Marnina Gonick
Biographic Data
| ID | 107997 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Marnina Gonick |
| GIVEN NAMES | Marnina |
| FAMILY NAME | Gonick |
| SIGNATURE | GONICK M |
| AFFILIATIONS | Pennsylvania State University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-5801-7030 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 26 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 102 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 25 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1997 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
A Seat at the Table: Recalling the Promises of Girl Activism and Advocacy
This Special Issue, “A Seat at the Table: Recalling the Promises of Girl Activism and Advocacy,” emerged from a roundtable discussion during the 2023 National Women's Studies Association (NWSA) Conference in Baltimore, Maryland, about working with girls in spaces of political and socio-cultural import. The title of the session was inspired by “A Seat at the Table that I Set: Beyond Social Justice Allies” by Toby Jenkins (2009), in which she explo…
Re) Stor(y)ing Class: Working-Class Women, Smartness, and Higher Education
For Canadian-born working-class women, university is often characterized through the axioms of 'expanding one's mind,' 'bettering one's life,' and 'saving oneself from a life of hardship.' Associated with these adages is 'smartness,' a signature orientation of the academy and a designation that has often excluded the working-class. Our article asks: What does it mean to be a working-class woman in higher education in Canada? How do working-class …
The Saint Mary’s Rape Chant: A Discourse Analysis of Media Coverage
In September 2013 student leaders at Saint Mary’s University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, used a chant about the rape of underage girls as part of an Orientation Week activity for new students. The incident garnered national and international media coverage. In this article, we analyze and critique a selection of Canadian media articles published in the weeks after the rape chant was used. We draw on feminist analysis of post-feminism and the sexuali…
Engaging girls with disabilities through cellphilming: Reflections on participatory visual research as a means of countering violence in the Global South
Despite the fact that most countries have ratified the United Nations' Convention on the Rights of the Child, girls with disabilities experience multiple forms of violence and oppression. Using a critical approach to arts-based research, we argue that while disabled girls experience multiple vulnerabilities due to the structural conditions which exposed them to violence, the use of participatory visual methods allowed them to reframe their storie…
We Want Freedom Not Just Safety’: Biography of a Girlfesto as a Strategic Tool in Youth Activism
Girls are increasingly visible as activists demanding social change, equity and justice. Yet communication between girls and policymakers is fraught with challenges over how to translate young people’s knowledge into policy change. This article traces the history of the manifesto as a form for the marginalized to articulate new social visions, drawing on the Riot grrrl manifestos as examples of this genre. It describes the creation of the first G…
Unsettling research versus activism: How might critical disability studies disrupt traditional research boundaries
This article responds to the call for producing activist-oriented scholarship by engaging with theoretical and methodological approaches that explore the inclusion of women and girls with disabilities in Vietnam. We consider possibilities for connecting different forms of knowledge and activism by reflecting on research practices designed to foster social change. Specifically, we ask: how can critical disability studies be more reflexive about kn…
Schooling the mean girl: A critical discourse analysis of teacher resource materials
This paper is a critical discourse analysis of teacher resource materials about girl bullying. The ‘mean girl’ phenomenon has been widely taken up as one of the current key narratives about schools and school girls. This paper argues for the importance of understanding the origins of this discourse within behavioural psychology, which coined the term ‘relational aggression’ to describe what is purported to be a uniquely female form of aggression.…
Producing Neoliberal Subjectivities: Literacy, Girlhood, and Collective Biography
This article takes up the question of literacy and its relationships to gender, race, class sexuality, and neoliberal ideologies. It traces the various feminist critiques of the relation between gender and literacy. It uses the memory stories of learning to write written by young American women, in the context of a collective biography exercise done in a women's studies university classroom. I analyze the stories for what they reveal about neolib…
Ruptures in the Heterosexual Matrix Through Teenage Flows and Multiplicities
This article analyzes a series of stories and artworks that were produced in a collective biography workshop. It explores Judith Butler's concept of the heterosexual matrix combined with a Deleuzian theoretical framework. The article begins with an overview of Butler's concept of the heterosexual matrix and her theorizations on how it might be disrupted. It then suggests how a Deleuzian framework offers other tools for analyzing these ruptures at…
Entanglements: Art-making, Becoming Girl and Collective Biography
This article analyses a set of stories and artworks that were produced in the context of a collective biography workshop. A Deleuzian framework is used to explore the entanglements that are produced through a cross-reading of different kinds of texts, each taking up the question of girlhood subjectivities. The analysis focuses on the contradiction and indeterminacy of meaning-making in the research process. The aim is to investigate how different…
Collective Biography: An Introduction
In June 2011, seven feminist academics gathered to spend a week working together on a collective biography workshop in a small resort town, called Hawk’s Nest, in New South Wales, Australia. Some of us were senior faculty with prior experience with the methodology of collective biography, others were freshly minted or about to be minted PhDs who were totally new to the research methodology. Some of us knew each other from other contexts, and othe…
Old-Fashioned and Forward-Looking”: Neo-Liberalism and Nostalgia in the Daring Books for Girls
In this paper, we examine The Daring Book for Girls and its follow-ups for their constructions of gender. We suggest that, as examples of how neo-liberalism finds its way into notions of proper girlhood, the books provide intentional and unintentional “lessons” to their readers in how to perform themselves in these times. In both the American and the Australian edition of the initial text, girls are instructed in complex ways to be the right kind…
Collective Biography and the Question of Difference
This article engages with the research method of collective biography. We are particularly interested in what the question of difference brings to bear on the collective biography process. The aim of embodied writing in the collective biography process is "to tell the memory in such a way that it is vividly imaginable by others, such that those others can extend their own imaginable experience of being in the world through knowing the particulari…
Indigenizing girl power: The Whale Rider , decolonization, and the project of remembering
This article considers the intersection of girlhood, agency, and indigenousness through a reading of the internationally renowned film Whale Rider. I suggest that Whale Rider presents a double project that resymbolizes girlhood as it also produces a "decolonizing of the screen." On the one hand the film resonates with what emerged in the 1990s as the assertion of "girl power" and the notion of a new, active, powerful and agentic femininity. On th…
Rethinking Agency and Resistance: What Comes After Girl Power
With the current proliferation of images and narratives of girls and girlhood in popular culture, many ‘truths’ about girls circulate with certainty. Amongst the aims of this Special Issue is to examine critically these ‘confi dent characterizations’ (Trinh 1989), to trace the social conditions which produce these ‘truths’ along with the public fascination with girls and to analyze critically the eff ects of these ‘truths’ in the lives of young g…
The Teaches of Peaches: Performance, Hybridity and Resistance
Girl Number 20 revisited: Feminist literacies in new hard times
This paper revisits the question of ‘voice’ in the context of neo‐liberal social and educational reform. ‘Voice’ has been one of the key concepts of feminist and critical pedagogies in the theory and practice of producing social transformation. I argue in this paper, that the political effectiveness of this concept needs to be reconsidered at a time when the incitement to speak is one of the means by which neo‐liberal subjectivities are produced …
Between ?Girl Power? and ?Reviving Ophelia: Constituting the Neoliberal Girl Subject
This article investigates two of the discourses currently organizing meanings of girls and girlhood. These are the multi-stranded "Girl Power" and "Reviving Ophelia," which both emerged in the early 1990s. I argue that "Girl Power" and "Reviving Ophelia" set up an intriguing illustration of not only competing definitions of femininity but also how discourses may interpellate feminine/feminist subjects in a non-unitary way. At first glance, the tw…
Who are the participants? Rethinking representational practices and writing with heterotopic possibility in qualitative inquiry
This paper draws on Foucault's notion of heterotopia to ask a series of questions about the important link between the crisis of representation in qualitative research and new theorizations of the ‘subject’ within poststructural feminist research. Reiterating Foucault's question, ‘what is it impossible to think and what kind of impossibility are we faced with here,’ the authors wonder how naming practices that mobilize social categories determine…
Young Femininity: Girlhood, Power and Social Change
This text draws on international work to do with femininity, identity and youth cultures to explore how girlhood is defined and portrayed in contemporary theoretical and popular discourses, and to examine how young women from different social backgrounds and cultural contexts negotiate their gendered identities. Encompassing topics such as sexuality, the body, friendship, family, education, work and citizenship, this is an appealing and wide-rang…
VII. The Mean Girl Crisis: Problematizing Representations of Girls Friendships
VII. The Mean Girl Crisis: Problematizing Representations of Girls Friendships
Old Plots and New Identities: Ambivalent femininities in late modernity
This paper investigates changing modes of femininity. It asks: What are the discourses and discursive practices within which new femininities are constructed? What are the social conditions in which they emerge? How are these negotiated and lived by girls? What do these stories tell us about the complications of subject formation and what it means to be a “girl” in “global times”. Drawing on a school-community project with a racially diverse grou…
IV. What is the ‘Problem’ with these Girls? Youth and Feminist Pedagogy
Doing it Differently: Young Women Managing Heterosexuality in Australia, Finland and Canada
In this article we explore the changing constitutive relationship between agency and social structure in the fashioning of young women's identities, focusing on one of the key social processes that shapes young women's experience of entering into 'adulthood'; the institution of heterosexuality. Traditionally crucial in positioning oneself as 'properly' female and mature, discourses of heterosexuality are parts of a network of power relations gove…
Collective Biography and the Question of Difference
This article engages with the research method of collective biography. We are particularly interested in what the question of difference brings to bear on the collective biography process. The aim of embodied writing in the collective biography process is "to tell the memory in such a way that it is vividly imaginable by others, such that those others can extend their own imaginable experience of being in the world through knowing the particulari…
Rethinking Agency and Resistance: What Comes After Girl Power
With the current proliferation of images and narratives of girls and girlhood in popular culture, many ‘truths’ about girls circulate with certainty. Amongst the aims of this Special Issue is to examine critically these ‘confi dent characterizations’ (Trinh 1989), to trace the social conditions which produce these ‘truths’ along with the public fascination with girls and to analyze critically the eff ects of these ‘truths’ in the lives of young g…
Producing Neoliberal Subjectivities: Literacy, Girlhood, and Collective Biography
This article takes up the question of literacy and its relationships to gender, race, class sexuality, and neoliberal ideologies. It traces the various feminist critiques of the relation between gender and literacy. It uses the memory stories of learning to write written by young American women, in the context of a collective biography exercise done in a women's studies university classroom. I analyze the stories for what they reveal about neolib…
Who are the participants? Rethinking representational practices and writing with heterotopic possibility in qualitative inquiry
This paper draws on Foucault's notion of heterotopia to ask a series of questions about the important link between the crisis of representation in qualitative research and new theorizations of the ‘subject’ within poststructural feminist research. Reiterating Foucault's question, ‘what is it impossible to think and what kind of impossibility are we faced with here,’ the authors wonder how naming practices that mobilize social categories determine…
VII. The Mean Girl Crisis: Problematizing Representations of Girls Friendships
Old Plots and New Identities: Ambivalent femininities in late modernity
This paper investigates changing modes of femininity. It asks: What are the discourses and discursive practices within which new femininities are constructed? What are the social conditions in which they emerge? How are these negotiated and lived by girls? What do these stories tell us about the complications of subject formation and what it means to be a “girl” in “global times”. Drawing on a school-community project with a racially diverse grou…
Doing it Differently: Young Women Managing Heterosexuality in Australia, Finland and Canada
In this article we explore the changing constitutive relationship between agency and social structure in the fashioning of young women's identities, focusing on one of the key social processes that shapes young women's experience of entering into 'adulthood'; the institution of heterosexuality. Traditionally crucial in positioning oneself as 'properly' female and mature, discourses of heterosexuality are parts of a network of power relations gove…
We Want Freedom Not Just Safety’: Biography of a Girlfesto as a Strategic Tool in Youth Activism
Girls are increasingly visible as activists demanding social change, equity and justice. Yet communication between girls and policymakers is fraught with challenges over how to translate young people’s knowledge into policy change. This article traces the history of the manifesto as a form for the marginalized to articulate new social visions, drawing on the Riot grrrl manifestos as examples of this genre. It describes the creation of the first G…
Girl Number 20 revisited: Feminist literacies in new hard times
This paper revisits the question of ‘voice’ in the context of neo‐liberal social and educational reform. ‘Voice’ has been one of the key concepts of feminist and critical pedagogies in the theory and practice of producing social transformation. I argue in this paper, that the political effectiveness of this concept needs to be reconsidered at a time when the incitement to speak is one of the means by which neo‐liberal subjectivities are produced …
Unsettling research versus activism: How might critical disability studies disrupt traditional research boundaries
This article responds to the call for producing activist-oriented scholarship by engaging with theoretical and methodological approaches that explore the inclusion of women and girls with disabilities in Vietnam. We consider possibilities for connecting different forms of knowledge and activism by reflecting on research practices designed to foster social change. Specifically, we ask: how can critical disability studies be more reflexive about kn…
Engaging girls with disabilities through cellphilming: Reflections on participatory visual research as a means of countering violence in the Global South
Despite the fact that most countries have ratified the United Nations' Convention on the Rights of the Child, girls with disabilities experience multiple forms of violence and oppression. Using a critical approach to arts-based research, we argue that while disabled girls experience multiple vulnerabilities due to the structural conditions which exposed them to violence, the use of participatory visual methods allowed them to reframe their storie…
Schooling the mean girl: A critical discourse analysis of teacher resource materials
This paper is a critical discourse analysis of teacher resource materials about girl bullying. The ‘mean girl’ phenomenon has been widely taken up as one of the current key narratives about schools and school girls. This paper argues for the importance of understanding the origins of this discourse within behavioural psychology, which coined the term ‘relational aggression’ to describe what is purported to be a uniquely female form of aggression.…
IV. What is the ‘Problem’ with these Girls? Youth and Feminist Pedagogy
Reading selves, re-fashioning identity: Teen magazines and their readers
This paper discusses the difficulties of introducing a critical feminist project in the form of a girls' magazine to a group of girls whose own desires seemed to include the reproduction of media forms that reinforce power relationships, stereotypes and the objectification of women. Based on discussions with a group of grade 6 and 7 girls of Vietnamese, Chinese and Cambodian backgrounds at a Toronto public school, this paper asks: what subject po…
Reading selves, re-fashioning identity: Teen magazines and their readers
This paper discusses the difficulties of introducing a critical feminist project in the form of a girls' magazine to a group of girls whose own desires seemed to include the reproduction of media forms that reinforce power relationships, stereotypes and the objectification of women. Based on discussions with a group of grade 6 and 7 girls of Vietnamese, Chinese and Cambodian backgrounds at a Toronto public school, this paper asks: what subject po…
Doing it Differently: Young Women Managing Heterosexuality in Australia, Finland and Canada
In this article we explore the changing constitutive relationship between agency and social structure in the fashioning of young women's identities, focusing on one of the key social processes that shapes young women's experience of entering into 'adulthood'; the institution of heterosexuality. Traditionally crucial in positioning oneself as 'properly' female and mature, discourses of heterosexuality are parts of a network of power relations gove…
IV. What is the ‘Problem’ with these Girls? Youth and Feminist Pedagogy
Young Femininity: Girlhood, Power and Social Change
This text draws on international work to do with femininity, identity and youth cultures to explore how girlhood is defined and portrayed in contemporary theoretical and popular discourses, and to examine how young women from different social backgrounds and cultural contexts negotiate their gendered identities. Encompassing topics such as sexuality, the body, friendship, family, education, work and citizenship, this is an appealing and wide-rang…
VII. The Mean Girl Crisis: Problematizing Representations of Girls Friendships
VII. The Mean Girl Crisis: Problematizing Representations of Girls Friendships
Old Plots and New Identities: Ambivalent femininities in late modernity
This paper investigates changing modes of femininity. It asks: What are the discourses and discursive practices within which new femininities are constructed? What are the social conditions in which they emerge? How are these negotiated and lived by girls? What do these stories tell us about the complications of subject formation and what it means to be a “girl” in “global times”. Drawing on a school-community project with a racially diverse grou…
Who are the participants? Rethinking representational practices and writing with heterotopic possibility in qualitative inquiry
This paper draws on Foucault's notion of heterotopia to ask a series of questions about the important link between the crisis of representation in qualitative research and new theorizations of the ‘subject’ within poststructural feminist research. Reiterating Foucault's question, ‘what is it impossible to think and what kind of impossibility are we faced with here,’ the authors wonder how naming practices that mobilize social categories determine…
Between ?Girl Power? and ?Reviving Ophelia: Constituting the Neoliberal Girl Subject
This article investigates two of the discourses currently organizing meanings of girls and girlhood. These are the multi-stranded "Girl Power" and "Reviving Ophelia," which both emerged in the early 1990s. I argue that "Girl Power" and "Reviving Ophelia" set up an intriguing illustration of not only competing definitions of femininity but also how discourses may interpellate feminine/feminist subjects in a non-unitary way. At first glance, the tw…
Girl Number 20 revisited: Feminist literacies in new hard times
This paper revisits the question of ‘voice’ in the context of neo‐liberal social and educational reform. ‘Voice’ has been one of the key concepts of feminist and critical pedagogies in the theory and practice of producing social transformation. I argue in this paper, that the political effectiveness of this concept needs to be reconsidered at a time when the incitement to speak is one of the means by which neo‐liberal subjectivities are produced …
Rethinking Agency and Resistance: What Comes After Girl Power
With the current proliferation of images and narratives of girls and girlhood in popular culture, many ‘truths’ about girls circulate with certainty. Amongst the aims of this Special Issue is to examine critically these ‘confi dent characterizations’ (Trinh 1989), to trace the social conditions which produce these ‘truths’ along with the public fascination with girls and to analyze critically the eff ects of these ‘truths’ in the lives of young g…
The Teaches of Peaches: Performance, Hybridity and Resistance
Indigenizing girl power: The Whale Rider , decolonization, and the project of remembering
This article considers the intersection of girlhood, agency, and indigenousness through a reading of the internationally renowned film Whale Rider. I suggest that Whale Rider presents a double project that resymbolizes girlhood as it also produces a "decolonizing of the screen." On the one hand the film resonates with what emerged in the 1990s as the assertion of "girl power" and the notion of a new, active, powerful and agentic femininity. On th…
Collective Biography and the Question of Difference
This article engages with the research method of collective biography. We are particularly interested in what the question of difference brings to bear on the collective biography process. The aim of embodied writing in the collective biography process is "to tell the memory in such a way that it is vividly imaginable by others, such that those others can extend their own imaginable experience of being in the world through knowing the particulari…
Old-Fashioned and Forward-Looking”: Neo-Liberalism and Nostalgia in the Daring Books for Girls
In this paper, we examine The Daring Book for Girls and its follow-ups for their constructions of gender. We suggest that, as examples of how neo-liberalism finds its way into notions of proper girlhood, the books provide intentional and unintentional “lessons” to their readers in how to perform themselves in these times. In both the American and the Australian edition of the initial text, girls are instructed in complex ways to be the right kind…
Ruptures in the Heterosexual Matrix Through Teenage Flows and Multiplicities
This article analyzes a series of stories and artworks that were produced in a collective biography workshop. It explores Judith Butler's concept of the heterosexual matrix combined with a Deleuzian theoretical framework. The article begins with an overview of Butler's concept of the heterosexual matrix and her theorizations on how it might be disrupted. It then suggests how a Deleuzian framework offers other tools for analyzing these ruptures at…
Entanglements: Art-making, Becoming Girl and Collective Biography
This article analyses a set of stories and artworks that were produced in the context of a collective biography workshop. A Deleuzian framework is used to explore the entanglements that are produced through a cross-reading of different kinds of texts, each taking up the question of girlhood subjectivities. The analysis focuses on the contradiction and indeterminacy of meaning-making in the research process. The aim is to investigate how different…
Collective Biography: An Introduction
In June 2011, seven feminist academics gathered to spend a week working together on a collective biography workshop in a small resort town, called Hawk’s Nest, in New South Wales, Australia. Some of us were senior faculty with prior experience with the methodology of collective biography, others were freshly minted or about to be minted PhDs who were totally new to the research methodology. Some of us knew each other from other contexts, and othe…
Producing Neoliberal Subjectivities: Literacy, Girlhood, and Collective Biography
This article takes up the question of literacy and its relationships to gender, race, class sexuality, and neoliberal ideologies. It traces the various feminist critiques of the relation between gender and literacy. It uses the memory stories of learning to write written by young American women, in the context of a collective biography exercise done in a women's studies university classroom. I analyze the stories for what they reveal about neolib…
Schooling the mean girl: A critical discourse analysis of teacher resource materials
This paper is a critical discourse analysis of teacher resource materials about girl bullying. The ‘mean girl’ phenomenon has been widely taken up as one of the current key narratives about schools and school girls. This paper argues for the importance of understanding the origins of this discourse within behavioural psychology, which coined the term ‘relational aggression’ to describe what is purported to be a uniquely female form of aggression.…
Unsettling research versus activism: How might critical disability studies disrupt traditional research boundaries
This article responds to the call for producing activist-oriented scholarship by engaging with theoretical and methodological approaches that explore the inclusion of women and girls with disabilities in Vietnam. We consider possibilities for connecting different forms of knowledge and activism by reflecting on research practices designed to foster social change. Specifically, we ask: how can critical disability studies be more reflexive about kn…
We Want Freedom Not Just Safety’: Biography of a Girlfesto as a Strategic Tool in Youth Activism
Girls are increasingly visible as activists demanding social change, equity and justice. Yet communication between girls and policymakers is fraught with challenges over how to translate young people’s knowledge into policy change. This article traces the history of the manifesto as a form for the marginalized to articulate new social visions, drawing on the Riot grrrl manifestos as examples of this genre. It describes the creation of the first G…
The Saint Mary’s Rape Chant: A Discourse Analysis of Media Coverage
In September 2013 student leaders at Saint Mary’s University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, used a chant about the rape of underage girls as part of an Orientation Week activity for new students. The incident garnered national and international media coverage. In this article, we analyze and critique a selection of Canadian media articles published in the weeks after the rape chant was used. We draw on feminist analysis of post-feminism and the sexuali…
Engaging girls with disabilities through cellphilming: Reflections on participatory visual research as a means of countering violence in the Global South
Despite the fact that most countries have ratified the United Nations' Convention on the Rights of the Child, girls with disabilities experience multiple forms of violence and oppression. Using a critical approach to arts-based research, we argue that while disabled girls experience multiple vulnerabilities due to the structural conditions which exposed them to violence, the use of participatory visual methods allowed them to reframe their storie…
Re) Stor(y)ing Class: Working-Class Women, Smartness, and Higher Education
For Canadian-born working-class women, university is often characterized through the axioms of 'expanding one's mind,' 'bettering one's life,' and 'saving oneself from a life of hardship.' Associated with these adages is 'smartness,' a signature orientation of the academy and a designation that has often excluded the working-class. Our article asks: What does it mean to be a working-class woman in higher education in Canada? How do working-class …
Sociology (25 works) · Gender Studies (18 works) · Gender Studies (16 works) · Political science (14 works) · Psychology (14 works) · Gender, Feminism, and Media (13 works) · Gender Roles and Identity Studies (12 works) · Girl (12 works) · Law (12 works) · Law (11 works)