and ‘girls as risk-takers’ as important sources for the analysis and management of young women's experiences and behaviours under late modernity. It then focuses on what is known as the grrrlzine culture as a site where these contemporary images of girlhood are challenged and deconstructed. It is argued that grrrlzines create a community for young women within which they can participate in debates about the meaning of girlhood under late modernity. Grrrlzines offer spaces for young women to discuss and organize among themselves, and in particular to wrestle with and parody contemporary images of girlhood. In doing so, they help to complicate and advance feminist youth studies approaches to the role of the public/private split in girls’ cultures, places for youth resistance and the ‘problem’ of girls’ silence and invisibility in the context of late modernity. The article examines the ways grrrlzines appear to be complicit in the silencing of young women by insisting on expression only within liminal spaces. However, it is suggested that this constitutes an important attempt on the part of some young women to evade new regulatory regimes that operate primarily by inciting them to speak.