Abstract

The Girl House is a tiny home: a 14’x7’ traveling house on wheels, a mobile art installation, storytelling vehicle, and a collective biography. Inside the house are stories, memories, reflections, poems and prose about girlhood, growing-up and learning sex within rape culture. This thesis locates the physical work of the Girl House Project in the theoretical landscape of girlhood studies. Situated in foundational gender theory work by Judith Butler this project understands gender as a constructed identity, and girlhood as a moment of gender production. The house, grounded in feminist methodology, is a collective biography: an expansion on how we comprehend the “girl identity” and an effort to illuminate the production of girlhood as one rooted in sexual injustice, an experience that is curated reproduced and maintained within the performance of gender and the reality of coming-of-age.

My work introduces four categories of analysis derived from themes weaved throughout the narratives of the project: 1) Orgasm and Sexual Awakening: Pleasure as a site of analysis, 2) “I Didn’t Say no.. But I Didn’t say yes either” Passivity and the normalization of trauma, 3) Letters to my teenage self- reflections on Girlhood, consciousness and reclamation, and 4) What does reclamation look like? This paper analyzes the narratives submitted to The Girl House Project and argues that they illuminate the political and social potential of storytelling and reveal sexual injustice as a unifying facet of the girl identity.

First Advisor

Greta Austin

Date of Completion

Fall 12-23-2020

Degree Type

Article

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