Growing up and rising up: Teenage girl activists and social movements in the Americas

Abstract

Teenage girls are active participants and leaders in a variety of social movements, organizing around a wide range of political issues, yet they are often invisible. Located at the intersection of the literatures on girlhood, social movements, youth civic engagement, globalization, and transnational feminism, this dissertation illuminates the experiences and perspectives of these uniquely positioned agents of social change. A multi-site, transnational ethnography, the study is based on in-depth interviews and participant observation with 75 high-school-aged girl activists in the San Francisco Bay Area, Mexico City, Caracas, Buenos Aires, and Vancouver. The first half of the dissertation explores how teenage girls construct activist identities. After addressing girls' routes into activism and their conceptions of what it means to be an activist, I demonstrate that girl activists refuse the common adult view that they must be extraordinary individuals. I look at their complex relationship to girlhood, arguing that they view girlhood as both diametrically opposed to activist identity and simultaneously supporting it, and explore how they construct social movement standing and authority for young people. The second half of the dissertation examines girl activists' social movement strategies and collective political practices. Despite the many differences in girls' ideologies, experiences, contexts, and tactics, there are several commonalities in their approaches to activism, including their commitment to learning and the ongoing process of education, their interest in building participatory activist communities, and their spirit of hopefulness and optimism. These three tendencies in girls' activism reflect some of the most fruitful and dynamic elements of contemporary adult radicalism -- elements developed by other groups historically subordinated in both dominant and oppositional politics. Faced with their own experiences of exclusion and tokenization, constructing activist identities in complex relation to the categories of girlhood and youth, and emerging as political actors in the context of an international upsurge in prefigurative and process-oriented social movements, teenage girl activists draw upon and contribute to this configuration of open-ended and horizontal radical political practices in the Americas. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by addressing your request to ProQuest, 789 E. Eisenhower Parkway, P.O. Box 1346, Ann Arbor, MI 48106-1346. Telephone 1-800-521-3042; e-mail: disspub@umi.com