I just saw an article in my local paper, The Star Tribune, about an art show/film screening being put on tomorrow night by adolescent girls in which their original works convey their feelings about harmful and stereotypical media messages about girls. This seems like a fantastic project in so many ways. Although this is a local group being featured, they are part of a national organization called Project Girl, which was founded a couple of years ago with the goal of empowering girls to critically understand mediated messages geared toward them and to counteract the effect of those messages by producing their own art and programming about them. This again reminds me of M.C. Kearney's book, "Girls Make Media," that I discussed in an earlier post, and I love that this organization places the girls directly in the role of producer rather than consumer or even analyst (though of course, analyzing is an important part of the process). In a lot of cases, the programs are happening in conjunction with YMCAs so girls from many racial and class backgrounds tend to be involved, which is also cool and frankly, very important.
It looks like Lyn Mickel Brown is the keynote speaker for this event. She and Carol Gilligan co-authored one of my favorite scholarly books about girls (and one of the earliest ones that I know of since it came out in 1993), "Meeting at the Crossroads: Women's Psychology and Girls' Development," which was this great ethnographic portrait of girls experiencing adolescence.
I still have to read her more recent "Packaging Girlhood" that she co-wrote with Sharon Lamb (I have to admit that the language used to market this book really turned me off: "A parent Guide to protect girls from marketers and media." I realize this is probably just the publisher's way to market the book to worried parents, and that makes me wonder if parents need a book to protect them from publishers' and the media's overzealous marketing efforts that play on their own fears. I'm not sure if you followed that, but basically, the marketing of this book about marketing bugs me.)
As much as I'd personally be psyched to see Mikel Brown, I wonder if the girls themselves might have been better served by bringing in Diablo Cody or Ani Difranco, given the mission of the project. Just a thought.
(Photo above is from The Star Tribune and shows some of the film producers for this Project Girl event.)
No comments:
Post a Comment