Chips, Coke and Rock-'N'-Roll

Children's Mediation of an Invitation to a First Dance Party

Bibliographic Data

ID3945545
AuthorsAmy B Rossiter, Amy Rossiter (0000-0002-8878-4887, corresponding author)
Year1994
Volume46
Issue1
Pages1-20
Publication date1994-03-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueFeminist Review (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0141-7789 • E-ISSN: 1466-4380
PublisherJSTOR (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.2307/1395414
OpenAlexW4237926642
LanguageEN
Citations received28
References cited5

In my adolescence, I truly believed that because I couldn't dance, I would never meet a nice man, get married and have children. In other words, I was doomed to no life at all. Most of my contemporaries would go on to real lives because they attended Miss Ford's Dance School. There, they learned to foxtrot, waltz, and even (at the end of the class only), fast dance. I never asked to go to Miss Ford's classes because I had attended some dance classes as part of the school gym programme. Those classes were such an experience of humiliation that I chose the no-life option. My mother never suggested Miss Ford's lessons: I think she thought of dancing as some kind of informal fun and, besides, there was a kind of pretentiousness associated with Miss Ford's that we were supposed to disdain. Even now, I cannot recount these memories without distancing myself from them by casting them in humour. I do not return easily to those memories of shame, exclusion and humiliation which I felt. I have learned to account for that pain through a mode of memory which describes the feelings as the 'normal growing pains of adolescence'. Oh how funny I was to take such trivia so seriously. One girl's pain is dismissed. In contrast to the dismissive mode of individual remembering, empirical studies document pain experienced by many girls. A number of recent studies have described disadvantages that early adolescent girls experience with regard to the development of self-esteem and self-concept (Bush and Simmons, 1987; Gilligan etal., 1990; Hill and Lynch, 1983; Simmons and Blyth, 1987; Tobin-Richards, Boxer and Petersen, 1983). Hill and Lynch, in their review of gender differences in early adolescence, discuss the finding that, among other differences

Art · Coke · Dance · Feminism · Human sexuality · Mediation · Political science · Social science · Sociology · Visual arts · Waste management · Anthropology · Art Education and Development · Children's Rights and Participation · Cultural Studies · Diversity and Impact of Dance · Early Childhood Education and Development · Engineering · Gender Studies · Music History and Culture · Theater, Performance, and Music History

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