Shauna Pomerantz
Biographic Data
| ID | 341139 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Shauna Pomerantz |
| GIVEN NAMES | Shauna |
| FAMILY NAME | Pomerantz |
| SIGNATURE | POMERANTZ S |
| AFFILIATIONS | Brock University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-9536-8515 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 20 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 173 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 20 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2004 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
Can't trace time
In this special issue on multidisciplinary explorations of childhood and temporality, we add to a growing body of literature that critiques linear time's injurious effects on children. As an illusion that produces the stable, traceable child subject, we argue that adherence to a temporal essence reduces capacities for childhood and childhood studies. The articles in this special issue illuminate cripped, queered, affective, lingering, and diffrac…
A TikTok education
Post qualitative inquiry is an immanent approach to research that I engaged during a study on TikTok with my 11-year-old daughter. In this article, I reflect on how its experimental style enabled a provisional escape from the hierarchy of adult/child through lines of flight. I also reflect on how binary thinking that disparages children’s knowledge permeated our post qualitative inquiry through my authority as a parent making decisions about my c…
Call-and-Response
We are proud to introduce this special issue that was inspired by the 2019 International Girlhood Studies Association (IGSA) conference at the University of Notre Dame (IGSA@ND). At that time, we were not yet acquainted with each other beyond exchanging pleasantries and knowing of each other’s academic profiles. Yet we came together as three co-editors and scholars committed not only to the diversification of girlhood studies but also to the larg…
Immanent cinematic girlhoods
This article engages an immanent ontology to theorize how the film Eighth Grade produced affective intensities for me through the detailed, fluid rendering of a teen girl. Drawing on Kathleen Stewart’s concepts of worlding and ordinary affects, I analyze how Eighth Grade resists the representational stasis of an autonomous protagonist to produce a teen girl embedded in and contingent on wider social and material cultures. As Kayla is not reduced …
Bodies, hoodies, schools, and success
This article adds to the literature on smart girlhood by exploring the topic through Karen Barad's theory of post-human performativity. We focus on the transcripts of two participants from a larger study on girls and academic success in Canada in order to highlight the material, discursive, embodied, and temporal entanglements that co-produce the possibilities for girls’ academic subjectivities. Using a diffractive methodology, we highlight the m…
Smart Girls
Are girls taking over the world? It would appear so based on magazine covers, news headlines, and popularized books touting girls’ academic success. As a result, many in Western society assume that girls now play on an equal playing field so have nothing to complain about. But contrary to the widespread belief that girls have surpassed the need for support because they are ‘doing well’ in school, smart girls struggle in ways that have been made i…
Smart Girls
"Are girls taking over the world? It would appear so, based on magazine covers, news headlines, and popular books touting girls' academic success. Girls are said to outperform boys in high school exams, university entrance and graduation rates, and professional certification. As a result, many in Western society assume that girls no longer need support. But in spite of the messages of post-feminism and neoliberal individualism that tell girls the…
Spaces of Possibility
Jessica Ringrose. 2013. Postfeminist Education? Girls and the Sexual Politics of Schooling. London: Routledge
Playing it down/playing it up
Through the lens of post-structural agency, this article focuses on how self-identified smart girls strategically negotiate their academic identities within the gendered terrain of the school. Based on interviews with 51 smart high school girls in Canada, our analysis complicates current narrative of girls’ easy achievement in school. Participants discussed balancing the hazards of being overly academic with the rewards of academic success. In re…
Girls Run the World
How do teenage girls articulate sexism in an era where gender injustice has been constructed as a thing of the past? Our article addresses this question by qualitatively exploring Canadian girls' experiences of being caught between the postfeminist belief that gender equality has been achieved and the realities of their lives in school, which include incidents of sexism in their classrooms, their social worlds, and their projected futures. This a…
Oh, she’s so smart’
This article explores how six teenage girls talk about being smart in the wake of celebratory discourses touting gender equality in education and beyond. Set against the neo-liberal backdrop of ‘What about the boys?’ and ‘girl power’, it is assumed that smart girls today ‘have it all’ and, therefore, no longer require feminist interventions in the school. Issuing a challenge to these post-feminist assumptions, we highlight complex narratives of g…
Mean, Wild, and Alienated
The article explores representations of "realistic" teen girlhood in popular culture in order to examine the current constructions of power made available to girls. Specifically, it focuses on three recent popular and critically acclaimed films: Mean Girls, Thirteen and Ghost World. The dominant discourses put forward in these films—girls as mean, as wild, and as alienated—naturalize negative behavior as a normal part of girlhood. In the terrain …
Between a Rock and a Hard Place
Find information about UTP Journals. University of Toronto Press is Canada’s leading academic publisher and one of the largest university presses in North America, with particular strengths in the social sciences, humanities, and business. The Book Publishing Division is widely recognized in Canada for its strength in history, political science, sociology, Indigenous studies, and cultural studies. Internationally, UTP is a leading publisher of me…
Listening to girls
Recent decades have seen a proliferation of books that ‘listen in’ on the everyday lives of girls. In their research the authors maintain that ‘listening’ to girls in order to make claims about what they ‘heard’ is a theoretically mediated process, and therefore it is not as straightforward as many authors imply. The purpose of this paper is to explore what they call the ‘symptomatic reading’ of interview transcripts. While attending to the contr…
The power to squash people’
While researchers and concerned adults alike draw attention to relational aggression among girls, how this aggression is associated with girls’ agency remains a matter of debate. In this paper we explore relational aggression among girls designated by their peers as ‘popular’ in order to understand how social power constructs girls’ agency as aggression. We locate this power, hence girls’ agency, in contradictory messages about girlhood that, alt…
Cleavage in a Tank Top
In this article I explore the gendered assumptions in the new generation of dress codes that have swept through North American schools in response to how girls are dressing these days. Through a feminist poststructural examination of a particular case in Langley, British Columbia, I locate three contradictory discourses in one school’s dress code policy that positioned girls as irresponsible, deviant, and in need of help. I argue that these disco…
The geeks shall inherit the earth’
This paper is located in a larger study of girls’ empowerment within the everyday context of school cultures. While much feminist research has focused on the ‘perils’ of feminine adolescence, we are interested in how girls successfully navigate the transition from girlhood to adult womanhood. Thus the sample for this paper includes girls who consciously positioned themselves against an ‘emphasized femininity’ that made their classmates popular, b…
No Boundaries'? Girls' Interactive, Online Learning About Femininities
This article explores girls' learning about issues of femininity that takes place in the presence of others online, connected through chat rooms, instant messaging, and role-playing games. Informed by critical and poststructuralist feminist theorizing of gendered subjectivity, agency, and power, the article draws from qualitative interviews with 16 girls in Vancouver, Canada. Girls reported that online activities allowed them to rehearse differen…
Skater girlhood and emphasized femininity
This study draws from interviews with 20 girls in British Columbia, Canada who participated to varying degrees in skateboarding culture. We found that skater girls saw themselves as participating in an ‘alternative’ girlhood. Becoming skater girls involved the work and play of producing themselves in relation to alternative images found among peers at school, at skate parks, online and in music videos. The alternative authority of skater girl dis…
Sk8er girls
Skater girlhood and emphasized femininity
This study draws from interviews with 20 girls in British Columbia, Canada who participated to varying degrees in skateboarding culture. We found that skater girls saw themselves as participating in an ‘alternative’ girlhood. Becoming skater girls involved the work and play of producing themselves in relation to alternative images found among peers at school, at skate parks, online and in music videos. The alternative authority of skater girl dis…
Sk8er girls
Girls Run the World
How do teenage girls articulate sexism in an era where gender injustice has been constructed as a thing of the past? Our article addresses this question by qualitatively exploring Canadian girls' experiences of being caught between the postfeminist belief that gender equality has been achieved and the realities of their lives in school, which include incidents of sexism in their classrooms, their social worlds, and their projected futures. This a…
The power to squash people’
While researchers and concerned adults alike draw attention to relational aggression among girls, how this aggression is associated with girls’ agency remains a matter of debate. In this paper we explore relational aggression among girls designated by their peers as ‘popular’ in order to understand how social power constructs girls’ agency as aggression. We locate this power, hence girls’ agency, in contradictory messages about girlhood that, alt…
The geeks shall inherit the earth’
This paper is located in a larger study of girls’ empowerment within the everyday context of school cultures. While much feminist research has focused on the ‘perils’ of feminine adolescence, we are interested in how girls successfully navigate the transition from girlhood to adult womanhood. Thus the sample for this paper includes girls who consciously positioned themselves against an ‘emphasized femininity’ that made their classmates popular, b…
Oh, she’s so smart’
This article explores how six teenage girls talk about being smart in the wake of celebratory discourses touting gender equality in education and beyond. Set against the neo-liberal backdrop of ‘What about the boys?’ and ‘girl power’, it is assumed that smart girls today ‘have it all’ and, therefore, no longer require feminist interventions in the school. Issuing a challenge to these post-feminist assumptions, we highlight complex narratives of g…
Listening to girls
Recent decades have seen a proliferation of books that ‘listen in’ on the everyday lives of girls. In their research the authors maintain that ‘listening’ to girls in order to make claims about what they ‘heard’ is a theoretically mediated process, and therefore it is not as straightforward as many authors imply. The purpose of this paper is to explore what they call the ‘symptomatic reading’ of interview transcripts. While attending to the contr…
No Boundaries'? Girls' Interactive, Online Learning About Femininities
This article explores girls' learning about issues of femininity that takes place in the presence of others online, connected through chat rooms, instant messaging, and role-playing games. Informed by critical and poststructuralist feminist theorizing of gendered subjectivity, agency, and power, the article draws from qualitative interviews with 16 girls in Vancouver, Canada. Girls reported that online activities allowed them to rehearse differen…
Cleavage in a Tank Top
In this article I explore the gendered assumptions in the new generation of dress codes that have swept through North American schools in response to how girls are dressing these days. Through a feminist poststructural examination of a particular case in Langley, British Columbia, I locate three contradictory discourses in one school’s dress code policy that positioned girls as irresponsible, deviant, and in need of help. I argue that these disco…
Bodies, hoodies, schools, and success
This article adds to the literature on smart girlhood by exploring the topic through Karen Barad's theory of post-human performativity. We focus on the transcripts of two participants from a larger study on girls and academic success in Canada in order to highlight the material, discursive, embodied, and temporal entanglements that co-produce the possibilities for girls’ academic subjectivities. Using a diffractive methodology, we highlight the m…
Mean, Wild, and Alienated
The article explores representations of "realistic" teen girlhood in popular culture in order to examine the current constructions of power made available to girls. Specifically, it focuses on three recent popular and critically acclaimed films: Mean Girls, Thirteen and Ghost World. The dominant discourses put forward in these films—girls as mean, as wild, and as alienated—naturalize negative behavior as a normal part of girlhood. In the terrain …
A TikTok education
Post qualitative inquiry is an immanent approach to research that I engaged during a study on TikTok with my 11-year-old daughter. In this article, I reflect on how its experimental style enabled a provisional escape from the hierarchy of adult/child through lines of flight. I also reflect on how binary thinking that disparages children’s knowledge permeated our post qualitative inquiry through my authority as a parent making decisions about my c…
Call-and-Response
We are proud to introduce this special issue that was inspired by the 2019 International Girlhood Studies Association (IGSA) conference at the University of Notre Dame (IGSA@ND). At that time, we were not yet acquainted with each other beyond exchanging pleasantries and knowing of each other’s academic profiles. Yet we came together as three co-editors and scholars committed not only to the diversification of girlhood studies but also to the larg…
Playing it down/playing it up
Through the lens of post-structural agency, this article focuses on how self-identified smart girls strategically negotiate their academic identities within the gendered terrain of the school. Based on interviews with 51 smart high school girls in Canada, our analysis complicates current narrative of girls’ easy achievement in school. Participants discussed balancing the hazards of being overly academic with the rewards of academic success. In re…
Sk8er girls
Skater girlhood and emphasized femininity
This study draws from interviews with 20 girls in British Columbia, Canada who participated to varying degrees in skateboarding culture. We found that skater girls saw themselves as participating in an ‘alternative’ girlhood. Becoming skater girls involved the work and play of producing themselves in relation to alternative images found among peers at school, at skate parks, online and in music videos. The alternative authority of skater girl dis…
The geeks shall inherit the earth’
This paper is located in a larger study of girls’ empowerment within the everyday context of school cultures. While much feminist research has focused on the ‘perils’ of feminine adolescence, we are interested in how girls successfully navigate the transition from girlhood to adult womanhood. Thus the sample for this paper includes girls who consciously positioned themselves against an ‘emphasized femininity’ that made their classmates popular, b…
No Boundaries'? Girls' Interactive, Online Learning About Femininities
This article explores girls' learning about issues of femininity that takes place in the presence of others online, connected through chat rooms, instant messaging, and role-playing games. Informed by critical and poststructuralist feminist theorizing of gendered subjectivity, agency, and power, the article draws from qualitative interviews with 16 girls in Vancouver, Canada. Girls reported that online activities allowed them to rehearse differen…
Listening to girls
Recent decades have seen a proliferation of books that ‘listen in’ on the everyday lives of girls. In their research the authors maintain that ‘listening’ to girls in order to make claims about what they ‘heard’ is a theoretically mediated process, and therefore it is not as straightforward as many authors imply. The purpose of this paper is to explore what they call the ‘symptomatic reading’ of interview transcripts. While attending to the contr…
The power to squash people’
While researchers and concerned adults alike draw attention to relational aggression among girls, how this aggression is associated with girls’ agency remains a matter of debate. In this paper we explore relational aggression among girls designated by their peers as ‘popular’ in order to understand how social power constructs girls’ agency as aggression. We locate this power, hence girls’ agency, in contradictory messages about girlhood that, alt…
Cleavage in a Tank Top
In this article I explore the gendered assumptions in the new generation of dress codes that have swept through North American schools in response to how girls are dressing these days. Through a feminist poststructural examination of a particular case in Langley, British Columbia, I locate three contradictory discourses in one school’s dress code policy that positioned girls as irresponsible, deviant, and in need of help. I argue that these disco…
Mean, Wild, and Alienated
The article explores representations of "realistic" teen girlhood in popular culture in order to examine the current constructions of power made available to girls. Specifically, it focuses on three recent popular and critically acclaimed films: Mean Girls, Thirteen and Ghost World. The dominant discourses put forward in these films—girls as mean, as wild, and as alienated—naturalize negative behavior as a normal part of girlhood. In the terrain …
Between a Rock and a Hard Place
Find information about UTP Journals. University of Toronto Press is Canada’s leading academic publisher and one of the largest university presses in North America, with particular strengths in the social sciences, humanities, and business. The Book Publishing Division is widely recognized in Canada for its strength in history, political science, sociology, Indigenous studies, and cultural studies. Internationally, UTP is a leading publisher of me…
Oh, she’s so smart’
This article explores how six teenage girls talk about being smart in the wake of celebratory discourses touting gender equality in education and beyond. Set against the neo-liberal backdrop of ‘What about the boys?’ and ‘girl power’, it is assumed that smart girls today ‘have it all’ and, therefore, no longer require feminist interventions in the school. Issuing a challenge to these post-feminist assumptions, we highlight complex narratives of g…
Girls Run the World
How do teenage girls articulate sexism in an era where gender injustice has been constructed as a thing of the past? Our article addresses this question by qualitatively exploring Canadian girls' experiences of being caught between the postfeminist belief that gender equality has been achieved and the realities of their lives in school, which include incidents of sexism in their classrooms, their social worlds, and their projected futures. This a…
Spaces of Possibility
Jessica Ringrose. 2013. Postfeminist Education? Girls and the Sexual Politics of Schooling. London: Routledge
Playing it down/playing it up
Through the lens of post-structural agency, this article focuses on how self-identified smart girls strategically negotiate their academic identities within the gendered terrain of the school. Based on interviews with 51 smart high school girls in Canada, our analysis complicates current narrative of girls’ easy achievement in school. Participants discussed balancing the hazards of being overly academic with the rewards of academic success. In re…
Smart Girls
Are girls taking over the world? It would appear so based on magazine covers, news headlines, and popularized books touting girls’ academic success. As a result, many in Western society assume that girls now play on an equal playing field so have nothing to complain about. But contrary to the widespread belief that girls have surpassed the need for support because they are ‘doing well’ in school, smart girls struggle in ways that have been made i…
Smart Girls
"Are girls taking over the world? It would appear so, based on magazine covers, news headlines, and popular books touting girls' academic success. Girls are said to outperform boys in high school exams, university entrance and graduation rates, and professional certification. As a result, many in Western society assume that girls no longer need support. But in spite of the messages of post-feminism and neoliberal individualism that tell girls the…
Bodies, hoodies, schools, and success
This article adds to the literature on smart girlhood by exploring the topic through Karen Barad's theory of post-human performativity. We focus on the transcripts of two participants from a larger study on girls and academic success in Canada in order to highlight the material, discursive, embodied, and temporal entanglements that co-produce the possibilities for girls’ academic subjectivities. Using a diffractive methodology, we highlight the m…
Call-and-Response
We are proud to introduce this special issue that was inspired by the 2019 International Girlhood Studies Association (IGSA) conference at the University of Notre Dame (IGSA@ND). At that time, we were not yet acquainted with each other beyond exchanging pleasantries and knowing of each other’s academic profiles. Yet we came together as three co-editors and scholars committed not only to the diversification of girlhood studies but also to the larg…
Immanent cinematic girlhoods
This article engages an immanent ontology to theorize how the film Eighth Grade produced affective intensities for me through the detailed, fluid rendering of a teen girl. Drawing on Kathleen Stewart’s concepts of worlding and ordinary affects, I analyze how Eighth Grade resists the representational stasis of an autonomous protagonist to produce a teen girl embedded in and contingent on wider social and material cultures. As Kayla is not reduced …
A TikTok education
Post qualitative inquiry is an immanent approach to research that I engaged during a study on TikTok with my 11-year-old daughter. In this article, I reflect on how its experimental style enabled a provisional escape from the hierarchy of adult/child through lines of flight. I also reflect on how binary thinking that disparages children’s knowledge permeated our post qualitative inquiry through my authority as a parent making decisions about my c…
Can't trace time
In this special issue on multidisciplinary explorations of childhood and temporality, we add to a growing body of literature that critiques linear time's injurious effects on children. As an illusion that produces the stable, traceable child subject, we argue that adherence to a temporal essence reduces capacities for childhood and childhood studies. The articles in this special issue illuminate cripped, queered, affective, lingering, and diffrac…
Sociology (19 works) · Psychology (16 works) · Gender Roles and Identity Studies (13 works) · Gender Studies (13 works) · Gender, Feminism, and Media (13 works) · Gender Studies (9 works) · Youth Education and Societal Dynamics (9 works) · Political science (8 works) · Developmental psychology (7 works) · Feminism (6 works)