Description
In the early 1990s, Bloustien (communications, U. of South Australia) began collaborating with ten Australian teenage girls on a video project that would document the ways in which they negotiated the difficulties and contradictions of growing up. The girls came from diverse social groupings and cultural backgrounds, and the project would ultimately cover a span of nearly ten years. In this text, Bloustien reports on her research, exploring such topics as the girls' use of private spaces (such as bedrooms) as places to experiment with a developing gendered identity and the importance of music fandom as the social glue for young people. Annotation ©2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
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Through the innovative methodology of asking them to record their experiences on videotape, this book offers an evocative and fascinating cross-cultural exploration into the everyday lives of a number of teenage girls from their own broad social, cultural and ethnic perspectives. The use of the video camera by the girls themselves reveals their exploration and experimentation with possible identities, highlighting their awareness that the self is not ready made but rather constituted in the process of continuous performance. The result is an active self-conscious exploration of the continuous "art" of self-making. Through their play, the teenagers are shown to strategically test out various possibilities, while keeping such explorations within the bounds of what is acceptable and permissible in their own micro-cultural worlds. The resulting material challenges previous findings in those feminist and youth anthropological studies based on too narrow a concept of class, ethnicity or populist approaches to culture.
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