Girlhood Studies on the Move

For well over three decades, Girlhood Studies, as a unique area of critical inquiry with close ties to third-wave feminism, has provided a scholarly forum for creating and disseminating research “on issues about girls, for girls and by girls” (Reid-Walsh and Bratt 2011: 9). The field of Girlhood Studies encourages exploring and developing detailed understandings of girls’ diverse realities while drawing attention to intersections of age, gender, and generation, among other facets of identity, that shape girls’ identities and experiences. It offers an analytical framework to confront essentialized notions of girl and girlhood and challenge conceptualizations of appropriate girlhood grounded in post-feminist, neoliberal, and neocolonial ideologies and operationalized in political and social structures (Kearney 2009; Pomerantz 2020). However, criticisms of the field have been numerous with respect to the still limited attention and space awarded to the lives and voices of non-white, non-Western, non-middle-class girls as well as to the imbalanced impacts of structures of power based on race, class, ethnicity, religion, sexuality, ability, and the like. As a result, there have been calls to broaden Girlhood Studies to include greater attention to girls’ voices, particularly those marginalized by social location, identity, circumstance, and/or geography, to incorporate meaningful consideration of the political, socio-economic, legal, and cultural contexts of girls’ lives, and to explore how girls and young women interact with and are treated in different social institutions (Gourdine et al. 2021; Kearney 2009). Going a long way to answering these calls are recent issues of Girlhood Studies including Sandrina de Finney and colleagues’ 2019 Special Issue on reimagining girlhood in white settler-carceral states, the 2023 Special Issue on girls in Africa guest edited by Marla Jaksch et al., and Salsabel Almanssori and Muna Saleh's Special Issue on the experiences of girls and young women who wear the hijab. We intended this issue to contribute further to greater inclusivity and expansion of the field.

Our consideration of the experiences, contexts, and actions of girls and young women on the move is inspired by Catherine Vanner's (2019) treatment of transnational girlhood. Vanner explains that exploring transnational girlhood involves “including analysis that connects global structures and localized experiences within nation-states, intersectional lenses that prioritize the voices of traditionally marginalized women from the Global South, and a critical counter-hegemonic call for global systemic change” (117). Providing detailed attention to the local and temporal experiences of girls living forced displacement, migration, and (re)settlement serves not only to illuminate the specificities of individual girls’ realities but also enables analysis of the influence of larger global structures—such as neoliberalism, neocolonialism, capitalism, and patriarchy—and international institutions and instruments associated with migration, nationhood, and citizenship. Doing so offers fruitful opportunities to consider girls’ autonomy, agency, and action while simultaneously taking account of the influences of structures and institutions beyond their control. Here, intersectionality provides a critical lens through which to analyse how such structures and institutions are experienced differently by various individuals or groups depending on how they identify or are identified based on race, class, gender, ability, age, nationality and so on.

Integrating girls’ own perspectives of their experience remains at the heart of Girlhood Studies (Mitchell and Reid-Walsh 2009). Certainly, this remains the case for gaining insights into girls’ experiences of forced displacement, migration, and (re)settlement. Privileging girls’ voices in research and scholarship provides opportunities to interrogate and challenge static, rigid discourses of girls’ victimization and agency, or power. A long-standing tradition in Girlhood Studies has been the exploration of seemingly competing discourses naming girls as bad or vulnerable and in need of rescue or powerful and autonomous (Gonick 2006; Pomerantz 2020). Discursive treatment of forcibly displaced girls, especially those from the Global South, is perfectly representative of this dichotomization. Whereas some girls are celebrated for their exceptionalism—their abilities to escape persecution or conflict while pursuing excellence in education, sport, or activism, for example—others are defined by the risks they face (Switzer et al. 2016; Taft 2020). Such discourses may serve to inspire national or global agendas or quell public anxieties (Taft 2020), but they may also contribute to making invisible the diversity of girls’ voices and the shifting nature of their experiences. As noted by Rachel Larkin (2022), “as girls move, they are actively navigating the shifting ways their bodies are seen, and the (dis)connections with the meanings they themselves attach to their bodies.” Underscoring the importance of listening to and learning from girls, she adds that “there are multiple and complex reasons for girls’ migration, and there is no single story to be told” (51).

Contributions

Our hope, when we put out our call for this Special Issue, was to attract articles exploring the experiences and representations of girls on the move through a range of methodological, theoretical, and disciplinary perspectives. Coming from backgrounds in social work and education, we shared an interest in raising awareness of the varied experiences, circumstances, actions, representations, and contexts of girls on the move. Developing and disseminating nuanced understandings of girls’ complex, diverse, and shifting realities as they simultaneously navigate girlhood and migration seemed to us an ideal point of departure from which to reflect on and enhance interventions aimed at accompanying girls living through forced displacement, migration, and (re)settlement. Without denying or ignoring the obvious risks, dangers, and disadvantages facing forcibly displaced girls, we expressed in our call an interest in articles that considered girls’ active participation in their forced migration. We saw this as an important avenue for confronting homogenous and essentializing notions of forcibly displaced girls, especially poor, racialized girls in the Global South, as passive victims in need of rescue and protection (Desai 2016). Correspondingly and recognizing that context—geographical, temporal, cultural, legal, and sociopolitical—influences girls’ experiences of forced mobility, we sought articles that would draw attention to and explore the intersectional complexity shaping their migratory journeys. While seeking articles highlighting girls’ different ways of enacting agency, resistance, and resilience, we were equally interested in articles illuminating the structural and systemic barriers posing limits to their freedom to speak, act, move, or simply be.

In our call for proposals, we invited authors to consider several questions, four of which received significant attention:

• What are the varied experiences, actions, and movements of forcibly displaced girls?

• How do diverse and intersecting aspects of identity shape girls’ experiences and navigation of forced displacement, migration, and (re)settlement?

• How are forcibly displaced girls portrayed, imagined, or represented in public, popular and/or professional discourses?

• How do girls talk about or express in other ways their journeys of forced displacement, migration, and (re)settlement?

We begin this issue with two articles that interrogate prevailing notions of refugee girlhood through a consideration of artistic expression. In “Ungrateful Girl Refugees in Lore Segal's Other People's Houses and Vesna Maric's Bluebird,” Carly McLaughlin examines two narratives of refugee girls in Britain during earlier historical periods—Lore Segal's Other People's Houses, in which the author recounts her experiences as a Kindertransportee in the late 1930s and Vesna Maric's memoir, Bluebird, that details her journey as a teenage refugee escaping the Bosnian war in the early 1990s. McLaughlin provides a reading of both texts that contests and offers complexity to narratives of refugeehood associated with either empowered or victimized girlhood. In doing so, she challenges hegemonic scripts of displaced girlhood, ultimately disrupting broader narratives of nationhood and citizenship commonly reinforced by such stories. McLaughlin contends that when viewed from the perspectives of girlhood and refugeetude, Segal's and Maric's narratives offer alternative ways of envisioning refugee girls and their roles in and beyond the nation, and, more specifically, the British nation. In her article, “Staging Presence for Spatial Dignity: Exploring Representations of Refugee Girlhood,” Margaret Ravenscroft draws from a feminist refugee epistemology to explore the figuration and physical presence of Little Amal, a 12-foot Syrian girl puppet and the central character in the immersive public theater production titled The Walk. Positioning Little Amal in contrast to another symbol of refugee girlhood—popstar M.I.A.—Ravenscroft challenges typically “superfluous and stunted representations of sanctuary-seeking girls.” Through proposing a departure from such conventional representations of refugee girls, the author invites a deeper consideration of girls’ “creative and complex lifeworlds.”

The third article shifts attention to a consideration of art as a medium for accompanying girls coping with their realities of forced migration. In “Girls Rule Art! Exploring Forcibly Displaced Girls’ Engagement in Arts-Based Programs,” Ashley Cureton explores the potential of arts-based programs to respond to certain emotional, relational, and educational needs of forcibly displaced girls. Drawing from data collected through a series of in-depth interviews with high-school girls who had settled in a Midwest city in the United States following a period of forced migration, Cureton highlights the benefits of girls’ participation in arts-based activities such as dance, drama, and theater. The author adds her voice to a burgeoning literature that considers the value of arts-based programs as mechanisms for supporting forcibly displaced girls in establishing connections with other girls sharing similar cultural identities, coping with feelings of homesickness and loss, and developing resilience and agency.

Providing further insights into forcibly displaced girls’ experiences of resettlement in the United States, Ida Fadzillah Leggett, in “Paperwork Selves and Arab Refugee Girls’ Experiences of Resettlement in Tennessee,” exposes and interrogates competing perspectives relating to refugee girlhood of Arabic-speaking refugee girl students and educators at a Tennessee high school. Basing her observations on interviews with school personnel and refugee girls, Leggett reveals important divergence in perspectives between the two groups. Whereas educators tended to “highlight exotic stereotypes of innocence, ignorance, and a lack of educational history,” the Arabic-speaking refugee girls’ narratives routinely demonstrated girls’ strong sense of identity as young women with deep connections to real places and histories. Girls also expressed integrated visions of themselves as transnational young women with global possibilities.

The next two articles are based on empirical studies documenting forcibly displaced girls’ experiences of gender-based and structural violence at various points in their migratory journeys including during their processes of (re)settlement. In “Wartime, Flight, and Resettlement Realities of Unaccompanied Eritrean Girls in Israel,” Maya Fennig and Myriam Denov report on a qualitative study that sought to provide insights into the realities of war-affected Eritrean adolescent girls and young women who migrated to Israel. Privileging the words of the study participants, Fennig and Denov provide insightful and touching accounts that reveal how structural and symbolic forms of violence intersect with gender and age to shape Eritrean girls’ migratory journeys. While noting that such violence remained “embedded in their everyday lives” even once apparently settled in Israel, the authors refuse to categorize these girls solely as victims and instead include a focus on their active strategies of resistance in the face of violence and discrimination. In “Intersectional Barriers Faced by Urban Somali Refugee Girls in Uganda,” Manya Kagan and Winnie Nakatudde bring specific attention to the barriers encountered by Somali Muslim refugee girls in their efforts to access education and integrate into Ugandan society. Based on a comparative analysis of qualitative data collected from interviews with Somali refugee girls living in Kampala, Kagan and Nakatudde provide an expanded and nuanced portrait of the challenges to integration experienced by these girls. Contesting homogenized visions of such challenges, the authors emphasize the pertinence of an intersectional understanding that takes account of girls’ experiences of gender and ethnicity that occur simultaneously with the structural constraints of the host environment. The authors conclude the article with a call for local responses to girls’ complicated access to education and social inclusion that are responsive to their intersectional identities and contexts.

The last article takes an artifact-based approach to exploring the influence of political and cultural structures and expectations, as they intersect with gender, on a young woman's experience of forced displacement. In “Gender, Ethnicity, and Individual Resistance: Arpenik Aleksanyan's Diaries of Stalinist Deportations,” Ella Rossman provides a reading of Sibirskiy dnevnik (that translates to Siberian Diary) written by a young Soviet-Armenian woman exiled to Siberia with her family in one of the late Stalinist deportations of ethnic minorities. Rossman treats Arpenik's diary as both “an historical source [that reveals] gendered experiences of forced displacement” and as autobiographical writing that provides “a glimpse into late Stalinist girlhood and young women's subjectivity.” The author's analysis of the diary is revelatory in bringing attention to “Arpenik's seemingly contradictory integration of Stalinist ideologies of the so-called new woman and nationalities as a basis for self-construction as well as individual resistance to persecution.”

The visual essay and the creative piece with which we conclude this issue serve to amplify the voices and perspectives of young women on the move. Together, these contributions form a cohesive narrative, combining personal storytelling and artistic representation to deepen our understanding of the diverse and intricate realities faced by refugee girls and young women. In “Girl on the Move from Syria: A Visual Essay,” Meghri Bakarian narrates her personal experience of forced migration, outlining the challenges and triumphs encountered along the way as she constructs a new life and identity in Canada. The author/photographer reflects on episodes from her earlier life and details aspects of her migrant journey. Through a combination of photos and text, she invites her audience to witness her thoughtful introspection on her coinciding journeys of forced migration and transition from girlhood to womanhood—both set within shifting sociopolitical and geographic contexts.

In the award-winning¹ comic illustration, “For Me, a Border,” Lucy Hunt and Parwana Amiri provide artistic expression to the reality of borders as being far more than mere physical entities. A collaboration between two women—both artists, one an academic from the Global North and one a poet and activist exiled from her Afghan homeland—the images provide an eloquent reflection on borders as obstacles to girls’ and young women's full and equitable access to voice, rights, space, and action.

Moving Forward

Looking back to when we embarked on this Special Issue, we recall being both overwhelmed and humbled by the profound challenges associated with forced displacement, migration, and (re)settlement—particularly in light of our social and physical positions of relative privilege and safety. From these vantage points, we set forth with the overarching vision of shedding light on the intricacies of girls’ experiences, perspectives, opportunities, and activism in the context of being on the move. However grandiose it may appear, our aim was to raise awareness, believing that such awareness could, in some way, contribute to inspiring social and political action and it remains steadfast. In fact, our aspirations for sparking meaningful action have only intensified over time, fueled by the ongoing impact of what seems to be an ever-increasing global tide of conflict and disaster. The urgency of our undertaking has become even more apparent as we witness the accumulating effects on displaced individuals, particularly girls and young women, who navigate these tumultuous circumstances. As guest editing this Special Issue comes to a close, we are reminded that our commitment to raising awareness and inspiring action is not only enduring but also essential in the face of persistent challenges and emerging crises. We hope that the collective voices and insights shared in this issue will inspire positive change and foster empathy, understanding, and advocacy for the rights and well-being of girls affected by forced displacement. We invite readers to pursue the discussions introduced in this issue and to continue to produce, collaborate on, learn from, and be inspired by scholarship inclusive of the many voices and experiences of girls on the move.