All About the Girl: Culture, Power, and Identity

There has been a recent flurry of books about ‘the girl’: Odd Girl Out, The Secret Lives of Girls, Fast Girls, Queen Bees and Wannabes , amongst others. Many of these titles have tackled the previously unheard of idea that girls can be mean, even aggressive. The strength of All About the Girl is that it offers a complicated portrait of girls in the twenty-first century. These are the riot grrrls, and the Spice girls, the good girls and the bad girls who are making their own girl culture and exude grrrl power. The essays cover girlhood around the world and cover such key areas as schooling, sexuality, popular culture and identity. There is a great list of contributors, including Michelle Fine (foreword), Angela McRobbie, Valerie Walkerdine, Nancy Lesko, Niobe Way and Deborah Tolman.