About

Welcome to our girls’ culture digital exhibit! This is an ongoing collaborative project by Rutgers-Camden’s first ever undergrad girlhood studies course and both Bridgewater State University’s First Year Seminar course “GIRL WORLD” and Senior Seminar II course “Girl Activism.”

For the final assignment, each GIRL WORLD student was tasked with picking an artifact they thought belonged in a digital exhibit on girls’ culture. They were challenged to do a deep dive into the history and construction of the artifact, the artifact’s accompanying politics, and explore how the artifact related to our class on girlhood studies and constructions of girlhood more broadly.

A cultural artifact is defined as: anything created by humans which gives information about the culture of its creator and users; something that is familiar to a significant amount of the population, particularly the masses or “common” people. As you will see, the results of the selected artifacts were diverse! While each were distinct in their own way, making different arguments and focusing on different aspects of the politics of girlhood, they loosely fell into 5 overarching categories: characters, movies, dolls, media, and clothing.

Most importantly, each artifact reflects the main focus of our course this past semester: how girlhood is a complex, complicated, and multi-faceted experience that deserves critical attention and analysis. Many artifacts detail the long history of only understanding girls through binaries of existence ~ as either/or beings, easily and simply understood. As we know, life is much more complicated than that. And thus, so is girlhood. Girls’ culture, and girlhood at large, are major keys in understanding life at the intersections of gender, race, class, age, ability, location - and are deserving and worthy of critical thought.

In addition, our Girl Activism students collaborated on a podcast series based on Sarah Ahmed’s idea of the willful girl. Check out the page for more info!

Girlhood is as vast as the universe! As such, the chosen title “The Girl-Verse” reflects the limitless and unbounded potential of not only the study of girlhood, but of girls themselves.

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Many thanks to the contributors to this exhibit - their hard work all semester made this project a reality.